her before men of a certain status. Mostly they watch in mounting despair as she neglects them. But Clara’s virtue is a commodity, prized, so where are her guardians now? His voice, so easy and present, seems dangerously close at hand. At times it might be echoing inside her.
They banter back and forth, bird and boy. (Not a boy, exactly—older than she perhaps, but with an air of play about him.) The phrase ricochets on stone, dazzling her with indirection. Once she catches him regarding her with those eyes—a shocking blue, they are—and not regarding her too, as servants do and don’t regard their betters. He can absent himself. He has that gift, it seems, which explains Father’s willingness to abandon his socially vulnerable daughter in the dank recesses of a house of beasts with a loping boy-stranger. Father does not see the beast keeper any more than he takes note of individual beasts.
Besides which, Clara is notoriously sensible. This and her skill as an artist give her a degree of domestic liberty little duplicated in other households. Their first day at the menagerie, for her sake, Mr. Cops made a great show of the leopard’s predilection for seizing and destroying parasols, muffs, and hats almost before the astonished visitor knew to miss them. Father only smiled, well assured. His Clara would not flaunt her finery before a leopard.
But here she is, left feeble-minded by the lean curve of a boy’s back. She’s a honey hive full of bees, all distraction. They have no history, she and this boy, no memory in common, but—and this is ridiculous—she seems to recognize him. His voice, ringing from all directions and none at all, soothes and bewilders, and she envies the bobbing, mangy bird balanced on the plane of his shoulder, gnawing his ear.
Clara won’t lift her eyes from her charcoal sketch but uses deft knuckles and thumb to smudge, deepen, enrage the white space. It’s spiteful, the ivory page, sworn to see her fail. But caring little lets her succeed where her father, who in his quiet way cares so much, fails. She sometimes imagines her talents come of a spell cast by some benevolent spirit on behalf of her dead mother.
Clara draws as well as any scientific artist in London, and the older and more marriageable she becomes, the better she understands: this is her breath and barter.
He’ll be in this gallery, Clara knows, for at least an hour. It’s evening mealtime, and now she knows his habits as she knows those of the other residents of the menagerie, of which there are fewer and fewer each day, with the king and Cops gradually surrendering them to the Zoological Society of London’s more scientific venture at Regent’s Park.
The cats will pace and sleep at intervals and then crowd with tensing muscles by the slat door a quarter hour before their meat arrives. Old Martin the grizzly makes three long paces and then rubs his back against the stone and, turning, flings his upper half into the air before beginning the pattern all over again. She knows when the singing birds will sing, if at all. The hyena and a gaunt American black bear share a den, and while neither actually succeeds in killing the other, relations between roommates are daily tested. When they have a bone to squabble over, squabble they do, in a ludicrous manner, and the devious hyena always wins the day.
“Which of my lovelies are you drawing today?” His voice seems almost shy, though she knows a glamour when she meets one. She doesn’t make the mistake of looking at him.
But it’s a bold gesture. They’re alone and he at least remotely in the Crown’s employ; he couldn’t know who she is: the daughter of a great man? An old friend of the royal line? A courtier’s child? Her clothes are plain but fine, the product of doting aunts who pity her prospects. He can’t know whom he might offend, or that she is only her father’s daughter, here because her talents have proven useful. Thanks to the charitable impulses of Sir Artemus Lever, an old family friend, she and Father have secured between them a major commission. Father has redemption and she respite from the tedious topic of matrimony.
“I’m sketching that one.” She motions to his parrot. “Since you’ve been so kind as to display him for me.”
He smiles, and his teeth are gently crooked. “Display is a fine word for old Mettle.” He breathes deep and begins a litany that dizzies her. “Psittacus erithacus erithacus, native to Africa. He’s a fine mimic, easily bored, with a tendency to growl, except at me. He’s a vocabulary to rival most men and fancies himself a humorist. Marie Antoinette had a grey like this. So did Henry VIII, one as ill-mannered as his master. That one amused himself by crying out by the river, ‘I’m drowning! He fell in the Thames!’ Or he’d hail the boatmen over from Hampton Court Palace. Across they’d row thinking to be paid for their trouble, but inciting royal chaos was all in a day’s entertainment for the rogue. Mettle’s vain about his dress, drab though it is, so your favor’s a great conquest.”
Clara steels herself to look at him. “Is that the speech you give everyone? Psittacus erithacus erithacus?”
“You’re not impressed, then?” He feigns disappointment. “With the Latin, at least?”
Her lips purse and her nose twitches. It isn’t right. It won’t do. What would Aunt Lucretia advise in such a crisis? Defy flattery. Pray for grace.
She prays but finds him closer. He’s loped closer, and she can see now that he has a slight limp, so slight as to go almost unnoticed, and she can’t breathe. Clara drops her charcoal, and the crayon rolls off down the stone, right to him. Mesmerized. Even a dumb piece of coal knows what to do. But instead—to spare her complexion, as the advice columns trumpet—she practices self-restraint. She feels his furtive gaze, unbearably lit from behind with a hard light, slipping from her face to her hand. Slipping.
“I’d hoped for a nod, at least, from an educated specimen like yourself.”
She looks up and catches him teasing his lower lip with his top teeth to check his smile. “All right, yes.” She lets her breath out. “I was impressed.” Now you’ve done it. “Very.”
He reaches down for the charcoal but doesn’t close the space between them to deliver it, folding it circumspectly in his fist. “‘Very’ because I’m a mere beast keeper and a buffoon, probably, or because the facts were of use to you?” His gaze, now unabashed—and it’s as if she’s never been looked at before this moment, really looked at by another human soul in all her endless nineteen years—is terrible in its brightness, his eyes endearingly ringed round with sun and laugh lines. It hurts, she thinks, hurts, for it does, sweetly, to be seen, and who could have warned her? “I don’t look for charity, as a rule, but I like to be of use.”
She watches him swallow, noting the shadow on his hard jaw—no elaborate mustaches for him—watches him await her verdict. The Adam’s apple travels in his fine-muscled throat, such a lovely sun-kissed throat the color of honey, and for one agonizing instant she’s not in the stony heart of her nation’s capital but lying with this wildly beautiful, clever but no less inappropriate boy in a fall orchard full of goldenrod and smashed fruit and drunken bees, her favorite sort of place. A paler bit of flesh winks under the collar, and perhaps he feels her eyes on it, for he shifts a bit, pulls his cap down lightly, and this is a relief since it shadows those eyes so like the sky over an orchard on a clear day with the white clouds billowing by fast and senseless as dreams, and she can’t look away on her own.
Though he seems frank and foolish as a child, he compliments her somehow, without a word. He makes words redundant. Lord knows words have her in a thicket now.
Mere. Beast. Buffoon. Very.
“A little of both, I confess, sir. But I thank you for your knowledge. My father’s illustrating a scientific catalog,” she adds quickly, to justify her gratitude, “and I assist. He and his sponsor hope to expand their findings into a book.”
“Looks to me that you’re illustrating it.” He smiles with his eyes alone—fearful witchcraft. “I say so humbly, of course, with all respect due your father.”
“You have no obligation to respect him … a stranger.” She busies her hands, packing.
The keeper clears his throat, motioning gravely toward her sketch. “Mettle will fault me if you don’t