As Titus Downing looks at his close friend Sir Richard Ostlet’s eyeballs floating preserved in the glass jar, he knows all of this to be true, yet there is no science that can explain how the eyeballs were taken out of Richard’s head, how they came to arrive inside his specimen box along with other scant personal items on Rebecca Ostlet’s doorstep, indeed, how they remain in such excellent shape having traveled the distance they traveled, by land and sea—and though Rebecca insists that these are Richard’s eyes because she could recognize her husband’s atypically large blue eyes anywhere, this is not, in Downing’s view, finally the point: the young, freshly widowed botanist—for who knows what reason but likely some female complication of grief and bewilderment—is keeping the man’s eyeballs locked in her secretary, with her stationery and trinkets!

When the coroners buried Richard, Rebecca explains to Downing, there was no wake, no open casket. Instead, when the coffin arrived in London from Africa it had been sealed shut, and was quickly laid to rest thus, unopened, at Kensal Green, and she now recalls for Downing the many complaints of the pallbearers, how heavy the coffin was, how it took every man on hand just to lift it, let alone to git da bleedin’ box in’er da ground, and though she believed at the time that the weight borne by the coffin was—could only be—the body of her portly husband, she now wonders aloud whether maybe that was a mistake. Not to open the coffin.

Rebecca Ostlet looks at Titus Downing, and the look she gives him is pleading. “He’s been up and down Gloucester Walk for weeks,” she tells him. “I felt I should write you.”

Downing nods. “I understand why you would write,” he says, gazing at Richard Ostlet’s optic nerves, which are floating behind the eyeballs like tiny nervous tails. “But, madam,” he continues, “you are asking me to believe in ghosts, apparitions—”

“Normally, I would agree with you,” she says, and, sweeping an arm around her living room, explains that she usually keeps plants in the windows, but an occultist instructed her to decorate the flat with roses to keep Richard away, and really go overboard about it, the occultist advised, and so she went overboard. “I have roses on the front door,” she says. “Roses in the windows. And yet still he comes.”

“I see,” says Downing.

“I think that Richard—or whatever is remaining of Richard—wants his eyes back. I think that’s why he walks. But I have no idea what to do,” Rebecca says, and smiles sadly at the Brontës, curled in sleep at her feet.

Downing nods again, for he, fighting off his own terrible personal sadness over the prospect of having lost Richard, has already formulated a plan: he explains to the woman that, quite conveniently, he has an appointment with Harold Skinner the next morning, a noted specialist in prosthetics, and if it may help her situation, with her permission, Downing would gladly bring the eyes to Dr. Skinner and ask his opinion? About what might have happened to Richard? About what to do?