Part 12 (1/2)
”How did you meet, if you don't mind my asking? You're a professional photographer and you've spent most of your career overseas with a news agency.” His eyes crinkled with amus.e.m.e.nt. ”Don't look so surprised. You didn't think I wasn't going to look you up, did you? Your photographs, by the way, are stunning.”
”Thank you.” I'd looked him up, too. I just hadn't expected him to be this direct. ”A mutual friend, a Jesuit priest, introduced us years ago and we became friends. How about you?”
”I saw him when our paths crossed at various conferences over the past few years, but I only started working at Monticello the week before Thanksgiving so I didn't really get to know him until he came here for a month in January.” He sipped his coffee and added as if it were an afterthought, ”What brought you to me? I mean, besides the letter?”
”I saw your name listed along with Kevin's as one of the speakers at a conference at the Botanic Garden . . . 'Losing Paradise.' Plus I knew Kevin was here in January doing research.”
He set down his mug and folded his hands on his desk. ”Tell me about this letter.”
I realized then that he hadn't known about it before I contacted him and that Kevin hadn't confided in him. But if I expected any help, I had no choice but to do as he asked.
”It's a letter from John Fairbairn, the head of the Chelsea Physic Garden, to a Leesburg doctor named Francis Pembroke,” I said. ”It was written in April 1807 and it's rather long.”
He arched one eyebrow. ”Did you bring it?”
”A copy, not the original.”
I got it out of my camera bag and pa.s.sed it to him. He picked up a pair of gla.s.ses and read while I drank my coffee and watched him. Though he kept his face neutral, I could see his eyes flicking back and forth over the page as though he was either surprised or startled by what he read, and my own heart started beating faster.
When he had finished, he looked up. ”May I ask where the original is?”
”I don't have it.”
He smiled like a patient teacher waiting for a student to figure out the right answer to the question. I smiled back.
”Look,” he said, ”let me tell you something about Kevin. Here at Monticello we're trying to restore Thomas Jefferson's garden to what it was in his day, no mean feat because Jefferson grew three hundred and thirty types of vegetables. You might think a man who kept a detailed Garden Book for nearly forty years and wrote twenty thousand letters in his lifetime would have meticulously recorded the proper names for the plants he grew, but you'd be wrong. Jefferson had a habit of describing plants by their appearance or some identifying characteristic-like 'the flowering pea of the plains of Arkansas'-that has made trying to figure out what he meant something of a botanic treasure hunt. We wouldn't be nearly so far along as we are if it weren't for Kevin, who was tireless in helping my predecessor and, for the last few months, helping me track down some of those lost plants.” He leaned forward, palms squarely on his desk, and looked me in the eye. ”So if I can do something to repay a debt Monticello owes Kevin, I'd like to do it.”
”I see.”
He sat back and folded his arms across his chest. ”So that's my story. What's yours? And, while I'm at it, how'd you get hold of the letter? Kevin was in touch a few weeks ago asking questions I now realize had to do with it. He didn't say a word about this”-he tapped the letter-”so I figure he had a reason for keeping it quiet. Now he's dead and you show up. Are you working on a newspaper or magazine story maybe?”
The folksiness in his drawl was gone. He thought I was trying to cash in on Kevin somehow.
I straightened up in my chair and looked him in the eye. ”No. It's nothing like that.”
”Then what is it?”
I told him about finding Kevin the other day in the monastery garden, his fears of being stalked, and my belief that his death was somehow tied to the letter.
When I was finished, Ryan said in a stunned voice, ”Good Lord, Kevin thought someone was after him? Who would do something like that?”
”I don't know. But the letter was inside a Solander box with a book. Adam in Eden.”
”Are you implying the book also had something to do with his death?”
”I think it's possible. That's why I'm here. I was hoping you could tell me about Francis Pembroke. And about Adam in Eden.”
Ryan looked perplexed. ”I know the book, of course. The author was William Coles. Jefferson didn't own a copy, but I'm sure he knew about it. He used Philip Miller's Gardeners Dictionary, which was published a century later, as his primary gardening reference. Miller's book was a cla.s.sic, far more than Coles's was. Anyone who was a serious gardener in those days had a copy of Miller's dictionary. Jefferson owned three editions, including the last one in which Miller finally began using the new Linnaean system of binomial nomenclature.”
From high school biology I dredged up binomial nomenclature. ”The Latin system for naming plants?”
”Actually for naming and cla.s.sifying all living things. Unfortunately, Jefferson didn't use it or we'd know what we were looking for in his garden.”
”And who was Philip Miller?”
”Curator at the Chelsea Physic Garden in London during the 1700s. One of the most influential botanists of his time. He was succeeded by William Forsyth-for whom forsythia was named-and John Fairbairn succeeded him.”
”Why would the head of the Chelsea Physic Garden be writing to a doctor in Leesburg, Virginia? It was obviously an ongoing correspondence. Who was Francis Pembroke?”
Ryan stood and got the coffeepot, holding it up by way of asking if I wanted a refill.
I shook my head, so he filled his own mug. ”Francis Pembroke was a wealthy physician who, as you already know, was a cousin of Meriwether Lewis. Before Lewis and Clark left on their western expedition, Thomas Jefferson, who got Congress to fund this journey, insisted Lewis have some medical training to equip him for whatever might come up in the wilderness. So Jefferson asked Francis Pembroke to train Lewis. In return, and as thanks, Jefferson gave Pembroke many of the new and unknown herbs Lewis and Clark brought or sent back, which would be of obvious interest to a colonial doctor who treated his patients with herbal remedies. Jefferson also asked Pembroke to see whether he could cultivate anything, or what use he could make of these new plants.”
”There was a pressed plant in Kevin's copy of Adam in Eden,” I said. ”It was on the page that described hyssop, the plant John Fairbairn said Francis Pembroke misidentified.”
Ryan gave me a thoughtful look, rubbing his fingers across his lips as though he were considering something. He picked up the letter. ”I'd like to make a copy of this.”
”Go right ahead.”
When he was done, he returned my copy and said, ”You still haven't told me where the original is. Though, presumably, it's with the book.”
”I don't own the book or the letter, so an antiques dealer friend made arrangements for them to be stored in the vault of another dealer whose specialty is rare books. They're quite safe.”
”How did you get hold of them in the first place?”
”I had the key to a locker where Kevin kept them.”
”And-?”
”And I found the book and brought it to my friend.” We were still dancing around, but he'd pushed hard enough. I hadn't told him about the hand-colored prints or that the book belonged to Isaac Newton. But until the th.o.r.n.y matter of who now owned it was sorted out, the fewer people who knew, the better.
”Look,” I said, ”Kevin didn't get to finish something he started. I want to help out if I can, do something in memory of a dear friend. That's all.”
He gave me a long a.s.sessing look. ”Let's go see the garden. Afterward I want to show you something in the mansion.”
”I'd like that. But does the 'something in the mansion' pertain to the letter? Because you haven't explained to me why it was significant to Kevin.”
He gave me an enigmatic smile. ”No, I haven't.” He pointed to my camera bag. ”Take that with you. We won't be coming back here.”
I obeyed and followed him outside. Though Charlottesville is a hundred miles south of Was.h.i.+ngton, give or take, the trees were as bare as they were at home and the gra.s.s was the washed-out yellow-green it always is at the end of winter. Thomas Jefferson's beloved mansion came into view, long and low with its octagonal dome and neocla.s.sical lines reflecting his love of ancient Rome and the elegant symmetry of Palladian architecture.
”First we're going over to the west lawn,” Ryan said, ”the side of the house you see on the back of a nickel, and then to the vegetable garden before we go inside the mansion. By the time we're through, you'll know as much as I do about why Kevin thought the letter was important.”
I had seen a few tourists at the gift shop on this damp, gray day as we walked over to the west lawn, but just now Monticello seemed deserted and we had the wide gravel path that Ryan called ”the winding flower walk” to ourselves. Today there were only some early heirloom tulips, daffodils, and rosemary in bloom, and the brilliant yellow of the forsythia.
Halfway around the flower walk when the mansion was directly across the lawn from us, Ryan stopped and pointed down. ”Look.”
A bra.s.s plaque, maybe twelve inches in diameter, was set into the ground. CORPS OF DISCOVERY II-200 YEARS TO THE FUTURE formed a ring around two hands extended in friends.h.i.+p, a peace pipe crossed over a tomahawk, and the words PEACE AND FRIENDs.h.i.+P.
”It's based on the original silver peace medal Jefferson had the mint make for Lewis and Clark to trade,” Ryan said as I knelt to photograph it. ”The marker commemorates the two hundredth anniversary of the day he wrote Congress asking for funds for their trip.”