Betina Krahn (3 page)

Photography. She was instantly intrigued. It had been years—more than a decade—since her grandparents had taken her to have her picture made at a Portsmouth photographic studio. The rigors of the process she had quite forgotten, but she had always relished the resulting image of herself in braids and a ruffled smock … barefoot … with an adventuresome glint in her eyes. The prospect of having another photograph to mark “so momentous an occasion” delighted her.

She was ushered into the chair, stripped of her hat, and posed with a quickness and purpose that belied the supposed spontaneity of the sitting. The photographer and Edgar Cherrybottom stood behind the camera, heads together, peering over and under the black camera drape, murmuring approval. Alert and focused, her curiosity alight, Celeste watched every motion and visually examined every bit of equipment, framing a score of questions to ask.

The brightness of the first flash and the smell of burning powder caught her by surprise, but she had no time to ask about them. Cherrybottom quickly suggested she lean toward one arm of the ornate chair and place both hands on its cool, polished surface.

It registered in her mind that the arms of the chair were made in the shape of leaping dolphins and she traced the dark, thick carvings with surprised pleasure … noting that the images were unusually authentic. As she looked up, the powder flashed again, blinding her momentarily. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to recover, and the photographer bolted forward and removed some of the pins from her hair.

That unexpected intimacy, the fellow’s abrupt withdrawal, and the slide of her hair down her neck so surprised her that she didn’t know quite how to react. Turning her face aside and bending slightly, she raised one arm to retuck her hair. Again, the powder flashed.

“Wonderful!” Edgar Cherrybottom strode forward to offer her assistance down from her perch. “Nothing short of perfection, eh, Brigadier?”

The old soldier harumphed about “newfangled nonsense” and inserted himself determinedly between Cherrybottom and Celeste.

Nonplussed, the garrulous publisher led them through the crowd of curious hotel guests, to the front doors and the enclosed carriage waiting beyond. They were three blocks away before Celeste reclaimed her senses enough to repin her hat and once again concentrate on her mission.

“Oh, my bag—my charts and equipment!” she said, looking frantically over her shoulder.

“In the carriage boot,” Mr. Cherrybottom assured her, looking very pleased as he balanced both palms on the head of an ornate walking stick. “I had my driver bring them out while you were being photographed. You needn’t worry about a thing, my dear. You need only tell your story, as you did in the book, and then respond to a few questions.
They’ll be charmed, I’m certain, just as the rest of London has been.”

“The rest of London?” She frowned. She hadn’t a clue what Mr. Cherrybottom was talking about.

The publisher sat forward. “I was saving this to announce at dinner, but … we’ve passed sales of twenty thousand copies and there’s no end in sight. Just yesterday, I struck an agreement with French and German publishers to issue translated editions. Scarcely a day goes by without an article in a newspaper somewhere, remarking on the ‘dolphin craze’ initiated by your book. You’re a smashing success, Miss Ashton.”

The news stunned her. A dolphin craze. Twenty thousand copies. Why, if she had sold
one
thousand copies, she would have been delighted. Imagine …
twenty thousand
people reading about her dolphins, learning about the ocean and its marvelous creatures, discovering some of the joy she had felt at being permitted a glimpse into the mysteries of the deep. That was her hope, her dream … her mission in life … to research the sea and somehow awaken people to the wonders it held. She thought with awe of thousands of people sitting at night by their lamps and hearths, reading about Prospero and Ariel and the others … imagining themselves gliding through the sea-green waters with her … their eyes and hearts opening to the beauty and majesty of the sea …

It took a moment for her to realize that twenty thousand copies also meant larger-than-expected revenues.
Money
. Her eyes widened. She would have enough money to replace the entire roof and pay some long-overdue grocer’s and butcher’s bills. She might even have enough money to take Nana back to the Azores, where they had lived when her grandfather was doing archaeological work … where she had first met dolphins! Her mind began to race and her heart began to pound. Why, she might have enough money to buy a larger boat … to build better equipment to use under water—

“Bloody Duke of Wellington!” The sound of the brigadier swearing by his favorite military hero interrupted her spiraling expectations. She looked up and discovered the carriage was slowing and the old general was staring out the window in alarm. Sliding across the seat, she peered out over the brigadier’s shoulder, while Cherrybottom raised the shade on the window across the way. The publisher’s face lit with a broad smile.

Swarming toward the coach was a noisy throng of men in bowler hats and rough woolen coats. Most had pencils stuck in their hatbands or tucked behind their ears; a few bore sketchpads. The instant the coach stopped they clambered onto the wheel spokes and carriage steps and strained to peer through the windows, calling out questions.

Cherrybottom seemed not the least bit distressed. Smiling, he straightened his tie and readied his high-crowned hat for donning as he left the carriage.

“Who are these cheeky blighters?” the brigadier demanded indignantly.

“I sent word to one or two news writers that Miss Ashton would be arriving by this entrance,” Cherrybottom told him, with a glance in her direction. “I expect word got around. They all want a glimpse of the Lady Mermaid.”

“Lady Mermaid?” She scowled. “Who on earth is the ‘Lady Mermaid’?”

Cherrybottom thrust open the door, knocking one intrepid fellow from his perch on the carriage steps. As he exited, he cast a grin and two words over his shoulder.

“You are!”

CELESTE EMERGED FROM
the carriage into the brigadier’s arms and a storm of voices. Here and there in the pushing, jostling crowd, someone waved a copy of a newspaper bearing a drawing of a dolphin and a grotesque figure that seemed to be part fish, part human. As Mr. Cherrybottom and the brigadier made a way for her through the crowd, she tussled with the unfamiliar bulk of the skirts she wore and caught snatches of what they were saying:

Could she really breathe underwater like a fish? Where did the dolphins take her? How did she say “I love you” in dolphinese? And—surely she hadn’t heard right—a request that she show them her “tail”!

It was unsettling to say the least, and her first coherent thought, once they were safely inside the Gothic dignity of the Athenaeum Hall, was that she was glad that Nana hadn’t had to run that awful gauntlet with them. Her second was bewilderment that those pushy people seemed to think her work was somehow linked to a bizarre mythological sea creature. And her third was that Mr. Cherrybottom not only seemed to know of that unfortunate connection, he seemed dashed pleased about it. Clearly, there was more here than met the eye.

But she had no chance to quiz the publisher, for at that
moment a pair of massive doors at the center of the lobby opened and a reedy older fellow in a dark suit came hurrying out, headed straight for them.

“Miss Ashton?” His pasty face colored with relief at the sight of her. “I was so concerned that you wouldn’t be able to get through that hideous mess outside. Insufferable, these news writers … we’ve had to evict a number of them from the hall already this afternoon. So pleased you’ve gotten through.”

“Sir Hillary Hockstetter, Miss Ashton.” Mr. Cherrybottom introduced the fellow. “General secretary of the Royal Oceanographic Society.”

The fellow took her extended hand with a harried nod, then used it to usher her toward the doors from which he had just emerged. “We’re not quite assembled, as yet. This was our usual dinner meeting and what with hosting those zoological fellows”—he flicked a nervous glance toward the staircase across the lobby, then overhead—“most of our members and guests are still in the dining room, upstairs. If you will just follow me.”

The oak-paneled lecture hall was nothing short of cavernous. Ornately carved oak arches supported a high, vaulted ceiling that enclosed space for well over three hundred seats. Arched windows with accents of stained glass and oak-paneled walls lent a cathedral-like air to the place. Ranks of wooden chairs filled virtually every inch of floor space, all facing a stage draped in dignified gray velvet on the far end of the room. On that stage—awaiting her arrival—were several chairs, a table, an easel, and a speaker’s podium. Celeste’s knees weakened at the sight of it. She followed numbly as the secretary seated her escorts near the back, then led her down a side aisle and up onto the stage.

Did they truly expect to fill all of those chairs? She had spoken numerous times before the fledgling Pevensey Bay Conservancy Society and occasionally before her grandmother’s Atlantean Society. It hadn’t occurred to her that a royal “scientific” society would be comprised of considerably
more than just a score or two of individuals. With growing uneasiness, she began to hang her charts and to arrange her equipment on the table for display.

After a few moments a rumble rose at the back of the hall and grew steadily louder. She took refuge in her seat just as the doors flew open and in rushed a garrulous tide of dark-clad, Windsor-tie-wearing humanity. The gentlemen of science. The distinguished fellows of the royal societies.

Her mouth went dry. There were literally
hundreds
of them.

Her first impulse was to run for her life. Her second was to close her eyes and fight the first impulse. And her third—the one that always came to her rescue—was the urge to seize what had caused her to quail, examine it, experience it, and ultimately make it yield up some sort of benefit. Knowledge, confidence, joy, adventure … her grandfather had taught her there were treasures waiting beyond the forbidding barriers of the unknown. And if there was anything Celeste Ashton loved, it was an adventure with a promise of treasure.

Grappling with the blend of tension and excitement inside her, she watched the royal societies streaming into the hall, and was stunned to realize that they were all men. A veritable tidal wave of men. No, she told herself, these were scientists—real scientists. They shared the same love of learning, pursued the same goal she did … truth. They weren’t so different from her.

But as they shook hands and slapped shoulders and roared greetings at one another, she was struck by the uniformity of their dress—black or charcoal suits, starched collars, and silk ties denoting old school affiliations—and by the preponderance of silver or missing hair among them. In fact, there was only one full head of dark hair in the first several rows of the audience. Her eyes lingered on that head for a moment, registering that it was higher than the others, then moved on. Up from her assembling audience wafted a mélange of scent: stale tobacco, recently imbibed port, a peculiar tart,
sweatlike musk, and the occasional whiff of mentholatum. Foreign sounds. Foreign smells.

Her stomach tightened. These might be fellow scientists, but they were also unequivocably men. And just now she had never felt more aware of the fact that she was a woman. The only woman in the room.

Most of the seats were filled by the time the society secretary called the meeting to order. When he welcomed as guests both the fellows of the Royal Zoological Society and their esteemed speaker, every motion and every utterance in the hall stilled.

Celeste took the podium, clutching her notes and a copy of her book, and stared—cotton-mouthed—at several hundred serious male faces. The scattered and desultory applause caused a disconcerting thud in her chest. She sipped from the glass of water on the stand.

“I am honored, indeed, to be asked to address this meeting of two distinguished royal societies. I bring to you a body of observations on the nature and habits of bottlenose dolphins, made over a number of years and in two distinctly different climates and locations.”

She could have sworn she heard someone mutter: “A number of years? She’s scarcely been alive that long.”

Rattled, she glanced at her notes, pretending not to have heard. “Perhaps it would be helpful if I detailed something of how I came to learn about aquatic life. From a very early age, I accompanied my grandfather, Sir Martin Ashton, to the locations of his archaeological fieldwork in the Azores and Canary Islands. While there, I was required to maintain a strenuous daily regimen of studies, but I still frequently found myself with too much time on my hands.”

More mutters. “I’ll say” and “’At’s what comes of permissiveness with young females” seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere in particular.

“Our cook was a wonderful Portuguese woman, who took me to the markets with her and introduced me to her brother, a local fisherman. At first, he allowed me to watch
him and his crew sort their catch and answered my questions. After a while, he permitted me to help them do the sorting. Before long, I was allowed to accompany them on short fishing trips. It was from that generous and knowledgeable fisherman that I learned the basics of sailing and navigation, the practice of diving, and something about the habits of common commercial fishes. However, when I reached the age of twelve years, I was dry-docked by my grandmother. ”