The Coral Thief (3 page)

“I plan to leave Paris in the spring,” I told her, “and travel down to Montpellier and then Heidelberg, then across to Padua and Pavia. My father does not approve. He thinks I should buy a practice in Derbyshire and settle down or study for the church. He says I am a dilettante. He says philosophical questions are of no practical use in this world. He does not like France or the French.”

“And your mother? What does she think?”

“My mother always agrees with my father.”

Over thirty years my mother had adapted to married life and a house full of large and noisy sons by retreating to her room with a vague, unnamed medical condition.
Your mother is not to be worried
, my father insisted, using her constitution as a way of ensuring compliance from his sons. Conversations with my mother were almost entirely conducted in hushed tones in darkened rooms. I remember a table of colored bottles like stained glass in her drawing room and the thick burnt-flower smell of laudanum that hung about her like incense. She had little interest in my childish obsessions with butterflies, newts, and fossils, but she taught me to draw and paint watercolors of birds and plants, which I would bring to her like offerings.

“If your father hates the French,” the woman said, noticing my distraction, “why does he let you come here?”

“My professor at Edinburgh wrote to him several times pressing my case. I am the youngest son, so I think he is more indulgent with me than with my brothers.” I didn’t tell her how many times Jameson had used the word
exceptional
in his letter to my father or that he had described me as the finest student in my year. I had worked hard for that word
exceptional
and for his letter of recommendation to Cuvier.

“So you will take the Grand Tour.”

“Well, no. Not like that. Paintings and ruins are interesting enough, but it’s the natural-history collections and libraries I want to see. Knowledge, not art. That’s what’s important now. Advances in knowledge. We will soon discover the key to all of nature’s laws. Soon we will know God’s purpose and design—”

“God’s design,” she said. “Are God and Nature the same thing, or different? I find that a difficult question. Nature? Is she God’s agent, his servant—doing his work for him, following his plan, or can she go her own way? And I wonder if they argue sometimes, Nature and God—it seems to me that they want different things.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

She baffled me. I had never met a woman who thought about philosophical questions. The women I had spoken to at the dinner tables of Derbyshire or Edinburgh seemed only to want to gossip about people or novels or to talk earnestly about the poor. I wasn’t very good at talking about those things and hadn’t really listened. “You are much too serious with women, Daniel,” my brother Samuel had once said. “They really don’t want to know about your microscopes and your fossils and your butterflies.” He was right. They didn’t. I had long since given up talking about natural philosophy to women.

The horses, sensing the closeness of their destination, picked up the pace. We passed another group of French soldiers by the side of the road, wounded Waterloo veterans making their way wearily back to Paris. I had sketched several groups of soldiers since leaving Calais and had tried repeatedly to capture the details of the war-torn landscape. I had drawn fields full of ripe corn and no one to harvest it; rubbish blowing in the warm wind; half-empty villages, every second house boarded up or left with its doors and shutters flung open. I drew the white flags that peasants had suspended from windows and rooftops and trees. I sketched disoriented soldiers, some badly wounded, others being dragged on boards tied to horses, traveling home, carrying their swords over their shoulders to support bundles of clothes and food, women in uniform walking alongside them.

“It is a good plan, of course,” she went on, “this one of yours to travel. But what will you do when your money runs out? Go home? Become a doctor? Marry and have children? Grow fat? Stand for Parliament, perhaps?”

“No,” I said. “I have to make my own living. I’m not ashamed to say
that. But I want to continue my studies, and if I’m careful with my money… I might—”

“You have a letter of introduction to Professor Cuvier?” she asked, yawning.

“Yes, from Jameson. And some specimens to present. Do you know him, Professor Cuvier? What is he like?”

In my mind’s eye, Baron Cuvier appeared larger than life. Perhaps that had something to do with the bones he worked on—the giant bones of mammoths and megatheriums dug out from the quarries of Paris or brought to him from the canal workings or mine shafts of Europe. I imagined him walking through halls of bones, through the bellies of whales. He, more than anyone, could make them speak. He could see how they fitted together, how this joint here fitted with that foot there. He could take a single fossil toe bone, they said, and rebuild the entire skeleton of the creature from it. I wanted him to teach me to see what he saw. That’s why I was in Paris. I wanted to see through Cuvier’s eyes.

“He is stiff,” she said. “Rather formal in his manner, but clever, very clever. A very important man in France. You seem young for such responsibility.”

“Yes …” I hesitated. “Well, no … I am one of the oldest in my year. My friend—”

“You have much to see in Paris, M. Connor. The natural-history collection at the museum in the Jardin is beyond compare. I cannot imagine what it will be like to see it for the first time. I envy you. I would like to show you, take you there.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Of course.” She laughed. “We’re almost in Paris now. Perhaps another hour or so. See how the light is lifting up the color in the fields—they are not flat anymore. The shapes are filling out and the stars have almost disappeared.”

“The mammoths have gone back to the hills,” I said.

“One day, when the water has retreated even more, you will be able
to walk from London to Paris. There will be no more English Channel. Your country will be joined to mine.”

“It will?”

“Well, perhaps not soon. It might take a few thousand years. And who knows, perhaps by then we will have wings.”

In a sleeping village on the outskirts of Paris, the mail coach stopped to change the horses. A dog ran alongside us, barking. A young woman, awake in the dawn, stepped into her doorway; a small child strapped to her back stared up at us, bleary-eyed.

“I can’t keep my eyes open any longer,” my companion said. “I shall sleep. You should too.”

I leaned against the leather side of the seat, watching the hunched silhouette of the driver beneath me, his clothes coming into color in the light of the morning, steam rising from the backs of the horses. I glanced over at the woman who had pulled her cloak around her and the child curled in sleep. I wondered why I had not asked her more questions. What else did she know? I felt the mail coach lurch one last time, and tired and hungry, I fell asleep, thinking of mammoths lumbering in the dark.

When the mail coach stopped at the Barrier of Saint Denis an hour later, I woke to find the woman and the child gone, along with my travel bag and the small case containing the specimens. She had left me only my identity papers and my wallet, which had been placed under my arm as I slept.

Two notebooks of writings and annotations. Years of precious notes on natural history taken from books I might not find again and from experiments I could not hope to repeat. A book of sketches. Letters of introduction from Professor Jameson. The cases of specimens and the manuscript entrusted to me—gone.

Startled, and still half-asleep, I turned to look for her among the ragged tangle of buildings that made up the outskirts of the city. But
she was nowhere. Outrage gave way to bafflement, then a sickening sense of my own stupidity.
I had fallen asleep
. I might as well have
given
my possessions away. I climbed over to the luggage rack, turning over bag after bag, trunk after trunk, calling out to the driver for help. He was busy reining in the horses and only cursed me in French and shouted that I had better return to my seat unless I wanted to get everyone killed.

A Scottish soldier standing guard with several Prussians at the barrier called out for identity papers. The English passengers passed papers through the window of the coach below. My spirits lifted for a moment at the familiar sight of the tall soldier in his kilt.

“Sir,” I called out. “My bag has been stolen.”

“Welcome to Paris, my friend,” the soldier called back.

“What should I do?”

“Go to the Bureau de la Sûreté and report it. Give yourself a few hours. There’s usually a queue. Want me to lend you a few francs?” He passed my papers back.

“No. I have money. She didn’t take my money.”

“She didn’t take your money?” He turned to the Prussian soldier, mimicking sexual gestures. They laughed: a joke at my expense. “There can’t be a single woman in Paris who doesn’t want your money. They’re not cheap, mind. Forget your bag, monsieur, and find yourself a woman. Just make sure you get what you pay for—and don’t fall asleep.”

The coach lumbered through the gates and into the city.

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