The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  As I drove I found myself thinking of my grandfather again. When I was a young naturalist it had been easy to criticize him for his old-fashioned values and his poor planning, his lack of any scientific rigor. For the way he sacrificed his family to his own ambitions. But I knew there was a part of me that resembled him, too. There had been a time in my life when I’d been the same, slogging around the world from collection to collection, squandering money I couldn’t pay back and friendships that deserved better; a time when the only thing that seemed real was the dream of the great discovery, the one that would change my life. That time felt like madness now, and I wondered if my grandfather had ever come to that understanding. Was there a day out there in the jungle when he paused and promised himself that the future would be different? If there was, he ignored it and pressed on regardless.

  My grandfather’s party on that expedition was a small one: a young naturalist named Barnes, an experienced guide, and four local men to carry and cook, each bribed with promises of unimaginable plenty if they could find a peacock in the African jungle. They traveled up-country by river to Matadi and then by railway and barge to Stanleyville, but after that they were on foot. For eight weeks they headed northward and then, perhaps a sign of indecision, they cut sharply to the northeast and carried on.

  If you haven’t been to the rain forests of the Congo, it’s hard to imagine the effect of the heat and humidity. It’s unforgiving country, and my grandfather did nothing to seek its forgiveness. He met it head-on, as if sheer strength of will were all he needed. Within four months Barnes had taken a fever, and within a few days more he was too weak to continue. After just 120 days my grandfather’s plans of more than twenty years had collapsed in confusion. In the end the party split so that Barnes could be carried home. It’s telling that the invalid was accompanied by the guide and three of the four porters. Only one man chose to stay with my grandfather, who by now was eating virtually nothing and living on hydrochloride of quinine. Shouldering triple-weight packs, the two men set off north again, beginning a trek that in the passing fashion of the times was to make them both quite famous. Neither of them could have known that the first formal identification of an African peacock was only a few months away.

  I drove south toward Revesby, where the rolling hills of the wolds gave way to the Lincolnshire fens. I reached the village sometime after three, with the sun already low in the sky so that the church stretched a long shadow over the corner where I parked my car. Revesby was a small, not very significant sort of place: no pub to offer welcome from the creeping shadows, no shop that I could see, just silence and a large, square green area, and houses hiding behind hedges. Not really a village green as such—Revesby is too disparate for that. If anything the space in the center divides one side of the village from the other, leaving—at least on a winter’s afternoon—a sense of emptiness. On one side of the grass square was a long row of single-story cottages—almshouses, judging by their shape and design. On a stone set above one of the doors I could make out the name Banks, and a date. I did a quick calculation. My man’s grandfather, perhaps.

  There was no real reason for my visit, only a curiosity to see where the lives I’d read about had once been lived. Revesby Abbey lay outside the village: the house where Joseph Banks had lived had burned down in the 1840s and its replacement was still a private house, aggressively signed as such. Instead I turned to the village church as a focus for my musings. Even that turned out to be a different building from the one Banks had attended. His church had been torn down in the nineteenth century to make way for something more spacious, and now, like the Abbey, there was nothing left to see, only in one dark corner a model of the old church as it would have looked—small, irregular, and appealing. In the years since, the new church had mellowed and become an old one in its turn, but it didn’t feel like the place I’d come looking for. That was all gone. I was a hundred years too late.

  Outside the light was dying quietly, without fanfare. The graveyard around the church was older than the building it surrounded, and I made my way through it, walking between gravestones that had been there when Banks was alive. Even in the gloom I could still make out names and dates where the moss had not yet overwritten them. Soon they would be gone. Eventually the brambles and the darkness combined against me and forced me to step away. My visit had told me nothing.

  Or perhaps it had. As I got into the car I thought of the old gravestones sitting comfortably around the new church, their past reconciled to the present. Was there a lesson for me in that? After all, I reflected, my grandfather’s was not the only expedition in history to carry on disastrously simply because the people involved had neither the vision to change nor the courage to give up.

  The quietness of the afternoon had put me in the mood for company, and four or five miles along the Lincoln road, when my headlights picked out the sign of a roadside pub, I pulled in, aware of the cold in my fingers and toes. Inside it was too early for more than a couple of drinkers to have gathered at the bar, but there was already a good fire going and I settled myself pleasantly into a corner seat with a pint of beer. It was an old-fashioned, ungentrified country pub with no makeover and no menu. This was foxhunting country and the walls were decorated with the remains of various creatures that had fallen foul of the fact. Most prominent was a glass case above the bar where a young vixen was carrying off a tatty, slightly graying hen. The case for the prosecution, I punned to myself. Around it, on the other walls, were the usual array of horse brasses and faded prints of Edwardian hunting scenes, testimonies to the age-old conflict between the Lincolnshire farmer and Vulpes vulpes, the red fox.

  Vulpes vulpes, the red fox.

  For a moment I was completely still, working it out in my head, and then came a rush of amazement at my own stupidity. When I did move, I was clumsy with haste. That letter, did I still have it with me? I groped in my pocket for the photocopied sheet. It was badly crumpled now. Where was that line I’d talked about with Potts? That throwaway line that I’d taken as nothing more important than a casual quip. There it was…

  Until then, guard it with your life—I don’t want to return and find that young Vulpes of yours has snatched it from my grasp!

  I’d thought he meant it loosely, a jocular reference to a suitor at his sister’s door. But what if he hadn’t? A young Vulpes. A young Fox.

  At first I couldn’t find the number I wanted, and then I couldn’t find the phone. I misdialed twice before I got it right. And I almost punched the air when I heard his voice at the end of the line.

  “Hello? Bert? It’s John Fitzgerald here. I came around the other day about your family tree.” In the background I could hear the crackling sob of a dimly remembered tenor as I raced on. “I know it’s an odd question, but in your time in the archives, have you come across the name Martha Stamford anywhere?”

  There was a pause. I thought I heard him chuckle.

  “Yeah, you could say I’ve come across it.” He spoke very deliberately, as if he was amused by something. “Martha Stamford’s my mother.”

  JULY WAS a month of winds. On the Thames, white water and ships uneasy on the swell. In Lincolnshire, floods. In the Bay of Biscay, bound for Portsmouth, a small ship, the Saffron, driven off course and forced to hug the coast. On board the Saffron, tired and sick, a small figure watching the sea-flecked wind and longing for home. But summer remained tightly furled, and a three-week voyage turned to four. By the time she reached England he was already gone.

  She had always imagined her return in bright colors. She had seen people in summer clothes waving on the docks, sunlight on the roofs, white sails and green sea lapping at the harbor walls. But she came ashore in Portsmouth under gray skies with rain in the air and the night already falling. The town looked drab, the streets dirty, and there was no welcome. Standing unsteady on firm land, she felt the emptiness of the dusk eddying around her. She had measured out her strength in grains, like hourglass sand; now she found it at an end. S
he needed a smile to welcome her. More than that. She wanted to be held very tightly, silently, without questions or conditions. But instead she stood unnoticed in the rain, looking at the impartial faces of strangers. She had not written ahead to advise of her coming, but even knowing he couldn’t be there, she looked for him.

  That night, restless in a cheap inn, she thought of the nights in Revesby when her father lay dying, nights when she would open the shutters and watch the trees tossing in the wind. She had thought then the trees were questions, not answers. Sometimes it is not until the end of a journey that you begin to say good-bye.

  HE SAILED in early June when the wind dropped long enough for the Sir Lawrence to creep out to sea. Much of his last month in England had been spent either drunk or ashamed, and he had begun to blame both on her. By running off ahead of him she had placed him in an impossible position, and as a result he had been forced to give up his greatest adventure. If he had sailed with Cook, he reasoned, all would be well. But her rashness had made it impossible. It was intolerable, and it was not of his making. And now he must sail if he was not to betray his companions; must stay if he was not to abandon her a second time. The misery of it all confounded him, and it seemed to him that the intimacy of their Richmond winter had been blown away forever. It was easier to drink and forget. And when the wind dropped they sailed for Iceland.

  In a sense the wind was his salvation. All the way to the Lizard and then up the Irish Sea, it fought against the Sir Lawrence. Those on board were forced to focus on the struggles of the ship, and Banks, the great circumnavigator, was wretchedly seasick. A landing on the Isle of Man had to be abandoned because of the rough seas. It was not until they neared the Hebrides that the weather relented and Banks, after the darkest month of his life, found the sun shining again.

  SHE ARRIVED in Richmond in late-evening sunlight and found the place unchanged. In the time she had been away, England had drifted into the folds of full summer. The fields were higher, the hedges less well kept, and the fresh playbills on the tavern door had begun to peel from their moorings. But nothing else seemed different. She had sailed through storms and seen places that those around her would never see, and in the time she had been away, Richmond had done no more than stretch itself in the sun. Startled by the familiarity around her, avoiding the riverside, she made her way up the hill in the fading light to the discreet place where Martha, forewarned of her arrival, was waiting to greet her. There was nothing to draw attention to their meeting, but anyone who chanced to be watching would have noticed, after a warm clasp of hands and some indistinct words, that the larger figure produced a letter and passed it to her companion, who, after a pause, broke it open and began to read.

  “‘My dearest,’” she said aloud. “‘Writing this causes me great distress. I have had no choice but to undertake another voyage…’” She read no further then, but held the letter for a moment before folding it into her pocket.

  “Come, Martha,” she said, “the letter will wait, and I need more than anything to wash. And when I am clean and fed we have a great deal to talk about.” As the two dark figures turned to go, no moon rose above the trees behind them, no wind stirred the trees with a sigh.

  There followed some months in which the two women in Richmond heard nothing of Banks. In August, arrived in Iceland, glorying in the air and exercise and in the uncomplicated spaces of an empty country, Banks thought of England only with a sense of release. In September he and Solander climbed Hekla and there was a moment, when the sunlight flashed on the deep blue meltwater many feet below, that he thought of how she would marvel at the colors. By late September the Icelandic autumn was advancing, and looking out over a treeless landscape, he more than once imagined the browns and golds of his home woods. From there, unless he took care, it was easy to imagine the russet hangings of that firelit bedroom. October brought the expedition to an end and carried him to Scotland, where he chose to linger. He was no longer afraid to think of her but now he did it with regret, as if for something irretrievably lost. And he was in no hurry to reach London and look again at the damage he had done there.

  By November, when word reached her that Banks was in Edinburgh, her hair was growing long again and the notes and sketches she had made in Madeira were being transformed into color. Even then he did not write, and if she thought of him at all, it did not seem to unsteady her hand or distract her from her strict regime of work.

  HE REACHED London in early December and was glad to find that in his absence the acrimony of his departure from London had largely been forgotten. A friendly letter from Cook awaited him. Lord Sandwich called on him, and the two got drunk together. But he made no attempt to write to her. By now she must know of his arrival, he reasoned. If she chose to ignore him, it told him what he needed to know. If she wrote, her letter would tell him how he stood. And if it proved she harbored no grudge, he would call when his business in London allowed it.

  After two weeks of hearing nothing, he rose one morning, called for his horse, and set out for Richmond.

  There was a light fall of snow on the ground that reminded him of the same journey at other times, but for the most part he was too intent on his own thoughts to see the beauty of it. It wasn’t until the last half-mile that he became fully aware of his surroundings and felt a stirring of familiarity. When the door was opened, it was by a servant he did not recognize.

  “Miss Brown’s at home, sir,” she told him. “If you’ll wait here, sir.”

  The same girl returned a moment later.

  “Miss Brown says you’re to go up, sir. She’s painting, sir.”

  So, heavy-footed, he made his way upstairs to the room where she painted, rehearsing his words as he went. When he came to her door, it was open and he saw the room flooded with sunlight. She was standing near the window with her back to him, intent on the picture before her. She was dressed in green and her brown hair, loosely pinned, tumbled over her collar in places. He barely had time to note the slimness of her figure before she turned and the light fell golden on her face.

  “Hello, Joseph,” she said, and he saw a light in her eyes that made him cross the room in two strides and take her in his arms.

  “HOW IS it that you are able to forgive me?”

  They lay again in the green bedroom, little more than a year since the first time. Outside, the afternoon sun glowed against the windows and threw ripples of light onto the bedclothes. They had barely spoken as they tugged and hurried each other out of their clothes, but when their eyes met they laughed and paused to kiss. When they stumbled to the bed, their bodies found a dialogue of their own and their whispered endearments were broken and half-formed. Only when they had fallen still in each other’s arms did the time for talking arrive.

  “Forgive you for what?” she asked.

  “For letting you go to Madeira. For failing to join you there because I was too proud and too angry to sail.”

  “I understand. I know what happened. The hard part was coming back and finding you gone.”

  His arms tightened a little around her. “I was ashamed to see you. And I had to go. They were waiting for me to do something.”

  “I know. I guessed. But by then I was tired of being a boy. I wanted to be a woman again.”

  “And did you make a good boy?”

  Her head lay on his shoulder and he could feel her smile.

  “Not really. I was good at not attracting attention. Anyone who bothered to look seemed to guess. But not many looked. In a crowd I was quite anonymous.”

  He tightened his arms a little more and bent his head to kiss her. He felt he had come home.

  AND YET it was not quite the same. While Cook was abroad with the Resolution, Banks found it hard to settle, as if part of him had not been able to disembark and walk away. In response he began to plan more journeys, to Wales and to Holland. His career in London continued to take up a good deal of his time, building his influence in philosophical circles, establishing his reputation wi
th the Royal Society. There were fewer spontaneous visits to Richmond, and now there was no sense when they were together that time was standing still.

  Their time apart seemed to have changed her. The wildness in her feeling for him seemed gone, and he began to sense a doubt in her that had not been there before. At night she held him no less tenderly, but when mention was made of the future, he thought he saw a hesitation in her eyes. Then he would laugh and take her in his arms and tell her that she must never leave him, that he was only happy when she was with him—things that were both true and untrue.

  When he asked her how she had spent her time when he was in Iceland, she would answer with a shrug and say, “I painted.”

  By the early days of the new year, Richmond had become impractical. To keep her close to him while he continued his work, he persuaded her to move to London. She made the move amid the January mud to rooms above Orchard Street, where she could hear the street-criers on Oxford Street and the bells of fifty churches and where, when the wind blew from the west, she could think she caught the scent of open fields. The rooms were new and slightly grand, and the day she looked at them for the first time was the day she first felt she’d become his mistress. She had made a great point of protecting her family name, but here her caution seemed unnecessary; she had no name. She was Joseph Banks’s mistress. The tradesmen who called knew it and the women in the street knew it and neither her name nor her past mattered to them. When she was gone, she knew, another woman would live there, visited by another man, and she too would not matter to anyone except perhaps to the man who kept her.