The Coral Thief (44 page)

From my study in the attic of Kit’s house, I looked down on the long stretch of her garden, with its rose beds and gravel path twisting through tall shrubs and Mexican orange blossom, and imagined the ground elder stretching itself luxuriously under the lawn, under the iris bed, unseen in the dark. We had pulled out most of it by the end of June, but a root or tendril here and there would have clung to the root systems of other plants—the iris bulbs, the tubers of the gladioluses—so I knew we would see it again.

As I write, Grace’s grandchildren play in raincoats on the trampoline under the apple tree. Before the rose garden and the shrubs and the trampoline and the shed, before any of that, the elder had made its way up through the orchards that stood here for centuries, before Kit’s house and before all the others in this terrace were built. Kit has a sepia photograph in her kitchen of the building works for her street, a skeleton row of houses being built on the orchards. Before the orchards, there were marshes here to the south of the city, southeast of Newton’s Trinity College, and the ground elder would have rioted then in the wet earth, unrestrained. Before the orchards and marshes, Roman farmers and the gardeners of Roman villas built on this land would have kept it at bay or used it in herb gardens to make soups and broths or to cure their gout. Builders found the remains of a pretty villa under the road only a stone’s throw from here—three rooms with painted plaster walls, bright red, yellow, green, grey, and deep blue, some patterned to imitate panels of marble, a tiled roof, mortar floors, glass windows, under-floor heating built on blocks of imported chalk. It was probably the last house on the edge of the settlement, marking the boundary between civilisation and the marshlands.

Every cut in the ground elder root is a failure; every cut will make a redoubling of effort necessary. That’s how I came to understand Isaac Newton’s fear of sin, I think, and how embroiled Mr. F. became in Newton’s name, and how neither of them could stop what they had started, and, finally, how I have come to see the way the consequences of their seventeenth-century acts twisted and turned their way to us, underground and overground, splitting and redoubling. Organic and botanical.

My story, both of my stories, the police tapes in the Parkside station and the typed account I wrote for Patricia Dibb, began with Elizabeth Vogelsang’s funeral.

Now, Cameron Brown, I am starting to tell it again so that I can make you a thread for your labyrinth. Yes, I am putting the seventeenth century back into the picture. I hope you can hear me.

The Coral Thief
is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known actual people, events, and locales that figure in the narrative, all names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to current events or locales, or to living persons, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2009 by Rebecca Stott

Reading group guide copyright 2010 by Random House, Inc.
Excerpt from Ghostwalk copyright 2007 by Rebecca Stott.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Stott, Rebecca.
The coral thief: a novel / Rebecca Stott.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-385-53147-4
1. Anatomists—Fiction. 2. Evolution (Biology)—Philosophy—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6119.T69C67 2009
823′.92—dc22    2009012846

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