The hunter had held his swaying cock like it was a baby chick.

“Nature,” Ostlet said the hunter had said, as he began to work him, “unlike Man, does nothing in vain. God is Nature, and because God is Nature, he created nothing in vain. Therefore, the soul can never expire. It is immortal and in perpetual transit.”

“The next morning,” Ostlet continued, “the hunter showed me the aardvark, and I was feeling god-awful. It was brutally hot out. My eyes felt as though they might disengage completely, and the pain was, I must say, intolerable.” He explained to Downing how looking at the large dead aardvark had filled him with melancholy, for the aardvark, for himself, for Downing, for all this bloody wasted time, but how there was also beauty. He remembered what the hunter had said the previous evening, and the idea of what was possible began to take shape:

“That night I awoke and took camphor and whiskey—but not to die,” he said, “just to numb myself for the procedure,” and early the next morning, after the hunter told everyone that Sir Richard was dead, leaving them to their sorrow, he returned to his own tent, far away from the British tents, where Ostlet, half-conscious, awaited him.

“The hunter stuck a small rod of iron into a fire, then severed and burned my ocular nerve bundles. The man,” Ostlet told Downing, “literally cut the eyes out from my head. Put them into a jar of some kind of glycerin and formaldehyde—the hunter’s ‘own preservative solution,’ or so he said—and then he put the jar into my specimen cabinet.”

The aardvark was sent, via Ostlet’s assistant, to Titus Downing. The cabinet, unfortunately and quite by accident, went to Rebecca Ostlet.

“I stayed in Africa with the hunter a while longer to recover,” Ostlet said, and he ordered the construction of a coffin, a sealed coffin, to be sent back to London, as proof of his death.

“What was in it,” said Downing.

“The coffin was empty,” said Ostlet. “But when it arrived in London, it was believed by all not to be empty,” and went on to explain that the wood used to build it was an extremely heavy African wood, a unique Combretum imberbe known to exist only in southern Africa under the common name Leadwood, and it is a tree which can live for a thousand years, the hunter told him, and the Herero and the Namaqua, they all worship the tree, as to them Leadwood is the great healer, a shared ancestor of Animal and Man.

“When I was well enough,” he said, “I returned first to London, to Gloucester Walk. I had rather hoped to catch a moment when Rebecca was out of the house, so I could go in—so I might save Rebecca from opening the cabinet, from finding my—” and there Richard stopped short. “But she never left,” he said. And though he walked by their flat several times, widows, he knew, they could grieve for a full year, never leaving home, and so Ostlet, upon hearing the bark of the Brontës whenever he passed, upon smelling the roses which filled their flat, assumed she had returned to her botany, become a rosarian and was perfectly content, and about this, Downing did not correct him.