Beasts of the Sea A Novel
Constance spends her days with the collections, and in the evenings she is too tired to join the others.
She is barely seen at all, and Anna and Hampus finally have the chance to be alone.
Anna gets her husband back, but Alaska has left its mark on him.
He has lost weight and has started to see danger and adversity everywhere; he is afraid of shipwrecks and running out of money.
Anna is not wasting their allowance, is she?
She hands over the account books for her husband to inspect, shows him how frugally she has been using their funds, and even makes Ida Hoerle haggle over the price of eggs.
She only ever buys the most modest fabrics.
Why dress up smartly in a place where there is nobody to see it?
She sees her bonnet on the dresser and smiles – Sitka truly is no Paris.
If they wish to save money, Hampus should turn his attention to his sisters.
Ludmila is constantly writing to him, demanding money for dresses and tours, and Constance eats like a horse.
They do not know how Constance spends her time, but it doesn’t matter, for Hampus employs a real curator too, a man whose job it is to acquire new species for the collection and to exchange the worn old samples for new ones, for skins preserved using the newest methods.
Anna doubts the need for a new employee, but Hampus puts her right: a taxidermist is essential.
The governate’s collection must be brought up to date, so that he can present the Company’s scientific achievements to those visiting the colony.
The English and the French have chastised Russia for its brutality and its expansionist policies, so now it is all the more important to demonstrate that, alongside the trade in furs, the empire has higher objectives too.
Martin Wolff was on his way to South America.
He was planning to compile a study of the birds of the Tierra del Fuego, but crossing the Atlantic ate into his savings more quickly than he had calculated, and his father no longer wished to support his proposed project.
He had hoped his son would become a soldier; but Wolff is uninterested in species classification and frontier lands, and now he is on his own.
However, in Panama he meets an official from the Russian-American Company who tells him that the governor of Alaska is looking for a taxidermist. Back in Hesse, Wolff has been supporting himself by stuffing hunting trophies, the heads of elks, deer and wild boar, along with hazel hens and other grouse to be displayed on shelves and mantelpieces, and now he follows his instinct and heads north.
He arrives in Sitka and loathes every minute of it, the endless rain, the algae growing up the walls of his dorm, but to his relief the official was not lying: the governor pays well, and though every evening Wolff resolves to leave, every morning he decides to stay until the next payday.
Hampus imagined his sister would be thrilled at the new taxidermist, but Wolff arrives in the collection as if he owns it, opening the cupboards and running his fingers across the labels.
Constance feels the urge to tell him to disappear but restrains herself, for Wolff is a useful creature who will acquire new samples for her.
When first she saw the collection, Constance had thought the room full, but now she sees the gaps where various birds and animals once stood.
She has gone through the catalogues of animals, the lists of species native to the colony, and a new passion has lit up within her.
She dreams of collecting in this room all the wildlife in Alaska, a freeze frame of all the life that she will never see but can gather here, within arm’s reach.
But in order to make this dream a reality, she needs help, and for this reason she decides to tolerate Martin Wolff.
Still, Constance cannot help but cause a little mischief, and in the taxidermist’s presence she behaves even more gauchely than usual, she talks to herself, watches him as he examines the shelves, and lets out small, hiccoughing sounds.
Martin Wolff – even his name amuses her!
The taxidermist is more a rabbit than a wolf, he has long limbs and goggle eyes, warily staring here and there as Constance potters behind his back.
Wolff opens a box and lifts out a goose, a round-headed, short-necked bird whose white plumage is marked by two magnificent black tail feathers.
This is Ross’s goose, anser rossii, the newest addition to the governate’s collection.
Constance watches the taxidermist at work.
She has examined the animals in the collection, scrutinised their seams, run her fingers along the stitching and gone through the birds, catalogue in hand.
The great grey shrike appears in the catalogue twice, and Bonaparte’s gull is missing altogether.
Constance examines the paperwork, looking for any note that might tell her when the bird was added to the collection, but she finds nothing and decides to try and guess.
This is not impossible, as she has learned to recognise certain taxidermists’ handiwork.
Some of the animals added to the collection at the beginning of the century have been stuffed immaculately.
In the hands of this craftsman the creatures look vibrant and alive: the mink raises its head, disturbed while eating, the raven looks as if it is about to take flight, and Constance believes that Bonaparte’s gull must be the work of the same man, so lively are its eyes as it stares at her.
She examines the Ross’s goose. She knows that this irritates Wolff, and she turns the bird deliberately slowly, feeling the weight of its skin stuffed with rags.
Its eyes have been skilfully attached, the edges of the eyelids preserved intact, the feathers are pristine, and she cannot even find the bullet hole, though she touches the skin beneath the feathers too.
Wolff’s work is clean, but he is no artist. Standing on its plinth, the goose looks stiff.
Wolff has not considered how the bird stands and moves; he spends more time in the tavern than out in the wilds, and it shows: he has found a form and settled for it.
But the seams are smooth, and Constance lifts the goose into her arms, places it between the northern shoveler and the king eider, and experiences the slow, solemn fulfilment of a true collector.
On evenings when Constance feels up to joining the rest of her family, Anna marvels at the change in her.
Her usually quiet sister-in-law now babbles endlessly about birds and mammals, and there is a spark in her eyes that makes Anna concerned.
If one did not know better, one might imagine she was smitten.
Anna asks her husband into the salon. Is it seemly for the taxidermist and the governor’s sister to spend so much time together in that dim room without a chaperone – Constance, a girl so unaware of the ways of the world – but Hampus gives the briefest of smiles.
This is Sitka, and Constance is Constance: two exceptions to the rule.
What would be unimaginable in Dresden or St Petersburg is banal here, commonplace even – or would Anna prefer to have Constance back to assist her?
Anna hurriedly shakes her head and tries to explain that it is not so much a question of what might happen but of what it looks like, that out here the officers’ wives watch one another as closely as anywhere else, perhaps more so, because here they need something to pass the time, and a scandal can form at the drop of a hat.
And when they finally uncover a sin great enough, it will sustain them for a long while.
Anna had barely stepped off the ship when she heard the first stories about the former pastor in Novo-Arkhangelsk, of how Uno Cygnaeus had hurriedly given his housekeeper’s pretty daughter a gold ring, and before long everybody knew exactly why a promising man of the cloth had been sent away to the furthest corner of the earth.
The words maid and lovechild started to spread around the town, and if Cygnaeus had imagined that the disapproval would not follow him to Novo-Arkhangelsk, he was soon to find out how wrong he was, for as a result he was forbidden to teach at the girls’ school.
Eventually, Cygnaeus judged that enough water had passed under the bridge, and he returned to Finland.
Back home, he was finally able to put into practice certain thoughts on education that the people of Alaska were not yet ready to hear, but though the pastor is gone, the whispers will not abate, and Anna orders Ida Hoerle to take Constance a cup of tea at unpredictable hours and to step into the room without knocking, just in case.
For a moment, Martin Wolff even wonders whether it might be beneficial to induce the governor’s sister to fall in love with him.
Normally, he would not even entertain the idea of such a thoroughly odd union, but for a sickly spinster he could make an exception.
Constance notices that he has started combing his hair, and as he presents a harlequin duck that he has recently stuffed, he leans over towards her and brushes her hand so clumsily that there is no mistaking the gesture.
Constance bursts into laughter. She chortles so much that spittle flies from her mouth, and for a brief moment she pities him.
The things he has to do to keep himself afloat!
Wolff decides it would be ignoble of him to try to woo such a simpleton – why would he be interested in an ugly, twitching woman when the town is full of Creoles who laugh so prettily?