The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  He blinked at that. “Someone has been through your notes?”

  “You know it.”

  He looked down at my hand on his arm, then up again and met my gaze directly. “I can give you my word, Mr. Fitzgerald, that had nothing to do with me. I promise you that.”

  We looked each other in the eye for a few seconds more, and then I took my hand away.

  “Then who?”

  It was Gabby who replied.

  “Karl told you there’d be other people interested in the bird. Perhaps one of them…”

  At that point a movement behind me caught Anderson’s eye and he rose to his feet again. I turned around to see Katya hesitating at the door of the bar, all in black, her hair very dark. Anderson called out to her, something in Norwegian or Swedish, and beckoned her over. “Join us,” he said in English. “We’ll open another bottle.”

  I can’t say it was the easiest of evenings, though Anderson seemed completely relaxed. He was careful to keep the conversation away from the Ulieta bird, telling us instead about his time as a young palaeontologist in America. The stories sounded well-practiced but they were good ones and I noticed they made Katya laugh. When the conversation became more general, Anderson turned to her and asked something about Sweden, which left Gabby and me to face each other. There, in Anderson’s presence, the closeness I’d felt at our previous meeting seemed changed, and we chatted rather stiltedly, aware of the presence of the others. From time to time Gabby’s glance flicked over to Katya, slightly curious, not sure where she fitted in.

  When Anderson began to make arrangements for the four of us to eat together, I’d had enough, and I was quick to tell him that Katya and I had booked a table somewhere else. Outside, when we’d both found our coats, I had to admit to Katya that it wasn’t true.

  “I just didn’t want to spend the evening with Anderson,” I told her.

  She looked at me a little strangely. “He seems very friendly. And he’s very entertaining, too.”

  “You like him?”

  “He’s an interesting man. Not how I imagined at all.” She put her hand on my arm and squeezed it slightly, guiding me down the narrow street. “But he’s very used to winning,” she said. “I’m not sure that’s something I like.”

  For a moment we walked in silence, but there was something else I had to say.

  “I didn’t think you’d tell him all about your Fabricius research. I thought that was between us.”

  She looked hurt. “Of course it is. I only told him I’d been looking at those papers. I didn’t tell him what I’d found.”

  “He seemed to know all about it. He said it was a dead end.”

  She stopped me then, in the middle of the empty street, and looked up at me. “Did you tell Gabriella about it?”

  “Gabby?” I felt myself blushing. That night in the restaurant when the wine was flowing…

  Katya watched me for a moment, then shrugged and walked on. Dinner that night wasn’t a great success.

  The next day we were in the county archives practically as soon as they opened. The librarian with the nice face recognized me again.

  “People beginning with B, isn’t it?” she asked with a smile as we began to move toward the microfilm readers.

  “Not this time,” I told her. “This time it’s only people called Burnett.”

  She nodded at that. “Did you have a particular one you’re looking for?”

  “Not really. We’re going to start off with a Mary Burnett. After that we’ll take any we can find.”

  That rather casual summary was pretty much all we had by way of a plan. It didn’t seem like much, especially given Anderson’s display of confidence the night before, but I was living in hope that his plan might go wrong, that something in all his relentless research might prove flawed.

  Next to me, Katya was all bristling efficiency, but somehow the night before had broken the flow of our understanding. In an attempt to get us back on track, I showed her what I’d found on my previous visit.

  “Okay,” she said briskly, “if this Mary Burnett is the one we’re looking for, then she should have been an orphan by the time Banks got back. You’ve already found out that her father died, but what about her mother?”

  We found the relevant reels of film and checked them intently, edging slowly down the parish lists.

  “Nothing,” Katya concluded eventually. “Does that mean we’re wrong?”

  “Not necessarily. Perhap she died somewhere else. There are loads of reasons why she may not have been buried in Revesby.”

  “Well, if our mystery woman really was this Mary Burnett and she came from Revesby in the first place, might she have come back here at some point? After her affair with Banks?”

  I nodded. “I suppose so. It’s a long shot but it’s possible. She might have married here. Or died here.” So that set us off on a desperately long search. We checked all the records of marriages in Revesby for the next forty years. We checked all the deaths for the next hundred. There was no more mention of Mary Burnett. Then, still hoping for a miracle, we began to check the records of neighboring parishes. We broke for sandwiches at lunchtime, then carried on. At three o’clock we paused. On one wall of the library there was a map of the county.

  “Lincolnshire’s an incredibly large place,” I said.

  “A lot of parishes,” Katya agreed.

  “And why stop there? She might have settled in Norfolk. Or Yorkshire. There are plenty of parishes in Yorkshire.”

  By four o’clock our eyes were aching from the screens, and the list of Burnetts we’d found was becoming increasingly meaningless. And we still hadn’t found any other references to Mary Burnett. At four-thirty we called it a day and packed up our notes. While Katya disappeared to find the ladies’ room, I lingered by the main desk, where the library staff was beginning to pack up. The librarian we’d spoken to earlier clearly thought I looked downcast.

  “No luck?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid not. We found some Burnetts, but none of them are the ones we really wanted.”

  She looked around the reading room. “There’s a gentleman who comes in here to do his family tree. We see a lot of him. He was telling me the other day that he was looking for Burnetts. It struck me this morning, as soon as you said the name. I was going to point you out to him if he came in. He’s here quite often, so perhaps if you come back tomorrow…His name’s Bert. Most of the regulars can point him out to you.”

  Before we left the library, Katya and I agreed to split up and meet again at seven to go through our notes. That arrangement made, she didn’t wait for me. I watched her step out into the gathering gloom, her face buried deeply in the collar of her coat. Twenty yards down the road, she turned and saw I was still watching her. A moment later she was out of sight, hidden behind the evening traffic, but before she turned away she’d raised her hand and given me the shyest of waves.

  It lifted my spirits, and I was about to follow her into the dark when the friendly librarian called out to me.

  “Excuse me, sir. I thought this might help.” She pushed a scrap of paper into my hand and gave me a rather surprising wink before bustling off in the other direction. The paper, when I unfolded it, had the name Bert Fox written on it, and next to it, in very neat handwriting, a phone number.

  The piece of luck my grandfather had prayed for arrived so late that he’d almost given up waiting for it. Kicking around London with a diminishing reputation and nothing much to do with his time had turned him into a stubborn, angry man. When he welcomed in the New Year of ’33 at the Explorers’ Club it was already twenty years since Chapin had found that single feather, and through every one of those years my grandfather had lived in permanent dread of hearing that the bird itself was discovered. And then, one day at the same club, he was introduced quite by chance to a South African named Myerson. Myerson had made a lot of money in mining—and, as my grandfather discovered, he was an avid collector of rare birds.

  I
hadn’t anything better to do, so I decided to call the number I’d been given. After three or four rings a male voice answered.

  “Excuse me,” I began, realizing I hadn’t worked out what to say. “Is this Bert Fox?”

  “Yeah.” His voice was gruff but not unfriendly.

  “Look, you don’t know me. My name’s Fitzgerald. I’ve spent all day in the county archives, and the librarian there said you might be able to help me. I’m trying to trace someone called Burnett.”

  “That would’ve been Tina. I always tell her what I’m working on. Which one are you looking for?”

  I told him I was looking for a woman who’d lived in London in the 1770s, someone who might be the Mary Burnett born in Revesby in 1754. He listened politely enough, but when I’d finished he grunted an apology.

  “Don’t think I can help you with her,” he muttered. “I’m afraid Revesby isn’t really my area.”

  “Well, anything you know about Burnetts in Lincolnshire would be helpful, wherever they were.”

  He thought about it. “Sure, why not? If you want to talk family trees, come around. I’m in all evening.”

  He lived a bus ride away, in a street of redbrick Edwardian villas, three floors high. The front gardens were bounded by dark hedges spotted with laburnum trees or yews, still dripping arhythmically after the last shower of rain. The house I was looking for had an old Ford Anglia parked in the driveway and another standing on bricks in the open garage. When I rang the bell, my host turned out to be someone quite unexpected. He was tall and wiry but slightly stooped, and the little hair he still had was tied behind his back in a long silver ponytail. He was wearing a white, baggy, collarless shirt and a brown suede waistcoat, and his face was creased with lines that suggested both smiles and frowns. I noticed his hands were covered in dark stains: ink, perhaps, or oil.

  “You’re the Burnett man?” he asked, and beckoned me indoors. “Come on in. I’m working, but I can talk.”

  At first glance the room he showed me into seemed to be in chaos. There were shelves and tables everywhere, each one densely packed with ancient, wind-up gramophones. Scattered everywhere, on the tables and on the floor, were screws and levers and molded chunks of metal in weird shapes. Near the middle of the room were three old, low sofas covered with more parts, surrounded by tottering piles of old gramophone records in white paper covers. Most of the room was in shadow, but an enormous swing-arm lamp shone brilliantly onto the table in the center of the room, where a gramophone appeared to lie in a thousand pieces.

  “This is what I do,” he said. “Gramophones. You’d be surprised how much work there is.” He signaled the pieces on the table. “Some gent brought this one up from Kent. Here, take a seat.”

  I found an empty patch of sofa large enough to sit on and perched myself there. A record tipped from the arm of the chair and slid into my lap.

  “A seventy-eight,” I commented, peering at it.

  He waved his hand around the room. “All of them are. Great sound. The only way you can hear them properly is on one of these.”

  I waited patiently while he gave me an impassioned speech about the glories of early sound recording, smoking continuously as he talked and occasionally poking the metal pieces scattered in front of him.

  “So tell me,” I said, eventually changing the subject, “you’re working on a family tree?”

  He nodded, cigarette clutched firm in the corner of his mouth. “Yeah. I do it for my mum. She loves that kind of stuff. She’s well into her nineties. Still lively, though.” I made a hasty recalculation of his age. I’d taken him for about sixty, but now I could see he was older, late sixties, seventy perhaps. “Can’t say I don’t enjoy it, though,” he went on. “It’s a bit like one of these things.” He indicated the work in front of him. “Putting bits together in the right order. Finding what you need to fill the gaps.”

  “So what’s your interest in people called Burnett?”

  “There’s Burnetts on my dad’s side.” He began rooting around among the bits on the table in front of him. “I did my mum’s side first. That was quite easy. They were local gentry, really. Easy to follow. Not that you ever really finish something like that, do you? You can always go further back. Or wider. There’s always someone you haven’t found.”

  That seemed a good cue to tell him the little I knew about Mary Burnett of Revesby, and about our failed attempts to find any other references to her. Eventually he shook his head.

  “Don’t think I can help you with her. She’s earlier than the ones I’m interested in, and Revesby isn’t really my bit of the county. My family all come from further north, the other side of Lincoln. And I’ve never come across any Mary Burnett.”

  “So it was your grandfather who married a Burnett?”

  “Nah.” He took a swift drag at his cigarette. “Goes back much further than that.” He got up and came back with a scrap of paper. “Look. This is me, at the top of the list, born 1925. Then there’s my dad, then my granddad. He was Matthew Fox, born 1856. He didn’t have my dad until he was forty-odd, so that leaps us back quite a long way. Then there’s my great-granddad. He was another one who married late. Then my granddad’s granddad, another Matthew. He was the one that married a Burnett.”

  Albert Fox b. 1925

  Henry Fox b. 1896

  Matthew Fox b. 1856

  Joseph Fox b. 1804

  Matthew Fox b. 1764

  I watched him write, impressed. “It must have taken some work to go back that far.”

  “Nah, it wasn’t too hard. Fox is an easy name, and I like to do a couple of afternoons a week. Get out of the house, you know. It’s their wives that cause me problems, finding out about them. My grandfather married twice, a Smith and a Jones. Would you believe that?”

  “You follow back all the wives as well?”

  “I do what I can.” He shuffled more metal pieces on the table.

  “And that last one on the list. You say he married a Burnett?”

  “Yeah, though not yours.” He took a long draw on his cigarette, clearly not very interested in any Burnetts beyond his own family. Then he looked down and tapped the list. “Those first three were all married in the same church. Makes them easy to trace. It was my father who broke the trend, married my mother in Cornwall. She was living with a cousin down there. That sort of thing is a pain for people trying to track you down later on.” He gave a dry chuckle as he contemplated the plight of future genealogists. “Me, I was married in Finsbury Park registry office, so I guess I can’t complain. But generally speaking it’s one thing that makes the Foxes easy to track—they didn’t move around much. Tenant farmers or the like. All in the Ainsby area.”

  He was looking down again as he spoke, so he didn’t see me start forward.

  “Hang on, hang on.” My tone of voice made him look up. “Did you say Ainsby?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. Ainsby.”

  “You mean Ainsby is a place, not a person?”

  He looked at me as though I was either strange or simple. “Yeah. Northwest of here. Small village. Not much of a place now.”

  I stood up quickly. “I don’t want to be rude, Mr. Fox, but do you mind if I rush off? There’s something I really need to check. I think you might have told me something really, really important.”

  If he was surprised at my sudden exit he didn’t show it. He came to the door with me and then watched as I hurried out into the night. It was all I could do to stop myself from running.

  BANKS’S EMOTIONS on the day he found her gone were a surprise to him. He expected to be angry. He expected to be hurt by her deception, pained by her stupidity, guilty at his part in such folly. He felt none of those things.

  His first thought was to stop her. He demanded of Martha the time of her departure, did rapid calculations of how and where he could intercept her. If he returned directly to London, set off at once, he could surely be in Southampton before she sailed. But the Resolution was ready to sail, and he was
needed in London. To disappear now would throw the expedition into disarray, draw every attention to the reasons for his absence. More than anything she would hate that. And he had alternatives. He knew the ship she sailed on and the name she traveled under. A messenger would reach her in time. He would write to her now, beg her to return, promise her…Promise her what? The question stilled him, and for half an hour or more he considered it as thoughts of pursuit were made to wait.

  At the end of that time he crumpled her letter in his hand. She had gone. He unclenched his hand and balanced the ball of paper on his palm for a moment. She had gone, and for reasons that no arguments of his would alter. It was not for him but for herself, because she needed to go. He could persuade her to stay, perhaps. The cage-reared bird will always partly fear the sky. But in that small drawing room he felt for a moment the confines of her life, confines he would never know and perhaps would never understand again as clearly as he did at that moment.

  He had ridden to Richmond determined to stop her. That evening, as he drew nearer the lights of London, he began to see what the independence of thought that had always intrigued him really meant. It made her different from other women, but he had always tended to think of it as something external, like a bird’s plumage. Now he could see it was more than that. It was something deep inside her, part of that essence that made her what she was. Perhaps there was an unusual clarity in the air that night. Perhaps being in love had sown seeds that grew and budded in that evening’s starlight. He rode with a serenity inside him and a sense of understanding that he thought would remain with him forever.

  It made him determined to live up to her example. In the last months he had begun to fear the condemnation of society, the disapproval of Cook, and, perhaps most of all, the possible ruin of his own ambitions. To avoid these things he had been prepared to disappoint the hopes he himself had nurtured in her. Now, as he pushed his horse into a canter, it seemed clear to him that her judgment of him was the only one that mattered. If their scheme failed now, it would not be through his cowardice. He would make it work.