The Parasol Flower Read online

  Contents

  The Parasol Flower

  Copyright © 2019 Karen Quevillon. All rights reserved.

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  March 11, 1896

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty One

  Twenty Two

  Twenty Three

  Twenty Four

  Twenty Five

  Twenty Six

  Twenty Seven

  Twenty Eight

  Twenty Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Thirty Two

  Thirty Three

  Thirty Four

  Thirty Five

  August 11, 1896

  Thirty Six

  Thirty Seven

  Thirty Eight

  Thirty Nine

  Forty

  Forty One

  Forty Two

  Forty Three

  Forty Four

  Forty Five

  Forty Six

  Forty Seven

  Forty Eight

  Fourty Nine

  Fifty

  Fifty One

  Fifty Two

  Fifty Three

  Fifty Four

  Fifty Five

  Fifty Six

  Fifty Seven

  Fifty Eight

  Sixty

  The Parasol Flower

  Karen Quevillon

  Regal House Publishing

  Copyright © 2019 Karen Quevillon. All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  Raleigh, NC 27612

  All rights reserved

  ISBN -13 (paperback): 9781947548732

  ISBN -13 (epub): 9781646030200

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941545

  All efforts were made to determine the copyright holders and obtain their permissions in any circumstance where copyrighted material was used. The publisher apologizes if any errors were made during this process, or if any omissions occurred. If noted, please contact the publisher and all efforts will be made to incorporate permissions in future editions.

  Interior and cover design by Lafayette & Greene

  lafayetteandgreene.com

  over art from the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

  Digitized by Smithsonian Libraries. | www.biodiversitylibrary.org

  Regal House Publishing, LLC

  https://regalhousepublishing.com

  The following is a work of fiction created by the author. All names, individuals, characters, places, items, brands, events, etc. were either the product of the author or were used fictitiously. Any name, place, event, person, brand, or item, current or past, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Regal House Publishing.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To my parents,

  with gratitude for your unfailing love and support

  One

  Let me be as plain as possible. I don’t know with any certainty how it ended for Hannah Inglis. What became of her? The ending here is particularly speculative. So if you’re the sort of no-nonsense person—as is my own mother, I am familiar with the type—who won’t waste time on anything but the facts, it’s best you move on.

  Not that I’m not working from evidence. I have done the research. I have documents, scholarship, findings. I have made my own travels. Seen, touched, taken notes, read, re-read her letters. Her art! When I close my eyes, I see the pieces arranged on walls, in galleries, in homes and office buildings. These “botanical portraits” are exquisite, vibrant expressions of lives that may have gone unnoticed. But I must admit that Hannah’s achievement is as I imagine it. As I have had to imagine it.

  “Because it’s subjective,” Professor Munk said to me the first time we met, shrugging his narrow, cardiganned shoulders. “Art is a subjective matter.”

  Shrugging off Hannah’s work, I thought, and mine.

  I’ll admit I’m not in the fine art business. That’s a point in my favor, isn’t it, that I’d make no money from Hannah’s success? I’d been funded—shabbily, but funded—to pursue a PhD. My dissertation concerned the social construction of gender. Simone de Beauvoir had written, “a woman is made, not born.” Okay, but how does that making happen? Does it happen to a woman, or does she do it to herself? These were the sorts of questions I wanted to answer. Because my gurus were French and I looked good on a fellowship application, I was living in Paris while I wrote up, as we put it.

  Except that I wasn’t writing. I read feminists, gender theorists, postmodernists, postcolonialists, and other sorts of “ists” with a kind of exhaustive fervour that made me feel thoroughly knowledgeable, though it was absolutely useless for my own progress. I couldn’t write anything I didn’t want to drag to the trash afterward. I couldn’t write anything good enough to send to Kenneth Cavanaugh, my dissertation advisor. So I kept on reading, further and further afield, in the hopes I’d find a way to say something.

  Ah, Paris! Where I ate pot noodles most nights of the week and washed my clothes in my tiny kitchen’s tiny sink. My only friends were a couple of Welsh expats—madly in love with each other—who were studying the history of phrenology. (“Not that there’s any future in it!” was their standing joke.) Other moments of human contact involved verbally abusive Parisian clerks and cashiers and the occasional email from my ex-boyfriend. I savoured Paris for what it meant to others who didn’t live there (romance) and what I imagined it would mean to me after I had left (romance), then carried on as best I could, tempering my loneliness and desperation with jasmine tea and English detective novels.

  I first encountered a reference to The Descent of Woman in a contemporary analysis of colonial desire. Published in 1908 in London, The Descent was old and foreign (to France) and therefore housed in the Richelieu Library Reserve collection. This was reason enough for me to seek it out. I loved Richelieu. The Reserve reading room is an enormous oval, five or six stories high and ringed with bountiful mahogany bookshelves and arched porticos. In the center, under a dome punctured by iron-laced windows, readers sit in quiet solidarity at the long tables, exercising their minds.

  The librarian with the flame red hair fetched me the leather-bound volume, penned the hour of day in her logbook, and I took my kill to the table. The Descent of Woman: On the Role of Sexual Selection in the Origination and Continued Creation of Femininity. By Dr. Charles Peterborough and Eva Peterborough. My own line of enquiry had nothing to do with evolutionary biology or indeed any scientific approach to sex identity. In fact, the Peterboroughs’ presumably naturalistic theory was what I and my interlocutors wanted to leave behind: the move to root femininity in a “natural” given. I treated The Descent as an exotic specimen—quaint, worthy as a spectacle or an artifact. I flipped pages.

  What caught my eye, consequently, were the illustrations—etchings of jungle botanicals, ferns,
insects, moths, birds and so forth. Page 173 had an unusual flower. THE PARASOL FLOWER. PERAK, MALAYA, read the caption. Resembling a morning glory in shape, this blossom was obviously much larger, ensconced in a jungle scenario of corkscrewing ferns and lianas, moss-covered boulders and towering trees. The life and world of this flower appeared at once substantial and ethereal. Tangible yet fantastical. I peered at the engraving, running a fingertip gently over the page.

  The longer I considered the illustration, the more masterful and unique it seemed. I would not have been surprised to discover that Whistler or Degas had drawn it. At the corner of the etching, the initials E.W. meant nothing to me. I stared, wavering between laughter and a conviction I’d struck gold. While around me the other library patrons, with heads bowed, carried on as usual.

  In the nearby pages of text there was no reference made at all to the majestic “parasol flower.” Odd! But there was nothing to be done about it. I skimmed the section of the book about sexual selection and took a few notes before winding my way home for pot noodles.

  There was an email waiting for me from Jason, my ex, and a student in a neighboring program of the university. Rumor was, Cavanaugh was leaving for Loyola—did I know anything about this? No, I did not. I’d heard nothing from Kenneth since I’d left the States, thankfully not even a reply to the lengthy, sappy email I’d sent him in winter. If Kenneth left the department, would I have to find another advisor? The thought of this, and the low level of heating in my apartment, sent me to bed early where I tossed and turned, mapping out different futures and different pasts for myself that all involved backing up against a cold wall in Kenneth Cavanaugh’s wine cellar, his hot mouth on mine.

  At last, I got up for a glass of water. I gulped it down, redirecting my thoughts to the parasol flower, blooming so vividly in its forgotten tome at Richelieu. Surely if such an incredible species existed I would have heard of it. The Descent of Woman belonged to a time when science was not afraid of speculation, faith, art, adventure trekking, or storytelling—but it was still science. From the shadowy corners of my apartment, Charles and Eva Peterborough murmured to me in distressed tones; no, they were definitely not engaging in make-believe.

  Had they, or had E.W., the artist, named the plant? Such a whimsical, pretty name for a jungle survivor. I slipped back into bed, balled up the covers, and shut my eyes. I could see E.W. in one of those white three-piece Victorian suits, pushing his way through sweating, squawking rainforest and happening upon an almost unbelievable sight.

  A few days later I called home. This was rare for me. My mother kept in touch by mailing me homemade cards with her handwritten notes folded inside, plus clippings from our small-town newspaper. Neighbors and former classmates were making good with their lives in various ways. Getting married and having babies, though not always in that order.

  “Hi, dear!” Mom said. “How are you?”

  “Pretty good, the weather’s been good. I’ve been researching Victorian etching technology.”

  “Oh!”

  “It’s interesting. Much more complicated than I thought.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is interesting, yes. And complicated.” There was a noise as she put her hand over the phone and shouted to my father. “It’s Nancy! No, I haven’t mentioned it yet. We’ve only just started talking.”

  “Mentioned what?”

  “Oh, your father! It’s just about Christmas. We’re thinking of going to Florida. Disneyworld.”

  It was September and I hadn’t given Christmas much thought. The year before I’d flown home to Michigan for a couple weeks. My parents never went anywhere over the Christmas holidays except to visit family, which was no vacation. In fact, I thought they considered that sort of thing ridiculous—jetting off to a beach, leaving commitments behind.

  Sulkily I said, “And what about Sam and Mikey?”

  “Sam and Michael are able to come with us. And their girlfriends! It really worked out just perfectly.” She went on breathlessly, telling me the story of the booking of the airline tickets as if it were high drama. My father interjected comments from beyond. There were beaches involved and various options for rental cars and villa types and parking arrangements at the airport. Disneyworld was only an hour on the freeway from the closest beach. To hear her talk, Disney had improved the beach by its proximity.

  As she spoke I rolled my eyes and bit at my nails. I stood up from my chair, trying to see out the room’s high window past a dying potted plant. Stepping up onto to the seat of the chair, a sea of Parisian rooftops swayed in my watery vision. When my mother stopped talking, I said, “That’s so good. Good for you guys!”

  There was a longish silence.

  “Nancy?”

  “So I’ve heard back about the travel grant.”

  “Oh!”

  “The one from the graduate school?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said.

  “They’re giving me the full amount.”

  “Oh! Will you have to pay it back?”

  “A grant, Mom. That’s why it’s called a travel grant.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful. Nancy’s won a grant!” I heard her shout to my father. “You’re doing wonderful work, I’m sure. And that’s what they saw, and what they’re rewarding you for.”

  I felt myself about to cry and I turned my face away from the receiver, inhaling as deeply and silently as possible. “I don’t know,” I mumbled at last.

  “Nance, come to Florida with us.”

  I was still standing on the chair. I sank slowly into a squat.

  “Now I know you’ve never liked Disney, but you could just stay at the resort on those days. We’ve only planned on spending three or four of the days at Disney. And, you know, MGM and the other ones.”

  “How long are you going to be there? I thought you said a week?”

  “Yes.”

  “How are they even open at Christmas? Of course they’re open at Christmas. It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Capitalism run amok.” An image visited me: Nancy the freak, reading The London Review of Books, walking the beach to collect stones, nipping out for a cup of fair trade coffee while the rest of her gregarious sneaker-wearing clan piled into a van to go ride roller coasters and hug giant plush mascots. I’d never met Mike’s girlfriend but Sam’s partner, Summer, was Cinderella incarnate, all curves and kindness. She wouldn’t stand for leaving me on my own.

  “I…I can’t.”

  “Well,” said my mother. “I know you’re always so busy.”

  “I have so much to do.”

  “I understand, dear. Everybody understands. You’re devoted to your paper.”

  “It’s not a paper, Mom.” For some reason, my mother had always referred to my dissertation as a “paper,” and I always felt bound to correct her. “It” wasn’t anything, I thought to myself. It was four hundred pages of notes on other peoples’ books and articles and dissertations. It was a draft prospectus I’d really liked and that Cavanaugh had rejected. It was a second prospectus I liked much less but that Cavanaugh accepted, pending further changes. All of this mass of nothingness was so far from understandable, so far from devotion, that it clotted in my throat like a plug of phlegm. I swallowed hard.

  “I received an email this morning from Daphne Plewett,” my mother resumed after our substantial silence. Daphne was some relation or other, or maybe just a friend of a relation, some woman who lived in England. She and my mother had always swapped Christmas cards. Mom kept up with a raft of old people this way.

  “A Christmas card already?” I exclaimed.

  “Are you all right, Nance? What was that noise?”

  “Nothing. Dropped the phone. Sorry, what did you say?”

  “I said it’s not a Christmas card, it’s an email. Daphne’s even on Facebook now! She wondered how you and the boys were doing. She was asking me all sorts of questions.”


  “Right. And what did you tell her?” I wiped my cuff under my leaking nose.

  There was another long pause. Such a long one I thought my mother was retrieving the email to quote from it. “I’ve just had a thought,” she said, taking another moment. “Nancy, I know you’re very busy. But. I was wondering if you would do something for me?”

  I waited for her to go on.

  “Daphne and Bob have been so good to us over the years.” She cited a few incidences stretching back to before my birth. None of it sounded familiar to me. “Nancy, would you look in on them over Christmas?”

  “Look in on them?”

  “Visit them. Stay with them for a week or two. I think it would mean a lot to them. Daphne was more or less begging me, begging us, to come over.”

  And you chose Mickey Mouse. I didn’t actually say this, mostly because it didn’t occur to me until much later.

  My mother went on in some detail about the Plewetts’ apparently miserable existence (kidney dialysis, no adult children, broken appliances, drunkard cousin) and their unflaggingly bright attitudes (charity shop, gardening, knitting caps for preemie babies). Their lives sounded quite full to me. What I could I possibly add? The answer was that I would be the Roach family standard-bearer. Show up and please Daphne and Bob. Redeem myself a little for rejecting the Magic Kingdom. Avoid eating pot noodles for Christmas dinner.

  “And everything’s so close in Europe,” Mom concluded. “You’re only an hour away by train, aren’t you? Think about it, Nancy. I’m just asking you to think about it.”

  I didn’t know it at the time, but Daphne and Robert Plewett happened to live near a stately home called Fulgham House, and Fulgham House would lead me to Hannah. Destiny never looks like destiny except in retrospect.

  Two

  By the light of a kerosene lamp, on an early morning in March of 1896, Hannah Inglis dabs shades of olive on a busy canvas, covering the kapok’s trunk with crisscrossing roots. Stepping back to regard the effect, she chews at the nail of her index finger, too absorbed to respond to the voice.