The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  The following Monday Katya and I met in the café of the Natural History Museum to compare notes. Katya was neat in jeans and trainers, with her hair pulled back. I was scruffy and slightly unkempt in an old jacket. The Natural History Museum welcomed both of us equally, and if anyone thought we made an odd couple, no one particularly showed it. Somewhere to our left the remains of a giant ground sloth towered silently over parties of schoolchildren. Many floors farther up, safe in sepulchral darkness, the first-found archaeopteryx lay awkwardly in its bed of stone. We bent over our frothy cups of coffee and ignored them both.

  I’d bumped into Katya that morning in the hallway as she was leaving for a lecture. Slightly to my surprise, I started telling her about Hans Michaels’s widow. Up to that point I’d thought of that visit as my own secret, but on seeing Katya I changed my mind. I’d imagined the search for the Ulieta bird would be about checking records, following up on rumors, making phone calls. But Hans Michaels’s sketch altered that. Now I was faced with a puzzle. I suppose I just wanted someone to help.

  It was Katya who suggested meeting in the museum. I was pleased with the idea; it was one of my favorite places, elegant and airy and stuffed full of wonders. And the thought of talking things through with her made me feel better.

  We began by sharing what we’d found out—the main facts of the case, if you like. As we didn’t have many facts, we didn’t expect to take too long. Nevertheless, we put our heads together and started off on the early life of Joseph Banks. He was a good subject—charming, dashing, good looking, and the leading natural scientist of his generation. Oh, and rich, too. By the age of twenty-eight he’d been around the world with Captain Cook, established himself as the darling of society, been schemed after by various women with daughters, been painted by Joshua Reynolds, and become one of the leading members of the Royal Society. I felt I had a good grasp on events; Katya had clearly done better on the people. After twenty minutes we’d come up with this:

  1743

  Joseph Banks born. Grew up in Lincolnshire (Revesby Abbey).

  1760

  Age 17. At Oxford. An avid naturalist.

  1766–67

  Age 23. Expedition to Newfoundland with Daniel Solander.

  1768

  Age 25. Engaged to Harriet Blosset. Departed with Cook and Solander on the Endeavour. Gathered specimens. Observed the transit of Venus from Tahiti. Helped map coast of Australia. General hero and good companion.

  1771

  Age 28. Endeavour returns. Banks a huge hit in top social circles.

  1772

  Age 29. Cook’s second voyage. Banks drops out at very last minute. Replaced as ship’s naturalist by Johann Forster.

  1774

  Age 31. Forster collects birds on island of Ulieta (now Raiatea).

  1775

  Age 32. Cook returns. Forster gives (only ever) specimen of Ulieta bird to Banks.

  “How does that look for background?” I asked.

  Katya nodded. “It’s good. We can call it ‘Events Leading Up to the Crime.’”

  I looked at the list again.

  “Actually, there are a couple of things in there I don’t really understand. We’ve put down ‘1768—Engaged to Harriet Blosset.’ But he never married her, did he? What went wrong?”

  Katya looked down at her notes again.

  “Not sure. They’d met in London. Seems like the engagement was never announced—it was all arranged just before he sailed off with Cook. And it seems to have broken off again soon after he got back.”

  “Do we know why?”

  “Not really. But they’d had three years to go off the idea.”

  Katya seemed to think this was a perfectly adequate reason in itself. Even so, I knew we were both thinking the same thing.

  “Any pictures of her?” I wondered.

  “Not in the books I’ve read so far.” Katya looked worried. “We should be able to find one, though, shouldn’t we?”

  I wasn’t so sure. After some discussion we agreed to alter our list:

  1771

  Age 28. Endeavour returns. Banks no longer engaged (why?).

  My other question was about Cook’s second voyage, a year later. Banks had been all set to go, with his provisions bought and his arrangements made, only to pull out on the very brink of departure over an argument with Cook about cabin space. It seemed a strangely petulant piece of behavior from an otherwise good-natured man.

  “Yes,” Katya agreed. “You can tell it took people by surprise. Did you read about Mr. Burnett?”

  “Burnett?” The name didn’t ring any bells.

  Katya picked one of the books off the pile and leafed through it until she came to a page she’d already marked. It was the text of a letter from Captain Cook to the Admiralty, sent quite early on his second voyage. The letter was quoted with Cook’s original punctuation.

  From Captain James Cook of the Resolution to the Secretary of the Admiralty, Madeira, 1st August, 1772

  …Three days before we arrived a person left the Island who went by the name of Burnett. He had been waiting for Mr Banks arrival about three months, at first he said he came here for the recovery of his health, but afterwards said his intention was to go with Mr Banks, to some he said he was unknown to this Gentleman, to others he said it was by his appointment he came here as he could not be receiv’d on board in England. At last when he heard that Mr Banks did not go with us, he took the very first opportunity to get off the Island. He was in appearance rather ordinary than otherwise and employ’d his time in Botanizing &ca—Every part of Mr Burnetts behaviour and every action tended to prove that he was a Woman, I have not met with a person that entertains a doubt of a contrary nature. He brought letters of recommendation to an English House where he was accommodated during his stay. It must be observed that Mrs Burnett must have left England about the time we were first ready to sail….

  Katya grinned as I finished reading.

  “What do you think? A Joseph Banks groupie?”

  I smiled. “It could be. Or just gossip? Banks was a dashing young man with a bit of a reputation, so he was fair game for rumors. And the two men had fallen out. Perhaps Cook couldn’t resist dishing a bit of dirt on Banks to the folks back home.”

  Katya closed the book and put it back on the pile.

  “Either way, it doesn’t get us anywhere,” she said. “The bird hadn’t even been discovered then. But when Cook passed that way again at the end of his voyage, he had the Ulieta bird on board. What do we know after that?”

  It was an easy enough question, because what we knew was virtually nil. It was like trying to read a murder mystery where all the pages describing the suspects had been torn out. And I had a nasty feeling that if we were to get as far as the denouement, it would probably be Anderson revealing the answers. Nevertheless, Anderson himself seemed to think we ought to know something, so we corralled our coffee cups and went on looking.

  The problem was clear enough. We knew that the bird had been given to Banks shortly after the Endeavour returned to Britain. Latham saw it in Banks’s collection in the couple of years that followed. But four years after Banks was given the bird, a French ornithologist called Malbranque spent months studying the same collection, and his catalog made no mention of anything that might have been the Ulieta bird. After that it was never mentioned by anyone ever again.

  That left a couple of years where we had nothing. Two blank years in which a specimen casually given had casually disappeared. Two years of London society tramping through Banks’s house in Soho Square. Banks had kept records of any specimens presented to fellow collectors and scholars. The Ulieta bird wasn’t listed. But at some point it was either destroyed or carried out of that house in Soho Square. And then, if Anderson was to be believed, it had spent the next two hundred years or so lying quietly, waiting to be discovered by someone who knew where to look.

  As I jotted down the various dates, Katya began to check her watch. I remembered there were ot
her things she was supposed to be doing.

  “So what do we do next?” she asked.

  I smiled and pulled out another blank sheet of paper.

  “We play a game. According to Michaels’s drawing, there’s a woman involved. Now, what women were there in Banks’s life at the time the bird disappeared? We write down all the ones we can think of here. They’re all suspects. And if the bird was given to one of them, we could check to see what happened to their collections. Assuming they had collections.”

  Katya gave me a bright smile.

  “I like it,” she said cheerfully, reaching for her notes. “Cherchez la femme. We’re mad, of course, but I like it.”

  For five minutes we tried to come up with names. The first three or four came quickly: Banks’s mother; his sister, Sophia; Harriet Blosset; one or two society hostesses whose names we had noted. Somewhere there would be portraits of them if we could be bothered to search. After that we paused.

  “Anyone else?”

  “There was a mistress,” Katya said at last. “After his engagement. I read about her but I didn’t write down her name.”

  I nodded. I hadn’t written it down, either.

  “Was she still around in 1775?”

  Katya was packing up her things.

  “I don’t think so, but put her down if only to…What’s the phrase?”

  “Eliminate her from our inquiries?”

  Katya stood up, smiling. “That’s the one. Then we go and find their portraits! Now come on…” She jerked her head toward the museum’s main hall. “I want to have a look around.”

  I glanced down at our list of suspects. In the space at the bottom of the list I added the words Joseph Banks’s mistress. Then, as an afterthought, I added a question mark.

  There was an irony to all this. My grandfather gave up the best part of his life in order to search for the African peacock—which is all the warning anyone should ever need about looking for things that might not exist and that you don’t know where to find. And it might never have happened if it hadn’t been for James Chapin’s feather. Back in 1913, Chapin had been part of an expedition to the Congo basin in search of the okapi, the mysterious jungle giraffe about which very little was known. One night toward the end of the expedition, Chapin’s party had been entertained by a group of local people, and Chapin had admired the feathers worn by the group’s leader. When he was allowed to take some of them away with him, he found he could identify every feather except one. Puzzled, and interested to discover what bird it came from, he kept the feather with him, but by the end of the expedition the mystery remained. It was not a tail feather. There was nothing about it that guaranteed it came from a peacock. But it was enough for my grandfather. That single feather was the spark. And yet, though neither Chapin nor my grandfather could have believed it at the time, it was to be twenty-three years before a bird was found to match that feather.

  Katya’s guided tour of the Natural History Museum began where every tour of the Natural History Museum has to begin, in the Main Hall, under the skeleton of the giant diplodocus. It was a weekday morning in winter: quiet, no crowds, and long shafts of pale sunshine cutting diagonals across the hall.

  We moved haphazardly from room to room, two small figures made tiny by the creatures around them, insignificant under the high ceilings; past fossil plates of great sea creatures and under the ribs of long-extinct mammals, strange creatures from an improbable bestiary—ancient crocodiles, armadillos as big as ponies, sloths bigger than bears.

  At one point Katya turned to me, curious.

  “Have you always been the way you are? Interested in things, I mean.”

  I looked at her, surprised by the question. A woman hurried past us, tugging along two small children.

  “I suppose I have. In some things. I was always out in hedgerows, collecting. Started with beetles and tadpoles and worked my way up. Used to sneak off from school to go and catch newts.”

  “And what about later? When you were a teenager? Didn’t you ever rebel? Take drugs and give up school?”

  I laughed. “At seventeen I spent my summer in Costa Rica cataloging beetles.”

  She laughed at that, but looked thoughtful.

  “I did all those things,” she said. “I mean drugs and things. It meant I never really…” She searched for the right word for a moment and then gave up. “All the boyfriends I had back then were the ones who dropped out of school and smoked dope and lived in squats. I used to collect them.”

  “How come?” I asked. “It isn’t how you strike me.”

  She made a face. “Oh, you know. These things just happen. Come on.” She took my arm and led me on to the next gallery.

  We wandered on in companionable silence for a little longer, until we came back to the main hall and the carefully reconstructed skeleton of a dodo.

  “There you go. When people say ‘dead as a dodo,’ that’s what they mean.”

  “Three hundred years dead.” She nodded, reading the label.

  “And speaking of dead birds”—I looked at my watch—“we’ve got an appointment to keep.”

  I led her to the small library at the back of the museum. Here, tucked away, is the museum’s General Library, where Geraldine, the long-serving librarian, was expecting me.

  “They’re just fetching it, Mr. Fitzgerald,” she told me. “Should be ready for you in a few minutes. And I’ve put out the Banks biographies you asked for on the table over there.”

  “You’ll see what in a moment,” I told Katya. “In the meantime, let’s look at these.”

  We sat down next to each other and went through the pile of books, looking out for the name of Joseph Banks’s mistress. Or at least that’s what we tried to do. Instead we found that the more we looked for her, the less visible she became. No one even seemed to know her name. We’d made no progress at all by the time Geraldine returned with the object I’d requested. She left it on a table near us, covered only with a loose sheet of clear plastic.

  It was a drawing of a bird, expertly done, its colors apparently as fresh as they had been on the June afternoon in 1774 when Georg Forster sat drawing in his cabin. Through the plastic sheet you could even glimpse traces of the artist at work—the corrections to his original outlines, the places where his sweating hand had smudged his own pencil lines as he drew. Face to face with the very paper he’d drawn on, that hot afternoon suddenly seemed very close, the bird in the picture very real.

  “The bird itself…” Katya breathed.

  “Yes, that’s the one. The one they caught that day. The one that ended up in Joseph Banks’s collection. We don’t know how many of these there once were, or how they lived, or anything. All we know of them is this one individual.”

  We sat together in front of that picture, musing, until the room began to grow gloomy around us and Katya looked at her watch.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ve got a tutorial.” She began to pull on her coat. “We should…” She trailed off. “Well, whatever. I’ll see you later.”

  By the door she turned and waved.

  After that I found it hard to settle down again. I let Geraldine remove the picture and then returned to the reference books, still vaguely curious about the missing mistress. The next twenty minutes or so threw up a couple more references to her, which I photocopied for Katya before I went home. I still hadn’t found out the mistress’s name. And Katya didn’t get to see the photocopies for quite a while, because when I got home I found a plain, unmarked envelope had been pushed through the door. Two things struck me about the document inside. The first was that it had been sent anonymously. The second was that it looked remarkably as though it might be Anderson’s secret clue.

  THE MEASUREMENT of time during a long sea voyage is a puzzle with more than one dimension. The question of longitude was left to Cook, a matter of sea clocks and dead reckoning, something recorded in logs and on the carved sticks of sailors when the breeze hung slack. To Banks, time was a
mystery of a different sort. The days passed so fast that a year was gone before he knew it, and each passing day was simply piled in his memory onto the ones that had gone before, until the months of travel began to rise behind him like a ridge of mountains between him and home. And yet his last days in England, when he chose to think of them, remained vivid: the Revesby woods, Harriet’s head on his shoulder, London left at dawn, Plymouth by sunset. It was as if each new adventure left these images sharper and they became his destination, the lights to navigate by if a night seemed starless. He felt that when the demands of the voyage were done, that world would be waiting for him just as it had always been, green and safe and ready for him.

  IN REVESBY she measured time differently: by the leaves turning, by the lowering of the candles, by the slowing rhythm of her father’s breath. While Banks’s days passed quickly, hers did not pass at all; one grew into another imperceptibly, until their combined mass began to press upon her memories. The sharp outlines of her days in the woods thickened under their weight, and to preserve them she did two things. She continued to draw by day despite the shortening light, and with each line she felt she made the woods more real. Then, by night, curled under her sheets, she did the same for her memories of him, reaching for them one by one, retouching the color and lines of each until they became sunlit portraits hanging in the dark.

  The autumn after Banks’s departure was a short one, and winter came early. But there was one day in October when the sun shone in a last reprise of summer and she left the house early to spend a final warm day in the woods. She hoped to slip through the village unseen, but she quickly found she was not the only person drawn outdoors by the fine weather. In the meadow leading to the woods, two figures stood on the path ahead of her, and when she came into view they hesitated. She recognized Banks’s sister, Sophia, and Miss Taylor, the doctor’s daughter, on the way from the Abbey into the village.