The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  For a moment she looked down and Banks studied her face. Then, when he realized that she intended to make no reply, he bowed and smiled into the silence she had left for him.

  “I’m sure we shall meet again soon. Perhaps you will be at home when I call upon your father.”

  Her eyes had remained lowered but now they moved sharply to his face. She spoke very clearly, her voice much harder.

  “Perhaps you are mistaken as to my identity, sir. My family does not receive visitors. Our neighbors do not call on us and we do not expect them.”

  He smiled and bowed again.

  “I shall wish you good-bye,” he said. “Until we meet again.”

  SHE PREYED upon his mind for reasons he didn’t understand. Perhaps it was the unusual circumstance of her being alone, or perhaps her demeanor as she drew. But more than either was the impression of a person hidden, and he found himself speculating about the emotions beneath her shell.

  THE NEXT MORNING Banks took his sister, Sophia, to pay visits in the village. Ahead of them the sun was shining and the meadows were full of the scent of summer. Both air and sunshine felt fresh on his cheek. With the danger of his great voyage looming, he had never felt more aware of being alive.

  The various calls were made with good humor. Banks was pleased to be with his sister, and she was pleased to show him to their neighbors. Their summer mood lasted until the end of the village. There, when Sophia went to turn back, Banks stopped her and indicated a small stone-built house that lay ahead of them.

  “I’m told the black sheep of the parish is unwell, Sophia. They say he is dying. I would like to call to find out how he fares.”

  “No, really, Joseph!” She pulled back on his arm and her face was suddenly serious. “Since the incident it is not proper to call. And besides, he has suffered a seizure that leaves him insensible to the world around. Even, one fears, insensible to his own disgrace.”

  But he was not to be dissuaded. With a firm arm he continued to steer her toward the house until turning back would have seemed so deliberate a snub that it was not to be contemplated. The old woman who answered the door informed them that the daughter of the house was not at home and that the master was unable to receive.

  “Do you think you might keep my card, nurse, so that he is aware of my visit?” Banks asked.

  “I fear he will know nothing of it, sir.”

  Banks nodded, his card still between his fingers. He might have spoken more, but Sophia’s pressure on his arm persuaded him to nod and move away.

  The same morning, as they returned home through the place called Slipper Wood, Banks spied a movement in the shadows. They watched for a moment until it became clear they were glimpsing the figure of a woman dressed in white. As they looked, the figure stopped by the trunk of a tree with her face turned toward it. For some moments she was motionless, then she began to slip around the tree, her face still close to the bark. When her circuit was complete, she moved to a neighboring trunk and repeated the ritual.

  “I fear that is the invalid’s daughter,” Sophia told him. “She is often to be seen alone in the woods. It does little to redeem her family’s reputation in the eyes of the village.”

  “How old is she?” he asked.

  “She must now be sixteen or seventeen.”

  He watched for a moment longer, his face unreadable against the sunlight.

  “What does she do in the woods?” he asked.

  “Really, I have no idea. Perhaps she is hoping to catch the attention of a passing gentleman of susceptible disposition. Though her looks are sadly ordinary and she has no prospects whatsoever.”

  That evening the party at the Abbey was joined by Dr. Taylor from the village. Sophia related what they had seen in Slipper Wood and turned to the doctor to support her in her disapproval.

  “Indeed. That young girl is most difficult,” he confirmed. “Since her father’s disgrace she shuns us all most markedly. It is as if misfortune has aged her and hardened her. She is alone a great deal too much, I fear.”

  Banks nodded and the conversation turned to other subjects.

  The next morning he took a magnifying glass from his study and returned to the place in Slipper Wood where he had seen her. So great was his absorption there that his business correspondence of the morning went unattended and a letter beginning “My dearest H…” was left unfinished on his desk.

  I was feeling distinctly uneasy as I sat in my small back kitchen and watched Katya make tea. Opposite me, across the table, a young policeman was asking the usual questions. No, nothing was missing. No sign of any disturbance at all. No damage, nothing.

  “Passport, bankbook, post office book…All all right, sir?” He made me feel like somebody’s grandfather.

  “Yes, all still here.”

  “Do you keep money on the premises?”

  “I’d like to, but I never seem to manage it.”

  “Well, if you’re really sure, sir.”

  He made a note on his pad and looked up at Katya as she approached the table with three mugs of tea balanced on a dinner plate. “I know this must be very disturbing for you both.”

  The remark was intended entirely for her, and it made me glance up at her as she turned for the sugar, my attention caught by the young man’s interest. I hadn’t seen much of Katya since she moved in, and I’d never looked at her very carefully before. Now I found her taller and slimmer than I’d thought, attractive in a youthful, slightly angular way. She was wearing black and her hair was dark, too, long and straight, with a fringe that framed her face. Before then the small silver stud in her nose was the only thing I’d ever really taken in. A strange thing, I thought randomly, how little I’d noticed her.

  She answered the officer’s questions with a faint accent, but she spoke English naturally, as if she’d grown up with it. Her story was very simple. She had returned a little before twelve and found the glass in the door broken. She’d called the police immediately and waited on the stairs. She hadn’t touched anything. She had lived here two months. She had never seen anyone acting suspiciously near the front door. She was from Sweden and was studying for a master’s degree in history.

  At this point something bleeped in the officer’s pocket and he began to put away his notebook.

  “There’s nothing much else I can do here, sir,” he told me neutrally. “Probably just kids. But I’m afraid you’ll need to take steps to make these premises more secure. With a front door like that, it’s only surprising it didn’t happen sooner.”

  I got up to show him out, but Katya rose, too, and as she was nearer the door, I let them go with a nod. From the hallway I could hear a voice lowered confidentially.

  “If you need me again, miss, here’s the number to call. Any time. Just pick up the phone…”

  Then the front door shut and Katya returned to the kitchen and the chair opposite me. The downstairs kitchen was my kitchen—Katya had her own—and it felt strange for us to be alone together there. Nevertheless, it was a good place to sit—an aging boiler kept it warm at unlikely times and a quirk of the ventilation meant it always smelled of coffee from the offices next door. Even tonight it felt immune from the sense of intrusion that hung in the hallway and the rooms beyond. The room was mostly filled with an old wooden table, and it was there that we sat, in the soft yellow light, neither of us speaking for a moment. When I looked up from my tea, she was watching me from under her fringe of hair.

  “Is it true?” she asked. “Is there really nothing missing? You didn’t seem sure.”

  I paused before I replied, afraid of making a fool of myself.

  “No, nothing missing. I just feel unsettled.”

  Katya nodded. “It’s never nice to think of someone poking around. But at least they didn’t take anything.”

  That was what was worrying me. I could have understood theft.

  “There’s something I noticed,” I told her. “Something a bit odd.”

  She was looking at me car
efully. “What sort of thing?”

  I didn’t attempt to explain until she’d followed me upstairs and we were standing side by side facing the bookshelves that covered one wall of my bedroom.

  “Have you ever seen any of those black-and-white films where the detective comes back to find his office has been ransacked? Well, this is exactly the opposite.”

  She looked alarmed and slowly shook her head, not understanding. I wasn’t quite sure how to explain.

  “Here, run your finger along my desk. What happens?”

  She picked up her finger and blew on it.

  “Nothing happens. Just dust.”

  “Exactly. Now do the same on the bookshelves.”

  She didn’t need to.

  “Nothing. They’ve been dusted.”

  “Take a look around. Do I look like a man who dusts?”

  It wasn’t hard to see what I meant. Everything in the room that wasn’t in daily use was covered with a thin layer of dust—the chairs, the wooden chest, even the photograph by my bed. But the bookshelves were immaculate, beautifully and carefully wiped clean.

  Someone had dusted my bookshelves.

  It was too absurd to really believe. My first thought on finding it had been that something must be missing, that perhaps someone had wiped extravagantly for fingerprints after a theft. But there were no gaps between the crammed books to suggest an absence, and I knew the contents of those shelves so well I could almost recite them. And besides, there was nothing worth stealing. No book in the whole collection of any real value.

  To my surprise, Katya began to giggle.

  “So,” she began, trying to restrain herself, “you think someone would break in to do your cleaning? I mean, it isn’t that messy.”

  It was about then that I found myself liking her. I think it was her laughter, the way she kept things in proportion. The break-in was confusing, and the conversation with Anderson was still on my mind. I needed someone to listen while I tried to manufacture a little cosmos out of the chaos. So that she wouldn’t go away, I cleared her a seat and began to tell her about my evening at the Mecklenburg Hotel. But to make sense of that, I found I had to tell her about the book I’d never written, the ultimate book about extinct birds. A book that was going to make each one, in a little way, live again. I told her about the discoveries I’d made in obscure collections and the unknown drawings I’d found in the papers of dead travelers, and then about some of the birds themselves: the Stephen Island wren, entirely wiped out by a single domestic cat; the spectacled cormorant, eaten to the brink of extinction by Arctic explorers and finished off by a fleet of Russian whalers in the course of an afternoon.

  Katya listened with her elbows on her knees and her hands around the tea she’d brought up with her. She didn’t seem bored, and she prompted me when I hesitated. When her tea was finished, I fetched two glasses and a bottle of Polish vodka from the freezer. When I went to close the curtains, the street outside lay in darkness, the night gathered thickly beyond the reach of the streetlamps. It had started to rain again.

  “Why did you never finish it?” she asked as I filled the glasses.

  It was hard to explain. I picked up the bottle and put it between us. It was still four-fifths full.

  “Look,” I said, pointing to the empty fifth at the top of the bottle. “When I set out I thought all I had to do was describe the gap here.” She looked at the empty part and nodded.

  “But do you see? After three years I was farther from finishing than when I started. The level in the bottle keeps falling, and the rate it drops gets faster and faster. Each year there are more and more species on the brink, more empty space about to appear in the bottle. Sometimes they even discover new species, but they go straight onto the endangered lists, too. And then there are the empty bottles we don’t even know about, the birds extinct before we even noticed them. One day I suddenly realized that I’d never catch up. There’s never going to be a definitive work about extinct birds. All we can do is record the handful we happen to know about. The rest are gone forever.”

  She pursed her lips. “I hadn’t thought of it like that. But what has this got to do with the dust on your shelves?”

  So I told her about my meeting with Anderson and his plan to hunt for the remains of the rarest bird in the world. The room got warmer as we talked. Every now and then Katya sipped at her drink, wrinkling her nose slightly at every sip. The idea of the lost specimen, the evidence of a whole vanished species, seemed to fascinate her.

  “I can see why it’s valuable,” she nodded as I tried to explain the DNA collectors, “though fifty thousand dollars seems a huge amount for a dead bird.”

  I shrugged. “That depends on how you look at it. A great auk would be worth a fortune, and there are about twenty of them. And if you came across a preserved dodo, you’d be able to retire for life. Seriously. You see, there’s no such thing as a preserved dodo skin, only bones and beaks and things. So perhaps something genuinely unique does have a value.”

  Katya looked unconvinced.

  “It’s got another sort of value, too,” I went on. “You see, for a species to officially exist, there has to be something called a type. That’s a sample specimen, one that’s held to be typical of the species. Without a specimen, there’s no type, and without a type, science doesn’t really recognize that something exists. So if we’re going to be strictly scientific about it, the Ulieta bird isn’t even extinct. It just never happened. There’s no physical evidence, no bones, no feathers, nothing. Just a drawing, a few lines of writing, and one lost bird.”

  Katya nodded slowly. “But where do your books fit in?”

  I looked at them.

  “I’ve absolutely no idea. None of them is very special. Besides, if there was a clue somewhere, wouldn’t whoever it was have taken it away?”

  Katya turned and studied the wall of books thoughtfully. “Perhaps they did. Perhaps there’s a page torn out of one of them. You ought to check.”

  “Let’s see, a thousand books at three hundred pages per book…”

  She turned back to me then and we both laughed, appalled at the thought of going through them.

  “Perhaps another day,” she said.

  “Perhaps another month.”

  We stayed there drinking until the bottle was two-thirds empty. As we talked, I began to see her differently. Her face lit up when she spoke, and her vitality was infectious. Our conversation went from birds to history, and we rambled happily about the way things in the past come to be recorded, about the way Time takes things away from us if we don’t fight to keep them. It was common ground of sorts.

  “My father teaches history at the university in Stockholm,” she told me. “He used to be a real historian, the sort who went off and found things out. When he met my mother he was going to be the most brilliant historian in Sweden. Now he’s never out of restaurants and TV studios and he writes the books the publishers tell him to write. He’s too busy doing interviews to care anymore.” She shrugged. “We don’t get on. That’s why I came to England. I want to do it for myself.”

  “And is that why you don’t phone your mother?”

  She paused, her face a half frown. “My father walked out on her when I was a teenager. She didn’t even fight. Not even for my sake. She just let him go.”

  It was too harsh a reason to reason against. She reached out and ran her finger down the spine of one of the volumes. We’d been talking for a long time now. It made questions easier. Now it was her turn.

  “Why didn’t you take the money you were offered?” she asked.

  “If I wanted money, I wouldn’t be doing what I do. Besides, there was something about Anderson. I didn’t like his suit.”

  At that Katya spluttered on her vodka and began to laugh again and we were both still laughing as we swept up the glass in the hall and tried to seal up the broken windows with tacks and plastic bags.

  Finally we stood by the semi-repaired door, facing each other, both
smiling. Despite the break-in I felt oddly lighthearted.

  “So many lost things,” she mused, her voice growing a little more serious. “Why don’t you go and look for it?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I wouldn’t know where to start. The trail went cold two hundred years ago. And, besides, Anderson is a professional. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Those words ran through my mind again in the early hours of the morning when I finally reached my bed. It was an impossible task, surely. But Anderson’s confidence disturbed me. Could he be right? Could it really be that the bird had survived in some unknown collection, untouched since the days of Cook and Joseph Banks? I tried to put the thought away, tried to remind myself that my life had moved on. But Anderson knew better than that. He understood that I’d left something unfinished, that I’d never made a find like the one he was intending. The bird of Ulieta. The lost bird. It would be the most remarkable find of all.

  I knew I should sleep, but my mind kept turning, and as the night began to change into the gray light of a winter dawn I realized I had one small, faint hope, something I knew that Anderson couldn’t possibly know. A decision made, I felt able to swing myself into bed, and it was then I noticed that the photograph on my bedside table had fallen over, as if someone had knocked against the table. I stood it up carefully and looked at it for a moment. When I turned out the light, the room didn’t go dark.

  THREE DAYS later she returned to the clearing where Banks had watched her sketch. It was a day to savor. The sky was an unblemished blue and the sun was hot on her skin. She found the fallen branch where she had been seated previously and fixed her attention on the ground before her. Without any great preparation she began to draw. As she worked the silence of the woods turned to small noises—the water in the stream, the darting of unseen birds.

  She had learned that only when in the woods could she be the person she knew herself to be. As her father’s daughter she had needed to protect herself from the world she lived in. Here that world was no more than a fleeting odor on the breeze.