Chapter ONE
It is an unusual thing, to live in a botanical garden. But then again, Simon and Gregor were an unusual pair of gentlemen.
You might imagine that the vast greenhouse at Grimfern would be too stuffy for human habitation. You would be more or less right, though Gregor Sandys—that notorious botanist—had become accustomed to the garden’s balmy climate. Grimfern’s many brilliant glass surfaces were always covered in a sheen of condensation, so he developed a habit of carrying a handkerchief in every pocket for the sole purpose of wiping his spectacles. His sumptuous fruit trees and exquisite orchids required such moisture and heat that by the end of a hard day’s gardening he could practically wring out his cummerbund. Gregor would swelter at any temperature though, cooking slowly like a steamed ham, for his precious collection of botanical curiosities.
In a house made of glass, the dazzling sun was a constant worry. An embellished wrought-iron frame held up countless artisanal panes, and if a denizen of the garden were caught off-guard by a passing sunbeam—or even by a particularly flamboyant candle flicker—he would be quite incapacitated by the light’s furious beauty. Simon Rievaulx, the other resident at Grimfern, had set up his taxidermy workstation in the cool, dark basement of the glasshouse precisely to avoid this problem. Down there, beneath even the boiler, he could make sure that his compositions did not spontaneously de-compose by keeping his cadaverous creations, and himself, pleasantly chilled.
The immense roof of the central dome was a masterpiece of levity through structural integrity—a hallmark of Victorian engineering. The Grimfern Botanical Garden was a prismatic Hagia Sophia—a fountain of jewelled rafters. Even the great Crystal Palace in London would be jealous of its bespoke glasswork. Gregor had taken care to fill his glass mosque not only with greenery, but also with music; he had his mother’s piano placed carefully under the great dome to achieve maximum acoustic effect. There he would sit of an evening and swoon to the excesses of French and Bohemian composers. Of course, the great glass roof made a great damn clatter when the storms hit, so even under its shelter Gregor’s rhapsodies could be rained off. In addition, the heat and damp played havoc with the beast’s temperament. Even the simplest étude became savage with its barbarous tuning.
The final complaint to be discussed here about living in a rococo conservatory is the sheer lack of privacy. Simon and Gregor, being confirmed bachelors, had no qualms about keeping each other’s company. Well, they shared one qualm—that they should guard their own workspaces as sacred to themselves. Simon never visited the west wing where Gregor conducted his research, and Gregor never descended the stone steps to Simon’s refrigerated taxidermy practice. They slept, washed, and cooked in the east wing of the gardens, which was split up with luscious ferns and vines into smaller rooms. A playful device allowed for a bath or shower in amongst tropical foliage, with the jungle flora appreciating this steamy atmosphere.
An odd thing about this notionally see-through house was that barely anyone, except for the two gentlemen inhabitants, ever actually saw inside. It was set upon a commanding hill with a long, sweeping lane, stone steps, and terraces. It was ringed by a thick hedge and guarded by sentinel poplar trees. The wider grounds were kept by a squadron of villagers, handpicked for their discretion, or for their un-inquisitiveness. They trimmed the lawns, spruced the bushes, mucked out the horses, and so on, enjoying generous pay and limited oversight from Mr Sandys. But they were never to set foot, or even peer, within the topiary fortress where the masters lived.
The only villagers who even came close to the greenhouse were the post lad and the girl who dealt with the laundry. They would meet Gregor
at the top of all those steps, where the privet reared up into an arch over an iron gate, to swap fresh mail for dirty clothes, and vice versa.
The story starts here at one such exchange, in part because the boy—Will—carried with him a long-awaited delivery: a crate marked with angry customs notices in both Dutch and Malay. But we also start here because the girl—Jenny—was entirely absent.
* * *
“Package for you, sir. Straight from Araby, by the looks of it!”
Gregor eyed the crate with ill-concealed glee.
“It is a specimen from Indonesia, in fact.” He dropped his canvas sack of laundry and hefted the rough-hewn box from Will. “And it took more than a few well-chosen words in the ears of powerful people to get it back here.”
The young man just smiled and shrugged, making the most of his time near the greenhouse to nosy around the patio. Gregor tolerated this indiscretion, as all he could spy on would be the meticulously spherical rose bushes. The view inside the greenhouse was blocked by emerald, sun-hungry leaves, thick and waxy against the steamed glass.
“I guess Johnny Foreigner doesn’t like you nicking his plants.”
“I didn’t steal this, I discovered it. And it’s not a plant. It is a fungus.”
“Finding or robbing, flowers or fungus. Can’t tell the difference, myself!” Will said with his cock-eyed smile. The corners of Gregor’s eyes creased behind his spectacles, but he held his tongue. Now there was only the matter of the laundry bag, slumped on the floor between them. Both men stood there, just blinking at it.
“The girl—she isn’t here?”
“No, sir,” said Will, “Jennifer’s not turned up today.”
“Whyever not?”
The lad shifted his weight, his countenance darkening. “It’s a sorry business, Mr Sandys. It seems—”
“Question withdrawn. She can pick up the laundry next time. Good man. Off you pop.”
Gregor turned sharply and rushed his acquisition to the laboratory, dragging the laundry behind him. He dumped the linen sack in the entryway, with shirts and smalls spilling out onto the stonework. The post he cast carelessly near enough to a sideboard near the door. He had better things to do—there was botany afoot.
* * *
Simon emerged from his underground workshop, blinking in the full light of morning. His jaw was pale and sharp, and scrupulously shaven. He stopped briefly at the pile of clothes on the stonework floor, looked this way and that, then stepped clean over it with his gangly legs.
“Was there any post for me, Gregor?” he called into the west wing.
“Probably,” might have been the muttered response.
The sideboard was empty. The sideboard which was placed there for the express purpose of receiving the mail. Simon tapped it. That was where the post was supposed to be. There was laundry on the floor and no post on the sideboard. The whole world was out of alignment. Such things irked Simon in a way that he had learned never to show.
“Where is it?” he asked back, in a practised, even tone.
“By the door!” came the distant, disinterested response.
By the door. But not on the sideboard. Simon turned a full circle before his doleful eyes fell upon a pile of envelopes, sticking out of a large terracotta pot. Barely a foot away from their proper place, on the sideboard, the sideboard put there to receive the post. He retrieved them stiffly (he wore his pinstripe trousers slightly on the too-tight side) and brushed off the potting soil.
One letter, addressed to him personally, displayed such lavish penmanship that he opened it hurriedly with a grin.
* * *
[Letter from Rosalinda Smeralda-Bland, dated Saturday 8th June 1889]
Dearest Simon,
A curse upon the botanist! Has he no love for me, the greatest (and presumed last) of his admirers (other than your own, dashing self)? The letters I have written to him, so carefully crafted, so stuffed with adulation, I fear have languished unopened upon his potting shed bench. So much love—so much stationery—wasted!
I implore you, darling Simon, when you next see the elusive gardener, to strangle him with his own watering hose. And after that, give him the news that I intend to visit Grimfern on Whitsun to see what botanical wonders he has in stock. I have been badgering him for weeks about
himself, either.
* * *
Gregor bounded back into his laboratory, the straps of his apron flapping behind him. It was a bracing, bright day, and there were cloud-shadows scudding along the brick floor.
Gregor’s workshop was messy, but it was a human’s mess rather than Nature’s. In the great central atrium, he had meticulously planned and maintained Nature’s chaos to resemble itself. Tropical plants were laid out in a riot of colour and shape—it was Gregor’s scrupulous organisation and upkeep which kept it looking spontaneous. In his laboratory, however, careful filing systems and square trays of seedlings, which should have spoken of humankind’s impulse towards systematisation, lay scattered and chaotic in Gregor’s tempest of genius.
Gregor stalked around the various workstations, trying to spot a stray animal or a broken pane—the potential source of a bluster. But there was no sign of a further disturbance, nor even of anything having fallen to make the noise.
Until he looked back at his newly arrived crate.
No sooner had he prised the lid open, Simon had called him back to the atrium. Gregor had reluctantly left the crate slightly open, its lid just off-kilter. Now though, it was squarely shut.
“Who…” Gregor began, before holding his tongue. There was no one in the garden besides himself and Simon.
He pulled at the lid, but it gave more resistance than he expected. He finally wrenched it open and the contents released a puff of mildew, before shaggy tendrils of grey broke between the contents and the lid.
This was the precious specimen Gregor had imported, at no insignificant cost, from the Isle of Sumatra to his greenhouse in sleepy Buckinghamshire. Out there in Indonesia he had discovered this mycelium with miraculous properties. But had it… closed its own crate?
He looked at the torn threads between the lid and crate. Thin wisps looked almost white and cottony. There was a root system spread throughout the box—the aerial roots of an orchid, which sprouted into a small cluster of leaves, and bore a single, bell-like flower. The poor plant was nearly engulfed by the mycelium. Thicker
globs of the fungus, a bulbous mass, were huddling up in a dark corner. Cowering, almost.
“You don’t like the sun much, do you? And you have a little friend—what a pretty orchid. Wait—are you…”
Despite the unfavourable conditions, the orchid seemed to be flourishing. Its flower was firm and vivid, violet and green with spots of rich burgundy. The shape was florid and round, yet exquisitely pointed—as if it had been rendered in the Art Nouveau style. These kinds of orchid—Paphiopedilum—grew on the jungle floor, far away from any direct sunlight. This one was an absolute beauty.
“Are you protecting your pretty flower from the light?”
He placed the lid down in a diamond shape upon the square crate, then crossed the room to his experimental jotter. He scribbled some initial, unstructured thoughts and eyed the box carefully over the rims of his steamy spectacles.
After a few minutes, Gregor heard a scuffling coming from the box. The lid trembled, and so did Gregor’s writing hand. Then, with a scrape and a thud, the lid slotted squarely back into position. Gregor scratched a blasphemy into his notebook, which will be left to the reader’s imagination.
Gregor reapproached the crate with great caution. He wiped his spectacles and scratched his beard. Instead of opening the lid once more, he carefully removed a plank from the side of the box and peered inside.
In that murky cave, the mycelium had reached up like so many stalagmites to coax the lid back into place. That way, the orchid would only be exposed to the filtered light creeping in between the crate’s thin wooden planks.
“You’re a very motivated mycelium, aren’t you,” Gregor muttered, “and not a bad little gardener, to boot.”
After gazing for a while at the miraculous contents of his delivery, he felt a tiny fleck brush against his cheek. He jumped and shuddered, until his eyes refocused on a slim finger of grey—a wormlike appendage scoping the surroundings. Before his very eyes, the thing was burgeoning out towards the intrusion of sunlight.
“Oh no you don’t, you little bugger.”
Gregor fixed the plank back onto the box and scribbled a couple of pages of notes. Then with his whole arm he slid his other, lesser, experiments to one end of the central workbench. The Sumatran mycelium would take pride of place, both in his workspace, and in his fevered mind.
Chapter TWO
Simon saddled the grey mare and set off down the sweeping lane, leaving Gregor to his inscrutable research. Simon disliked riding horses but growing up in a forthright religious household had perfectly accustomed him to doing things he disliked, and not doing things he did like. He did not care for animals, for example—his profession was a mere accident of talent. It wasn’t his fault he was good at stuffing God’s creatures and posing them to lampoon the social mores of the day. He had tried sculpting in other materials—in clay, marble, wood, and bronze—but corpses were the only medium that really sang under his fingers.
The Finches lived in a ramshackle water mill on the edge of the village. The ride there was smooth enough through the sultry summertime country lanes, but his several layers of miserable black tweed quickly had Simon hot and bothered. Florence the mare was a stubborn horse, who would never let her fatigue show to her rider. Simon admired that. Together they suffered in silent dignity all the way to the little water mill.
He tied Florence to a post and wrestled with the gate to no avail. The catch did not want to budge, and Simon’s over-developed sense of decorum did not allow him to rattle it with enough force to free it. He glared over at Florence, but she was not of a mind to help. At long last John Finch stepped out of the mill cottage, wiping his hands with a rag. He was a gruff widower of some muscle and little joy. These days he earned more through poaching than he did through milling, and Simon would often make the journey down from Grimfern to avail him of his catch.
“Oh ’eck, here’s death come to take me at last,” Finch mumbled, chucking the red rag into a bucket.
Simon looked over at him with his huge, dark eyes. The former miller’s mouth was a perfect parabola, as if a child had drawn him ‘sad’. In reality you could never tell what he was thinking, as he would always pull his mouth into that shape whether he was impressed or indifferent.
“Gate’s stuck,” was all the old man had to say.
Simon’s voice was muffled as if coming from far away—he barely moved his mouth and kept his jaw firmly clenched. Ventriloquism is a side effect of social awkwardness. “Good afternoon, Mr Finch. I was hoping to enquire as to—”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve got your stuff,” growled Finch, batting away the words like so many midges. “Three hares and a pair of pheasants. Usual price.”
Simon was really here to ask after his daughter but could not resist the lure of raw material—a blank canvas.
“And were they properly—”
“Killed in the right way, as you like them, lad.”
Simon needed there to be no ugly scars or damage to the bodies of his subjects, and as such had exacting requirements as to the method of killing. John Finch didn’t ask questions—as far as he was concerned, the money man was always right. He fetched the merchandise from their hanging spot in the doorframe. Simon paid him and loaded the carcasses into Florence’s saddlebag.
“Ah, but the principal reason for my visit this morning… is your daughter. Or rather, her absence. Is she… How is your daughter, Mr Finch?”
Finch removed his flat cap and scrunched it up idly. Simon had never before seen the top of the man’s head. The grizzled grey of his temples stopped suddenly where the brim of his hat started, and the roof of his head was bald as a tonsured monk.
“There’s been some upset. Jenny’s little friend. The Haggerston girl. Close as sisters, those two were. Gone. The way of all things, God knows.”
“I’m so very sorry to hear that. How old was she?” asked Simon.
“Not old enough. Barely nineteen, I should think. But then again, nobody is ever old enough. My Mary, Jennifer’s mother… Well, sod
it. There’s nowt to be said.”
Simon could not allow the feeling of grief to seep into his emotional fortifications, or he would be overwhelmed then and there. He nodded in understanding and copied John Finch’s stiff-lipped frown.
“In which case, Jennifer’s absence from work is understandable. Please send her my—”
Casting the briefest of glances at the miller, Simon started. He was looking right at Simon, which made them both uncomfortable. Normally their business was conducted facing at right angles from one another, as befitted the awkward transaction of two dour men trading dead bodies. But now John Finch was looking straight at him, and Simon was obliged to attempt eye contact.
“Mr Rievaulx—Simon,” the older man began, with a sigh in his voice, “you gents have got a big house up there, an’t you. Lots of rooms and so on…” His sentence carried on into inaudible mumbling that couldn’t escape his unruly beard.
“Not so many rooms, just one cavernous glass vault. What is it that you are implying, Mr Finch?”
“It’s just—Jennifer, get out here, will you?” he bellowed over his shoulder, before returning to face Simon, piteously wringing out his workman’s cap. Simon had never seen him like this before.
Soon Jennifer, Finch’s daughter, appeared in the yard, her hair as wild as gorse. Her smock had many pockets, stretched from frequent use. Her boots seemed too big and her sleeves were too short, revealing bramble scratches all up her arms. Her freckled cheeks were red from a glut of angry tears.
“My Jenny’s been looking for more work than she has now with your laundry. ...
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