where within those walls Maria Sibylla remained silent.
She was staring out her window when he arrived, thinking of the creatures she might find there, wondering how she might conduct her work from this new home, she was seeing God in all she saw, and trusting in God to direct her.
Graff sought audience with his wife through the personage of Petre Yvon. He demanded that he be admitted inside the walls of the castle. She is mine, he shouted, mine, I will not let go what is rightfully mine.
Only silence for reply.
And though he went down in a rage on his knees and pounded on the rock-strewn ground for three days, eating nothing, and not even drinking water, and though the ground was cold in the strong November chill, and though he made supplication and implored, and beseeched and importuned, and alternately begged and bellowed, she would not yield.
Tropical sweetness now. Sweeter than the sugar cane. Sweeter than the syrup dripping from the stalks cut and bound for refining. Blinding sun. Blazing heat. Leaves of plants so delicate they wither in the sun.
Sirs, the female is fussy in her decision as to where to lay her eggs; she grades each leaf for suitability, rejecting one leaf after another before choosing.
Insects swarm, approaching hungry and curious, the jungle forest stretches before her, sounds, the occasional glimpses of birds. She is on her way to Rama, farther down along the Saramacca. The African slaves walk ahead of her, unsheathing knives flashing, cutting a path through the dense growth of the forest, hacking down the weeds and the saw grass so she can pass through. She has with her bottles half-filled with brandy to preserve dead some of what she finds, but also the mesh cages lined with bolting cloth to take other specimens alive, and to retain for them the natural conditions of their environment, to study their transformations without interrupting them, to observe for herself all the stages of their development. Her head is covered with a wide-brimmed hat. A few beads of perspiration run down from beneath the hat. She wears a shirt under the makeshift overall that she has sewn for her work in the jungle. The Surimombo slaves call her medicine woman. The women bring her chrysalids that they promise will open into moths, and butterflies more beautiful than any she has ever seen, creatures which will whisper certain truths to her, endow her with certain powers. But everything now has begun to draw her attention. It is no longer simply the larvae, the moths, and the butterflies. Now she wants to know frogs, toads, snakes, and spiders, hummingbirds, the parrots and red monkeys screeching in the trees, the habits of the grasses that grow here, the invisible creatures that inhabit the air.
Sirs, for each there is the head, the thorax, the abdomen; the surface of the body divided into platelike areas; there are the mouth parts, the antennae, the feet; and the special hairs that are sensitive to sound.
“Your hands are so delicate, dear,” the Widow Ivenes tells Maria Sibylla that night at supper, “one would never guess from looking at them you are a scientist.”
Pastries and puddings are brought to the table, jellies and preserved fruits, fruit tarts sitting in transparent syrups, cakes made from nut meats, sweet oranges, yellow pineapples, alligator pears, guava, shaddock.
After supper Mathew van der Lee asks permission to enter Maria Sibylla’s study. It is in a ground floor room at the rear—attached to but distant from the other rooms of Surimombo. “Mr. van der Lee. Here, come.” Before he is able to say a word, he is directed to a brownish shape in a mesh cage that looks at first as though it might be a curled bit of bark. But then there is the slightest movement. A kind of weaving from side to side, a tear in the wall at one end, a small but violent movement, the tear opening a little larger, and then a little larger still, until a shape is visible inside, pushing forward through the tear, a damp and matted little thing pushing its way through the opening until it has pushed itself fully out, and then sits and rests there for a time. “There, you see,” is all she says.
Sirs, there is a heart, as well, I have found it lodged in the frontal vessel suspended from the wall of the abdomen. The tiny heart can almost not be seen. But it is, I assure you,