Chapter 1
CHAPTER
One
The hollow belly of a whale gaped down at Jane, yawning open like a maw of curved teeth.
The skeleton watched her closely with hollowed sockets, eyes that could no longer see, smelling her with nostrils that could no longer smell, and hungered with a belly that could no longer be starved.
The preserved baleen’s sleek, black bristles shone like obsidian beneath the sunlight that filtered through the museum’s windows.
A plaque told her that it was once a fin whale, whose body had washed up on a beach in Sussex, but to her, it was a monster, with its wide-open ribs waiting to gobble her up.
It both frightened and left her in awe knowing that such a creature swam the seas, and was real, was once alive, much like the skeletons of elephants and gorillas that occupied the museum in Milwaukee.
To picture it being wrapped in the sarcophagus of blubbery flesh, stuffed with guts while pirouetting through the depths of the pitch-black ocean with an elegance that betrayed its awesome size made her lips tickle with a grin.
Jane had never been to Cambridge’s University Museum of Zoology, but so far she was impressed by its rich collections, both anatomical and zoological.
She struggled to decide if she favored this museum over London’s Natural History Museum—though, to her, no collection could hold a candle to London’s greater, grander specimen that was the whole Diplodocus skeleton.
It was just back in May when she’d witnessed the ancient spectacle unveiled.
An ancient creature resurrected to enamor modern eyes.
She wished she could’ve spent more time exploring this particular museum.
She wanted to burrow and snoop through the whole extent of the collections stored in the depths of its belly, even if it did lack a whole dinosaur skeleton for her to fawn over.
It certainly would’ve been far more exhilarating than sitting through another bore of a lecture.
She had once loved attending such lectures as a little girl.
Seeing fossils displayed and discussed, reborn by academic mouths, she fooled herself into believing that her own interest in paleontology somehow made her an equal to those men.
So much so that, more often than not, she allowed herself to be swept up in daydreams of standing upon those podiums, displaying whatever ancient bones she would have found in her pretend archeological digs in the garden or on the shores of the Great Lakes, shaped with arched horns and thousands of teeth like a dragon, to a gaslit theater of academics who would applaud her efforts.
Such interest waned as she matured and realized that such lectures were less of a celebration of enlightenment but rather a competition to see who had enough money to sound the most educated.
It was why Jane was saddened that her father couldn’t attend this particular series of lectures (which were about findings of the recent Saurian Expeditions in the States); she thought Dr. Simon Sterling was the only man ever of decent intelligence in a room.
At least none of these men were detonating each others’ fossil finds—that Jane knew of.
Though their war wasn’t nearly as ruinous as the one waged between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh (Jane would forever mourn any and all species lost in that Bone War, the ultimate fatalities), these academics still used bones and antiquity in an eternal act of posturing.
For a moment, Jane found a kinship in the assemblage of whale bones above her: suspended in time, forced to endure stuffy, academic competitions whilst yearning for freedom of the open ocean.
Or, in Jane’s circumstance, the freedom of the university’s collections.
Or a clothing shop, with her fingers plunged deep within the silken folds of a new gown.
“Jane!” A hand snatched Jane’s elbow, startling her from her daydream.
Based on the intensity pinching the woman’s mouth and punctuating her words, this wasn’t her first attempt to get Jane’s attention; Jane had been too enraptured with the whale skeleton to hear her mother’s approach.
“They’re gathering in the theater now, and I don’t want to get poor seats again,” Zelda Sterling—naturalist, artist, and ghostwriter for anyone who paid well enough—said with a firm grip.
By “poor seats,” Mrs. Sterling meant the ones positioned toward the front of the theater, so close that they would have to crane their necks to look straight up at the podium.
Those were the seats that the richest and oldest men scrambled to claim in their game of vying for the attention of whoever was speaking.
If Dr. Sterling was here, that’s where he’d want to sit, or at the very least be forced to sit.
Everybody loved Dr. Simon Sterling and his lectures on paleobotany.
Colleagues, professors, curators, and students alike were disheartened by the news that he couldn’t be in attendance on account of contracting a horrid cold back home in the States and that they would have to contend with his wife and youngest daughter to attend in his stead.
How would they be able to wrestle with one another over who among them was his most devoted enthusiast when he wasn’t present to hear their praises sweetened by milk and honey?
Jane had tried to ignore how when a man would greet her or her mother, he would look behind or around them in search for the beloved Dr. Sterling once he fulfilled the obligatory nicety of plastering on a too-polite grin for his too-polite greeting.
She’d return it with her own vapid flashing of teeth.
Couldn’t they be satisfied enough having a conversation with only her?
What was wrong with a scientific conversation with a lady anyway?
It wasn’t Jane’s fault that she had a tendency to detail the plum-colored ensemble and well-feathered merry widow hat she happened across in a shop window in the same breath as celebrating Lawrence Lambe’s recent discovery of the Centrosaurus bones in Canada just last year.
Perhaps it was their own fault for being so disinterested in such colorful conversation. A theory Jane kept to herself was that the true reason as to why these men held so many degrees was to compensate for their lack of knowledge regarding the proclivities of the female sex.
Mrs. Sterling took Jane by the elbow and together they followed the trickling of men in suits and their wives in shapely gowns to the museum’s main theater.
There weren’t many that Jane recognized among all these most-likely-Cambridge-doctors, at least well-enough to strike up easy small talk, so she kept close to her mother.
She did catch some glancing at her dress, however, which was a loud shade of pink with ruffled white lace bunched around her bodice and the opal charm clasped upon her throat, and she smirked, not hesitating in adding a flaunting flow to her stride so that the lace and fine fabric caught prettily in the sunlight.
If others didn’t wish to converse with her, then the least they could do was spare her wardrobe an envious look.
From the flowing crowd, a short, stocky man with snow-white mutton chops broke away to walk toward the Sterlings. He was smiling, with his wife at his elbow.
Jane studied the woman’s pale gray dress with a raised brow.
The puffed sleeves and stiff bodice recalled images of silhouettes of the previous decade, and Jane speculated that she had nothing newer in her wardrobe to wear.
The ensemble was completed by a modest green hat, parasol, and emerald-jeweled choker.
Jane cringed, though affectionately, as she had begrudgingly accepted that Mrs. Elizabeth Talbot wasn’t savvy with what was presently fashionable.
It was all tacky, to Jane, but there was some character in tackiness.
“Oh, Zelda, Mary! How lovely to see you again!” The man said, his tone bright and aged—and American. His wife smiled as well, nodding her greeting. She was similar to her husband: white-haired, wrinkled, and stocky in build.
Jane winced at the use of her nickname, “Mary.” It was an alias she crafted as a child, when her paleontological aspirations were big and thriving, but had long since outgrown. She smiled, nonetheless.
“Mr. Talbot, Elizabeth, hello!” Mrs. Sterling greeted them with a warm grin. Her hands, outstretched, found those of Mrs. Talbot’s. The cloth of her gloves strained as she imprinted her affections into her old friend’s skin. “It’s been far too long.”
Jane inclined her head in a nod that displayed the details of tinseled feathers and silk roses sewn into her hat when the Talbots offered her their quieter greetings.
She last met them at the unveiling of the Diplodocus exhibit in London.
The Talbots weren’t necessarily scientists, neither of them holding degrees or possessing any tangible education in the sciences to boast about, but rather passionate patrons of the Smithsonian in Washington.
About once a year, in the late spring when the Sterlings would take holiday in Saratoga Springs, the Sterlings and the Talbots would share a suite for the month-long duration of their stays, and in such a way a bond like that of family had been forged between them.
In a way, Jane nearly considered the Talbots as surrogate grandparents, as she didn’t have any more living ones with whom she shared blood and bone.
“Yes, I agree,” Mrs. Talbot said as she took a moment to cup Jane’s chin before returning her attention to Mrs. Sterling.
Jane caught Mr. Talbot looking around, looking over Mrs. Sterling’s shoulders, and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
The number of chins Mr. Talbot possessed doubled as he skewered his lips into an exaggerated frown. It was an expression that would have had Jane in a fit of giggles as a child, but now only a huff of amusement rushed from her nostrils. “I see no sign of Simon. Will he not be present?”