At that, with another bow, he turned and walked away, leaving the two women silent behind him.
SHE TRIED to warn Joseph. She wrote him a note telling him of her encounter, telling him that she feared a scandal if Maddox told the story of her journey to Madeira. She begged him to visit so that she could explain the danger. And then she waited. For five days he did not come. He had been out of town, he explained when he finally appeared. He had not been aware of her note. He stood in front of her like a sulking adolescent, deliberately late, petulant at being summoned but embarrassed at his petulance. When she saw how he carried himself, she turned away and tried to leave the room, but this dismissal piqued him further and he caught her before she reached the door.
“I am here because you wished to talk to me.”
“There is no point,” she replied. “I can see you are not to be talked to.”
“That is insulting. I have come away from the household of very good friends. They do not value my conversation so lightly.”
“Oh, Joseph!” She looked him in the eye and shook her head, suddenly weary. “Then go and talk to them. We would both prefer it. Once you gave me your word that you would never hold me against my will. This is the night I remind you of it.”
The sharpness of her words shocked them both into stillness. In the silence that followed he stood aside so that she was free to pass out of the room.
“You are right,” he murmured. “I will not detain you against your will.”
At that moment, in the sadness of his face, she saw clearly and for the last time the young man she loved; saw him hurt and confused and uncertain of her. For that brief moment she felt her resolution waver, and she reached up and touched his face.
“My love,” she said, “this isn’t how it should be.”
He took her hand in his and pushed it to his lips, his eyes shut. They stood like that until she freed her hand.
“How has it come to this?” he asked. “I know I love you now as much as I have ever loved you. Sometimes I forget that. I blame you because things are not as they used to be. I can feel such resentment. But even as I do, another part of me thinks of you with such pride and such longing that I end up hating myself.”
“Perhaps love is always honest in the end.”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’d like it to be.”
“I seem always so weighed down by the world. There is so much to do that it seems I can do none of it well. And it feels there is no space for you. Yet sometimes when I feel tired and alone I don’t understand myself for not being with you.”
“And yet you are here less and less.”
He looked away, and then turned back to her. “There are so many things I want to be. Sometimes it is easier to pretend those things when I am not with you. You know me too well.”
“You can be anything. I’ve always told you that.”
“Yes, I can be anything. You make me believe that. But it comes at a price.”
She leaned against him then, her forehead resting lightly on his chest.
“Yes,” she said. “It all comes at a price.”
THAT NIGHT he slept with his body pressed close to her. She slept, too, but intermittently, woken from time to time by the presence of him so near her or by his arm reaching for her in his sleep. His sleep was peaceful and even, and in sleep he seemed young again, his face as uncreased as in the Revesby woods. As she lay there she felt again the warmth that always filled her when they were together at night. And when it came, the dawn on her skin was like an icy breath.
As the sun rose higher she fell eventually into a deeper sleep. He woke and watched her sleeping. He began to reach to wake her, but her sleep seemed too perfect to disturb. If he had known it was the last time he would ever see her sleeping, he would never have left that room. But the night spent with her had reassured him, and the morning was a bright one. A new day beckoned. He hurried to meet it. When she woke, the room was full of light and he was gone.
Her letter reached him three days after that, in his house in New Burlington Street.
My love, she wrote, the words pressed deep into the paper. I have sold my Madeira paintings. I did it while you were away and didn’t tell you. They are gone abroad. They are all unsigned so they will never reappear to embarrass you. The terms were generous and I have commissions for more—I cannot help but be a little proud of it. With the money, I have prepared a home for our daughter. A quiet place where she will grow and be loved. All her life she will be loved. That is my promise.
Good-bye, Joseph. I will love you forever.
When he reached the house in Orchard Street, he found she had left everything. She and Martha were gone and Sophia’s cot was empty, but not even her clothes had been taken. The servants were as surprised and mystified as he. Only later, when the light was fading, did he notice that where her painting of oak leaves had once hung, there was now an empty space.
The journey to Lincolnshire felt like a fresh start. In the end, not wanting to arrive early, I took a circuitous route and when I reached Lincoln I called in on Bert Fox to make arrangements. We agreed that he would deliver to the hotel at seven o’clock that evening, and then we fell to chatting, so that I didn’t make it to the hotel until six. By that time another cold evening had settled on the streets and the hotel fires were stoked up high. I arrived on foot in the darkness and stepped quietly into the light of the lobby, my big overcoat still hunched around me, its collar high around my face. I found Potts sitting there reading a Raymond Chandler novel and watching the door. His eyes ran quickly over me when I came in, but I carried nothing and had no one with me. He looked disappointed, but when he rose to his feet to greet me, he was all Old World charm in a New World accent.
“Mr. Fitzgerald! How very mysterious you’re getting to be. You know, if there’s one thing I didn’t expect from you, it was mystery.”
“Is that meant to be a compliment?”
“It’s whatever you’d like it to be.” He waved in the direction of the reception desk. “I guess you’ll want to freshen up after your journey. After that, I’d very much like to have a word with you alone.”
“I could meet you in the bar in half an hour.”
“Perhaps somewhere with a little more privacy?”
“No, I like the bar. That’s about as private as I want to be.”
He nodded, accepting my terms. “Sure. The bar, then, in half an hour.” He pottered back to his sofa, for all the world a kindly old gent with nothing on his mind but his book.
I told the woman at the reception desk that I was expecting someone to arrive with a parcel for me.
“When he comes,” I asked her, “could you ask him to drop it off in my room, please? His name’s Fox.”
When I got to my room I rang Katya and Anderson, in that order. Five minutes before I was due in the bar, Katya knocked at my door and let herself in.
“Phew!” she gasped when the door was shut, then flopped dramatically onto the bed in mock exhaustion. “I’m so tired. They’ve been on at me all day, trying to persuade me to put in a word for them. The bidding is ferocious. And one of them always seems to be watching me whenever I leave my room.” She pushed herself upright. “Did everything go all right?”
I sat down next to her. “It went well. Look at this.” I pulled a piece of paper out of my pocket. “It’s my receipt. I’ll only show it to them if they demand to see one. I don’t want them tracking down Bert Fox and giving him hassle about any of this.”
Katya looked down at it and laughed. “Five thousand pounds! That’s going to make them so mad.” We both laughed then, and with the laughter returned that warm thrill of complicity. “Where is it now?” she asked.
“With Fox. I didn’t want to bring it with me while they were all watching. He’s going to bring it around later.”
“And you’re sure he won’t change his mind?”
“Yes, I’m sure. Bert is an odd one. He’s hi
s own man, with his own ideas. I always thought he might see things my way. I’m sure I can trust him.”
“What about the pictures?”
“The case is all sealed up. You can’t tell if there are any paintings in there until it’s opened.”
Katya looked at her watch. “We should go down. The others are all in the bar. Except Potts. He’s hanging around at the end of the corridor, seeing who comes in and who goes out.”
“Okay, then.” I stood up and gave her my hand to pull herself up. “Let’s collect him on our way.”
Potts showed no surprise when he found Anderson and Gabby waiting for us in the bar. He merely took off his little round glasses and rubbed them vigorously on his waistcoat.
“I see.” He smiled affably. “You’d have been much better to talk to me by myself, Mr. Fitzgerald. But, hey, let’s see what happens.”
The room was empty apart from Anderson and Gabby, but the fire was already blazing. Behind the bar, a slightly lugubrious barman was reading a book that he pushed hastily out of sight when we came in. As if to compensate for the lack of drinkers, the music had been turned up. Someone was singing “Fly Me to the Moon” with slightly too much feeling.
We gathered around the same table as before, but this time everyone was looking at me, not at Anderson. I looked back at them, one by one: Anderson expectant, Katya happy and excited, Potts restless, darting swift glances to the door of the bar. And Gabby. Gabby was watching me anxiously, and I wondered what she made of what she saw.
For once Anderson didn’t wait for the drinks to be ordered before getting down to business. He wanted to know about the Ulieta bird. Was it true? Did I have it?
“Yes,” I told him. “It’s true. I bought it this afternoon for five thousand pounds. The owner was quite happy with the deal.”
“Who was the owner?” That was Potts cutting in, but Anderson waved the question away impatiently.
“Did he have the pictures, too?”
“No, he’d never heard of the pictures. But the seal of the case hasn’t been broken for years. Probably not since the last century.”
“And you’re sure it’s the real thing?” he asked.
“You’ll have to make up your own mind on that,” I told him. Then I turned back to Potts. “As for the owner, it doesn’t matter. I own it now.”
“And what will you do with it?” Gabby’s voice was calmer than the men’s, and almost sultry in its softness. “You can see why I’m curious, Fitz.”
They all stopped at that and waited for me to answer. Anderson cast a swift glance at Katya, but she was looking at me, too, an easy, contented smile on her face.
“Well,” I began, “that’s one of the things I thought we’d talk about this evening. But first there’s a couple of things I wanted to ask.”
“Such as?” Anderson was finally signaling to the barman.
“Such as which one of you broke into my house.” I turned to Potts. “Was it you?”
He was leaning back in his chair, his hands joined over the generous curve of his stomach.
“Ah, Mr. Fitzgerald! Just a little research. I would have liked to leave things tidy, but you’ll understand that I didn’t want to linger. It was important for me to check your notes, to see what you really knew about the Ulieta bird.”
“Why didn’t you do that the first time? What was all that stuff about dusting the bookshelves?”
He looked back at me blankly.
“I don’t think he can answer that.” Anderson sounded his usual, calm self.
“It was you?”
“That’s right.” He seemed amused by my surprise. “Remember, Mr. Fitzgerald, we’re talking about something that could be worth a million dollars. That night, after you left the Mecklenburg, I tried to catch up with you. But when I reached your house, no one was in. And your front door was practically inviting me to look around.”
“But what were you looking for? What was all that stuff with my bookshelves?”
Anderson stared at me as if he was seeing me clearly for the first time. And then he leaned back from the table and began to laugh; big, genuine gusts of laughter that rose from his diaphragm and made his whole ribcage heave. When the laughter began to subside, he began to shake his head.
“You really don’t know, do you? The famous John Fitzgerald, world authority on extinct birds, and somehow you still don’t know, even though it’s in the most obvious textbook.”
“Know what?” At that particular moment I disliked him more than ever. And his laughter was having an effect. Although they had no idea what he was laughing at, Gabby and Potts, even Katya, were beginning to smile.
He gave a few more shakes of his head and then sat upright again, composing himself.
“Okay, I’ll start at the beginning. When we met at the hotel you said you knew nothing about the Ulieta bird—but I didn’t believe you. There was one basic thing that you had to know, and when you pretended not to, I just assumed you knew a lot more besides.”
I was completely confused now, and my expression made Anderson laugh some more.
“When I found you weren’t there that evening, I thought I’d go in and try to take a look at your famous notes. But when I got to your room, something on the bookcase caught my eye. You see, Mr. Fitzgerald, an academic has to keep his library up to date. Fosdyke’s Notes on Avian Species—you have the wrong edition.” He paused to let the comment sink in. “I was pretty sure from the cover that yours was the first edition, but I needed to take it down and look at it, just to check. Perhaps you stayed with that edition because it was signed by the author. I don’t know. But then it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps you hadn’t been pretending after all. Perhaps you really didn’t know anything.”
I shrugged, still not comprehending.
“You see,” he went on, “Fosdyke brought out a second edition a few years after the first. He’d added one or two new bits of information, including one about the Ulieta bird.” He turned now and looked at Katya. “Fosdyke had found that letter, the one you saw in the Fabricius archives. The letter mentions a drawing of the Ulieta bird made in Lincolnshire, and Fosdyke made a Latin joke about it. I can’t quote it exactly but it’s something like this: ‘The specimen of Turdus ulietensis once owned by Joseph Banks seems likely to be the Turdus lindensis mentioned later by Fabricius.’ Lindum is the Roman name for Lincoln,” he explained, looking around us, assuming ignorance. “So that’s why the letter sent to Martha Stamford was so exciting. Because it fitted with what we already knew—that the bird had somehow ended up in Lincolnshire.”
“So you put the book back, dusted the shelves so I didn’t know which book you’d looked at, and left me to wallow in my ignorance?”
“More or less. I didn’t think it would take you long to find out about the Lincolnshire reference, but I wasn’t going to point it out to you.” He turned to Katya. “Considering you hadn’t read Fosdyke, I was very impressed with the way you found it for yourself. Of course, your friend here could have saved you all that trouble if he’d bothered to visit a decent reference library. Now, tell me, Mr. Fitzgerald, what was the other question you wanted to ask?”
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the crumpled picture of Miss B that Potts had removed from Anderson’s room.
“Do you know who this is?” I asked.
Anderson barely glanced at it. “Joseph Banks’s mistress. His first mistress. He went on to have others, of course.”
“Why did you have her picture in your room?”
“I have all sorts of stuff in my files. I brought it all with me. Does it matter?”
“You didn’t think she was important in some way?”
“In finding the bird?” He breathed out a little impatiently. “No, of course not. I had someone research Joseph Banks for me, so I knew all about the mistress. She was interesting because she knew Fabricius, and Fabricius knew something about the bird. But she’s a dead end. No one can even say who she was.”
I looked across at Katya. “No, I suppose no one will ever know who she really was.”
Before Anderson could reply, one of the women from the reception desk appeared at our table.
“The gentleman has been and gone, sir,” she explained. “He’s left it in your room as you said.”
“Thank you.” I smiled, and turned to the others. “What do you think? Is it time for us to go upstairs and inspect the merchandise?”
I’d left one small lamp on in my bedroom, so when we all filed in, the room was washed with a dim reddish light. It was a small room and the double bed where Katya had flopped earlier filled the center of it. Otherwise there was only a small desk and wardrobe, a couple of chairs, and just about enough space for the five of us to stand in.
Bert Fox had left his parcel in the center of the bed, and we instinctively spread out around it, Katya on my left, Anderson on my right, with Gabby next to him and Potts a little apart, watching us all.
The parcel on the bed was a couple of feet tall and about the same square. It was wrapped in brown paper under a layer of bubble wrap, and had been crisscrossed with belts of heavy-duty pink tape. No one spoke at first, but Anderson gave a little sigh on seeing it. It was a sigh that told me something. Before then I’d taken him for the ultimate professional, a man who looked for rare things purely for profit. But now I wondered if Gabby might have been right. Perhaps behind it all there really was a man who just loved the search. In a little way I found myself liking him more.
“You might need this.” Potts had taken a penknife out of his pocket. “Come on. We’re waiting.”
I started forward, suddenly full of doubt about the whole enterprise. But now I had no choice but to show them what was in the package. Slowly, with careful movements of the knife, I cut away the tape, then the plastic, until there was only the brown paper left. Suddenly impatient, I tore it away with two sweeps of my hands, leaving the object below uncovered.
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