Sound of Butterflies, The (5 page)

He had nearly made love to her in the park once, in a discreet pocket of forest, when she had accompanied him to collect butterflies. He had brought a rug, and they sat down together well out of sight of the forest path. He remembered kissing her, and the velvet of her fluttering tongue, like the wings of the butterflies in the jars that lay beside them. One of his hands was in the earth, and as he scratched at the ground, the damp odour of mushrooms was released. He moved to lie on top of her and she opened her mouth wider, but when he began to lift her skirts, she pushed him away and sat up.

‘Not here, Thomas,’ she said.

‘It’ll be fine,’ he breathed. ‘Nobody will come.’ But when he covered her face with insistent kisses, she turned away and got to her feet. She stood over him, with the strong trunks of oak trees stretching above her, and her blonde hair wisping about her face. Her hands were balanced on her hips, and she no doubt thought she was warning him off, but it only aroused him more. He had turned away then, and busied himself with his collecting equipment, while she gathered up the rug and brushed off her skirts.

He gave a soft moan and turned on his side, bringing his hands away from where they would be tempted and folding them under his cheek.

But he couldn’t sleep. After managing to steer his mind away from thoughts of his wife, he focused on the day to come, which gave him a new kind of excitement. He couldn’t help but worry a little — certainly there were dangers to be met in this country. If it wasn’t the snakes and the giant spiders, or the stinging ants and the prickling plants, it was the mosquitoes, or the diseases. And the alligators. Those that had gone before him had even had trouble with the people — for hadn’t one explorer overheard a plot to kill him by some of the Indians who were assisting him? It was only his knowledge of the language that had saved him. Thomas vowed to learn as many of the languages as he could. There was Portuguese first, of course, but there was also a shared Indian language, the Língoa Geral, which all of the tribes understood. But when would he fit it in? In between collecting and preserving and studying, he might not find the time. He would speak to the others about it tomorrow.

Tomorrow. He turned onto his back and crossed his arms behind his head. He imagined the forest again, its fragrant trees and twisted flowers. He pictured himself standing in a clearing with his net in his hand, while a cloud of butterflies floated around him. He could make out some of the species he knew — a multicoloured
Papilio machaon
, a transparent
Cithaerias aurorina
with its bright pink spot on its lower wings — and there, in the middle of the cloud, was
his
butterfly. The left wings were a glossy black, the right sulphur-yellow: a crazy asymmetry that went against all the laws of nature. It was larger than any of the others and it hovered with a regal presence, alone.

The butterfly had never been caught or recorded. Thomas had heard of it through Peter Crawley at Kew Gardens. He stood one day with Peter in the palm house at Kew. He had removed his jacket and was fanning himself with a newspaper — the glasshouse was very humid to promote the growth of tropical plants. They were discussing the lecture on South American butterflies they had both attended the night before at the Natural History Museum. It reminded Peter of a rumour that had floated around Kew for some forty years, that both Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce had seen a giant swallow-tailed butterfly in their travels in the Amazon. The two great explorers had spoken of it separately, in whispers, not able to give a positive sighting of it, but both agreeing that it had the most unusual marking — on one side its wings were yellow, on the other side black. It shouldn’t even have been able to fly with such markings, as the black wings would absorb more heat and weigh one side of the creature down. They conceded that it could have been a trick of the light; that the long evening shadows distort images in the jungle, much as the moon appears to be bigger when it rises over the horizon. They were busy enough with their own new species without worrying about one that perhaps did not exist.

Thomas remembered Peter’s little round glasses misting up as they spoke, his awkward tongue tripping over his slight lisp, and a little girl with a blue ribbon in her hair who was standing behind him, about to pull a delicate flower from the spiky stem of one of the exhibits. Then Peter said something that Thomas immediately knew would change his life forever.

‘That chap that I introduced you to. Ridewell. He was asking about you. It seems there’s an expedition to Brazil being planned to collect specimens. Some fellow over there, a rubber tycoon of some sort, is anxious to pamper British interests in his company. He’s funding some chaps to go over there, through the Natural History Museum. Ridewell was impressed by your comment about what little kudos there is in beetle-hunting and butterfly chasing in England. He wondered if perhaps you might be interested in a bit of a challenge.’

The rumour of the black and yellow butterfly ingrained itself in Thomas’s mind. With encouragement from Peter, and from the friends he had made at the Entomological Society, he decided not only to take the opportunity to fulfil his dream of becoming a professional naturalist, but to make a mark in history by capturing, studying, naming and bringing home the elusive specimen.

‘You’ll see, my love,’ he had said to Sophie. ‘It’s my true calling. Our lives will never be dull!’

She had laughed then, stroking his forehead. ‘Well, if you put it like that, how can I let you stay here with me? You
must
go. Don’t you worry about me.’

Now, in his imagination, Thomas held his breath as he stole towards it. The other butterflies rose towards the treetops, while his butterfly — his
Papilio sophia
as he had decided to call it — remained hovering just above the ground. He held out his net. The butterfly waited a moment, then dived forward into it. He felt the thrill of the catch deep inside him.

He must have fallen asleep: the image was too perfect, too real. He woke up to find a stickiness between his legs, a chorus of birds screeching through the shutters.

A loud grunt came from Ernie on the other side of the room. Evidently the good doctor’s interest in birds didn’t stretch to early mornings. ‘Can’t you shut them up?’ he moaned, before he pulled up his cover and buried his head beneath it.

Thomas’s back ached. After the rigid berth on the ship, his spine protested at resting the whole night in curvature, but he was not going to let that dull throb interfere with his first day’s collecting.

John and George already sat in silence at the breakfast table, eating bread rolls and drinking coffee, the smell of which enveloped them. George offered him the pot — more out of politeness than kindness, Thomas couldn’t help thinking — then went back to his book, holding it away from his body while peering through his glasses and turning the pages with clean white hands. He was dressed in his usual sombre black waistcoat, and his cufflinks shone in the patch of early morning sun that fell through the window. Thomas wondered how long he would remain so pressed and tidy, and whether his pomade would melt in the heat.

Thomas cradled the cup of warm liquid in his hands and took a sip. It was thick and strong, not like the weak and muddy brew served at the Star and Garter in Richmond and by his maid at home; when he tasted it he made an involuntary garbled noise in his throat and lifted his eyes to find the others staring at him. John smiled and pushed the sugar towards him. Thomas gratefully dropped three lumps into his cup and stirred. It was now a heady sweet mixture and he finished the whole cup, then another.

Ernie Harris arrived and sat down, rubbing at his face and yawning. His hair stuck up and he tried to smooth it down with his hands. Until now, nobody had spoken, but Ernie wasn’t one to let a gap in conversation go by without filling it.

‘Did anybody sleep with that racket going on all night?’ He had moved on to his moustache, twirling the ends before reaching for the coffee.

The other men looked at each other. ‘What racket?’ asked George.

‘Bloody insects! And God knows what else. And those birds this morning. It was like being in the Cockney markets, all that shrieking!’

George was smirking at him. A scream sounded, a haunting noise that Thomas felt down his spine.

‘Christ!’ said Ernie and nearly dropped the coffee pot. ‘See what I mean? What was that?’

‘Howler monkey,’ said John in his soft northern accent, so quiet for such a big man. Thomas remembered being surprised by it when he had first heard him speak. He had expected a booming burr, striated as if by tobacco and whiskey. Instead, John’s voice was that of a gentle soul — one who spends his life trying not to frighten children.

The doctor looked at John in surprise, as if he’d forgotten he was there, though how, Thomas couldn’t imagine: the bearded man dwarfed the chair he sat on and leaned heavily on the table with his elbows.

‘You’d better get used to it pretty quickly, Ernie, or you’ll never get any sleep.’

‘I suppose you’d be accustomed to the noisy life, with your background,’ said Ernie. Thomas wasn’t quite sure what he meant by this, but while Ernie’s puffy eyes looked at George and winked, and George continued smirking, John just stared at the table and turned his coffee cup around twice in his big hands before getting up and loping from the room.

After breakfast, the men gathered their equipment and set off in high spirits with a clatter of jars and collecting boxes. Their young guide, Paulo, had shown up on the doorstep that morning. The ever-efficient George Sebel had spoken with Santos’s man, Antonio, about obtaining a full-time guide who could assist in the catching of errant specimens and who could also carry equipment, and this boy seemed to please him. He was about sixteen, with bronze skin, downy hair on his face, and long thin legs, like a deer’s. His doe eyes looked at them shyly through long eyelashes.

Even John seemed to have forgotten his mood, and swung his machete as he stalked ahead of them, humming to himself. They made a racket as they entered the forest — probably scaring off any life forms within a mile — but Thomas knew they would settle down once they were deep inside. He surprised himself by chattering to the others; he couldn’t slow himself down. They must have made a curious sight — four white men and the darker-skinned guide. George Sebel and Ernie Harris each carried shotguns, and the bespectacled George’s waistcoat and immaculate shirt and collar looked stiff and out of place. In deference to the heat, Thomas wore a simple light cotton shirt, with his fishing vest over the top — useful for carrying pins and boxes — and a soft felt hat. The others carried bags filled with their equipment — in addition to jars and boxes, they had wads of cotton, different sizes of paper and shot, and pin-cushions. From experience Thomas knew pins could leap out of a cushion and prick the fingers of an unsuspecting collector, which was why he carried his pins rolled on a piece of cotton in one of his many pockets.

‘Are you not intending to catch any birds and bring them back alive, Ernie?’ asked Thomas.

‘Good heavens, man, not yet! I can’t be bothered looking after the bloody things. Easier just to shoot them and skin them on the spot. I’m hoping our man here will help me carry them back.’

Paulo walked on ahead, oblivious to the fact that they were talking about him.

‘I say,’ said Ernie, and he tapped the boy on the shoulder with the barrel of his gun. The boy spun around and dropped to the ground, shooting his leg out and knocking Ernie off his feet. He fell heavily.

‘Bloody hell!’ he roared. ‘What did he do that for?’

‘He thought you were threatening him with your gun, you idiot,’ said George, adjusting his glasses to peer down at the prone doctor. ‘You can’t go around pointing it at people like that.’

‘It’s not even bloody loaded yet!’ said Ernie as he got to his feet, puffing — the wind was nearly knocked out of him. He stooped to pick up some paper that had fallen out of his bag.

Paulo’s widened eyes were shrinking back to their normal size. He looked from one man to the other, saw that John had stopped and turned, and was suppressing a laugh. Paulo broke into a wide smile. ‘Ele não vai me matar?’ he said.