Dead as a Dodo

by Jane Langton

  “It’s all right, Homer.” Helen stood up from her chair in front of the computer and went to the table where the jars of crustaceans stood in their long rows. Half of them were newly labeled, half still awaited inspection. “But why were these jars hidden away in his family place in Burford? And why did he bring them here so secretly? Why did he have to be so furtive? Why was it so terrible that I might have guessed he brought them into the museum?”

  “Ah,” said Homer mysteriously, “wait and see. Mary’s about to work on it. We may have an answer from ages past.”

  CHAPTER 45

  I’ll tell you all my ideas about Looking-Glass House.…

  Well then, the books are something like our books,

  only the words go the wrong way.

  Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

  Mary removed the brushes and combs from the top of the dresser. She pulled up a chair in front of the mirror and sat down. She was not interested in her own reflection. Opening the book in the middle, she held it up to the glass. At once the backwards language of the journal of Oliver Clare became plain English.

  She turned the pages back to the beginning. Here there was no need for a mirror. The entries began sensibly enough. The writing was slanted and difficult, but the words went forward rather than backward.

  I make my first entry on this day, July 17, in the Year 1839.

  It is a day of CELEBRATION at Windrush Hall. Even His Grace, my brother the Bishop, has condescended to approve my friendship with Mr. Bell. “Well, little brother,” said he, looking down his nose, “it seems your malodorous preoccupation with slimy things has been noticed in high places.” And then he departed to meet with the Archbishop of York on the question of the Bishops’ Pension Bill, shortly to comt before the House of Lords. Bishops and archbishops are my brother’s preoccupation, quite as slimy in their way as my dear crabs.

  Mr. Bell has kindly passed along to me one hundred crustaceans in spirits of wine, given him for identification by Mr. Darwin after his journey around the world. Mr. Bell has kept an equal number, and hopes by thus dividing them to finish the task with all speed. It is a SACRED TRUST. I am cock-a-hoop that Thomas Bell should think me capable of the task—me, a mere collector of natural curiosities, hardly worthy of calling myself a natural philosopher. It is true that my cabinet contains some remarkable things—the horn of a Narwhal, a joined pair of human fetuses, the skeleton of a Singhalese Ape, the shriveled head of a savage, as well as a large collection of crustaceans from the Bristol Channel.

  Tomorrow I shall begin decanting them for examination. My wife has expressed a longing for the containers, as being desirable in the kitchen. Therefore I have ordered from the chemist a set of new glass, at considerable expense. His Grace, my brother, who continues to hold the purse strings, will complain, no doubt, but I say f——— the Bishop.

  In my journal I will diligently record my study of every specimen.

  At this point the mirror writing began, a hurried muddle of scribbled paragraphs. Mary held the book up to the glass, but even with its help she was often at a loss. The keeper of the journal had been writing in some distress of mind.

  Alas, there has been an abominable misfortune. In removing the Crustaceans from their original jars, my accursed assistant neglected to label the new containers at once with Mr. Darwin’s numbers. Perhaps I should make allowance for the fact that he is only twelve years old and a mere stableboy, but it was impossible for me to control my fury. Snatching up a switch, I applied it to his backside. How he howled! My youngest son appearing at that moment, I gave him a stroke for good measure, he is such a horrid little beast.

  The next entry was indecipherable, except for a BLOODY GODDAMN, written forwards, and an EVERLASTING HELLFIRE, set down in the writer’s sloppiest backwards hand.

  The following entry was forwards again. The nineteenth-century Oliver Clare was exulting in a new acquisition to his cabinet of curiosities, a giant snail, bought from a boy in the village.

  I believe it to be marine, perhaps having wandered far from shore, but I may be mistaken.

  July 20, 1839. I am charmed by the gift of a very pretty young shrike, entangled in a net in the peach orchard belonging to the parson.

  At once there was more of the scribbled backwards writing:

  My attempts to identify Mr. Bell’s crustaceans have been hampered by the loss from my library of Rev’d Congeries’ great Opus, Creatures of the Atlantic Deep, last seen squaring up a table. Without it I am in a quandary!

  The ordinary hand returned in a long passage about the diarist’s health, especially concerning the corruption of his bile and the consequent fouling of his breath. It is painful to report that my wife turns away from me in the bedchamber. There followed an account of a consultation with his physician, who treated him with anise and fennel administered in a tot of rum. However, Molly still WON’T, complained Oliver Clare. Curse the bitch, she still refuses to favour me!

  The next coded passage was in a wild, nearly indecipherable hand:

  Bloody hell! I cannot tell one specimen from another. Crabs small and large, worms with legs, worms without legs, shrimps unlike any of my acquaintance. I curse the day I begged Mr. Bell to allow me to assist him! How shall I explain my failure? In desperation I have numbered the new jars, but in truth only Almighty God knows which is which. Above all, I am tortured by thoughts of Mister D.

  There were no more backwards passages. The next entry concerned a packet of Cantonese silkworm cocoons sent by a naturalist aboard a vessel in the harbor of Hong Kong. The last was an excited paragraph about a seagoing expedition to the Indian Ocean on which he was about to embark. To my surprise, my brother has agreed to fund the journey. I suspect he is glad to get rid of me.

  Mary needed no more. It was obvious what had happened. In spite of his assurances to Charles Darwin that he was eager to identify all the Beagle crustaceans, Thomas Bell had been too busy to do the job. Therefore he had dumped some of them into the lap of his provincial friend Oliver Clare of Burford, who had pretended to more knowledge than he possessed.

  And then Oliver had muffed it. The stableboy had decanted the precious crabs into new jars, forgetting to transfer the numbers at the same time. Finally, examining them in earnest, Oliver had been totally bewildered. His modest experience was not adequate to the task of identification. Embarrassed and at a loss, he was still too respectful of that important young man Mr. Darwin to simply flush the contents of the jars down the patent toilet at Windrush Hall. Craftily he shoved them into a high cupboard with labels straight out of Mrs. Beeton’s cookbook—Jugged Hare, Potted Venison, and so on. Then he slapped his journal shut and took off on a voyage across the world.

  Perhaps he hoped that a knowledgeable naturalist would come to Burford sooner or later, someone who could identify the collection and rescue his reputation. But no such person had appeared, and eventually, decided Mary, closing the book, Oliver Clare of Burford had died peacefully in Windrush Hall, with the crabs still on his conscience, hidden away in the housekeeper’s kitchen along with his journal, high up in the darkness of the topmost shelf.

  There were still unanswered questions. What had His Grace, the Bishop, said about his brother’s failure with the borrowed crabs? Did the anise-and-fennel infusion cure his bad breath? Did his sex life improve? Above all, how did he explain his failure to Thomas Bell? Was that why his tombstone asked so pathetically for forgiveness?

  And there was a last and final question. Why did the namesake of Oliver Clare of Burford—young Oliver Clare of Oxford—return the missing specimens to the Oxford University Museum like a thief in the night?

  Perhaps Oliver’s parents would know. Mary typed up a transcript of the journal and showed it to Homer, then badgered him into another trip to London.

  CHAPTER 46

  God bless you!—get well, be idle,

  and always reverence a bishop.

  Charles Darwin, letter to T. H. Huxley

  The ho
use on Pont Street looked familiar. Mary and Homer had seen it for a fraction of a second when the vultures of television had caught Oliver’s parents climbing into a car on the morning after his death.

  Mrs. Clare threw open the door and welcomed them. Taking Mary’s hands she pulled her inside. She was a brisk little round woman, given to cries of enthusiasm, horror and delight.

  It had been a month since Oliver’s death. The grief they had seen on her face at the funeral service was no longer visible. She did not lay its burden on her visitors. “Oh, I’m so glad you called. We’ve wanted to talk to someone, but except for Detective Inspector Mukerji, there hasn’t been anybody.”

  Homer took off his coat and made polite conversation about a picture on the wall, a photograph of a young woman standing beside an old-fashioned biplane. Leaning closer, he said, “I believe that is you, Mrs. Clare.”

  “Oh, yes, that’s me.” Lucy Clare’s speech was rapid and merry. “I was a stunt pilot, back in the fifties. I barnstormed all over the northern shires, doing wingovers and snap rolls at county fairs. That’s how I met Bob. He’d been an RAF pilot during the war. He taught me to find my way by the stars. He’s been pointing them out ever since, even in storms of rain.”

  Mary admired the sturdy shape of Lucy Clare’s shoulders as she led the way into the sitting room. It was apparent that the latest storm was the death of her son.

  Oliver’s father rose as they came in, pushing back his chair from a table covered with books and papers. He was tall, like Oliver, and he had the same yellow hair, half gray now and growing thin. The freckles spread so thickly on his cheeks were friendlier than the perfect pink and white of Oliver’s fresh young face.

  Lucy introduced her husband. “Bob’s writing a book on the history of diplomacy since ancient times. He makes a cat’s breakfast of it, I’m afraid.” She flourished an arm at the litter of papers on the table, the ancient typewriter, the file box sprouting a flurry of blue and pink slips of paper. Fans of file cards lay on the floor.

  Robert shook hands heartily and urged them to sit down: Lucy dumped a cat out of a chair, and in a moment the four of them were settled, facing one another in a small circle.

  The visit was not a social call. Homer made a few gruff noises of sympathy, doing his damnedest to abandon his bastard British accent and talk American, and then Mary went straight to the point. “Mr. and Mrs. Clare,” she began, fumbling in her bag, “have you ever seen this book before?” She undid the tissue-paper wrapping and handed Lucy Clare the journal from Windrush Hall.

  “I’m afraid we took it without permission,” said Homer. “We went to Burford with Professor Dubchick’s daughter Freddy. My wife found it in one of the rooms that had been rented by your son. Of course it belongs to you.”

  Lucy Clare began to laugh. “Oh, Bob, Bob, look at this. It’s Oliver of Burford again, another secret journal. And do you see?” She held the book up. “More of his mirror writing. How marvelous!” She handed the book to her husband, who turned to the first page at once and began to read.

  “Mrs. Kelly, Mr. Kelly,” said Mrs. Clare, standing up eagerly, “you must see this.” They stood up too, and followed her to a glass-fronted bookcase against the far wall. “Bob inherited some of his curiosities.”

  Homer gave a snort of delighted recognition. “The shrunken head, the narwhal’s horn.”

  “And beetles,” said Mary. “Look, Homer, he didn’t mention beetles.”

  “Oh, they all collected beetles,” said Mrs. Clare. “There was a beetle craze. Every country parson collected beetles.”

  Homer pounced on a chance to show off. “So did Charles Darwin. He began with beetles.”

  “But he didn’t end with beetles, did he?” said Lucy Clare. “I’m afraid Oliver Clare of Burford didn’t get much farther. Not that he didn’t try.” She lifted the glass front of a shelf and brought out a skull with a long thick beak. “What do you think this is?”

  “It looks awfully familiar,” said Mary thoughtfully. “You know, Homer, it reminds me of something.”

  “Of course,” said Homer, “the dodo. It looks an awful lot like the skull of the dodo in the museum. Could it possibly be—?”

  “No, it could not.” Lucy Clare laughed. “It’s a flamingo from Madagascar. But old Oliver, Robert’s great-great-greatgrandfather—Bob, have I got it right?—did his best to pass it off as a dodo. He said he found it in a swamp on the island of Mauritius, where all the dodos were, back in the seventeenth century, before the last ones were hunted down by visiting sailors or killed by rats. He also claimed to have seen a living specimen flopping around in the woods.” She put the skull back on the shelf. “Oh, he was impossible. After that, people began to snicker and call him Dodo Clare.”

  Smiling, she pointed to the painting hanging on the wall above the case of curiosities. “Here he is, Oliver of Burford.”

  “Oh, golly.” Mary couldn’t help laughing. The first Oliver had been painted as a dandy of the eighteen-forties. His crossed eyes stared in two directions. His right hand rested on the shell of a giant clam. “Oh, forgive me.”

  “No, no,” said Lucy. “I always laugh too. Well, he was an old scamp. He wasn’t above a spot of forgery, lying, theft, adultery, anything that would irritate his brother, the Bishop of Warwick. How he loathed the bishop! Of course he confessed to everything in his journals. Confessed with relish, assuming, I suppose, that his mirror writing would conceal his naughtiness, which of course it didn’t.”

  She led them back to the circle of chairs, where her husband was still deep in the journal that had turned up in Windrush Hall. “Until a few years ago he was my favorite among Bob’s ancestors. Bob’s favorite too, which explains why we named our son after him.” As she sat down, her face turned grave. “But that was before one of the secretaries for the Oxford Assizes cleared out an old cupboard and sent us the last of Oliver’s journals, and we found out what happened later on. The last one was written in prison.”

  Homer’s jaw dropped. “In prison!”

  Lucy Clare glanced at her husband. Solemnly he closed the journal from Windrush Hall and took up the story. “On November 10, 1863, Oliver Clare of Burford was hanged for the murder of his brother.”

  Mary gasped. “His brother? You mean the bishop? Oh, Homer, that explains the inscription on that little tablet in the church—Forgive.”

  “Oh, you’ve been in the Burford church, have you?” Robert Clare smiled grimly. “It also explains the inscription for his brother. Did you see that grand monument on the wall, the one with classical ornaments and a pediment?”

  Stunned, Mary said, “Was that the bishop’s?”

  “Indeed it was. The poor old stone carver must have been worn out, inscribing an entire square yard of marble with praise for the achievements of Arthur Wellington Clare, Bishop of Warwick. Did you see the last words of the inscription, Snatched by Untimely Death?

  Homer nodded vigorously. “Indeed we did.”

  “You see,” said Lucy, “the bishop was ten years older than his brother Oliver, but they died in the same year, 1863.”

  “Of course,” said Mary, “because one brother killed the other, and then he was executed himself. But why? Why on earth did he murder his brother?”

  “It’s a long story.” Robert Clare excused himself and left the room, returning in a moment with two books. “He was a great scribbler. There are eight of these journals all together, including the one you found. They make it painfully clear that the bishop was a bully. He tormented poor Oliver, disapproving of everything he cared about, especially his interest, in natural history. The bishop was always pitching, out Oliver’s favorite mollusk or his bucket of sea worms or his prize collection of arthropods from halfway around the world. Listen to this: His Grace my brother Arthur—wait a minute, I have to parse it backward:

  has refused me five shillings for the coach to Oxford to attend the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. How I long to go! Mr. Darwin
is expected! Perhaps he will talk about his new theory of descent, the one that so upsets my brother. But Arthur has forbidden me to go. “You will bring shame and notoriety upon me,” says he. “You will jump up and claim to have seen a camelopard. “A camebpard! How absurd! Of course he plans to attend the meeting himself and deliver a discourse, which I know from experience will be mere”—

  Robert paused and ran his finger over a backwards word. “Two S’s? Oh, I see:

  horseshit, mere horseshit, on the Porphyritic Granite of Cornwall. My horse is lame. I will go by dungcart if all else fails.”

  Robert glanced up from the book with an ironic smile. “The next part’s easy enough. It’s all in caps.

  GOD DAMN HIS ABOMINABLE GRACE, THE LORD BISHOP, MY DETESTABLE BROTHER! OH GOD IN HEAVEN, IN THINE EVERLASTING CARE FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS AND JUSTICE, STRIKE HIM DOWN!”

  “Oh, the poor wretch,” murmured Homer. Mary shook her head in sympathy and looked across the room at Oliver’s portrait. One eye stared back at her slyly, the other gazed out the window with an expression of astonishment, as if beholding an outlandish creature in the wilds of Pont Street. A dodo? A blue-footed booby?

  Angrily Lucy rearranged the sagging pillows on her chair and beat them with her fists. “As you can see from that episode, it was the bishop who kept control of the family funds. Oliver had to beg for his share. Imagine having to bend the knee to an autocrat like that, just to buy a coach ticket!”