The Signature of All Things Read Free Page B

“I must say, young man, that you are a crowning distress to your father.”
    “And him to me, sir,” Henry fired back.
    Once more, the surprised bark of laughter from Banks. “Is he, then? What harm has that good man ever done to you?”
    “Made me poor, sir,” Henry said. Then, suddenly realizing everything, Henry added, “It were him, weren’t it? Who peached me over to you?”
    “Indeed it was. He’s an honorable soul, your father.”
    Henry shrugged. “Not to me, eh?”
    Banks took this in and nodded, generously conceding the point. Then he asked, “To whom have you been selling my plants?”
    Henry ticked off the names on his fingers: “Mancini, Flood, Willink, LeFavour, Miles, Sather, Evashevski, Feuerle, Lord Lessig, Lord Garner—”
    Banks cut him off with a wave. He stared at the boy with open astonishment. Oddly, if the list had been more modest, Banks might have been angrier. But these were the most esteemed botanical names of the day. A few of them Banks called friends. How had the boy found them? Some of these men hadn’t been to England in years. The child must be exporting . What kind of campaign had this creature been running under his nose?
    “How do you even know how to handle plants?” Banks asked.
    “I always knowed plants, sir, for my whole life. It’s like I knowed it all beforehand.”
    “And these men, do they pay you?”
    “Or they don’t get their plants, do they?” Henry said.
    “You must be earning well. Indeed, you must have accumulated quite a pile of money in the past years.”
    Henry was too cunning to answer this.
    “What have you done with the money you’ve earned, young man?” Banks pushed on. “I can’t say you’ve invested it in your wardrobe. Without a doubt, your earnings belong to Kew. So where is it all?”
    “Gone, sir.”
    “Gone where?”
    “Dice, sir. I have a weakness of the gambling, see.”
    That may or may not have been true, Banks thought. But the boy certainly had as much nerve as any two-footed beast he had ever encountered. Banks was intrigued. He was a man, after all, who kept a heathen for a pet, and who—to be honest—enjoyed the reputation of being half heathen himself. His station in life required that he at least purport to admire gentility, but secretly he preferred a bit of wildness. And what a little wild cockerel was Henry Whittaker! Banks was growing less inclined by the moment to hand over this curious item of humanity to the constables.
    Henry, who saw everything, saw something happening in Banks’s face—a softening of countenance, a blooming curiosity, a sliver of a chance for hislife to be saved. Intoxicated with a compulsion for self-preservation, the boy vaulted into that sliver of hope, one last time.
    “Don’t put me to hang, sir,” Henry said. “You’ll regret it that you did.”
    “What do you propose I do with you, instead?”
    “Put me to use.”
    “Why should I?” asked Banks.
    “Because I’m better than anyone.”

Chapter Two
    S o Henry did not dangle on the gallows at Tyburn, in the end, nor did his father lose his position at Kew. The Whittakers were miraculously reprieved, and Henry was merely exiled, sent away to sea, dispatched by Sir Joseph Banks, to discover what the world would make of him.
    It was 1776, and Captain Cook was about to embark on his third voyage around the world. Banks was not joining this expedition. Simply put, he had not been invited. He had not been invited on the second voyage, either, which had rankled him. Banks’s extravagance and attention-seeking had soured Captain Cook to him, and, shamefully, he had been replaced. Cook would be traveling now with a humbler botanist, somebody more easily controlled—a man named Mr. David Nelson, who was a timid, competent gardener from Kew. But Banks wanted a hand in this journey somehow, and he very badly wanted to keep an eye on Nelson’s botanical collecting. He didn’t like the idea of any important scientific work being done