A Dangerous Collaboration (Veronica Speedwell #4)(4)
The viscount held up a hand. “Not entirely extinct, as it happens.”
My heart began to thump solidly within my chest as a warm flush rose to my cheeks. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that there are still specimens in the wild. Do you know the origins of the name?”
I recited the facts as promptly and accurately as a schoolgirl at her favorite lesson. “Oleria romillia was named for Euphrosyne Romilly, one of the greatest lepidopterists in our nation’s history. She founded the West Country Aurelian Society, the foremost body of butterfly hunters in Britain until it merged with the Royal Society of Aurelian Studies in 1852. She discovered this particular glasswing on the coast of Cornwall.”
“Off the coast of Cornwall,” the viscount corrected. “As it happens, the Romillys own an island there, St. Maddern’s, just out from the little port town of Pencarron.”
“A tidal island?” I asked. “Like St. Michael’s Mount?” The Mount was one of Cornwall’s most famous attractions, rising out of the sea in a shaft of grey stone, reaching ever upwards from its narrow foundation. On sunny days it was overrun with parties of picnickers and seaside tourists and other undesirables.
The viscount shook his head. “Not precisely. St. Michael’s is accessible on foot via a causeway whilst St. Maddern’s Isle is a little further out to sea and significantly larger than the Mount. There are extensive gardens as well as a village, farms, a few shops, a quarry, even an inn for the occasional traveler seeking solitude and peace. It is a unique place, with all sorts of legends and faery stories, none of which interest me in the slightest, so I cannot recall them. What I do recall is that the Romilly Glasswing makes its home upon this island, and nowhere else in the world. And this has been an excellent year for them. They have appeared in record numbers, I am told, and they dot the island like so many flowers.”
I caught my breath, my lips parted as if anticipating a kiss. Nothing left me in such a heightened state of expectancy than the thought of finding a butterfly I had never before seen in the wild. And glasswings! The most unique of all the butterflies, they traveled on wings as transparent as Cinderella’s slipper. Ordinary butterflies derive their color from scales, infinitesimally small and carrying all the colors of the rainbow within them, reflecting back the jewel tones associated with the most magnificent butterflies. Moths and more restrained specimens of butterfly have scales with softly powdered hues, but the most arresting sight is by far the butterfly without any scales at all. The wings of these butterflies are crystalline in their clearness, patterned only with narrow black veins like the leaded glass of a cathedral window, the thinnest of membranes stretching between them. It seems impossible that they can fly, but they do, like shards of glass borne upon the wind. Their unique wings make them delicate and elusive, and the Romilly Glasswing was the most delicate and elusive of all. The largest of the glasswings, an adult Romilly could span a man’s hand if he were lucky enough to catch one. I lusted for them as I had lusted for little else in my life. But it was no use to me.
I forced a smile to my lips. “How kind of you to share this information,” I said in a toneless voice. “But I no longer hunt, my lord. My specimens from Madeira were all gathered after their natural demise. I have lost the drive to thrust a pin into the heart of a living creature. My efforts are directed towards the vivarium that Lord Rosemorran is graciously permitting me to develop on the estate.”
Once the derelict wreck of a grand freestanding glasshouse, the vivarium had been my own pet project, undertaken at Stoker’s suggestion. While he tinkered happily with bits of fur and bone and sawdust, I had been permitted to stock the restored structure with exotic trees and the larvae of a number of specimens. I had nurtured them carefully as any mother, bringing several species to life in my bejeweled little world.
“You should know that better than anyone,” I reminded the viscount. “You were kind enough to send me a grove of hornbeams and luna moths to feast upon them.”
The viscount crossed one long leg over the other, smoothing the crease in his trousers. “I remember it well. You gave me quite the education upon the subject of the luna moth. What was it you said? That they have no mouths because they exist only to reproduce? One is not certain whether to regard them with envy or pity.”
He arched a brow at me and I gave him a quelling look. “Precisely,” I told him, my voice crisp. “And while I am glad to hear the Romilly Glasswing is not extinct, I must leave its pursuit to others.”
The words pained me. I had only within the last year discovered in myself a reluctance to carry on my life’s work as I had always known it. The pursuit of the butterfly had given my existence meaning and pleasure, but it had dried up for reasons I did not entirely understand. Madeira had been an experiment after a fashion, a short expedition to test my mettle. And I had failed to conquer my reluctance to kill. The few inadequate specimens I had brought back had made the entire affair pointless, and I could not justify further expeditions if I had no better expectations than the results I had achieved there. It chilled me to think that I might never strike out again, net in hand, for foreign climes and exotic lands. The notion of being forever immured in Britain, this too-often grey and sodden isle, was more than I could bear. So I did not think of it. I pushed the thought away whenever it occurred, but it had crept back over and over again as our ship had neared England, returning me to the complacent little life I had built within these walls. It teased the edge of my consciousness as I drifted off to sleep each night, that little demanding voice from a place that longed for adventure. What if this is all there is?