The Conjurer's Bird

by Martin Davies

  She didn’t hear him approach. The sound of his voice, sudden in the quietness, made her start and turn.

  “Lichen pulmonarius,” he said simply, and her eyes went to the place on the edge of the clearing where he stood. “The name of the lichen on the trees in Slipper Wood,” he added.

  With that, he stepped forward into the sunlight and she saw he was smiling. Behind him the trees were deep green. Later she always remembered that moment, that smile.

  “That is what you were looking at.” His voice betrayed no doubt. “It grows only on the trees you were examining and on no others.”

  He stood before her, his smile both a greeting and a challenge. His shirt was open at the neck, his hair unkempt. In one hand he swung a leather collecting bag. She had never seen anyone so alive.

  “I don’t know its Latin name,” she replied. “They call it tree lungwort. It’s different from the lichens around it. But you’re wrong to believe it grows nowhere else in these woods.”

  “I am?” He placed his bag at his feet and looked at her again. She had remained seated, looking back at him. If she had flushed on his arrival there was no sign of it now. Yet he felt again that in the moment before his greeting he had glimpsed a person different from the one now before him. Now only the green eyes remained the same.

  “I was sure I had examined each tree most particularly,” he said.

  As he spoke he was wondering about that other person, the young girl alone, drawing so avidly. Later, in lands where people hadn’t learned to hide their joy at living, he was to think of her again. But for now he was aware only that he was being studied by a cool and thoughtful face.

  “It grows on just those twelve trees in Slipper Wood,” she stated. “But you’ve certainly seen it elsewhere. You will find traces of it on nearly every tree in your home park.”

  He shook his head in response, the naturalist in him reasserting itself.

  “No, I had not observed it. Or rather, if I had, I had not noted it. Do you believe what they say, that it is a cure for sickness of the lungs?”

  He began to feel embarrassed standing before her, as if his presence was an intrusion. And she was looking at him from where she sat with clear, calm eyes that neither welcomed him nor made him wish to depart.

  “No, that’s surely not true,” she said, her gaze turning for the moment to the trees all around them. “They say so because of its appearance, like the texture of a lung. But that is coincidence, surely? I cannot believe that Providence felt it necessary to illustrate its workings in such literal ways.”

  “I confess I am surprised. And overjoyed. I had no idea Revesby contained a fellow natural philosopher.”

  Embarrassed at towering over her, yet unable to sit without being invited to do so, he instead sank to his haunches as though he wished to study something on the ground in front of him. It was, he knew, an assumption of informality.

  To which she responded by rising to her feet and preparing to depart.

  “I am hardly that, Mr. Banks. I have no books to study, and my tutor is no longer able to instruct me.”

  “Your tutor?” he asked, rising hurriedly, caught off balance.

  “My father, sir.”

  “Of course. My apologies. I did not mean to pry.”

  “And yet your presence here would suggest the opposite.”

  It was not said coldly but with an air of detachment that made him step backwards.

  “My apologies, madam. I had not realized my presence here was objectionable to you.” And as he spoke she saw the sunlight go out of his face. The sight stopped her even as she began to move, though she had thought herself safe. She could feel it even then. She knew she should turn away and return to the village, past the low houses with their gazes averted as she passed. But she had not intended to wound, only to safeguard her own retreat. Around her the summer morning was still sweet. So, although she began to understand the risk, she turned back to him and met his eye.

  “I am not used to company, Mr. Banks. I have known these woods since I was a girl and I was taught to notice what I saw around me. It would be a great luxury to talk about these things. But today I have this drawing to complete. Soon this flower’s season will have passed and my opportunity will be lost.”

  He hesitated, concerned that her more curt response was the true one.

  “Of course,” he responded. “It was selfish of me to interrupt your work. Please be seated again,” and he gestured at the fallen branch. “There are few here that share my interests.”

  As she seated herself she took care that her dress fell properly to the ground. When he spoke again she had opened her book and was turning to the page of her unfinished drawing.

  “I shall bid you farewell and leave you to your work,” he began.

  But his sentence trailed away and she sensed no motion to withdraw. Instead she felt him move forward. When she looked up she saw his eyes fixed intently on the drawing in her hand, and the expression on his face sent a flash of joy to her heart.

  THAT DAY she stayed out late, until the light in the woods began to thicken into dusk. Then she returned home slowly along the fringes of the fields with the stars already showing above the trees. On reaching the house at the edge of the village, she paused with the door open, then let it close softly behind her, knowing that in the whole village on such an evening her door was the only one shut against the night air. Inside the house the shutters were fastened, trapping the heat of the day, and a candle burned in the dark. It was suffocatingly hot. She put her drawing book down on the bare table in front of her and listened. Upstairs her father was dying.

  She stood listening for nearly a minute. She could hear the low whispering of Martha, the nurse, as she cleaned him. She had had so many months of practice now that it didn’t take her long; even turning him barely made a sound. Beneath it all, regular and slow, his breath counted away the days and the hours. Finally, content from her place in the hallway that all was unchanged, she went to wash herself. Then, with her hair still damp and loose, she went upstairs.

  Martha greeted her with a nod and a smile and briefly the two sat in silence on either side of the sleeping man.

  “Thank you, Martha,” she said eventually. “You can leave me for a while. You must get yourself some supper.”

  The older woman began to stir herself, then paused. “Mr. Ponsonby called again today, miss.”

  The two exchanged a look.

  “Then it’s fortunate I was not at home, Martha.”

  After another silence, Martha spoke again.

  “He has not asked for rent these twelve months, miss.”

  “I know he has not.” She lowered her head. “There is nothing we can do about that.”

  She might have said more, but she was eager to be left alone that evening. When Martha had gone downstairs, she sat for a little, listening to her father’s breathing. Sometimes at night its steady rise and fall crept into her dreams like the sighing of the sea. On other nights it fell quiet and then she would go to him and lean close, anxious, like a mother over a sleeping infant.

  She had been upstairs sleeping that night they brought him home. At first she thought it was drink that affected him and she had been ashamed. Then she saw his hair was matted with blood and they told her how he had been found. He had been drunk, they said, and had interrupted the Ponsonbys at dinner. He’d been thrown out by the servants there and had wandered into the darkness. The men who found him had been returning horses to the stables at High-wold when they noticed him in a ditch, his head hard down on a stone.

  She hurried them out as soon as they had carried him upstairs, hating for them to see him so helpless. That night she tended him, mopping at the wound, an ache of anxiety deep in her stomach. The wound seemed clean. There was not much blood. Yet he would not stir. She tried to force a little brandy between his lips and then waited through the night for him to open his eyes.

  The doctor came the next day, even though she had not sent
for him. He was a good man: there were few who would come willingly to their door.

  “You must try to feed him,” he said. “Anything he can be made to swallow without choking him. You need him to keep up his strength.”

  The days that followed were suffused with half-light, as the full daylight disturbed him. She found he would swallow what she could force between his lips, but at other times of day he lay inert, unconscious of her touch. After a week Dr. Taylor returned and brought with him Martha, a nurse. She was a woman from the next village who had once nursed his own children and at his request she was willing to accept work in the house of a sinner and a heathen.

  “You must understand,” he said when Martha had gone downstairs to store away her things, “that the longer he sleeps, the less likely his waking.” She nodded at that but he could see she hadn’t heard. It was a lesson he would have to repeat.

  “Doctor,” she said when he came to leave, “my father has debts. I have nothing to pay the nurse.”

  He looked at the troubled green eyes.

  “Martha will come to me for her wages,” he told her.

  “But I cannot…”

  She looked up at him, wordlessly asking him to understand. But he was a study of concentration fastening his glove, and he paused only to add that he would call again when he could.

  The day of his next visit he found her changed. She was neatly dressed and she did not smile as she greeted him. As she led him upstairs she explained there had been no change, that her father was still unaware of the world around him. But he could see for himself a change in the man’s face, the gray pallor of his skin and a reshaping of his cheeks, as though he was inching away from life. He knew she had seen it, too, knew by the way she touched the patient as she tended him, softly now, like a caress. He had learned to recognize the ways people begin to say good-bye.

  “Doctor,” she whispered, “it is possible that my father may not recover, is it not?”

  “I fear that is possible,” he replied, wishing she had a mother to place an arm around her. “The wound to his head is more profound than was apparent to the eye.”

  “Will it be long?” Her voice was smaller than he had ever heard it.

  “I cannot say. I have known men in his state to survive for many weeks. Recover too, sometimes. You must tend him well and keep him comfortable.”

  “I shall,” she said. “And then…” But neither of them cared to complete the sentence, and after only a few words more the doctor withdrew.

  She was already used to walking alone. The day after the doctor’s visit she stood on the edge of the wood and let the sun warm her face as if its touch might smooth away every thought. She felt the roughness of the grass on her fingertips and let it fill her mind. She made herself memorize the pattern of leaves on the forest floor and the way the saplings turned and twisted toward the light. And to keep these things forever, to have them fill the emptiness inside her, she took up her pencil and drew.

  It’s a common thing for people to be fascinated by the ghosts that history leaves behind. Look in the public records offices on any Saturday and you’ll find rows of people trying to summon up their ancestors, outlining with names and dates the shadows of people they can never truly find. Hans Michaels was like that, but for him it was birds, not people.

  It was only by chance that I ever knew him. He wrote to me after reading an article I’d written about the spectacled cormorant, and as you don’t generally get many letters about the spectacled cormorant, I wrote him quite a long reply. Some months later, after various letters had been exchanged, he invited me to visit him to look at some of the research he’d done. It was a humbling experience. I was the professional and he was the amateur, but when it came to the two or three species he had really concentrated on, he had found sources and references that were completely new to me. We spent the afternoon together, his wife bringing in tea from time to time, then leaving us alone. He offered me his research quite freely, quite openly, just happy to find someone who shared his interest. But by then I already knew I would never publish, and his generosity was wasted on me. I remember as I left that day he asked me about the Ulieta bird. I told him what I knew and he nodded and then said something about an idea he’d been working on, something I didn’t really listen to at the time. But it was that chance remark that now kept me awake in the dawn, wondering what it was he had found so promising.

  I was up early the next morning. I’d slept for no more than an hour, but my mind wouldn’t rest and it was easier to get up and get on with things. After a shower and a cup of coffee I felt clearheaded and surprisingly vital. Outside it was a cold morning, but it smelled of autumn and the air felt fresh on my skin. The roads were already busy, but I fired up my bike, then edged out against the traffic and headed south.

  Hans Michaels lived in a redbrick villa in a village south of Guildford. Even allowing for a breakfast stop and some trouble finding the house, I was there ringing the bell at only a little after ten. At first his wife seemed exactly as I remembered her. Her voice from the hallway, as she ordered me to wait, had the same slightly curt edge, and when she had undone the bolts on the door, the face peering around it was still alert and intelligent.

  “My name’s Fitzgerald,” I told her. “I was hoping to talk to your husband. It’s about extinct birds.”

  She looked at me evenly. “My husband died five years ago, I’m afraid. But if you’ve called about his research, you’d better come in.” It was only as I followed her into the house that I noticed how slowly she moved ahead of me. And then there were the other things—the fraying hem on her skirt, a slight shake in her hand as she opened the living room door, a button on her blouse not properly done up—little things that made me feel sad and guilty. It wouldn’t have been difficult to stay in touch, I thought irrationally, as if somehow my presence might have ameliorated the pain of aging.

  The living room was cluttered with furniture and objects. “I still dust,” she told me, waving her hand airily around her front room, “but there’s a girl who comes in to do the rest. She isn’t very good, so my apologies if the place is not as clean as it should be. Please take a seat.” I sat down on one of the floral-print armchairs and she moved to the door and then paused. “I do remember you, Mr. Fitzgerald,” she told me. “You’re the expert. Hans used to talk about you. You came here to look at his work once.”

  “That’s right,” I replied. There didn’t seem much else to say.

  While she returned to the kitchen to make tea, I browsed among the books and pictures on her sitting room walls. There was a small watercolor of a slim girl in an old-fashioned dress, her back turned and her head hidden beneath a parasol. Beyond her was a wash of pale sea.

  “Me,” she explained when she came in and saw me looking. “My sister painted it one summer. I was about fourteen, if I remember. She was always a romantic, my sister.”

  Next to it was a black-and-white photograph of a smiling young man with a pipe. I recognized him immediately as the ordinary, inoffensive man I had met years before. I noticed it was the only picture where the frame had no layer of dust.

  While the tea was being poured, I began to explain about the Ulieta bird. I told her I was after any information I could find, and that I thought her husband might have been interested in the same area. In response to that she waved a small brown hand and gave a snort. “If it was as obscure as you say, he probably did. He loved that sort of thing.”

  “So tell me,” I asked, finally getting around to the question I’d been too polite to ask, “do you still have his notes? Did you keep them?”

  She looked at me for a moment and then leaned forward.

  “Let me explain something. When you get to my age you have very few things left of those you love. You certainly hang on firmly to those you have.” She leaned back again in her armchair and pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her blouse. She dabbed carefully at her nose, then returned the tissue to her sleeve and looked at me again.
“The bird notes were the thing he was proudest of. Of course I kept them.”

  “And may I see them?”

  “Yes. I’m sure Hans would have liked that.”

  The notes were kept in a room on the first floor. She climbed the stairs slowly and paused at the top before leading me into a large book-lined room.

  “Up there,” she said, pointing to the highest shelf. It ran all the way around the room, and instead of books it carried a neat series of box files, each of them carefully labeled by hand. They stuck out above the books, but it would have been easy not to notice them—compared with the smart leather volumes below, they looked old and faded and somehow very ordinary. Nevertheless, I could see at a glance the care that had been taken over them. There was one file per species and other files under subject headings, some of them named after various collectors or collections. It would have taken me a month to go through them all.

  “Did he show them to many people?” I asked, my eyes still wandering along the shelves.

  “Just me,” she replied. “And you.”

  In my haste to scan the labels, I nearly missed it. The one I was looking for wasn’t a box file at all, just a folder placed between two boxes, and the ink on the cover was pale. Even here the Ulieta bird seemed determined to be elusive.

  I paused beneath it and his wife nodded.

  “Go on. You can stand on one of the chairs.”

  I knew as soon as I began to lift the folder down that it wasn’t going to tell me the answer. It was too light—I thought for a moment that it was going to be completely empty. But I was wrong. Hans Michaels had done some research after all, and what he discovered was there on a single sheet of paper. There was no text of any sort, no dates or references. Only a simple pencil sketch of a woman’s face.

  Looking at it again in the brighter light of the sitting room, I was still at a loss as to what it meant. She was a young woman, not beautiful but noticeable, with eyes that caught your attention and then held it. There was something vivid in them that made the face memorable. And something knowing in them that made it sad.