A Flower for the Queen: A Historical Novel

by Caroline Vermalle

  “But then I received a letter from Banks asking me if I would be willing to undertake a further expedition, this time to Portugal. I decided that this was no accident of fate, but rather a clear and unambiguous message: I had chosen my path and I had to follow it through to its end.

  “I accepted Banks’s offer and some weeks later I arrived in Lisbon, only to find that Jane had already left on a ship bound for the Caribbean. Over the following months, I faithfully completed the tasks that Banks had set me, all the while trying to glean any information about where Jane might have been headed. With a terrific collection of plants but little else to show for my efforts, I returned to England and asked Banks if he could send me west. He agreed.

  “And so it went. Following in Jane’s trail, I explored and collected flowers along the way. In the beginning, I refused to accept that my search was hopeless. After I arrived in Granada, the trail ended, and I was about to give up when I was captured by the French invaders. I was only released when Banks intervened on my behalf, but I lost my entire collection. With no option but to continue on the route I had agreed with Banks, I travelled next to Saint Lucia, where I discovered to my relief that Jane had settled for a short time before travelling north to the mainland. But as I was readying myself for the journey, disaster struck again, and all of my new collection together with all of my equipment was destroyed in a hurricane. I was lucky to escape alive and almost drowned trying to save my journal.

  “I was forced to return to England. Even with Banks’s influence and his personal friendship with Benjamin Franklin, tensions between America and England meant that for the time being I had to give up my search. But it was a flower that had led me to Jane in the first place, and so I reasoned that if I kept collecting them, one day they would lead me back to her.”

  The old man paused to rest his gaze on his notebooks. He whispered, “In my lifetime, I have collected more than fifteen hundred species of flowers. All of them plucked from faraway lands, most previously unknown to Western science, many admired by artists and men of importance. And yet … I still search for the one flower that escaped my grasp that day in Table Bay.”

  All in the room were silent and hanging onto the old man’s words.

  “Thunberg was right. The winds of change did blow through the Cape, and when it was taken by the English, I went back and spent many years collecting and travelling the same paths that we covered together. Each time I spied the orange petals of a lion’s tail or inhaled the pungent aroma of the moonflower, it would awaken in me the memories that were growing fainter every year, just as the ink faded in the sketch in my journal. And with each new discovery, despite the years that accumulated, I felt that I was somehow one step closer to finding her.

  “Eventually I was called back to England and to Kew, but there were no new discoveries to be made there. My time was only spent sifting through the finds of other flower hunters. But my time at Kew held one advantage: I was able to correspond with collectors all over the world, and so I sent out letters asking if anyone had knowledge of a lady botanist with a knack for shooting lions.

  “I heard nothing until one day I received a letter from Thunberg. He told me a story about a friend of his who had once attended a tea party at a house in Montréal. The friend had been surprised to find a freshly cut Strelitzia Reginae decorating the table: somehow the Queen’s flower had found its way to Canada.

  “When he had enquired as to how the host had managed to procure such an exotic flower, he had been told that his host’s housekeeper had a way with plants and had somehow brought them to flower in the greenhouse.

  Despite my age and on the flimsiest of premises, Banks agreed to send me on one last expedition. When I arrived, the first thing I did was visit the address that I had been given, a seigneurie at Saint-Hyacinthe, but I found the house sold, the greenhouse dismantled and the new occupants to be tenants who had no certain knowledge of the previous owners or the mysterious housekeeper.

  “Sadly, the rest of my time here yielded nothing further. My ship was due to sail back to England when the foul weather and the fear of ice meant that it was held in Montréal for another few days. I decided to use the time to collect one last specimen and had just finished doing so when we met so calamitously on the road.

  “It is most odd, is it not, that after so much life that has been lived, this most fleeting of instants so long past should claim so much space in my heart?”

  He looked down at the pages of his journal. The faded portrait of a beautiful young woman was positioned opposite the bird-shaped watermark. When Jack looked more closely, he could see that with nothing to separate the two pages, through time and exposure to moisture, and perhaps from constantly being kept so close to the old man’s heart, the watermark and the sketch had superimposed themselves onto each other, their forms overlaid so that it was difficult to know where one started and the other left off.

  “Poor Jack. You wanted heroes, and instead I give you an old fool who spent a lifetime chasing a moment.” His hands traced the outline of the portrait one last time before he gently closed the book and turned to Jack’s mother. “I’m sorry that your guests decided not to come, Mrs Grant. In my humble opinion, they have done themselves a great disservice in not taking advantage of such warmth and hospitality as I have seldom come across in all my travels.”

  “It is us that should be grateful to you, Mr Masson. I am only sorry that your story could not have had a happier ending,” Mary Grant replied.

  “You really are too kind, but I feel that I have overstayed my welcome. I really am feeling much better, and I wonder if it would be too much to ask for the use of your carriage in getting me back to my lodgings. They are only just the other side of Pointe-Claire.”

  But then a voice came from a forgotten corner of the room. “Mr Masson will remain here.”

  The old lady had spoken for the first time all afternoon. Judging by the reaction her statement induced in her family, it may well have been the first statement she had uttered for quite some time, as all eyes turned towards her.

  From the shadows, she was staring at the window, her eyes moist. Her hands had stopped their needlework but were still clinging onto a single golden thread of silk that remained tethered to the piece of white linen stretched within its circular hoop frame.

  As she turned from the window, the hoop tumbled from her lap and rolled across the floor before coming to a stop against Jack’s foot. He leaned down to retrieve it and then stopped, his breath caught in his chest.

  Within the confines of the wooden hoop, set against the pure white backdrop of the linen, the loops of coloured silk combined to form an image that had been in his thoughts every day for the past three decades. That same design was embroidered on the corners of every napkin in the Grant household. It was cast into the great bronze knocker that hung on the front door which every guest and visitor used to announce their arrival. It had even been marked out in stained glass in the south-facing windows of the first-floor ballroom so that when the sunlight streamed through in the afternoons, the shapes and colours traced their way across the wide pine planks.

  In silken thread of deepest emerald green, a single narrow stem had been stitched from memory alone without the need of a pencil pattern. At its end, the stem turned and opened out, like a maiden’s upturned palm, and perched within was a crown of the most delicate petals and sepals, like tears of liquid gold amidst shafts of midnight blue. The petals were arranged like the feathers at the end of an eagle’s wing and seemed to tremor in anticipation at taking flight. Jack knew then that the design his grandmother had stitched, the design embedded in the very fabric of her life, was derived from the same source as the watermark in Masson’s journal: Strelitzia Reginae, the Queen’s flower.

  “A fine work to be sure, so very true to nature,” the old man whispered. “I would never have dreamed that my African flower could blossom in such cold latitudes.”

  When she smiled, it was like a desert flower r
eceiving water after a long drought. Her face, which before had been drawn and tight, began to soften and unfold, and her voice was as clear as the dawn. “A flower such as this is hard to forget, is it not, Mr Masson?”

  Their eyes met, and when they held each other’s gaze, everybody in the room understood without another word being uttered that after all the years and all the voyages, through oceans, tempests and tragedies, the old man had finally found his home. His frailty forgotten, he stood up from his chair and walked across the room, kneeling before her and taking both of her hands into his own. He whispered with a quiet, contented smile, “Impossible, Ms Burnette, impossible.”

  EPILOGUE

  JUNE 24, 1845, LONDON

  Jack Grant poured himself a double measure of Scotch and replaced the crystal decanter on the polished walnut console. He looked out the window of the mahogany-panelled office and watched the bustle of Charing Cross Road as he waited for his publisher, Oswald Smythe, to finish reading his manuscript.

  The clock’s brass pendulum swung silently back and forth as Oswald’s stubby fingers flipped each page, reminding Jack of the coachman’s whip all those years ago.

  At last Oswald finished and removed his spectacles from his nose so that he could rub his eyes.

  “It was all true,” said Jack, as if in reply to Oswald’s silent question. “After Mr Masson’s visit, I checked at the library of the Gazette. His journals had been published in 1776 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London. It’s all there, the lions, the flowers, the mission for the King, everything. And my Grandmamma confirmed the rest.”

  “But surely you must have known the truth about her from the moment he told you about Jane?”

  “Jane changed her name when she moved to Canada to escape the scandal that surrounded her affair with Joseph Banks. She was shunned by her family and took work as my grandfather’s housekeeper around about the time my grandmother died giving birth to my mother. She was the housekeeper that Thunberg told Masson about. Robert’s story about her shooting the bear that almost killed him is absolutely true. What Robert didn’t know was that it was only after she saved him that my grandfather proposed, and so the housekeeper became Grandmamma.”

  “What happened to Masson?” asked Oswald.

  Jack took a long sip from his drink before answering. He felt the heat of the liquor course down his throat.

  “Mr Masson never did go back to England. He passed away a month later on Christmas Eve. He spent his last days with us in that house, most of them in the summer kitchen, sitting beside Jane and trying to catch up on a lost lifetime.”

  “I imagine there must have been so much to say,” said the publisher as he fiddled with the manuscript.

  “Oh, they didn’t talk much. Masson’s life was there in his journal, in the pages and pages of drawings of the more than fifteen hundred specimens that he had collected, and it was all there in the one page that had changed everything.

  “He filled up the last few pages with drawings of her. Not as the young flower that he remembered from that summer in the Cape, but as the treasure that he found in the glacial Canadian winter. In the end, their time together in Montréal was the same as that in the Cape, almost to the day. The difference was that when they parted for the second time, their reunion was never in doubt.”

  “Well, Jack,” sighed Oswald, “as I told you before, we’re certainly keen to publish it. An under-gardener turned explorer turned spy turned free spirit and romantic hero, that story has got instant appeal. We’ll need to make a few changes, of course. I understand you may have an emotional attachment to the characters, but you know what it’s like: we have to give the readers what they want.”

  “I understand. The most important thing is that his story is told. What changes did you have in mind?”

  “I think the Africa part could do with some fleshing out.”

  “Which part exactly?”

  “You know. The lions and all that.”

  Jack smiled. A wave of bitter-sweet nostalgia washed over him as he remembered Robert’s face in the light of the summer kitchen fire, enchanted by Francis Masson’s tales of adventure. Jack, so entangled in his complicated youth, had not known then that this would be one of the happiest times of his life. For one must often wait until the twilight of life to discover the treasure in simple moments: the ordinary miracle of a family together; the lasting pleasure hidden in a story well-told; and the serendipity in an encounter with strangers, who, with just a few heartfelt words, might illuminate entire lives.

  “Of course,” Jack finally said.

  “Excellent,” bellowed Oswald. “Well, if you could get me the revised version by the end of June, I think we may have a crack at the Christmas season. I’ve suggested a minor change to the title, but of course the final choice is up to you.”

  The publisher put the manuscript back in its folio and handed it across his desk to Jack, who looked down at the title page. His neatly typed title had been crossed out, and just below in red ink was scrawled, “A FLOWER FOR THE QUEEN — Or the Amazing Adventures of Mr Masson in the Fair Cape.”

  Jack opened his briefcase and placed the manuscript beside the leather notebook before shaking hands with Oswald and stepping out into the midday traffic. Looking at his watch, he realised that he had some time to kill, and so he walked down the Strand, past the Royal Society, before turning left into Covent Garden.

  Amongst the myriad colours and perfumes of flowers from every corner of the globe that were being sold by bellowing cockneys, he found what he was looking for.

  “I’ll take one dozen, please,” he said, pointing to the blue-and-orange star-shaped flowers.

  “Excellent choice, guv’ner,” replied the cheerful young man from behind his table. “Did you know that this ’ere flower originally came from Africa …”

  Jack smiled as he listened, losing himself in the market trader’s tale.

  AFTERWORD

  A Tale of Two Seaside Villages

  By Caroline Vermalle and Ryan von Ruben

  Where did it all begin?

  CV: It all started in the small seaside town where I have spent my summers since I was a child. As I remember it, I was standing in line one morning in 2010 at the local fishmonger’s.

  Actually, let’s rewind a little — if the truth be told, the real beginning of A Flower for the Queen is to be found on page 151 of the paperback edition of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, a comic tale about a slightly overweight writer’s odyssey through the American wilderness. This may seem a strange place for a story such as this to start, but in this self-parody of a man’s struggle against an alien environment, Bryson touched on the trials and tribulations of early American plant hunters and something touched a nerve.

  From Indiana Jones to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, I have always been captivated by stories of lost treasure. Here was a similar tale: only instead of pirates or buccaneers chasing gold ingots or jewel-encrusted relics, these were eminently more sensible people whose prize was something altogether more fragile, but which the circumstances of the time connived to make just as valuable: flowers.

  The poetry of that quest for a strange new plant proved irresistible. After reading about the era and people who inhabited it, I found what seemed to be an endless list of potentially suitable heroes, but somehow, either by noble birth or by the gift of fortune, they were all too distinguished, too readily destined for greatness.

  But then, lost in the pantheon of great plant hunters, I came across a fellow named Francis Masson. Neither a botanist nor a gentleman, here was a man who was not even a fully-fledged gardener, but a simple under-gardener who had never left the shores of his native Britain before sailing to South Africa on a flower-hunting expedition. He was too old, too awkward, too poor, and by all accounts was one of the unluckiest men to have graced the pages of history. And yet, against all odds, he managed to enrich London’s Kew Gardens with fifteen hundred new species of plants foun
d in some of the remotest, most inhospitable places in the world. And did I mention he was a reluctant spy? Francis Masson was an ordinary guy living an extraordinary life. I knew instantly that he was the chap I wanted to write about.

  I had my hero, but the story I wanted to tell kept eluding me until one fine summer’s day when I was queuing for freshly caught crab at the only fishmonger in a little seaside town on the French Atlantic coast.

  There, on the counter, was a small and rather common arrangement of exotic flowers — so common, in fact, that I was probably the only one of all the waiting customers to notice it. But notice I did because it contained a Strelitzia Reginae —

  a bird of paradise — discovered by none other than Francis Masson.

  It seemed crazy that right there in front of us was the product of one man’s fantastic odyssey, and yet no one seemed to notice except me. Right there and then I knew that I had to tell this story.

  So it’s a true story?

  RvR: Let’s just say that most of it is factually correct, and what isn’t, we feel could be true — if not in fact, then at least in spirit.

  The real Francis Masson was indeed sent on a botanical expedition to the Cape, spectacularly under-qualified for the job. Even if history implies that he went willingly, we know that nobody else applied for the position. The few scholars who cared to write about him seem to disagree on the issue of espionage — did he or didn’t he? We cannot be sure, but Sir Joseph Banks’s instructions with regard to False Bay were true enough. He might not have dreamed of a mythical garden, but this humble son of the British Isles definitely caught a serious case of wanderlust. Who knows what he was chasing in his decades-long, and oftentimes catastrophic, travels around the world? He certainly found (and lost) many flowers, but the paucity of information relayed by Masson in his letters and reports back to Banks leaves open many avenues for fantasy to fill in the blanks.