Dr. Halder sat at a desk surrounded by papers and books, with a tray of half-eaten breakfast at his elbow. I had often seen my father in a similar pose, but there the resemblance ended. Dr. Halder looked rather like an insect himself. A weevil, specifically.He had enormous spectacles and a thin, drooping nose, and no eyebrows to speak of. His hair was thinning and almost the same color as his skin anyway, which made it look even thinner. Everything about him was faded and oddly colorless, clothes, skin, hair, even the spectacles. If I were painting him, I would lay down washes of sepia and then probably blot most of them right back up again, leaving mere suggestions of color on the page.
Halder blinked at me behind his glasses and said, “You’re the girl I sent for. The one who can paint.”
Don’t act scared, I thought, and did not curtsey. Instead I gave a little half bow of acknowledgment. “I am Miss Wilson.”
He sucked on his front teeth. “I thought your ticket was for yesterday.”
“It was. It is a long way from the train station, however, and there are no coaches at Siler Station.”
If I had expected an apology, I would have been disappointed. (I hadn’t really expected it. Between the stationmaster and Mrs. Kent, I already had a fair idea that I wasn’t getting one.) He grunted instead, and gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “So you’re the illustrator.” He frowned. “I expected an older woman.”
“I am thirty,” I said, sitting. “But I began assisting my father as an illustrator when I was fifteen.”
“Hmm. My great interest, Miss Wilson, is in in parasitic and necrophagic species.” He looked over his glasses at me.
“Carrion eaters,” I said, wondering if this was a test of my vocabulary.
“Precisely. I do not expect that you will have read any of my papers, but my reputation in the field is unmatched.”
As is your humility, clearly.Aloud, I said only, “I look forward to learning from a master of the field.”
Either my flattery did not move him, or I hadn’t been able to keep a trace of irony out of my voice. He studied me silently over his glasses again. I had been subjected to such scrutiny by far better people—Headmistress Silverton had a glare that would senda charging rhinoceros tiptoeing apologetically from the room—and so remained seated calmly with my hands folded in my lap.
There was a gallon jar on the desk in front of me, full of clear liquid and some strange object resembling an exotic fruit, shaped rather like an artichoke, but with hundreds of small, pale lobes. I wondered where it had come from.
Perhaps realizing that I wasn’t going to speak first, Halder harrumphed and looked down at his papers. “I have devoted much of my life to a work that will revolutionize our understanding of the life cycle of insects that live on flesh. I trust that you are not squeamish, Miss Wilson?”
My father drowned in his own lungs, and when he coughed so hard it made him vomit, I cleaned it up. When he pissed and shat himself in his final delirium, I changed the sheets. And you think your insects will trouble me?“Not at all, Dr. Halder,” I said, in my most pleasant tone.
“I ask because your prior work appears to have mostly beenbotanical.” He pronounced the word with obvious disdain.
One advantage of having worked as a teacher for so long was that I could seethe internally while keeping an expression of polite interest on my face.My father’s work cataloguing plants was groundbreaking, you pompous old bastard.“I assure you, I have painted many animal specimens as well.”
“That is good to hear.” He started to say something more, but the large orange cat that I had seen in the kitchen suddenly leapt up onto his desk. Halder sighed and made a shooing gesture, which the cat ignored utterly. One tawny paw snaked out to bat at a paper on the desk.
“This wretched beast is named Smilodon,” Halder said. “After—”
“Smilodon populator,” I said. “The saber-toothed cat.”
I had surprised the doctor this time, I could tell. He took his glasses off and polished them on his shirt. “Very good, Miss Wilson.”
Smilodon stopped attacking the papers when I spoke, apparently noticing another person in the vicinity. I offered my fingers and he rubbed his cheek along them, showing oversized canines that stuck out just slightly. No question what had inspired the name, then.
“Precision is key when studying insects,” Halder said. I had an odd feeling that he was reciting a predetermined speech. “There is no room within my work for flights of fancy. This is a work of science, not an illustrated storybook for children.”
“I have little interest in flights of fancy, Doctor.” I withdrew my hand from Smilodon—or Smiley, as Mrs. Kent had called him—and he stalked off toward a bottle of ink. Halder rescued it, glaring at the cat but making no attempt to remove him.
“I am glad to hear it.” Halder opened a desk drawer and withdrew a sheaf of papers, keeping them well away from the cat. “This is a list of the insects which I will require illustrated at each point in their life cycles. The library contains specimens of each of them. Under no circumstances are you to remove the specimens from the library, do you understand?”
I dipped my head in acknowledgment. “Certainly, Doctor.”
He passed over the papers. I read down a list of Latin names, most of which I did not recognize. Some had notes beside them—show life cycleorlarval form only. One was taggednote markings on metathorax!
I swallowed. What the devil was a metathorax? I had a vague notion that a thorax was part of insect anatomy, but did a metathorax go under it or over it…? Or was it like metamorphosis, and it was a thorax that had changed? Was it something that happened when an insect changed from one form to another?
It doesn’t matter. You’ll figure it out.So long as there were specimens, I could work it out as I went. Surely there were books somewhere with diagrams that I could consult. He’d mentioned a library. Libraries had books.It will be fine.
“This does not seem like so many,” I said, paging through. It looked like the work of a season or two at most. My stomach knotted at the thought that I had left the school for a job that would not last out the year. Possibly less, if I admitted my ignorance of metathoraxes.
