“Sir?” he said. “Sir?”
One of those moments in which no words were possible was upon him. He gazed at the open, handsome face of the young man, aware that this was someone he knew. The man said, “It’s Rotheram, sir.”
Rotheram. Rotheram. The sound was like the wind moving over the Lappland hills. Rotheram, one of his pupils, not a fiancé at all. Human beings had two names, like plants, by which they might be recalled. Nature was a cryptogram and the scientific method a key; nature was a labyrinth and this method the thread of Ariadne. Or the world was an alphabet written in God’s hand, which he, Carl Linnaeus, had been called to decipher. One of his pupils had come to see him, one of the pupils he’d sent to all the corners of the world and called, half-jokingly, his apostles. This one straightened now, a few feet away, most considerately not blocking the fire. What was his name? He was young, vigorous, strongly built. Was he Lofling, then? Or Ternström, Hasselquist, Falck?
The woman frowned. “Papa,” she said. “Can we just sit you up? We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Sophia. The man bent over again, sliding his hands beneath Linnaeus’s armpits and gently raising him to a sitting position. He was Hasselquist or Ternström, Lofling or Forskal or Falck. Or he was none of them, because all of them were dead.
Linnaeus’s mind left his body, rose and traveled along the paths his apostles had taken. He was young again, as they had been: twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five, the years he had done his best work. He was Christopher Ternström, that married pastor who’d been such a passionate botanist. Sailing to the East Indies in search of a tea plant and some living goldfish to give to the Queen, mailing letters back to his teacher from Cádiz. On a group of islands off Cambodia he had succumbed to a tropical fever. His wife had berated Linnaeus for luring her husband to his death.
But he was not Linnaeus. He was Fredrik Hasselquist, modest and poor, who had landed in Smyrna and traveled through Palestine and Syria and Cyprus and Rhodes, gathering plants and animals and keeping a diary so precise that it had broken Linnaeus’s heart to edit it. Twice he had performed this task, once for Hasselquist, once for Artedi. After the drowning, he had edited Artedi’s book on the fish. Hasselquist died in a village outside Smyrna, when he was thirty.
Of course there were those who had made it back: Pehr Osbeck, who had returned from China with a huge collection of new plants and a china tea-set decorated with Linnaeus’s own flower; Marten Kahler, who’d returned with nothing. Kahler’s health had been broken by the shipwreck in the North Sea, by the fever that followed the attack in Marseilles, by his endless, grinding poverty. The chest containing his collections had been captured by pirates long before it reached Sweden. Then there was Rolander, Daniel Rolander — was that the man who was with him now?
But he had said Ro…, Ro…Rotheram, that’s who it was, the English pupil. Nomenclature is a mnemonic art. In Surinam the heat had crumpled Rolander’s body and melted his mind. All he brought home was a lone pot of Indian fig covered with cochineal insects, which Linnaeus’s gardener had mistakenly washed away. Lost insects and a handful of gray seeds, which Rolander claimed to be pearls. When Linnaeus gently pointed out the error, Rolander had left in a huff for Denmark, where he was reportedly living on charity. The others were dead: Lofling, Forskal, and Falck.
Sophia said, “Papa, we looked all over — why didn’t you come back?”
Pehr the coachman said, “I’m sorry, he begged me.”
The pupil—Lofling? — said, “How long has he been weeping like this?”
But Pehr wasn’t weeping, Pehr was fine. Someone, not Pehr or Sophia, was laughing. Linnaeus remembered how Lofling had taken dictation from him when his hands were crippled by gout. Lofling was twenty-one, he was only a boy; he had tutored Carl Junior, the lazy son. In Spain Lofling had made a name for himself and had sent letters and plants to Linnaeus; then he’d gone to South America with a Spanish expedition. Venezuela; another place Linnaeus had never been. But he had seen it, through Lofling’s letters and specimens. Birds so brightly colored they seemed to be jeweled and rivers that pulsed, foamy and brown, through ferns the height of a man. The letter from Spain announcing Lofling’s death from fever had come only months after little Johannes had died.
There he sat, in his sleigh in the kitchen, surrounded by the dead. “Are you laughing, Papa?” Sophia said. “Are you happy?”
His apostles had gone out into the world like his own organs: extra eyes and hands and feet, observing, gathering, naming. Someone was stroking his hands. Pehr Forskal, after visiting Marseilles and Malta and Constantinople, reached Alexandria one October and dressed as a peasant to conceal himself from marauding Bedouins. In Cairo he roamed the streets in his disguise and made a fine collection of new plants; then he traveled by Suez and Jedda to Arabia, where he was stricken by plague and died. Months later, a letter arrived containing a stalk and a flower from a tree that Linnaeus had always wanted to see: the evergreen from which the Balm of Gilead was obtained. The smell was spicy and sweet but Forskal, who had also tutored Carl Junior, was gone. And Falck, who had meant to accompany Forskal on his Arabian journey, was gone as well — he had gone to St. Petersburg instead, and then traveled through Turkestan and Mongolia. Lonely and lost and sad in Kazan, he had shot himself in the head.
Outside the weather had changed and now it was raining. The pupiclass="underline" Falck or Forskal, Osbeck or Rolander—Rotheram, who had fallen ill several years ago, whom Sophia had nursed, who came and went from his house like family—said, “I hate to move you, sir; I know you’re enjoying it here. But the rain is ruining the track. We’ll have a hard time if we don’t leave soon.”
Rolander? There was a story about Rolander, which he had used as the basis for a lecture on medicine and, later, in a paper. Where had it come from? A letter, perhaps. Or maybe Rolander had related it himself, before his mind disintegrated completely. On the ship, on the way to Surinam, he had fallen ill with dysentery. Ever the scientist, trained by his teacher, he’d examined his feces and found thousands of mites in them. He held his magnifying glass to the wooden beaker he’d sipped from in the night, and found a dense white line of flour mites down near the base.
Kahler lashed himself to the mast of his boat, where he remained two days and two nights without food.
Hasselquist died in the village of Bagda.
Pehr Kalm crossed the Great Lakes and walked into Canada.
In Denmark, someone stole Rolander’s gray seeds, almost as if they’d been truly pearls.
Generic names, he had taught these pupils, must be clear and stable and expressive. They should not be vague or confusing; neither should they be primitive, barbarous, lengthy, or difficult to pronounce. They should have significant metaphorical or historical associations with the character of the genus. Another botanist had named the thyme-leaved bell-flower after him: Linnaea borealis. One June, in Lappland, he had seen it flourishing. His apostles had died in this order: Ternström, Hasselquist, Lofling, Forskal, Falck, and then finally Kahler, at home. His second son, Johannes, had died at the age of two, between Hasselquist and Lofling; but that was also the year of Sophia’s birth. Once, when Sophia had dropped a tray full of dishes, he had secretly bought a new set to replace them, to spare her from her mother’s wrath.
His apostles had taken wing like swallows, but they had failed to return. Swallows wintered beneath the lakes, or so he had always believed. During the autumn, he had written, they gather in large groups in the weeds and then dive, resting beneath the ice until spring. An English friend — Collinson, Peter in his own tongue but truly Pehr, and also dead — had argued with him over this and begged him to hold some swallows under water to see if they could live there. Was it so strange to think they might sleep beneath the water above which they hovered in summer? Was it not stranger to think they flew for thousands of miles? He knew another naturalist who believed that swallows wintered on the moon. But always there had been people, like his wife, who criticized his every word.