Birdman's Wife

by Melissa Ashley

  Daisy, seated in a chair brought in from the dining room, takes my hand in hers. She brings the candle towards my face. ‘How do you feel?’ she asks.

  ‘No change.’

  ‘You’ve been calling out in your sleep.’ She looks into my eyes, and I can tell by her expression that I am in dreadfully poor health.

  ‘Pains,’ I say, pointing a finger at my lower middle.

  ‘I’ll call the physician.’

  I squeeze her hand. ‘Please, stay with me. I just need sleep. I’ll speak with him in the morning.’

  I turn my face from Daisy’s concerned gaze. Until today, until the birth of Sarah Gould, I imagined I had passed life’s most severe trials. But the searing in my chest, the violent beating of my heart – how it hammers inside my ribs – feels as if it might become dislodged, as if it might burst, or stop, the blood it pumps swelled to an abnormal consistency. It requires all of my strength not to cry out. The pain in my womb and lower body is fierce, a fire, a horrid and terrible burning that will not abate. However do I manage to sleep? Then I recall the cupful of brandy, the tincture of laudanum, fed me by Dr York.

  I draw on my strength. I will rise to this challenge, like all the others I have endured. I learned when I was just a girl to bear hardship. I have had experiences that I thought were the worst events ever to happen. My sister died. My eldest brother and father passed on. My first child died. My third child died. These losses have burdened me, a living hollow that I transport about, always able to stretch to make room for the most recent surrender. Though it felt pulled to splitting, something in the matter of its spirit always slipped and moved, incorporating the new soul in with the rest.

  Suffering, I decide, is like loving – a form of constancy. When you meet your lover, or after your first child is born, you cannot imagine finding the room to accommodate another cherished soul. The fullness engulfs you with its demands and pleasures. And yet you manage to locate a tiny fold, a gap to make an adjustment, like affixing a new slide beneath the lens of a microscope, and there you have it, another glass pressing to add to your treasures.

  Daisy has combed my hair and replaced the nightcap. She has helped me into a fresh nightgown. But I have lost flesh and, although she has washed and dried my face, the sheen of the fever has returned. There is no disguising the pallor of my complexion. My breath frosts the looking glass. I know the morning will come when they hold it to my lips and no condensation will appear.

  My children line up at the end of the bed. They wear their Sunday best. The mischief and sense of fun from yesterday is drained from their expressions. They are formal. As if, as if – and this is what floats to mind – they attend a funeral. As if they glide by my corpse. Am I that shocking to apprehend? Two days have passed since Sarah’s birth and I have not once left the lying-in bed. I have not had a proper sleep, nor have I kept down a meal. Cups and droppers have been passed to and from my lips, as if I were an invalid. Sarah has been taken into another’s care and now my children file past my body to pay their respects. Mother and John alternate in reading psalms. Dr York prescribes an ongoing regimen of brandy and egg yolks, laudanum and camomile tea. The laudanum brings visions; the brandy, sleep, and then in the morning, terrible headaches. Always they prod at my abdomen.

  I frighten my own children. They kiss my lips and it is through a blurred eyeglass that I see them.

  I buried John junior, my dear Edward. The flaking wallpaper of our former home, the blue and white kitchen that caught the morning sun, became my world. I requested errands to complete for my husband: accounts to tally, letters to copy, deciphering his messy script and transcribing it into the leather-bound journals he bought at the stationers. Mourning my two sons, an agony of loss invaded my whole body. The cry of a child was like being cut by a thousand tiny knives. Once, at the market, I rounded a corner and saw a poor woman with a baby swaddled in rags, a young boy and girl at her side. She held out her hand, her eyes cast to the ground, and I felt an awful pulling at my heart. I wanted to run to the end of the street, to tear up the stairs of my house and dive into my bedroom and take the laudanum John kept in the bathroom cabinet for emergencies. I wanted to drink brandy and fall asleep and not awaken. As I stood wrestling my demons, I imagined the shell of my girlhood coming off, revealing the soft, wet adult morph. A gentleman walked past the woman and gave her a sneering look. I watched the back of his stockinged calves as he was absorbed into the swirling crowd, his coat-tails flapping. My experience made me unable to ignore the mother’s need. I could not bear the wanting in her children’s faces. Soon I was scrabbling in my purse and handing over the money I had brought with me for the grocery shopping.

  I am to join my sons in death. Our bond is like the trail of a sandpiper from its marshy nest down to the beach, with its fine grains of sand. It sinks its bill to find molluscs and crabs, fresh crustaceans to transform into stored fat, to sustain it on its journey to the other side of the world to breed. The memory of my boys is like a skein of wool. Parting the threads would destroy the integrity of the yarn. In my childhood, siblings simply disappeared. They were never spoken of again, and I vowed it would be different for me. I would not grow weary with sadness. I would have interests besides piety and the Lord to bring me comfort. There was my brother Charles to look after. How he personified my tattered faith. I saw him wandering into the well-lit mornings with his collecting box. I saw him clinging to the door lintel as the time came for him to go back to school. Or am I imagining Charlie, my own son? My memories are growing confused. I cannot separate these images from the process of mixing India yellow and lake red and ultramarine, zinc white and burnt sepia, with a wetted brush. I cannot take the one for the other – they must remain together. Their bright complexity is a beautiful mesh, like the embroidery on an exquisite gown, like the patterns made in the lithographic factories for wallpaper, ceramics, curtains and linen. Unravelling the fine weave, the laced yarn of a precious Turkish carpet, to return it to a loom of forgetting is unthinkable to me. The silk, spun by pale moths, the slave children who collect the mulberry’s leaves; to untangle it all, to separate out the fine fibres, would erase history.

  It is not possible to harbour love without vexation.

  I had known there was something not right with John junior. I had called the doctor. But my heart refused to believe it. When he was taken from me, all of the beauty that had filled my days disappeared. I was back to where I had been as a young woman, a confused girl who had just left home, escaping to the city. Grief returned as a natural state.

  If only I could return to those earlier hope-filled days. John had a commission from the King and everything appeared to be coming together. London, despite its smog and noise, seemed like a place I might one day call home. I did not need drawing. John junior’s crib sat next to my bed. Though our quarters were small and cramped, I did not care; I held him and fed him in the night. I harboured an infernal optimism. Looking back, I can see that this infinite coil of resolve – I picture it stretching out between my fingers – this ability to keep my attention on a task until the last moment was my great strength. This was why when he passed, I felt a grave shock.

  There had been little in my experience to prepare me. Though grief was an emotion I knew well, it became a too familiar garment that I resisted taking off – walking in it, sleeping in it, washing it once a week. Until, a year later, the sky broke open and flocks of pigeons flew over the Thames. Slowly my body healed and returned to normal. I learned to observe the cycles of our lives. I was a girl, born with a strange itch. Beneath my skin I embodied a weird dissatisfaction. I peered at the rooms I had made my own. My husband loved me and had done well for us. We might make something of our union. And so I came to my decision: to keep his house, to be mother to his children. To sketch the feathered tribes that obsessed his mind.

  I recall the dreams I used to spin, like floss, like spider’s web and caterpillar cocoons. John appealed to things in me that were ill-formed, that I was
not old enough to understand but recognised the first turnings of. I had sensed something in him – beyond language – leading me to an early notion of reaching above my station. My upbringing had not fashioned me for such a feat. I dabbled in my drawing but did not share the fierce ambition of my husband to build his business. I liked to paint, yes, but to be an artist, and a famous one at that? If my two sons had lived, would I have dared take this path? Might I have stayed in London with my flock of children, while John and some other illustrator sailed beyond the equator searching for bird species to name and describe?

  I recall the Australian eucalypts stretching their coppery limbs towards the sun, the cedars boasting girths the width of a coach. I remember the parrots of that great continent, painted every hue of the rainbow, whole clouds squawking past, and a sky so huge you could see it curve at the far edges. A thousand stars and constellations filled the night. The bats at dusk swarmed over the low-lit moon, a pink and apricot backdrop of cloud; by daylight they clumped, wizened fruits dangling from the boughs of trees. I take pleasure in revisiting my Australian experience, in my blood a queer longing for news of my second home. I had not expected to return to England with what I can only describe as fondness spilling into love for that other place. I close my eyes and see grasses, willowy trees awash with soft flowers. The sky like a beaten pan, forged and glistening, burnished, the sun at my chest, a fierce embrace.

  Author’s Note

  Elizabeth and John Gould’s intense creative relationship intrigued me from the very beginning, not least because it reflected a similar coupling in my own life as a writer. My love of birds was first inspired by my love for a poet, and his poem about a black-faced cuckoo shrike. An aspiring writer myself, I had never heard of this common bird, and its enigmatic presence in the poem sparked in me a desire to learn all about the birds that sang and preened in my Brisbane backyard. Curiosity is a powerful motivator and, during the next decade and a half, my interest in Australia’s birds steadily increased until I began birdwatching in earnest. Tied to my hobby was a fascination with antique etchings and prints of birds; I loved the illustrations’ awkward grace. In 2004, the discovery of a cache of 56 paintings of Australian birds and plants by George Raper, a midshipman and navigator on the First Fleet, seized my imagination. The watercolour paintings were uncovered in England during an inventory of the estate of Lord Moreton, the Earl of Ducie. Intrigued by the illustration of a laughing kookaburra, one of the evaluators brought the buried collection to light. Once part of Sir Joseph Banks’ First Fleet materials, the collection had passed into the Ducie family and lain untouched for two hundred years. This was a truly astounding find. Although Raper’s paintings were naïve, his attention to the details and colours of the birds’ wings and feathers was extraordinary. By this time my birdwatching had intensified into a near obsession, and I began to travel great distances to encounter new species, which I would excitedly add to my ‘life list’, a record of birds seen for the very first time. My fellow poet, now a birdwatcher too, and I drove to Queensland’s far western mulga region, explored the Mallee in South Australia, endured the rough currents of the Southern Ocean, peering through binoculars and camera lenses to chase the intense experience of sighting a new species. The excitement of this pursuit led to me wonder what it might have felt like for George Raper and his fellow First Fleet bird enthusiasts when they encountered Australia’s unique birds, so utterly different to the species of Britain and Europe, for the first time.

  The appeal of delving into Elizabeth Gould’s forgotten history, for me, was intimately connected to the thrill of twitching never-before-seen birds, although it had a rather more prosaic beginning. One summer afternoon, my birding partner rescued an Indian ringneck parrot perched on the net of a tennis court. He phoned, full of excitement, asking me to find a book about caring for parrots and to buy a cage to house it. A friend loaned me A Guide to Pet and Companion Birds, by Ray Dorge and Gail Sibley (ABK Publications, 1988), along with Isabella Tree’s The Birdman: The Extraordinary Story of the Victorian Ornithologist John Gould (Ebury Press, 1991). In Tree’s fascinating biography, I discovered the ornithologist’s wife, Elizabeth Gould, who played a fundamental role in the creation of John Gould’s publishing empire. In her decade-long career, Elizabeth designed and completed some 650 hand-coloured lithographs of the world’s most beautiful bird species. Her ability to manage a demanding artistic career capturing the sublime beauty of hundreds of exotic birds for her husband’s celebrated collections, including illustrating Charles Darwin’s Galapagos finches; to care for an ever-growing brood of children; and defy convention by joining John on a two-year expedition to the Australian colonies, intrigued me enough to take up the thread of her thinly sketched character and follow wherever it led.

  For a century after Elizabeth Gould’s untimely death in 1841 at just 37, very little was known about her life apart from occasional references to her lithographs by John Gould in his correspondence, and acknowledgements of her artworks in several newspaper and journal articles. To commemorate the centenary anniversary of the Goulds’ expedition to Australia in 1938, Australian journalist and birdwatcher Alec Chisholm travelled to England to interview Grace Edelsten, a descendent of the Goulds’ eldest daughter, Eliza Muskett Moon. Chisholm was fortunate enough to be shown the family’s precious heirlooms, a series of letters written by Elizabeth to her mother during her period in Australia, and a small diary. Aware of the significance of the materials, Chisholm obtained permission from Grace Edelsten to publish the letters in a short biography and family genealogy, The Story of Elizabeth Gould (Hawthorne Press, 1944). The letters and diary were subsequently donated to the Mitchell Library.

  From knowing nothing of Elizabeth Gould I had now become fascinated with her shadowy figure. I was convinced that her story would have a wide appeal to readers as the protagonist of a historical novel. In 2011 I was accepted into the University of Queensland’s PhD in Creative Writing program to research and write The Birdman’s Wife. A trained writer, but not an historian or ornithologist, I had set myself an enormous task, not only in accessing Elizabeth Gould’s archives, held in libraries around the world, but in learning enough about 19th century ornithology, the discovery of Australia’s birds and the print-making technology of lithography to write convincingly about these topics.

  About a year into my research, swamped in correspondence and biographies, I felt a growing need to connect with the life and work of my subject beyond the printed page. It was a writer’s need to get her hands dirty, to engage in investigative field research. Along with undertaking birdwatching trips, ‘shooting’ species with the zoom lens of my camera, I became a volunteer trainee taxidermist at the Queensland Museum, submitting myself to the pungent and very visceral task of preparing scientific study skins. I would enter the zoological vertebrate laboratory of a Wednesday morning and take up my stool at a shared worktable. Neatly arranged at my place was a stuffing kit – toothbrush, Dacron (more commonly used to stuff mattresses), paper towels, cornflour, clamps, forceps, scalpel, bonecrusher – and a plastic bag containing a thawed specimen from the museum’s enormous storage freezer: a black-shouldered kite, a barn owl or grey petrel, its thick skin making it easier to remove the body or ‘meat’, as Gould’s stuffers referred to a specimen’s tissue and bones. Slicing into skin, removing muscle and fat, separating joints and scraping ligaments from bone, with my hands and senses I learned the processes John Gould followed to prepare specimens for Elizabeth to sketch. I was also granted the privilege of hearing entertaining stories about zoology in the field (and beyond): of volunteers causing near car crashes while parked on a shoulder of highway to collect fresh roadkill for the museum; of a researcher nearly falling into the carcass of a rotting humpback whale; of a volunteer’s Christmas gift to her med-student daughter of a taxidermied rat she had prepared and dressed in a tiny coat, draping a doll-sized stethoscope around its neck (the daughter was unimpressed). And, in one of those strange synchronicities, on
e of those weird miracle moments that pull together a long research project, an invitation to an incredible meeting. Jan, a long-term volunteer in her eighties, took me aside during a morning tea – I distinctly remember the skin of a fairy penguin, turned inside-out and hung over a tap to dry, and its uncanny resemblance to a rubber glove; and curator Heather’s Nigella Lawson-inspired blueberry tart – to discuss a proposal that might enhance my research. Jan, who attended a bookclub, had been chatting about my project and discovered that a fellow member, Jenny Crawford, was married to a descendent of Elizabeth Gould’s nephew, Henry Coxen. Jenny and her husband Bruce asked me to lunch to share their personal collection of Gouldian treasures. I was shown photographs of the homestead ‘Yarrundi’, still standing, where Elizabeth stayed with her brother, Stephen Coxen; told tales about Henry Coxen, nicknamed ‘Gammy Coxen,’ because of his maimed arm; and, to my delight, enthusiastically supported my project of reimagining Elizabeth Gould’s life.

  Now more eager than ever to see original documents from Elizabeth’s archives – the lithographs and correspondence, the ink and paint and paper that she had touched with her very own hands, I imagined that somehow the documents would speak to me across almost two centuries – I planned several research trips to visit Gouldian collections in the United States and in Australia. With the financial support of the University of Queensland’s School of Communication and Arts, I flew to Sydney to spend a week at the Mitchell Library, photographing the ‘pattern plates’ or original templates painted by Elizabeth Gould as a guide for the colourists the Goulds’ employed, along with an album of plant sketches she made during her stays in Tasmania and the Upper Hunter Valley. I also hoped to view Elizabeth’s letters and diary, which Alec Chisholm had deposited with the library in the late 1930s. I had no trouble accessing the seven-volume collection of pattern plates and Elizabeth’s impressive plant album, but I had to put a strong case to the library’s special collections department as to why I needed to see the precious originals of Elizabeth’s letters and diary for my research. Ultimately, while I was unable to view Elizabeth’s correspondence, I did manage to obtain permission to handle her diary. I had to wait until the last day of my stay for the paperwork to be completed allowing the document’s release – from a natural-disaster-resistant safe buried deep in the bowels of the library. Two staff were required to visit the ‘bunker’ and retrieve Elizabeth’s diary.