The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  “Seeing that bird last night mattered to him, didn’t it?”

  “I know. It makes me feel bad.”

  Katya still had her arm in mine and she gave it a little squeeze. “Do you think he’ll ever find out?” she asked.

  “Perhaps. In time. In a way I hope not.”

  “Yes.” She nodded, understanding. “He’d be happier not knowing. Tell me, did you really need to go to such trouble? All that work…”

  “I think so. Otherwise Potts and Anderson would never have stopped looking. This way they can forget about it and leave us all in peace.”

  Tiny flakes of snow were lingering in her hair as we talked, and she pulled the collar of her coat around her face.

  “And Gabby?” she asked. “Did you say good-bye to her?”

  “Sort of. I don’t think she minded.”

  “Didn’t mind you keeping Anderson from the bird?”

  “That, too.”

  We reached the car and found its windscreen wipers edged with a delicate line of snow.

  “What would you have done if Potts hadn’t stolen it?” she wondered.

  “I’ve no idea. But I was sure he’d try something. He’s that sort of guy.”

  We got in and began the practiced routine of buttoning our coats and pulling our scarves tighter. It felt familiar and comfortable.

  “Is it far?”

  “About forty minutes in this thing.” I grinned, patting the steering wheel affectionately. “Come on, let’s get moving and see if we can get some heat in here.”

  As we nudged our way out of Lincoln into the countryside, we were caught in an unannounced flurry of proper snow, thick flakes falling thickly and making the windscreen wipers do their job. Then almost as suddenly we drove out the other side and into sunshine. Around us, patchy white furrows scored the fields.

  We talked as we drove, lighthearted now, taking our time to understand everything Bert Fox had told me about his family history.

  “So Bert Fox’s great-grandfather married a Sophia Burnett?”

  “Yes, except it was his great-great-grandfather. Bert told me about it when I went to see him the first time, but I got so excited when he mentioned Ainsby that I never asked myself if his Burnett and our Burnett might be related.”

  “So Mary Burnett brought her daughter to Lincolnshire. I wonder what became of her after that?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. But we know Sophia married Matthew Fox. He was a small-time farmer. Guess what their son was called?”

  “Not…?”

  “Yup. Joseph. Joseph Fox’s son was another Matthew Fox, and he ended up as steward to the Stamford family at the end of the nineteenth century. That Matthew Fox has a son called Henry, who grew up with the Stamford children. They all knew the stories about the stuffed bird Matthew had in his cottage. And Matthew Fox is the old man John Stamford was talking about in his letter. He died while Stamford was at the front.”

  “And Martha Stamford grabbed the bird for safekeeping?”

  “That’s right. She already had an attachment to Henry Fox, the old man’s son. The two of them had grown up together. He’s the ‘young Vulpes’ mentioned at the end of the letter.”

  “A young Fox…” Katya smiled. “You think John Stamford was worried about him prowling around his sister?”

  “I don’t think he sounds disapproving in his letter. But it’s hard to tell.”

  “And at the end of the war?”

  “Martha gave the bird back. Henry Fox had been in France when his father died. But it was his bird. And that’s why it missed the sale of everything in the Old Manor. When the dust settled after the war, Henry and Martha married. She’d moved to Cornwall to live with a cousin when the house was sold, and he went to find her there. In a way the loss of all the family money must have helped them. If it hadn’t been for the war, they’d probably have been kept apart.”

  We sat in silence then, pondering the vagaries of chance. Gradually we left the fields behind and began to pick our way through the outskirts of the next town. A few minutes later I pulled up outside a terrace of smart Georgian houses three stories high, tucked away down a quiet street a short walk from the town center.

  “This is it. Where the last of the Stamfords ended up.”

  On the pavement in front of the houses a figure I recognized was lurking slightly disreputably, smoking a roll-up. Bert Fox’s response to the weather had been to pull on a faded baseball cap and a gray, slightly saggy overcoat. He wore the coat unbuttoned so it hung open and I could see a T-shirt and a leather waistcoat underneath. His silver ponytail was squashed down by the cap and hidden under the collar of his coat.

  “Just having a fag,” he explained when I introduced him to Katya. “Mum doesn’t like me smoking at her place.” He dropped the cigarette onto the pavement and pressed it with his toe. “You’ll like my mum,” he told Katya. “She’s a laugh.”

  We went inside. The hallway had been built to feel spacious, but the effect was overwhelmed by the mass of objects squeezed into it. An umbrella stand by the door sprouted walking sticks and old-fashioned canes and two very long African spears. Next to it, a small table was covered with smaller objects—a cigar box, an ashtray-with-lighter, a porcelain bowl, a gold photograph frame, an ebony camel. And the walls were studded with pictures from waist height upward, so that the wallpaper beneath them was all but obscured—watercolors, miniatures, framed photographs, and a couple of large portraits in oil, clumsy among their neighbors like ocean liners amid a flotilla of small boats.

  “Mum!” Fox shouted as he closed the door behind us. “John’s here again. Remember? To see the bird. Got a friend with him.”

  We hung our coats above the walking sticks and were shown into the front room. Like the hallway, it was packed with objects, but the effect was somehow more harmonious. Amid the clutter, tiny under a pink blanket in a large green chair, sat the woman whose letter had first made us believe in the Ulieta bird. She was old now—so old that it had occurred to none of us that she might still be alive—but Martha Stamford had aged into a happy, laughing old lady. All around her were the mementos of another age, but she herself was so alert it seemed impossible to believe that she had danced and flirted with men on leave from Passchendaele.

  She greeted Katya with a nod, and made her stand close so she could see her face.

  “Albert says you’re from Sweden,” she informed her.

  “Yes, that right. From near Stockholm.”

  “Well, you’re very welcome,” she replied. “You must like it a lot to come here in winter,” she added, following a thought of her own. Then she looked up at me.

  “So you’ve come for another look? It’s a dull old thing, that bird, but I’m not surprised it’s valuable. We’ve always treasured it in my family. It’s part of our history, you know.”

  And she began to tell me again how old Matthew Fox had called it his grandmother’s most precious possession.

  “She loved it because it was her mother’s, you see. Her mother had been given it by a lover—at least that’s what Matthew used to say. That was rather shocking, of course, but we all thought it was terribly romantic. I remember old Matthew telling me how his grandmother took him by his hand when he was a boy and showed him all her treasures, and when she came to that bird she told him it was her mother’s, and even though it was so plain, her mother had always treasured it more than anything else she owned because it was given to her by someone she loved. And I remember Henry—that’s Albert’s father—telling me how it was so valuable because of Captain Cook finding it. But none of them would ever sell it because it was a love gift.”

  “And what about the pictures, Mum? Tell them about the pictures again.”

  “Ah, yes. Those. Henry found them, not long after we were married. Beautiful things they were. All local wildflowers. There were harebells and bluebells and all sorts. So bright, they were. Lovely things. Henry had them all framed and we had them on the walls. But when
we moved here there was no room, so he sold them to the family that had bought the Old Manor. Got a few pounds for them, he did.”

  Katya turned to me breathlessly. “So they could still be there now?”

  I shook my head and looked across at Bert Fox.

  “The Old Manor burned down during the war,” he said. “I suppose the flower pictures went with it.”

  “Lovely things, they were,” his mother went on. “Lovely bright colors. Better than having fresh flowers in the house, I used to say…But of course you don’t want to listen to me going on. It’s the bird you’re interested in. Go on up and take a look at it.”

  However, I hadn’t quite finished with her reminiscences. “Tell me, do you know anything else about old Matthew’s great-grandmother, the one who first owned the bird?”

  “Oh, I don’t think there’s much to know. It’s all too long ago now. Old Matthew must have heard tales about her, but I don’t think he told me.”

  Bert Fox coughed quietly. “She might be buried in the churchyard in Ainsby. I can’t tell for sure because there’s a gap in the records. It’s a bit overgrown up in the old part, but the stones are still there.”

  “You mean we might be able to find her headstone?”

  “Nah, not now. They’re too far gone. You can’t make ’em out now for all the moss and stuff grown over them.”

  “Better than the crematorium,” chipped in his mother. “That’s what Albert says he wants.”

  He winked at me. “And that’s where you’ll be too, Mum, if they ask me to decide.”

  At which she laughed happily and slapped him on the arm.

  She didn’t come with us to see the bird. She couldn’t climb the stairs now, and, as she put it, she already knew what it looked like. Before we left her I felt obliged to stop and tell her again what I’d told her when we first met, that someone would probably pay very good money for the specimen she had upstairs.

  “Money?” she muttered, just as she had before. “I’ve got what I need. It will be Bert’s soon, and then he can decide.” Bert looked across at me and gave a little shrug. Then he led us upstairs to the first landing and the strange little room they called the Book Room.

  It had been created years ago, probably soon after the house was built, when someone decided to alter the layout of the first-floor bedrooms. The construction of a new wall had created a strange, awkward room sandwiched between the main bedrooms. It had probably been used as a linen room then, but for as long as Bert Fox remembered it had been the Book Room, where the family books were kept. He showed us in and turned on the overhead light from the switch by the door. The room was narrow, about five feet wide but perhaps fifteen feet long. Both long walls had been covered with bookshelves, which meant only the far wall and the space above the door had any space for decoration. Here the temptation to hang too much had been resisted. The far wall was empty but for a rather drab study of oak leaves, but that was not the wall attracting our attention. Above the door, in a clear glass case, quiet master of the stillness below, stood the lost bird of Ulieta.

  It wasn’t unlike the bird I’d made in its image, but it was far, far better preserved. To create mine I had been forced to beg and buy very old specimens of thrush and blackbird, and it had taken all my skill to combine them believably into a counterfeit bird: where things proved difficult, I had simulated decrepitude to mask my failings. But this specimen had none of the torn feathers, none of the shapelessness. It was in a remarkable, almost incredible, state of preservation. To anyone who had seen Georg Forster’s picture, there could be no doubting that this was the original.

  Katya and I both stood and wondered.

  “How can it be so perfect?” she said at last.

  “I don’t know. It must be the most amazing fluke.”

  But Bert Fox pointed around him. “No outside walls to this room, you see. My father kept it in here with the books because this room never gets damp. And the temperature is always the same. Always cold.”

  “But what about before then? All those years in a steward’s cottage. It’s amazing it survived.”

  “My father said they’d been told to treat it with arsenic,” he said. “I think each generation did what they could to look after it.”

  “So that’s why,” said Katya, as if a missing piece of understanding had just fallen into place. “That’s why this one’s still here when all those other specimens fell apart.”

  She paused and looked up at the bird again before she realized we were both watching her, waiting for her to explain.

  “Because of all that love,” she said simply.

  When we went downstairs again, we found Martha Stamford asleep under her pink blanket, surrounded by the multitude of objects that her life had touched with meaning. Above us Joseph Banks’s bird had been restored to the stillness and the darkness of its sealed room. There seemed no reason to disturb either.

  Before stepping out into the street, Katya and I stood in the doorway, trying to gauge the temperature. I waited while she buttoned up her coat and pulled her collar up to her nose, and then we stood close to each other for a second or two, looking up at the sky. Then we stepped out together into the winter sunshine.

  THREE DAYS before his death at the age of seventy-six, Joseph Banks called for pen and ink and began a letter to his old traveling companion, Daniel Solander, a man who at that date had been dead for almost forty years.

  My dear Solander, it began in a shaky hand, You once told me the past casts a shadow. You saw much I couldn’t see. But I see now that beyond the shadow there is sunlight and trees and leaves.

  She has such green eyes, Solander—it is well that we are about to depart.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Historical Background to The CONJURER’S BIRD

  The Conjurer’s Bird takes as its starting point a number of historical facts, the three most significant—and intriguing—being these:

  • The Mysterious Bird of Ulieta was first recorded in 1774, by Cook’s expedition to the South Seas. No subsequent specimens were ever discovered.

  • In 1772 Sir Joseph Banks, the eminent naturalist, broke off his engagement and began an affair with one Miss B. Her identity and history remain unknown.

  • The search for the African peacock began early in the century with the discovery of a single feather. It took twenty years of searching before the first actual bird was found.

  The Mysterious Bird of Ulieta

  I’m indebted to James Greenway and his excellent book Extinct and Vanishing Birds of the World for the name “Mysterious Bird of Ulieta” to describe the thrushlike bird Turdus ulietensis. The bird’s history is very much as described in the novel. It was collected on the island of Ulieta (now called Raiatea) during Cook’s second voyage of discovery, and was described by the naturalist on that voyage, Johann Forster.

  Forster was a good scientist and the bird’s details were well recorded. In addition, it was drawn by his son, Georg. The description given by Forster makes it hard to be certain what sort of bird it was. It appears to be a type of thrush (Turdus) but certain details (about its tongue, for instance) cast some doubt on this. That mystery will never be resolved, because despite diligent searching no other specimen of this bird has ever been found. If it were not for Forster’s account and his son’s drawing—still viewable at the Natural History Museum—there would be nothing to say it had ever existed.

  As for the specimen itself, this was presented by Forster to Joseph Banks at the end of the voyage. It was recorded in his collection by Latham, but, like many specimens from that time, its precise fate remains unknown.

  Joseph Banks

  The young naturalist Joseph Banks rose to public prominence as a result of his participation on Cook’s first voyage of discovery. He went on to become a commanding figure in the development of the natural sciences, president of the Royal Society for forty-two years, and the unofficial scientific adviser to George III. But there are a couple of questions about his ea
rly life that remain unanswered.

  Shortly before leaving with Cook he became engaged (at least informally) to Harriet Blosset. Shortly after his return this engagement was broken off, and at the same time we learn from the gossip magazine of the day—Town & Country Magazine—that Banks had begun an affair with a young girl known only as Miss B——n. That account, and the letter to Banks from Fabricius (first brought to light by Averil Lysaght), both suggest a warm relationship and the birth of a child. As far as I’m aware, they are the only known references to Miss B——n.

  The affair must have begun very quickly after Banks’s return (the timings are tight), but what happened to end the affair—and the subsequent fate of Miss B and her child—are still mysteries.

  Shortly after Town & Country Magazine published its article, Banks was due to embark with Cook on a second great voyage of discovery. His quibbling over the extent of his accommodation and his sudden, last-minute refusal to participate are well documented but (to my mind at least) never fully explained. A letter from the Navy Board to the Admiralty concluded in the end that Banks had only one small cabin fewer than he had requested.

  I began to form my own view about why this particular issue may have been so important to Banks when I read Cook’s letter to the Admiralty from Madeira about the mysterious “Mr. Burnett,” who was, apparently, a woman. The letter is often quoted but, as far as I’m aware, has never been properly explained.

  My own researches into Miss B and her whereabouts followed much the course ascribed to Fitz and Katya in the novel—ending in the archives in Lincoln, where I found that a Mary Burnett had been born in Revesby at about the right time. The temptation to link the Burnett on Madeira and the Burnett from Revesby is hard to resist.