The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  “Will you have enough time?”

  “I don’t know. And if I don’t pull it off, Anderson is going to get wind of what’s going on and blast us out of the water. You’ve got to get up to Lincoln quickly to keep his nose out of things.”

  “I’m going there now,” she promised.

  By a miracle of public transport, Katya was back in Lincoln in time for a pre-dinner drink. Before visiting the bar, however, she stopped at reception and told them I’d been called away suddenly but was keeping my room for at least the next couple of days. Then she went upstairs, found Anderson’s door, and knocked on it.

  The previous twenty-four hours hadn’t been Anderson’s best. He’d been forced to accept that his research had led to nothing, that the Ulieta bird hadn’t been part of the sale at the Ainsby manor. That being the case, he knew there could be no quick win, no shortcut to the bird or the pictures—not even any guarantee they still existed. By the time Katya arrived in Lincoln, he and Gabby were beginning to pack their bags. His urbane charm was wearing a little thin.

  But all that changed when he opened his door and found Katya standing in front of him.

  “How much will you pay for the bird?” she asked.

  Half an hour later she found Potts in the bar.

  “Ah, greetings,” he beamed, and bobbed to his feet. “You and Mr. Fitzgerald made a very early start this morning. I’ve been looking for you.”

  Katya smiled brightly. “And here I am.”

  “And Mr. Fitzgerald? Is he here?”

  “He’s been held up. He’ll be back later, I think.”

  “I see. Back from where, I wonder.”

  “You’ll have to ask him that.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I promised not to say.”

  “I see. Well, in that case I have all evening to persuade you otherwise.”

  Katya raised an eyebrow and looked deliberately enigmatic. “There was something else I promised not to say, too,” she teased.

  “Is it very pointless to ask what?”

  “That depends.” She studied him for a moment. “Are you likely to pay more for the Ulieta bird than Karl Anderson will?”

  That night I managed to snatch a few hours’ sleep. It was my first for forty hours and I knew I was going to need it. The next day would be long and difficult. I wasn’t sure how it would turn out.

  It began at 6:00 a.m., and I was out of the house by seven, heading west toward Bristol. The morning was a bright one, but when I got beyond the London sprawl there was frost on the fields, and the branches of the bare trees were white. With the sun shining and the sky a very pure blue, it felt like a good day for driving and I felt my tiredness slipping away. As I left the last remnants of the city behind, I began to feel a deep stirring of exhilaration. I knew what I was doing and where I was going. And that morning when I thought of the face looking out of the photograph, I found I could smile back.

  Luck went my way that day, and yet I shouldn’t have been surprised—the discovery of most things comes down to luck. People often feel uncomfortable about that. They want discovery to be driven by something more meaningful than coincidence. But they’re wrong. It’s the discovery itself that matters. And if anything ever proved how important luck is, it was the discovery of the African peacock.

  While my grandfather made his way on foot through the heat of the Congo forest, James Chapin, the American naturalist, was visiting Belgium, making one of his periodic visits to the old Colonial Museum in Tervueren. It’s a magnificent building, the Belgian rival to Versailles, and it houses an amazing number of artifacts and items of general clutter that over the years found their way there from the Belgian Congo. It was twenty-three years since Chapin had found that single feather, so it was hardly at the front of his mind. But while he was browsing through some of the less prominent items on display, he came across two stuffed birds pushed away into a corner. No one appeared to have paid them any attention for a great many years. They were both described as Indian peacocks—juveniles, the label said—but Chapin knew at once they were not. Neither of them were young birds—the spurs on the male, for instance, were thick with age. Whatever they were, they were not juveniles. They certainly looked like peacocks, but not the sort of peacocks he had ever seen before.

  Inquiries showed that the specimens had been donated, along with other exhibits, by a Belgian Congo trading company. Further inquiries by Chapin established precisely where in the Congo they had been collected. Armed with that information, Chapin arranged a new trip to Africa. It wasn’t a difficult expedition because he knew exactly where to go. Within a few weeks he had collected a dozen or more live specimens of the Congo peacock, the only bird of its kind in the whole of Africa.

  Yes, that’s how it happened. While my grandfather hacked desperately into the heart of the Congo, the first African peacocks were found on a dusty shelf in a Belgian museum. They had been there all along.

  That day I covered a lot of miles in the rusty-lemon car and called in more favors than I had ever earned. I visited squat Victorian suburbs and villages with frosty village greens and ice-fringed ponds. I met one man in a betting shop and another in a rambling country vicarage. Some were able to offer me material assistance, others had nothing to give but advice on how an eighteenth-century specimen would be preserved and about what state it would be in now; about the sort of care I would need to exercise and the sorts of chemicals I might need to use if I wanted to carry the thing off. I listened to it all, and when there were no more donations to be collected and nothing more I could possibly learn, I drove home.

  I didn’t reach London until about ten o’clock, but instead of feeling tired, my mind was alert and full of restless energy. I knew I should try to sleep so that I could start the next day fresh, but time was so critical that the idea of sleep seemed laughable. Instead I dug out the keys and opened up my workshop. There, in the bright pool of light that flooded my workbench, I let my fingers lead me, until the restlessness in my brain gave way to the ferocious concentration of the taxidermist. The longer I worked, the more settled I became and the clearer the path ahead of me appeared. It was going to be all right.

  In the end I worked long, long into the night. Reviewing it the next day, I realized it was some of the best work I’d ever done.

  After that everything seemed to go right. I set out for Lincoln later that day.

  HER CHILD was born early, kicking and coughing amid the dust and heat of late August. The birth was a difficult one, and for a month after it she was too weak to leave the house, too exhausted to go on with the plans she had laid. Instead she nursed her baby and herself through long, breathless days when the stench of London seemed to boil up to their windows, and through floundering nights of sleeplessness.

  Banks had returned from Wales barely three weeks before his daughter was born. On his arrival he found the rooms in Orchard Street changed. Her artist’s clutter was all tidied away and in the places where four of her first Madeira paintings had hung, there were now bare walls. The sole example of her work that remained in view was the collection of brown oak leaves and acorns that she had painted in her first months in Richmond. For all its plainness, it was her favorite—the first she had framed, the first she had hung on arriving in Orchard Street.

  “The Madeira work is put away,” she explained. “It felt right that it should all be kept together, and I don’t want to be distracted by it. You would not have me neglect our child for thoughts of line and shading?” He concurred, but her words saddened him and the removal of her paintings left the rooms subdued and empty. Even the arrival of a new life, for all the noise it brought, never seemed to Banks to fill the rooms as they once had been filled. Perhaps because of that, his daughter failed to move him in the way he had expected to be moved. He found the little distance that had come to exist between father and mother came also between father and child. He willed her well from his very heart, but it was as if the knot of uncertainty that twist
ed inside him prevented him from loving. He was a man who found it easiest to love when he was loved, and this was a time of doubt. They named her Sophia after his sister.

  As she began to recover her health, he would watch her laughing with the small bundle on her lap and at first he was jealous. He tried to shorten his visits, to entertain himself elsewhere, telling himself that her fascination with the child would dwindle with time. But the memory of the look on her face as she smiled down would often bring him back. For all his confusion, she was still a miracle to him. He wanted to take her in his arms and tell her so, but he found he didn’t know how. And though she would often give him a look both tender and searching, she seemed unwilling to help him.

  Eventually there came a day when he found her alone, arranging flowers in a bowl, her hair neatly tied up and her dress crisp and fresh. She looked as she had looked in their first days in Richmond, and a rush of tenderness carried him across the room until he stood behind her, his hands resting gently on her waist. She finished positioning a particular stalk, then laid the other flowers down and turned her head so she could look at him over her shoulder. He met her gaze and remembered how green her eyes were, how soft the smile at the corner of her lips. He moved his hands farther around her and pulled her to him. He could smell the familiar scent of her hair.

  “It has been a long time since we were alone,” he whispered.

  She leaned back then, so that her cheek was touching his. “Things are changed,” she said.

  “You are not changed. You are still more special and more lovely than I can ever tell you.”

  “We are both changed, Joseph. It is just that sometimes we forget.”

  “Shut your eyes. Do I feel changed?”

  “Do you remember how you used to hold me, at night in our little room with green hangings?”

  “That’s how I’m holding you now.”

  She moved her cheek from his and twisted around within his embrace until she was facing him. “No, that was different.”

  “How was it different?”

  “You had no doubts then.”

  For a moment he held her gaze and then he looked down. “I don’t doubt you,” he told her very quietly. “I know that I love you. But I don’t know what happens next.”

  She leaned closer to him, so that her cheek touched his and her lips almost touched his ear.

  “You have things to do, Joseph. A world to change. You have to do all the things we have talked about.”

  “But how?”

  “You grow respectable. You set an example. You marry. You produce an heir.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” She moved her cheek gently against his. “I like to think I was a help to you once. Now, with Sophia, I’m in the way.”

  “It isn’t true.”

  “And I must do my best for her.”

  “Meaning?”

  She broke away from his embrace and turned away from him. “Have you thought how it will be for her to be known as your daughter?”

  There was a sharpness in her tone that surprised him.

  “I cannot believe that being my daughter is a disadvantage,” he replied. “She will not want, I can promise that.”

  “She will be the daughter of your mistress. The daughter of a kept woman. Some people will never forgive her for that. It will be used against her for the rest of her life.”

  “And the alternative?”

  She came back into his arms and held him tightly before she answered. “The alternative is that you let us go,” she said.

  HE VOWED he would never let it happen. He swore that his life meant nothing without them. He refused to believe that his daughter’s life could not be lived in London, discreetly, acknowledged by him, unseen by others. But she knew he was wrong. She looked at the small, perfect little creature that she had brought into the world and then thought of her own childhood. Her family had always been marked by disapproval and laden with shame. She had been shunned and scorned for being her father’s daughter; had been cut in the streets of Louth for being John Ponsonby’s mistress. And now she was Joseph Banks’s mistress, seduced by that notorious adventurer. She held the tiny Sophia close to her and promised her that in her whole life she would never be scorned or shamed by anyone.

  FABRICIUS LEFT London shortly after Banks returned there. He went back to Denmark, where the air was clean and the light shone off water that dazzled with its clarity. In London he had missed the great arching Danish sky, and now he found himself frequently looking up or stopping to scan the horizon with a sense of simple joy.

  The close, confined afternoons in Orchard Street began to seem to him increasingly unbelievable, an episode in life that had come from nowhere and led him nowhere and left him back where he had begun. It seemed remarkable that he had somehow fallen into that quiet, unspoken partnership; remarkable that he had felt so much and been prepared to show his feelings. He thought of her often. Sometimes, when he was concentrating on a difficult piece of work, a word or a phrase would come into his head and he would pause and smile.

  “The thing about beetles,” she had once teased him, “is that however dull you become studying them, at least you will never run out of new ones to look at.” For many years after his return, at the end of long days of study, he would sometimes sit back and address his students very solemnly. “Gentlemen,” he would say, “let us at least console ourselves with the one great certainty about beetles.”

  “What certainty is that, sir?” they would always reply, and then their rather serious mentor would surprise them with a smile and repeat her words, and for the briefest of moments he would be back in London, where a slender young woman stood before him, painting.

  Banks had been generous with access to his collection, and the examination of it during that summer had left Fabricius with a great deal of work to do and much to ponder. Nevertheless, he found himself shy of Banks now, as if his visits to Orchard Street had been an undiscovered betrayal. Perhaps that was why he waited until November of that year to write to Banks, and even then he had to rework the letter several times. “My best compliments and wishes in Orchard Street,” he wrote. “If a boy it will be clever and strong like his father, if a girl she will be pretty and genteel like her mother.”

  Banks’s reply was short. He was the father of a daughter. Both mother and child were well.

  When Banks next wrote to him, it was February and the sky over Denmark was low and heavy with snow clouds. Banks’s letter said nothing of Orchard Street, nothing of either mistress or child. When Fabricius made his own discreet inquiries, he learned Banks had been deserted by his mistress. Miss Brown and her daughter had disappeared.

  IN JANUARY of 1774, four months after her daughter’s birth, she left her rooms to walk in the nearby gardens. It was cold and the ground held a stiff frost, but she was accompanied by Martha, and despite the chill the two were talking comfortably when she heard her name spoken. Her true name. Not since the day she left Revesby to become John Ponsonby’s mistress had anyone addressed her by that name. She had thought it a secret and she treasured it, the only way she could think of to protect her father’s reputation. So the shock was a great one when a voice called out to her.

  “Miss Burnett, I believe.” It was a man’s voice and there was something in the way it lingered over the word Miss that made her turn sharply.

  At first she didn’t recognize him in his heavy winter coat, but when she thought of Madeira she could see his face laughing at her in the candlelight.

  “Mr. Maddox,” she replied instinctively, surprise making her incautious.

  “So you remember me?” He smiled that lazy, confident smile. “As I recall, I am dressed rather differently today from our last meeting. But then I would have to remark that the same is equally true of you.”

  She felt herself blushing, suddenly aware of people within earshot, of the clarity of his voice.

  “I’m afraid, sir, that Burnett is only the name under which I travel
ed,” she said quietly. “Now if you will excuse me…”

  He kept pace with her effortlessly. “Such haste to be gone is most unflattering. The time was when you were not so shy. I feel it would be quite wrong to end our acquaintance so soon after rediscovering it, Miss Burnett. Especially under such different circumstances. And as you see, I have no alternative but to call you by that name until you furnish me with another.”

  “My name can be of no interest to you, sir.”

  “On the contrary, I find you most intriguing. I have often regretted that I never had the opportunity of coming to know you in quite the same way as you came to know me. Perhaps now that we are both in London we may be able to make good that omission.”

  “I hardly think so, sir.”

  He was still walking alongside her, and in her hurry to get away from him she had left Martha slightly behind.

  “Really?” She could hear the mocking smile in his voice. “I wonder if your current gentleman knows of your former exploits? Perhaps you do not care for him to know. After all, he may not wish to think he is in the company of a former ship’s boy?”

  “Sir!” She stopped walking and Martha came up puffing to her side. He paused, too, and eyed them both with his easy, unruffled smile. “Come now, you must admit that good reasons for your extraordinary behavior are hard to come by. I’m sure your current protector would not enjoy trying to discover them.”

  She spoke as slowly and calmly as she was able. “Sir, I would ask that you leave us at once. I’m sure you have business to attend to elsewhere.”

  His smile widened and he gave a little nod of approval. “I’m pleased to see that your spirit has not been diminished by your abandonment of male clothing. It was your spirit I admired that day you watched me bathe. I was convinced you would blush and run away.” He smiled broadly and made a little bow. “As you have asked me to leave you, I shall leave you. But I can assure you that none of my business affairs are nearly so interesting as the surprising Miss Burnett. I shall be looking out for you. For a great city, London is surprisingly poor at keeping its secrets.”