Chapter 6
Another Sunday came and went, with food and sympathy and a sermon that lasted nearly two hours.
“Young preachers,” muttered the woman in the pew behind me.
“Swear they forget that some of us got to pee on the regular.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Mrs. Kent’s lips start twitching at that.
The food continued to be extraordinary and I continued to be pathetically grateful to talk to people that I didn’t see every single day.
That afternoon, I decided that I would go absolutely mad if I went back to work on the latest insect and went out in the garden again to sketch flowers. I could actually feel my jaw unclenching as I worked. I should do this more often.
“Why plants?” Esther, my roommate at the schoolhouse, had asked me once. “Why not something interesting?”
“Plants are interesting,” I said defensively. “They have evolved many fascinating mechanisms for—”
“Why not people?” she clarified. “You’re good enough that you could paint people and they’d pay money for it. Or, I don’t know, horses or dogs or something like that. Things people buy.”
“People buy pictures of plants.”
“People buy pictures of flowers,” Esther pointed out with ruthless accuracy. “Roses and peonies and whatnot. You’re painting weeds.”
At the time I had been doing a watercolor sketch of the crumpled leaves of a broadleaf plantain, which is indeed a weed.
Its flower spike is greenish-purple and you have to look closely to even see the flowers themselves.
“I like plants,” I said, knowing that she was right and that it would have been sensible to paint some peonies and see if I could sell them on my day off.
“For one thing, they stand still while you’re working, unlike some people.
” Which sent her off in a peal of laughter, because of course she was a terrible model, endlessly fidgeting, and my attempts to sketch her would end up with five different lines of mouth and ten different sets of arms.
“Fine, fine. You win. Enjoy your weeds.”
What I didn’t tell her, then or ever, was that plants were easy because they didn’t have to like you.
People have to like you if you’re going to paint them.
Animals, despite all the claptrap about the unconditional love of pets, have to like you.
You have to move right and act right and have the right expressions or else they get skittish and start eyeing you as if you’re plotting something nefarious.
Plants don’t care about any of that. You can show up in a plant’s life for two hours and then go away and the plant goes on about its business without any change. You can’t say the wrong thing to a plant or startle it by sitting still for an hour and then moving suddenly.
And they are fascinating. Not just things like my Father’s Venus flytraps, which even Esther could appreciate, but the little low plants that hardly anyone cares about.
When hairy bitter cress goes to seed, if you touch it, the seeds explode in all directions as if propelled by tiny springs.
The maroon bells of pawpaw stink of carrion to attract flies that normally feed on rotten meat.
(Halder probably knew all those flies by name.) Some people hang chicken bones from the pawpaw branches to attract more flies and get more fruit, so in spring the trees look like grisly wind chimes.
Unfortunately, it was hard to get a publisher to bite on a book of illustrations of things like that.
Nice ladies don’t write odes to flowers that smell like rotting flesh.
Esther was right, I’d probably have better luck with a book of peonies, or of different types of roses.
Something that people could cut out and frame and hang on the wall.
It was just that other people had already done that, so there was no reason for a publisher to take a chance on me.
I had to find a different angle, and the angles available to respectable single women without a patron were extremely limited.
Still, if I did enough illustrations of various flowers, maybe I could figure something out. And here I had access to some marvelous materials, and if I used the paper and paints meant for the insects to draw some plants … well, surely Halder was unlikely to notice or care.
Two days later, I found something that Halder cared a great deal about, purely by accident.
I had been drawing blowfly maggots, which was exactly as thrilling as it sounds.
They were mildly disgusting, but mostly they were dull.
I couldn’t even muster the enthusiasm to give them names and do voices for them.
When I found that I was missing a maggot specimen, I consulted my predecessor’s notes, then stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, thinking, Somehow my life has led me to this point.
Then I pushed back from the table and went to ask Halder for direction.
“Eh?” His eyes sharpened on me. “What did you say?”
“The first instar of Calliphora vicina,” I repeated patiently. “Either it’s mislabeled or it’s identical to C. vomitoria, but since the notes say that they’re two different—”
Halder’s fist slammed down on the desk. “How do you know what my notes say?!” he bellowed. Mottled red suffused his face, and for a moment I was afraid he was having an apoplectic fit.
I lurched back in my chair, astonished. “I … but…”
It’s just a maggot! I wanted to yell. Why are you this upset over one maggot? But of course the answer was that he was a naturalist and careers can be made or lost on the back of a single maggot, so I bit my tongue. Hard.
“Are you spying on me, girl?” He pushed himself to his feet, leaning over the desk. “Did someone set you on me? The Megatherium Club?!” Drops of spittle struck my face.
“You gave me the sketches!” I said. It came out as a squeak. I didn’t fear him physically—much—but his rage was shocking to see. “It was in the sketches, next to the drawings … you told me to use them…”
Halder stared at me. “The sketches,” he repeated. I nodded vigorously, wondering if I should get him a glass of water or flee the room.
He dropped back into his chair, the flush slowly fading from his cheeks. After a moment, he said, “Vicina is identical to vomitoria until it pupates. All the Calliphora blowflies are like that.”
“Okay.” I was torn between anger at him and an intense sympathetic embarrassment for him.
Had he forgotten that he’d given me the sketches?
Why would he be so upset at the thought of me seeing his notes anyway?
I remembered how he had pulled the few sketches he had given me from a locked safe.
Odd, even for a naturalist. You only did that if there was something you didn’t want people to see.
“I’ll arrange the plate to show that. I just wanted to make sure I hadn’t missed something important. ”
He nodded curtly, pressing a hand to his chest. Dear god, maybe he was having a fit.
Should I do something? But what? All I could think of was to get Mrs. Kent, but what was she going to do?
For that matter, what was I going to do?
Was he going to remember that he’d been angry at me for no reason, or just that he’d been angry?
Maybe I could distract him? I scrambled for a topic to divert his ire. “Errr … what is the Megatherium Club, sir?”
Halder flushed again, but his gaze was turned elsewhere. “Damned fools. A drinking club disguised as a naturalists’ society. People advancing not because of their wits, but because they’d raised a glass with the right people forty years ago. Pah!” He looked at if he wanted to spit.
“There is no excuse for such nepotism,” I offered, even though it sounded to me like Halder mostly resented the fact that he hadn’t been invited.
“Entirely correct, Miss Wilson.” He shoved his spectacles up his nose. “Nevertheless, I shall be vindicated. I have learned things about parasites that will revolutionize the field, and someday, the world shall wonder at it.”
I bowed my head in acknowledgment. Halder waved an irritable hand and I slipped away, feeling as if I’d run a mile in uncomfortable shoes.
I had, of necessity, gotten used to being yelled at in the last few years.
Headmistress Silverton had a tongue like a greenbrier whip.
But in her defense, it was usually for actual reasons, even if they were extremely minor.
She had never accused me of spying on her.
Then again, naturalists are far more paranoid, as a group, about their work being stolen than headmistresses are. It is not as if one can copy a dozen schoolgirls and beat the originals to publication.
I shook my head and went back to painting maggots, telling myself that there was nothing unusual about Halder’s paranoia, and almost, almost succeeding.
I stayed up later than usual that night. Even after I blew out the candle, I sat in the dark studio, staring out the window, where the year’s first fireflies were beginning to call to each other in voices of flickering light.
Normally watching fireflies made me unaccountably happy, as if I were a small child again. Now I just felt weary and hopeless. Halder’s anger must have shaken me more than I expected. Why?
You got comfortable. He was pleased with your work and you started to think you were safe. But all it takes is an angry whim and you’ll be gone, out the door, onto the street.
The trees outside were Payne’s gray with hints of ultramarine where the moon touched them, the shadows almost black.
Black pigment is usually a poor choice for painting shadows.
It flattens them out, and shadows are rarely flat.
They’re deep and layered and there are hints of shapes in them, things to catch your eye and make you wonder what’s there, and if maybe it’s looking back at you.