“Look”—Alex returned to the conversation like an unnecessary 90s reboot—“an earl you may or may not be—”
“He’s a fucking earl,” I growled.
“—but my friend here has asked you a perfectly civil question, and you’re just saying the wordsaintover and over again like you’re my uncle Archibald after that unfortunate incident with the croquet mallet.”
“My name,” repeated the earl with, honestly, less frustration than I would have shown in his place, “is Saint.”
“Ah hah!” exclaimed Alex. “So youarean imposter. The Earl of Spitalhamstead is certainly not named Saint. You may consultBurke’sif you need to.”
“My name,” repeated the Earl, now with about the same amount of frustration I would have shown in his place, “is Hilary Topwith St. John Edmonton Bloom de Lancy, fourteenth Earl of Spitalhamstead. I go by Saint.”
“Whatever for?” asked Alex.
“Because of men like my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather and you.”
Having failed to get theWe need to make this man like usmemo, despite having personally sent it, Alex bristled. “I’ll have you know, I knew your father, and he was a damn fine chap.”
“He was a parasite,” said Saint bitterly. “Like all the rest of them.”
I’d been doing this job long enough that I didn’t have to try very hard to resist asking who the rest of them were and why he—having just inherited a fortune, a peerage, and a dung beetle charity—wasn’t one of them.
“Who—” began Rhys Jones Bowen.
I clapped my hands. “Let’s get to the meeting.”
* * *
At exactly ten o’clock, Dr. Fairclough walked through the door of the meeting room/hot-desking area/Barbara Clench’s old office. At exactly one minute past ten we were all sitting down while Alex started trying to load Dr. Fairclough’s PowerPoint. Eight minutes later, while Alex was still trying to load the PowerPoint, Dr. Fairclough said, “Perhaps we can do without visual aids for now.”
“Nearly there.” Alex switched on the projector to show the room his desktop wallpaper, which was apparently the Twaddle coat of arms: argent, on two bars wavy azure, two fish rampant gardant. “Just trying to find the file. I knew it was important, so I moved it this morning for safekeeping.”
“Thank you for joining us,” Dr. Fairclough continued, addressing herself almost exclusively to the earl, who was eating a Jaffa Cake with an expression of epic unimpressedness. “I’m Dr. Fairclough, head of the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project, and I wanted to take this time to outline for you some of the vital work we do here at the Coleoptera Research and Protection Project and how it contributes to the ecological and agricultural stability of the British Isles.”
Behind her, Alex had finally found something to show us. Unfortunately, what he’d found was a selfie he’d taken in Mustique with Miffy, his heiress It-girl wife.
Dr. Fairclough glanced briefly over her shoulder, then back at the earl. “Geotrupidae…” she began, and my heart sank. No successful fundraising pitch ever began with the wordGeotrupidae. “… are an integral part of—”
“I’m going to stop you there,” said Saint.
“I’d rather you didn’t,” returned Dr. Fairclough.
He finished his Jaffa Cake, swung back his chair, and thunked his boots on the table. “I just don’t want to waste your time. Truth is, bugs were the old man’s thing, not mine.”
“Bugs,” said Dr. Fairclough, “as you call them, are everybody’s thing, for reasons I am about to explain in some detail.”
My heart stopped sinking, but only because it had hit the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Pitches that began with the wordGeotrupidaehad a marginally higher success rate than pitches that included the phraseI am about to explain in some detail.
“Look”—Saint gave the kind of dismissive hand wave that only the terminally overprivileged could give—“I appreciate everything you’re trying to do, but you’re not going to convince me that beetles are more important than schools, hospitals, or a cure for cancer.”
I bit my tongue incredibly hard. Because once somebody played theschools, hospitals, and cures for cancercard, it wasveryhard to get them back onto the importance of dung beetles without ever so slightly implying that they were up their own arse. The thing is, ten seconds’ thought would tell you that CRAPP’s annual operating budget, translated into school, hospital, and cure-for-cancer money, would buy you half a classroom, one clinic bed, or a tenth of a drug trial that would almost certainly go nowhere. But it was funny how few people reacted well to being told that their grand plans to solve the world’s problems were glorified vanity projects. And although itwas unfair of me to judge, I had a feeling that Saint was an absolute sucker for a glorified vanity project.
If only we had one to sell him.
“Cancer,” said Dr. Fairclough, “is an umbrella term describing a set of distinct but related conditions that are highly unlikely to be responsive to a single treatment.”
I somehow succeeded in not slamming my face flat onto the table in front of me. “What she means,” I tried, “is that cancer already attracts a lot of research funding, and if you want your money to make a real difference, smaller charities like ours can do proportionally more with the same resources.”
“I understand what you’re saying.” Saint was nodding in that indulgent but unyielding way I saw a lot in this job. And not normally from people who wound up as donors. “But, cards on the table, I’m finding it very hard to get excited about insects who eat shit.”
