‘Slavery.’ He leans back in his chair. ‘He married the rich widow of a plantation owner who was one of Jamaica’s leading slavers. Slavery funded all of this.’ He gestures at the museum around us. ‘He wasn’t collecting specimens himself, didn’t venture out to net butterflies. He sent slaves.’
I put the box down.
‘When you understand the scale of his collection, the voraciousness of it, it’s disturbing. He didn’t limit himself to plants and butterflies. He collected clothes worn by slaves. Among other things.’
My skin crawls. ‘What does that mean? Should I not look at it? Should the museum not have his collection?’
‘What do you think?’
I push the drawer gently away. ‘I don’t want anything to do with them.’
He shakes his head. ‘Without his collection and the collections of so many others, there would be no way of tracking the evolution of species, the destruction of habitats.’
‘So, you’re saying the museum should keep it?’
‘Keep it but know where it’s from. Use it but recognise that it is born from cruelty. Hold together that one of the greatest collectors of all time profited from slavery. A man can be both.’
Decades later, I will read that the British Museum has removed the statue of Hans Sloane from its pedestal, imprisoned him ina glass case dedicated to his relationship to slavery, and I will recall this conversation, my eyes filling suddenly at how a man who confronted slavery years before the museum did could have wrought such damage. And it will occur to me that perhaps Daniel wasn’t warning me off Sloane at all, but himself. The insatiableness of his collecting. The contradiction that existed inside him. His ability to love and hurt. But I didn’t see it back then. I didn’t listen.
Daniel tells me about himself. He has a special interest in Asian butterflies because he grew up in the Philippines, his father was a soldier posted to Fort Magsaysay. His passion for butterflies started in the forests of the military base. He is a curator, a conservationist, a taxonomist. ‘I like to name nature. I want to name, describe, categorise.’
He teaches me basic lepidoptery, but over time, I find I am observing less the trays of butterflies or the volumes of herbaria but him. How he only wears glasses when he looks through the microscope. The shallow curve of his lower back. The line of buttons on his dove-grey shirt.
He has discovered a new genus of Nymphalidae (‘nymphets’ he calls them), he has identified two new species.
‘Have you decided what you’re going to call them?’ I ask.
‘Not yet. Paul wants to name it after Harry Potter characters – Harry, Hermione, Ron—’
‘Ron!’
He makes a face. ‘I know. But the goal is to get the public interested in butterflies, in conservation.’
‘What do you want to call them?’
‘Tess,’ he says without hesitation.
‘Is that biblical?’
He laughs. ‘Almost. Thomas Hardy. He wroteTess of the d’Urbervilles.’
‘Never read it.’
‘It’s about a tragic woman who’s failed by the men in her life – her father, her cousin, her husband. By the standards of Victorian England, she’s fallen. But not for Hardy. He called her pure. Sometimes I think he must have known a real Tess, had strong feelings for her.’ His mind seems to wander for a second, disappear beyond the walls of the lab and then return. ‘I think about her when I look at these butterflies.’
He returns to the microscope, adjusts a shard of wing. The cuff of his shirt rides up his wrist.
I want my story to be different. But it isn’t. It is this: I am jealous of the slide between his fingers, of the wing that holds him rapt. I want to be under his lens, I want his pupils to be wide and dilated above me. What is it to be the object of a man’s obsession? For him to devote his life to the study of you? ‘Can I look?’
‘Sure.’
He bends down, straightens the slide.
Behind him, I lean forward. Breathe him in. His scent pulses through me: cotton, herbs and something else, sharp and astringent, like pure alcohol.
You see now why I’ve never told Kit.
Because everything Daniel is going to say about me is true.