Inside, upon a bed of sawdust, lay the strangest creature I had ever seen. It was a fish, I believed, but like none other: long and thin, the shape of its head was vaguely equine. I touched it with a fingertip: it had no scales but rather a hard, nobbly skin that was almost a shell; a cheek and a small dark eye at the end of a graceful curved neck; beyond the eye a long snout, so thin it resembled a young reed, with a tiny, puckered mouth at its end. More musical instrument, it seemed, than biology. The body was covered in stripes and dots of many fantastical colours: purples and yellows and russets and whites. And protruding from the margins of the long body, in the positions where one might have expected to see fins, the beast appeared, like an ornamental shrub, to bear leaves. Two sprays also emerged from under the animal’s chest, giving the impression of forepaws tucked under a kangaroo. The whole creature was perhaps ten inches long, but it contained all of the wonders of the world.

‘What is it?’ I breathed.

‘A sea dragon. Not so rare as it appears, but a beautiful specimen nonetheless. They live on the sea grasses. Lacépède: damned Frenchman. Never left Paris, but he gets this lovely thing as his legacy.’ His cynical chuckle gave way to a look of genuine wonder. ‘I am torn, you see. The specimen as a whole will bring a very high price, but on the other hand I wish to dissect it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I believe the animal is a vertebrate. See the elongation, the bilateral symmetry? Despite appearances it is a fish, not a relative of the crabs and shells. There is that desire, you understand, to take it apart and understand how it is composed.’

I looked at the wondrous thing and could muster no such urge to deconstruct. Why would one want to hear from each individual musician in the orchestra? Its beauty lay in its wholeness, in the impossible symphony of colour and shape. Divine writing had made nature from chaos.

‘The colours fade after the creature’s death. The beauty you see there will diminish.’

He stepped to the windows as he spoke, arms folded in thought. I was struck again by his unlikely physical strength, in a field that so valued thought over muscle. The silver light from outside fell on his face. I could smell the timbers of the Moonbird, the faint but inoffensive lingerings of the dead things in the room, and the sea. He spoke again, softly, inviting my trust.