Every Hidden Thing

by Kenneth Oppel

  He must have seen me hesitate, because he added, “Only if you can bear it. I know you’re naturally shy.”

  I wasn’t afraid of being shy; I was afraid of being charmed. A foolish part of me still wanted to talk to him, to see his eyes and his smile. He was a distraction. I wanted—I needed—to impress my father on this trip, to prove myself.

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll see what I can learn.”

  All I had to do was close the gate on Samuel’s charm. The problem with a gate, though, was this: Even though it slammed shut with a very impressive bang, you could still see through the bars.

  5.

  KEEPING YOUR ENEMIES CLOSE

  SHE WAS SITTING BY HERSELF AT THE FAR END of the parlor car, sewing something. She didn’t look up as I entered with Father.

  Outside the big windows, prairie rolled endlessly past. It felt spacious in here. Clusters of overstuffed armchairs, mostly filled with Yale students, humming tunes. Laughing. Comparing their bowie knives and pistols, so shiny they must’ve just bought them in Omaha.

  Cartland was here too. Smoking a cigar and talking to a small wiry man. Must have been the wispy fellow my father mentioned. Balanced on his knee was a notebook, his right hand busy scribbling.

  “Ah, Bolt,” said Cartland, sighting my father and ushering us over. “Mr. Landry here is traveling with our expedition yes yes, to write an article for Harper’s Magazine.”

  “Is that so? Good afternoon, Mr. Landry.”

  “Professor Bolt, a pleasure to meet you, sir.” The scribbler’s enthusiasm seemed genuine as he shook my father’s hand.

  “Have you ever been out west before, Mr. Landry?”

  Cartland chuckled. “There’s no point trying to winkle our destination from Mr. Landry. He himself doesn’t know where we’re headed.”

  “It’s true,” Landry said.

  His quick head movements and perpetually startled eyes reminded me of a meerkat I’d seen once in a zoo.

  Cartland released a narrow plume of smoke. “He does have some questions about your extraordinary elasmosaurus, though.”

  Worriedly I glanced at my father, saw him raise his eyebrows. But he forced a grin. “Well, I’m sure your version of events is more amusing, Cartland.”

  “No need for my version when yours yes yes has been immortalized in print.” And Cartland lifted from among some papers the latest edition of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. The locomotive gave a shrill whistle, and I started.

  Father’s grin hardened. “You were speedy in getting a copy.”

  “I had the editor send me one still damp from the press.”

  Cartland was the biggest fool to taunt my father like this. Dangling the journal like a red cape before a bull. My father’s nostrils flared. I took a step closer so I could grab if he lunged. Though I wouldn’t have minded seeing Father take another punch at him. I glanced over at Rachel, who’d looked up from her sewing. I hoped she was seeing this, how her father was hell-bent on provoking mine.

  But Father just looked calmly at the journalist. “Well, Mr. Landry, I don’t know what the good professor has told you about my elasmosaurus, but it’s a difficult business, piecing together something that’s been asunder for millions of years.”

  “I’m sure, I’m sure,” murmured Landry, his pencil scratching paper.

  “And Professor Cartland might not appreciate that, since he’s only found . . . how many actual dinosaurs is it, Cartland? Ah yes: none. Not a one. Don’t forget to put that in your story, Mr. Landry, and I’ll be sure to read it.”

  The chatter of the Yale students dwindled. Their eyes focused on us.

  Cartland waved his cigar in the air. “Let’s be fair, Bolt yes yes. We’ve had our fossils found for us by quarrymen and amateur prospectors.”

  “No, sir,” I said indignantly. “He was there when Laelaps was found. Dug him out himself.”

  “His birthday present,” said my father with a grin.

  “That’s true,” I said. “I’d just turned six.”

  “Oh, that makes a very nice bit,” said Landry, jotting it down.

  “It was there in the marl; I remember the day precisely,” my father said. “It rained and rained, and they shouted down at me to come up; they were worried about a slide. I was soaked through, more mud than man. But I knew what I’d seen: a scapula, and attached to it, a humerus of a creature no human had ever set eyes on, and I was not climbing up from that pit until I had every bone the black earth was prepared to yield to me!”

  He finished to an appreciative silence. The Yalies all watched, enthralled by this oration. Rachel was listening too, and our eyes met briefly before she looked away. The journalist himself had forgotten to scribble, was peering up at my father with his wide meerkat eyes.

  “And where we’re headed,” my father went on, aware that the entire car was his audience now, “we’re going to exhume even more amazing creatures, vast creatures that will be talked about and marveled over for centuries.” He beamed at Cartland and Mr. Landry. “But Professor Cartland here, I know, won’t be coming home empty-handed either. He’s got quite a fine collection of horse fossils, you know. Some of them no bigger than a cat. Adorable little creatures.”

  Chuckling from all around the car.

  “You’re a fine storyteller, Bolt,” said Cartland, “yes yes, but I think with all your showman’s bluster you’ve missed the real story. And the real story yes yes is evolution. These horses of mine that you’re so quick to mock span millions of years, and when I have completed my collection, they will provide the physical proof for our English friend Charles Darwin and his controversial theory of evolution. How life starts, how it adapts over millions of years. It’s fun to dig things up and give them names, but evolution will explain the entire story and nature of life on our planet.”

  His sober speech didn’t win him any chuckles, but it had a heft to it. What I knew about evolution and natural selection wasn’t much, but I knew it was talked about more and more. Many of the students grunted and nodded seriously. Cartland had just called my father a digger, a foolish amateur.

  “Well,” Father said with a forced grin, “I will look forward to admiring your horses in the museum, if I can push past the crowds thronged around the behemoths I’ve got on display.”

  “Ha!” said the journalist Landry. “And where will you find these behemoths, Professor Bolt?”

  My father was so lathered up now I worried he might give something away. So before he could speak, I said, “You’ll know when we get off the train.”

  “Very nice!” said Landry, scribbling. “You’re a secretive bunch! I love this rivalry angle that’s emerging. Feuding paleontologists in the Wild West!”

  My father stepped very slowly, but firmly, on my big toe, and when I looked at him in objection, he tilted his head in Rachel Cartland’s direction.

  I didn’t need any encouragement.

  Across the aisle, he sat down with a sigh of contentment, as if the chair had been designed for him.

  “Miss Cartland,” he said cordially.

  “Mr. Bolt,” I replied.

  He lifted a newspaper from a side table and began to read. I attended to my sewing, but watched him sideways. When he’d walked over, he still carried himself like a boy, vigor and eagerness bundled into the swing of his shoulders and arms. He had a mild stoop, his head drooping slightly. I was glad of it, this hint of uncertainty. A little tarnish upon the prodigy.

  Some of the Yale students were humming purposefully now, warming up to yet another song.

  “Have they been singing the entire trip?” Samuel Bolt asked, looking over with a grin.

  “Unfortunately yes.” I glanced up from my sewing. His profile really was quite perfect. “I’m hoping they’ll quiet down once we get into the field.”

  “A little heatstroke might do the trick.”

  “Or a snakebite.”

  He chuckled. Freckles were dusted across either side of his nose.
I kept my eyes on my work. Would nothing extinguish that smile? It made it harder for me to think clearly. The singing started up, loudly enough so that I couldn’t hear what he said next.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  He started to speak again, then gave up, and simply crossed the aisle and took the chair opposite me. There was not a foot between our knees. “May I?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  His eyelashes were thick enough to make most girls jealous. His mouth was very well molded. And the outline of his jaw was strong, giving his narrow face a lupine look.

  “Our fathers are quite a pair, aren’t they?” he said. “The way they carry on. Philadelphia! Good thing we were there to save them.”

  He was being a bit too familiar for my liking, like it were all some big joke. I carefully jabbed my needle into the material.

  “As I recall, it was your father who struck the first blow.”

  His grin dissolved. “Only after your father publicly humiliated mine and tried to destroy his reputation.”

  His temper was quick when it came to defending his father. I supposed I was no different.

  “What my father did,” I said more gently, “he should have done in private. I truly wish he had.”

  Samuel nodded, the storminess leaving his face at once. “Well, my father’s a terrible hothead. And he took a pounding for it. Ice to his face for the next three days. He’s quite vain. I heard him murmuring to the mirror about permanent disfigurement.” He chuckled.

  “He looks absolutely fine to me.”

  “I hope your father wasn’t too badly off.”

  “There was a lot of bruising. But he’s fine now. Thank you for asking.”

  I looked around the carriage, hoping some gallant student wasn’t going to join us. I needn’t have worried. It was a lucky fact of growing up half-orphaned that I was often unchaperoned. I had no older sister or mother to fussily shadow me. My father forgot, and I was allowed a lot more freedom than most girls my age. I was used to sitting alone, and I enjoyed it.

  “What are you sewing?” he asked.

  I was ready with the lie I’d prepared, but something made me tell him the truth. Maybe it was because I wanted him to trust me. I’d give him a small secret, and maybe he’d give me a bigger one in return. Something useful to my father. I glanced around, but no one else was listening. They couldn’t have heard anything over the singing anyway.

  “A split skirt,” I whispered. “I found a pattern in a magazine, and it didn’t look too difficult.”

  “Is it like trousers?” he asked, lowering his voice to match mine.

  I put my sewing to one side. “A little bit.” I watched him, wondering if he’d think me odd. It was odd. No one wore split skirts out east. Even in the West, I’d heard, it was still considered eccentric, even improper. “It just divides a skirt into two equal halves. So a woman can ride astride.”

  He leaned closer, a conspiratorial smile on his face. “You’re going to ride like a man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does your father know?”

  “Not yet.”

  His eyes widened. “What’ll he say?”

  I had several guesses, none of them happy, but I felt reckless right now. “I don’t know, and I don’t care. If I’m going fossil hunting, I need to be able to ride properly, not slide off like some silly lady in the public gardens.”

  There was a pause, and for a second I was very worried he’d disappoint me and say something stupid.

  He said, “I always thought those sidesaddles looked really uncomfortable.”

  “They’re treacherous!” I said, pleased. “They don’t hold you well, and sitting twisted in the saddle is terrible for your back. Not to mention the horse. I’ve seen them cinch those saddles so tightly the horse can hardly breathe.”

  “A split skirt makes total sense to me,” he said. “Why not?”

  I looked at him anew. I couldn’t imagine too many men, if any, liking the idea of a woman riding astride. Was he just humoring me? No. For all his confidence and charm there was a guilelessness to his face. I didn’t think he’d make a good liar.

  He looked out the window at the endless grassland, hammered flat by the sky, and for a moment I was at a loss for what to say.

  I nodded at a basket on the side table beside me. “There are some games here,” I said, sorting through them. “Do you know this one?”

  It was a word game, which was my forte. Samuel didn’t know it, so I quickly explained the rules. There were sixteen cubes, with a different letter on each face. You shook them up in a little cloth sack and dumped them into a four-by-four tray, and then tried to write down as many words as possible using the adjacent letters.

  “Like prospecting for words,” I said.

  “I should be good at this, then,” he said.

  “We’ll see.” Still cocky. I handed him a piece of paper and a pencil and turned the small hourglass upside down. “We have three minutes. Go.”

  When I played this game with Papa, we did it in complete silence, so intense was our concentration. So I was surprised when Samuel said, “Your father has a lot of hands working for him on this trip.”

  “Twelve students,” I said, jotting down another word. This was no secret—anyone could count them right now in the parlor car.

  “Don’t forget you,” he said.

  I felt pleased. “I’ve done more prospecting than most of them. Some of them hardly know how to hold a geological hammer.”

  I heard him sniff sympathetically. “I hope they don’t smash anything good.”

  “The soldiers will be even worse; I’m hoping Papa doesn’t let them help.”

  Too late I realized I’d just let something slip.

  “How many soldiers will you have?” he asked conversationally. It was a natural enough question, but I knew he was prospecting for information—just like me.

  “No idea really. They’re giving us an escort because of the Indians.”

  “Good idea,” he replied. “That didn’t ever occur to my father.”

  “Well, we’ll certainly attract a lot more attention.”

  “With the singing and all.”

  I laughed. “Yes. It’s just you and your father?”

  “Pretty much.”

  We were quiet for a little bit, jotting down our words.

  “Will you spend the whole summer out west?” he asked.

  I didn’t look up; I’d found a good clump of letters. “Yes.”

  “Your mother won’t miss you too much?”

  “I have none.”

  When I glanced up, I saw the frank surprise in his face.

  “Me either. She died of influenza.”

  “Mine in childbirth.”

  Eyes back on the game, he said, “So we both grew up motherless.”

  I glanced at the dwindling sand in the timer, then back at the letters. “With only the influence of our fathers.”

  “For better or worse.”

  He laughed, and I laughed with him.

  “I suppose that’s why you’re such a tomboy.”

  “The last person to call me that was punched in the nose.”

  “And who was that?”

  “Matthew Kyles, in the schoolyard when I was nine. The timer’s out.”

  He put down his pencil. “Interesting. So my father’s not the only one who has a quick fist.”

  I was aware of the heat in my cheeks and hoped I wasn’t blushing. I got splotchy when I blushed. “I was a child.”

  “So why did he call you a tomboy?”

  “I took an atypical interest in a worm that had been cut in half.”

  Samuel nodded eagerly. “I ate one once.”

  This was good. “What did it taste like?”

  “Dirt mostly. Dirt and . . .” His brown eyes looked up and to the right. “Cucumber. Did you get in trouble for punching Matthew?”

  “He cried, and I had to stay in at recess and lunch all the next week. Which suite
d me fine. I got to read undisturbed.”

  “Well, I hope you won’t punch me,” he said.

  “I might, if you call me a tomboy again. Maybe you’d cry too. I’m going to read out my words. The ones we have in common we cross out, and then I’ll show you how we score the rest.”

  I could already see my list was much longer than his. He hadn’t done very well. It was very satisfying trouncing him.

  “How are you so good at this?” he demanded.

  “A youth misspent on word puzzles and reading.”

  “I imagine you were quite abnormal as a child.”

  “Very.”

  “Did your friends enjoy losing over and over?”

  “I didn’t have friends.”

  “Not even at school?”

  “I spent recess reading under a tree.”

  “The teacher’s pet, I bet.”

  I shook my head. “That would’ve involved being helpful and chatty.”

  “I’d have sat with you under the tree,” he said, and I raised my eyebrows doubtfully until he added, “if you ate a worm.”

  “Another game?” I asked, shaking the letters up again, because I could feel my cheeks redden, and I knew I was doing a very poor job closing the gate on his charm. What I really needed was more a windowless dungeon door, very thick.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m determined to beat you at this.”

  I set the timer going again. He glared at the letters—as though he could order them into shape with the same uncanny ability he said he had with bones. He was very clever, and he knew it, but this was something I was undeniably better at. I got to work.

  “Well,” I heard him say, “I’m glad you won’t be riding sidesaddle. I’ve heard the terrain can be pretty punishing. Especially around the South Platte.”

  “Is that right?”

  “So’s your father hoping to complete his horse collection out there? He’s had good luck in Nebraska.”

  “That would please him no end.”

  I kept my answers vague. Was he fishing again? Was that the real reason he’d come to talk to me? The only reason? I was surprised by the prick of hurt I felt, even though I’d been asked to do exactly the same thing.