and almost bare: a rough table, a few straight chairs.
Pehr set Linnaeus on the floor, propped against the wall, and then he went back outside and unhitched the horses and shoved the sleigh through the door and in front of the stone fireplace. He was very worried and feared he had made a mistake. His master’s face was white and drawn and his hand, gesturing from the sleigh to the door again and again, had been curled like a claw.
“Fire?” Linnaeus said, or thought he said. At certain moments, when the lake receded a bit and left a wider path around the shore, he was aware that the words coming out of his mouth bore little resemblance to the words he meant. Often he could only produce a syllable at a time. But he said something and gestured toward the fireplace, and Pehr had a good deal of sense. Pehr lifted Linnaeus back into the sleigh, tucked the sheepskins around his legs and his torso, and then built a fire. Soon the flames began to warm the room. The sky darkened outside; the room was dark except for the glow from the logs. Pehr went out to tend to the horses and Linnaeus, staring into the flames, felt his beloved place around him.
He’d rebuilt this house and added several wings; on the hill he’d built a small museum for his herbarium and his insect collection and his rocks and zoological specimens. In his study and bedroom the walls were papered from ceiling to floor with botanical etchings and prints, and outside, among the elms and beyond the Siberian garden, the glass bells he’d hung sang in the wind. In his youth he had heard the cries of ptarmigan, which had sounded like a kind of laughter. The fire was warm on his face and his hands, and when Pehr returned from the horses Linnaeus gestured toward his tobacco and his pipe.
Pehr filled the pipe, lit it, and placed it in his master’s mouth. “We should go back,” he said. “Your family will be worried.” Worried was a kind word, Pehr knew; his master’s wife would be raging, possibly blaming him. They were an hour late already and the sun was gone.
Linnaeus puffed on his pipe and said nothing. He was very pleased with himself. The fire was warm, his pipe drew well, no one knew where he was but Pehr and Pehr had the rare gift of silence. A dog lying near the hearth would have completed his happiness. Across the dark lake in his mind he saw Pompey, the best of all his dogs, barking at the water. Pompey had walked with him each summer Sunday from here to the parish church and sat in the pew beside him. They’d stayed for an hour, ample time for a sermon; if the parson spoke longer they rose and left anyway. Pompey, so smart and funny, had learned the pattern if not the meaning. When Linnaeus was ill, Pompey left for church at the appropriate time, hopped into the appropriate bench, stayed for an hour and then scampered out. The neighbors had learned to watch for his antics. Now he was dead.
“Sir?” the coachman said.
His name was Pehr, Linnaeus remembered. Like Osbeck and Forskal, Lofling and Kalm. There had been others, too: those he had taught at the university in Uppsala and those he had taught privately here at Hammarby. Germans and Danes, Russians and Swiss, Finns and a few Norwegians; a Frenchman, who had not worked out, and an American, who had; one Englishman, still around. And then there were those he had hardly known, who had come by the hundreds to the great botanic excursions he’d organized around the city. Dressed in loose linen suits, their arms full of nets and jars, they had trailed him in a huge parade, gathering plants and insects and herding around him at resting places to listen to him lecture on the treasures they’d found. They were young, and when he was young he had often kept them out for twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch. On their return to the Botanic Gardens they had sometimes been hailed by a kettledrum and French horns. Outside the garden the band had stopped and cheered: Vivat scientia! Vivat Linnaeus! Lately there were those who attacked his work.
The coachman was worried, Linnaeus could see. He crouched to the right of the sleigh, tapping a bit of kindling on the floor. “They will be looking for you,” he said.
And of course it was true; his family was always looking for him. Always looking, wanting, needing, demanding. He had written and taught and lectured and tutored, traveled and scrabbled and scrambled; and always Sara Lisa said there was not enough money, they needed more, she was worried about Carl Junior and the girls. Carl Junior was lazy, he needed more schooling. The girls needed frocks, the girls needed shoes. The girls needed earrings to wear to a dance where they might meet appropriate husbands.
The three oldest looked and acted like their mother: large-boned, coarse-featured, practical. Sophia seemed to belong to another genus entirely. He thought of her fine straight nose, her beautiful eyes. When she was small he used to take her with him to his lectures, where she would stand between his knees and listen. Now she was engaged. On his tour of Lappland, with the whole world still waiting to be named, he’d believed that he and everyone he loved would live forever.
Now he had named almost everything and everyone knew his name. How clear and simple was the system of his nomenclature! Two names, like human names: a generic name common to all the species of one genus; a specific name distinguishing differences. He liked names that clearly described a feature of the genus: Potamogeton, by the river; Drosera, like a dew. Names that honored botanists also pleased him. In England the King had built a huge garden called Kew, in which wooden labels named each plant according to his system. The King of France had done the same thing at the Trianon. In Spain and Russia and South America plants bore names that he’d devised, and on his coat he wore the ribbon that named him a Knight of the Polar Star. But his monkey Grinn, a present from the Queen, was dead; and also Sjup the raccoon and the parrot who had sat on his shoulder at meals and the weasel who wore a bell on his neck and hunted rats among the rocks.
There was a noise outside. Pehr leapt up and a woman and a man walked through the door. Pehr was all apologies, blushing, shuffling, nervous. The woman touched his arm and said, “It wasn’t your fault.” Then she said, “Papa?”
One of his daughters, Linnaeus thought. She was pretty, she was smiling; she was almost surely Sophia. The man by her side looked familiar, and from the way he held Sophia’s elbow Linnaeus wondered if it might be her husband. Had she married? He remembered no wedding. Her fiancé? Her fiancé, then. Or not: the man bent low, bringing his face down to Linnaeus’s like the moon falling from the sky.
“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