Should you donate your collection to us, the Smithsonian would be prepared to name a wing in your honor.

Sincerely,
Miss Annabelle Larkin
Botanical Specialist,
The Smithsonian Institution

The promise of a wing was genuine, for the director of the Smithsonian had already authorized it, and everyone knew that Dr. Norwood would barter his own grandchildren to get his hands on Gray Delacroix’s plants. Dr. Norwood’s main interest was the orchids, but he’d asked her to go after the entire collection. She didn’t understand his zeal, but she would do her best to get it for him.

This task was especially important, for her job here was only temporary. She’d been hired for a six-month position to preserve and catalog a large shipment of plants from Africa and Australia, but in a few months she would be out of work. Dr. Norwood had dangled the prize of a permanent position if she could persuade the famously reclusive Gray Delacroix to donate his extraordinary plant collection.

As she set her letter to him in the outgoing mailbox, she silently prayed for success. It was an honor to work at the Smithsonian with scientists who sought to explore and understand the world around them, and she desperately needed to keep this position. Even if it meant cooperating with people like Mr. Bittles. Her supervisor didn’t like any woman unless she was bringing him coffee or ironing his shirts. He’d been appalled when Dr. Norwood appointed her to be his assistant, but Annabelle was merely happy to have the job.

“Come, get back to work,” Mr. Bittles ordered, setting a new crate from Australia before her. The box was filled with grasses, moss, and seedpods, and it was her job to catalog them for posterity. Each plant would be dried and preserved on a sheet of parchment, its seeds packaged in an accompanying envelope, and then stored in oversized metal filing drawers. She liked to imagine that hundreds of years from now, scientists would consult these specimens, fascinated by this glimpse into the botanical treasures of the past.

“Why do you suppose Dr. Norwood is so anxious to get inside the Delacroix collection?” she asked.

“It’s all about the vanilla orchid,” Mr. Bittles replied. “He doesn’t give a fig about the other plants, only that original vanilla orchid. I don’t think it even exists anymore.”

Annabelle had already heard about Dr. Norwood’s quest to hunt down the progenitor of the modern vanilla orchid. The Spaniards came upon it when they encountered the Aztecs in the sixteenth century. They smuggled it into monasteries and overseas to the eastern spice islands, where over the centuries it had been crossbred with other varieties of vanilla and was now believed to have been hybridized out of existence. No one had seen a living example of the original vanilla orchid in over a hundred years.

Despite herself, Annabelle was intrigued. “Do you think Mr. Delacroix has one?”