A Curious Beginning

I moved to the specimen shelves to look over the Wardian cases, handsomely made, and each set with a small metal plaque incised with a series of letters—R.T.-V. I traced them idly with a fingertip, a growing suspicion beginning to take root in my mind. “R.T.-V.,” I murmured. “Revelstoke Templeton-Vane. Now, this is a very interesting development indeed.”


I dredged up all that I knew of the famed explorer and natural historian, but the facts were few and I had been on the other side of the world when his story had been splashed across English newspapers. The darling of the naturalists, he had established himself as a brilliant scholar with a series of papers reconciling Darwin’s and Huxley’s conflicting views of natural selection. But everything had been lost on a disastrous expedition to . . . Where was it? I cudgeled my brain and could not recall until I remembered Mr. Stoker’s brief mention of hiking the Amazon. That was it, of course. He had headed a single expedition to South America, and that one trip had seen his career wrecked upon the shoals of infamy. I had heard only snatches of his ruin, but there had been vicious rumors, and he had all but disappeared from the scientific community for years.

But here were his Wardian cases, consigned to a derelict Thames-side warehouse. And then there was the matter of his name. It took little imagination to derive Stoker from Revelstoke. So, the once brilliant comet whose light had burned out so flamboyantly had come to rest in obscurity and poverty, I reflected as I looked about the dilapidated room.

I ran a finger over one of the cases and it came away black. I shuddered. It was unthinkable to sit idly by when I was surrounded by so much filth. As a scientist I rebelled against the disorder, and I had long since discovered that nothing thwarted the mental processes like clutter. While Mr. Stoker slumbered on, I swept the floor, dumping the sweepings into the dirt yard I found behind the workshop. I cleared out the ashes from the stove, putting them carefully aside in a pail and leaving a thick bed under the grate. This I polished and laid with a new fire, kindling it merrily as I rummaged about the meager stores for the makings of a soup. I scoured a wide pot and put it to the boil, hoping it had not held something unsavory in the recent past. I found a beef bone only a little past its prime and put it into the pot, adding a few limp carrots and their tops, and an onion with its sprouted green cap. In the dirt yard I discovered a struggling herb, etiolated as it was, and chopped it to add to the pot. There was salt in great quantities—he apparently used it in many of his preparations—and I did not think he would begrudge a little for the soup pot. I added this with crumbs of the loaf from the earlier repast to thicken the broth. As it bubbled away, I found spoons and took up the pail of ashes to polish them, rubbing them until they gleamed.

After this, I continued to tidy the workshop, dusting the cases and straightening the books and wiping the sticky worktables of the worst of their grime. The endless stacks of newspapers, I was amused to see, had provided him with drawing paper, for most of the margins held small sketches—some faces or ships, others botanical specimens or animals. He was a gifted artist, I realized, capturing in a few strokes of pencil or charcoal the essence of what he intended to depict. I had attempted enough sketches and paintings of my butterflies to know true talent when I saw it. His technique was rough and hasty, but his talent was far beyond my own.

I tamped the newspapers into neat bundles without sorting them, skimming the headlines to see what I had missed in the years I had been abroad. The Irish question appeared often, as did the Mahdist War in the Sudan. The Prussians featured frequently, but that was no surprise. The Prussians were always up to something nefarious. And there had been an impressive number of gunfights in cities in the western United States. But that, too, was no great surprise. In my experience, Americans were very friendly and very fond of their firearms. I put these aside and moved on to the shelves holding bottles of chemicals. He had a collection of them, many potent, all flammable, and quite a few capable of producing nasty burns if permitted to touch bare skin. Most bottles contained preservatives in various dilutions, although one bore a label that crumbled at the tentative poke I gave it. I sniffed experimentally and was assaulted at once by the cloying pickled smell of formaldehyde. I gave it a wide berth and continued on, tidying until I had brought a reasonable semblance of order to the place. I was intrigued to find a florilegium of Romantic poetry tucked under a pot of hide glue and was just about to settle in to read when I heard a roar of outrage.

“Holy Christ, I told you not to touch anything.” Mr. Stoker had come awake, wincing a little as he sat up and worked the stiffness from his muscles.