Description
London, spring 1887. The Royal Society has called for one illustrator-botanist to build The Pollen Archive: a Kew-housed, lifelong visual record of British flowering plants and their reproductive structures, with a single name on the contract. A widowed plate-maker, whose best work still travels under a late husband's credit, and a cousin who runs the herbaria, the letters, and the reputation she keeps scorching, intend to win that place together, not always pulling in the same direction. The same field season forces them beside Theodore Whitlock, a University College London lecturer with a modest name and a sharp gift for moss, who means to take the prize alone. Chalk downs, Welsh marches, Highland lochs: the samples change, the stakes do not. Intercepted mail, a misattributed plate, and a drawing-room enemy sharpen the professional knife. The most dangerous discovery may be the regard between people the Committee was never meant to see in the same ink.
