Irregularity

by Nick Harkaway

  She looks around, as if suddenly aware of our presence, and stares into the shadows. She is a creature who is unafraid to look into the dark to seek answers. This is why she is so perilous to us.

  It is nothing, Émilie, she says aloud. Just your mind once again.

  Satisfied that she is alone, she pushes aside the essay she has been working on and finds a sheet of pale cream writing paper, with a delicate hand-painted border. On it, she begins a letter.

  She writes of the blackness she sees, of the presentiments of death that cloud her walks in the gardens. She begins to write in smaller letters, in tighter lines, so that she may finish her last thought before the page runs out. Her last sentence, in smaller script, runs along the pale-green border.

  I finish because I can write no more.

  How does she know we have come for her? Perhaps now is not the right time?

  We play out the consequences once more, map the choices. We are at a junction and only one path may be taken. She is on the cusp of shifting the course of ideas. A few more years and she will have the breakthrough that could undo everything. All our work. We cannot permit her those years.

  But she senses us. She fights to hold on. For now, we must retreat.

  We will allow her to finish her work, we will allow this one indulgence. The birth of her child too, we will sanction. Her writings, in the right hands, will prove useful. We will see to that.

  We will return.

  September 10th, 1749.

  Time has found its grip once more.

  We took her in the early hours of the morning. They will say it was sudden but it was thirty-nine years in the coming. She looked straight at us, unafraid to the last. Daring us to come. In her last moments, she turned not to God, but to her idea of multiple universes. The notion that somewhere a different version of herself continued to live and to work gave her comfort. And yet, in every possible universe, we are there, an invincible force ensuring there is only one possible path.

  Her grand project is completed. In time, we will permit it to be seen. The work she began will inspire other men — our men. But we must wait till her light has faded from memory.

  We will see that her brilliance is framed solely by her relationship to our man. It is his name that will, that must, echo through out the ages. Sharp-tongued gossips will disparage her work. She will become nothing more than Voltaire’s mistress. A parrot of great men. A curiosity and nothing more.

  She was a woman out of time.

  We do not, cannot, think on the morality of our actions. Only that they are necessary.

  Our work is done.

  We fade into darkness once more.

  Fairchild’s Folly

  Tiffani Angus

  1736

  My Dear Mr. Fairchild,

  He held the quill, waiting for a way in. Carl Linnaeus corresponded with learned men across Europe, all interested in the natural world and his bold idea of ordering the creatures found upon it, yet none of them, alas, amort. It was no surprise that he found himself ignorant of the agreed upon courtesies required when corresponding with the dead.

  Pinks, he wrote and then stroked his chin with the feather, hoping to tease out the next word.

  Pinks are… what? Thomas Fairchild had known everything there was to know about pinks.

  Carl crossed it out and began again.

  The genus Dianthus has, for me, a bittersweet connection.

  It still wasn’t right. A drop of ink marred the line. No matter.

  He waited, determined to find the correct voice. Mannered? Humble? Cordial with a tint of solemn? Making the acquaintance of the nephew had given him the idea, but he resisted the urge to begin a list of moods and their matching facial expressions, each of which affected a voice’s timbre and delivery. It would be a game for another time.

  East of the City of London I found your Hoxton awash in Pinks, defiant against hard Stone, soft’ning Man’s Creations with the rose colour of a Child’s cheek, the ruddiness of a Nipple viewed through gauze. The picot edges of each bloom saw at the sky, unconcern’d that rather than Meadow they grow against Brick and Iron, risking hooves and carriage wheels. They are a hardy Plant, and even blanket’d the dead lying beneath their stones in the Churchyard. Which brings me to this letter.

  You may think me ridiculous to admit that it was a Pilgrimage of sorts. I allow myself to believe that you would not, for I know you to be—to have been—a man of God. We know God’s Message by studying his Creations.

  In the Ground at St Leonard’s where the Poor are laid to rest, you lie alongside Men who—in spite of their station—had what you had not: Children to continue their Name, a Wife for their Comfort. Yet those same souls sleep eternally near Thomas Fairchild, a Man who left what they did not: a Legacy….

  1716

  His face flushed, Thomas Fairchild trembled as he pulled at his neckcloth, but the thin puff of air that slid down beneath the fabric of his shirt did little to alleviate the heat that built in his chest. For a moment, he even considered undressing and going as Adam into his Eden, but his workers were nearby, pushing barrows of dirt, tending to the trees and plants in his nursery. Already the thought of them — of anyone — watching what he was about to do both terrified and excited him. Not that anyone — except, of course, the educated crowd at the Royal Society, and only then if it worked — would know what he was about to do. Except, of course, God.

  It was so unnatural as to be invisible.

  He picked at his shirt front again, the limpness of the fabric reminding him of the crush during the dance a week before, and breathed her name.

  Miss Rebecca Wade. The hard consonants of her given name tapped at Thomas’s sensibilities, waking him up, holding him there until letting him loose with the descent of her surname, the final d bringing to an end the sigh of the a following the lip-pursing w. He’d taken to repeating her name under his breath, a tiny prayer among all of the others.

  Each repetition, each meeting of his lips on m and b, was a kiss on the lace that finished the hem of her mantua. She was a walking exotik, a living advertisement of her father’s Spitalfields weaving house, the bizarre silk design of her dress by turns spiky and soft. Thomas, apprenticed to a clothmaker in his youth, wanted to study her, to find where she ended and the fronds, leaves, pistils, stamens, petals, seeds, and roots of her dress began. Thomas had never travelled, his plants shipped to him across the seas, but with Rebecca he imagined he could conquer a foreign land. And now in his shed he stood at the edge of one discovery, a culmination of his lust for recognition, from the society and from Rebecca. To create something that no one had seen before: an exotik not imported but bred on home soil.

  This, then, had sent him to his gardens to find the right shade, shape, ruffle to capture her attention.

  Outside, his men called goodnight to one another as they stored their tools and hung up their aprons. Thomas returned their goodbyes to keep them away and was soon alone.

  He returned to his task.

  He was a man, wasn’t he? With all his faculties? He wondered whether he was the first person ever to think of it. Or just the first to brave the Almighty’s wrath.

  Adam and Eve did what they were destined to do in their garden. Thomas Fairchild would take the steps necessary to claim his own destiny in his garden.

  It would make his name.

  On the table, he placed the female to his right, the male to his left. The arrangement was important. Fertilisation should happen from left to right, in the same order as one would read.

  He considered his personal potting shed — the smallest in his nursery, its few windows covered in condensation, every cubby full to bursting with papers and catalogues, pots and tools — as a glowing cocoon, a hen’s egg held up to a candle, a bright womb.

  “Enough,” he said to himself. “Philosophy is made confused with such poetry.”

  Before him lay the materials necessary for new life, each party in the transaction displaying a deep blush
, their essential parts open and ready. The humid room filled with the mingled scent of the happy couple. Thomas said a little prayer to himself, a sort of nuptial service, uniting the two in a matrimony before consummation.

  He had assigned the Sweet William the role of patriarch on account of its name. With a brush of Thomas’s feather, it gave up some of its essence. He turned to the bloom chosen as his heroine, her frills reminiscent of Miss Wade’s. With a flick of his wrist, the carnation, its scent so reminiscent of sugar pastries and cloves that Thomas’s mouth watered, was fertilised. He twisted the feather between his fingers, tempted to force nature’s hand even further.

  A goat bleated nearby. A carriage rolled down the lane. A sprinkle of rain fell on the roof above Thomas’s head. He laid down the feather, the end piece of a broken pen, nothing decorative or regal about it, just a practical item given one final chore before being crushed into the ground with the table scraps. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  That evening, as he wrote orders at his desk, answered correspondence, and recorded the newest shipments from the Netherlands, he couldn’t help but return again and again in his memory to the afternoon in the shed. The moment with the feather. The late afternoon light. The closeness, the heat, the condensation on the glass panes. “You act like a man half your age, walleyed with lust,” he said to himself.

  He resisted the urge to return to the nursery. He resisted the urge to tell his brother-in-law. He resisted the urge to call on Mr. Wade.

  Rebecca.

  Would that he could recollect a tryst with her. But it hadn’t yet happened. Nor had any nights with Miss Mary Buelton, her cousin Henrietta, or the Misses Cavendish. He had loved none of them, but had lusted after all of them. Did lust mellow to love, or was a man who married in haste forever sorry for it? Thomas didn’t know. He had never made it past the first flush of physical yearning. The more he aged, the sillier it all seemed.

  What had he done?

  1729

  Dear Sir,

  Mr. C—n, a Gentleman of your Acquaintance, inform’d me of your Great Idea last evening over a delightful Lamb pie. By Divine Providence or plain Luck I recently receiv’d word of your Thesis on the Sexual Reproduction of Plants, a topick with which I am very familiar. Perhaps you have heard of me? Or are aware of my Presentation to the Royal Society on my Experiment on that very Subject?

  I was informed that you are considering the devising of an ambitious Strategy to create a System by which to organise every Animal and Insect, Fish and Flower. I inquir’d over Pudding, curious in the extreme to know how one Man could take upon himself such a Task, for aren’t there more Lands upon the Earth than we have seen, leading one to assume that there are divers more Creatures upon it than those with which we are familiar. Will the discovery of a never before seen Plant or Butterfly undo the ranking, bringing it crashing down higgledy-piggledy as surely as a young Child playing with his Blocks? Not that I equate You, sir, with a Child. On the contrary. I am but a curious Botanist.

  Please excuse my Ignorance. I am, with all Humility, Your faithful Servant,

  Thos Fairchild

  1736

  It was several minutes before a man clad in a dirt-smeared apron over simple clothes met him at the gate.

  “Mr. Linnaeus, sir, I am John Bacon.” The young man held out his hand. “You are welcome to my nursery.” His tone indicated a certain weariness, leaving Carl to assume he said the lines by rote. How many voices were there, Carl wondered, and how might they be ordered? By tenor or by purpose? Commands, exclamations, manipulation…. The number of voices was as endless as the assortment of faces, yet did not all faces contain two eyes, a nose, a mouth, etc., each component flexible into only a limited number of variations?

  “Sir?” The young man directed Carl’s attention back to the moment.

  “I have come to inquire after Mr. Thomas Fairchild,” Carl explained. “We corresponded many years ago, but I have been travelling.” He patted his satchel, feeling the familiar bump of letters. “Is he about?”

  The young man nodded. “I’m his nephew—”

  Carl mentally aged young John, giving him reddened cheeks and a bulbous nose, a paunch that strained the buttons of his waistcoat, and lines at the edges of his eyes.

  “—but he has been dead these six years,” John continued, and the image of the uncle disappeared inside of the slim young man.

  “Six years?” Carl tried to control his shock. Another voice to add.

  “Mayhap seven,” John said.

  “That explains the lack of response.” He trailed off, only brought back to the present by the smell of manure carried on a shifting breeze. “Please excuse my manners. My condolences, sir,” he said and bowed his head. “I truly regret that I never was able to know your uncle. In person.”

  John nodded. “My uncle was proud of his wide correspondence. He never travelled. He loved London and its gardens, kept a greenhouse for his own projects.”

  Carl thought for a moment. “May I see it? I wrote a thesis on plant reproduction. To observe the mule’s birthplace….”

  As John led the way, he described the new greenhouses being built with bigger windows and better ovens, and he proudly listed which new plants had arrived and from where. Carl nodded but barely listened.

  “Here it is,” John said and opened the door to the smallest greenhouse.

  “And the mule?” Carl asked.

  “At the Royal Society, pressed on paper, I believe.”

  “Seeds—?”

  “—No seeds, of course.”

  Carl realised his mistake. “Of course.”

  “I’ve no need of this shed,” John explained. “Too cramped for more than one man at a time, and the windows too small. I’m thinking of tearing it down.”

  “It’s rather well kept,” Carl said. The building’s floor was free of muddy footprints, its shelves dustless, the pots stacked in a corner without cobwebs or moss.

  John Bacon grunted. “’Twas a squirrel’s nest when Uncle was alive. I loved it as a child. If I didn’t know any better it wouldn’t be a stretch to think that a shelf snapped with the weight and the plants fell upon one another in their passion.”

  Carl kept his disappointment to himself. He had hoped, standing in the man’s private shed, for a feeling of connection to Thomas Fairchild, but the longing disappeared in a breath. There was no life in the little building: no papers or a forgotten cap, no boots by the door or an old glove, its thumb worn from use. Thomas’s business legacy, the nursery, had been left open and his nephew had stepped in seamlessly, as Carl could see by the number of workmen tending to the plants and trees. His other legacy lay in a dark drawer in a stone building in London.

  “My search for your uncle is destined to be unsuccessful,” Carl said and stepped backward out the door to allow John to return to his work.

  “He’s buried near to here,” John said as they returned to the gate. He explained his uncle’s endowment and the annual sermon that Thomas had felt was necessary for forgiveness. “You’ve missed the Whitsun sermon by a fortnight, I’m afraid.”

  Carl rested a hand on his satchel before asking whether Thomas had ever married.

  John shook his head. “There was some talk, when I was younger, about a betrothal. My own parents are gone now, and no one to ask.” Carl noted a tone of resignation, another voice to add to the growing list.

  “The letters?” the man asked. Carl pulled his hand away from his satchel and wondered whether the man had any claim on the packet. “May I ask how you were acquainted?” John then asked and Carl relaxed.

  Thomas’s letters had followed Carl from post to post, their author already dead by the time Carl had opened them. While he sat at his breakfast and read Fairchild’s questions, he had been conversing with a ghost, though one with a kind temperament and a keen mind. It was the order of things, of course, to grow and then wither and die.

  “I wonder,” Carl asked the nephew, “whether you took possess
ion of a letter that arrived after your uncle’s death?”

  The young man’s eyes lifted as if the answer were flying above; he cocked an eyebrow and stuck out his lips, and Carl Linnaeus saw Thomas Fairchild in his nephew’s face. He clapped his hands together, eager to receive what he had sent.

  Later, as Carl said his goodbyes, he asked one last question. “Where do you rank love, sir?”

  John leaned on a shovel and studied the ground, his demeanour not one of a man trying to remember a past event but one attempting to consider the impossible or even unworthy. “I’ve never thought on it. The seasons turn quick. Not much time for contemplation—”

  “—of something so abstract?”

  “Of something so important.”

  “Your uncle loved you. He said it in a letter.”

  John raised his head and nodded. “He said so when he trained me and left his nursery in my care. He gave me the one thing he ranked above all others.”

  Carl turned away soon after and made his way toward St Leonard’s.

  1729

  Dear Sir,

  I do hope that the lack of a Response to my Initial Letter is not indicative of Irritation on your part. I will, until I hear otherwise, assume that it is your Study of the Natural World that hinders your Correspondence and not a humble Gardener’s inquiries.

  It is your Study itself that brings me to write to you again. I have found myself, at my age—I am two and sixty, and I understand you aren’t half that!—wondering more Things than I can write in a simple letter, unless that letter were to grow to the length of one of Defoe’s Novels. It is a Conversation to be had over a Dinner—a Feast even, with many Courses, one for each Topick. It would last into next week! Please excuse my wandering. I shall blame that upon Age as well, and be forgiven for it by someone such as Yourself.