my father was even settled in—the servants had made off with his luggage—Freddy, talking a mile a minute in a state of great agitation, conveyed him into the Conservatory, which was an ancient stone structure with a wall knocked out so it could expand out quite a distance onto the lawn into a series of greenhouses. It seemed that Freddy’s latest enthusiasm, in which with his newfound title and wealth he was fully able to indulge, was the collecting and raising of rare plants, particularly orchids. Now my father had only a passing interest in botany, and no particular fondness for flowers. In his generation, American men who liked flowers were either swishes or lounge lizards—although of course the English have always had their eccentrics, and that’s different. In any case Freddy was hardly the stereotypical orchid collector. You know: about four foot six, stoop-shouldered, ninety pounds, capable of speaking only in the tiniest, squeaky voice, and dominated by terrifying female relatives. Freddy was a tall, broad-shouldered man with a bristling, grey moustache. He had been a major during the war. His credentials as a scientist, of the wealthy, amateur variety, were impressive. He had been on expeditions. He had shot lions. He and my dad had saved each other’s lives a dozen times in tight situations. So if Freddy said a plant was worth seeing, if you will pardon the expression, it bloody well had to be.
It was too. At the far end of the greenhouses was a large, cleared area, in which had been placed a clay flowerpot the size of a small swimming pool. It was filled with earth, and there was a shovel handy, but nothing had been planted yet. There was something wrapped in a tarp, on a table nearby.
“I wanted you to see this before I put it in the ground,” said Freddy.
He unwrapped the tarp.
“My God!”
It was a bulb, or at least vegetable matter of some sort, about the size of a watermelon, ovoid, and covered with hairy tendrils or roots, which visibly writhed in the air. It may have been his imagination, but perhaps the thing even made a faint sound, like a teapot whistling in another room.
“Then you appreciate what this is,” said Freddy.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s not totally without precedent, you know. There is a certain amount of literature on the subject.”
“But—Wells, Collier, Clarke—I thought that was all fiction.”
“Not entirely, old boy. Not entirely.”
“Where did you get it?”
All Freddy would say to this was, “We collectors of such things have connections. It’s an old system.” No more than that. There are some things the English will not reveal to foreigners, even if they happen to be close friends. It is the famous English reserve, you know.
As Freddy pulled on some quite ordinary gardening gloves and picked the thing up, fondly, gently, as if he were holding an infant—almost as if it were his own child, a thought my dad found decidedly disquieting—its tendrils reached up toward his face, but he pulled back before it could touch him.
My dad found it increasingly repulsive.
“It looks like it’s from outer space,” he said.
“It quite well could be,” said Freddy, and without further ado, he planted it, and then watered it with a watering can.
Some while later dinner was served in the great hall. One did dress for dinner. Freddy’s valet had laid out appropriate attire for my dad. They sat beneath rows of stuffed animal heads, many of which Freddy himself had shot; some of the others dated back to the late Middle Ages. There were suits of armor in the corners, shields and pole arms alternating with portraits of ancestors along the walls, and if a couple ghosts had tittered softly up in the dark above the heavy beams overhead, it would only have been appropriate. This was the kind of place where if there isn’t a ghost or two, you have the right to ask why not. Sitting there, my father realized, he could well have slipped back in time. This could have been 1900, or 1800, or even 1600, and if gentlemen in Tudor costumes accompanied by Queen Elizabeth the First had come thundering into the room, Dad might have been at a loss for the proper etiquette, but not wholly surprised.
The dinner was of course superb, and the evening very pleasant. They were the closest of friends. They reminisced for a while about their previous adventures. Lord Cheebleford—Freddy—inquired tactfully about my dad’s future plans, and when he said he expected to return to America soon and get married, Freddy congratulated him heartily. As for his own plans, Freddy expected to live here at Cheebleford Hall, as the place was called, cultivate plants and tenants (for in this part of England, the old sense of noblesse oblige was not a thing of the past) and take his father’s place in the House of Lords.
It seemed, my father began to suggest, that their adventuring days were over.
But Freddy’s attention was suddenly elsewhere. He was listening to something his guest couldn’t hear.
After dinner, they carried their drinks into the Conservatory. Freddy was all too eager to see how his prize plant was doing. My dad thought this a bit obsessive. How much could a plant have grown in just a few hours?
About five feet. When they got there, it had shot up several greenish yellow stalks in all directions, of a rather ghastly, unpleasant color somehow, but Freddy looked on the thing as if it were his darling and his treasure. He was even more interested in the bulbous area in the center, which had swelled into a mass like an artichoke waiting to open, only about three feet high.
Pale, greenish-white tendrils floated on the air, extending out from the artichoke.
My dad should have run screaming into the night at that point, and I am sure no one would have blamed him if he had, but he was no coward, Freddy was his close friend, and in any case Freddy didn’t seem the slightest bit alarmed.
Maybe it was just nerves. Delayed combat fatigue or something.
In fact, Freddy had become obsessed. In earlier times—1600 or so—they might have said he was bewitched.
By a plant.
In the days that followed, Freddy and my father went through the usual round of activities. They toured the countryside, visiting everything from Neolithic sites and Roman ruins to Norman churches, since my father was interested in that sort of thing. They called on the neighbors, who lived the castle across the valley, and even participated in a traditional fox hunt, for all my dad didn’t ride a horse very well and struggled to keep up. (“But I thought all you Americans were cowboys,” someone said. He reminded them that he was from Philadelphia. There are no cowboys in Philadelphia.)
But whenever he could, Freddy spent his time in the Conservatory, seated in front of the plant on a folding chair. Soon its bulbous center was over six feet tall. The tendrils could reach almost to the edge of the room. And there was no question that the plant was making noises, first whistling sounds, then something that sounded disturbingly like music, and finally like speech.
My dad tried to draw him away. He asked to be shown this or that local sight, and maybe he even came close to wearing out his welcome a couple times, but of course Freddy remained properly polite and accommodating. Sometimes, though, there was no help for it. Freddy was in the Conservatory with the plant, while my dad either wandered the grounds or sat in the library, looking for answers in some of the very curious volumes the lords of Cheebleford had accumulated over the centuries.
By the time he thought to take Blodgers, the butler, into his confidence and express
