The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  She turned to the second sheet, a page from a more recent biography.

  Although Banks died without children, his affair with Miss B—n seems to have resulted in a pregnancy, at least according to the gossip columnists of the time. On this occasion the gossip may not have been entirely malicious. In 1773 a letter to Banks from Johann Fabricius, who spent a lot of time studying Banks’ collection in the 1770s, seems to confirm the rumours. “My best compliments and wishes in Orchard Street. What has she brought you? Well it is all the same, if a boy he will be clever and strong like his father, if a girl, she will be pretty and genteel like her mother.” For all that, there is no further mention of either mother or child and, whether the affair was ended by mutual agreement or by death in childbirth, it is clear that by 1774 it was indeed over.

  Katya pushed the paper back to me and raised her eyebrows.

  “Is there a picture of her anywhere?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. We should check it out.”

  Katya seemed less sure. “Sad story,” she said, “though from a practical point of view we can cross her off our list of suspects if she was gone by 1774. The Ulieta bird didn’t even arrive in the country until a year after that.”

  I nodded, for a moment not really thinking about the bird, but thinking instead of a life unrecorded, of the fragility of human tenderness. “It is sad,” I agreed. “Sad that no one even knows her name.”

  Katya refilled our glasses and held hers up for a toast.

  “To solving mysteries,” she said.

  “And finding things,” I added, though I wasn’t sure the two were always the same.

  That night we both got outrageously drunk. Around us the tables filled and candles were lit and a crackly recording of old Italian songs sobbed away somewhere in the darkness. The evening slipped by effortlessly. Toward the end of the first bottle, Katya began to tell me about herself. She told me her family had spent eight years in London while her father taught here. She’d been fourteen when they went back to Sweden and her parents’ marriage broke up. She’d spent four or five years after that rebelling against both of them—dropping out of school, living in a squat, trying to do all the things that parents like least.

  “So what changed?” I asked her.

  “I did. When I was about nineteen.” She smiled a half-smile and gave half a shrug. “One day I realized that my life was just boring and miserable. I began to find myself spending whole days in the library, reading. I pretended it was just a way of keeping warm when I had nowhere else to go, but then I found myself sneaking books out at night so that I could carry on reading. It made me stop and ask who I was trying to punish. A week later I signed up for school again. First I wrote a long, angry letter to my father telling him it didn’t mean I was forgiving him.”

  After that the evening grew a little hazier. Tables began to empty, but in our little pool of candlelight we scarcely noticed. We talked about history and politics and wondered aloud whether Joseph Banks had loved his mistress and whether she had loved him. At some point Katya leaned back and, eyeing me solemnly from under her fringe, asked me why I’d changed my mind about finding the bird.

  “Who says I changed my mind?” I asked. I was a little aware that my thoughts weren’t as clear as they had been.

  “You have changed your mind. Definitely. The night of the break-in you weren’t very sure.”

  She leaned forward now and deliberately dipped her head into my sightline so that I had to look at her.

  “I suppose I thought Anderson would get there first.”

  “And now you don’t?”

  “It’s like he said. This sort of discovery was the one I was always looking for. All that time. I suppose I knew I had to give it another try.” I paused and thought for a moment. I’d reached that point in the evening where it didn’t seem to matter if I was making sense or not. “You know, sometimes someone’s born and then they die and they’re gone forever. I mean, however hard you try to remember them, you begin to lose them from that day. In the end you’re left with something that’s made up of fragments of them, little bits of memory and feelings.” I shrugged at her across the candlelight. “And those are all we have and we should keep them.”

  “People? Or do you mean birds?”

  I shrugged. “Both, I suppose.”

  She touched my hand then but didn’t say anything. She looked very lovely in the candlelight.

  “And there’s another reason for finding it, of course,” I went on solemnly.

  She took her hand away and frowned. “What’s that?”

  “Well, if that bird outlived Cook and Banks and survived all the wars and fires and floods since then I’m damned if I’m going to let Anderson flog it off to somebody in a lab in the vague hope that by tearing it apart they may someday come up with a slightly modified chicken.”

  She laughed at that and I laughed at myself, and I don’t remember much after that, not even how we got back to our rooms, only a moment at the top of the stairs looking at Katya when it would have been easy to forget the photograph by my bedside and that bare room from so long ago with the rumpled bed and the electric fan. Easy to forget everything, in fact. A hazy, fleeting moment, gone before I even thought to grasp it.

  A very few hours later I was woken by a series of painful raps on my bedroom door and by Potts’s American accent summoning me to breakfast. When I finally made it downstairs, dry-mouthed and a little croaky, Potts was settled neatly in the bit of the lounge bar where they served food. By daylight the bar seemed stained and tatty again, and the air smelled of stale cigarette smoke.

  “Over here, Mr. Fitzgerald,” he said, beckoning me. “I already checked out of the George. I thought I’d get these folks to cook me breakfast. I thought we could talk while we eat.”

  He was as immaculate as before, this time in a suit of purple and green tweed, Santa Claus dressed for a grouse shoot. As he helped himself to coffee, he explained that Smith, Anderson’s detective, had left Stamford the night before. His departure meant there wasn’t much reason to stay.

  “That letter looks like a dead end,” he told me. “I’m off to London to look for Anderson and to check out a couple of other little things, too.”

  I nibbled dully at a triangle of cold toast and couldn’t think of anything useful to say. In front of me Potts demolished an enormous cooked breakfast.

  “You know how old I am, Mr. Fitzgerald?” he asked. “I’m seventy years old next birthday. And do you know what I’ve learned in all those years? I’ve learned that breakfast is the only meal the British haven’t learned how to ruin. Jeez, some of the hotel dinners I’ve had in this country…”

  He paused, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a paper napkin. “You know the other thing I’ve learned? I’ve learned to know when I’m wasting my time. And no matter how you look at it, neither of us is doing much good around here, peering into priest holes and laughing at rare breeds of sheep. The answer’s somewhere else.”

  With that he settled in to the remains of his breakfast and kept me busy with questions about what Katya and I had done the previous day. When he’d mopped the last traces of baked beans from his plate, he pulled a ten-pound note out of his wallet and pushed it under the salt shaker.

  “That should cover it,” he announced. Then he looked at me for a moment and pulled something else out of his wallet. “Know who this is?” he asked.

  I recognized her at once. Not a photograph, but a photocopy of an old print, the sort of cheap, printed portrait that was common in the eighteenth century—grainy, blurred, and executed with no great finesse. It was a neat, pretty face, small-featured, unremarkable. And yet, despite the journeyman haste of the work, the artist had caught something in the eyes that made the portrait oddly striking, something intelligent and compelling.

  I looked up at Potts. “Where did this come from?”

  “It was lying around in Anderson’s hotel room.”

  “I didn’t know you’d seen
Anderson.”

  “I haven’t. I’ve no idea where he is. But I found out he’d kept his room at the Mecklenburg. So I went in and had a look through his papers.” Again that benign smile. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Mr. Fitzgerald. I just wandered around the corridor looking lost until a maid with a vacuum cleaner let me in.” He gave me a slightly rueful smile. “There wasn’t much to see. A copy of the letter we already have. Then a big bundle of photocopies of books and articles about Joseph Banks. Nothing very exciting. This picture was near the bottom and it kinda caught my eye. So I brought it with me.”

  I gave him the picture back as coolly and as carelessly as I could manage. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve no idea who she is.” And then I took a long, slow swig of tea. Because whoever she was, Hans Michaels had found her. And when Michaels sat down to make a sketch of her portrait, it was because she was the clue he thought would lead him to the Ulieta bird.

  Potts shrugged and put the picture away, then stood up and shook my hand. As he headed for the door with his bags, I called after him.

  “Mr. Potts?” He turned back to me. “That picture. Would you mind if I took a copy, just in case I come across it again?”

  He put down his bags and took out the picture again, looking at it with new curiosity. “Well, well,” he muttered. “So it is important.”

  “I don’t know any more than you do,” I told him, almost truthfully. “It just…well, I don’t have many leads.”

  He looked at me for a moment, then placed the piece of paper on the table nearest him. “It’s yours. Keep it.” He picked up his bags again. “I always keep copies.”

  When he’d gone I stayed in the bar, smoking cigarettes and drinking tea until Katya joined me. She helped herself to fruit juice and cereal, and as she ate, she studied the picture and listened to my account of breakfast with Potts. She looked amazingly fresh after her late night. I watched her eat with a sort of awe. Sometimes you forget how beautiful youth can be.

  THAT AFTERNOON in Louth, the sun shone and the little churchyard seemed heavy with summer. No one else came to the lych-gate, and the high hedges muffled the sleepy movements of the town. Where the two figures sat side by side near the long grass, there was only the noise of insects and the rustle of small birds foraging.

  As she talked he looked ahead, at the moss on the gravestones or at the honey-stone of the church wall. From time to time she paused and studied his profile, still wondering at his being there, almost prepared to find herself mistaken.

  “When we last met,” she began, “my father was dying. He fell from the road when he was both drunk and angry. It’s well known in Revesby that he attacked John Ponsonby at his own table, in front of his wife and daughters. You must have heard that. I believe he struck him with his fist as Mr. Ponsonby rose to face him. Anyone in Revesby will tell you the details. It was what they expected of a man like my father: a nonbeliever, a man who let his daughter run wild in the woods. What they don’t know is why my father went to the Ponsonby house that night. It was because everything he owned, he’d sold to Ponsonby, and that day he realized the sale included his own daughter.”

  She let herself look at him. He was sitting leaning forward, his forearms resting on his knees. She couldn’t see his eyes but she could see the tension in the line of his jaw and the way he rubbed the knuckles of one hand with the fingers of the other. Sensing her hesitation, he turned and she found she could not read the expression in his eyes. Looking down, she continued.

  “John Ponsonby is not all bad, though I have not always thought so. If I tell you about him you must promise to take no action against him, must tell no one.”

  Banks turned his head away again and ran his palm across the back of his neck. “Of course,” he replied, flat-voiced. “Please continue.”

  SHE WAS nearly fourteen when Ponsonby first noticed her. He had seen her in the distance, early one summer evening as he approached Revesby on horseback. She was wearing white and she stood out against the green of the hedgerows in the late sunlight. Almost unthinkingly he found himself intrigued by the slim, straight figure alone on the lane in front of him. By her carriage, a lady, he thought, although a lady would not be unaccompanied, yet surely too poised to be a village girl. As he drew nearer, he found himself stirred by the piquancy of that female neatness so alone, and he spurred his horse on at a trot.

  Ponsonby was not by nature a libertine, but his business took him well beyond the narrow morality of the village, and his indulgence in the habits of well-to-do young men had never quite ceased upon his marriage. There was nothing unusual in that, and in matters of personal conduct he did not feel himself any better or worse than his peers. Nevertheless, he had always conducted his liaisons at a discreet distance from his home. Indeed it had never occurred to him that Revesby itself could provide anyone to excite his amorous instincts. He therefore felt a slight shock when he came up to the figure in the lane and recognized the daughter of one of his debtors, a girl of no more than fourteen. He stopped beside her under the pretext of a greeting and took time to study her. She was, after all, nothing unusual, he thought: still little more than a girl, nothing striking or beautiful in her features. And yet he noticed her eyes, very deep and very green, and wondered if perhaps he had not been entirely mistaken.

  From that day on he noticed her more and more. He would glimpse her in the woods or picking flowers in the hedgerows, always alone, supple and graceful, returning his gaze boldly with that clear, unafraid face. He took to calling on her father, something few in the village would do. When he called he would find the father either talkative or sullen, the daughter always short with him to the point of rudeness. Piqued by such unaccustomed treatment, he began to make more frequent visits.

  She felt his interest in her from the first, and instinctively sought to avoid him. Wherever they met she was aware of his gaze asking her questions, and in company the smile he saved for her seemed to invite complicity, as if they shared a secret. Worse, she knew that many of Ponsonby’s visits involved the signing of papers. After those visits her father’s spirits would rise and he would drink more freely. As his debts grew she felt the trap closing, yet even as she watched her father edging toward ruin, she was aware of her love for him like a sharpening pain. The more fallible he revealed himself to be, the more she loved him. Even while she chafed at Ponsonby’s attentions, part of her gave thanks for the money that allowed her father to buy his own sort of peace. And if Ponsonby’s smile suggested a secret between them, perhaps she could not in truth deny it. They both watched her father and waited.

  She was fifteen when the interview she had always imagined finally took place. It was late spring and there were still yellow crocuses at her door. That year Ponsonby had watched the girlishness grow out of her figure and, half believing her father’s radical rhetoric, was afraid to wait longer lest he be forestalled. He wasn’t proud of the suggestion he intended to make, but she inspired a sort of desperation in him that he could neither understand nor escape. So he waited until he knew she was alone and then he called.

  She knew at once that this visit was different. But he was her father’s only friend and she was only fifteen; she could see no other course but to allow him inside. In the doorway of the small parlor he took her arm as she passed and drew her close to him so that she was only inches from his chest. At his touch she became suddenly quiescent, as if by standing very still she could be safe. She could smell the tobacco on his clothes, even the faint scent of sandalwood on his skin. They were smells that were always to remind her of him.

  The sensation of her body so close to his shocked him with a sudden arousal and made him more decided. He had at first hesitated, but now the thought that this soft, shivering creature should be anyone’s but his filled him with an aching jealousy. He realized how much he wanted her.

  “Please,” he said. “I have things I must say to you.”

  She stood, her head down, and gave no sign of understanding.


  “I’ve watched you grow up unnoticed here,” he went on. “I swear to you that you are worth more than anyone in this place will ever know. You have the sort of beauty they don’t recognize, an intellect they cannot understand. You are different. And you’re wasted here, with a father who doesn’t think of you, in a house no one respectable will ever visit. There’s no future for you here, no chance of an honest marriage because your father has delighted in making you unmarriageable. He boasts to anyone who’ll listen that he has raised you a heathen, that you have learned no rules or religion to check your natural passions. The women here think you a wanton, and the men know you to be a pauper. They forbid their daughters to speak to you lest your presence corrupt them.”

  “I have no wish to speak to them,” she said quietly, her head still bowed.

  “So what can the future hold for you here?” His tone was low, almost begging. “It breaks my heart to see you here. There will be a time when your father will not be able to protect you. What then?”

  Still she said nothing, and suddenly his tone changed.

  “Who knows? Perhaps what they say is true. Perhaps you already understand ways an attractive young girl with no money can hope to make a living? Perhaps if I were to scratch at the surface of your reserve, some of those natural passions would rise to the surface? Would they? Is that not the truth?” He tightened his grip and held her closer, but she stayed limp and unresponsive, her eyes still turned away from his. With a half-sigh he let her go and took a step back from her. His voice was more controlled when he next spoke.

  “I beg you, do not go wasting your virtue on some village boy, some clumsy farmer’s son. You must believe me that you are too good for that.”

  He paused and moved to the window, looked out over the lane. She remained where she had stood from the beginning, her eyes tracing meaningless patterns in the floorboards at her feet.

  A silence ticked by between them, and when he turned to her again his voice was strangely tender. “When the time comes that you have nowhere else to go, come to me. I will take you away from this place, give you the books and clothes you cannot have here. You need a world beyond this place.”