Birdman's Wife

by Melissa Ashley

  Chapter 7

  Resplendent Quetzal

  Trogon resplendens

  Golden Square, London 1835

  I had been listening for a sign: the whinny of horses, a sharp command from a coachman, a messenger boy pounding on the door. John was late, and I had woken with the determination that today he would return from his travels in Europe.

  Through the open nursery window, I heard the chink of metal. I raised myself from the floor where I had been reading a story to Henry about the adventures of an Egyptian prince. Henry liked the animal pictures, unable to resist turning the pages to peer at the illustrations. After our morning reading, I would surrender him to Joanne for his lessons. Under the window, my son Charles squirmed in his cot. The morning light moved over the sheets and he waved his fist above his eyes, as if studying the play of shadows. His hair, black as pitch, came from my side of the family.

  Charlie, who was nearing his first birthday, proved a fighting fit infant. He had been named after my brother Charles, who had sailed to Australia the previous year, having found it increasingly difficult to earn enough in his occupation as a taxidermist to support the rent on his modest London lodgings. I missed Charles terribly, but could not fault him for setting out on a new path. I found solace in his decision to join our elder brother Stephen, who had immigrated to the colony several years earlier, and make a new life there. Stephen was a successful pastoralist in the farming region of the Upper Hunter Valley, which lay west of the coal-rich coastal settlement of Newcastle and was watered by a tributary of the Hunter River.

  As Charles was not only a skilled stuffer but also a gifted naturalist, John had provided him with a list of desired species to shoot and trap for our collections. Charles was to ship his quarry to London as dried skins or wet specimens preserved in alcohol for John to describe. My husband’s interest in the colony had been sparked by Stephen, who had thought to send the odd curiosity for our interest.

  From the window I made out the dull cylinder of John’s hat and Lear’s purple, dented version, bobbing together at the back of the open carriage. They moved apart and a footman lifted out a large chest.

  ‘Papa’s home!’ I called to the children, returning to the rug and rubbing my nose against Henry’s cheek.

  ‘Has he brought me a present?’ Henry jumped up and twirled in a circle. Then, with a bewildered look, he met my eyes. ‘I need to go … He tugged at his trousers.

  It was too late. The puddle on the living-room floor shimmered like glass and without warning Henry ran through it, his footprints shining on the floorboards.

  If I had a dropper, I could have siphoned it up, I thought. The straw-coloured liquid was a highly effective fixative for grinding pigment, and boys’ urine was still sold by art suppliers for such a purpose – with a different name, of course. I smiled to myself. Such thoughts were surely a sign that it was time to get back to work on my illustrations.

  With John out of range I had tended to tarry with the children. My studio, like myself, seemed to alter its personality, and I had to work twice as hard at shedding the myriad distractions that claimed my attention, like a puffin moulting after winter. Amid sketching and drawing, I would lose focus, abandoning my desk to linger over the household’s domestic routines. I chatted to our cook, Bessie, as she baked cakes and pickled onions, shelled peas and prepared roasts. I helped Daisy turn out the winter carpets and planned a spring garden with Mrs Prince. I watched over Charlie’s wet nurse like a hawk, almost envious of her closeness with my son. Sometimes I walked down to the Broad Street pump, invigorated by the jostle of the crowd that gathered there to draw water.

  John’s journey to Europe had been necessary to gather research for a monograph on one of his special interests: the toucan, a family of birds about which he had amassed an impressive collection of specimens and notes over the years. He had borrowed skins for Lear and me to sketch, but he wished to include in the folio some rare specimens whose owners could not be persuaded to lend them out. Deciding he had little option but to visit their collections in France and Holland to complete his monograph, John invited Lear to sail with him as companion and sketch maker for the two-month tour. The offer was an enticement of sorts to secure Lear’s continuing work in our studio.

  For many months Lear had been threatening to leave the city. He had grown weary of the demands, not to mention the artistic limitations, of natural history. He felt that he had learned all he could, developed his skills as far as they could be stretched, and he itched to try new subjects. Landscape painting with oils, for instance. To make matters worse, London’s cold winters and poor air wreaked havoc with his already fragile health. Since childhood he had suffered from asthma and bronchitis and on his most painful winter days he could hardly breathe from coughing. He held a great fear that he would be struck deadly ill. On the rare occasions when Lear’s playful mood deserted him, he warned me that he was having an attack of ‘The Morbids’.

  Rome loomed in Lear’s imagination as the ideal city for relocation. He would live among gypsies and expatriate artists, feeding stray cats and pigeons, drinking coffee in the ancient plazas while painting the sun falling into the ruins that broke the skyline. Lear had also confessed to me that he could not put up with John’s miserly fees and punishing schedule indefinitely. One of the strengths of Lear’s and my friendship was our ability to commiserate with each other about keeping up with John’s deadlines to finalise the lithographs. Rather than making things easier, our success had made everyone’s workload heavier as we raced to meet our subscribers’ demands. To ease the tension, Lear drew caricatures of my husband and composed riddles that made me splutter with laughter. Of course I knew that John worked twice as hard as any one of us, but sometimes in his single-minded obsession to complete a project he forgot that we were not all able to work from dusk until dawn as he did.

  I went downstairs to greet the two travellers, Charlie in my arms, Henry clutching my skirts. Henry, unable to hold back, ran and threw his arms around John’s knees. John laughed and tickled him under the chin. Then John reached for my hand, squeezing it, and drew me into a warm embrace, kissing Charlie on the top of his head. ‘It’s good to have you home,’ I said. I glanced up at Lear, who seemed exhausted. The coach trip from Dover to London had been long and the channel crossing rough.

  After a noisy and happy luncheon, Henry and Charlie were ushered back to the nursery with Joanne, and I joined John and Lear in the drawing room to hear about their adventure.

  ‘I found this for you, Eliza,’ said John. He had purchased a rare book, Gesner’s Renaissance Almanac, an encyclopaedia of the animal kingdom compiled in the sixteenth century. Touched that John had found time to search for such a treasure, I flipped through the pages of indecipherable text and stylised woodblock prints, already thinking of ways to try to recreate some of the effects with my pencils. This treasure would have pride of place in our collection of bestiaries.

  ‘Eliza, you would have adored Paris,’ said Lear. ‘The clipped gardens, the outdoor cafés and street painters, the women strolling about in their ridiculously puffed sleeves, their hats trimmed with ostrich plumes. But your husband here didn’t care much for such spectacle. I could barely tear him from the Museum of Natural History.’

  ‘I’m a little jealous, if you must know,’ I confessed.

  ‘You had your chance,’ said John, smiling.

  It was true – and it had been so tempting. John had encouraged me to travel with him to Europe before asking Lear.

  ‘In my condition?’ I protested, brushing my swollen belly. ‘And what about the boys?’ My husband had a gift for ignoring anything that interfered with his plans, never mind the body’s protestations.

  I became even more jealous when John and Lear described the many intriguing museums and collections crammed with curiosities they had visited. They had wandered rooms filled with striped and spotted felines, and gazelles with every form of antler imaginable: some like tree branches, others shar
p as a spear, all suspended from the walls. In other rooms dried sponges and corals hung from the ceilings, and grass skirts from the Pacific Islands were displayed alongside the carcass of a crocodile, its eyes represented not by glass, as in our taxidermy specimens, but by two large cowrie shells, with the opening facing outward to stand in for their vertically slit pupils. There were dried sharks and glistening fish, preserved with resin and mounted on wooden boards, their fins carefully separated. There were pinned butterflies, big as plates, which Lear thought would surely come to life with his breath, and beetles with iridescent wings arranged in patterns fit to make your eyes reel.

  In Austria they had travelled to the city of Leiden, where they paid a call on the delightfully named Mr Johann Natterer, a renowned ornithologist, naturalist and explorer. Mr Natterer loaned John a crate of toucans, which he promised to ship back when he had finished his examinations for his monograph. But it turned out that Mr Natterer’s Brazilian specimens were not the star attraction of their tour. Rather, a small but remarkable collection belonging to a Mr Otto Stein, from Frankfurt, provided the true marvel. Mr Stein, an armchair ornithologist, and an amateur one at that, had purchased a case of rare specimens at an auction. They were trogons, a colourful Central American order of perching birds about which little was known. Trogons lived high in remote cloud forests and were exceedingly difficult to collect. Mr Stein had attempted to submit a paper to the Linnean Society describing the hoard, but it was sent back full of corrections. Realising that he lacked the systematic experience to publish, Stein elected to be rid of his collection.

  ‘His wife had never been happy with the purchase,’ said John. ‘He bought it with money he’d put aside to buy her a ring. When it seemed there were no profits in the venture, she convinced him to sell.’

  ‘I can understand her frustration,’ I said, meeting my husband’s eye. ‘Never forget your good fortune in marrying a woman who shares your interests.’

  ‘I trust you’ll not let me,’ said John, smiling. He rested a hand on my knee.

  ‘You missed the best part,’ said Lear.

  John motioned to the glass flask sitting on the table, several green and red plumaged specimens drowned in the preserving liquor it held. ‘Mr Stein came to fear his collection, believing he had no right to house them – indeed, that they had brought a curse on his family. That the birds were causing him ill.’

  ‘How queer,’ I said. ‘They don’t look particularly intimidating.’

  ‘I’m glad you’re not concerned, Eliza,’ said John. ‘Because you’ll never guess, but your next job will be to illustrate these specimens – the resplendent quetzal – for our new trogon monograph.’

  It was only after John explained his research into native beliefs about the species’ special qualities that I could appreciate Mr Stein’s fears. Resplendent quetzals were revered by the ancient Mayans as gods and spiritual protectors. There was a legend that when the Spanish conquistadors speared one of the last Mayan chiefs, a resplendent quetzal, hearing the leader’s cries, plummeted to earth and flew to his side. Discovering the chief mortally wounded, the dazzling green quetzal perched on his chest, remaining there until the chief died later that night. The next day, when the quetzal flew off, its green breast was stained scarlet by the conquered chief’s blood. To the Mayans, the bird was considered sacred and killing a resplendent quetzal was punishable by death. Only Mayan chiefs were permitted to wear the quetzal’s long tail plumes, which were collected by high priests who then released the de-feathered animals back into the wild to grow more. The species was believed to value its freedom so highly that if one was housed in a cage it would expire.

  The legend reminded me of a lecture about birds of paradise that I attended at the Royal Society some months earlier. Just like the natives of the lands in which birds of paradise dwelled, Europeans had fashioned their own myths about these magnificently plumaged creatures. When Malay merchants first encountered paradise birds in the sixteenth century, they were said to have been made speechless by their beauty. The ribbons, tufts and wires of their tails, the glistening sheen reflected when light fell on their feathers, like liquid copper or burnished gold – a single barb could entrance – became so treasured that those same merchants were soon trading the birds and greedily setting high prices for their finds. In the nine months it took for a three-masted barque to sail from Batavia to Rotterdam, the Paradisaeidae entered the cabinets of European collectors. The specimens inspired long treatises and letters, sleepless nights and imaginative flurries about the forests of undiscovered species inhabiting the earth’s wet tropics. Expeditions patronised by royal families set sail to collect further samples, which were then proudly displayed in the cabinets of private connoisseurs.

  Birds of paradise were granted a sort of magical status as angel birds, ghost birds or god birds by natives and Europeans alike. Their beguiling beauty led to suppositions that they were not of the earth. Indeed, the Greek name of the great bird of paradise, apoda, signified that it lacked feet, reflecting not only the natives’ practice of removing the creatures’ legs during preservation, but also the idea that paradise birds never left their remote forest canopies, plummeting down to earth only in death. The resplendent quetzal, with its majestic bearing and exquisite plumage, evoked a similar awe, inspiring the transcendent imaginings of European birdmen, allowing them to soar above the familiar, the everyday. No wonder the amateur Mr Stein felt wary.

  A few days later, when John prepared the specimens for illustration, setting and brushing the feathers, I saw in a glance what the fuss was all about. The transformation of the male from a wet specimen into a taxidermied mount was nothing short of a metamorphosis.

  Simply looking at the creature sent a shiver through me. The quetzal sported iridescent sheens in its plumage, like silk from China, gossamer and spider’s webs, droplets of water catching the light. The male’s body was actually quite small. Its head feathers were a dazzling chlorophyll green; the plumage of its breast and its epaulette-shaped wing coverts an iridescent turquoise. The quetzal’s chest was the crimson of blood lit by fire, and six long, thin emerald-teal plumes streamed from its tail, thrice the length of the quetzal’s body. It was these tapers in particular, and their similarity to those of the bird of paradise, that had caused such a stir. Overall, there was something of the decorated soldier about the male, wrapped in his glistening armoury, the crest around his tiny skull creating a fearsome expression. Both the male and female quetzals had a yellow bill and eyes ringed in lilac. The hen did not produce streamers; indeed, her modest tail was white with black notches. Sharing incubation duties, the cock was said to enter the nest through a hidden opening, so he did not harm his feathers, which trailed from the tree hollow where the female quetzal laid her eggs. The bird’s feet were tiny, seemingly unable to support its body weight, with two claws curling forward over the perch, and two backwards, like those of the toucan. John had discovered that the delicate skin of the trogons required handling with the utmost care, lest it tear. Despite this, its plumage was thick, producing the illusion of a larger body than the creature really possessed.

  The bird’s unusual features inspired a sense of awe, a rush of immense visual pleasure. Here I was, with an opportunity to bring this mesmerising animal back to life in an illustration, to share its magnificence with a wide audience. For no matter how precisely my husband detailed his descriptions, the splendour of the quetzal could not be conveyed in scientific letterpress. To do it justice required no less than a life-sized, hand-coloured lithograph.

  Initially, the quetzal proved an intimidating subject. After many drafts, I was finally satisfied with my depiction of the upper body. In representing the male’s plumes, I joined together two pages of sketching paper. We drew our creatures true to their size in life, where possible, and I became preoccupied by the problem of fitting the tail feathers onto the page. And then one morning I had the answer: we must include a fold-out page in our monograph, so the reader could
appreciate the quetzal’s eye-catching tail.

  There was much to learn about the trogon family, and John was exceedingly pleased to be the one holding a torch to light the walls of knowledge about the family. The male and female quetzals were sexually dimorphic, showing vastly different coloured plumages, and the juveniles took some years to produce their mature adult feathers. These differences had confused European ornithologists, causing them to classify the specimens as separate species.

  While John searched for words to describe the specimens in his letterpress I lined up my brushes, ready to work. Some were made from the finest sable, the dark brown fur of the Arctic marten, others from camel’s hair and squirrel fur. I had snipe feathers for the delicate work of depicting the quetzals’ eyes and feet, and variously sized quill handles – swan’s quill was the largest grade, followed by goose, duck, crow and lark.

  I tested for the appropriate pigments to render the brilliance of the male quetzal’s plumage. Mixing colour required stillness and space. I needed a mortar and pestle, pigment, gum Arabic from the Egyptian acacia, a little alcohol and candied sugar to smooth out the dryness of the paste. I also needed patience and a willingness to surrender to the task’s physicality. It was difficult in the beginning – my powders spilled across the table and I poured in the wrong amounts of water. I could not grind out the lumps. When I eventually made a colour of the correct consistency and viscosity, I would run out halfway through and have to mix more. For the yellow I used an Indian pigment made by feeding Brahmin cows the leaves of mango trees, then intensifying the colour of the animal’s urine by adding chemicals. Mixing pigments was a process of continual readjustment and recalibration, of adding and diluting, until I was absolutely satisfied that I had created the desired shade.