It was Ma Kersey who sent for Louisa, I eventually learned. She hitched a ride into town and sent a telegram to her family backin Robeson County, where she had sent Louisa a year prior. The telegram then passed through a few dozen sets of hands, and was finally delivered to Louisa, nearly three hundred miles away. Such was the power of Ma Kersey’s family connections.
Seeing Louisa and Saul together eased a fear I hadn’t known I had. There was nothing predatory in Saul’s eyes when he looked at her. He looked more like a worshipper gazing on the face of his god. Even his acidic tongue softened a little, though Louisa was more likely to go off into fits of laughter than to take offense to anything he said.
The one thing he asked of me was not to tell Louisa how long he had been trapped in the shed. “It would only hurt her,” he said, “and what good would it do any of us now?”
I agreed, and not because I was afraid. Saul had a strange, perhaps even twisted moral code, but it seemed that I was firmly on the safe side of it.
(Besides if he killed me and dumped my body in a hole, it would have upset Louisa, and I’m pretty sure that Saul would have gnawed his own arm off rather than upset Louisa.)
I moved back into the room I’d stayed in the first night. I missed the light of the studio, but as it happened, I had plenty of other work to occupy me, and most of it involved Halder’s papers.
“I can’t read them,” said Louisa bluntly. “I hated him. I still hate him. I’ll end up burning it all in a fit of rage.”
“I don’t think anyone will care if you do.”
She sighed, running her hands through her hair. “No. That’s the thing. I can’t decide what to do about his book.”
We stood in Halder’s office—or more accurately, I sat behind the desk while Louisa paced back and forth like a caged beast. Smiley tried to twine around her ankles a few times, realized that she was not going to oblige by tripping over him, and had settled down on my lap to sulk.
“He put in years of research on his book,” Louisa said. “I don’t want him to get credit for it. I don’t want anyone to read his nameand think he was a great scientist.” She paused in front of the table where I had stacked all the dozens of illustrations liberated from the cabinet. “ButIworked on it for years, too, dammit.”
“Ahhh.” Suddenly everything came clear. Of course she had. All those magnificent beetle shells and delicate fly wings, all those tiny, elegant antennae… those represented more than a decade of Louisa’s life.
“Saul thinks I should leave it all in the past,” she said. “But I can’t let all those paintings go. For years, they were practically my reason for living.” She flashed me a quick smile. “I don’t know if you feel the same way about yours.”
“I’d hate to see them wasted,” I admitted. “I already got paid for them, so maybe it shouldn’t matter to me what happens to them now, but it does.”
“Exactly.” Louisa tapped the tabletop. “What I’dliketo do is find some other entomologist who can take his notes and the completed plates and produce something useful from them. And that doctor can have his name front and center, and we can have our names on the frontispiece and my late husband can be a footnote somewhere in the back.”
I thought of Halder’s near-apoplectic rage at the thought of other people stealing his work, and felt a smile begin to spread over my face. It wasn’t a nice smile, but it was deeply genuine.
“Youunderstand,” said Louisa, with an echo of that same malicious smile.
“Oh, Ido.”
“However…” Louisa spread her hands. “I don’tknowanyone. But if you’re willing to go through his correspondence, maybe you can find someone. Someone who isn’t as detestable a human being as my late husband was.”
I nodded. “Between that and the naturalists my father knew, I suspect I can come up with something.”
“That would be worth a great deal to me, Miss Wilson.”
“Please,” I said, picking up the first letter. “Call me Sonia.”
EPILOGUE
As I write this, it has been eleven months since Halder’s death, and I am still living in the house that Louisa’s money built.Observations on the Habits and Developmental Stages of Parasitic Insectswill be published tomorrow, written by an enterprising young doctor named Ainsley. It includes plates credited to Sonia Wilson and Louisa Gregor, and while it is unlikely to be in most drawing rooms, I am told that it will be invaluable to academics in the field. Halder’s name appears only in the author’s note, where Ainsley notes that his widow very graciously bequeathed his notes and his collection to the author, which “went a fair way to making this work possible.”
(I still don’t believe in Phelps’s devil, but if He exists, I imagine He read that author’s note aloud to Halder. Eternal flame would not even begin to compare.)
Louisa and I sat around drinking Jackson’s moonshine the day that the acceptance letter arrived from the publisher, toasting each insect more and more extravagantly. By the time we reached Rex theC. hominivorax, we were both sitting on the floor giggling helplessly, and Rose took our drinks away and told us that we were setting a terrible example for Sally, then finished both cups off herself.
Now that it’s done, Louisa has been urging me to write the book about medicinal herbs that I kept imagining. I’ve been working on it off and on. Hopefully with my name out there as a scientific illustrator, another publisher will be willing to take a chance. (Ma Kersey says that I should call itMa Kersey’s Witand Wisdomand include a section on remedies to enhance male virility. I still can’t quite tell if she’s serious, but if I do write it, she’ll get half the money. It’s her knowledge, after all.)
I live in Halder’s rooms now. They don’t hold the memories for me that they do for Louisa, and the light is almost as good. I offered to move out again, but Louisa said that while she’d be damned if she was moving out of the house that her money built, it was too big a house for just her and Saul and the Kents. I allowed her to persuade me. Louisa is still a better painter than I am, but I am a better naturalist, probably because Halder rarely bothered to teach her anything. Between the two of us, I truly believe that we’ll make some fine books.
Saul and Louisa were married last spring, once enough time had passed that no one could connect him to the deaths. The story was that he had seen the notice of the doctor’s death in the papers and come back to propose to his lost love. The people who might have been surprised about Saul’s reappearance would have had to admit that they thought Saul had been murdered and hadn’t done anything about it, so the matter was allowed, somewhat gracelessly, to drop.
Ma Kersey, I suspect, knows more than she lets on. But she keeps her own counsel, and in return, Saul keeps her table liberally supplied with venison and the world-famous Chatham rabbit. And if the deer has been drained and gutted before being delivered… well, that’s simply how one field dresses a carcass, after all, and there’s nothing unusual about it.
