Evelyn

Evelyn Adelia Alexander is borne away from England in a blaze of gaily-streamered glory. Around her, the crowd cheers and waves, goodbye they call, farewell to all, and handkerchiefs flutter like a flock of small white birds. The band has been playing with unwavering gusto—so far “Auld Lang Syne” and “Where Is Now the Merry Party?”—and she fears for the trumpeter, whom, she is certain, has not taken a breath since they left. Now, as they steam out of Tilbury, they have struck up “Soldiers of the King,” a lively tune to inspire good humor among the passengers—for more than a few faces are saddened, she notices, at the sight of those left behind.

They are on board the SS Maloja, and since she knows very little about ships, all she can say with any accuracy is that it is very new and very big. Indeed, it is the single largest ship she has seen in her life. A sleek and shiny beast, gleaming like a thing of wonder conjured from the future—and it must be so with electricity installed throughout, wireless telegraphy, and even, she has heard, modern and elaborate anti-rodent protection. She tries not to betray any of her astonishment, as though to all this she is an old hand, but she has failed already. It is written clearly all over her face, and truly, she is alight with excitement—I am on my way; I am on my way!

She can hardly believe it.

Is this her journey’s beginning or its end? Where will it take her? To what will it bring her back? What might she learn? What will she see anew?

Stop, she tells herself, enjoy this moment, be present, observe.

The long, empty lines of Tilbury’s coastal fort gliding past, Gravesend’s cast-iron piers falling away on the opposite bank, docks and warehouses giving way to flat, wet marsh, seagulls wheeling above her in a winter gray sky, and the river glinting thickly, leading them out into the North Sea. She stands on the deck lost, somewhere between waking and dreaming, which she might well be given their frightfully early start to make the boat train from St. Pancras this morning. How very quiet her mother and father were on the way, as was Florence, dear Florence, with only Patrick making an attempt at conversation, though he, too, soon gave up and resigned himself to silence.

The crowd around her begins to disperse soon after they have passed Dover, its coastline as undulating as the waves, and the cliffs sheer and white and gleaming. These, too, seem to arouse strong sentiment in the passengers—When, oh when shall we see home again?—but not so much in Evie, whose thoughts lie ahead, tumbling, stumbling into the future, wondering what it might reveal. Three weeks on board! This is terribly quick, she knows—it once took months and months before the Suez Canal opened—but even then, it feels decidedly extended. If only there were a way to get there faster so that her adventure could truly begin.

Only when the straits have opened up, and the water lies wide and blue around them, does she realize she is one of the last few stragglers still out on deck. She also notices that she seems to have lost her chaperone, Mrs. Ward, a large, fussy woman who, one would think, would be difficult to misplace. Must I find her? Perhaps given this is their first hour on board, she must. Though before she heads inside, where she knows there will be company and chatter and the busyness of settling in, she lingers for a moment at the railing, with the wind, light and playful, the smell of the sea rising up strong and salty, and before her, the ribbon of coastline fast, fast receding.

 

They are three to a cabin: Evie, Bessie, Mrs. Ward’s blond-haired, blue-eyed niece, and slender, serious Victoria Baker—both of whom are about seventeen.

Mrs. Ward, who is elsewhere, in plush accommodation, at first makes a fuss about being away from “her girls.” “What if you should need me?” she frets. “We won’t,” they chorus so emphatically that their chaperone looks wounded. “What we mean,” Evie adds quickly, “is that we would not wish to trouble you, but we are so awfully glad you are here.” Beside her, Bessie nods vigorously. Mollified, Mrs. Ward sweeps off and swiftly forgets about them.

Back in their cabin, Evie unpacks her belongings. This will be home for a few weeks, and while it may not be the most cheerful of living quarters, Evie does not like to complain. Bessie, though, feels no such reluctance.

No windows, no heating, and only one lamp overhead? How will they dress?

Evie thinks it best not to inform her at this moment that the bath cubicles down the passageway are shared.

“Why isn’t there a porthole, even?” Bessie continues. “For some light and fresh air.”

Victoria replies, already sounding like she is at the end of her patience, “Because if it were left open, water might sluice in on us while we were sleeping and that would be dangerous.”

Evie asks if Victoria has made this journey before.

She has, for she was born in India, she tells them, and had lived on a tea plantation in the Nilgiris until she was ten, when she was sent away to school in England. “Now I’m returning to be with my family and to get married.”

“Oh! As are we,” says Bessie, brightening. “To be married, I mean. Our families are in England.” There is nothing more Bessie likes to discuss, Evie has discovered, than marriage plans, despite having no suitor yet in sight.

“Isn’t that right, Evie?” She looks across at her, her eyes as blue, Evie imagines, as the sea outside their windowless cabin.

Evie laughs, nervous. “Yes, we are part of the fishing fleet!”

Her fellow passengers look visibly displeased. “I do not feel entirely comfortable with that term,” says Victoria primly. “Nor me,” adds Bessie, and she turns to shove her trunk beneath her berth. Evie is glad, though, that her silly comment has put an end to the marriage talk for the moment.

 

By the time she is done unpacking, Evie is alone, and she sits on her berth in the quiet. Was it just this morning they had arrived at Tilbury? All abustle with ships being loaded and fired up, the smell of coal and damp pungent in the air, the Maloja towering above the P&O dock, black smoke billowing from her funnels. Amidst the swirl of passengers and porters, there was Papa, solemn yet kindly, Mama, her face set tighter than usual, and Florence, by now crying small, quiet tears. Evie had stood among them feeling like a wretched Judas, betrayer of Christ and all that was good in the world.

“You will write to us often, won’t you, Evie?” her sister had blurted out. “Don’t be lazy and vanish off into the wilds of India without a word.”

“No. Unless,” she jested, “I am eaten by a tiger.”

No one laughed.

Thankfully, Patrick returned just then with the news that her belongings were safely stowed, and her cabin baggage sent up. “You will please give Charlotte my love,” he continued. Of course! She was also carrying letters for his sister in Calcutta, and presents—lavender soap, silk stockings, sweets for the children. Florence clasped at his arm; they had been married two years now, and soon hoped, Evie suspected, for a happy expansion to the family. Florence is the least suspicious of her story about making a trip to the colonies to look for a match—she had found marital happiness, and it seemed only true and right that Evie, and all the world, would wish to as well. Her father, as was his nature, went along with things, although her mother, despite apprehensions about Evie, now twenty-three, ending up an old maid, had not been easy to convince. Surely she could find someone in England? This was not a discussion to pick up at Tilbury, however, and soon enough, Mrs. Ward arrived with Bessie, hellos were exchanged, then farewells, and shortly after they were pressing through the crowd, stepping straight up the gangplank. From the deck, her family’s upturned faces looked small and faraway already, and Evie’s heart—if only for a moment—was tugged back to them, onto land.

 

It is dark now in the cabin, and their single lamp sheds no more than a feeble yellow glow. Evie, though, is undimmed. She might have a moment where she feels she has not arrived yet, wholly, on the ship, that she is still traveling from the place she has left behind—a quick whiff of London air, the feel of it crisp and wintery against her skin, a sudden vision of trees shedding their golden leaves, and fat chimneys hotly smoking, but just as swiftly, she has shaken it off.

I am leaving England! I have left! I’m off to—

Evie is unburdened by superstitions, save one, that saying out loud the thing she seeks will render it unattainable. So she decides that until she has stepped on Indian shores, she shall not name it, regardless of how strongly she may be tempted to along the way.

What will it be like?

She reminds herself again that questions like these are futile. One needs to be there! She has seen many Daniell prints and glossy Bourne & Shepherd photographs of landscapes, temple scenes, train stations, faqirs, and is unconvinced about pictures being able to truly capture places; instead, they feel distinctly more . . . removed somehow. Besides, she has a feeling it will be different, where she wishes to visit, and in some ways, she is glad it yet remains a mystery, un-glimpsed and concealed.

*  *  *

How oddly easy it is to begin to feel as though all of this is quite normal, ordinary even, to be aboard a ship, floating along on a journey. Since this is her first time, Evie had not really known what to expect—would it be an entirely different world? Perhaps not. There’s a distinct holiday feel in the air but even on a ship people settle into doing everyday things . . . reading, writing letters, strolling, taking tea.

What does take a bit of getting used to, though, is being at sea, and the thing Evie finds more disorienting than the roll and slope of a big wave is the deck moving persistently beneath her feet. She does not like to think of it too often: the world suddenly turned watery and fathomless. Thankfully, it is easy enough to distract oneself on the upper deck, with its variety of organized entertainment, a slew of deck games at which, it turns out, Bessie is ace. She wins the egg-and-spoon race, and is quite an expert at quoits, throwing the metal hoops skillfully over the hob. Evie is happy enough to be an occasional participant. She is well aware her expertise lies not in sport. Instead, she wanders to the quieter edges, recruits an empty deck chair, and lounges. This is nice. Dutifully, she has carried with her Roxburgh’s Flora Indica, although she finds it is so . . . learned that she can barely go two pages without seeking diversion.

“It’s all nonsense,” Grandma Grace would have said. “Go get some mud on your hands.”

Advice ill-suited for while at sea, sadly.

All this unwavering blue around her, endless and immense, and unlike anything she had imagined, even though she has pretended to be on a ship, as a child, every so often—in the nursery, Florence serving tea to her dolls, Evie atop a chair, or swinging from the curtains—“Land ahoy!” This was usually followed by a brisk chiding, and exasperated instructions from Mama to be “more like her sister.” She has failed in this regard. One could blame it on a diet of Nesbit books, and unruly days spent with Grandma Grace. Florence and she are fated to be night and day, storm and spring.

Not a half hour passes before she fishes out Frank Kingdon-Ward’s On the Road to Tibet. She cannot resist—he is a new author, recently published, and recently acquired by her local bookshop. For the last few years, Evie has harbored a great passion for travel memoirs, particularly those with a botanical bent. She has read them all: George Forrest’s account of his journey on the Upper Salween, both volumes of Marianne North’s Recollections of a Happy Life, J. E. Smith’s translation of Linnaeus’s Tour of Lapland, Reginald Farrer’s In Old Ceylon, Mary Kingsley’s Travels in West Africa. They thrill her—the setting out, the promise of newness, the tricks picked up along the way, the wealth of new flora, all that adventure. This one is particularly promising, she is pleased to discover. As the sun rose, Kingdon-Ward writes from the mouth of the Han River, we sailed out into the wide, free world . . . At this, a delicious affinity overcomes her, and she looks out to sea, and smiles, small and secret.

 

On the ship, the passengers are prescribed a daily routine. Rising at seven, prayers at eight, breakfast at eight thirty, luncheon at one, and dinner at seven thirty—all of which Evie considers happily missable except the meals. The second-class dining saloon is cavernous, supplied by natural light through portholes, and set with long rectangular tables at which diners sit on mahogany swivel chairs bolted to the floor. She shares her table with Bessie, an elderly bearded gentleman by the name of Professor Bower, Mrs. Ward, and a chatty young girl in a pastel taffeta dress who, Evie is soon informed, is off to stay with a cousin married to someone stationed in Ceylon.

“I have missed going out for August Week,” she adds woefully over carrot soup.

Evie clears her throat. “What is August Week?”

She almost drops her spoon. “Don’t you know? It is the biggest social week of the year there! Hundreds of dances and picnics. It is the perfect time to find—”

“A husband,” Evie finishes for her.

“You do know about it, then,” she says happily.

When they are done with soup, the head waiter beats a gong, and the stewards appear in a rush, pounce on the empty plates, and just as swiftly, serve the fish.

“Why are you going to India?” she asks Evie.

“To look for treasure.”

“What kind of treasure?”

“I am not sure yet.”

The girl’s pretty face is drawn in puzzlement. “How do you mean?”

“Sometimes,” says Evie, digging into her haddock, “you don’t know until you find it.”

 

There are many things to learn from Kingdon-Ward’s travels in Tibet, about mules and rhododendrons, Lamaism and hunting sheep on high precipices, but also this: that the weather in the mountains is as changeable as at sea. For two days, it is glorious, the sky and water united in their benevolence, though seasoned sailors on board murmur about how things will change once they approach the Bay of Biscay.

On the afternoon the storm breaks, Evie is invited to join her chaperone at the Veranda Café. Must she? Perhaps because it is the first of such summons, she must. Mrs. Ward is lunching with a group of ladies at the Veranda Café beneath a trellised canopy of fake flowers. She makes the introductions and does not think it indecorous to furnish them with details of Evie’s husband hunt.

“So, if you happen to know of anyone . . .” she ends coyly.

One of the ladies, Mrs. Hopkins, she believes, turns and chuckles. “Well, my nephew, if you will have him. My sister’s boy. He is joining us at Marseille. Still unmarried, to his mother’s disappointment . . . he is too busy collecting plants.”

Evie catches her breath. She wants to ask for his name, but it will be misconstrued as interest on her part, which it is, but not for the reasons they would assume.

“Evie,” asks her chaperone, “didn’t you study plants at Cambridge?”

Before she can reply, one of the women turns to her. “Oh, you have been to university?” She sounds not so much surprised as disapproving. For propriety’s sake, Evie acknowledges this unfortunate shortcoming on her part.

“What did you study?” asks Mrs. Hopkins, though she sounds genuinely curious.

“Natural sciences . . . at Newnham College.”

She can see this does not impress most of the gathering.

Mrs. Ward laughs. “Well, don’t go around publicizing it, that is all I can say.”

 

Evie excuses herself early from the lunch party to walk the deck.

The sky, like her mood, has darkened, and white frills rim the waves, rough and choppy, under the wind. For a fleeting moment, she allows herself the pleasure of picturing the Veranda Café swept away by a storm. If she were home, a temper like this would solicit cups of tea and kind words from Florence, while in Cambridge, Agnes, her friend and mentor, her science sister, would offer neither. She had no time. “If you’re looking to leap overboard,” Evie imagines her saying, “please get on with it.”

She misses Florence, but Agnes even more.

If there is one person she would have liked to accompany her on this trip, it was Agnes, but Agnes would have hated it. Being away from her study, her at-home laboratory, her garden. All the world is here, she would have said, why leave?

When the storm breaks, ice-cold rain pins Evie in place. It begins to fall harder, in thick sheets, the sea morphs into undulating slopes, the ship heaves, and beyond, clouds fall low, obscuring all the world in white. By the time she rushes in, her hair is wet, her jacket soaked, and her annoyance dissipated.

In moments like these, one can feel only briskly, dizzily alive.

*  *  *

Her first year at university, Evie stood outside a lecture hall, undecided between tears and fury, when a woman stopped to ask what the matter was. She was tall, and had strong features, a large nose, dark eyes, and raven-black hair, though most striking of all, she held a large bouquet of pink lilies.

Evie told her she had been thrown out of the classroom.

“Did you have permission to attend?” Women students were required to ask for the approval of certain professors to sit in on their classes. She did, but the professor did not seem to think this also allowed her to ask questions.

“You asked a question?”

Evie nodded. She expected an outpouring of sympathy, admiration even, but instead, the woman looked as though she would have liked to call her an idiot.

“What makes you think a professor from whom you need permission to attend his class will put up with anything less than you pretending you’re not even present?”

“But—” she began.

“Nobody really wants us here—women, I mean—but since we are, how do we best get our work done?”

Evie opened her mouth, then shut it.

“Whose class was this?”

“Professor Bateson. Delivering a lecture on plant cytology.”

“You have an interest in botany?” the lady asked, her tone softening.

“Yes, but after today—”

“You will spend your life wallowing in the unfairness of it all?”

“No,” she said, slightly offended.

“Good. I’m headed to Balfour. Come with me.”

On the way, the lady introduced herself as Agnes Arber. She had studied at Newnham too, she said, and on her marriage, had recently moved back here from University College London with a grant to undertake her own research. Evie was in awe—it was not easy for a woman to be offered these kinds of opportunities. Their footsteps echoed through the quiet Cambridge afternoon, and soon they arrived at Balfour, an abandoned chapel in Downing Place, converted in 1884 into a laboratory for women. This, because the university did not allow its female students to attend practical sessions with men.

“See,” said Agnes, as they stepped inside. “This is how we get our work done. By keeping out of everyone’s way.”

It was a large, high-ceilinged space, with light streaming in from arched windows, cabinets and workbenches running along the walls, and more workspaces down the center. They were greeted by a clutter of pipettes, test tubes, and pinned notes requesting students to “kindly wash any glassware after use.”

Agnes placed the lilies on the counter, next to a pile of glass slides. “Now, why don’t you help me prepare these?”

“For what?” gibbered Evie.

“A Christmas wreath. What do you think? For the microscope, of course. Consider this a catch-up class for the cytology lesson you just missed.”

*  *  *

The storm off Biscay is short and gusty, a temperamental rage that swells and surges, and just as quickly fades. Evie grows restive, though, lying in her berth, listening to wild wind and water, wondering if they are going to sink. She had always fancied herself a brave one, right from when she was a little girl running at the waves on their holidays to Brighton while Florence held back, shrinking behind their mama, but she realizes now that all she has known so far are safe and familiar dangers, and that every peril on this journey will be new.

She is first to head outside after the storm, with both Bessie and Victoria still pale and precarious in the cabin, united in their resentment of Evie’s seemingly miraculous immunity to seasickness—she even managed meals, apples, eggs, heaps of buttered toast.

On the upper deck, the wind remains brisk and the sky overcast, but passengers are out and about, a group is setting up quoits, she can hear someone suggest a game of tug-of-war, somewhere the band is playing something cheerful. If nothing else, there is a sense in the air that one must make the best of things.

She greets a few familiar faces, then sits and sips a horse’s neck, a concoction of brandy and ginger ale that is being liberally handed around on doctor’s orders to help settle the stomach. It is delicious, warm and sweet, and quickly helps restore her spirits. Soon she brings out a notebook in which she has been filling out details of her journey—hastily, she might add. She is not one for pouring thoughts and feelings and minute details of her life into ink and pages. This leads her to suspect she will never write a travel memoir—though first she needs to travel, so much more. Oh, that she were a man and could throw on a pair of trousers and a jaunty hat, and be off to see the world!

On the first page of her journal, a question beckons: How will I get to where I need to be? And underneath, a scribbled answer that sounds almost reproving: One thing at a time, Evie. What she means by this is arriving in Bombay alive and well to begin with, then taking the train across to Calcutta with Mrs. Ward and Bessie, staying with Charlotte and her husband in the city, and once there, finding a way to meet a Mr. George Mackay Muttlebury at the Agricultural and Horticultural Office, armed with little more than her wits and a letter of introduction from Agnes.

“We haven’t met, but we have corresponded a few times, and maybe he can help. But what if he can’t, Evie?”

Then—well, she does not have the faintest idea. She will work out a plan. This is what she calls the spirit of adventure and Agnes calls stupidity.

For certain, blame must be placed for this on Grandma Grace—she had not inherited her dogged obstinacy from anyone else. Mama would claim Grandma Grace had nurtured it too, from Evie’s childhood.

“Stop filling her head with all these fancies,” she would say crossly. “The other day, she insisted on staying up all night to watch the toadstools.”

Grandma Grace would try stifle a chuckle.

“Why?” her mother would query irritably. “Why would she want to do that?”

“I might have mentioned that some had grown in my backyard . . . overnight.”

She is certain Grandma Grace would think this journey worthy, because for her every journey was—whether right outside the door to the bottom of the garden, or to the woods behind her house, or farther away, to the river, down by the coast, to the sea. And what excitement if they found the first bluebell, or a rare fern, or a patch of wild strawberries!

“To strive, to seek, to find, dear Evie,” her grandma would sing, “and never to yield.”

“Never to yield to what?” she would ask.

A smile, an arched brow. “A life bereft of wonder.”

 

Now, after bringing her travel journal up to date—Storm—Evie stashes it away.

What time would it be back in England? It looks like that hour in the evening when Mama will be preparing supper, Papa and Patrick making their way home from Mandall & Alexander, and Florence readying tomorrow’s lessons for the primary school where she teaches. In Cambridge, Agnes will be outside, humming, watering her garden.

All this feels far away; the past, she realizes, as much as the future, can be veiled.

Evie is soon summoned back by the sky, though, and how extraordinary it appears at the moment. Somewhere there has been a break in the clouds, and the palest of pink-gold has spilled across in a watercolor wash—a too-lovely sunset. She watches the light collecting over the horizon, dipping low, and sinking into the sea.

*  *  *

Today, Marseille! A confluence at which all the world meets—yet tragically, tantalizingly out of reach, as all passengers are not allowed to step off the ship.

But why? Evie has asked the steward at the door.

Not enough time, miss.

So she must be content with gazing from afar, leaning over to catch the sounds and smells wafting up from the busy dock. The Maloja has stopped to restock on coal and pick up passengers who, to avoid the wrath that is Biscay, and who could afford it, took the overland train from Calais.

“A lot of grand people,” says Bessie, including, she points out helpfully, a Lord and Lady Bute, the Duke and Duchess of Hamilton, and even a young Maharaja, distinguished by an elaborate silk umbrella held over his person. “Probably off to Delhi,” she adds, “for the coronation.”

Evie is vastly uninterested in grand people. Not for them has she sat, as a child, with the atlas of the world open at her feet, reading out names slowly, tracing a finger across distances, over land and sea, to see how far she could reach—São Paulo, Nanjing, Moscow. Only for this—the thrill of a new place.

For her, the ships docked as far as she can see, the bustling row of warehouses from which porters come and go lugging their wares, the sudden oddly inviting odor of water meeting land. She notices there is not a plant in sight, so built up is this part of the old city. To the north stands a lighthouse; to the south, the imposing abbey of St. Victor; and in the distance, next to many stylish shops and hotels, the grandest of buildings, a cathedral—all this filtered through the haze of fine coal dust that, she has heard, can sometimes grow so thick it settles on the soup served onboard.

 

Thankfully, there is no such condimental disaster at lunch. Her minestrone is clean and uncoated, but something else comes to pass that Evie had hoped would not. The gentleman seated next to Mrs. Ward, Professor Bower, turns his attention to her. He has discovered she is a botanist, and so, he declares, is he.

“At Cambridge in ’74,” he informs her.

“How old does that make him?” hisses Bessie into her ear. “Two hundred?”

Evie tries not to choke on her soup.

Professor Bower, bulbous and heavily bearded, enjoys the sound of his own voice. “At the time, Cambridge was not an inspiring field for a beginner in the sciences, especially botany.” Evie has a feeling she will soon learn why, in spite of no prompting on her part. “Collecting, classifying, and recording, that was the order of the day, while everything else was neglected, if taught at all.”

Eat faster, mumbles Bessie, eat faster.

He drones on. “I did, finally, find myself supplied with some laboratory work in my third year, but it was not until just before graduation. During eight weeks of a hot summer in Wurzburg, I learned laboratory methods directly from Professor Julius von Sachs.”

Evie is, grudgingly, impressed—to be tutored by the monumental German botanist himself!

The stewards remove the soup plates and replace them with chunky beef stew.

“He taught me the Hofmeisterian methods of the time. These were, of course, pre-microtome days,” he adds fondly. “Our slide preparations were made by hand.”

Bessie’s right, Evie thinks, he is two hundred.

“How did you do that?” she asks, genuinely interested—though at a price, for under the table she receives a well-aimed kick.

Bower puffs up at her query. “Well, we sectioned fresh ovules between finger and thumb, and I remember obtaining fine hand sections of Althaea pollen grains by embedding them in gum arabic, dried on the end of a cork.”

The second course is nearly over; the end of their meal is nigh.

“Dessert!” exclaims Bessie, as bowls of wobbling trifle are set on the table.

“Now things must be different.” He glances at Evie. “Very different.”

Not different enough, she wants to say.

“The focus finally shifted to physiological botany in the late ’70s, didn’t it?”

She nods. “This is true.”

“For so long, Britain was only interested in the dead,” he continues, happily applying himself to the pudding. “Too busy with industrialization and the railways, in consolidating her empire, with the result that, botanically, she was counting her assets not in a rational study of the structure, development, or physiology of the plants of her empire, but in cataloging and describing them in their dead adult state. Now, of course, we have thankfully seen a change . . .”

Rude as it might be to insert herself into the monologue, Evie cannot help herself. “Pardon me, Professor, but perhaps in some ways nothing has changed . . .”

He is visibly taken aback. Next to him, Mrs. Ward looks distinctly displeased. This is no way to address a distinguished gentleman. Evie feels as though she is back in university, speaking when she ought not to in class.

To her surprise, he clears his throat and asks if she would care to elaborate.

So she does. “There has been a shift to physiological botany, yes, but the methods of studying plants and their living processes are rooted within a history, as you said, of an interest in the dead.” The table has fallen into a small silence, but she might as well finish now. She takes a deep breath. “The concern, I think, ought to be as much what is taught as how it is taught.”

The professor raises his eyebrows. “And what are these alternative methods of teaching about which you feel so passionately, Miss Alexander?”

“I am interested in the way Goethe studied botany.”

“Goethe? Well . . . admirable fellow, and quite the writer, but not a scientist, surely?”

“Oh, but he was!”

“A dilettante, then, an amateur.”

Evie had expected him to say this, and takes pleasure in the fact that he does—he has affirmed all the prejudice she can now be fully justified in feeling toward him.

“The thing is, Professor, to acknowledge Goethe as a scientist means taking seriously a radically different way of doing science.”

He blinks, slowly, incredulously. “How do you mean?”

“It means to look at the phenomenon of color and not reduce it to numbers, to look at a plant and not see it merely as a collection of parts . . . To do this entails a moving away from traditional scientific methods of inquiry that seek comprehension via boundaries, linearity, uniformity, all of which emphasize distinction and separation. Goethe called for something more intuitive, a state of mind that is simultaneous, nonlinear, concerned with relationships rather than discrete elements. The question is,” she adds with a flourish, “is this something of which we are capable?”

“And are you, Miss Alexander?” He sounds amused, and worse, patronizing.

She flushes. “Well, Professor, I try.”

They eat the rest of their trifle in silence.

 

Later, back out on the open sea, Evie wanders into the reading room. It is a cool, quiet, and airy place, with plenty of comfortable armchairs, and a generous selection of newspapers and periodicals lying scattered on the tables.

She sits in a corner with Kingdon-Ward, though her mind is elsewhere. The number of people she has met like Professor Bower! Teachers in school and university, a scientist she apprenticed under at Reigate one summer, the dour gentleman who interviewed her for a place at Newnham.

“Why would you like to specialize in botany?” he had asked, and she had her answer ready, one she had rehearsed repeatedly, trying to get it just right. For as long as I can remember, I have had questions about the natural world. She confessed to storing boxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves under her bed, that she would take walks and stop to look at unfamiliar flora, that she was intrigued by certain plants and their habitats and had thought about their nature—why were lady’s mantle leaves waxy? If butterflies loved cottage pinks, why didn’t animals?—and, she had added with excitement, why did people find flowers beautiful?

The professor had laid down his pen and fixed her with a sad, disappointed smile. “Miss Alexander, I must tell you, this is not science. These are not at all the things with which botanists concern themselves.” Evie had sat there with no rejoinder, paralyzed, embarrassed at her error, certain she had failed to gain admittance. And truly, she had been given a place at the college only because a woman sitting there quietly all this while had intervened, saying, perhaps they ought to give Evie a chance? Since she had won a scholarship, she must show some promise?

Well, thinks Evie brightly, look how that turned out!

She has just opened up her book when voices float across from the other side of the reading room. It is Mrs. Hopkins speaking with a gentleman of about thirty, darkly tanned, with thick cropped hair and a generous mustache. She supposes this is the plant-hunting nephew.

“You cannot imagine, Gerald, the state your mother was in . . . after she heard you had fallen off a cliff—”

“But saved by a bush, Aunt Aida.”

Mrs. Hopkins expresses little gratitude toward the heroic shrub.

“And besides,” he continues, lighting a cigarette, unperturbed, “no alternative route, really, to the blue poppy. I promise you, as I promised Mother, I do not take unnecessary risks.”

“Yes, you keep saying that. But the last time you went days without food, and the time before, were you not almost impaled by a bamboo spike?”

I know his type so well, thinks Evie. She has been reading about them for a while now. The bold male adventurer, traveling the world, risking life and limb to gather botanical knowledge for God and gold and country. She is intrigued by him, of course, and excited, too, that a real plant hunter is on board, but she cannot deny that there is some envy and resentment to be reckoned with on her part—if only because women could never enjoy such sponsorship or receive imprimatur, the kind offered to men by professional institutions or commercial nurseries.

She peers back into her book—Caves, Kingdon-Ward declares, always seem to me overrated places of amusement . . . Aunt and nephew continue to converse, though, and she finds it difficult to concentrate.

There he goes, telling her about a recent meeting of great importance in Marseille, apparently, with a certain Dr. Heckel, who wished to consult him about the new botanical garden planned for the city. “Critical work, Aunt Aida,” he adds.

Braggart, mutters Evie, and she heads back out to the deck to look for a friendly steward serving up some of that horse’s neck concoction.

*  *  *

What makes it so distressing is that botany had been their own for so long.

The roots of which lay in herbalism, Agnes had told her, our oldest system of healing, and not in the many fanciful associations between plants and women in myth and literature.

“Who would tend to medicinal home gardens? Who would care for sick children and administer herbal remedies?”

Botany had been their own for so long but no longer.

Many heated discussions were had about this in her years at Newnham, usually in someone’s room, after dinner, over cocoa and biscuits and a healthy helping of rebellion, the last inspired largely by the whirl of suffragette news around them. Women disrupting speeches at political meetings, unfurling “Votes for Women” banners in public places, being jailed, going on hunger strike, and recently, even sending themselves by Royal Mail to the Prime Minister’s residence to try to obtain a meeting with him. (Alas, Downing Street didn’t accept the parcel.)

Even in their quiet college, this spirit burned.

“Blame it on John Lindley,” someone would say. “Dead and gone now, but in his time he was on a quest to defeminize botany.” “Who is Lindley?” the younger girls would ask, and someone would doff an invisible hat, puff out her chest, and march across the room, announcing, “Botany teacher, writer, institutional powerhouse, and first-class prig.” The room would erupt into laughter.

Botany was also once seen, the older girls would explain, as an extension of flower arrangement and floral painting, as something worthy only for women to busy themselves with for entertainment and improvement. But when new disciplinary boundaries were being established in academia, people like Lindley thought it imperative to separate what they considered “polite” botany from “real” botany, since nothing scientific and modern could possibly involve women.

At this point, a voice would pipe up: “But ought there not be ‘botany for ladies’? Would this separation hinder our intellectual development?” Then many voices would rise at once. “Yes, but that is not the point!” “The accomplishments of women, even if ‘polite’ and informal, must not be dismissed!” “Why can’t there be room for both!”

 

Evie came to realize only later that the matter was more complicated than one in which men, as they always tended to do, were sidelining women in the field. It was also a question of how botanical knowledge was sought, gathered, processed, gleaned—and whose methods were considered sound and “scientific.”

Certainly not Grandma Grace, who gained little regard from her own daughter, or her neighbors, for “tramping around” gardens and forests, not for exercise or improvement, which would have rendered the activity somewhat respectable, but unforgivably, for clear, unadulterated joy. Friends often gave her books—Robert Tyas’s The Sentiment of Flowers, Hibberd’s Familiar Garden Flowers, Kate Greenaway’s The Language of Flowers—but they were placed on the shelf and rarely glanced at again. “How do you know so much about plants?” Evie had once asked her. “They tell me,” she replied. And she had believed her, for Grandma Grace spent hours outside, in a hat and scarf, with a basket in hand, and she talked about her plants as though they were intimate confidants. “My sweet peas are feeling poorly today,” or “The pumpkin requests to be moved somewhere less shaded.” Evie would grow to realize that this was not what her mother called “airy-fairy” talk; rather, it sprung from knowledge gained through the rigor of experience—nothing less than what was upheld in a laboratory. Day after day, year after year, over a lifetime, until she died, getting to know plants intimately—how much shade, how much sunshine, when to water, when not to, when to prune, when to leave well alone. It was a deep knowing, one gained from touching the earth every day—being in touch—and attuning herself to the lives of growing things. It was intuition, clear, precise, and hard-won, too.

Evie learned an awful lot sitting in on those fiery conversations at Newnham, but only later, elsewhere, with a different group of discussants, did she come to see that knowledge itself was hierarchical, and that Grandma Grace’s knowledge about plants and the way she herself had been learning all her life was not recognized as valid or important.

*  *  *

As they sail across the Mediterranean, the mood on the ship turns decidedly festive, with games and competitions running through the day—tie-and-cigarette races for the ladies, to test who could tie a tie or light a cigarette fastest, things no “lady” would normally do, and a spot of deck cricket or spar fighting for the gentlemen. After dinner, still no respite. Dances are organized, usually by the lords in first class—reels by the Scottish, step dances by the Irish, both always vying to outdo each other.

One evening, while the pipers are gaily piping, Evie wanders off until she finds a quiet corner of the deck. Overhead are wonderful stars, while around her, the sea is lit by flashes of silvery blue phosphorescence, trailing in ribbons of light. She is not often sentimental, but it might be nice to share this moment with someone, Florence or Agnes, perhaps even a betrothed. In this regard, she fears, she may bring perpetual disappointment to her parents. Poor Papa, who has worked so hard to build up his firm and introduce her to worthy apprentices in the hope that there might be a blossoming of love, just as with Patrick and Florence. Mama, solid, steady, practical—everything she believed her own mother, Grandma Grace, not to be—is more straightforward: “Remember, Evie, women have two ages: marriageable or not.” But has Evie been tempted by the thought? Not really. And has she met anyone with whom she would like to spend her life? Good heavens, no! For a while, she was certain that if she did it would be someone who would be to her what Edward was to Agnes, for theirs was a marriage of mutual respect—for each other, and each other’s work. When she apprenticed with Agnes last year at her small in-house laboratory, she would often overhear them in the study, discussing their research. Edward, a palaeobotanist, was now involved in geological studies, while Agnes was writing her first book, a history of herbals. Now she was beginning to think this lovely, calm steadiness was not meant for her. She might be bored in a week and—was one even allowed to say it?—divorced in another. Yet what could possibly sustain constant newness and excitement? Life dictated that this was a sad impossibility.

At this moment, someone steps up behind her, glancing over her shoulder. A tall, auburn-haired woman.

Evie turns, startled.

The woman places a cigarette to her lips and lights it. She would have won that competition easily. “Where am I?” she asks.

“The second-class deck.” Evie expects her to be surprised, aghast even; it is clear she has wandered over from first by mistake.

“Oh, thank God. He will never follow me here.” She does not offer further explanation. “It is madness up there,” she says instead. “One ball after another. Everyone already discussing what they will be wearing at the end-of-voyage fancy dress. Can you believe it? And we have only just boarded! Although I must admit I also already know, so I, too, am quite the hypocrite.”

Evie smiles. “And what will you go as?”

“A peasant.” She drags on her cigarette like a sailor, long and deep. “An Irish peasant,” she clarifies.

“Why Irish?”

She lifts an eyebrow. “English parents, but I grew up in Ireland.”

Ireland! Why, she’s only known London, says Evie, and the spires of Cambridge.

“And soon enough, India,” adds her new companion. “Where will you be?” She’s standing alongside her now, leaning out to sea, smoke trailing from her cigarette.

“Calcutta, mostly. And you?”

“Delhi . . .”

“For the Durbar, of course.”

“Yes, then a little traveling around, about which I am far more excited . . .”

“Why is that?”

She laughs. “I think because somewhere deep within my Irish soul the fires of Republicanism have been stoked.” Evie makes no attempt to hide her surprise. “But it is a paradox really,” she continues, “believing in the inherited English social and political order, all this, my life as I have always known it . . . And yet also in the natural rights of the Irish.”

Evie is silent for a moment. “And what of the Indians?”

She shrugs, flicks the cigarette ash overboard. “I am sure we’re doing good, but at the same time I wonder why we are not moving toward the granting of greater self-government . . .”

At this, there is silence, and the sound of water lapping against the sides of the ship. Then the woman asks, “And why will you be in India?”

Evie suspects the woman thinks she will say she is looking for a husband, or joining one there, or traveling back with him now at the end of his leave.

“I’m searching for a plant.”

The young woman arches one perfectly shaped eyebrow. “Are you a . . . what do they call them? A plant collector?”

“In a way, I suppose, yes. I am a botanist.”

“And what kind of plant are you looking for?”

Evie smiles, a little nervous. “I’m afraid I can’t say.”

“You can’t? But why? Is it some sort of secret mission? How thrilling!”

It is hardly that exciting, she admits, only that—and this sounds silly—she is afraid. “That if I say it out loud, I will never find it.”

The woman flicks her cigarette away. “Then clearly only one thing remains.”

“Which is?”

She smiles. “For me to wish you luck.”

*  *  *

Evie had not yet turned nine when she was sent away from home.

Only for a while, she was told, long enough for Florence to convalesce from a bout of scarlet fever. Everyone feared for her sister, eleven years old, always a little delicate, racked as she was by a raspy cough and high fever—it was deemed safer for Evie to stay away. “Besides, she is a handful,” she overheard her mother say, “and we really can’t manage with her around.”

So off she went to Grandma Grace, who lived alone in forested Richmond—Grandpa Henry having succumbed years ago to inexplicable illness—and for the first three days, she could not stop crying. It was all her fault; of that, she was certain. She had troubled everyone so much that Florence had fallen ill, and now Mama and Papa wanted to be rid of her. She had always known she was less loved.

Her grandmother tried to convince her otherwise—Don’t be silly, child!—failing which, she tried another tactic—distraction—and in the only way she knew how. By taking her into the garden, to be “more in the world,” as she called it. There, they propped up the sweet peas, plucked peaches, trimmed the hedgerow. She indulged Evie’s many questions—Why are trees straight? Does honey come from honeysuckle? What’s inside an acorn? Why are flowers beautiful?—and allotted to her a patch in which to grow vegetables, carrots and radish and lettuce. Evie overwatered and underwatered, sowed too deep, too shallow, but once in a while, harvested perfect produce with great pride and joy.

For weeks, they roamed far and wide, through the woods, over the hills, by the river, and sometimes they even made short trips to the coast. Grandma Grace had friends there, women who collected strange rocks with impressions of long-ago fish and other sea creatures. On their explorations, if they found dandelions in a field, or a four-leaf clover, she would be asked to make a wish—Quick, quick!—and she would close her eyes tight—Please let Florence be well. Please let Mama and Papa love me—and then she would either blow the puffball or collect the clover to press into the pages of a book. “You know, you mustn’t tell anyone what you wished for, Evie,” Grandma Grace would instruct her, “else your wish might not come true.”

After many months, Evie returned home, though she would always visit Grandma Grace for holidays and long weekends, and Easter and Christmas, and for no reason at all—this was where she had found happiness.

And how were things at home? Well, Florence had recovered, and Mama and Papa seemed pleased enough to see her—but she could not help but feel that some sacred familial circle had been drawn in the time she was away, and that she would always somehow fall outside of it.

*  *  *

It is her first evening in the East.

They near Port Said just as dusk falls, and suddenly, as if borne in one afternoon over some invisible hemisphere, Evie is in a different world.

They drop anchor opposite the Custom House, a white building with emerald green domes and rows of graceful arched windows, and as they begin to disembark, the town lights up, casting its shimmering reflection on the water. Everyone agrees, even Mrs. Ward, that they have not seen anything quite so beautiful.

Despite her wobbly sea legs, Evie has a thoroughly enjoyable time, strolling up Commerce Street, bustling with shops, cafés, and vendors poking their wares under her nose—strange fruit, pottery, carved replica sphinxes and other knickknacks. They stop at Simon Artz, rising in ornamented splendor, stocked with topis, parasols, and fly whisks, and anything else one might need for the tropics.

By the time they return to the Maloja, the officers have changed into white uniforms and double awnings have been erected over the decks. They watch the ship’s coaling. Piled-up baskets from the barges hoisted up by Arabs, small yet strong and agile. “They look like monkeys,” giggles Bessie. Evie says nothing, watching them hard at work in the warm evening, set against a soft black-and-green sea.

 

Early the next morning, they depart, and sail cleanly through the Suez Canal. Evie does not expect the scale of it, an endless waterway flanked by miles of flat desert, banks studded with towering palm trees. They pass barge after barge crowded with Arabs, small waterside settlements shaded by date palm and eucalyptus. On the shore’s edge rumble camels with riders in bright garments, while at intervals, Bedouins with muskets appear in robes of black and white, or men of the Egyptian Camel Corps in their khaki coats. At one point, the canal opens out into Great Bitter Lake, so wide it briefly feels like being back at sea again, then it narrows, and the sandy banks continue.

She is certain that this is one of those moments when she is “more in the world.”

How could she describe it? Usually, she feels it by the sea or atop a high hill, or walking through a forest, and now here, sailing through the canal—it is being minutely, wholly, heartfully present in a way that all walls and barriers, of mind and stone, are dissolved. When no obstructions seem to lie between the world and her, and her and the world, just plain air, and in this moment, with the sun, the stars, the moon, and the whole unknowable universe beyond, a feeling of unbridled oneness.

 

Beyond Suez, heat. Heat as she has never experienced before. The kind of heat that makes it difficult to hold any other thought in her head.

Everyone on the ship changes into white linen, white muslin, and sun helmets—But does it help? Evie lounges on the deck, subsisting on iced lemons. Beside her, Bessie is in a faint, wondering whether they might be allowed to sleep out here at night rather than in their airless cabin. Victoria is convinced this will give them malaria, caused by an early morning vapor off the shores of the Red Sea. Evie would like to protest—Ronald Ross won the Nobel Prize for scotching this idea, didn’t he almost die experimenting on all those mosquitoes?—but it is much easier to stay silent, and shut her eyes against the heavy air and doze.

 

A few days later, they steam into Aden. Evie can see why polite London circles refer to it as the Abomination of Desolation, and this is one of its more generous sobriquets.

In contrast to gay Marseille and bustling Port Said, it is a somber place, surrounded by mountains black as soot, the harbor itself lying in the crater of a dormant volcano. On land, there is not a tree in sight, nor plant, nor leaf; only dry, grayish sand dotted with sharp rocks.

Still, she has four hours before the ship departs, and she wants to make the most of it. She heads out alone, as everyone else has declined her invitation to see the ancient tombs—or, a few miles away, the Aden gardens. “In this wasteland?” cried Bessie, and she refused to disembark. She walks down Main Pass Road to Crater town, and passes the market, suddenly finding herself amidst a mix of people from around the globe: Arabs, Negroes, Greeks, Levantines, and others whose origins are unrecognizable to her eye.

Just then, a strange covered carriage draws up next to her.

Inside are Mrs. Hopkins and her nephew. “We’re off to see the gardens,” she says. “Would you like to come with us?”

Would she! Thrilled, Evie climbs in, and they are off at breakneck speed. Introductions are made—Mr. Gerald Finlay, the nephew, who she fears may have caught her staring rudely at his mustache, and his friend Mr. Edwin Dossett, who is what they call a “fixer”—someone who, apart from arranging expeditionary requirements, also ships plants across the seas. Like her, they are on their way to Calcutta, from where they will catch a steamer to the foothills of the Himalayas.

“Why there?” she asks.

Mr. Dossett smiles. “Orchids.” There is something about him she dislikes instantly—a quality she can only describe as acquisitiveness.

“I had mentioned, hadn’t I, Gerald, that Miss Alexander studied botany at Cambridge?”

“You did, Aunt Aida. Impressive.” He tips his hat in her direction.

They rattle on, the road sharp and rocky, passing camels, and a landscape of sandhills with dense palm thickets and low maritime scrub. The gentlemen discuss the latest improvements in Wardian cases, including crossed battens to hold the plants in place on rough crossings, and ventilation holes covered in perforated zinc to keep out rodents. Most excitingly, some of the newest ones can hold up to fifty samples!

“No plant left behind,” says Mr. Dossett, and Evie must try very hard not to make a face.

“Not collecting anything from around here, Gerald?” asks Mrs. Hopkins.

“Not if I want to return alive, no.” Apparently horned vipers infest the area—“very venomous.”

The gardens they’re headed to are at the oasis of Sheikh Othman, a town bordering the colony and protectorate of Aden. When they arrive, it could be a mirage before them—a sudden scar of green, spread over forty acres, with lush, well-irrigated millet fields, tall date palms raising their plumed tops, banana plantations, and rows and rows of pawpaw trees.

Inside, they’re greeted by roses and bright flowering bougainvillea, sweet-smelling jasmine, shiny dark green mango trees, and elegant cannas. Evie strolls beneath the cool shade, reveling in the tropical richness around her—dizzy as though she’s drunk too much wine. At the huge screw pine trees, she stops, as does Mr. Finlay.

In great excitement, she points at the aerial roots, sent down from the dense spreading clumps, forming new stilt-like stems. “Aren’t these marvelous?”

Mr. Finlay smiles. “Quite a treat for a botanist.”

She hesitates, then says, “Yes, it is.” The spindle-like structures are enormous, seeming to prop up the entire tree. “Though most botanists,” she adds, “would ask: Are they root or trunk or branches?”

He furrows his brow. “But not you?”

“I try not to.” He appears interested, which is rare for a man, so she continues. “It is not something we think about much, I suppose, but plant form is often forced into categories . . . and this becomes more obvious when structures like these are encountered . . . ones that don’t quite fit. Yet even then the question is asked: Does it belong to this or that category? Is it essentially this or that?”

They walk around the screw pine, taking in the breadth of the tree.

“Wouldn’t that be what is . . . usually done, though?” asks Mr. Finlay.

“Oh yes,” says Evie. “Aristotle, Linnaeus, Troll, the most influential botanists in the world were all essentialists . . . And as a result, we also have this.” She gestures around them.

“The botanical garden?” He sounds surprised.

She nods. “It is beautiful—but look how the plants are organized. In ways that distinctly demonstrate systematic botany . . . according to classification, nomenclature. Why, you might call it a colossal project to fix and categorize the natural world.”

He glances at her, smiling. Is he intrigued? she wonders. Or does he think her crazy?

“And so, what is it that you ask, Miss Alexander?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He laughs. “Well then, that would be the same as me. I ask no questions either. I simply collect.”

No, it is not the same at all, Evie would like to tell him. She prefers to ask nothing because she is striving to move away from a way of seeing that is quick to judge, and sort, and categorize—based usually on preconceptions. But the day is short, the garden is large, and there is much to see—so she smiles and says, “Yes, of course.”

*  *  *

One summer, Evie was apprenticed to Ethel Sargant—a scientist, and mentor to Agnes.

“Shall I write and make introductions?” Agnes had asked, and soon afterward, Evie found herself at the Jodrell Laboratory in Reigate, a cheerless place two hours out of London. Worse, it was hardly a happy communion. Miss Sargant was in her fifties, brilliant, strict, demanding, and while her teaching methods were agreeable to Agnes, a patient, dogged worker, they did not suit Evie, who in Miss Sargant’s eyes managed to do little right—“That is not how to microtome a carrot, Miss Alexander”—and made observations she thought very silly.

“It’s astonishing, isn’t it? That a seed once sown knows which way is up.”

“It is called geotaxis.”

“Yes, I know the term, Miss Sargant, but—”

“It has to do with gravitational fields; plants orient themselves accordingly.”

Once, while examining the experiments for studying seedling structures, Evie stopped at a pea shoot. “I wonder if we have a word for it in English?”

“For what?”

“The force that pushes a leaf up through the soil toward the sky.”

“No, we do not. And it is not a leaf, it is a hypocotyl.”

Day after day it went on like this, she was chided, corrected, sometimes derided, oftentimes dismissed.

Two months later, back at the university, Agnes asked how it had gone, her summer apprenticeship.

“Oh, quite well.”

Agnes threw her a long look.

“All right, it was awful.”

Agnes sighed. “I know, Ethel can be demanding . . .”

Yes, but Evie thought she ought to be fair to Miss Sargant. “It didn’t help that I couldn’t really manage . . .”

They were strolling through the botanical gardens; it was early autumn, and the world around them was turning amber gold.

“Do you have any plans for after you finish?” asked Agnes. If she didn’t, she had a small offer to make. “I have set aside some grant money for an assistant, and I thought I’d ask if you might be keen to take it up.”

“Me?” Evie hesitated. “I mean it is kind of you, but I’m not . . .”

“You are not what?”

“I don’t think I would make a very good botanist.”

“Why do you say that?”

They were walking past the West Tropical House, where the Medinilla crassata, which bloomed in the warm, humid Philippines, had burst into its chandelier blossoms thinking it was still summer.

“It’s something I have come to suspect since the first term.”

Agnes frowned. “But you enjoyed your classes, did you not? You grew interested in leaf structures, photosynthesis?”

Evie fell silent. Where should she begin? That she felt as if she had been wrenched from the forests of her childhood into university. That from lying in fields of strawberries—how silly this sounded—she was now dissecting the fruit in a laboratory. Not that she did not savor the pleasure of precision or had not learned to honor the chain of evidence and logic—but all she felt she had been trained to do was . . . separate. Learn how each part of a plant works. “Once you have removed one part of the plant, try to identify it, and place it on the corresponding plate—stem, petal, leaf, pistil, stamen, and other. Put it in the section that is labeled with the right name.” And how much more to measure? Oxygen pressure during photosynthesis, CO₂ production during glycolysis. And how many more times to prove that light is essential for photosynthesis? A thousand quod erat demonstrandums. Agreed, the more she performed the experiments, the better she got at them, and she had studied all the textbooks she needed to—Pfeffer, Sachs, Strasburger—collected and classified every plant in Cambridgeshire, microtomed every angiosperm she could lay her hands on from here to London, memorized the concentrations of essential plant nutrients and hundreds and hundreds of botanical names . . . Yet something was missing. And what this was, she had attempted to articulate to herself and failed.

Instead, Evie wished to gesture toward a bed of spiral aloe before them, radiant in their geometric swirls, and say: I want to know what is at the heart of this, and I think it cannot be seen under a microscope. But nothing came to her, and she faltered.

“Lately—I feel that I study, but I’m not learning anything about the world.”

Agnes nodded. “I can understand that.”

It was nice of her to say so, but Evie still felt she had failed her. “I am not a good scientist . . .” she began again.

“I think you’re not a particular kind of scientist,” Agnes interrupted, “which does not make you a bad one.”

Evie had not thought of it that way before. Or even known that there might be . . . different kinds of scientists.

“What should I do?”

“Many things, but first,” said Agnes, “we feed the swans.”

With that, they walked down the path leading to the stream where the lilies grew.

*  *  *

On their last day on board, Evie sits out on the deck for a long while.

The sky and the sea are darkening rapidly, and the clouds are edged with the last of the sunset’s silvery glow. Her things are packed, ready to be offloaded, the letter for Mr. Muttlebury tucked safely into her bag. A strong wind springs up, tugging at her skirt, her hair, though no warning has been issued about rough weather.

Onward, onward, she thinks. The wind is blowing me toward my wishes.

 

Evie caught her first glimpse of India when she was ten. When she and Grandma Grace took a bus to Kew Gardens to see the work of Marianne North, and she wandered through the gallery, a large wood-paneled room hung with paintings from floor to ceiling, and then came to one—of gardens laid out in Agra around a white building with a great dome—and squealed, “Grandma, this looks like an onion!”

Even afterward, she was a regular visitor at the gallery. Here was Australia, there Ceylon, Chile, Japan, Java, and she did not stand there only with an extravagant longing to trot around the globe, she was also enamored by the plants. She felt about them the way some people feel about books—that there were exasperatingly too many to encounter in a lifetime. When might she see the flaming crimson mahoe of Jamaica, for instance? The trumpet trees of Brazil? When the plant collectors bring them to Kew, her sister would say pragmatically, and she had to be satisfied with that.

Over the last year, she had visited the gallery to inspect the India paintings more closely and discovered that Miss North had traveled through the subcontinent far more widely than she had imagined—she had painted in the north, in Simla, Delhi, and Agra, to the west in Rajputana and Bombay, in the south all the way to Cochin and Tanjore, and even—how exciting—the far east, beyond Benares to Calcutta, Darjeeling, and Sikkim, though no farther.

 

And here she is now, in a clanking train, chugging toward the east, looking out at a landscape that could have come from one of those paintings.

How am I here? It seemed to have all happened so fast. She was awakened that morning by a strange stillness, and it took her a moment to realize the Maloja had docked in Bombay. From the deck, she could see small sailboats and large steamers on a smooth oily sea, and beyond that, in the pale gray-blue light of early morning, misty hills and banks of gold-tipped clouds. Later, they descended into the hubbub on the quay, festooned with madly fluttering decorations—for the impending arrival of the king—and crowded with hawkers and journalists. They drove into town in a low hooded carriage, the narrow streets crammed with animals and people, clanging bells and music, spicy cooking smells and radiant colors. Bessie nearly screamed for joy as they passed a water carrier with bare brown shapely limbs and turbaned head who she was certain looked straight out of a picture book. Slowly, the musky scented twilight subdued the bright patterns of the day and the setting sun threw long shadows across the streets. Only a short while ago, Evie had been in foggy London . . . unbelievable, impossible even, that she had arrived in India at last.

The train journey has not been the nightmare Bessie and Mrs. Ward make it out to be, but it certainly feels . . . constrained. They share a three-berth compartment, with no connecting corridors between the carriages, so there is little they can do to escape one another’s company. For four days and three nights, they speed across a thousand dusty miles, across changing landscapes and temperatures. Evie takes all the outside in—gray monkeys with white chests and long tails darting about in the trees, parakeets flying at sunset, carts drawn by great horned bullocks, peasants farming, washing their clothes along riverbanks. Small stations come at regular intervals—Manmad Junction, Akola, Badnera, Nagpur, Raipur, Rourkela—and at each stop there are oranges to be bought, or small bags of nougat and tangerines. Once, when Evie steps out, she is surrounded by a swarm of small boys in brilliant turbans, bargaining, begging, or performing conjuring tricks.

All of this is new and beautiful, though somewhere along the way she begins to feel it is also strangely superficial to be so wholly removed from the rhythms of the outside world, to speak to no one from here, to know little or nothing about the places they pass through. Then she tells herself to be patient—she is on a train!—and that it will be different once she arrives in Calcutta.

They rattle through the fertile United Provinces, with fields of green crops, mimosa trees, and mango plantations. Villages are frequent, huts hung with pumpkin vines, or sometimes a small town with whitewashed houses and a temple, or a mosque with a minaret. When they enter Bengal, the Grand Trunk Road runs alongside the railway track, carrying its traffic of horse-drawn vehicles and the occasional motorcar or lorry.

Then, finally, they chuff into Howrah Junction—which, even at five thirty in the morning, hums with activity.

As Evie tries pushing her way through, hands pluck at her for alms, boxes of sweets, fruits, and flowers are pressed to her face. Mrs. Ward and Bessie are changing for the train to Serampore, and Evie has said her goodbyes earlier. To her surprise, Bessie had flung her arms around her, tearfully, “I shall miss you so!”

Evie feels lost, too, stepping off the train alone, and just when she thinks she will be wandering the platform forever, a tall, fierce-looking Indian stops her. “Miss Alexander?” She nods. “Mr. and Mrs. Hall, waiting,” he says, and gestures outside, and then with an authoritative declamation—“Be off with you!”—he clears the crowd around them.

 

She hopes Calcutta will not be the end of way for her like it was for Miss North.

Though there is much to like about the city, too. It has the same busy air as London, docks lively and dirty, markets bustling, and the river palpably central to people’s lives—or so it appears, for she has only just arrived and does not wish to make hasty observations. She has passed many grand buildings already, the Great Eastern Hotel facing the Maidan, and another whose construction is still under way, an immense memorial to Queen Victoria—beneath the scaffolding, she can glimpse the shape of turrets, and possibly a gigantic dome.

It strikes her then: This is the capital of the empire!

So much around her also feels bewilderingly new, and the pretense she had attempted to put up at the beginning of the journey, of being unperturbed, has melted away—that is also, possibly, because of the heat. “This is the beginning of the cold season,” she has been told, while around her brightens a day as warm as any in a London summer. She realizes she ought to have brought more cotton, and infinitely less flannel.

 

Charlotte, her husband, Victor, and their two children live off the Strand, close to the Hooghly River and the Calcutta Port Trust headquarters, where Victor works as assistant to the chief commissioner. They have servants, a pretty garden, and have been assigned one of the better government quarters. “Though the damp still rises through the walls during the monsoon,” Charlotte tells her cheerfully, “and sometimes our living room floods. But we are very quick at removing furniture and carpets now.”

She comes to learn swiftly that the household runs with clockwork precision—meals are laid out and partaken on time, all surfaces—wood, silver, glass—gleam despite the perpetual onslaught of dust, the children, Sam and Eleanor, four and two, are entertained, bathed, fed, and put to bed at appropriate hours by the ayah. What also amazes her is that their cook conjures miraculous “home” dishes—one does not expect pea soup, beef rissoles, and caramel custard for one’s first meal in India, but apparently “Babarchi has learned to cook everything English.” His greatest triumph? A giant honey-glazed ham for Christmas, complete with paper frill on the knuckle. Occasionally, Charlotte says, he has been known to spice a baked fish pie with cardamom and brighten the chicken roast with turmeric, but apart from these culinary misadventures, the Hall household operates smoothly under Charlotte’s firm, watchful eye.

 

The quest to find Evie a husband is met with similar efficiency.

A few days after her arrival, they are in Evie’s room, sitting at the edge of the bed—Charlotte, like Patrick, has light eyes, but hers are a stormier blue. She also exudes a certain spirited energy Evie had not expected. She is just done doling out handy hints—all silks in the teak trunk, please, else termites will ravage them overnight; if she is stepping out in the evenings, be wary of mosquitoes, and always shake out her shoes before slipping them on, in case a frog has climbed in, or worse, a scorpion. Next she chalks out their winter itinerary. “You’ve arrived at the beginning of the season,” she says. “Which is good.” Upcoming events in the social calendar include races, polo matches, cricket week, paper chases, and an array of garden parties, cocktails, dinners, and picnics, both by day and by moonlight. Then there’s Christmas, of course, and a whole slew of activities arranged around it at the clubs.

At this rate, thinks Evie, she will be married off by the end of the month.

“Did you not meet someone nice on the ship?” Charlotte asks. She was a fishing fleet girl too—she had traveled out with her mother, and on the way she met Victor, an officer returning from leave, and they were married in Bombay in six weeks. “Almost as soon as we docked,” she says, laughing. This would be no surprise for two people passionately in love, except Evie finds it hard to imagine Victor being swept away by his emotions, or even swayed by them in the least. He is older than Charlotte by ten years or more, with a serious way about him that Evie finds almost comical.

“Also, is there anything in particular you’d like to do here?” asks Charlotte.

“Well . . .”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to see the botanical gardens.”

Charlotte looks surprised and then she laughs. “I’d expected the races or a visit the Marble Palace . . . I’m not sure how much of a chance you’ll have to meet eligible men all the way out in Seebpore, but I’m sure a trip can be arranged.”

Her guest is thrilled. “Wonderful,” she says. “Thank you.”

Charlotte stands up, making to leave, but stops. “I also wanted to ask . . .” she begins, and then hesitates. Evie waits for her to continue, wondering what this is about. “It’s what you want, isn’t it? Coming out here, getting married? I know it’s what we must do, but these days women have a little more time.”

For a moment, Evie holds her breath. She is sorely tempted to be as candid, to tell her the truth, but if she does, would it not make its way back to London? Could she trust Charlotte? And more important, was it fair to burden her with the truth?

“Well?” asks her hostess.

Evie manages to nod, somewhat convincingly, even if she’s unable to bring herself to actually say, Yes, yes, that this is what I want.

*  *  *

Evie’s association with the Goethean Science Society began toward the end of her final year at university. She saw an announcement pinned to the notice board outside Balfour, calling for a meeting, and beneath that, a quote: The many in the One.

How odd, she thought. Not long after their walk in the botanical garden, Agnes had lent her some books, which she had only glanced at briefly, but among them lay a pamphlet—a translation of a volume by Goethe titled The Metamorphosis of Plants.

Evie wound her way to Queens’ College that winter evening out of curiosity. What did she know about Goethe? Not much except that he was a German novelist and poet, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, which she remembered reading in school and dismissing for its annoyingly lovelorn protagonist. Was it not extremely popular in its time? An eighteenth-century bestseller! A key text of the Sturm and Drang movement, she remembers her English teacher saying. A harbinger of Romanticism, she had called it. He’d written a few plays, too, if she was not mistaken. Why on earth, then, was there a Goethean Science Society? It all seemed very peculiar.

At Queen’s, in room CC43, she found three others waiting there.

“Hello,” she said, “have we started, or are we waiting for the rest?”

A skinny, straight-haired youth with spectacles, told her, “Well, this is it.”

“For today, you mean?”

The girl spoke this time. “What my brother Phineas means is we are all there is.” Evie recognized her as a student at Girton; she had seen her before at Balfour.

“Oh, I see.” Evie had stumbled upon the tiniest society in the university.

The last of the three, a stockier student who introduced himself as Oliver-please-call-me-Ollie, made her feel more welcome. “We are . . . err . . . a small group, but passionate.” She was offered a cup of tea and a biscuit.

“How did you hear about us?” She told them. “And what is your academic background?” Natural sciences with an emphasis on botany. “We are botanists too,” said Ollie, indicating himself and the girl, whose name was Luella though they called her Lulu. “Phineas is a mathematician.” Phineas bowed, and added solemnly, “Despite Goethe’s critiques of the overuse of mathematics, his ideas on morphology may be connected with it, especially in D’Arcy Thompson’s work, where he extends it into a science of form by applying physical methods to biological subjects. Of course, we’ll know more on the subject when his book is published, which should be soon now.”

Evie said she couldn’t wait.

Ollie cleared his throat. “For Lulu and me, well, we were beginning to feel a deep sense of alienation from the natural world, after engaging extensively with scholarship that condoned strictly mathematical interpretations of nature . . . we felt they had lost their connection to the senses entirely.” He paused. “Might that be what you began to feel, too?”

Evie nodded slowly.

Lulu narrowed her eyes. “Why are you here?”

She decided to be honest but before she was done, she was being admonished. “You have no clue what this society is about?” Lulu was aghast.

“No, but—”

“I don’t think you understand. We are not here to waste time. We read, we discuss, we aim to revise contemporary scientific practices.”

Phineas muttered that this was why they never had any new members, while Ollie tried to placate everybody all around. “There, there, Lulu, everyone has their own journey into Goethean thought . . .”

Lulu said Evie should try meeting them when she was farther along her journey rather than when she hadn’t even begun.

“And now I probably won’t,” said Evie. “I came here inspired by the one principle that guides the beginnings of all pursuits, scientific or otherwise. Curiosity. And you have squashed it.”

She was halfway down the hall before Ollie caught up with her, apologizing on behalf of the society. “Please stay,” he said.

And because she was intrigued, she did. She was given another cup of tea, but no biscuit, and the meeting reconvened.

“Thank you,” began Evie, “for bearing with my ignorance, and I apologize for being ill-prepared, but I assure you I am eager to learn.” She looked at the others. “What is Goethean science?”

First, there was a moment of silence, and then, she was given an answer she didn’t quite expect: “Life.”

She shook her head, bewildered. “What?”

In that, the botanists explained, it was a way of learning that didn’t wrench one away from nature in all her vitality and aliveness.

“Nature is ever shaping new forms,” added Ollie, “that’s what Goethe said. What is has never yet been; what has been comes not again. Everything is new and yet nothing but the old.”

Evie wasn’t sure what to make of it—what exactly did they mean?—but she knew she was drawn to this, the idea of nature as infinitely changing, infinitely alive.

They told her that in trying to understand Goethe, she first needed to understand what came before him, his scientific inheritance. What made him break away from it? It was hardly difficult to see how the Age of Enlightenment played a part, its obsession with order, control, with the classification of the natural world, its rule of reason, of “pure” rational thought, its eventual crystallization into Cartesian science, bound by the empirical and analytical. However, in Germany a rebellious wildness had begun to grow—Romanticism!—and it was within this spirit of defiance and questioning and freedom that Goethe’s science was born.

“He was an outsider to science, really,” Ollie continued. “A scientist with a poet’s eye and a poet’s sensibility. Who had heard of such a thing? But he recognized and actualized a new way of seeing . . .”

“And what might this be?” asked Evie breathlessly.

“Of seeing in wholeness. He wished to understand nature by experiencing it as a living organism whose ever-changing, ever-growing dynamic the observer—us, you, me—is a part of, and in this way to train one’s mind to be as flexible as nature herself.”

Evie was quiet for a moment before she asked, “Did anyone take him seriously?”

“Oh, no,” the three replied. “Hardly anyone does even now.”

“Then why do you?”

Ollie said simply, “Everything we missed over the course of studying for our degrees—intuition, inspiration, imagination—we found here in abundance.”

*  *  *

After ten days in Calcutta, she is finally en route to the Agricultural and Horticultural Office in Alipore, where Mr. George Mackay Muttlebury is a senior council member.

She is accompanied by Bahadurjee, the fierce-looking Indian who had picked her up at Howrah Junction. They drive along the Hooghly for the most part, the banks particularly noisome in this warm spell, although the odor lightens as they maneuver away from the river, past the half-constructed Victoria Memorial, Alipore Zoo, and a maidan where children are playing in the dust. She is curious about her chaperone—although she has not yet had a chance to strike up a conversation with him. Charlotte and Victor treat him fondly—but with a carefully maintained distance. He is from Punjab, he tells her, for many years employed by an English family, who were finally posted to Calcutta before returning to England.

“They wanted to take me, miss . . .”

“Oh, and did you not go?”

He shudders. “Too cold.” Then he adds, “People should be where the temperatures suit them.” She agrees, adding with a laugh, “That would mean all British people here need to relocate back to their rainy little island.”

He nods somberly, as if to say eventually that will happen.

 

The Agricultural and Horticultural Office is well protected by high gates and hedges, and a pebble track runs to the office building ensconced within well-trimmed lawns and rows of blooming hibiscus shrubs. It doesn’t feel at all like being in a city.

Inside, she first encounters the secretary, a young man in owlish spectacles, a bureaucratic pedant, she discovers, who makes her fill out form after form.

“But all I need is for you to hand over this letter.”

“And I will, Miss Alexander . . . as soon as this is filled out.”

When that is done, she is kept waiting in a dusty lounge before being summoned.

Behind the desk sits a smiling man with a neat mustache, neatly parted hair, and noticeably pointed ears. “I’m given to understand you were Mrs. Arber’s assistant?” He gestures to the letter. She confirms this, saying she apprenticed under Mrs. Arber for a year in Cambridge. “Wonderful.” He had made her acquaintance when she wrote to the institute asking for information on the Indian holy basil, tulsi, a medicinal plant native to the subcontinent. They have corresponded a few times.

Evie knows all this, but she listens politely, waiting until he is done.

“Now, what can I do for you, Miss Alexander? Mrs. Arber’s letter indicates that you are interested in undertaking botanical excursions while here in India.”

She says this is indeed the case.

“Not a problem,” says Mr. Muttlebury airily. Well! She had not thought it would be this easy. “What would you like to see? The botanical gardens?”

She says that is already being arranged by her hosts.

“What about the Sundarbans?” he offers next.

Their conversation is punctured by the arrival of tea, after which she mentions that she is also happy to venture farther afield: “I would like to make productive use of my time here, and I am lucky Mrs. Arber is acquainted with someone like you . . .”

The flattery seems to work, as flattery tends to; the tips of Mr. Muttlebury’s ears turn pink.

She directs her gaze to the map of British India hanging on the wall, and gestures with her white-gloved hand. “Look how much there is to explore. I am sure you have seen it all.”

Mr. Muttlebury protests, saying that would simply be impossible, but yes, he adds modestly, he has traveled in the east a fair bit, to the farthest parts of Burma and the jungles of Assam.

“Oh, Assam,” gushes Evie, “how marvelous!”

“Yes, it was. Until we were ambushed by leeches.” She exclaims, hand to chest, wondering if her dramatic interlude is too much. Clearly not, for Mr. Muttlebury puffs up and continues, “Quite the biggest I have seen.” He holds his hands apart to indicate an impossible length.

She hopes never to encounter such terrifying creatures, she says, although she is fascinated by the hills of Assam, especially, she lets drop casually, the places where Hooker roamed.

“Ah, orchid country.”

“Yes, I have a passion for drawing them,” she says, lying lightly. If there are any expeditions to the area that she could join, she would be so grateful if he could inform her.

He has been won over. “Immediately, and at once, Miss Alexander!”

After she is ushered out, she decides to take a quick walk around the garden. “No, don’t worry,” she tells Bahadurjee when he makes to accompany her. “I will be back shortly.”

She strolls down the winding path that opens out onto a lawn, while to her left sits a squat greenhouse, filled with potted plants in bloom, blazing golden, maroon, and white chrysanthemums. Evie continues down a path snaking around the grass; the place is sun-drenched and quiet, and not until she crosses an arched bridge does she meet anyone else: a gardener taking a nap.

She walks on and enters the next greenhouse—brimming with orchids. One is shaped like a slipper; another is of purest white with a hint of magenta at the tip of its innermost petal. Each of them a symbol of high social status and wealth back home, so rare were orchids there and difficult to grow. Orchid mania had not died down entirely even now—they still fetched high prices at auctions in London, which, of course, explained Mr. Dossett’s continued interest in collecting them.

From the greenhouse, Evie wanders out into a nearby rose garden, also in bloom—damask and albas, Kashmiri and miniatures. A distance away, the gardener is back at work, the gentle swish of his khukri slicing through the grass. She prefers it here, outside: the air is scented, and the roses rise plump and petaled from their bushes, lifted toward the sky.

*  *  *

The next day, all is not well at the Hall residence.

Victor is subdued at lunch, and he conveys the news that all arrangements have been made for Evie’s visit to the botanical garden as though telling her that someone is dying.

“Is everything all right?” she inquires.

“We’ll see.”

Evie does not pursue the matter—in truth, she is thrilled about her trip, and thinking about how she ought to prepare her inks and sketchbooks and flower press. Finally, she will get to see the ancient banyan, which she has heard is so vast it is its own forest. She can hardly wait.

To occupy herself, she stays outside for most of the day, sketching the bougainvillea in the garden. The children play around her, chasing butterflies and bumblebees.

“What you are doing, Evie?” Sam asks breathlessly, his sister standing behind him.

Evie shows them the drawing, which she thinks is coming out rather nicely.

“Flowers!” he yelps.

The colorful blossoms are not flowers but bracts, which surround the true white flower sitting tiny and unnoticed at the center. But perhaps four is a little young for lessons on botanical morphology.

By the time she returns to the house, it is late afternoon and tea is laid out in the veranda.

“There has been a bit of news,” says Charlotte. “Victor’s office has had a telegram.”

Oh, no. Evie hopes, selfishly, that whatever it is, it will not interfere with her plans.

“There was an announcement at the Durbar yesterday . . . The capital is being moved to Delhi.”

For a moment, it fails to make sense.

“Can they do that?” asks Evie. “I mean, what happens to Calcutta?”

“We don’t quite know. It is a shock . . . Poor Victor, he can hardly believe it. It was a betrayal, he was saying, and done in such secrecy, too. No one knew about it—not even the king.” Charlotte stirs her tea, absently. “I suppose if we are not the capital any longer, we will be reduced to nothing more than a marginal provincial town.”

 

In the days to come, it is all anyone discusses, at the gymkhanas and the clubs, at lunches and dinners, the shift of the imperial capital, and what it will mean for Calcutta.

Evie hears often that it is a tremendous loss, of power and prestige, “a stab in the back” according to one belligerent officer, “utterly shocking” for many ladies. More than a few officers are now considering a transfer. If the center of power shifts, so will they. Except that Delhi is yet ill-equipped to accommodate the British. They have heard it will take twenty years or more to complete laying out a “New Delhi” to the south of the old Mughal city. A few approve of the decision—it makes little sense for Britain to govern from Calcutta, located on the eastern extremity of its Indian possessions. Still others lament, “This city will never recover.”

“What might the Indians think?” Evie would like to ask, even though she suspects this is not what anyone else considers an important question.

Nevertheless, she is kept occupied. Many outstation gentlemen are present at these social occasions, whose time is limited and cannot be spent bemoaning Lord Hardinge’s drastic decision—they are on leave and in Calcutta expressly to find a wife. So far, Evie has been introduced to an eager young physician from Patna, a few fun-loving tea planters from Darjeeling, a handsome railway engineer currently posted in Burma. And she smiles and says, How do you do, how do you do, then spends the rest of the evening trying to avoid them.

*  *  *

The morning doesn’t start out as blue skied as she hoped it would be, but by the time she and Bahadurjee set off for Chandpal Ghat, a brisk breeze picks up and the clouds begin to clear.

In her step is a happy lightness. They catch the steamer from near the Port Trust Office and sail down the Hooghly, past Howrah, making a few stops along the way, first at Tuckta Ghat, then Kidderpore, and Shalimar, an ugly place with a pretty name. On the steamer are several other passengers, including a thin Indian man, dressed in a traditional dhoti and turban, who bursts into song.

“What is he singing about?” she asks Bahadurjee, who answers suspiciously quickly, “The greatness of the British.”

As they speed along, the river churning behind them, she turns to him again.

“Bahadurjee, what do you think? Of the British changing capitals like this?”

Before he can reply, the singing man chuckles. “They should move it farther west . . .”

“Oh? To Bombay, you think?”

“No, no, farther.”

She’s puzzled. Isn’t Bombay on the coast?

“All the way back,” he adds, “to London.”

 

They finally arrive at the landing stage for the botanical gardens, which leads to a long, elegant avenue of royal palms. Walking between them feels processional, as though they are here in attendance on matters of state. Bahadurjee, less fond of outdoor activity, appears none too impressed.

They are a short walk away from the famous banyan tree, the largest in all of India, he tells her, but it is a long time getting there because Evie stops to examine every single plant that catches her eye. Among the exotics she finds a nutmeg, and a pretty tree, like a myrtle, with a delicate peach-like blossom, planted in a sheltered situation and carefully matted around with moss.

Finally, they approach the banyan, which from a distance looks like a grove of trees. “This is just one tree?” she confirms with Bahadurjee. “Yes, miss, just one.”

She has never seen anything like it, not even in Kew Gardens with its ancient black walnut and splendid Lucombe oak. She walks around the grove; the main trunk is lost somewhere in the depths of the overhanging roots. Just as she is about to step inside, though, someone calls her name. She turns to see Mrs. Hopkins, accompanied by an elderly lady and her plant collector nephew, whom Evie can barely recognize without his mustache.

“Evelyn, dear, how wonderful to see you!” She returns the greeting less warmly, saying this is a surprise. “Well, we are all plant lovers here, so it is not too shocking,” counters Mrs. Hopkins, smiling. They have been in Bombay all this while and have only just arrived in Calcutta. “It is much nicer weather here.”

A few more pleasantries are exchanged before talk swerves to the shifting of the imperial capital. “It might have to do with growing anti-British sentiment here.” Mrs. Hopkins drops her voice as though to even say this is treachery.

Evie, straight-faced, says she has not heard anything of the kind.

“No, they wouldn’t proclaim it, would they?” Gerald, she adds, can hardly wait to get away from all this and make for the wilds.

Tempted as Evie is to exclaim me, too, she must feign polite interest. “When will you be off, Mr. Finlay?” She is suddenly aware that the ladies’ eyes are on them.

“Directly after the New Year. My aunt insists I stay for the season and spend some time with humans rather than plants for a change.”

The older ladies laugh, and he smiles, looking boyish.

As she feared, they invite her to join their party and share their luncheon—ham sandwiches, lemonade, plenty to spare. “Oh, but I would not wish to intrude.”

Mrs. Hopkins is quick to reassure her this is not the case. Evie cannot think of a reason not to join them, apart from not wishing to—and this she cannot voice, so she accepts. What flusters her though, is that Mrs. Hopkins strolls ahead with her neighbor, leaving her to walk with Mr. Finlay.

“I apologize if we have intruded on your day, Miss Alexander. My aunt can sometimes be quite . . . insistent.” She says it is all right, that the promise of ham sandwiches is hard to resist. “But I must warn you, we will be stopping every so often to allow me to make pressings.” Pressings? He is happy to stop and uproot entire plants if that is what she would prefer. She smiles, her mood lightening. He is definitely improved without his glinty-eyed friend, Mr. Dossett, and also without his mustache.

They are deep inside the grove now, and sunlight filters through in dappled patterns. It is an eerie place, bare-branched and leafless. From the branches rising above them drop hundreds of spindle-like structures, crutches that seem to prop up the entire forest.

“I remember what you said at Aden,” begins Mr. Finlay. “And believe me, I am not standing here asking whether these are trunks or branches or roots.” She laughs, pleased—saying she hadn’t imagined he would remember at all.

“How could I not,” he says, looking at her, and somewhere in her stomach she feels a flutter.

They continue to stroll through the strange forest, and out the other side, into a sudden sweep of openness. “You may know already,” begins Mr. Finlay, “that these gardens were designed . . . or rather redesigned in the 1840s by William Griffith . . .”

“I did not!” I have read his travel memoir, she wants to add but does not wish to interrupt.

“He took over from a superintendent of an older generation, Nathaniel Wallich . . . let’s just say they did not see eye to eye over many things. On taking control of the garden, Griffith described its neglected state in an official report, saying it was a mess.”

They walk along again, away from the banyan, to catch up with the older ladies.

“I assume what you are suggesting is that Griffith’s objections stemmed from more than personal animosity?”

Mr. Finlay nods. “You are quite right. I think the informal layout of his predecessor’s garden was offensive to his conception of ordered rational science. So what he proposed was radical reorganization . . . and here we have it, what you called a colossal attempt to fix the natural world.”

He remembers everything, she thinks warmly.

“Admittedly a more picturesque arrangement than what Griffith had planned,” he continues, “and following a geographical planting plan, but still, as orderly as ever.”

“You are well informed on the subject, Mr. Finlay.”

“And you are surprised?”

She nods, smiling.

He feigns offense. “Miss Alexander, I may be a lowly scavenger of plants, but I am rather interested in the history of my profession.”

“Yes,” she says, teasing. “That is quite unusual.”

He laughs, heartily now, and looks at her as though to say something, but changes his mind. Up ahead, the older ladies have stopped and are waiting. They head to a bench overlooking a still lake, one of many dotting the gardens, its surface glistening with algae and yellowed leaves.

*  *  *

After Evie stumbled into her first GSS meeting, she attended the next, and all the ones after—more enthusiastically, it must be said, than any of her classes. So much fresh learning! And a realization, from which there was no coming back, that the history of science was untidy, except it had been pruned and neatened—to exclude scientists who did not contribute to conventionally accepted narratives.

Goethe did not feature in any of the textbooks she had studied—his story, as with so many others, was written out, erased, uncelebrated. His way of seeing remained dismissed, much like the work of the women botanists they discussed at Newnham, deemed to be forever engaged in—and judged for—their domestic botany.

She came to these meetings with many questions, but first, what was Goethe’s way of seeing, exactly? What did it mean to see in wholeness?

To not reduce a phenomenon to its parts, she was told promptly, as is the rather reductive way of conventional science.

“Have you noticed the quote on our poster?”

Evie nodded. The many in the One.

“It is exactly that.”

By Goethe’s late Enlightenment age, he inhabited a world stricken by separation. Everything in the natural world had its place—with humans, naturally, placed on top, scrutinizing, demystifying, and harnessing the power of all aspects of the natural world. To do this most effectively, all kingdoms—plants, animals, minerals—were named, systematically categorized, and fixed.

“By Linnaeus, mainly,” added Phineas.

“‘God creates; I organize,’ he said,” added Lulu. “Pompous man.”

Ollie nodded in all seriousness. “It was the grand scientific mission of the time. To impose order on chaos, so everything could be made knowable. Then Goethe came along discounting it all, asking, Is this the only way? He was post-Linnaean, you see, hoping to identify some sort of natural taxonomy, if indeed there even was such a thing.”

Linnaeus’s obsession with classification supported a way of seeing the natural world, and everything in it, as made up of separate entities working together to produce what we, from a distance, then observed. “Open a textbook on botany,” said Ollie, “and look at how the language on the page directs you to see . . . the internal and the external, the constituent parts of a cell, the parts of a flower that seemingly exist with little connection to each other . . . drawings separate and divide too, each part labeled and numbered, emphasizing boundaries, walls, studying the workings of a plant in isolation . . .”

These textbooks don’t magically, benignly, come into being—they are written to prop up a particular scientific view. “All of this”—Lulu gestured around them, by which Evie took to mean the university—“upholds it too.”

For someone like Linnaeus, the belief was that the sum of the parts made up the whole. “Take all of these parts, throw them together, and voilà! You have a plant! A human! A planet!” Similar, Ollie supposed, to a machine. But did she see how this held the whole subservient to the parts? At its heart lay this irrevocable inequality.

“And Goethe?” asked Evie, holding her breath.

For him, unity. Alles eins aus. Not a mechanistic reduction of living, breathing beings. Each part, even in its minuteness, contained the whole. The leaf is stem which is flower which is seed which is the entire plant, and on and on it goes in an unending cycle of life. In this way, the parts and the whole are equal. Calling for connection at the deepest level—one denied by the other, more conventional Linnaean view.

There is diversity, yet a unity in this multiplicity.

The many in the One.

 

So many revelations for Evie in a musty room in Queen’s, huddled over a cup of tea.

She pored over Goethe’s scientific writings—first, the essay “The Experiment as Mediator of Subject and Object.” “It’s a whole new way of seeing,” she enthused to the others, and even though written more than a hundred and twenty years ago, still remarkably prescient. In Goethe’s age of empiricism, focused on the testable by observation and experiment, how vividly aware he was of science as a human activity, easily open to the flaws and biases to which they were susceptible. “Die Natur,” his essay that read more as an ode—Nature is the only real artist—championed a “good science” that took her back into the world, that reinstated imagination at the heart of the subject, as well as wonder. Both of which by Goethe’s time, served little purpose in the practice of science. Instead, dependence on the quantitative method—one that gave primacy to qualities that could be expressed mathematically in a direct way—had grown.

“Number, magnitude, position, extension,” explained Phineas. “While in contrast, qualities that couldn’t were made secondary. Color, taste, sound. Demoted to being no more than subjective experience, would you believe, or illusions of the senses, and not part of nature. In fact, secondary qualities were seen as unable to exist on their own, and were understood when explained how they could have arisen from primary ones alone. As though primary qualities were always there behind them, hidden by appearances.”

“Newton, for example!” exclaimed Ollie. “He replaced the phenomenon of color with a set of numbers.” But where he “split” colorless light and calculated angles of refraction, Goethe saw something else—he refuted the notion that color was determined solely by light and the color spectrum, arguing instead that color is shaped by perception as well as light and darkness. He saw darkness itself as an active ingredient of the spectrum, one that made color perceptible rather than being mere absence of light.

“Color as ‘light’s suffering and joy,’” murmured Lulu.

With Goethe, all focus, all attention was on the phenomenon itself, which he believed could be accessed through observation—or what became Evie’s favorite term, anschauung. A word with no equivalent in English, but which could be interpreted as intuitive knowledge gained through careful patient contemplation, a “gentle” empiricism or “thinking with the mind’s eye.”

“We tend to treat observation as a matter of opening our eyes in front of the phenomenon,” said Ollie. “As if it were something that happens to us when visual information flows in through the senses and is registered in the consciousness. Here is a flower”—he gestured before him—“look how it functions.”

But observing in Goethe’s way required one to be more than usually alive to seeing.

“And not just gaining a visual impression,” he added.

Goethe spoke of it as seeing with a certain purity of mind, although one should not assume that he was recommending a naïve or precritical view. He accepted the essential role of the mind’s activity in rendering experience meaningful.

“Just that,” said Phineas, “despite recognizing the many failings of our ways of knowing, Goethe believed that a knowledge utterly in tune with the nature of things in the world was possible.”

“How so?” asked Evie. “I mean, is there some sort of . . . method to this?”

Stages is what they preferred to call them, or modes of perception, which for a beginner could be distinguished quite sharply, though the aim was to experience these processes in a seamless flow.

“In preparation, it is important to first acknowledge who we are,” began Ollie. “Our daily likes and dislikes, our personal history, and the impressions that ordinary encounters with the natural world create in ourselves as observers.” This is also when the observer chooses what to study, perhaps when one is struck by something; Goethe called it “being spoken to” by the thing.

“What, then?”

“The first stage, exact sense perception.”

Evie blinked.

“A detailed observation of the ‘bare facts’ of the phenomenon that are available to our ordinary senses. Seeing what is present with as little personal judgment and evaluation as possible. All our theories and feelings about a thing must be held back in order to ‘let the phenomena speak for themselves.’”

The stage after was exact sensorial fantasy. To perceive the time-life of the phenomenon, that is, to see it as a phenomenon in time, not as an objective frozen present as prompted by the first stage, but as a thing with a history.

“The growth of a leaf or the blossoming of a flower,” explained Ollie. “Imagining it undergoing this process in your imagination, and seeing minutely how it changes, how it exists as a sequence of forms.”

Then a move toward “seeing in beholding,” or an attempt to still or quieten active perception to allow the thing to express itself through the observer.

“To make space for it to be articulated in its own way,” added Lulu, though she looked doubtful that Evie was following any of this.

Ollie nodded. “Yes, and this is usually expressed in emotional language, poetry, painting, or other art forms.”

If the first stage used perception to see form, the second imagination to perceive its mutability, the third inspiration to reveal the gesture, the final process—being one with the object—called for intuition to combine and move beyond the previous stages.

“In terms of a Goethean methodology,” added Phineas, “each of the stages is dependent upon those which precede it.”

Evie nodded slowly. “Is that why each stage is more difficult to explain outside of the context of having experienced the previous ones?”

“Exactly!” they chorused.

But being “one with the object” was meant to allow for an appreciation of the content or meaning of the form as well as the form itself. The outer appearance and inner content combined by conceptualization.

All this brought a bewildering newness for Evie, and she was not entirely certain she had understood it all, it seemed abstract at the moment, and theoretical, but she felt great excitement and also great relief—that she was not dull, or worse, stupid, that she had not chosen to study the “wrong” subject. In short, there was little the matter with her, the problem lay in the way botany was being taught. At this realization, something in her lightened. An understanding of plants depended as much on a scientist’s personal sympathy with nature as on her systematic study of it! Grandma Grace, it struck her, was a “Goethean scientist” long before she was aware the term existed. What better way to honor her memory than to resolve to practice good science, to be a wiser botanist, and, like her grandmother, to be more in the world.

*  *  *

Finally, letters arrive from Mama and Florence. They await with the morning mail at breakfast, and Evie retreats to the garden to read them.

Her mother sounds much the same as she does in person—brisk, sensible, cheerful enough. Papa is hard at work, as usual, she writes, though recently recovered from a bad cold, while she has been busy with charity work at the church now that it is coming up to Christmas. Collecting old clothes, as she usually does, and food rations for the poor.

In other news, she is sure Evie would like to know that the winter hellebores have flowered early—they might not last through to January, but they are rescuing the garden from winter dreariness.

What about you, dear Evelyn? she asks finally. I hope so far you are finding it fruitful being in India? I look forward to your news.

Evie has the grace to blush. No news! At least not the kind that her mother expects. She will need to compose a reply carefully, or not write at all, laying the blame on the dreadfully unreliable Indian post.

The letter from Florence, though, carries a joyous announcement.

She and Patrick are expecting a baby in the new year. I cannot begin to say how glad it makes me to share this with you. Soon there will be three of us, a proper family, and you an aunt, and Sam and Eleanor will have a cousin to play with. Evie clasps the pages to her heart. A baby! She is happy for them—she knows it is what they dearly wanted. If she were back in London, they would have celebrated, of course. Presents for Florence, perhaps even that rarest of treats—tea at Brown’s with crimped sandwiches, dainty pastries, and pillowy scones. But here all this seems like another life, another world, distant and unfamiliar.

She places the letter away. How strange to receive this news in Calcutta from where everything before seems to have fast receded.

 

After this, Evie finds herself restless and impatient.

The problem is there is no news on any front. She has tired of keeping up the “husband hunt” for Charlotte, Victor dispenses gloom all day from his armchair, and above all, she has been in Calcutta almost a month, and there is still not a plan in sight. It does not seem likely that Mr. Muttlebury has found her an expedition. What must I do? Be reckless and marry a plant hunter? She considers it, not entirely in jest; how convenient this arrangement would be for purposes of travel. The problem is she is acquainted with only one, who might grow back a frightful mustache and who will soon be off to the remote Himalayas—and there will be no opportunity to ensnare him before that, surely.

Someone less determined might be tempted to consider this a lovely holiday and board a ship back to Tilbury—it would be easy, and her family would be pleased at her return. But no, there is little chance that she would come all this way and give up, despite the looming possibility of failing, and the fact that a long journey yet remains if she does embark on an expedition. Who could she blame for this mess and madness? Agnes? Herself? She sighs.

It isn’t that simple. It takes many winds to sail a ship, plant a seed, shape a mountain.

 

Another week passes, and she begins to lose hope. She spends her afternoons outside, sometimes with the children, sometimes on her own. She is done with Kingdon-Ward and has abandoned Roxburgh. Her journal lies unfilled. Maybe now there will be nothing more than empty pages.

More than ever, she needs the vitality of someone like Grandma Grace, but Grandma Grace is gone. Two years ago, she suffered from a sudden illness, so quick there seemed to be no chance for recovery. After the funeral, tired from weeping, Evie had walked through the forest behind the house, where they had walked together many times before. How would it ever again be possible to search for joy and adventure? And yet the trees around her seemed to whisper, always to strive, to seek, to find, and never to yield to a life without wonder.

For the first time, though, since she set out to catch the boat train from St. Pancras, she is brought down low. Otherwise, it had never seemed impossible. All she had to do was get there! To Calcutta! And something, anything, would work out, a miracle would take place, a hidden path newly revealed.

Today, instead of the bench where ladies perch, she squats inelegantly on the grass. She does not care. She only wants to feel the earth beneath her, the spikiness of the blades, the faintest of damp in the mud. There, closest to the earth, she begins to feel better. Miss Sargant was right when she said geotaxis determined the motion of a seed, but she did not mention phototaxis, how after the plant has grown, the stalks and leaves override the gravitational impulse and grow toward the light.

I am here, Evie tells herself. She needs to be still and orient herself to the world. And the world, as Grandma Grace would say, would orient itself around her.

 

Hope springs anew in the form of Mr. Muttlebury, who drops by, unexpectedly, a few days later, before luncheon. He apologizes profusely for the imposition and for the delay, saying he has been unwell, and hence unable to call on her earlier. “I won’t take up much of your time.” His voice still carries the jagged edge of his illness, like a vocal battle scar, and the tip of his nose is red and raw. They drink tea, and he keeps it brief and to the point.

He knows of no expeditions to Assam that would be suitable for a young lady such as herself. Her heart begins to droop in disappointment when he adds that, however, he is acquainted with the Wheelers—Charles and Margaret—who have been recently transferred up-country. “They are leaving Calcutta in mid-January,” he tells her, “if I am not mistaken.” It is a bit last-minute, he knows, considering it is already late December, but it had slipped his mind all this while. Regardless, he is happy to make introductions, and the parties could perhaps work out something suitable to them both.

This sounds promising. She is delighted, she says, and greatly appreciates his help. Their meeting ends with him assuring her that he will be in touch soon, and he exits blowing his nose into a large white handkerchief.

Sure enough, she receives a note from Mr. Muttlebury the next day. The Wheelers are away at the seaside in Puri but will be back just after Christmas. He will set up a meeting as soon as they return.

For now, there are club dos to attend—in fact, at breakfast, Charlotte insists they all go out for a spot of fun and dancing, especially after all the gloom. “And really, you should be meeting more people,” she adds, looking at Evie.

Evie nibbles guiltily on her buttered toast.

For Charlotte’s sake, she makes an effort, donning her best evening dress, pinning up her hair, and even dusting a light bit of rouge onto her lips and cheeks. “Oh, you look lovely,” says Charlotte when she emerges. “Let’s see how many hearts you win tonight.” None, she hopes.

Despite the mood across the city, the Calcutta Club is decorated gaily for the Winter Ball—streamers everywhere, and a glistening Christmas tree stands tall in the ballroom. Bessie had once told her that, given the scarcity of European women in India, one may look about as attractive as an umbrella stand and still be propositioned.

She was right.

Evie does not remember garnering this much male attention ever, although she can tell they find her less appealing as soon as she mentions she’s a scientist. “You have a degree?” Yes, she lies; two, she says, if she desires a quicker exit. All this seems a world away from the one where she and Agnes worked late in her makeshift laboratory, excited over their small discoveries, from her meetings with the GSS, from her quiet life at home in London. She sips her wine slowly and feels very much a stranger here.

The band strikes up another cheerful tune, and she makes her way outside, weaving past the dancers, through the lawns, all the way to the back, where it is shadowy and quieter. She takes a deep breath. She is certain no one will miss her. The air has a gentle nip to it, and the thicket behind her is dotted with dancing fireflies. Next to her, a hydrangea rises in full, gorgeous bloom, with its pale flowers glowing silver. It takes her a moment to realize there is someone else on the other side of the shrub.

It is Mr. Finlay, standing, smoking.

“Miss Alexander,” he says. “I assume you, too, are fleeing the two hundred and fifty-seventh rendition of ‘Boiled Beef and Carrots.’”

“I am indeed, among other things.”

“Oh? What might these be? Persistent suitors?”

“I have managed to stave them all off.”

“Did you now? And may I ask how?”

“I tell them I have been to university.”

“And it is effective?”

“Like garlic to a vampire.”

“I believe you,” he says, laughing.

Perhaps it is the moonlight, the fireflies, or even the silvery hydrangea, but she is glad for his company. When she asks after his aunt, he says she has not been well and isn’t at the club this evening. “Though she insisted I go, so I am here.”

“With the plants,” adds Evie.

“With the plants, and you.”

In the shadows, she smiles. “Well,” she says, “I am not sure I belong here, either.”

“Where?” he asks.

“In the city, with its social circles and social obligations. In some ways, it feels like being back in England.” She laughs. “Why, I have met more Indians at Cambridge than I have in my time in India! I mean, it is frightfully strange, isn’t it?”

He nods. “Which is why I enjoy it most when I’m traveling. You’re only with the locals, and at their mercy, really, and away from all this . . .”

She says she sees what he means—this is a little England within which everyone here moves. Before she can help it, she blurts out, “And it’s not even what I came here for.”

“No?” He looks at her curiously. What did she come here for, then?

An expedition, preferably, through forest and mountain.

“I see.” Anywhere in particular?

Yes—it is a relief to tell him, perhaps because she has not spoken of it in so long—near to where he is going, she says, the hills of Assam. “I’m looking for a plant which I think might be found only in that area, close to if not at the wettest place on earth. I have done some research but I’m being driven mostly by a hunch. You must think this silly . . . everyone thinks this silly . . .” she adds.

Actually, no, he says, he understands all too well. “My whole career is built on hunches.” For a while, he does not speak. The moon is hidden behind a cloud. The fireflies dance even brighter before them.

She is certain he is going to ask her what she is looking for, and braces herself to deny him—but he does not. Instead, he lights another cigarette and says, “Miss Alexander, I have no qualifications, at least not in the conventional sense . . . I am no botanist, or geographer, or horticulturist . . . But the essential qualifications for this work are not university degrees but a deep, one might say an insatiable appetite for the hunt. Whatever it is you are seeking, the more impossible, the better.”

*  *  *

The Wheelers live close to Dalhousie Square, in a white double-storied house that’s smaller than the Halls’ bungalow but with a larger, less formal garden. The house is set away from the road, at the end of a grassy, mudholed tract where cows graze languidly.

At the gate, a small dog appears, barking and wagging its tail. “Dustbin, Dustbin,” the servant calls, bowing to her and leashing him up. What funny names people choose for their pets, thinks Evie.

In the garden are some unusual potted plants, a miniature cherry blossom, a trailing epiphyte with long red flowers. The servant, now tangled with Dustbin the dog, ushers her into the living room filled with teak furniture and mandala paintings on the wall. He takes her out to the back garden, dotted with wicker chairs, where Mrs. Wheeler is reading.

“I’m so glad you could make it.”

She is older than Evie had imagined—perhaps forty-five—but tall and striking, with a youthful smile. Against her dusty pink day dress, her eyes shine leafy green.

“I hope Dustin wasn’t a bother?” she inquires.

“Dustin?”

“Our dog. He likes to be the first to greet people at the gate.” Evie assures her he has welcomed her warmly.

They sit in the garden; Evie is plied with lemonade and fresh fruit.

Mrs. Wheeler is a relative newcomer in Calcutta, having lived with her husband, a principal chief conservator in the Forest Department, in Burma for many years. “We have been here eighteen months, and I still don’t feel quite settled,” she tells Evie. “And now we are leaving again.” They were on what is called a “mercy posting,” meant as respite for being in off-the-map places for a long time, but she misses Rangoon, she says, and even more, the mountains—Arakan Yoma, the Shan Hills, and Bago Yoma. “I accompanied Charles on many of his official inspection tours, some to the most remote areas imaginable. He would survey the timber and I would survey the plants.”

Evie is thrilled to hear this. Did she collect them, too?

Mrs. Wheeler smiles at her excitement. “I did indeed.”

 

Charles, her husband, joins them for lunch before he heads back to work; a neat, heavily mustached gentleman with a long face and intelligent eyes. Pipe in hand, he smells faintly like Evie’s father.

Over bread and pea soup she is glad the conversation does not veer toward the usual topics of the day. Rather than lamenting the shift of the imperial capital, they talk of other things. They tell her about U Dhammaloka, the “Irish Buddhist,” challenging Christianity and British rule in Burma on religious grounds.

“He is the first Westerner to be ordained a monk, they say,” adds Mr. Wheeler, “and wildly popular with the natives for his anti-missionary, anti-colonial stance. At some point, though, the Burmese people won’t need a foreigner to lead them in their fight for independence.”

Evie has never heard anyone else be this candid about these matters, but the Wheeler household seems to be concerned with different issues, and she likes that. Out there, endless club lunches. In here, it feels as if there is a bigger world.

“I imagine you both saw a fair bit of Burma?”

They did, they tell her, and it was exciting exploration.

“And Mrs. Wheeler mentioned she collected plants . . .”

“Like a fiend,” her husband answers. “She even discovered a new species on Natmataung, though she did not name it after me.”

“No dear, Rhododendron charlesianum didn’t quite have the right ring to it.”

They laugh, and Evie feels pleased—she is comfortable in their company.

Finally, Mr. Wheeler brings it up. “We hear you would like to come with us to Assam.”

Evie stops slicing at the chicken. “Very much, if that’s all right.”

“Why, if I may ask? It is not where most visitors wish to go.”

“I haven’t made this journey for reasons most visitors do,” says Evie truthfully. “I am interested in the plants that grow in the wettest place on earth.”

Mrs. Wheeler adds that Evie is a scientist, with a specialization in botany.

“Oh, marvelous,” says Mr. Wheeler. “You must show her your herbarium, Margaret.”

No more is said on the subject for now, and Evie wonders if this was a test and if she had passed.

 

After lunch, Mrs. Wheeler leads her upstairs, to a wing of the house separated from the rest by a long corridor.

When they step inside a room, Evie expects to be amazed—but it is simple and unadorned, with a desk by the window, chairs, and a large chest of drawers pushed against a wall. Hadn’t Mr. Wheeler mentioned an herbarium? The only floral arrangement here is a jar of magnolia sprigs.

“These are lovely,” she says.

Back in Burma, Mrs. Wheeler tells her, they place them in front of the Buddha statues, and they last longer than a year.

“So . . . this is your herbarium?”

Mrs. Wheeler laughs a small laugh. “Well, Charles likes to call it that, but in all honesty, it was impossible to dry plants given the weather in Burma. The humidity ruined everything. So I have no herbarium specimens, but . . .” Mrs. Wheeler hesitates. “I painted.”

“Please,” says Evie, “I’d love to see.”

Mrs. Wheeler walks across to the chest of drawers, from where she lifts a stack of long folders. She pauses before she brings them over. “I haven’t had these out in a while . . .” The folders lie thick and heavy in Evie’s hands—Margaret Rosamund Wheeler, Burma—and when she opens one, she gasps.

There on the page, a fluted Aeschynanthus, drawn in crimson taken from a sunset, its leaves freshly green as though it has just rained. Then, a golden cluster of plumeria edged in pink, a white-and-butter-yellow orchid, branches of swirling cherry blossom. They are different from Marianne North’s oil paintings in their delicacy. The colors are lighter, the details infinitely finer. Evie holds the binder up and exclaims in delight—“How beautiful they are!” They ought to be on display, she adds.

Mrs. Wheeler seems pleased, and, perhaps sensing genuine joy and interest, she begins to tell Evie how it became an obsession, collecting plants she had never seen before, finding the ones with a “soul”—for else you cannot paint them. “I would bring them back to my garden and try to keep them alive . . . at least long enough to sketch them. Sometimes I sent the plants to England, thinking they might be better equipped to study them there than I was in Burma, with barely any equipment, indulging in my . . . domestic botany.”

Evie looks up. Mrs. Wheeler seems a little uneasy. “I must be honest,” she begins. “I envy you your Cambridge studies. It legitimizes what you do in a way my work will never be.” Evie finds she has no words at first. She is taken back to Newnham, to their heated evening discussions. For so long botany had been our own . . .

“What you say is true,” she begins, “and it is appalling, how the work of women is dismissed. First, men do not permit us to pursue scholarship, then they punish us for it.”

“But,” says Mrs. Wheeler, “you have been able to study the subject . . .”

“And that has not always been a good thing.”

Her hostess frowns, asking what she means.

Evie begins to tell her—about her early days in gardens and forests with her grandmother, how this was the spirit with which she had wished to study botany, with curiosity and playfulness and a compassionate regard for plants as living, growing, ever-changing beings. “My studies served to take me away from this,” she says, “so I don’t know if it is a thing to envy.”

Mrs. Wheeler’s face softens. She says she hadn’t thought of it that way. “What did you do then?” she asks.

Only recently, admits Evie, has she found a way back to the gardens and forests of her childhood.

And how?

Evie smiles. “With a little help from here and there.”