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  Steller’s Orchid

  Steller’s Orchid

  a novel

  Thomas McGuire

  Steller’s Orchid

  Copyright © 2019 by Thomas McGuire

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner.

  Book design by Mark E. Cull

  ISBN 978-1-59709-860-1 (tradepaper)

  The National Endowment for the Arts, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, the Ahmanson Foundation, the Dwight Stuart Youth Fund, the Max Factor Family Foundation, the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Foundation, the Pasadena Arts & Culture Commission and the City of Pasadena Cultural Affairs Division, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the Audrey & Sydney Irmas Charitable Foundation, the Kinder Morgan Foundation, the Meta & George Rosenberg Foundation, the Allergan Foundation, and the Riordan Foundation partially support Red Hen Press.

  First Edition

  Published by Boreal Books

  an imprint of Red Hen Press

  www.borealbooks.org

  www.redhen.org

  CONTENTS

  PART 1: Seattle, 1977

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  PART 2: Nome

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  PART 3: Ugashik

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  PART 4: Unga

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  PART 5: Nagai

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  Biographical Note

  PART I

  Seattle, 1977

  Ignoranti, quem portum petat, nullus suus ventus est.

  If one does not know to which port one is sailing no wind is favorable.

  —Seneca

  “You need to use the full range from dark to bright in every drawing. The hand only needs pencil pressure but the eye has to understand and that takes longer.”

  The portfolio was part of Alyson’s art school application. I turned another page as she watched with uncharacteristic diffidence. She wore tattered jeans and a thrift-shop flannel shirt. Her hair, once cut short and dyed lavender, was growing back to blonde. She looked nothing at all like her namesake grandmother, my sister Alyson.

  I stopped at a sketch of a girl sitting on a driftwood log on an otherwise empty beach, her face turned away. A commonplace subject, the kind of artwork you would find at any street fair, but Alyson had used a focal point that would never have occurred to me. She had tucked the image in one corner, making the empty space the real story.

  “This is really good,” I said to her. “You’ve gone way past me.”

  “I like your work, Uncle John. You’ve got a great sense of line.”

  “I’m a good draftsman but never an artist.” Alyson gave me a wry look as though I was fishing for a compliment but I was not. For a long time I had attempted nothing beyond illustrations for my botany work. I felt a pang of envy for Alyson’s talent. And for her youth.

  “One thing you still need to learn is that light can cast its own shadow.”

  “How’s that work?” Alyson wrinkled her nose.

  “Just watch a campfire, or a guttering candle.”

  “You’re being a little obscure.”

  “Some things you can’t learn in a classroom. I found out about light and dark a long way from school. In Alaska when I was your age.”

  “You mention Alaska a lot but then change the subject whenever I ask anything.”

  “The Arctic plays tricks with light and dark. So does memory.” Her drawing of the girl on the beach had struck too close to home.

  “Uncle John, I want to know what happened.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We’ve got all night.”

  “Okay, but for once you have to listen. Just listen.”

  CHAPTER 1

  I had to lie and threaten blackmail to get the job, which may have been why the gods frowned on it from the beginning. I was supposed to clerk in my father’s law office that summer, work that I loathed. When the botany department posted an offering for a plant survey in southwestern Alaska I thought I might have found my ticket out. And so, in New Haven, Connecticut, on the last day of March, 1924, I walked up Hillhouse Avenue toward the home of Professor and Mrs. Walter Arbuthnot.

  The maid who answered the door led me to a book-lined study. The professor was seated in a wheelchair, looking through a window at an elm tree still gaunt with winter. He turned his chair and considered me as though judging a horse.

  “John Lars Nelson,” he said after a long moment. “You are from Seattle?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And your family has connections with the Alaskan fisheries?”

  “Well, sir.” I cleared my throat and skated onto thin ice. “My grandfather built a cannery in Bristol Bay as an extension of our Puget Sound packing business. I grew up working on the boats. When Grandfather died two years ago the family sold the business but my father’s law firm still handles their accounts.”

  “Bristol Bay, you say?”

  “Yes, sir. At Pilot Point on the Ugashik River.” I was being a bit devious. In my application letter I had mentioned that my family once owned a cannery in Alaska and that I had worked on a company fish tender. Both statements were true, but the implied connection was not. My work in the company fleet had been in Puget Sound. I had never visited Alaska, never been north of Seattle. My only connection with Pilot Point had been watching the big windjammers depart in the spring with the Norwegian and Italian fishermen and the Chinese cannery workers, then return in the fall with the season’s pack. I had hoped to work in Ugashik during my college summers but once the canneries were sold the law office became my fate.

  The professor continued to study me. “Do you know the work of Georg Wilhelm Steller?” he asked.

  “Steller? No, sir.” The name was not at all familiar.

  “A very gifted man. He was ship’s doctor and naturalist on Bering’s Alaska expedition in 1741. The voyage itself was a bit of a fiasco. Bering lost contact with his second ship and made only two landfalls, first at Cape St. Elias, and then further west in the Shumagin Islands, the area that interests us now.” Arbuthnot gestured at a map pinned to the wall. It showed a group of about a dozen small islands scattered like windblown seeds near the beginning of the Aleutian chain.

  “Bering stopped to fill the ship’s water barrels. A seaman named Nikita Shumagin died of scurvy and was buried ashore. Bering named the island for him but over time the name shifted to the entire group. The island where they landed is now called Nagai, a name I had never heard till six months ago.”

  “Nagai.” I tried the name on my tongue, dark and bitter as an acorn.

  “Steller was able to botanize onshore, but his collection was lost in the wreck of the St. Peter.”

  “They were shipwrecked?”

  “On a small island off the Siberian Coast. Bering died that winter but come spring the survivors built a small boat from the wreckage and made it back to Petropavlovsk. Steller was among them but died not long after in mysterious circumstances. But the shipwreck is not important. What matters is Naga
i.”

  Arbuthnot rolled his wheelchair over to a work table with obvious effort. On campus he more commonly used crutches. The squeak of their rubber tips and the rasp of his breath heralded his passage down the corridors of the biology building. He was a bit of an outlier there, not an academic botanist but a plant hunter who had somehow become director of the Marsh Botanical Garden, the college’s botanical facility. Arbuthnot was British but had grown up in India and worked around South Asia. No one knew how he had secured his appointment.

  I was an outsider as well, and not just because I was from the West Coast. I had entered college as an art major. I quickly found that I had no real talent but was good at natural history drawing. I did a series of life-cycle drawings for the museum and gradually drifted into a botany major. But even that was low-status. At Yale all of us science majors were shunted to the Sheffield School to keep us away from the soon-to-be lawyers and stockbrokers, in case science was contagious. Even my class designation, 1925S, carried the scarlet letter.

  Still breathing heavily, Arbuthnot unfolded a map of Nagai on top of the table and beckoned me closer. I bent to study the map. The island was shaped something like an oak leaf—elongated but deeply lobed, a series of headlands and deep, narrow bays. On the south end of the island there was a promontory connected to the main island by a threadlike spit named Saddlers Mistake. On the north end was a similar, though broader, spit named Pirate’s Shake. Between the two stretched a convoluted coastline.

  “A complex topography,” Arbuthnot said as if following my thoughts. “Searching it will be difficult but that is what we want you to do. The brief for the expedition authorizes a survey of the Alaska Peninsula and neighboring islands but that’s something of a subterfuge. The real focus will be Nagai.”

  “Because Bering landed there?”

  “Because of what Steller found.” Arbuthnot sat back and steepled his fingers. “Steller came my way by chance. My wife collects botanical art. Her special interest is orchids, particularly Chinese brush-and-ink drawings. Last year a dealer in Shanghai wrote her about a very fine Ch’ing Dynasty drawing that had come on the market. From the estate of a White Russian named Zagoskin. Audrey purchased it but it arrived in a bulky European frame. When she had it reframed a packet of letters was discovered behind the mat. Letters that Steller wrote to his wife, Brigitta Helena, in 1741.”

  “Zagoskin,” I said, lost in the swirl of strange names and places. “How did he end up with the letters? Was he related to the wife?”

  “Who can say? Not much is known of Brigitta Helena. She had planned to accompany Steller to Kamchatka but for some reason turned back at Moscow. He never saw her again.” Arbuthnot paused for a moment. “I think we can infer she was a bit of a handful. Steller was quite young when he first came to St. Petersburg. He studied under a Dr. Daniel Messerschmidt and when the man died Steller promptly married his widow. Fell under her spell somehow. You can’t help but wonder . . .”

  A soft knock at the door interrupted him. A woman entered the study, dressed in coat and hat as though she had just come in from the street. “Walter, I hope I’m not too late,” she said. “Town was absolutely beastly.” As she crossed the room I had a confused impression of auburn hair framing a face pale and fine as porcelain.

  “Audrey,” Arbuthnot said, “this is John Lars Nelson. John, my wife Audrey.”

  She took off her gloves and extended one hand, palm downward. I took it somewhat awkwardly. She held my hand a bit longer than customary while studying me with jade-green eyes.

  “So this is your chosen chevalier. But he is so young, Walter, to send out amongst the heathens.”

  “Older than you were on your first trip to China.”

  “China,” Mrs. Arbuthnot said. She reached up and unpinned her hat. “Let’s not get started on that subject or we’ll be late for tea. Annie has set the table in the conservatory. John, perhaps you could help Walter? I’m afraid this is one of his bad days.”

  Arbuthnot objected briefly but I took the handles of his chair and wheeled him out of the study and down a long corridor. I felt an unwilling intimacy, smelling his hair oil and feeling the heft of his body in the chair. His wife walked ahead of us. She looked a lot younger than Arbuthnot, whippet-slim and very graceful.

  The house was rather grand for a professor’s salary. The conservatory faced south. Mrs. Arbuthnot opened the glass doors and a puff of moist heat escaped like the breath of a dragon. There was a faint hiss of steam from the coiled radiators and the tiled floor lay in squares like scales. Beyond the windows the brick-walled garden lay drab and brown but the tables within held dark green plants with vivid blooms. I wheeled the professor to a glass-topped table where their maid was setting a tea service.

  “Come, John, you must have a brief tour.” Mrs. Arbuthnot beckoned me to the plant tables. “We have space here for only a few of our favorite orchids. Mostly tropical. The heat is good for Walter’s bones, and for the cattleyas, but the mountain orchids don’t fare so well.”

  She stopped to touch a bloom. “Labiata,” she said so softly she could have been speaking to herself. The plant was lavender with a full lip, its color so brilliant and petals so extravagant that it cast a spell. Was it a cattleya? I had no idea. I picked up a lump of the fibrous material that filled the boxes and rolled it in my fingers.

  “The roots of the Osmunda fern, from the Jersey pine barrens.” Mrs. Arbuthnot took my hand and pressed till I felt the moisture. “The best of all potting mediums, even for the epiphytic orchids.”

  “Audrey, would you fetch the Steller letters?” Arbuthnot interrupted. “I was just about to show John when you arrived.”

  A ripple of tension crossed the room. Audrey dropped my hand with a flicker of a smile, then turned and walked away. I watched her go; it would have been hard not to. ‘Epiphytic,’ I thought. Orchids that drank the wind.

  I sat opposite the professor as he poured tea. He had massive shoulders and the blunt, worn hands of a working man. The porcelain teapot looked frail in his grasp. The tea he poured was pale green and aromatic.

  “Dragon Well tea,” he said. “From the mountains in Chekiang province. Hard to find in New Haven. No one understands tea here. Or any other plant for that matter.” He took a sip and looked at me. “You probably know that Evan Hamilton agreed to do the survey but then had to back out. The job is a bit much for an undergraduate to tackle but it’s late now for recruiting and Evan suggested your name. Your professors speak well of you and your Alaskan connection is a strong selling point.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m pretty eager to try fieldwork.” I tried to look stalwart and capable. Evan was a graduate student and close friend. When he had given up the chance to do the survey I had twisted his arm and even threatened blackmail with his fiancée over our past escapades to make him drop my hat in the ring.

  Mrs. Arbuthnot reappeared carrying a sheaf of typescript and a packet of letters. I stood to hold her chair and caught another brief smile. The professor untied the red ribbon that bound the packet and selected a single letter. The envelope was stained and brittle but the letter appeared to be in good condition.

  “Do you know German?” Arbuthnot asked.

  “German, not Russian?”

  “The expedition was Russian but Steller was German. Bering himself was Danish. The language is not important; we have a translation for you. But I wanted you to see the original document. It’s more compelling. This is the second longest of the letters, written while they lay at anchor off Nagai.”

  He handed the letter to me. It was on two pages with closely spaced lines. The writing was angular and spiky, the letters formed oddly in slashes of black ink. Looking at it I tried to picture a small sailing vessel anchored near a bleak and rocky island, while onboard a young man wrote to a wife he would never again see.

  Arbuthnot began to read from the typescript: “I have this day returned from a walk ashore. The island is perhaps forty versts in length and mountainous, with ro
ugh gray and yellow rock covered with the green of low vegetation. I saw many birds including sea parrots, auks, and Greenland pigeons. I also saw marmots and foxes, but no larger mammals and no sign of human habitation. The island is treeless and the plants are much like those I found at Cape St. Elias but with one quite extravagant exception, my love. In a low valley I found a brilliant crimson orchid. A color like your garnet necklace, or perhaps more like rubies. The petals are full and voluptuous with a labellum slightly more than a vershok in width . . . .”

  Arbuthnot paused and lookessd at me above his glasses. “That would be about five centimeters. A not inconsiderable bloom. So, what do you make of this at first reading?”

  “I don’t know what to say. Somehow I never thought of the North as home to orchids.”

  “Orchidaceae are in fact the most widespread of all plant families, but all northern orchids have modest blooms. Steller himself described several, which brings up a troublesome point. Nowhere in the journal or his plant lists does Steller mention such a remarkable orchid, only in the letters.”

  “Are you sure the letters are real? Is the handwriting even the same?”

  “There is a photostat of Steller’s journal in the Library of Congress, made by a man named Frank Golder in Moscow seven years ago. I traveled to Washington to see it only to find that what Golder had photographed was itself a copy, written in three different hands. So there was no way to compare. But what possible reason could there be for forgery? We paid nothing for the letters, only the painting, so what is there to gain? Even if the letters were forged a century ago it makes no sense. Who was being defrauded and why? No, I’m convinced the letters are authentic. Steller simply chose to keep his find a secret. Understandable, if you know anything about orchid collecting. They are not like other plants.”

  “No, sir.” I was not an orchid fancier but I did know something of their strange world, its passions and intrigues. And I knew that the scent of orchids was akin to the scent of money.