Wolf Worm — Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

It was full dark when we arrived at my employer’s house. Conversation had faltered after Phelps’s revelation. It may be difficult to follow up the phrase “Christian duty,” but that’s nothing compared to a claim of having seen the Devil in person. And calling it a her? I desperately wanted to ask what she had looked like, if she had two legs or four, hooves or hands, and if there had been any other witnesses, but these all seemed likely to end up with me walking the rest of the way to Halder’s. Small talk was entirely out of the question.

I didn’t know what Phelps had seen, but I definitely didn’t believe it was the Devil. Father had been raised Quaker but had acquired Unitarianism in his boyhood in Boston, which he passed down to me, mixed with occasional bouts of transcendentalist philosophy. He’d then compounded the issue by sending me to a Methodist school. My faith was perhaps best described as “vague idiosyncratic Christianity,” but it definitely did not allow for Satan to be wandering North Carolina in the flesh.

Our pace slowed as it grew darker, as Phelps let the horses pick their way along the road. Is he not worried that the Devil will get us if we go too slowly? Does Satan not bother wagons? Or is she simply not very fast?

Then again, if she isn’t that fast, it probably isn’t dangerous to walk in the woods. Unless the Devil is an ambush predator?

It occurred to me then that the station master had been unexpectedly alarmed about the prospect of me walking through the woods. At the time I’d put it up to chivalry, but what if it had been something else?

Perhaps he and Phelps go to the same church.

I could hear frogs calling around us, the finger-on-a-comb call of chorus frogs and the shriller notes of tree frogs. They, at least, were not concerned

about the Devil. A lone whippoorwill repeated his name off in the distance.

My father always said that whippoorwills were polite birds, because they told you exactly who was calling.

If my father had still been alive, he would have been proud of me for finding work as a scientific illustrator. Of course, if he were still alive, I wouldn’t have needed to go looking for work in the first place, so there’s no point in getting maudlin about it.

Eventually the wagon turned onto a long drive that looked as if it had once been very wide. Greenery had begun to creep in around the edges though, until it narrowed into a gloomy tunnel. Brick pillars flanked the entryway, both with lamps, but they were unlit.

Did they not expect me this evening?

Apparently they did not. As the wagon rolled up the drive, wheels crunching loudly, I saw the house in the dim moonlight, a grand confection of windows and pillars, but with only a single small lamp lit in a room on the second story. I swallowed hard. (they didn’t expect you. you clearly aren’t wanted. you’re in the wrong place) A side door opened, spilling light onto the ground, and a woman emerged, carrying a lamp. She turned toward us, lifting the lamp high.

“Now who’s coming around at this hour?”

I slid down from the wagon, anxiety curdling in my stomach. “My name’s Sonia Wilson. I … err … I was hired as an illustrator? By Dr.

Halder?”

“Lord help us,” the woman said, coming closer. I could hear her feet crunching on the gravel. “He said something about hiring one, but he never said any more than that. If I’d known, I’d have made up a room.” She frowned, though I don’t think it was at me.

In the glow of the lamp, I could see that she was Black, tall and lean, her hair braided tightly back from her face. She wore a shirtwaist dress with an apron over it.

I thrust out my hand, hoping to overcome the terrible impression I’d made by arriving so late. “Sonia Wilson.” No, you said that already. Say something else, quick. “Err … it’s nice to meet you.”

She took my hand, bemused. “Mrs. Kent. I’m Dr. Halder’s housekeeper.”

Her grip was firm, but she dropped my hand quickly and looked past me to

the wagon. “Mr. Phelps? Is that you?”

“Ma’am,” said Phelps. His voice was as emotionless as mud.

“He was kind enough to give me a ride from Siler Station,” I said, sensing tension between them. Mrs. Kent nodded, but didn’t say anything.

I went back to the wagon to retrieve my suitcase. Now that I was actually at my destination, I was curiously reluctant to see Phelps go. He had been an uncomfortable companion, but his Christian duty had gotten me here. If I had been on my own, I would still be walking and probably ready to weep from exhaustion.

Or maybe I’d have encountered the Devil by now. I bit down my desire to laugh and nodded to Phelps. “Thank you,” I said, stepping back with my suitcase in my arms.

He tipped his hat. “Miss Wilson. Remember what I said. I will look for you in church on Sunday.” Then he turned the wagon and it rattled off down the drive, into the dark.

I turned back to Mrs. Kent, still clutching my suitcase against my chest.

“I’m sorry to make so much trouble,” I said. “Dr. Halder sent me the ticket, so I assumed…”

“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” she said, sighing. “Come inside. You must be fair famished. I can probably rustle something up for you to eat before I go to bed.”

“I’m sorry to keep you up,” I said, feeling even more guilty. At the school, we got so little sleep that I begrudged every minute someone kept me awake. Was the life of a housekeeper like a teacher in that regard?

“No need to keep apologizing,” she said, gesturing me toward the door.

“I know who’s to blame, and it isn’t you.”

The door led through a small scullery into the kitchen. The walls needed whitewash and the stove was a monstrous iron beast the size of a coffin, but it was warm and smelled like baking bread. My shoulders, which had been inching up around my ears, relaxed a little. Such is the power of bread.

“Sit,” Mrs. Kent said, waving to the table. There were four chairs, but one held a washtub full of potatoes. I set down my suitcase and collapsed into one of the non-potato chairs. Either it was extremely comfortable or any seat that wasn’t moving had become a hedonistic delight. I smothered a groan.

“Here,” said Mrs. Kent. “They’re this morning’s, so they ain’t rocks yet.” She slid a plate of biscuits across the table. “There’s honey in the jar

there.”

“Thank you.”

“Mmm. Ain’t nothing.”

It was a good deal more than nothing. The biscuits were huge and delicious, even if they’d started to go hard. I found the jar of honey, spooned some out onto one of the biscuits, and attacked it. Crumbs went everywhere, but at the moment, I didn’t care. It had been so long since breakfast that even the Chatham rabbits were starting to sound good.

I studied Mrs. Kent out of the corner of my eye while I ate. She had a young face and old hands. I wondered which one was closer to her actual age.

She left the room for a moment, then returned with a tin cup and a pitcher of water. I washed down the biscuits and mumbled my gratitude, hoping that I wasn’t making too terrible an impression with my lack of table manners. If I was, she didn’t show it.

A large orange cat leapt up onto the table, startling me. The housekeeper sighed. “Smiley, get your tail down off that.” The cat ignored her completely, gazing intently at the biscuits. I put my hand up to shield them.

“Smiley…” She swooped in and picked him up, dropping him unceremoniously on the floor. He stalked away, tail held high, very fluffy and completely unrepentant.

“He won’t marry you,” said Mrs. Kent abruptly.

I blinked at her, the last of the honey congealing on my tongue. For a confused instant, all I could think of was the cat, and why she thought I’d want to marry outside my species. “Beg pardon?”

The housekeeper shook her head. “The doctor. If you took the position thinking he’d marry you at the end of it, put that thought out of your head.”

It seemed that I still had energy enough to bristle. “I assure you,” I said, “that I had no such thoughts. I am an illustrator and—and a naturalist, not a —a—” I couldn’t even think of the right words, probably because of all the other words playing through my head. (scarecrow, hatchet-faced, bag of bones) Mrs. Kent’s lips twitched. “All right,” she said. “Didn’t mean to get your back up. I figured it was better to have that out in the open, that’s all. Some

women would be thinking this was a stepping stone to the other.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “And you wouldn’t want it anyway. He’s

mean as an old snake, that one.”

“Then why do you work for him?”

Probably I wouldn’t have been so bold if I wasn’t tired and cross and resentful of having been forgotten at the station. Fortunately, Mrs. Kent did not seem to take offense. She snorted, removing her apron and hanging it on a peg. “Because he’s mean to everyone the same way. Doesn’t matter what color you are or if you’re a woman or a hundred years old. The doctor’s got no use for anybody.” She smiled ruefully. “There’s worse people to work for, here in the South.”

I sighed, my irritation ebbing away. I was so tired. I’d been tired for years, ever since my father died. But Mrs. Kent was old enough to have seen the War Between the States, and probably she was even more tired than I was. “You’d think we could do better,” I said glumly.

“You’d think.” She picked up the lamp. “I’ll show you to your room.

Well, a room. It’ll do for tonight, and we’ll find you something better tomorrow.”

I nodded and stood up, brushing the biscuit crumbs off my skirt. “Thank you,” I said. “For the food and the room. And staying up.”

“Mmm. Well. Nobody starves in my kitchen, no matter what hour they come in.” I followed her out of the kitchen and down a hallway, then through two doors and up a staircase. I couldn’t follow the twists and turns very well, and was thoroughly lost by the time we reached a door. “Here you go. It’s clean.” She pushed the door open. “And there’s water in the cistern, so if you turn the tap, you’ll get something. Don’t know if I’d drink it, but it’s good enough for washing up.”

“Thank you,” I said, lugging my suitcase into the small room. It was plain but serviceable, with an iron bedstead, a clothes press, and a stand with a basin and a tap. Cistern-fed water on demand seemed absurdly luxurious. At the school, we’d only had a hand pump. “Err … why wouldn’t you drink it?”

Mrs. Kent paused with her hand on the doorknob. “Bugs,” she said.

“They get into everything.” And then she closed the door behind her and was gone.

There was a swarm of white dragonflies on the ceiling. I stared up at them, profoundly confused. Why was that there? How was that there? Had one of the girls done something to my ceiling as a prank?

The dragonflies were larger than my head, which meant that they were not native to North America, and they were evenly spaced and all facing in the same direction, which meant that they were … pressed tin tiles? Yes.

Painted white.

This did not explain why they were on my ceiling. I sat up, wondering how to even begin explaining this to the headmistress, and caught a glimpse of my suitcase sitting on the floor next to the clothes press. Memory pushed back my disorientation and I rubbed my forehead. Right. I’m at Dr.

Halder’s residence. I’ve arrived. I’m going to work as a scientific illustrator again. And apparently his ceilings have tin tiles with dragonflies on them.

I felt a stab of panic that I had overslept, but a glance out the window showed that it was still quite early. I was still on school time. The headmistress had no use for sluggards, and her definition of “sluggard” began at 6:00 AM. Given how tired I was, I could easily have gone back to sleep until noon, but that seemed like a poor way to start my employment.

I had been too tired to wash up the night before. Now I ran water into the basin and learned what Mrs. Kent had meant about the bugs. A dead June bug floated on the surface of the water, green and shiny against the white porcelain. I had no particular fear of insects, but I never liked June bugs, because of the way they fly in your face if you’re standing anywhere near a light source. This one wasn’t going to be flying anywhere, but I still didn’t want to share the water with it. I fished it out, sighed, and used twice as much soap as normal.

I put on one of my two good sets of clothes, then made my way downstairs, wondering what to do next. Do I go and present myself to him?

Is he even awake? My experiences with naturalists warred with my experiences teaching. Would Dr. Halder be pleased with my punctuality, or appalled to be bothered before breakfast?

For want of any better ideas, I made my way to the kitchen. Perhaps Mrs. Kent could advise me. She’d been kind enough last night, even if her

suggestion about marriage had bordered on offensive. I had no plans to marry anyone. At thirty, I was officially a spinster, and it wasn’t as if one met many eligible bachelors at a girls’ school.

As a girl, I’d always assumed I would marry a naturalist and collaborate with him on scientific works. It was almost a cliché in my father’s circles that one eventually married one’s illustrator. Indeed, I’d met a number of wives who were clearly doing the lion’s share of the research, no matter whose name appeared on the frontispiece. My lack of physical charms had never seemed important, because my future husband would be marrying me for my ability to properly render leaf venation.

But somehow it had never quite happened, and then Father had died and the scientific world began to drift out of reach. I don’t think it was ever malicious. It was simply that we had come as a set, Dr. Wilson and his daughter. If any of his old friends ever thought about me, it was probably with general goodwill. “Oh yes, Wilson had a daughter, didn’t he? Bit dowdy, but by god could she paint a terrestrial orchid!” And they’d make a mental note to see what I was doing these days and then they’d see an interesting lichen and then it would be five years later.

I couldn’t even be angry. It was hard to compete with a good lichen.

I got lost twice looking for the kitchen, but eventually found the dining room. It had high ceilings and elegant moldings. The table that ran the length of it had no tablecloth, though the wood had been polished until it nearly glowed, even under a thin film of dust. There were silver candlesticks on the mantle, but they were beginning to tarnish. The whole room had an air of disuse about it and the fireplace did not look as if it had been lit in months. It reminded me uncomfortably of our home during Father’s illness, as I closed off the rooms one by one to save money. The rooms, when I walked through them, had the same oddly hollow feel, as if the echoes took a little longer to return than they should.

Just beyond the dining room, I found a narrow door painted the same color as the walls. I pushed it open and found, unsurprisingly, the servant’s stair. The sound of clattering crockery grew louder as I descended.

“Now I know those dishes aren’t done,” Mrs. Kent said as I stepped into the kitchen. Her back was to me, sleeves shoved to her elbows. “You can’t

even have done the silver yet.”

“Um,” I said. “No?”

The housekeeper twisted around, blinked at me, then laughed. “Miss Wilson! Goodness, I thought you were young Sally. Never mind the silver.”

I smiled. “Quite all right. Err—I was hoping to ask you when I should call on Dr. Halder?”

“Lord, I don’t even send his breakfast tray up until ten. He keeps late hours, unless he’s getting up early to chase bugs around.” She glanced my way. “You’ll probably be wanting breakfast though.”

“I don’t want to be a bother—”

Mrs. Kent snorted. “Feeding people’s no bother. Do you want to eat in the dining room, or here in the kitchen?”

Remembering the air of disuse in the dining room, I suspected that really would be a bother. And the notion of sitting all alone in that quiet room, while Mrs. Kent ferried food up the stairs—God, no. “I’d rather eat down here, if I won’t be in your way?”

“Not at all.” Her smile seemed a trifle more genuine, and I wondered if I’d passed a test of some sort. She pulled a cast-iron pan from a back burner of the stove and cracked a pair of eggs into it. “You always up this early?”

“Force of habit,” I admitted. “But I don’t actually need anything but coffee at this hour, if you’d rather I ate when you’re preparing the tray for Dr. Halder.”

“Pfff. Makes no never mind to me. I keep the coffee on for myself and Mr. Kent.” She poured out a mug and handed it to me. I slid into a chair and spooned a little sugar into it. Smiley appeared to see if he could leave some cat hair in the sugar bowl, and seemed vaguely annoyed that I wouldn’t let him.

The mug was halfway to my lips when it occurred to me that it might have worse things in it than cat hair. Where had the water come from?

Would there be mosquito larvae mixed in with the coffee grounds?

It’s coffee, I told myself sternly. The water was boiled to make it. Even if there’s mosquito larvae, they’ll be … er … pasteurized. I took a sip. It tasted like coffee. Nothing wriggled against my tongue.

“Anything you particularly like for breakfast?”

I blinked at Mrs. Kent. At the school, the teachers ate the same things as the students. (At least the junior teachers did. I had my suspicions about the headmistress.) Breakfast was oatmeal and an apple. Sometimes there was toast, and at Christmas there were often hotcakes, but the oatmeal was

eternal. I had almost forgotten that there were other breakfast foods in existence.

“Um,” I said. “I … err … hotcakes? If you ever feel like making them?”

“I make ’em twice a week regular anyway,” Mrs. Kent told me. “Mr.

Kent’s partial to them. Just eggs today though.”

“Eggs would be wonderful,” I assured her. “I love eggs.”

“Good.” She turned and slid two freshly cooked eggs onto my plate.

“Bacon in a minute.”

“Bacon?”

She raised an eyebrow at me. “You don’t eat bacon?”

“Oh, I would! I do, I mean. It’s just … it’s been a long time.” Truth be told, if not for tiny, mushy bits of pink that occasionally turned up in the school supper, I would have had no proof that bacon was not a hallucination of my youth.

Mrs. Kent didn’t pry. I heard a sizzle and the smell of bacon drifted through the kitchen. My stomach growled loudly and I applied myself to my eggs.

“And Dr. Halder doesn’t mind?” I asked when two thick slices of bacon

landed in front of me.

“Mind?”

“That we’re eating this well.” The headmistress would have fallen into strong hysterics at the notion of the junior teachers having bacon and eggs for breakfast. Even the coffee had been more than half chicory, and the milk so watered you could read through it.

“Why should he care? He eats the same thing every day regardless.” She counted it off on her fingers. “One poached egg, two pieces of toast, one slice of bacon, black coffee with one sugar, served at exactly ten o’clock.

He may be a tightfisted, mean-spirited old cuss, but I’ll give him this, he isn’t stingy about food.”

I considered this while demolishing the bacon. “Mean-spirited” didn’t bode well. Was he mean-spirited enough to dismiss me immediately upon meeting, if I said something wrong?

When you want to know something, consult an expert. I washed the bacon down with a slug of coffee and said, hesitantly, “Mrs. Kent? Can I

ask you something?”

“Ask away.”

“Is there anything … err…” I paused, not sure how to continue. “That is, if I want to make a good impression on Dr. Halder, is there anything I should or shouldn’t do?”

“Mmmmm.” A thoughtful sound, not a negative one. “Not sure if there’s such a thing as a good impression, mind you. Don’t act scared, I’d say. I don’t say argue with him, but don’t cower. He’ll likely insult you. If you get mad, he’ll think it’s funny, and he’ll keep poking that spot for the next

twenty years.”

“Charming,” I muttered.

“You know it.”

I took my empty plate and mug to the scullery and checked the clock in the hall. Barely eight. Assuming that I didn’t want to beard the lion in his den before he’d had his breakfast, I had at least three hours to kill.

“Will anyone mind if I look around the grounds?” I asked.

Mrs. Kent snorted. “Nobody around to mind. Mr. Kent’s the only one you’ll run into, unless you go across the road and start walking. And if you see Mr. Kent, tell ’im I need a chicken killed for dinner.”

I agreed to carry this message if I saw Mr. Kent, collected my sketchbook, and went outside.

The house was different in daylight. My impression in the dark had been an impressive construction of pillars and windows, a veritable mansion. By day, gazing up at it, it seemed somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Great columns rose for two stories, holding up a roof that extended outward, providing a broad shaded porch all the way around the building.

Massive windows lined both lower floors. The third floor, under the eaves, was probably servant quarters, although I had not as yet seen anyone beyond Mrs. Kent.

And yet, despite the size and grandeur, Dr. Halder’s house had clearly seen better days. Algae had powdered the white wood with flecks of green, and here and there, I saw the telltale signs of paint that had peeled and been repaired.

A house like this would normally be surrounded by formal gardens, but these had long ago left formality behind. The paths were paved with red brick and kept neat enough, but where one might expect to see clipped topiaries and trimmed boxwood hedges, there were instead thick perennial borders. Even these had gone to seed, though they held up better than the

house. I saw weeds lurking in corners and morning glory throwing narrow green ropes up through the shrubs, making a solid slope of leaves. The headmistress would have been appalled. The insects clearly were not. Bees and slender-waisted wasps formed a living cloud around the flowers. I watched a tiger swallowtail … Papilio something or other … stab its delicate proboscis into the tiny cups of a clary sage, and had a sudden suspicion why Dr. Halder did not care that his garden had gone to seed in such a fashion.

I circled the house by way of the garden. In the back, a pair of long balconies flanked the two wings of the second floor. On one side, the flower garden gave way to a practical-looking vegetable garden. The trees grew closer to the house on the other side, leaning out over the cleared ground.

This was the side with the kitchen door. A patio had been picked out in red brick, running almost up to the edge of the woods. I could see at a glance which places got sun during the day and which lay in shade. The shady areas were carpeted with dry pine needles and softly moldering leaves. The sunny patches grew thick and lush, tangled up with greenbrier and Virginia creeper. Someone was obviously cutting it back occasionally, but there is only so much that one can do in the South. My father used to say that the vegetation down here wanted very badly to be a jungle.

Perhaps the lushness of the woods was the problem with the house, now that I looked at it from this side. The building didn’t fit. It made the whole scene feel unfinished, like a square of paper left blank and white in the middle of a painting of carefully detailed green leaves.

And that is a botanist thought if there ever was one. Enough of that.

You’re here as an illustrator, not an architectural consultant. I looked up to the second story, where Halder’s office lay, according to Mrs. Kent.

Had it been three hours? My kingdom for a pocket watch. Father had had a lovely one, etched with silver, but it had eventually been sold along with everything else. I went back inside and checked the clock. Ten thirty. Surely that was close enough. I paused long enough to tell Mrs. Kent that I had not encountered Mr. Kent and ask directions to Dr. Halder’s office.

He kept his quarters on the second floor, and Mrs. Kent had pointed me toward the main entrance, which boasted a grand central staircase. Light streamed in through the windows that flanked the door, waking deep red undertones in the polished wood. It looked oddly unreal, as if it hadn’t

actually been made to walk on. I looked around nervously, as if someone might disapprove of the hired help using it, but there was no one there, and no other, more inviting staircase. I put my hand on the banister, which felt smooth and tepid as a beetle’s shell.

Halder’s house was strangely empty. Since I arrived, I had only seen Mrs. Kent, who had mentioned her husband and someone named Sally, but a house this size should have a small army of servants scrubbing and polishing, shouldn’t it?

Then again, remembering the empty dining room, perhaps Halder didn’t feel he needed any more. But why build such an immense house and then let it sit empty?

I shook myself. It was none of my business how my employer spent his money, so long as he spent some of it on me. I reached the second floor, the boards creaking under my feet. The creaks seemed to echo much longer than they should have before dying away.

Stop it. It’s just nerves.

Halder’s door loomed in front of me. I wiped suddenly clammy hands on my skirt. This is it, you’ll walk in, he’ll take one look at you and tell you there’s been a mistake and turn you off …

Stop.

I knocked.

“Eh? What is it?”

That wasn’t exactly an invitation, but I pushed the door open anyway and beheld my employer.

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 send a 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 been botanical.”

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 cycle or larval form only. One was tagged note 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.

“That is only the first two chapters,” said Halder. “When I have seen your work, then I shall prepare the rest.” He pushed his glasses up again.

I relaxed slightly. “Certainly, Doctor. Is there a particular visual layout you would prefer?” When he frowned at the question, I added, “In my experience, many scientists have a very specific format in mind, and I do not wish to waste your time or my labor by producing something unsuitable.”

Halder looked past me. I thought he seemed almost indecisive about something, which seemed at odds with what little I’d seen of him so far.

“No,” he said at last. “No, the time should not be wasted.”

I did not have time to wonder at his phrasing. He rose to his feet and made his way slowly to a tall wooden cabinet on the far side of the room.

He withdrew a key from his pocket and unlocked the doors.

I started to rise and he snapped, “Stay where you are!” over his shoulder.

What, does he have live wasps in there or something? Admittedly, that seemed unlikely, but some of my father’s naturalist friends had kept stranger things in the house. Say what you like about Father, at least plants are easier to deal with than live rattlesnakes … or that one fellow with the fox. Opening the front door to his house had produced an eye-watering blast of ammonia, and a weeklong stay during trillium season had cured me of

any childhood desire for a pet fox. Between the urine and the screaming, they did not have a great deal to recommend them. (Granted, I feel much the same way about babies, but they at least grow out of it.) Halder stood in front of the cabinet for some time. I could hear papers being shuffled about. Rather than twist about and stare at him, I studied his desk, and the mysterious object in the gallon jar.

After a moment, I realized that it wasn’t an object, but objects. The jar was full of grubs preserved in liquid, probably alcohol. Hundreds of them, stuffed in like candy in a jar, their bodies pale and wrinkled from the solution. Despite my brave thoughts earlier, I felt a twinge of nausea. I stamped it down and forced myself to stare at the pickled larvae. You are a naturalist. These are creatures of nature. How would you paint them?

Raw sienna greatly thinned and mixed with white gouache. Raw umber for the shadows of organs inside. A touch of blue for shading, applied very thin, so that it does not turn the yellows to green.

The queasiness subsided. (My nerves remained, but you can’t have everything.) Eventually I heard the cabinet doors close and Halder returned to his seat, then slid a thin folder across the desk.

“These are some of the completed illustrations,” he said. “I’ll expect you to match them.”

I opened the folder and felt my heart stutter in my chest.

The top sheet contained a series of illustrations of the American burying beetle, and they were magnificent. Black and orange carapace, tiny segmented antenna leading to a vivid orange comb, delicate spines on the back set of legs—it was a work of art as well as science. The uppermost illustration showed the beetle with spread wings, which the artist had rendered with veins so fine that they must have been painted with a brush the size of a hair. The pattern on the shell was not merely a flat wash of color but had richness and depth. Even the beetle grub elsewhere on the page seemed to glow from within.

“These are…” Beautiful. Elegant. Gorgeous. “… exquisitely done.” I suspected that Halder, with his scoffing at flights of fancy, would not appreciate admiration of their beauty. “Who was the artist?”

“That need not concern you,” said Halder. “Your job is simply to finish the illustrations.”

I swallowed and lifted the page. The second sheet was just as glorious.

An American carrion beetle, from egg to adulthood. The heavily armored larva was black, yes, but the artist had layered the shell with subtle washes of indigo and Tuscan red, making the black richer and more complex. Had the great Hans Simon Holtzbecker been obsessed with flesh-eating beetles instead of flowers, he might have produced something like this.

I am a good illustrator. I am inspired some of the time and competent all of the time. For all my gnawing fears, I had never truly worried about the technical aspects of this job.

But this … he wanted me to produce work to match this? I felt as if I had fallen into a fairy tale where a wicked fairy demanded that I spin watercolor into gold.

My mask of calm must have slipped, because Halder’s eyebrows slammed together over his nose. “Is there a problem, Miss Wilson? Can’t you do it?”

If I were as good a person as I was an illustrator, perhaps I would have told him the truth. But I needed the job too badly. I composed my face despite the sudden knot in my gut and set the folio back on the desk. “I do not have the pigments to match these,” I said calmly. “The artist appears to have used both watercolor and gouache, which I am proficient in, but I will require additional paints and finer brushes.”

The doctor scowled. The knot in my gut drew even tighter. Don’t think like that. He hired you, he’s seen your work in the Botanica, he knows what you’re capable of. He knew what he was getting.

Smiley leapt back onto the desk between us and broke the tension. I snatched the folder out of the way while Halder pushed the cat aside. “Very well,” he said, no longer scowling. “Tell Mrs. Kent I said to put you in the studio suite. There should be plenty of brushes and paints in there, and you are welcome to them.”

This sounded like a dismissal. I picked up the list of Latin names and rose to my feet. “I shall deliver the completed illustrations to you as I finish them.” Inspiration struck. “Would you prefer that I come to you when I have questions, or are there texts you would like me to consult first?”

Please, God, let there be texts. I could all too easily picture Halder shouting at me about metathoraxes and then perhaps throwing something. I desperately needed a reference book.

“I do not want my time taken up with foolish questions. But it is the specimens that are definitive, not the books.” He pointed a finger at me, eyes narrowing. “I have no desire to see my work as error-riddled as that fool Fitch’s, Miss Wilson. Consult whatever books you like, but do not repeat their mistakes. Do you understand me?”

“Certainly,” I lied. Who on earth is Fitch? And then, because I was already lying, I added, “I look forward to working with you, Dr. Halder.”

He grunted and turned away. I let myself out of the room and leaned against the wall, my knees shaking.

I had survived the first face-to-face meeting. Halder hadn’t thought better of hiring me or thrown me out on my ear. Now I just had to figure out how to match some of the most spectacular illustrations I’d ever seen, in a field that I knew virtually nothing about, without repeating the mistakes of books I’d never heard of.

No problem at all, I thought, and didn’t know whether to laugh or burst into tears.

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