The following Monday Katya and I met in the café of the Natural History Museum to compare notes. Katya was neat in jeans and trainers, with her hair pulled back. I was scruffy and slightly unkempt in an old jacket. The Natural History Museum welcomed both of us equally, and if anyone thought we made an odd couple, no one particularly showed it. Somewhere to our left the remains of a giant ground sloth towered silently over parties of schoolchildren. Many floors farther up, safe in sepulchral darkness, the first-found archaeopteryx lay awkwardly in its bed of stone. We bent over our frothy cups of coffee and ignored them both.

I’d bumped into Katya that morning in the hallway as she was leaving for a lecture. Slightly to my surprise, I started telling her about Hans Michaels’s widow. Up to that point I’d thought of that visit as my own secret, but on seeing Katya I changed my mind. I’d imagined the search for the Ulieta bird would be about checking records, following up on rumors, making phone calls. But Hans Michaels’s sketch altered that. Now I was faced with a puzzle. I suppose I just wanted someone to help.

It was Katya who suggested meeting in the museum. I was pleased with the idea; it was one of my favorite places, elegant and airy and stuffed full of wonders. And the thought of talking things through with her made me feel better.

We began by sharing what we’d found out—the main facts of the case, if you like. As we didn’t have many facts, we didn’t expect to take too long. Nevertheless, we put our heads together and started off on the early life of Joseph Banks. He was a good subject—charming, dashing, good looking, and the leading natural scientist of his generation. Oh, and rich, too. By the age of twenty-eight he’d been around the world with Captain Cook, established himself as the darling of society, been schemed after by various women with daughters, been painted by Joshua Reynolds, and become one of the leading members of the Royal Society. I felt I had a good grasp on events; Katya had clearly done better on the people. After twenty minutes we’d come up with this:

	1743	Joseph Banks born. Grew up in Lincolnshire (Revesby Abbey).
	1760	Age 17. At Oxford. An avid naturalist.
	1766–67	Age 23. Expedition to Newfoundland with Daniel Solander.
	1768	Age 25. Engaged to Harriet Blosset. Departed with Cook and Solander on the Endeavour. Gathered specimens. Observed the transit of Venus from Tahiti. Helped map coast of Australia. General hero and good companion.
	1771	Age 28. Endeavour returns. Banks a huge hit in top social circles.
	1772	Age 29. Cook’s second voyage. Banks drops out at very last minute. Replaced as ship’s naturalist by Johann Forster.
	1774	Age 31. Forster collects birds on island of Ulieta (now Raiatea).
	1775	Age 32. Cook returns. Forster gives (only ever) specimen of Ulieta bird to Banks.

“How does that look for background?” I asked.

Katya nodded. “It’s good. We can call it ‘Events Leading Up to the Crime.’”

I looked at the list again.

“Actually, there are a couple of things in there I don’t really understand. We’ve put down ‘1768—Engaged to Harriet Blosset.’ But he never married her, did he? What went wrong?”

Katya looked down at her notes again.

“Not sure. They’d met in London. Seems like the engagement was never announced—it was all arranged just before he sailed off with Cook. And it seems to have broken off again soon after he got back.”

“Do we know why?”

“Not really. But they’d had three years to go off the idea.”

Katya seemed to think this was a perfectly adequate reason in itself. Even so, I knew we were both thinking the same thing.

“Any pictures of her?” I wondered.

“Not in the books I’ve read so far.” Katya looked worried. “We should be able to find one, though, shouldn’t we?”

I wasn’t so sure. After some discussion we agreed to alter our list:

1771

Age 28. Endeavour returns. Banks no longer engaged (why?).

My other question was about Cook’s second voyage, a year later. Banks had been all set to go, with his provisions bought and his arrangements made, only to pull out on the very brink of departure over an argument with Cook about cabin space. It seemed a strangely petulant piece of behavior from an otherwise good-natured man.

“Yes,” Katya agreed. “You can tell it took people by surprise. Did you read about Mr. Burnett?”

“Burnett?” The name didn’t ring any bells.

Katya picked one of the books off the pile and leafed through it until she came to a page she’d already marked. It was the text of a letter from Captain Cook to the Admiralty, sent quite early on his second voyage. The letter was quoted with Cook’s original punctuation.

From Captain James Cook of the Resolution to the Secretary of the Admiralty, Madeira, 1^st August, 1772

…Three days before we arrived a person left the Island who went by the name of Burnett. He had been waiting for Mr Banks arrival about three months, at first he said he came here for the recovery of his health, but afterwards said his intention was to go with Mr Banks, to some he said he was unknown to this Gentleman, to others he said it was by his appointment he came here as he could not be receiv’d on board in England. At last when he heard that Mr Banks did not go with us, he took the very first opportunity to get off the Island. He was in appearance rather ordinary than otherwise and employ’d his time in Botanizing &ca—Every part of Mr Burnetts behaviour and every action tended to prove that he was a Woman, I have not met with a person that entertains a doubt of a contrary nature. He brought letters of recommendation to an English House where he was accommodated during his stay. It must be observed that Mrs Burnett must have left England about the time we were first ready to sail….

Katya grinned as I finished reading.

“What do you think? A Joseph Banks groupie?”

I smiled. “It could be. Or just gossip? Banks was a dashing young man with a bit of a reputation, so he was fair game for rumors. And the two men had fallen out. Perhaps Cook couldn’t resist dishing a bit of dirt on Banks to the folks back home.”

Katya closed the book and put it back on the pile.

“Either way, it doesn’t get us anywhere,” she said. “The bird hadn’t even been discovered then. But when Cook passed that way again at the end of his voyage, he had the Ulieta bird on board. What do we know after that?”

It was an easy enough question, because what we knew was virtually nil. It was like trying to read a murder mystery where all the pages describing the suspects had been torn out. And I had a nasty feeling that if we were to get as far as the denouement, it would probably be Anderson revealing the answers. Nevertheless, Anderson himself seemed to think we ought to know something, so we corralled our coffee cups and went on looking.

The problem was clear enough. We knew that the bird had been given to Banks shortly after the Endeavour returned to Britain. Latham saw it in Banks’s collection in the couple of years that followed. But four years after Banks was given the bird, a French ornithologist called Malbranque spent months studying the same collection, and his catalog made no mention of anything that might have been the Ulieta bird. After that it was never mentioned by anyone ever again.

That left a couple of years where we had nothing. Two blank years in which a specimen casually given had casually disappeared. Two years of London society tramping through Banks’s house in Soho Square. Banks had kept records of any specimens presented to fellow collectors and scholars. The Ulieta bird wasn’t listed. But at some point it was either destroyed or carried out of that house in Soho Square. And then, if Anderson was to be believed, it had spent the next two hundred years or so lying quietly, waiting to be discovered by someone who knew where to look.

As I jotted down the various dates, Katya began to check her watch. I remembered there were other things she was supposed to be doing.

“So what do we do next?” she asked.

I smiled and pulled out another blank sheet of paper.

“We play a game. According to Michaels’s drawing, there’s a woman involved. Now, what women were there in Banks’s life at the time the bird disappeared? We write down all the ones we can think of here. They’re all suspects. And if the bird was given to one of them, we could check to see what happened to their collections. Assuming they had collections.”

Katya gave me a bright smile.

“I like it,” she said cheerfully, reaching for her notes. “Cherchez la femme. We’re mad, of course, but I like it.”

For five minutes we tried to come up with names. The first three or four came quickly: Banks’s mother; his sister, Sophia; Harriet Blosset; one or two society hostesses whose names we had noted. Somewhere there would be portraits of them if we could be bothered to search. After that we paused.

“Anyone else?”

“There was a mistress,” Katya said at last. “After his engagement. I read about her but I didn’t write down her name.”

I nodded. I hadn’t written it down, either.

“Was she still around in 1775?”

Katya was packing up her things.

“I don’t think so, but put her down if only to…What’s the phrase?”

“Eliminate her from our inquiries?”

Katya stood up, smiling. “That’s the one. Then we go and find their portraits! Now come on…” She jerked her head toward the museum’s main hall. “I want to have a look around.”

I glanced down at our list of suspects. In the space at the bottom of the list I added the words Joseph Banks’s mistress. Then, as an afterthought, I added a question mark.

There was an irony to all this. My grandfather gave up the best part of his life in order to search for the African peacock—which is all the warning anyone should ever need about looking for things that might not exist and that you don’t know where to find. And it might never have happened if it hadn’t been for James Chapin’s feather. Back in 1913, Chapin had been part of an expedition to the Congo basin in search of the okapi, the mysterious jungle giraffe about which very little was known. One night toward the end of the expedition, Chapin’s party had been entertained by a group of local people, and Chapin had admired the feathers worn by the group’s leader. When he was allowed to take some of them away with him, he found he could identify every feather except one. Puzzled, and interested to discover what bird it came from, he kept the feather with him, but by the end of the expedition the mystery remained. It was not a tail feather. There was nothing about it that guaranteed it came from a peacock. But it was enough for my grandfather. That single feather was the spark. And yet, though neither Chapin nor my grandfather could have believed it at the time, it was to be twenty-three years before a bird was found to match that feather.

Katya’s guided tour of the Natural History Museum began where every tour of the Natural History Museum has to begin, in the Main Hall, under the skeleton of the giant diplodocus. It was a weekday morning in winter: quiet, no crowds, and long shafts of pale sunshine cutting diagonals across the hall.

We moved haphazardly from room to room, two small figures made tiny by the creatures around them, insignificant under the high ceilings; past fossil plates of great sea creatures and under the ribs of long-extinct mammals, strange creatures from an improbable bestiary—ancient crocodiles, armadillos as big as ponies, sloths bigger than bears.

At one point Katya turned to me, curious.

“Have you always been the way you are? Interested in things, I mean.”

I looked at her, surprised by the question. A woman hurried past us, tugging along two small children.

“I suppose I have. In some things. I was always out in hedgerows, collecting. Started with beetles and tadpoles and worked my way up. Used to sneak off from school to go and catch newts.”

“And what about later? When you were a teenager? Didn’t you ever rebel? Take drugs and give up school?”

I laughed. “At seventeen I spent my summer in Costa Rica cataloging beetles.”

She laughed at that, but looked thoughtful.

“I did all those things,” she said. “I mean drugs and things. It meant I never really…” She searched for the right word for a moment and then gave up. “All the boyfriends I had back then were the ones who dropped out of school and smoked dope and lived in squats. I used to collect them.”

“How come?” I asked. “It isn’t how you strike me.”

She made a face. “Oh, you know. These things just happen. Come on.” She took my arm and led me on to the next gallery.

We wandered on in companionable silence for a little longer, until we came back to the main hall and the carefully reconstructed skeleton of a dodo.

“There you go. When people say ‘dead as a dodo,’ that’s what they mean.”

“Three hundred years dead.” She nodded, reading the label.

“And speaking of dead birds”—I looked at my watch—“we’ve got an appointment to keep.”

I led her to the small library at the back of the museum. Here, tucked away, is the museum’s General Library, where Geraldine, the long-serving librarian, was expecting me.

“They’re just fetching it, Mr. Fitzgerald,” she told me. “Should be ready for you in a few minutes. And I’ve put out the Banks biographies you asked for on the table over there.”

“You’ll see what in a moment,” I told Katya. “In the meantime, let’s look at these.”

We sat down next to each other and went through the pile of books, looking out for the name of Joseph Banks’s mistress. Or at least that’s what we tried to do. Instead we found that the more we looked for her, the less visible she became. No one even seemed to know her name. We’d made no progress at all by the time Geraldine returned with the object I’d requested. She left it on a table near us, covered only with a loose sheet of clear plastic.

It was a drawing of a bird, expertly done, its colors apparently as fresh as they had been on the June afternoon in 1774 when Georg Forster sat drawing in his cabin. Through the plastic sheet you could even glimpse traces of the artist at work—the corrections to his original outlines, the places where his sweating hand had smudged his own pencil lines as he drew. Face to face with the very paper he’d drawn on, that hot afternoon suddenly seemed very close, the bird in the picture very real.

“The bird itself…” Katya breathed.

“Yes, that’s the one. The one they caught that day. The one that ended up in Joseph Banks’s collection. We don’t know how many of these there once were, or how they lived, or anything. All we know of them is this one individual.”

We sat together in front of that picture, musing, until the room began to grow gloomy around us and Katya looked at her watch.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’ve got a tutorial.” She began to pull on her coat. “We should…” She trailed off. “Well, whatever. I’ll see you later.”

By the door she turned and waved.

After that I found it hard to settle down again. I let Geraldine remove the picture and then returned to the reference books, still vaguely curious about the missing mistress. The next twenty minutes or so threw up a couple more references to her, which I photocopied for Katya before I went home. I still hadn’t found out the mistress’s name. And Katya didn’t get to see the photocopies for quite a while, because when I got home I found a plain, unmarked envelope had been pushed through the door. Two things struck me about the document inside. The first was that it had been sent anonymously. The second was that it looked remarkably as though it might be Anderson’s secret clue.

THE MEASUREMENT of time during a long sea voyage is a puzzle with more than one dimension. The question of longitude was left to Cook, a matter of sea clocks and dead reckoning, something recorded in logs and on the carved sticks of sailors when the breeze hung slack. To Banks, time was a mystery of a different sort. The days passed so fast that a year was gone before he knew it, and each passing day was simply piled in his memory onto the ones that had gone before, until the months of travel began to rise behind him like a ridge of mountains between him and home. And yet his last days in England, when he chose to think of them, remained vivid: the Revesby woods, Harriet’s head on his shoulder, London left at dawn, Plymouth by sunset. It was as if each new adventure left these images sharper and they became his destination, the lights to navigate by if a night seemed starless. He felt that when the demands of the voyage were done, that world would be waiting for him just as it had always been, green and safe and ready for him.

IN REVESBY she measured time differently: by the leaves turning, by the lowering of the candles, by the slowing rhythm of her father’s breath. While Banks’s days passed quickly, hers did not pass at all; one grew into another imperceptibly, until their combined mass began to press upon her memories. The sharp outlines of her days in the woods thickened under their weight, and to preserve them she did two things. She continued to draw by day despite the shortening light, and with each line she felt she made the woods more real. Then, by night, curled under her sheets, she did the same for her memories of him, reaching for them one by one, retouching the color and lines of each until they became sunlit portraits hanging in the dark.

The autumn after Banks’s departure was a short one, and winter came early. But there was one day in October when the sun shone in a last reprise of summer and she left the house early to spend a final warm day in the woods. She hoped to slip through the village unseen, but she quickly found she was not the only person drawn outdoors by the fine weather. In the meadow leading to the woods, two figures stood on the path ahead of her, and when she came into view they hesitated. She recognized Banks’s sister, Sophia, and Miss Taylor, the doctor’s daughter, on the way from the Abbey into the village.

She noticed their hesitation even though she had become accustomed to it. It was something that had become automatic to the people of Revesby. This time she saw that if they wished to reach the village, they had no option but to continue toward her, and she felt a growing coldness inside as she prepared for the encounter. Ten yards before she came up with them she fixed her eyes on the trees ahead. She would not leave the path; she knew they would. There could be no collision, as a collision was something they could not ignore. She heard the rustle of skirts as the two women stepped from the path and began to point out an object in the distance. Knowing that her way was clear, she continued unchecked as she had done many times before. But this time as she drew level, in the rarest of lapses, she allowed her eyes to flicker from the trees to their faces. She saw Miss Taylor’s chin lifted high and her face turned away, but with shock she realized that Miss Banks, like herself, had allowed her gaze to wander. Their eyes met for no more than a second, but before either could react she had passed by and without a word both parties continued on their way.

It was the first time she had encountered anyone from Revesby Abbey since the news of Banks’s engagement. She found it hard to imagine him amid his family, hard even to imagine him indoors, surrounded by china and the clutter of a drawing room. As she walked toward the woods, she wished their eyes had not met.

NEITHER OF the other women referred to the meeting as they continued toward the village, although Miss Banks studied the face of her friend carefully, as if to divine what thoughts were unspoken there. After walking the length of Revesby, they came eventually to the house that stood with its shutters closed. The autumn light seemed to accentuate its shabbiness. Together they took in the sight, unafraid of being observed, until Miss Taylor sniffed.

“How good it will be when Mr. Ponsonby is able to let that house to someone else!”

This caused the older woman to turn to her, puzzled.

“Mr. Ponsonby? I had not realized he was the owner.”

“You have not heard?” It was a state of affairs Miss Taylor seemed eager to remedy. “It falls to Mr. Ponsonby because of the debts he holds. In the months since the incident there has been no money to pay the interest and the house is now all but owned by him. It is only through his goodwill that the family is allowed to remain.”

“His goodwill? Why should he feel any such thing? The man struck him at his own dinner table.”

“Mama says it is a truly Christian act, as he seeks no credit for it. Only my father and Mr. Burrows know of it.”

Sophia seemed thoughtful.

“And yet is it right that a young woman on her own should be placed so very much in his debt when her father dies? I think, if I were her, it is not a situation I should enjoy.”

Miss Taylor raised her eyebrows. “Her family is not famous for its principles, and she seems happy enough with the arrangement. We shall find out soon enough—Papa says her father cannot survive many more months. But let us not talk of such ugly things. The hedgerows are so pretty at this time of year, are they not, Sophia?”

And the two women stepped through the fields, the one chattering, the other unusually silent.

AFTER THAT day, winter came on quickly. Dr. Taylor called less frequently than before, but he came early one morning in February when the village was still white with frost and there was ice on the path to their door. The cold made ordinary things look different, and the doctor found himself noticing the footprints of birds on the pathway and a frozen spiderweb, partly broken now, hanging uncleared across one window.

Inside he found the house cold, the fires small and newly lit. In the hallway, where he laid his hat and gloves, he could see his breath in short white bursts in front of his face. He found that only the sickroom was truly warm, and he could tell by the ash that the fire there had been tended through the night. His patient had, month by month, confounded the doctor’s expectations, but today he saw at once that it could not be very much longer. For many months his visits had been for the sake of the daughter, not the father.

“What will you do?” he asked quietly, his examination complete. “It will be soon now.”

“I will not think of it,” she said. “I won’t think him gone.” She reached out and took her father’s hand.

The doctor nodded but after a short silence he spoke again. “I have only a few connections, but I know of someone…a family…children to teach…”

She looked up. “You know what is said of me. They could not take me. They simply could not.” It was spoken quietly, without emotion.

The doctor nodded again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, although what aspect of the world he was regretting he did not say.

On his way out, the nurse, Martha, detained him at the front door with a hand on his arm and a gesture in the direction of the kitchen.

“I can borrow no more in the village on her father’s name,” she said softly.

“I’m sorry,” he said again, and hesitated. He was not a wealthy man and he had a family of his own. But he would not have her bury her father for want of food. And surely it could only be a few days more. “Then you must borrow on my name,” he told her, and stepped outside into the frozen morning.

THAT NIGHT she sat in the dark of her room and thought of the question the doctor had posed. She had opened the shutters and could feel the cold pressing in on her from the window. Beyond the glass, a half moon lit the meadow but left the great stand of trees in darkness. The grass was already sparkling with frost. She shivered and pulled her shawl closer to her neck. She knew there was only one answer to the doctor’s question, one that many would think she was lucky to have. It didn’t seem to matter to her so much now, as she sat there alone in the night with everything coming to an end.

For a moment she thought of Joseph Banks sailing through a southern summer and she was happy to think of it, happy that unlike her he was not straitjacketed by the cold and cramped by the long hours of darkness. And with the loss of her father now so close and so real, she found herself for the first time glad of Banks’s engagement, glad he had found his happiness. It was then, as she looked out over the dark trees, that she understood the gift her father had given her by clinging so tenaciously to life. He had given her time. Time before their world fell apart for her to enjoy the woods and the summer; time to love a little; time to understand her loss so that the great, empty ache she would feel on his death was one she had already learned how to carry.

WINTER IN Lincolnshire was very far from Banks’s mind. Among the smiling brown people of the southern seas he had found a new side to himself and a new value. Where others of the crew saw strangeness and barbarity, he saw only men and women. And where the islanders found in Cook’s officers an unnatural rigidity, they saw in Banks an openness of heart that they recognized as something of themselves. Without ever underestimating the differences in education and experience, Banks soon realized that quickness of thought was not confined to the white faces around him, that the crew of the Endeavour had no monopoly on honor and strength of character. Fascinated and delighted, he gave himself wholeheartedly to these people so different from him and so similar.

And as well as the people he encountered, there was a strange new world of jungle and reef to entrance him. He never tired of watching the light change on the water and marveling at the colors and the sounds of the islands. The botanist in him was overwhelmed by the variety and abundance that crowded in on him. His collection of birds and plants and animals grew and grew until he began to realize that he had in his possession something unique and unprecedented.

He never told her of the night in Otaheite when she came so strongly into his thoughts. There had been a feast and dancing and he had been at the center of both, laughing and shouting and clapping hands with every person there. Then as he paused for breath he caught a glimpse through the palms of moonlight on the sea and without a thought he slipped away to the water’s edge. There he stood for a while, strangely detached from the noise behind him, suddenly aware of the night sounds: the wind in the trees, insect song, waves very far away breaking on rocks or a reef. And as he stood and absorbed the beauty of the place, he found himself suddenly filled with an overwhelming sadness, an aching melancholy that flooded out of him until it seemed to fill the night.

At first he didn’t understand. But as he waited in the shadow of the trees, he began to realize it was the moment itself he was grieving for, that whispering moonlit night that could never be his to keep. No matter how many birds and plants he gathered together in the hold of the Endeavour, he could never take back with him the perfection of that moment in that place. And it was then he thought of her and her drawing, and he knew that if she had been there, then this was the place he would have found her: curled by the shore, quietly storing away every nuance of the night.

AS IF TO make up for the long summer, the winter held on in Revesby until March was almost gone. Lent came in with streams still frozen and the ground too hard to dig, and she waited tight-lipped for spring to lift the siege. Her father’s breathing was quiet now, but each breath was painfully fought for. She became determined that he should feel one last spring. As she cleaned him she would talk of the coming thaw, painting warm, bright pictures, as if her words could breathe into him the need to be alive. When she had finished washing him she would walk to the window and peep out at the dark skies and the trees still not in bud.

However, the first death in Revesby that year was not the one most expected. At the end of March, Dr. Taylor died, outlived by the man he had paid to keep alive. The village was stricken by its loss and the funeral was attended by mourners from five parishes. She sat at home and grieved by the bedside where he had so often sat. The shock of his death brought a new dimension to her loneliness.

Martha looked at the pinched face of her patient and the ice on the windows and decided to stay. There was food in the larder now to last until spring, and time then to see what could be done. Preoccupied by loss, her mistress thanked her with her eyes but said very little. She had begun to worry where the money would come from for the next funeral.

IN LONDON, Harriet Blosset was also waiting. In the first months of Banks’s absence she wore her situation like a mourning gown. At balls and dances she was fetching in her desolation and prettier than ever in all that it said and meant. She spent her days stitching him a great many waistcoats, but she found she was no Penelope, and as the season progressed she proved too pretty a widow to remain in black forever. No one she danced with was quite like Banks, she told herself, but they were pressing and charming and a great deal closer. She began to suffer in her own way, a way no less painful for its being particular to her. As month followed month she was learning for herself about time and how to measure it. On the day when her closest friend’s betrothal was announced, she waited until she was alone and then she wept.

AND IN Revesby perhaps the dying man had listened to his daughter’s exhortations. There were yellow crocuses outside his front door on the night when she woke at his bedside and found him gone.