She made no reply, no sign of having heard.
“The way you receive them makes my words sound like a threat. That is not how they are intended. Let me assure you I do not intend to coerce. I shall not make you return to this conversation unless you wish it. But I want you to understand that there is one person who appreciates your value. And if you are ever in need, I beg you to turn to me.”
When he left, she did not move to show him out. She simply remained where she was, her thoughts blank, until the light had faded, until the sound of her father’s return forced her back to herself.
WHEN SHE paused in her story, there was silence in the little churchyard. Instead of responding, Banks stood up and took a few slow steps away from her, toward the corner of the church. He stayed there for a moment and she waited, watching him. When he turned and looked at her, she met his look with eyes that were clear and unafraid. Standing there in front of her in the silence of the summer evening, Banks knew he had to speak. But words wouldn’t come. He found a pain and an anger inside him that seemed to make speech impossible.
“All those weeks in Revesby, I was so blind,” he said at last. “I should have seen, should have taken steps…”
She shook her head before he could finish. “No, please do not say so. Those days in the woods…None of the rest of it seemed to matter. There were only my drawings and the plants around us. Those days gave me more than you can know. They let me see that there will always be some things that are my own.”
And sitting there on the cold stone waiting for him to speak, she realized she had misunderstood. It was he who needed comforting. He who had traveled the whole world was the one lost, the one struggling to understand. She who had been nowhere knew so much more. So she rose and went to him and held out her hand.
“The afternoon is getting a little cooler. If you do not have to go, let us walk a little as we talk.”
He watched her approach, and once again he found it difficult to speak. Instead, when she came level with him, he allowed her to take his arm and guide him slowly along the path around the sleeping church.
As they walked, she finished her story. Ponsonby had kept his word. After that visit he had seemed content to let the distance grow between them. His calls became less frequent, and when he came it was usually at her father’s invitation. Those discussions were always of money, and left her father both excited and unsettled. He was drinking every evening now, alone in his study, and soon she began to fear for his physical health. She would often find him unconscious at his desk, brandy spilled over his papers and his breathing uneven. During the days he was flushed and unsteady and increasingly forgetful. He seemed to find it hard to concentrate. As the weeks passed, she watched him slowly breaking down, and the pain of her love for him grew sharper. She knew she would accept any suffering for his sake, but he was asking her to stand aside while he courted destruction. She held close to herself and tried to give him what he asked, knowing how forgetfulness eased his pain. But when she finally could take no more, she chose the wrong words and the wrong time.
For some days previously he had been short-tempered and unable to rest. Finally one afternoon he scribbled a note and left the house in a hurry. She knew where he was going but said nothing. That evening Mr. Ponsonby called and spent an hour with her father. When he was gone her father emerged from his study transformed, almost euphoric in his good humor.
“That man Ponsonby is a good fellow but a fool,” he declared. “He has agreed to advance me a substantial sum against the sale of certain books in my library. Oh, I don’t doubt the value of the volumes under discussion. I’m sure his money is secure. But in the matter of interest he is unnecessarily restrained. He says he does not wish to profit from a neighbor. And that must surely make him a fool.”
She listened to his words and felt sick inside. It was his blindness that hurt her most. Before she was able to pause and think, the words had escaped her.
“I’m sure Mr. Ponsonby sees his interest paid in a different currency,” she said.
It was an ugly scene. At first he raged and she tried in vain to explain her words in any way other than the one she had intended. But there was no escaping what she’d said, and her father was relentless. He pushed her and pushed her, drawing out the truth in tiny drops even as she begged him not to believe her. When he had heard everything, he turned his invective on his neighbor, repeating every word that had passed between them, finding betrayal in every smile, spluttering with rage at every mention of his name. It took her an hour to calm him. She swore herself false, promised him her suspicions were girlish fancy, praised Ponsonby for a hundred qualities she had never before imagined, and she wept a little at her father’s anger until eventually he became calmer.
“Leave me for a while,” he said at last. “You have given me a great deal to think about.” And as he retired to his study she even dared to hope that her outburst might have done some good, that he might at least reconsider any further borrowing.
She did not hear him go out. She only became aware of his absence when she began to prepare for bed. Her knock on his door went unanswered and, afraid that he had drunk himself to sleep, she entered the study and found him gone. He had left behind him the smell of brandy and the start of a note that consisted only of her name. It was three hours later when the men brought him home and carried him to his room.
“AND SO,” she said, leaning a little more heavily on Banks’s arm, “I was to blame. And when you become accustomed to that, there is little else with the power to hurt.”
They walked on for a while. The sun was still warm but the shadows were longer now and she could feel a shiver growing inside her. She had never imagined telling him of this, never imagined walking with her arm through his. She found the very fact of the moment, even though it seemed to her so desperate, made her in some way happy. But now she had reached the part of her story that could not be avoided. She waited for him to speak, to tell her to go on. She held her shoulders rigid to make sure the shiver could not happen.
“And so,” he began awkwardly, “when your father died…”
“Yes,” she said simply, and waited for the meaning to be clear. “There was nowhere else to turn.”
He paused again, his mind reeling, conflicting voices telling him to ask more, to ask nothing, to speak, to be silent.
“And?” He looked away as he asked the question.
“There was no money to pay for the funeral, so he provided it. Everything I thought of as mine was really his.”
“So he made you…?”
She stopped him then, pulling his arm so they came to a halt in front of the church door. She turned him to face her so that he had no alternative but to look into her eyes.
“No,” she said, looking up at him. “He would have allowed me to pursue any alternative, had there been one. But there wasn’t. I had nothing. A young woman with no money and no character, not brought up to serve, not fit to teach the children of decent people because she was raised with no religion and no morals. A woman known to meet a man in the woods and to return smiling each day. Do you see? Do you understand? He didn’t make me. He didn’t need to. I sent for him. All I asked was to live under a different name so that my father’s critics would not hear of it and jeer.”
Her hand on his arm meant he could not move on, and she was looking up at him with eyes full of fire. He had never before considered the price she might pay for their meetings, but he thought of it now. In his eyes she could see the pain and uncertainty, but she carried on, relentless.
“He was gentle with me. Do you understand? He did everything he could to make it right for me. His demands were never excessive. He has never alluded to my poverty, never reminded me of what I owe him. Never used it to humiliate me. He tries everything he knows to make me happy. And I let him try because it is all I can do in return.”
Still she looked at him, and as he looked down at her the light in her eyes seemed to burn into him. He had ne
ver seen eyes so green, so bright, never seen eyes blaze as hers did.
The shadows were lengthening, but the place where they stood remained in full sunlight. She saw the struggle in his face, saw words beginning to form on his lips, and she braced her shoulders tighter. When he spoke his voice sounded raw.
“Come away with me,” he said. A blackbird flew from the undergrowth and passed by them with a cry. “Come away with me,” he said again, more urgently. “You have an alternative now.” Suddenly he smiled. “I swear I will ask nothing of you but that you talk to me of lichen. And that you draw every day until your drawings astonish the world.”
As he spoke she felt such warmth rushing into her that she shivered. The fierce urging she had tried to forget was alive again, raging inside her. She knew that part of what he said was false; she knew that no one asked for nothing. But whatever the price to pay, she would be alive again. She would be wondrously, wildly alive.
It’s an obvious thing to say, but journeys do not always lead where you expect. We’d been looking for a bird, but we’d found a face in a picture: the face of a woman with striking eyes and no name. For the next couple of days, pictures obsessed us. We began with the best portraits of the age, a morning in the National Portrait Gallery and a bizarre sort of identity parade. In the end it didn’t take us long; there were many more portraits of men than women in the eighteenth-century galleries, and after less than an hour we’d run out of suspects. So then we started again, this time looking at the men, in search of a family resemblance, enjoying ourselves and laughing until we found ourselves by accident in front of the portrait of Joseph Banks. While other visitors flowed past we stood and looked at it in stillness, suddenly sober again.
It’s a striking portrait. It shows Banks as a young man recently returned from his great voyage. He is seated in his study and there are papers on his desk, but his body is half turned away from them, engaging the painter directly with his eyes. His expression seems solemn at first, but as you look properly you begin to detect the trace of a smile on his lips. It’s the same with his eyes: behind the direct, neutral gaze there is a lightness that belies his gravity, a laughing young man peeping out from behind a serious façade. Among all the figures in the paintings around him, there is not one that looks so alive.
“Mmm,” murmured Katya, slightly salaciously. “Attractive. Not handsome but definitely attractive. It’s the good humor in his face. And the intelligence. You just know he was interested in things. The sort of man a girl could like.” And as we looked at him and he looked back, I knew she was right. The painting was by Reynolds, and he had captured on the canvas an aura of youth and confidence and vitality that shone through the paint. It was hard to imagine that this man’s company would ever be dull. Easy to imagine him living and loving. We stood and watched him with our shoulders touching until with a silent nod we agreed to go. As we walked down the main stairs, I reached into my pocket and took out the other portrait we had, the photocopy Potts had given me. That picture had none of Reynolds’s sumptuous paint to distinguish it. Just a woman’s face, ordinary, unremarkable, anonymous. And yet, like Banks’s, her smile caught your attention and reminded you this was a person, too.
That afternoon we started in the British Library, working through every book of portraits we could find, scanning the faces of Georgian society in the hope that one would smile back at us with that slight, shy smile. It was mind-numbing work, and the great hush of the library began to grow oppressive. I don’t know how many women we looked at that day; the volumes of miniatures alone contained many hundreds of faces. By late afternoon we were shattered. A couple of suspects had been unearthed who bore a slight resemblance to the picture in front of us, but neither was similar enough to lift our spirits. Instead our thoughts turned to food, and that night I cooked Katya dinner in the comforting warmth of my kitchen. We lit a candle and drank cold beer from the bottle and sat up late talking about sex and politics in the 1780s. At one point she sat back in her chair and smiled.
“What?” I asked. “What’s so funny?”
“We are,” she said. “Come on, let’s have another beer.”
The next day we returned to the museum and continued our search. By midmorning we’d exhausted the books of portraits, so we returned to biographies. After the biographies of Banks we began on the biographies of Banks’s friends and associates—anything with pictures was good enough for us. Katya worked through the pile quicker than I did, and eventually she came to an enticingly large volume in worn leather bindings.
“Town & Country Magazine for 1774 and 1775,” I explained in a whisper. “Somewhere in there is the gossip item about Banks and his mistress. It’s worth checking out.” She looked up at me and shrugged, and then we both returned to the drudgery of searching.
It took me a little while to realize that Katya had stopped turning the pages. I looked up and saw that she was sitting very still, her dark hair falling away from her face as she leaned over the book. Her eyes were full of something very like wonder.
“I’ve found her,” she said softly.
I got up and moved around the table to see what she was looking at. I could tell at once she was right. It was a small, grainy print, the sort of illustration churned out cheaply for the cheap press. There wasn’t even any guarantee that it was an accurate likeness of the person it purported to be. But it was definitely the original of the grimy photocopy we had in front of us, definitely the same picture that Hans Michaels had once sketched.
“His mistress.” Katya was scarcely audible. “Miss B. The one who disappears from the records.”
I had been looking at portraits of women for two days—the plain, the pretty, the wholesome, the lustrous. Many of them were people you’d notice quickly in a crowded room, but this woman’s attractiveness wasn’t like that. Her face was small, almost ordinary, but her eyes held you. Perhaps, in a crowded room, when you grew tired of the noise and the social trivialities, perhaps this is the woman you’d seek out.
“So we’ve found her,” I said, resting my hand on Katya’s shoulder. “Hans Michaels’s woman. The clue to the bird. So tell me, now we’ve done that, what the hell do we do now?”
It wasn’t until we’d left the British Library and stood facing each other in the courtyard outside it that Katya answered the question. “I’ll tell you what we do,” she began. “We track her down. We find out who she really is and where she lived and what happened to her.”
The wind swirled around the courtyard and plucked Katya’s scarf away from her face so that she had to pause to tuck it back in.
“And you have a plan for how we do that?” I wasn’t feeling optimistic.
“No, but I will.” I could feel that her enthusiasm was burning bright again. “Look, I have an idea. I’ll see you at home this afternoon. By then I’ll have worked it out.”
I was less convinced. We had found the original of Hans Michaels’s sketch, but we still didn’t have any idea what linked her to the Ulieta bird. We didn’t even know her name. Worse than that, no one seemed to know her name. She had appeared in 1773 as Joseph Banks’s mistress. By the end of 1774 she’d disappeared. And there lay the catch. Because the bird from Ulieta didn’t even arrive in Britain until 1775. I didn’t like to say so, but our prospects were looking pretty forlorn.
Katya and I said good-bye on the Euston Road and I watched her moving off toward St. Pancras, her dark head bobbing along until I lost it in the eddying crowds. Then I thrust my hands a little deeper into my pockets and tried to refocus my thoughts. By rights I should have been going home to catch up on some work, but the idea never even occurred to me. Instead I found myself a pub and a pint and settled down with the notes I’d made about the item in the Town & Country Magazine.
As a piece of society gossip it was a surprisingly modern piece of work, all moral righteousness on the surface and sly innuendo underneath, and the more I looked at it, the more wary I became. Even so, it seemed a simple enough tale. Ms. B—n
was an orphan; Banks had known her when she was a girl, before his voyage on the Endeavour; on his return he had sought her out. There was no clue to where he had sought her or where she had come from, nothing to suggest where she might suddenly have disappeared in the months after the magazine was published.
And this was all we had. Without this one piece of cheap, lazy writing, there would be nothing to tell us that she had ever existed. It was the single feather hinting at the unknown bird. And that was not a comforting thought.
When James Chapin brought his mysterious feather back from the Congo, it convinced my grandfather that his theories were true: an undiscovered peacock really did exist in Africa. Grimly, with a determination that defied logic, he set out to prove it. He began to plan an expedition to Africa that would search the jungles until specimens were found. All he needed were supplies, transport, and the money to pay for them—and it was at that point that he began to encounter obstacles. Until then my grandfather’s travels had been conducted largely at his own expense, but now he found that his family funds were beginning to run a little thin. Even so, he had good connections, wealthy friends, and no shortage of optimism. So he made the announcement that he intended to lead an expedition to the Congo to obtain specimens of a peacock previously unknown to western science—and waited for funds and support to come rolling in. It proved a long wait. To his amazement his theory was laughed at. A few lines of dubious Latin and a single feather did not strike the rest of the world as evidence of anything very much. It was made very clear to him, painfully and repeatedly, that he would need much more by way of evidence before anyone would be disposed to hand over hard cash. Astonished at this lack of faith, he found himself alone and unsupported.
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