Betina Krahn (36 page)

“Well?” The grizzled middle-aged fellow in a frayed captain’s coat and sagging hat slid onto the planking bench beside him. “Wot happened?”

“The bitch won’t do it.” Bentley glanced around and spoke in low, tightly clipped tones. “We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

“But I tho’t ye said she wus ripe fer the pickin’,” the captain snarled. “Ye said ye could get her to lead them dolphins straight into th’ nets.”

“I said, she’s
out,”
Bentley snapped.

“What’ll we do now?” the captain demanded, looking around them to see if anyone was close enough to hear.

“We’ll have to take them by ourselves.”

“Us? How d’we do that?”

“It won’t be that difficult.” He smiled at the captain’s skeptical look. “She’s trained the damned beasts to come to her call. But they don’t have to know that she’s not the one doing the calling.”

THE NEXT MORNING
Celeste made herself go down to the dock to get her training equipment, even though it meant passing the skeleton of her sunken boat. With her arms full of floats, balls, hoops, and her journals, she paused to stare down at it, feeling that its demise somehow marked the passing of an era in her life. Being out on the sea in that boat was more than a way to study dolphins. It had been a link with her deceased parents and her beloved grandfather. As long as she could sail in the same craft they had sailed and enjoy the same coastline and savor the same wind, sun, and sea … she could still feel their presence and they had stayed alive for her.

Now, the means for that special communion was gone, and she couldn’t help feeling that the innocence and joy of her youth was gone with it, thanks to Bentley. She was a woman now, with responsibilities and duties and work to do.

She headed for the beach, set out her equipment, donned her whistle, and stripped her smock. There weren’t any fins visible in the water this morning, but she waded into the water and blew her whistle anyway. The group was often out of the cove in the morning, feeding, but they sometimes left an adult female behind to look after the babies. Since it was
the babies that interested her this morning, she continued to blow her whistle and to scan the surface for a sign of them.

Half an hour later, she donned her smock again and headed for the boathouse to get her tin “drum.” An hour of intermittent calling produced no dolphins. Puzzled, she took her spyglass up the cliff to the promontory where the great prehistoric stones stood. From that vantage point she could see the cove, and the coast on either side for some distance. There was no sign of dolphins, but she did spot that fishing boat she had seen yesterday as she and Bentley were coming back to the cove. It was under full sail, heading toward the channel, and she was relieved to see it go.

Through the afternoon she called Prospero and the others, with no success. Her dolphins seemed to have vanished. She thought of their migration patterns in previous years. According to her data, it was more than a month before they would leave for more favorable winter climes.

Nana heard her repeated calling and came down to the beach to see what was happening.

“I can’t seem to raise them at all,” she explained, trying to suppress the alarm rising in her. “Perhaps they ventured farther out than usual while feeding and got distracted. Perhaps they met some other bottlenoses and stopped for a bit of fun.” She looked at Nana with a question in her eyes.

“They’ll come, dear,” Nana said, putting an arm around her and turning her toward the house. “You’ll see. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning and the naughty beasties will be all over the cove.”

But they didn’t come the next morning. Or the morning after that.

Every day for the next week Celeste called and scanned and searched. The Bass brothers took her out in their boat to look for them. Pained by the sight of Celeste’s worry, the Atlanteans even tried one of their dolphin-calling ceremonies, hoping to raise them. Nothing seemed to work.

“How could they all have disappeared without a trace?” she asked the Atlanteans who had gathered to consult on the
problem and commiserate. No one had an answer, or at least an answer that wouldn’t deepen Celeste’s worries.

That night, Celeste went down to the dock by herself and called her dolphins for hours, praying they would return to the cove. But between rounds of calling, on the dock, she scanned the waves with burning eyes and realized that they might not come again for a long time … if ever.

It was almost too much to bear. She pulled her knees up and buried her face in her arms, sobbing and feeling abandoned once again. It seemed as if everyone she had ever loved had abandoned her—her parents, her grandfather, Titus, and now even her beloved dolphins.

O
XFORD SLOWLY WORKED
its stultifying spell on Titus’s overburdened senses. With all the black robes, tweed coats, monochromatic classrooms, and somber libraries, there was nothing to stimulate his memories of Celeste and her dolphins, or his regrettably emotional reaction to them. With each tedious, passing day, he felt himself returning a bit more to the man he had been.

Thus, a fortnight after he resumed his duties at Cardinal College, he was finally able to sit down with pen in hand and commit to paper the particulars of his experiences with Miss Ashton’s dolphins. He adopted a spare, scientific style and listed the basic, incontrovertible facts, making no comment on
her
claims and offering neither condemnation nor praise for her work. He simply left it to the readers to draw whatever conclusions they wished.

It was either a stroke of diplomatic brilliance or a pathetic capitulation to the powers that be. At this point he didn’t care which. It was over. Finished. And he had learned a valuable lesson in scientific writing. All one had to do to be scientifically acceptable in print was to remove everything but subjects and verbs from the page.

Sir Parthenay came rushing into his lecture hall a few days later, waving a telegram, his face flushed with alarm. “Awful
news, Thorny!” He paused to catch his breath. ‘There’s been a fire at the Natural History Museum and our specimens—
your specimens
… There’s been some damage, I’m afraid.”

Titus was on the train down to London that very afternoon. He arrived just as the museum was closing and, luckily, caught the curator of the aquatic-life section on the way out of his office. The harried curator delayed his departure to show Titus the damage, which fortunately had been confined to one exhibit hall, two preparation rooms, and a storage area.

In a sooty, smoke-stained exhibit hall, Titus found a number of broken jars and smashed and ruined specimens. There were his prize squid, his puffer fish, and some of his baby sharks, lying on the floor. He felt his stomach sink.

“It could have been much worse,” the curator said. “If the preservative alcohol in your specimens had caught fire, the entire museum might have gone up in flames.”

With that small consolation, Titus promised to return in the morning to help the curator move and clean the remaining specimens; then he headed for the Bolton Arms.

The minute the porter set his bag down in his customary room, Titus felt an unwelcome rustle of memories of his last stay here. Turning on his heel, he went straight back down to the lobby, asked for a change of rooms, and had the doorman call him a cab. He proceeded to the docks, where he located one of the fishing-boat captains who secured his specimens, and gave him a list of creatures he would need to replace the damaged specimens. Then he sent a note to the School of Medicine to ask if they would have an operating theater free for his dissections.

Midway through the next morning, he strode down the second-floor hallway of the Natural History Museum holding a two-gallon specimen jar in each arm. He had removed his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and donned a rubber apron to help the curator and his assistants clean the specimen jars, evaluate the damage, and transfer them to a holding area.

Up the main stairs came a small herd of children—more than a dozen—accompanied by a pair of gray-clad women of middling years. He groaned silently, wishing the museum hadn’t decided just to carry on and remain open to the public. Try as he might, he couldn’t make it past the stairs before the children poured into the hallway and blocked his passage. He had to pause and wait while they received orders and fidgeted, eager to be off exploring.

Two intrepid young boys spotted him and the large jars he held. “What’s in there, mister?” they asked him.

“A puffer fish and a small moray eel,” Titus said, deciding to clear his own path. The boys followed and then raced around in front of him to get a look at the contents of the jars. They recoiled from the sight, their freckled faces puckering.

“E-e-ewww, yu-u-uck,” one of the little barbarians declared.

“Looks like somebody ate ’em and then puked ’em up!” the other crowed with atavistic delight. The pair broke into enthusiastic and disgustingly authentic imitations of vomiting.

The little Philistines raced off to spread their gleeful disrespect elsewhere, and Titus was left standing in the hallway with their words echoing in his head—
Yu-u-uck. Somebody … puked ’em up
.

He stalked into the temporary storage room with his face like a thundercloud, and placed the jars on a shelf. Then he backed a step and surveyed the collection. Heat shot through his veins as he studied his prize octopus, baby sharks, and eels and tube worms. He hadn’t “puked ’em up,” he had
disgorged
them from the bellies of large fish. It was a perfectly legitimate investigatory technique.

And these were perfectly splendid specimens. What if his urchins were a little bleached from the alcohol? You could still see
some
of the colors they had been. And his sunfish specimens—only a few scales and fins had fallen off and drifted to the bottom. Eels and worms
always
shriveled when
taken out of seawater. The small rays and baby sharks—he had even inserted wires to make certain they wouldn’t curl up in the jars.

“Magnificent specimens,” he declared, crossing his arms tightly. “I’d like to see
anyone
keep a large squid from deflating in a bath of alcohol!”

That afternoon, he went down to the docks to meet the boats and collect his specimens. The captain had canvassed the other fishing captains and had come up with virtually his entire list. The fish were loaded into an ice wagon and hauled across town to the medical college.

On the stone floor of the wood-paneled operating theater, Titus rolled up his sleeves and put on his rubber boots and apron. He laid out his knives and saws and scalpels, placed the metal “gut” buckets beneath the operating table, and prepared the jars of alcohol. This was his element, he told himself firmly. It would be just like old times. He would find a few specimens, make his customary measurements and notes, and have replacements back to the Natural History Museum by tomorrow evening.

“Whar d’ye want it, guv?” The old sailor who had driven the ice wagon stood at the side door of the operating theater with a good-sized shark over his shoulder and dangling down his back.

“Over here, on the table.” Titus’s stomach contracted at the sight of the smooth gray skin and sleek body. When the old fellow plopped it onto the table, he took measurements from nose to tip of tail fin, wrote a brief description in his open journal, then picked up a hefty butcher knife and sharpened it on the leather strap hanging from the table. His heart was thudding faster and he looked down to find his hands shaking.

“Wot are ye gonna do, Perfesser?” The old sailor winced as Titus made the first cut.

Puke
, Titus thought as the first wave of blood and half-digested gut smells hit him. Clenching his teeth, he fought
down the nausea and a rising bit of panic. He’d never had this trouble before. What the hell was the matter with him?

“I’m looking for specimens … evidence of what sharks eat.”

“Aww—I ken tell ye that. They eat everthin’ wot gets in their way,” the old fellow declared, holding his nose and watching as Titus began sorting through the contents of the shark’s stomach. “I seen ’em eat hunks of wood th’ ship’s carpentur tossed overboard. Ye know, I seen a man’s guts before. They kinda look like that there shark’s. Funny, ain’t it? I guess parts is parts.”

Parts is parts
. A faint ringing began in Titus’s ears as he held his breath and pulled out the shark’s last meal. A few small fish … a cod or two … and the bleached remains of a bony beak—a leftover from a former meal. It was the remnants of … a small dolphin’s head.

Suddenly, the blood on his rubber gloves, on his apron, in the pool around his feet, looked too vividly, sickeningly red. He stared at the shark … limp and splayed before him, stripped of its ferocity, its dignity, its very life. He picked up the bony skull of the little dolphin and his ribs seemed to crowd his lungs. He was suddenly struggling for breath.

“Nothing worthwhile here,” he declared, dropping the skull into the gut bucket by his feet. Frantically, he cleared away the debris and ordered the old sailor: “Help me get this carcass back to the cart.”