The Coral Thief

by Rebecca Stott

  “Watch what you eat tonight, Bertrand,” the Emperor muttered to his general over dinner, his eyes glittering. “This English cook is capable of anything. They tell us it is burgundy, but it is vinegar. They tell us it is beef, but really they feed us shark. They may be fine soldiers, but their cooks are barbarians.”

  17

  WO DAYS LATER, on the fifth of October, one of the pair of red-necked ostriches died in the Jardin menagerie. Fifty-two years old, born amid the sand and grass plains of Senegal, having survived captivity in three menageries in Holland and France, and having laid hundreds of eggs that failed to hatch in the climate of northern Europe despite the increasingly eccentric incubating skills of her keepers, Antoinette had finally died by choking on a coin thrown to her through her fence by a Prussian soldier who had ignored the entreaty on the gate not to throw objects. The ostrich had always had a passion for coins—the shinier the better. This one had proved fatal.

  I had begun to set things out, piece by piece, as best I could, keeping my secrets to myself, taking calculated risks, being opportunistic. Cuvier wanted new assistants in his laboratory; there were several new animals that needed to be dissected and stuffed, including the red-necked ostrich. I had resolved to ask Fin if he wanted the work, as I thought it might help to have another pair of eyes in the Jardin. Of course, no matter how much I longed to, I had no intention of actually telling Fin about the plans to break into the museum. I did not want Fin or Céleste to become caught up in Jagot’s investigation or Lucienne’s planned theft.

  That afternoon was brighter than most, the kind of brightness that hurts your eyes. Fin and I found Céleste drinking with her friends in the café in the Marché des enfants rouges. The market of red children. These were orphaned children who wore red cloaks and who had lived there once in a school built by Margaret of Navarre. The red children were now gone but their name lived on. All the names of these streets in Paris seemed to retain vestiges of their past. However many laborers the Bourbon government hired to remove Napoleon from the streets and his insignia—the bees and the eagles—from the buildings, the Emperor remained everywhere.

  Céleste’s friends laughed at us as we approached, nudging her and rearranging their hair. She led us away from the café up a metal spiral staircase to a balcony overlooking the market. Laid out below, stalls covered in white cloths were arranged in rows, as if by species, I thought: clusters of fish stalls over to the right piled with shellfish in shallow glass tanks; over to the left, flower stalls behind which women in white aprons tended vases of lilies, delphiniums, and late sunflowers; at the far end spice stalls where the Moroccan and Arabic traders drank tea at brass tables behind boxes of spices.

  “It’s more private here,” Céleste said. “You can’t hear yourself down there.”

  “What were your friends saying,” I asked, “that was so funny?”

  Céleste laughed. “You’re pretty, M. Connor, with your curls and your blue eyes and your smile. They were saying what they would do with you. Non, non, vraiment, you don’t want to know.” From her basket, she produced us a bottle of absinthe, a glass, and a small cake that smelled of tamarind.

  “Thank you,” Fin said. “I’m hungry and my head hurts.”

  “You’re always hungry, chéri. Always eating, eating. There was nothing left in my cupboard this morning. You know, M. Connor, your friend here, he ate all the bread and all the chocolate. I had to go shopping.”

  “I am mortified,” Fin said with mock shame. “I must have had too much wine. Let me give you…” He reached inside his jacket for money.

  “You gave me plenty of your coins last night, citoyen. Enough to buy more brandy and eat a queen’s breakfast. Now you’re blushing. How funny you are.” She laughed, placing her hand against his cheek. I looked away.

  At the same time the smell of her, the perfume on her clothes, the absinthe, and the heat unsettled me. I watched her as she ran her hand up Fins leg absentmindedly. In an old life, I might have asked for strength to conquer such desires; now the thought no longer even occurred to me. Even the language of prayer seemed false and euphemistic here in this beautiful secular city where the priests had not yet regained their foothold after their return from exile.

  Daniel Connor was shedding another skin. What would be left of him?

  I turned away to look down into the square beyond the market. Out there everything came and went: artists sketched, beggars begged, horses stood in shade, vendors leaned up against lemonade stalls piled high with lemons, people queued talking in the sun. A cat with one ear sat on the edge of another balcony close by, watching us. Its eyes closed slowly, then opened again.

  “Stop it, Céleste,” Fin said without conviction. “My friend is here…”

  “It’s hot, Fin. And I need a siesta. Perhaps I will find a friend for Daniel—for a siesta. It won’t be difficult.” She smiled at me. “My friends. Which one do you like?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, thinking of Lucienne.

  “Someone must do something,” Fin said, kissing her. “My friend M. Connor is losing his heart to the beautiful widow who lives with her cats and pigeons. He needs to be distracted. Quickly. I speak as a doctor of course.”

  “Daniel’s dark lady,” Céleste said, placing her back up against the wrought-iron railings of the balcony and crossing her legs. She passed me the bottle again and smiled knowingly.

  “Have some more absinthe, Daniel,” Fin said. “Its good for your head. Last week, Céleste, when Daniel was very drunk, he talked about the widow all through the night. He was confused—sometimes she was a woman, sometimes a man. This is serious, you see. We have to do something. Being in love is one thing, losing your mind is another. He can’t even sleep properly anymore. And I hardly ever see him.”

  “I haven’t lost my mind,” I said. “I was drunk, that’s all. That dreadful brandy of yours. She’s in trouble,” I added, the absinthe searing the back of my throat. “I’ve promised to try to help.”

  “Daniel Connor is not losing his heart,” Céleste said, “he has already lost it. What will I tell my friends?”

  “I think you are jealous, Céleste,” Fin said, winking at her. “You are jealous of Daniel’s woman. If I talked about a woman like Daniel talks about this one, would you be jealous? Perhaps I should be jealous of Daniel. Perhaps we should all be jealous of Daniel.”

  “Eh bien,” Céleste said. “I’m listening. Tell me about her. Un peu. Un petit peu.” She brought two fingers up, making a little gap between them, and peered through, squinting as if she was looking through a peephole.

  “I don’t want to talk about her,” I said, clumsily, suddenly afraid that I would drop my guard and tell them everything. “You are both impossible. You take nothing seriously. I won’t talk about her. But I do have a proposition for you, Fin.”

  “A proposition? How very exciting that sounds.”

  “An ostrich died in the Jardin yesterday. That’s three animals in the laboratory, what with the bull and the llama. Cuvier wants them to be dissected, drawn, and stuffed quickly. I put your name forward. I hope you don’t mind. I thought it would be good experience. A reference from Cuvier could be valuable. M. Rousseau wants you in there tomorrow morning. What do you think?”

  “Hey, Fin,” Céleste said. “You can bring me ostrich meat. If its not turned too much, of course. I don’t want to be sick. We will have an ostrich dinner.”

  Fin agreed, of course. He agreed to give up his position at the hospital and transfer to the museum, not because of the promise of stolen ostrich meat, but because he knew, as I did, that working in Cuvier’s laboratory, even as a temporary dissector, would take him several rungs up the ladder, the ladder that might end in a job that would get him out of Paris and back to a prestigious position at Saint Bartholemew’s Hospital or at the Royal College of Surgeons. For me, having Fin in the laboratory had to be of use—some use—in the impossible task I had agreed to.

  The absinthe and the lack of sle
ep had made me delirious. Everything is upside down, I wanted to tell Céleste, and I don’t know how to get it back the right way up. And no, I can’t sleep for thinking of the map and Lucienne’s swollen face, for thinking about him, the nameless man in the shadows who is making her work for him, and now this other man, the coral trader who is the father of her child.

  “You’ve had too much of that absinthe, citoyen,” Céleste said as Fin headed off to buy coffee for us all. “It will make you ill. You’re not used to it. Did your mother never tell you about the dangers of strong drink?” She began to lean toward me.

  “You’re Fin’s girl,” I said.

  “I am not Fin’s girl. I don’t belong to anyone,” she said, her chin tilted upward. “We are in France, monsieur. Here you can own things, but you can’t own people. I own myself. I can kiss who I like. I can do what I want. Fin knows that. He is not like other men.”

  “I think he is,” I said. “I think we are all the same.”

  Céleste’s eyes were remarkable. They were blue-green, but when the sun brightened, her pupils narrowed into small black dots and a ring of gold appeared around them like the sun rising behind a storm cloud. I was suddenly mesmerized watching that gold ring appear like a fugue around the black.

  “Someone should warn your dark lady,” she said. “That Daniel Connor is in love with her.”

  Love. That was startling. Bald. Uncompromising. Céleste watched me closely. Whatever this thing was that had lodged in my flesh, it did not feel like love any longer. I had been in love before, I wanted to say to Céleste, with a pretty girl, a cousin who was demure, accomplished, and well groomed. I had loved her. Or at least that’s what I had told myself. But this was now something else. Something dark, something with feathers and claws.

  18

  CTOBER BROUGHT AN INDIAN SUMMER. Everything dried up. The leaves on the trees, curled up, brown, and scratchy, seemed to be suspended, waiting to drop. The first week of October circled into the second week as I waited for Deleuze to bring me the final drawing of the map.

  A couple of weeks before, I had said to old man Deleuze in the coffeehouse in the Jardin: “You know this place better than anyone. You really ought to write a history of it.” When he didn’t answer, I began to flatter him: “I’d say no one knows more about the Jardin and its history than you do. And the baron’s not going to live forever, is he? What will happen then? The world will want to know the truth about Cuvier.”

  “The truth?” asked Deleuze.

  “I hear there are many stories about Cuvier they tell in Paris.”

  “What kind of stories?”

  “Well, some say he’s a tyrant and a bully and that he won’t countenance new ideas. Who will be there to contradict them in the future?”

  “Lies. All lies,” Deleuze said, scratching the back of his hand, where the chemicals he worked with had raised a rash the color of raw meat. “The baron hates speculation, that’s true. He is a man of fact. But all those tales about him being a bully and a tyrant, they’re all lies.”

  “I know that of course. But how will other people know? Unless someone tells them otherwise? Now, a book, a history, written by the right person, would make the world see that the Jardin des Plantes is the greatest scientific institution in the world. Such a book might describe every detail of the work in the museum, the people who work here, the animals in the menagerie. All the facts. A list of all of France’s greatest men of science. Imagine—your name would be there listed next to Cuvier’s. Joseph Deleuze, assistant botanist. Entered Jardin in 1795. Translator of Erasmus Darwin’s Loves of the Plants…”

  I remember hesitating, ashamed by how easy it was to reel in old man Deleuze, holding up a mirror to his future glory and walking slowly away from him so that he would follow me, because he would want, above all, to keep that mirror in his sight, holding his reflection a little longer. I surprised myself at the ease with which I had taken to this deception. I could hear myself flattering and cajoling but then I reminded myself what was at stake.

  “Of course.” I said. “It would be a monument. It would be read in libraries in hundreds of years by students of science who will ask: How did they do that? How did those French men of science build one of the greatest museums in the world? You could call the book Utopia’s Garden.”

  “I think,” Deleuze said, scratching his chin, “I’d go for something a little less poetic. Something like The Jardin des Plantes: A History.” As he spoke he swept his hand through the air as if seeing his book in some shop window in a busy Parisian square.

  “Why don’t you start by drawing a map of the whole Jardin?” I suggested. “With a list of the people who work here, where they live what they do. Once you’ve got that in place, the rest will follow. You could draw all the buildings and number them and have a key with names of all the lodgings, the menagerie, the amphitheater, and the glasshouses.”

  “But that would take a long time. You can’t just draw a map any old way. You have to do it accurately, with measurements. I would have to get permission. It would have to go through committees.”

  “You can do all of that later. Once you’ve shown Cuvier a decent map and drawn up the list, then you can tell him about your plans. I’d keep it a secret for now. You wouldn’t want anyone else deciding to write the same book. Like M. Rousseau. He’s been here a long time too.”

  “You’re right. A secret. Yes, I like that,” he said.

  “I might even be able to help you get it translated into English. I have connections.”

  “You do?”

  A week later Deleuze had inky fingers and rings of darkness under his eyes. For a week he walked continuously around the perimeters of buildings in the Jardin, counting his paces and noting down the numbers; he carried notebooks and devices for measuring angles; he walked from the corner of one building to another corner, counting, and then he turned and walked back, counting again, just to check.

  “You need to be more discreet,” I said to Deleuze, but his eyes were blank. “You don’t want anyone else to know what you’re doing yet.”

  He had given up writing his animal-magnetism book to make this map. Everything had stopped for this, except the Jardin itself. Every day the Jardin seemed to mutate a little more; you could always hear the sound of banging and sawing—new enclosures, new glasshouses, bricks and mortar, earth, wood, plaster, cabinets, cupboards, alterations, new buildings, and demolitions.

  Deleuze showed me his first sketch, frustratingly incomplete, on the tenth of October. It was hard to read. He had begun to trace out the rectangles and right angles of the botanical borders and the curves of the walks through the menagerie and its pens and cages, the blocks that represented the houses of the professors and their assistants and their assistants’ assistants, complete with little dots that were supposed to look like trees from above. It was good but it wasn’t finished. It took him another week, and in the meantime I waited. We all waited. Everything was in limbo.

  In Cuvier’s library, at my desk, alongside the other scribes and aides, I continued to copy out page after page of his manuscript of volume 4 of The Animal Kingdom, mapping every corner of the avian world, minute descriptions of the curves of claws, or the patterns of plumage, or the precise colors of an egg, or the geographical distribution of bird after bird, noting them all down exactly as Cuvier liked them to be copied, checking all the accents, every last semicolon and hyphen just as he instructed.

  The bird volume was almost half completed, but there was a growing sense of urgency in the library that occasionally bordered on panic. Since Sophie Duvaucel, under Cuvier’s orders, had announced that we were now to increase the rate of bird cataloguing from one bird per week to two, we were now all working ten-hour days to keep up. There were no extra assistants appointed. There were none to be had.

  Most of the birds we drew were illustrations of stuffed specimens displayed behind glass either in the Natural History Museum or in Cuvier’s Museum of Comparative Anatomy; s
ome came from storerooms wrapped in paper. Those that belonged to the stadtholder’s collection were now brought out and lined up along the shelves of the library in order of priority, birds in waiting, birds in glass-fronted boxes, or folded in paper inside closed boxes. All were labeled. I had a list of the birds that I was to draw, and all through October a procession of birds of different colors, shapes, and sizes passed across my desk, so many that my dreams were feathered and whatever I touched, I could feel plumage perpetually against my fingers. I remember the English names of the birds better than the Latin ones I was supposed to use. That October I painted the supercilious Widowbird, the Magellanic Stare, the Esculent Swallow, the Dwarf Warbler, the Sumatra Bee-eater, and the Purple Gallinule.

  In the laboratory, a few buildings away, Fin and several other young men, including Cuvier’s stepson Alfred Duvaucel and his friend Pierre-Medard Diard, working in overalls at dissection tables under the direction of M. Dufresne, senior taxidermist, stripped, flayed, dissected, and studied under microscopes the feathers, bones, feet, and beaks of another series of birds, looking for common structures and patterns. Fin had already mapped the nervous system of the dead female ostrich from the menagerie, a nervous system until now inadequately understood; now he was mapping its digestive system. Once that was complete the flayed ostrich would be placed in the bath of acid at the back of the laboratory to strip it back to bleached bones, and then the skeleton would be stitched back together with wires, mounted, and sent over to Cuvier’s museum, where a space had already been made for it in Room 2.

  I was glad of the precision and concentration the work required, though Lucienne’s words twisted like smoke through everything I wrote. I need you to get me in. What was the attraction in those words that excited and aroused me, that brushed across my skin? I need you to get me in.