Outside, the young boys snort in their snouts while inside the grown men sweat and scowl. They feel bored, cheated, and the sun is now positively baking the room, and the Brontës, shaking their fur coats as though wishing to toss them from their bodies, begin idiotically barking at the door leading up to Downing’s flat.

It is not long before everyone starts filing out.

The Gentlemen walk perhaps a bit too quickly away from Downing’s shop, and when the others in line, from the Priests to the Sweepers, see the Gentlemen flee, when they see the men’s faces, all pink and downcast, they, one by one, decide it’s not worth it, it’s too hot out, and away they go; the lines hugging the shop splinter, peel off, until only four people remain: Rebecca Ostlet, noted prosthetic specialist Harold Skinner, Walter Potter, and a corpulent German man with tiny hands, pouchy cheeks, and a wispy, mal-grown Imperial mustache that looks vaguely pubic.

“I’m Potter,” Walter Potter says, offering a hand to Harold Skinner. “At last we meet.”

“I’m Skinner,” says Harold Skinner. “Not Downing. If you would like to buy the aardvark, I’m here to take bids.”

Walter Potter regards Harold Skinner with surprise. “Downing’s not here?” he asks.

Skinner affirms that, no, he is not.

Walter Potter leans over the aardvark, inspecting Downing’s craft, and Rebecca watches his hands move artfully over the pelage, feeling for seams, but Downing has worked the seams with a size 25 waxed needle, no bigger than a quilting pin, and Walter Potter, himself sporting a truly regal set of ginger-blond muttonchops, loudly breathes in and out over his mustache as he whispers, “It’s beautiful,” and handles the aardvark’s kangaroo tail like it’s a great, caught fish. The legs are like trunks. “It is truly nature,” he says, and moves his face to the face of the aardvark, at which point he stands up, startled.

He asks Rebecca and Skinner if they know what Downing did with the eyes.

In the sunlight of Titus Downing’s taxidermy shop, Richard Ostlet’s blue irises bulge.

“The eyeball can only be preserved in animals locally sourced,” Potter says, and goes on to inquire how Downing preserved the eyes from a creature from Africa. Was it immersion in Mueller’s Fluid for three whole weeks? Or maybe some kind of humectant, made from isopropyl alcohol? Or were the eyes frozen solid in ice and salt until sliced into lateral halves, then placed into a chloral solution before being placed into a glycerin solution? Does anyone know?

Rebecca Ostlet looks closer. Wild mammals, far as she knows, have brown eyes, and only human beings—or perhaps the rare dog or goat she has seen—have blue eyes, and blue eyes do not occur in the wild, she recalls from one of Richard’s lectures as she realizes, with horror, what the pale, ghoulish taxidermist has done.

“Are you all right, madam,” Walter Potter asks, and he and Harold Skinner each take hold of one of Lady Ostlet’s arms.