Not far from where Ross was now standing was a fallen oak tree. He moved quietly towards this, not wanting to frighten away the capercaillie, and sat down. Though beautiful in itself, with its shining green breast and the flash of red above its eye – its beauty somehow made more intense because these birds had been extinct in England and had only been reintroduced there a few years before by landowners who primarily wished to shoot them for sport – the capercaillie had immediately brought before Ross’s eyes fond images of his younger brother. He saw Edmund’s tall, gangly frame, running along a lane with his butterfly net. He saw his blond hair, ruffled by the wind. He saw his careful and steady hands pinning beetles to his cork boards. He heard his shouts of joy.

Edmund had been away for a year, on a mission – in the footsteps of his hero, Alfred Russel Wallace – to study the flora and fauna of the islands of the Malay Archipelago. The young man doubted that he could make a glorious name for himself as a mere collector – with no revolutionary theory about evolution with which to dazzle the scientific world – but he’d told Valentine that his heart nevertheless beat with longing at the thought of his adventure.

Edmund Ross believed he had a true calling towards botanical and zoological study, and he hoped to discover at least some new species on Borneo or Celebes that had never before been catalogued. He counted upon finding and dispatching ‘viable specimens, showing the region’s unimaginable variety’ to Kew Gardens and to Mr Richard Owen, superintendent of the Natural History Department of the British Museum. He’d acquired an agent, Mr Stephen Chancellor, who instructed him in the preservation of animal skins and insects in spirit-filled casks and who would make sure that, once arrived in England, these reached their destinations. Though Chancellor announced that he would pay himself one third of the money offered by the London institutions ‘on account of mighty work and trouble’, he had also promised Edmund high prices, provided his specimens were ‘first rank and by no means decayed’.

Edmund Ross had studied at exhaustive length William Wood’s 1821 Illustrations of the Linnaean Genera of Insects and was himself a good draughtsman. His infrequent letters to Valentine, together with his casks of specimens, put aboard slow vessels from Sarawak to Singapore, where they waited for merchant ships bound for England, had included beautiful drawings of butterflies, scorpions, leeches, beetles, bats, moths, centipedes and caterpillars. One letter described with awe Edmund’s ascension of Mount Ophir on Borneo. ‘Here,’ said this letter, ‘with low cloud making the air so humid that breathing seemed difficult, I found true wonders, including a pitcher plant nourishing itself on its collection of drowned insects.’

But a recent letter, dated September, found him at Kuching, ‘where’, wrote Edmund, ‘I have been balked in my intention of journeying on to the Aru Islands, where Wallace found the Birds of Paradise, by succumbing to Malaria. I lie in a hammock and sweat and groan. One night, I woke to find a rat licking the salt sweat from the soles of my feet.’