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Ed’s pretty sure Dr. Stede Bonnet is off his fucking rocker. Bonnet’s a biologist — a zoologist, broadly, an entomologist specifically — but Ed had to look him up in the staff directory to confirm because nothing Ed’s ever heard about Bonnet has ever made him stop and think: Sure, bugs. That fucking tracks.
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The first time Ed hears about Bonnet, one of his students is complaining about having to memorize a poem for extra credit.
“I mean obviously I’m going to do it,” Lucius Spriggs is saying (loud enough to disrupt the whole damn lecture hall). Ed stops the class so that he and the 20 other people in the room can wait for Spriggs to catch on, but even with absolute fucking silence, Spriggs still says: “He’s going to bump my 63 to a 73.”
Spriggs’s friend is nudging him to shut up. Ed kind of wishes he’d say just a little more. Not because he wants more of an excuse to chew out Spriggs it’s just… Ed can appreciate that that’s a wild thing for a professor to do. A full letter grade? Just for memorizing some poem?
Still, points to prove, responsible teaching practices or whatever:
“Fascinating,” Ed says. The whole room fidgets under the steel of Dr. Edward Teach’s voice. Spriggs, finally keyed the fuck in, snaps his mouth shut, his eyes darting around the room before landing on Ed. “If another professor’s assignment is important enough for you to disrupt my class, you’d better get to practicing it, Spriggs.” Ed knows he’s got a reputation for being a terrifying hard ass (keeps his undergrad classes small though, which is a bonus) so it’s on purpose when he lowers his voice, meeting Spriggs with eyes sharper than a knife’s edge and adds: “Now.”
Spriggs scrambles out of his seat and clears his throat. Ed looks on impatiently as the kid first seems to be trying to figure out if he’s serious, and then apparently getting the hint based on Ed’s increasingly annoyed expression, nods.
“Er, okay,” he says. “So it goes: Buffalo Bill’s defunct…”
Later, when Ed’s in his office doing fuck all — no one ever shows up to his office hours — he looks up the poem, just to see how bad Spriggs butchered it. (Could’ve been worse). It sounds like something out of a queer lit class, and Ed knows Spriggs is studying literature, so Ed assumes that’s probably Bonnet’s area.
He does print out the poem after a couple more readings, though, and hangs it on the wall to his left.
He likes the way the words bounce across the page, and he likes the tragedy at the end.
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During his next 10 a.m., with Spriggs, Ed grabs the boy on his way through the door.
“How’d the poem go?”
Spriggs fidgets, his classmate, Jiminez, has already gone to the back of the hall and is sitting down. Ed can tell by the look in Spriggs’s eyes that this is a betrayal, but if this is the shit Spriggs gets hung up on, Ed’s got the sense that Jiminez betrays Spriggs daily.
“Oh, you know,” Spriggs waves a hand vaguely, “nailed it.” He shrugs but Ed can tell he’s nervous, which is a little gratifying. “Even if I didn’t, Stede would never fail me.” Stede . Pretty familiar for a student. “I’m too valuable.”
Before Ed can wander down the road of this Bonnet guy sleeping with his students, Spriggs tacks on:
“I’m the only one in class who can draw the anatomy of a moth. So he loves me.”
Ed raises his eyebrow skeptically and Spriggs rushes to prove a point, apparently, by pulling out a leather notebook and pointing to a page where there is, in fact, a dissected moth drawn out and labeled.
“What the fuck do moths have to do with poetry?” Ed asks, bewildered.
Like they’re in on some sort of joke together, Lucius says “right? You get it Dr. Teach. He’s a weird guy!” And then Spriggs laughs, and skirts around Ed to get back to Jiminez.
Ed spends the rest of the class desperately trying to focus on his own lecture and fails miserably. He calls it a day at 30 minutes.
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Ed meets Bonnet in the rain.
He doesn’t know who Bonnet is yet, but he’s walking between buildings after a string of undergraduate lectures that make him want to pull his beard hairs out strand by strand. One building down from Queen Anne Hall he spots a guy dressed like a 17th century explorer standing under the library’s overhang. The guy is carrying about eight books and muttering to himself in… Latin?
Hard to tell. Ed’s knowledge of Latin begins and ends with the scientific names of some very specific sea creatures.
It’s mostly the get up that pushes Ed to intervene.
“Need a hand, mate?” He hollers. It’s hard to hear too much over the rain battering his umbrella, but Ed thinks he makes out an Oh, that would be lovely. So he goes over.
“Lot of book,” he observes, unnecessarily. The man chuckles and adjusts.
“I suppose I do tend to get carried away. It’s just … well, a whole university’s library at my beck and call? Mustn’t waste the opportunity.”
“Could always come back for the other hundred later.”
The man chuckles.
“I don’t mean to be a bragger, but I’ll have these read in the week,” he says. “It’s less trips to check them all out at once.”
“Makes sense,” says Ed, fascinated. Not by the books (kind of by the books), but now that he’s up close he can see the guy’s outfit better and he’s … mystified? Fascinated? Something. It looks straight out of Indian Jones. And Ed never really saw himself as into the flamboyantly nerdy, but he’s kind of digging this guys whole… deal.
“I’m Stede by the way,” says the man.
“Bonnet?”
“You’ve heard of me?”
Ed snorts. Jesus, he was a handsome man.
“Something like that,” Ed tells him. He offers a hand. “Ed.”
Stede smiles and shakes it. Ed thinks the rain stops for just a moment to fire off a sunbeam directly from this guy’s golden face.
Ed ends up giving Stede his umbrella and booking it through the pouring rain to Queen Anne Hall, covered, head-to-toe, unfortunately, in leather.
That night Ed spends about an hour rubbing ointment into his chafed thighs and desperately keeping his thoughts of Stede Bonnet as clean as he can reasonably be expected to manage. (Not clean at all. At least ointment is slick.)
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“Know anything about Stede Bonnet?”
Izzy’s destroying a ham and cheese with all the ferocity of a man whose true calling was probably violence but who never got tall enough to make it very far in boxing.
He studies Faulkner instead.
“Why are you asking me?” Izzy grumbles.
“I don’t know, figured literature professors probably know each other.” Ed shrugs.
Izzy looks up at Ed.
“Bonnet’s not in the fucking English department, Edward.”
“Know what department he’s in then?” Ed can feel himself getting irritated.
“Fucking biology you twat.”
Ed blinks.
“Dickfuck, no he’s not!”
Izzy rolls his eyes.
“If you bothered to show up to any of the faculty events or meetings for your own fucking department you’d know this, Edward!”
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Stede Bonnet’s a biologist — a zoologist, broadly, an entomologist specifically — but Ed had to look him up in the staff directory to confirm because, despite the fact that Ed is the senior most professor in the department and arguably the most renowned at the university, Bonnet slipped right under his fucking radar.
He’s also being investigated by the Ethics Committee, apparently.
Now that Ed knows this guy’s out there, he’s not really interested in watching him get fired.
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Stede winces as he rereads the letter in front of him, its folds smoothed near straight again by his anxious hands.
He’s been summoned to appear before the Faculty Ethics Committee. He can’t begin to guess why, although he suspects that the Badmintons are involved, as they have been since the day he sold off his father’s company and lost them millions.
They plagued his graduate studies with repeated anonymous reports of plagiarism, generous donations to prospective job offerings ensured he could not join any privately funded research opportunities, and this is the third university he applied to that even gave him an interview, discounting the nine who wouldn’t even go that far.
If he loses this job over an ethical charge not only will he have no more money to speak of, it’s also very likely he’ll never be able to work in academia again.
It’s, well, it is quite dire.
Stede isn’t sure how he’ll survive this.