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biochemists said. He held her against his chest and said, “I have an enzyme for you.”
    That night, after the fire burned out, they slept for a couple of hours. Ruby woke first and watched Jonathan sleep for a while. He slept like a child, with his knees bent toward his chest and his hands clasped between his thighs. Ruby picked up the tipped-over chair and swept the fragments of broken glass onto a sheet of paper. Then she woke Jonathan and they tiptoed back to the rooms where they were supposed to be.

Rare Bird
    Imagine an April evening in 1762. A handsome house set in the gently rolling Kent landscape a few miles outside the city of London; the sun just set over blue squill and beech trees newly leafed. Inside the house are a group of men and a single woman: Christopher Billopp, his sister Sarah Anne, and Christopher’s guests from London. Educated and well-bred, they’re used to a certain level of conversation. Just now they’re discussing Linnaeus’s contention that swallows retire under water for the winter—that old belief, stemming from Aristotle, which Linnaeus still upholds.
    â€œHe’s hardly alone,” Mr. Miller says. Behind him, a large mirror reflects a pair of portraits: Christopher and Sarah Anne, painted several years earlier as a gift for their father. “Even Klein, Linnaeus’s rival, agrees. He wrote that a friend’s mother saw fishermen bring out a bundle of swallows from a lake near Pilaw. When the swallows were placed near a fire, they revived and flew about.”
    Mr. Pennant nods. “Remember the reports of Dr. Colas? Fishermen he talked to in northern parts claimed that when they broke through the ice in winter they took up comatose swallows in their nets as well as fish. And surely you remember reading how Taletini of Cremona swore a Jesuit had told him that theswallows in Poland and Moravia hurled themselves into cisterns and wells come autumn.”
    Mr. Collinson laughs at this, although not unkindly, and he looks across the table at his old friend Mr. Ellis. “Hearsay, hearsay,” he says. He has a spot on his waistcoat. Gravy, perhaps. Or cream. “Not one shred of direct evidence. Mothers, fishermen, itinerant Jesuits—this is folklore, my friends. Not science.”
    At the foot of the table, Sarah Anne nods but says nothing. Pennant, Ellis, Collinson, Miller: all distinguished. But old, so old. She worries that she and Christopher are growing prematurely old as well. Staid and dull and entirely too comfortable with these admirable men, whom they have known since they were children.
    Their father, a brewer by trade but a naturalist by avocation, had educated Christopher and Sarah Anne together after their mother’s death, as if they were brothers. The three of them rambled the grounds of Burdem Place, learning the names of the plants and birds. Collinson lived in Peckham then, just a few miles away, and he often rode over bearing rare plants and seeds sent by naturalist friends in other countries. Peter Kalm, Linnaeus’s famous student, visited the Billopps; Linnaeus himself, before Sarah Anne was born, once stayed for several days.
    All these things are part of Sarah Anne’s and Christopher’s common past. And even after Christopher’s return from Cambridge and their father’s death, for a while they continued to enjoy an easy exchange of books and conversation. But now all that has changed. Sarah Anne inherited her father’s brains but Christopher inherited everything else, including his father’s friends. Sarah Anne acts as hostess to these men, at Christopher’s bidding. In part she’s happy for their company, which represents her only intellectual companionship. In part she despises them for their lumbago and thinning hair, their greediness in the presenceof good food, the stories they repeat about the scientific triumphs of their youth, and the fact that they refuse to take her