Chapter 3 #3
“Never mind, darling,” she consoled Daisy. “I’m going down to Haverhill this weekend for Grandfather’s birthday—can’t miss it, it’s his eightieth, the old sweetie—but next week I’ll go to the museum with you and get some good shots.”
While Lucy was toasting the start of the Earl of Haverhill’s ninth decade, Daisy joined the Fletchers for Sunday dinner, her nephew having by then gone home to Kent. Mrs. Fletcher actually unbent enough to commend Derek as a nice-mannered child.
“Spoilt, though,” she added hastily, as if horrified to find herself praising anything associated with Daisy, “but what can you expect, his father being a lord.”
Daisy, Alec, and Belinda escaped for the afternoon by taking Bel’s new puppy, Nana, for a walk on Primrose Hill.
During Lucy’s absence, Daisy also typed up her notes and started to get her article into its final shape.
The quantity of excess information reminded her of her idea for a more scientific article.
She popped into the nearest W H. Smith’s and found several suitable magazines, surreptitiously scribbling down their addresses and editors’ names without buying anything but the Daily Chronicle.
Letters of enquiry went out by the second post on Monday.
Soon after Daisy’s article and Lucy’s splendid photographs set sail across the Atlantic, two magazines replied, expressing their total lack of interest. A third wanted the complete text before deciding, and a fourth requested resubmission at a later date, as the next fifteen issues were already filled.
Slightly disappointed, Daisy went off to Shropshire to do the research for the next article in her series on minor stately homes for Town and Country.
Much as she might wish to, she could hardly visit that part of the world without staying a night or two with her mother, at the Fairacres Dower House. She found the Dowager Lady Dalrymple as disapproving as ever of Alec’s middle-class background and distasteful profession, yet making plans
for an elaborate—and expensive—wedding in St. George’s, Hanover Square.
“Who is to pay for this, Mother?” Daisy asked, exasperated.
“I dare say your cousin Edgar can be brought to understand his obligation, since he so cruelly exiled us from hearth and home.”
“Mother, you know Edgar had no choice but to succeed to the title,” Daisy could not help saying for the thousandth time, “and he offered us a home.”
“As though I should accept that man’s charity!
A schoolmaster, so underbred, and the way Geraldine puts on airs is quite shocking.
” Lady Dalrymple counterattacked: “When are you and Mr. Fletcher going to set the date? I disapprove of long engagements, and the church must be booked months in advance.”
Daisy at once started to think about registry offices.
She also wondered, rather dolefully, whether Alec could get a guaranteed leave of absence from the Metropolitan Police to be married, or if a sudden complex case might tear him from the altar—or the registry office equivalent. Frightful thought!
Her mother always had a depressing effect on her spirits but she revived as soon as she left Fairacres.
Her recovery was completed when she reached Mulberry Place.
On the table in the tiny hall, an extravagantly vast bouquet of chrysanthemums awaited her, and Alec’s card with a note saying simply, “Missing you.”
Beside the vase was a heap of letters, accumulated during her absence. Daisy flipped through them, recognizing the handwriting of her sister, two friends, a cousin. Then a business-size, typewritten envelope. Another rejection, no doubt.
But it wasn’t. Dilettanti magazine wanted her article, as long as she could let them have it by the end of September. If so, would she please telephone as soon as possible to confirm.
“Lucy?” she called up the stairs. No response.
Only three weeks! Still, it was not like starting from scratch. She already had a good start on the research, and she had made the acquaintance of all the people she would need to interview. Reaching for the telephone she and Lucy had had installed just a month ago, Daisy confirmed.
She was dying to share the news with someone who would appreciate it, but she always tried to avoid phoning Alec at the Yard, and he was often out of his office anyway.
Mrs. Potter, the charwoman who “did” for Daisy and Lucy and took a deep, admiring interest in their work, had already gone home.
Daisy rang through to Lucy on the studio extension, but there was no answer.
Three weeks—she had better get cracking. She telephoned the Natural History Museum and made appointments to see the Keepers of Zoology and Botany in the morning.
That done, she dropped her hat on the table, her coat on the chair, and leaving luggage strewn about the hall, hurried to the tiny back parlour which was her study.
She already had a rough draft of the stately home article, typed on the portable machine on semi-permanent loan from her Town and Country editor (How her mother had moaned at the evidence of her daughter’s occupation!).
It wouldn’t take long to finish it up on the massive, ancient Underwood typewriter which sat incongruously on the elegant Regency writing table from Fairacres.
The Underwood saw a great deal of her that week. Each day she returned from the museum with reams of notes and
typed long into the evening. The museum’s business was far more complicated than she had realized.
In the private offices, studies, and work rooms where she was now introduced, the preparation of specimens for display was a minor aspect of the work in progress.
From all over the world, unknown plants and creatures were sent to be classified.
Daisy had never previously heard of Linnaeus, but she was soon as familiar with his system as with the map of the London underground.
The museum staff produced not only minute descriptions but painstaking drawings and even paintings of each specimen.
That was in the Zoology and Botany Departments, where specimens normally arrived with all their parts intact.
In the Geology Department, imagination played a greater part.
As Mummery had explained to her, few fossils were found complete; the missing bits had to be guessed at.
At least, it looked like guesswork to Daisy, though Mummery insisted it was educated deduction.
His position was undermined by the iconoclastic Ruddlestone, Curator of Fossil Invertebrates, a jolly North-countryman who rivalled Alec’s sergeant, Tom Tring, in size and baldness.
“Guesswork is more like it, though we have advanced a bit since Waterhouse Hawkins,” Ruddlestone admitted to Daisy.
“Waterhouse Hawkins?”
“He built life-size concrete dinosaurs for the Crystal Palace exhibition of 1851, all as bulky and firmly four-footed as elephants or hippos.
Believe it or not, he gave a dinner party inside one half-completed model.
Then there were the Americans, Cope and Marsh: bitter enemies, brilliant in many ways, but Cope stuck the skull of an Elasmosaurus on
the end of its tail! Marsh never let him forget it.” Ruddlestone roared with laughter.
“Mr. Steadman told me his Diplodocus has the wrong feet.”
“Poor Steadman, it rankles badly that his prize exhibit is made of plaster of Paris. A load of real bones the Americans sent over during the War was sunk by a German submarine. A great loss, whatever that ass Pettigrew said.” The curator was no longer amused.
“What did he say?” Daisy asked, though she had a good idea.
“That the loss of mere fossils was trivial. In his view, a cargo of munitions would have been a great loss. But munitions can be replaced and fossils cannot! I’m afraid affairs like the controversy over Dr. Smith Woodward’s Piltdown skull play into the hands of ignoramuses like Pettigrew.
” Ruddlestone cheered up. “But it illustrates what I was telling you: They can’t all be right, so someone’s ‘educated deductions’ have to have gone far astray! ”
Later that afternoon, shortly before the museum closed, Daisy asked Smith Woodward about the Piltdown Man controversy.
He took her to see it again, but this time he contemplated it in silence for a minute, before sighing, “It really is very troublesome. Fossil fish are really my field, you know. I believe I may say I am accounted something of an authority on fossil fish. Do let me show you my Arthrodire.”
He had been so kind that Daisy let him off the hook. She could always ask someone else about Piltdown. He limped at her side across the gallery, and they entered the hall leading to the fossil reptiles, with the dinosaur gallery beyond, wherein the fishes occupied their modest place.
Somewhere in front of them a voice rose in triumph and
contempt, the words indistinguishable. The bellow that followed held a note of surprised agony, like that of a wounded bull. Then came a tremendous crash.
With a gasp, Smith Woodward stopped, rooted to the ground. Daisy ran through the arch ahead.
Sprawled on his back, immobile amidst a litter of smashed Pareiasaurus bones, lay Pettigrew. Across Ol’ Stony’s white shirtfront and pale grey waistcoat seeped a crimson stain.