Chapter 24

Elise

‘Gerry Burnsby … if you don’t tell me what we’re doing here right now … I’ll …’

Elise gently poked at Gerry’s torso as the two women arrived at the entrance to Kensal Green Cemetery.

A car honked urgently as a pedestrian with his face bowed to the illuminated screen in his hand walked straight out into traffic near the cemetery entrance, causing at least two cars to swerve.

‘PISS OFF,’ the pedestrian shouted maniacally, saluting the drivers with his middle finger.

‘Seriously,’ Elise said, strengthening her grip on Gerry’s arm. ‘What are we doing here?’

‘You’ll see,’ she said in a singsong voice, seemingly oblivious to the pedestrian who was now chasing a car down the road, yelling and shaking his fist.

At the entrance to the cemetery was a large arch with a thriving population of weeds growing at the top. The white paint on the arch was peeling and dirty, and litter had collected in the black wrought-iron fence that framed four unkept garden beds.

Once inside the cemetery, Elise and Gerry followed a maze of crushed gravel paths, past graves, monuments and little chapels. Shiny new headstones adorned with recent dates and photos of their occupants sat alongside concrete tombs in various states of disrepair where time and the elements had stolen the details of who they honoured.

A crow cawed at the same time that a squirrel rustled in a nearby bush. Elise startled. ‘I don’t usually make a habit of hanging out in cemeteries, you know,’ she said, nervously looking over her shoulder to ensure they hadn’t roused any ghouls.

‘They’re this way, I think,’ Gerry chirped as they reached a fork in the path and she tapped at a map on her phone.

‘Who?’ Elise insisted.

‘Two great lovers,’ Gerry replied.

After a few more steps, Gerry pointed to a group of graves to the left of the path.

‘They were separated for decades, before being finally reunited here, at their final resting place.’

The plain-looking grave, situated in a crowded cluster of others, was about six feet long and was adorned with a cross that stretched its length. The corners of the concrete were crumbled and broken away, and lichen mottled much of its surface area.

Gerry bent down to move some of the long grass that was growing up the side of the grave, revealing some faint letters etched into the side.

‘John Henry Gould’, she said as she traced the characters of his name with her fingers, ‘and, of course, his one great love, Elizabeth. Apparently, when it was created, it also said Here lies John Gould, “The Bird Man”, but you can’t make out much of anything anymore.’

A pigeon cooed softly from its vantage point on a nearby grave.

‘My goodness, Gerry,’ Elise exclaimed, ‘this is amazing.’

‘I haven’t been here for years. They’ve even got some new neighbours. Good for them,’ Gerry said, scanning their surrounds. ‘I came here a few times after I got back from Australia. I think I even sat right there and wrote one of the letters you never received.’ She pointed to a spot of overgrown grass at the foot of the grave. ‘I enjoyed the idea that I was sitting alongside such a capable, proficient natural historian. Even if the rest of the world didn’t yet know how incredible Elizabeth Gould was.’

The two women stood silently as they paid their respects to a woman who had brought so much to natural history, with so little acknowledgement, and who had bonded the two of them in their own love for natural history.

‘It seems like such a plain monument, for someone who captured the colour of the natural world so richly,’ Elise said, using her hand to clear away some leaves that had settled on the grave. The pigeon startled and flew off into the nearby trees.

Gerry reached into her bag and produced a parcel wrapped in a tea towel and tied with some kitchen twine.

‘What have you got there?’ Elise asked curiously.

Gerry peeled back the layers of the fabric wrapping to reveal two piccolos of champagne.

‘Gerry!’ Elise exclaimed, looking around guiltily for witnesses. ‘It’s eleven in the morning.’

‘I know,’ she said cheekily, as she handed Eli a bottle. ‘But I thought we owed it to her to have a toast in her honour.’

They each found a space on the grass surrounding the grave and sat down, which for Gerry meant leaning her weight on the grave as she lowered herself to a kneeling and then seating position. For Elise, it involved bending as low as she could before dropping the rest of the way and hoping for the best.

They cracked the twist-top seals on the small bottles in unison.

‘To Elizabeth Gould,’ Gerry said, bringing the neck of her bottle to Elise’s.

‘And women of science everywhere,’ Elise replied.

They sipped the slightly warm champagne through the metal straws Gerry had produced from her bag and welcomed the sun as it poked out from behind the clouds.

After only a few sips, Elise felt the muscles at the base of her neck soften. She didn’t know if it was the champagne, the sun on her skin or being there with Gerry, but she felt an overwhelming sense of peace. It was as though a deep wound, which had resulted in a thick, unsightly keloid scar, was healing.

‘Nice day for it.’ A man bearing an uncanny resemblance to Freddie Mercury shouted to them over the Queen anthem ‘We Are the Champions’, which was blasting from the phone in his pocket.

Elise looked to Gerry in bewilderment.

‘Freddie Mercury is buried here too,’ Gerry whispered by way of clarification. ‘But he’s not wrong. It’s a perfect day for it.’

They soaked in the sun and finished their drinks.

Getting up off the ground was a little more involved than getting down. Gerry hoisted herself up to kneeling and then stood with relative ease. Elise’s manoeuvre would be familiar to anyone who had seen a baby giraffe attempting to stand.

‘Rightio,’ Gerry said, clapping her hands together after they’d both risen. ‘We’d best be going. Part two of our adventure awaits.’

‘There’s more?’

‘Ooo, yes, mi amor. This journey is far from over.’

~

Gerry and Elise caught the bus from the cemetery to the stop outside London’s Natural History Museum. The spectacular gothic building dwarfed the people gathered at the entrance.

‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ Gerry said as they admired the intricate sculptures that adorned the facade, and the patterns created by different coloured bricks in the building’s many arches. Elise paid particular attention to the gargoyles – each with its own unique expression.

‘The architect designed it as a “cathedral to nature”,’ Gerry said.

‘I think he nailed his brief,’ Elise said as they walked towards the impressive front entrance.

Once inside and away from the hum of the London streets, the women were enveloped by Hintze Hall. The treasures housed in the nooks – each a giant in its own right – offered a reference to the scale of the hall’s gigantic proportions. An American mastodon, with its long protruding tusks; a taxidermied giraffe standing alongside a tall giraffe skeleton; and a giant swordfish in a tank all looked comparatively small in that vast chamber.

Elise stood underneath a giant blue whale skeleton that was suspended from the ceiling. But it was the magnificent tapestry of botanical artworks from around the world behind it that caught her attention.

Gerry made her way to the information booth. After a short exchange with a man behind the desk who gave her directions, she beckoned Elise to follow her.

They walked to the end of the hall and then along a corridor to the right. They reached the door of the Reading Room and Gerry pressed a doorbell. While they waited to be let in, they watched on as a woman gave a captivated audience an animated account of cordyceps – a fungus that turns ants into zombies.

The chatter and laughter of tourists and other visitors bounced off every hard surface, and the piercing squeals of toddlers protesting at being strapped into their prams accented the cacophony. Groups of excited school children, being corralled by weary-looking teachers, dodged and darted around, clipboards in hand. But within moments of walking through the heavy glass door to the library, Elise felt like she’d escaped to another world. The library was quiet and calm.

‘Now, behave yourself while you’re here,’ Gerry whispered to Elise with mock seriousness as they made their way down a short corridor to a reception desk. ‘I won’t have you getting me thrown out of here.’

Elise smiled as she recalled the hours she and Gerry had spent in the university library. They’d pick one of the less popular sections – usually an obscure ancient history, or a dead language – and shelter in the privacy of the aisles. One afternoon they were ejected from the library after they caught an incurable case of the giggles. Elise couldn’t remember what they’d found so funny, only that the librarian did not share their amusement. But they had an assignment due the following day, for which they needed access to a number of books, so they had returned, and, while Elise had weathered the brunt of the librarian’s whispered shouts, Gerry snuck in and concealed the books they needed up her jumper.

A young man at the reception desk looked up and smiled.

‘Hello,’ Gerry began, ‘we’re here to see Daphne Carmichael. I’m Gerry Burnsby.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he replied. ‘She’s expecting you. Just take a seat over here.’ He pointed to one of several tables in the centre of the room. ‘I’ll get you to clean your hands while you wait, if you don’t mind.’ He gestured to a box of wet wipes on the table before returning to his desk.

Elise looked to Gerry for context.

‘You’ll see,’ she said coyly.

As Elise dragged the wipe across her hands, she took in the room. The library walls were lined with dark timber bookshelves that reached more than five metres in the air. Tightly spiralled staircases led to a balcony that traversed the inside of the room, providing access to the books on the upper shelves.

A couple of metres from their table, a life-sized statue of Charles Darwin, crafted in a bright white stone, sat on an antique chair with one leg crossed over the other. He was engrossed in the book he was holding, which was decorated with flowers.

‘I wonder what he’d make of all this,’ Elise said, gesturing around the room, but implying the world.

‘God only knows,’ Gerry replied. ‘And he was basically an atheist.’

A handful of people sat at the tables around them, hunched over books or tapping away at keyboards. A cohort of librarians busied themselves at the shelves and desks around the room.

‘Gerry!’

A woman with long, blonde hair, a soft wispy fringe and elfin features approached them. She was carrying an enormous book and what looked to be some kind of foam bricks.

She reached the table, set down her load and pulled Gerry in for a long hug.

‘It’s so good to see you, Gerry,’ she said as she exited the embrace. ‘I’m so glad you got in touch. It’s been too long.’

‘I know,’ Gerry replied warmly. ‘It certainly has. I’m so grateful you made time for this.’

‘Of course! Anything for you, you know that.’

Gerry gestured to Elise.

‘Daphne, this is Elise Simpson. Sorry, it’s Elise Evans. Force of habit.’

‘It’s so lovely to meet you, Elise,’ Daphne said, extending her hand for Elise to shake. ‘I’ve heard so much about you.’

Elise felt a tickle of pride that Gerry – who had a catalogue of fascinating things to discuss and people to talk about – had chosen to talk to Daphne about her.

An older man at one of the nearby desks glared at the trio – theirs were the only voices in the library, and Elise assumed he heralded from a time when libraries were places for shh!

Daphne turned her back on him and surreptitiously rolled her eyes.

‘You must be so excited about seeing this,’ she whispered to Elise as she gestured to the items on the desk.

‘I’m afraid Gerry hasn’t told me what I’m here to see,’ she whispered back. ‘Today is full of surprises.’

‘We’re on a treasure hunt of sorts,’ Gerry offered.

‘Well, that makes it even more exciting,’ Daphne replied as she placed two big black foam wedges in front of Elise and then carefully lifted the oversized book onto them.

‘I understand you have an interest in John and Elizabeth Gould,’ she continued, ‘so Gerry thought you might enjoy seeing this …’

Elise looked down at the dark green leather-bound book. The leather around the edges of the book was slightly scuffed, and the spine was coming away from the cover at the top and bottom. The cover was decorated with an intricate gold pattern that bordered the edges, but offered no clues about the book’s contents. Elise, however, having been fascinated by Elizabeth Gould’s work for most of her life, knew exactly what it was.

She gasped.

‘This is the original The Birds of Australia by John Gould, which contains illustrations by the one and only Elizabeth Gould,’ Daphne confirmed.

Gerry nodded, smiling broadly.

‘Go ahead,’ Daphne said, gesturing to the book.

Elise beamed at Gerry as she carefully opened the cover.

The thick parchment inside the book was the colour of milky tea and was freckled with tiny brown splodges. It reminded Elise of when she’d helped Beth ‘age’ some paper using black tea for a history project. Every other page was marked with a small red stamp: ‘British Museum Natural History: ZD’. ZD stood for Zoological Department.

‘I’m going to leave you ladies to it,’ Daphne said, standing. ‘But I’ll be hovering around if you need me.’

‘Thanks so much, Daph,’ Gerry said warmly.

‘Yes, this is incredible, thank you very much,’ Elise gushed.

Elise slowly and tenderly turned the pages of the precious tome. She pored over the illustrations by John Gould and Henry Richter – the artist who worked on the series after Elizabeth passed away – and delighted in John Gould’s descriptions of the birds he encountered while in Australia.

Where the illustrations were particularly bold, they had transferred to the opposite page of text, creating a ghosting effect that looked like a watermark.

After a few minutes, Elise reached the illustration of a lyrebird – the first that carried the credit ‘J&E Gould’.

‘Oh! Here she is,’ she exclaimed, again attracting the glare of the older man.

‘It’s incredible to think Elizabeth Gould coloured this very work more than …’ she paused to calculate the book’s age, ‘170 years ago.’

Like so many species in the natural world, the male lyrebird’s plumage was resplendent compared to its female mate’s comparatively drab appearance. Elizabeth Gould’s tiny brushstrokes meticulously depicted its long tail feathers and captured the imperfections of the feathers.

Elise felt compelled to use her fingers to smooth where the feather barbs had split into sections. She chuckled as she read aloud Gould’s account of the lengths to which he went to collect a specimen.

While among the brushes I have been surrounded by these birds, pouring forth their loud and liquid calls, for days together, without being able to get a sight of them; and it was only by the most determined perseverance and extreme caution that I was enabled to effect this desirable object, which was rendered all the more difficult by their often frequenting the almost inaccessible and precipitous sides of gullies and ravines, covered with tangled masses of creepers and umbrageous trees.

‘Poor bugger,’ Elise whispered to Gerry. ‘Sounds like those lyrebirds made him really work for it.’

Another successful mode of procuring specimens, is by wearing a tail of a full-plumaged male in the hat, keeping constantly in motion and concealing the person among the bushes.

Elise chuckled. ‘Imagine someone crawling around in the bush with a hat full of lyrebird feathers.’

As she moved through the pages, she was able to distinguish Elizabeth Gould’s illustrations from Richter’s without needing to look at the credit.

‘Look at the way her strokes are finer,’ Elise said. ‘And the detail she’s applied to the background. It’s no wonder John Gould grieved her death so deeply. He didn’t just lose his wife, and the mother of his children, he lost a bloody good professional collaborator too.’

The birds were grouped in species, and when Elise reached the illustration of the first of the finches she smiled. She knew there was a reason she was looking through the third of seven volumes.

Page after page, beautiful little finches were depicted perched upon plants or feeding their young. Elise admired them all, but with every page she turned, she felt the suspense build for what she knew was coming.

Eventually, she turned the page to find the original version of the painting that had hung on her wall since Gerry left. The painting of the Amadina gouldiae, known commonly as the Gouldian finch.

‘Look how vibrant the colours are,’ she marvelled. ‘My version has certainly faded over the years.’

‘Haven’t we all,’ Gerry said with a smirk.

Elise swatted away her self-deprecation and began reading the text aloud.

It is in fact beyond the power of my pen to describe or my pencil to portray anything like the splendour of the changeable hues of the lilac band which crosses the breast of this little gem, or the scarcely less beautiful green of the neck and golden-yellow of the breast.

It is therefore with feelings of no ordinary nature that I have ventured to dedicate this new and lovely little bird to the memory of her, who in addition to being a most affectionate wife, for a number of years laboured so hard and so zealously assisted me with her pencil in my various works, but who, after having made a circuit of the globe with me, and braved many dangers with a courage only equalled by her virtues, and while cheerfully engaged in illustrating the present work, was by the Divine will of her Maker suddenly called from this to a brighter and better world; and I feel assured that in dedicating this bird to the memory of Mrs Gould, I shall have the full sanction of all who were personally acquainted with her, as well as of those who only knew her by her delicate works as an artist.

The tears that had gathered in Elise’s eyes breached her lower lids and tumbled down her cheeks.

She fished around inside her sleeve to find a tissue; she would have been mortified to spill tears all over the invaluable tome.

‘It’s not often that scientific reference books contain touching love stories,’ Gerry said, handing her a tissue from her bag. ‘And who said the English couldn’t be romantic?’

‘Do you mean you, or John Gould? Because today … all of this …’ Elise gestured at the book, ‘has been wonderful.’

Gerry smiled warmly.

‘I think you’ve got corny in your old age,’ Elise joshed.

‘Maybe you just bring it out in me,’ Gerry replied.

Before Elise knew what she was doing, she took Gerry’s hands in hers and brought them to her face and kissed them. Sixty years ago, she would have recoiled from such a public display of affection, and she would never have dared initiate it, especially with Charles Darwin’s ghost and a grumpy old codger next to them watching on.

‘I don’t want to leave you,’ she said urgently, and a little too loudly. ‘I don’t want to look back on this second chance at happiness with you and regret not taking full advantage of it.’ The older man looked up again. Elise felt her ears redden but she was compelled to go on.

‘When we were growing up, there were so many expectations about who we’d be and how we’d live,’ she continued, her voice hushed. ‘For the most part, I followed those conventions to the letter. I got married. I had a family. I had a happy life, a loving marriage and I adore Rosie and the kids. I felt I never had any right to complain about my life.

‘Somewhere along the line,’ she continued, ‘the conventions I measured myself against stopped being set in stone, and the people who enforced them were no longer around. I watched as other people felt free to live how they wanted to live, and love who they wanted to love. But I didn’t feel like that applied to me. I suppose I felt like I was touring this whole new world with a set of old visa conditions. Until now. Until this trip. I’m not ready to give this … to give you … up again.

‘But all of this depends on what you want too, of course,’ she added hurriedly.

‘Well … about that.’ Gerry leaned in. ‘What about if I travel back with you to Australia?’

‘Really?’ Elise replied excitedly, not caring who heard her.

‘Yes,’ Gerry answered enthusiastically. ‘I’ve got a few bits and pieces on the go here, but nothing I can’t defer for a little while. The university is always nagging me to take some annual leave. And I haven’t been to Australia for so long; it will be lovely to spend some time there again.’

‘Oh, Gerry,’ Elise exhaled. ‘That would be bloody marvellous.’