He looks at me with so much emotion in his eyes. ‘Vanish.’
I don’t tell Daniel about Alex. I tell him I found a sea heart. Daniel smiles. ‘Your focus is coming back; do you feel it?’ To reward me, he buys me the book I ask for on drift seeds. When the package arrives, I tear it open.
Alex was right about sea hearts being birth charms. In Iceland, they call themlausnarsteein, in Norwegian,losningsstein, and the meaning of both is the same: a loosening stone. To loosen a baby safely from its mother, just as this seed has been loosened from its tree and carried safely to a shore thousands of miles away.
I worry it constantly, brush its shiny casing with my thumb so often, I am afraid I will break it when thousands of kilometres of sea have not. At night, I lay it against my cheek, I press it to my lips, the scar across my stomach, during the day, I hold it secretly in my pocket. Maybe it will stop me from drowning too.
60
Study
Now
I’m not sure if it’s real or memory when I see it.
It’s afternoon. I’ve just come back to the cottage from swimming, I’m still in my wet clothes, leaving puddles all over the floor that I’ll need to dry before Daniel returns from the field, any reminder that I have been in the water irritates him. I’m heading upstairs, when something catches my eye. The master bedroom door is shut, Daniel knows I don’t like to see it. But the door of the room beside it is open. Inside, there’s a flicker of blue.
I cross the landing. Push open the door.
It’s the same simple set-up: trestle table; lamp; laptop. To the left are lepidoptery tools: glassine envelopes; bottles of entomological pins; spreading boards; a dish of wax paper. To the right is a bottle of ethyl acetate and a row of killing jars. Four are washed and dried, no streaks on the glass, but in the fifth, there is a layer of plaster of Paris soaked in ethyl acetate. And, on the plaster, is a Cornish Blue.
It can’t be. It must be a Holly Blue, like Daniel said. Under the table is a pile of lepidoptery journals, a stack of field guides. Ifind an old edition ofButterflies of Britain, turn to the section on Cornish Blues and Holly Blues, compare what I’m reading to the creature in the jar.
Itisa Cornish Blue. Male. The vibrant blue of its wings. Velvety margins. Black spots on the upper side. The Holly Blue has black spots only on the underside.
My mind is whirring. This is important but I don’t know why, it’s like having an answer to a question I haven’t asked and then, two parts of myself collide, my adult self – methodical, analytical – and Lolly. Not the Lolly Daniel wants but the real Lolly, who kept secrets, who went brazenly through his things. I run my hands over every inch of the trestle table, remove each of the journals and field guides beneath. When I don’t find anything, I start on the rest of the room.
I find them almost instantly under the bed, I don’t think he’s even trying to hide them, it’s just a convenient place to put them away. Two simple plastic boxes with snap-locks. I tremble a little pulling them onto my lap, I feel like I’ve been trawling through the dark, my net is full of monstrous things – tentacles and suckers and teeth – I don’t want to look in but I have to. I unclick the latches of one of the boxes. There are a handful of glassine envelopes, the same envelopes on the trestle table. Inside each one, folded neatly in half, are dead Cornish Blues.
I don’t understand. How is Daniel netting Cornish Blues when they’re extinct?
My mind is lurching, I need answers now. I unlatch the second box. Pull out a stack of neatly stapled journal articles. Force myself to read every single word.
I wrap my arms round myself after I finish. Two things are clear. First, the Cornish Blues did go extinct eighteen years ago. But second, shortly afterwards, a programme was started to reintroduce the Blues to secret sites in the UK.
The thyme field.
My fingers are trembling as I reach for the last item in the box. It’s very Daniel, a small, calf leather notebook, his initials monogrammed in gold, although I’ve never seen it before. It opens easily; the spine soft from use. My heart is racing so fast, it takes some time before I understand that what I’m looking at is a ledger, hundreds of pages long, setting out details of butterflies – species, sub-species, male, female, wingspan, the date it was caught. The first dates back over thirty years ago. The last dates to yesterday. This makes sense, he’s a scientist, he was always going to record what he caught, surely, that’s what we were doing eighteen years ago, recording the number of Blues, releasing them.
But it is the last two columns that explain why I’ve never seen this book. They set out the addresses where the butterflies were sent. And their price.
There is a sound behind me. I turn round.
He is standing at the doorway. The last of the light shines on his face – the planes of his cheekbones, his dark eyes. The rest is shadow. ‘What are you doing?’
I shut the notebook. Let it sit on my palm. ‘I think the question is, what are you doing?’
His eyes flitter over the trestle table, the Blue in the killing jar, the open plastic boxes, trying to decipher the conclusions I’ve drawn, the secrets I know.
‘You’re hunting them, aren’t you? Driving them to extinction. For money.’
For a while, he doesn’t respond. When he finally does, he speaks quietly, as if he isn’t speaking to me at all but to himself. ‘What am I supposed to do? I can’t go back to being a lepidopterist. No one wants to hire a criminal. And you know as well as I do that the Cornish Blues are so valuable, they’re as protected as snow leopards.’
‘Snow leopards are endangered,’ I say slowly. ‘Cornish Blues are extinct.’
‘Exactly, exactly!’ He gestures excitedly, like I’ve suddenly grasped a concept he’s been trying for hours to teach me. ‘Eighteen years ago, when they were endangered, their prices were already through the roof, they sold for more than Queen Alexandra’s Birdwings. But now, when no one knows if the reintroduction programme is working, when they’retechnicallyextinct, their price has skyrocketed.’ He sounds like an investment banker, analysing fluctuations in investments, triple shorting extinction. No wonder he was so harsh about me going into law. I am nothing but a mirror. Hold me up and he sees himself. ‘And with the connections I’ve made—’
Is that what he’s been doing in prison?