It took me forty minutes to cancel three days’ worth of university appointments and another twenty to get my bike tuned up, ready for a journey. I was back in the kitchen boiling the kettle when Katya came in. I intercepted her in the hallway, then made her a cup of tea before I pushed the envelope over to her. She opened it cautiously, not sure if it was good news or bad.

There were two photocopied sheets. The first showed the front of an envelope, grainily copied, the George V stamp clear, the postmark smudged and illegible. But the strong, sloping handwriting was easy to read.

Miss Martha Ainsby,
The Old Manor,
Stamford,
Lincs

The second sheet was a copy of a letter written in the same sloping hand.

The Savoy Hotel,

17^th January 1915

My dear Martha,

Colonel Winstanley was as good as his word and here I am in London. Sadly the arrangements were hasty and there was no time to write and warn you, still less time to visit. I have been here little more than eight hours but the papers are delivered to General Winters and at dawn tomorrow I set off to rejoin the regiment.

Your letter followed me around France and only caught up with me two days ago. What sad news! The old man was a great character and a good friend to us both. I’m glad the end was peaceful. He deserved as much.

It was great quick thinking to secure that precious bird of his. You know how I have always coveted it. Even without the connections to Cook and Banks, even without its subsequent history, it would still be the most remarkable and romantic object imaginable.

When I’m able to return for a proper visit, you and I shall record all its details and write to the Natural History Museum. It’s only fair they are made aware of the survival of a specimen unique to science. Until then, guard it with your life—I don’t want to return and find that young Vulpes of yours has snatched it from my grasp!

This brief glimpse of London has done me a power of good. My spirits are high and I’m certain this job will be all done shortly so I can return to your side.

Until then, remember me to everyone,

Your loving brother,

John

When Katya had finished reading we looked at each other across the table. She was sitting quite still but I could feel her suspense.

“The Ulieta bird,” she said quietly. “That’s what he’s writing about, isn’t it?” Her whole face asked the question.

“It could be.”

She made a little impatient face and looked down at the letter.

“What do you mean, it could be? A specimen unique to science—connected to Cook, to Banks—It must be.”

“No, it just could be. And this letter could be the one that has got Anderson so excited. He’d be crazy to look for a stuffed bird that hasn’t been seen for two hundred years, but a specimen that was safe and sound eighty years ago…”

“Then it can be found!” She clutched my arm. “It means we’ve got as much chance as he has!”

I held up my hand. I wanted to keep things under some sort of control.

“Wait a minute, a lot has happened since 1914. The Blitz, death duties, an awful lot of rising damp. We can’t be certain of anything.”

“But if it was still in one piece back then…”

“Yes, if it survived till then, there’s a chance it might still be around. Anderson obviously thinks so. But if this is Anderson’s big clue, who sent it to us? I can’t imagine Anderson dropping it in just to make sure he doesn’t have an unsporting advantage.”

Katya was still holding the photocopied sheets in front of her, as if they could ward off my doubts. “I don’t know.” She hesitated. “Who else knew about it?”

I immediately thought of Gabby. She’d promised to pass on anything she found, and it looked as though she was keeping her word. By now she’d be somewhere in Germany, but her raincoat was still behind my door. I reached over and took the papers out of Katya’s hands.

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“That’s easy,” I told her. “I’m going to Stamford to find out if these are real.”

“Very good,” she replied brightly. “I’m coming, too.”

We set out the next morning. Now that there were two of us traveling, I had to leave the bike, but Geoff, from the Hammer and Sickle pub, had a car I often borrowed—a small, rusty object the color of a fading lemon. We packed a bag each while it was still dark and then we were off, nosing out into the London traffic just as the rush hour began.

It was a slow journey, but we were childishly elated. The rain made it hard to see anything, and the pained creaking of the windscreen wipers meant we had to shout to be heard. Inside the car, the radio didn’t work and the heating only did enough to stop the windows from steaming up. On the outskirts of London we gave in, pulled over, and put on our coats. Katya’s was long and black, with a collar turned up around her face. Mine was old and tatty and made me look quite a lot like an extra from Doctor Zhivago. Under the coat, inside me, there was a little pulse of optimism that refused to be dampened. What if that bird had survived all this time? It might have. It just might. Coming suddenly to a stretch of open road, I plunged my foot down and the speedometer crept very slowly up to sixty-five.

Outside London the rain began to ease, and when I turned off the wipers the noise of the car settled to a low growl.

“You know this is crazy, don’t you?” I asked her, my voice still a little raised.

“Of course.” She nodded with a smile. “But it feels good, setting off in search of something.”

I smiled, partly at her, partly at the road ahead of me. “That’s what I always used to say to people. I spent six years in the rain forest, looking for things.”

“What sorts of things?”

“Birds, plants. Connections. It was a genetic impulse. My grandfather was the same. And my father. Do you know, they both have beetles named after them? How could I possibly follow that?”

I laughed and Katya laughed with me.

“So what did you discover?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much. When I was twenty-five I published a paper that showed how a certain species of tree frog was being badly affected by logging operations three hundred miles upstream. It was quite big news at the time—well, big news if you were into that sort of thing. I did some lectures about it. The thing is, they carried on logging anyway. When I next went back there were no frogs left.”

Katya looked at me for a moment, not sure of my tone. “But still, you’d done good work, hadn’t you?”

“In an academic sense. But that didn’t do the frogs much good.” I paused for a moment, not sure how much else to say. “I suppose that’s when things began to go wrong between me and Gabriella. We’d met out there, you know. We ended up working together, setting up rain-forest reserves. But after the frogs I began to wonder if we’d got it all wrong. All we were doing was treating the symptoms. The disease was so much bigger—population growth, consumer demand, that sort of thing. I began to tell people that reserves weren’t the solution at all; they were just Band-Aids for our consciences. We should have been putting all that funding into tackling the causes.”

Katya was still looking at me from under her fringe of hair. One hand held her coat closed at her neck, the other was hugged tight around her body.

“And that’s why you two fell out? Weren’t you really on the same side?”

“It wasn’t only that. There were other things…” I thought of saying more, but I was too slow or too shy, or too out of practice. “There always are, aren’t there?” I concluded lamely. “Anyway, we went our separate ways. Gabby stayed in the rain forest and I set off with my notebooks to track down the surviving remains of all the birds that we’d already lost. I figured that if we were going to make things extinct, we owed it to the future to preserve the evidence, to show what they’d been like.” I smiled at her. “I was a bit manic really. It was a difficult time. After a couple of years I calmed down and came back here to sort myself out. It was all a long time ago now. And another country.”

I smiled a little ruefully and then, before Katya could reply, the rain came on again and the wipers put an end to conversation.

A substantial bite had already been taken out of lunchtime by the time we found our way into the center of Stamford. However, still fired with optimism, we found a pub near the station with a sign that read BAR MEALS, SNACKS, BED AND BREAKFAST. The woman in the pub seemed mildly surprised when we asked for two rooms, but it was hard to tell if that was speculation about our relationship or just astonishment that anyone wanted to stay there at all. Leaving our bags packed, we found a café for lunch and sat down to do some planning. Before eating I rang the university and told them where they could contact me in case Gabby tried to get in touch.

Still buoyed by a flood tide of confidence and by two strong cups of coffee, we agreed to split up. Katya would try the local records office while I’d see if the tourist information office could point us toward the Old Manor. It was at the tourist office that things first began to look a bit more difficult. It was the sort of place I’d expected—lots of fake pine and the smell of polish and cheap carpet. Along one wall was the usual rack of leaflets and brochures, so I started there, half expecting to find the one I wanted straightaway. When my browsing failed to turn up anything useful, I waited politely until a would-be rail traveler finished monopolizing the woman behind the counter. She looked up and caught my eye as he let the door bang behind him.

“I’m not supposed to do trains,” she said with a sad smile. “I was only trying to help.”

She stopped smiling when I told her I was looking for a place called the Old Manor. Instead she looked at me as if I were trying to play some sort of trick.

“What is all this?” she asked. “I had someone in here a couple of days ago asking about just the same place.”

I felt a little stir of anxiety.

“And is that unusual?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be,” she replied, still a little wary, “except I’m not sure it exists.”

I don’t know what disappointment she saw in my face, but it was enough to persuade her to tell me about the previous visitor. She illustrated her story with a succession of leaflets, and soon I was holding a dozen different pieces of advertising for old houses in the surrounding area.

“This one seemed the best bet,” she told me, indicating one of them. “The Old Grange. Tudor, mostly. It’s just north of here.”

I nodded politely. “And was this visitor a tall man? A Scandinavian?” I asked, pretty sure of the answer.

“No, not at all,” she replied, looking at me strangely again. “He was an American. Very polite. Little round glasses. Getting on a bit. Now, are you going to tell me what all this is about?”

I explained I was trying to trace a family named Ainsby, who had lived in the area in the early 1900s. The name didn’t ring any bells with her, but she told me how to find the Records Office. Which, she said, was the same thing she’d told the polite American.

The rain continued most of the day, with only brief pauses to get its breath back. At six o’clock that evening Katya and I retreated to the bar at the Station Tavern. It looked a lot better after dark, with a gas-flame fire and lots of small red lampshades that made it harder to see the marks on the walls. But it was gloriously warm after the cold rain of a Lincolnshire evening and we even risked ordering food at the bar, then retired to the corner by the fire with a large glass of red wine and a pint of something dark and local.

The Records Office had told Katya what I’d already begun to fear. There was no trace of any family called Ainsby in or around Stamford in 1914 or, as far as they could see, at any other time. It had taken Katya three hours and the urging of two different librarians to accept the fact. We had drawn the most emphatically featureless blank imaginable.

Even so, we ate our meal quite happily, speculating furiously and trying to make things add up. Did this mean the letter we’d been sent was a fake? Neither of us wanted to believe that. Apart from Hans Michaels’s drawing, it was the only clue we had. We decided to try again the next day, to dig a little deeper. After that we suddenly grew a little awkward with each other, and when Katya opted for an early night I stayed behind for another pint. I was contemplating the possibility of a third when an unpleasant breath of cold air made me look up. A small, round man had come into the pub. Judging from the state of his raincoat, the weather outside was getting worse. The bar of the Station Tavern was beginning to seem a better place by the minute, and next to me the gas fire was still blazing away with a heartwarming hiss. I took out the collection of leaflets from the tourist office and spread them across the table.

“No good, any of them,” said an American voice above me. The newcomer had made his way over to my table, where he was flapping the water off the sides of his coat.

“I’m sorry?” I replied, as coldly as a man can when he’s just been caught reading a leaflet titled “The Pixie Glen and Elves’ Grotto, Fairbank.”

“None of them is the place you’re looking for,” he replied, discarding his coat onto a neighboring stool. “You’re Fitzgerald,” he added. “Mind if I join you?”

He was already pulling up a chair. The removal of his coat revealed a three-piece wool suit of the sort worn by country doctors in the 1930s. His hair was gray and slightly curly, and he wore thick glasses in old-fashioned frames. He looked absurdly un-American.

“The name’s Potts,” he said, holding out his hand. “I called the university and they told me I’d find you here. I’m staying at the George on the High Street,” he added.

While I was still registering this, he reached into a pocket and pulled out a pile of leaflets similar to my own. These he began to count out onto the table with a twinkle in his eye.

“The Old Grange? No. Hawsley Manor? No. Thurley Hall? Definitely not. Radnors? Jeez, that was the place that makes cheese. No way. Pulkington Hall? No. As for the Pixie Glen place”—he gave a shudder—“well, you can go there if you like, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I dropped my leaflets on top of his.

“I think you’d better start again. Who are you?”

“I’m Potts.” He practically winked at me, like an uncle sharing a secret. “I guess I’m here for the same reason you are.”

“You’re looking for a lost bird?”

“That’s the one.” He reached into his jacket and handed me a card. It didn’t give much away.

“You’re an art dealer?” I asked him, looking at him more carefully.

He pursed his lips as if to blow the idea away. “Not exactly. But you could say that art dealers are my business. I find the things they want to sell. Looking for a lost Van Dyck? Want a first-edition Ulysses? I’m your man.”

I gave him back his card.

“Isn’t this a little outside your normal line of work?”

“Oh, I prefer to call it a natural diversification. After all, you could say taxidermy is just a continuation of sculpture by other means.”

“So you know someone who wants to buy the Ulieta bird.”

Potts looked pained. “Such directness, Mr. Fitzgerald. Let’s just say that I’m very interested in finding it. And people seem to think you’re the best person to help. I phoned you a few times in the last few days, but I guess you were always out.”

I studied his face, not sure what to make of him.

“So what are you doing here in Stamford? Not just looking for me, surely?”

He reached into his pocket again and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

“You’ve seen this?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” I lied, recognizing instantly the photocopied sheet he placed in front of me. It was another copy of John Ainsby’s letter.

“Of course you have.” He leaned back and placed the letter neatly in front of him. “I sent it to you myself.”

I admit that took me by surprise, and my face must have shown it.

“Who did you think sent it, Mr. Fitzgerald? Karl Anderson?”

“No. Well, I mean…”

He chuckled softly to himself. “Well, it’s Anderson’s letter, all right. This is what brought him over here in a hurry to try to find the thing.”

“He told me he was coming over anyway. Something to do with botanical paintings. The Ulieta bird is just a sideline to him.”

Potts was still smiling affably, but I felt that he was studying me carefully from behind his glasses.

“He told you that, did he? Well, who’s to say?” And with that he took his glasses off and began to polish them on his waistcoat, apparently with no further interest in Anderson and his motives. But I couldn’t let him stop there.

“I’m sorry, this doesn’t make sense. Why would you send me that letter?”

He shrugged in a way that suggested the answer was obvious.

“I thought I’d put it under your nose to see what happened. You’re the expert, Mr. Fitzgerald. And I’m told that finding something like this would mean a lot to you. So I figured that when you saw John Ainsby’s letter, either you’d ignore it, in which case I’d know it’s a dead end, or you’d come running up here, in which case we might be onto something. And here you are.”

He was clearly a man who liked to talk. As he warmed up in front of the fire, and with no prompting from me, he began to tell me a lot more about the Ainsby letter. Apparently Anderson had been put onto it by an academic doing research into the First World War. Extinct birds may not have been Anderson’s main area of expertise, but he knew about the Ulieta bird, and he grasped the letter’s significance at once. His first step was to take a copy to Ted Staest, and the two men came to some sort of agreement about the bird’s value—though exactly what they agreed was something Potts seemed rather vague about. It wasn’t until rumors about the bird began to leak out that Potts got hold of his own copy of the letter.

“Not through official channels, you understand, Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“You mean you bribed someone?”

He looked offended. “Please, Mr. Fitzgerald, there’s no need for us to go into the details. Suffice it to say that I have a copy. And now, so do you.”

He indicated the piece of paper in front of him. “It’s an intriguing letter, isn’t it, Mr. Fitzgerald? The references to Cook and Banks, the unique specimen. And of course it’s addressed to Lincolnshire, Banks’s own county. All very promising. There’s one bit, though—‘I don’t want to return and find that young Vulpes of yours has snatched it from my grasp.’ What do you make of that? A rival for the bird?”

I shrugged. “Vulpes means fox, so I expect he means someone cunning and a bit predatory. The way he uses it sounds affectionate, though, doesn’t it? I wondered if it was a suitor of hers—someone prowling around while her brother’s away.”

“A suitor. A lover…” He played with the idea. “Yes, I can see that. Interesting…” Behind his glasses, his eyes seemed to cloud with thought, but a second later his unflappable exterior was back in place and he was telling me how the Ainsby letter had brought him first to London and then to Stamford. But in Stamford he’d drawn a blank. No trace of the Ainsbys, no trace of the Old Manor, no stuffed bird. No trace of Anderson, either.

“That was beginning to worry me most,” he confided. “I figured if I wasn’t where Anderson was, I was in the wrong place. Then on my fourth day here I noticed a guy in the George.” He took a card from his wallet. Edward Smith, Discretion Guaranteed, 63 North Hill Road, London N17.

“This guy Smith is working for Anderson. He admitted it quickly enough when pressed. He has a pretty confident air about him. Seemed to be hinting it was pretty much all over. Even so, I was happier once I’d found him. I’d be happier still if I knew where Anderson was.”

“What’s Smith actually doing?” I asked.

Potts shrugged. “Goes out early, comes back late. Takes his car. I tried tailing him one day but he must have spotted me. We drove around the county for six and a half hours. Jeez, the roads here are really something, you know that?”

He sat back in his seat and looked at me pleasantly.

“You know, if it wasn’t for noticing Smith, I’d have quit by now—if there’s anything here to find, I can’t find it, and the weather stinks. So that’s where you come in. Listen, we may as well be straight with each other.” He leaned forward, almost self-consciously conspiratorial. “You’re right that this isn’t my line, Mr. Fitzgerald. But I’m very, very keen to find that bird before Anderson does. Here’s the deal. You find me that bird and we can go to Staest together. You can deal with him directly. All I ask is a small cut, say five percent. Call it an introduction fee, if you like.”

It was then I began to understand the real value of Potts’s avuncular demeanor. For the next twenty minutes or so, very gently and with the greatest politeness, he interrogated me about the whereabouts of the Ulieta bird. Of course, it shouldn’t have taken him half that long, but, like Anderson, he seemed reluctant to believe how little I knew. Even my empty glass wasn’t enough to stop the questions, until finally I insisted on going to the bar to buy myself another pint. He declined a drink himself, and when I came back he was squeezing himself into his raincoat. He paused to shake my hand.

“Remember what I’ve said tonight, Mr. Fitzgerald. My job here is to find that bird before Anderson. But if you get to it before either of us, remember that I’ll be happy to help you get the best price for it.”

When he’d gone, I drank my pint in silence, feeling sure there was something going on that I wasn’t quite grasping. Potts seemed eager enough to get hold of the bird, but, like Anderson, he didn’t seem too bothered about making money out of it. Was this really all about pleasing Ted Staest? How much is the goodwill of a Canadian billionaire worth? Or was that the wrong tack? Was the actual value of the bird so immense that they were happy to let me name my price, knowing that I’d never dream up a value even close to the real one? I examined that theory for a while and then discarded it. There was no way the bird could be worth that much. At least not unless this DNA business was a lot more lucrative than I imagined.

In front of me on the table were the two sets of tourist leaflets, Potts’s and mine. Eventually I picked them up and began to go through them again. After all, I had no other clues to follow.

It was only much later, when I tried to put the leaflets back in my pocket, that I found the photocopies I’d made for Katya at the Natural History Museum, the two bits of paper about Joseph Banks’s mistress. I looked around. The bar was still warm and still serving. It seemed a shame to go to bed. So I settled down again and started to read them properly for the first time.

DEATH SEEMED to stalk the Endeavour when she finally turned for home. After leaving Batavia the air seemed full of fever and they lost men almost daily. Banks himself was almost among them, and Solander’s health also suffered. Twenty-three men died between Batavia and the Cape; by the time the Endeavour reached Atlantic waters, Parkinson, Monkhouse, and Molineux were all dead and about a third of the crew with them. The survivors turned their faces north and hoped for home.

But the last days of a journey can be the hardest. At sea every one of them had an order to live by, and clear duties to perform. They knew their routine and their orders and at all times they had a destination ahead of them. With the approach of land these certainties began to dissolve, and for many the return would be a hard one. As the Channel drew nearer, men paused in their work to scan the horizon. Banks was one of them. He knew even then, long before they arrived in London, that their return would be momentous. They had seen and recorded things beyond the imaginations of the people who had sent them. He brought back with him a collection—specimens, plants, and artifacts—that was unlike anything ever seen before. He was too young not to enjoy the anticipation of their triumph. And too human not to be a little changed by it.

Nevertheless, he was nervous and found himself envying Cook. Banks knew that the Yorkshireman’s reputation was made, and he found that he envied him his wife at home and his sturdy sense of belonging. For himself, Banks discovered that the aspects of home he had cherished in the South Seas began to seem subtly different as he edged nearer to the reality.

He found it easy to imagine himself in the salons of London, recounting his voyage and meeting the great philosophers of the day on equal terms. It was perhaps an image he had carried with him all along, hidden deep so that not even he could look at it until he was sure of success. But when he tried to imagine Harriet with him in that world, the picture he formed would begin to fade. She seemed to him to sit uneasily beside those men of serious science, and he was ashamed to find that when he remembered her, instead of recalling her face, he found his pulse quickening at the recollection of a neck as smooth as pale china, of his fingertips trailing gently down the line of soft, bare shoulders. These images returned to him over and over, as he tried instead to remember her voice or her smile. Disconcerted, he swept such thoughts away until the time came when he would meet her in person.

When the Endeavour finally anchored in Deal, they had been away almost three years.

Their return was an even greater sensation than he could possibly have expected, his reception in London beyond anything he had imagined. Within days of their arrival he had become the public face of the expedition, the young man who had combined daring and adventure with the most dedicated pursuit of knowledge. While Cook sank quietly into the routine debriefings of the Admiralty, Banks took the same message into polite society and opened a new world to its imaginings. If he had feared that the uniqueness of his experience would not be readily appreciated, he was quite wrong. And if the pictures and paintings of the places discovered were not enough, the specimens collected there were a wonder of their own. He had collected plant samples that would fascinate botanists for years, and there were other, even more sensational things to describe. It was hard to talk of plants and propagation while your listeners wanted to marvel at the shape and habits of the kangaroo. Carried to fame by both the novelty and the daring of the tales he had to tell, Banks was rushed breathless through parlors and dining rooms, scarcely able to believe the honors paid him.

At first he rode this wave of celebrity as a small boat rides the storm, frantic in his activity, yet lifted from wave to wave without control of his direction or his destiny. For five days after his return he did not visit Harriet Blosset until she sent him a hurt, reproachful letter complaining of his very public negligence. He went to see her then, and each found the other altered, so that the interview was awkward and unsatisfying. She found him constrained and uncertain where before he had been easy and amusing, and his talk of distant islands was less interesting to her than talk of a future with her in London and the shires. She greeted him coldly, unaware how much of her attraction had been in the openness with which she showed her feelings for him. This proud, resentful Harriet was a stranger to him. As their interview progressed he found her less striking than he remembered, the creamy white of her skin less perfect and her gait less graceful and natural. He wanted to touch her, to feel the softness he remembered, but the formality in her manner gave him no encouragement. They sat together for a painful, inconclusive half hour and then he excused himself. His time was not his own, he told her, and he was bound in a few days’ time to return to Revesby to inquire into the management of his estates. On his return, he promised, he would call again, and then there would be time to talk of the future.

Perhaps it was the excitements of London society or the rigors of his voyage that had affected him, but as he journeyed back to Revesby he barely thought of his last visit there. His thoughts were on the improvements he might make and the decisions that needed to be made about rents and rates. He was surprised on his arrival to be greeted by people and faces he hadn’t thought of for over three years, each of them smiling and eager to make him welcome, their reserve quite blown away by the fame and fortune he had obtained for himself. Their effect was to make him pause and remember, and it was his welcome in Revesby that brought him properly home. Amid all the greetings there was a moment of sadness for him when he heard of Dr. Taylor’s death, two years before. The doctor’s family, he was told, had left Revesby shortly after, their circumstances much reduced. It was commonly known that they had gone to live with Mrs. Taylor’s family in Clerkenwell, and Miss Taylor, the eldest of the daughters, had married a curate. Her younger sister, still only seventeen, had married a man of forty who owned a little property in the Fens.

Banks felt genuine sadness at the news, but he comforted himself with the discovery that his estates had been well managed in his absence: after three days of accounts and rent books, he was satisfied that there were no dreadful acts of neglect that needed remedy. Much of his time at first was spent in the dimness of the Abbey with the ledgers, but in the afternoons he would head into the sunshine with his steward, Nicholson, to see for himself how things stood. The tenant farms, the cottages, the deer park and gardens—each was inspected and found satisfactory.

It was on the afternoon of his sixth day that he and Nicholson, returning on foot from one such expedition, turned their attention to the woods that lay between the Abbey and the village. It was a hot afternoon in late summer, and the shade was welcomed by both of them. A few minutes into the trees, Banks found himself looking around as if surprised at where he stood. With Nicholson at his side, his thoughts had been entirely on business, and it came to him as a shock to recognize the place where he found himself.

“This way, if you will,” he muttered to Nicholson, and struck off to his right. “There is a little clearing this way, I believe.”

The steward followed him until both emerged into a space between the trees where the canopy parted and let in the sun. Banks was smiling quietly to himself.

“How little things change,” he murmured. “After so many years away, it is strange to find the paths, even the shapes of particular trees, exactly as they were when I stood here last.”

Nicholson looked around him. “There’s no denying the woods change slowly, sir. I daresay your children will run down these paths and believe they’re the first to discover them.”

Banks nodded. He liked Nicholson.

“Tell me,” he said. “When I was here last, there was a young lady who used to roam these woods as if they were her own. Her father had the house at the end of the village. He was something of a free-thinker and there was always scandal attached to his name. And he was much given to drinking and insulting his neighbors.”

“Yes, sir, I know the gentleman you mean. He died a couple of years back, in the spring. An unpopular gentleman he was in these parts.”

“And the daughter? Where is she now? Is she married?”

“She’s gone, sir. I don’t know where. Not married, though, I’ll warrant. Not if what they say is true.”

Banks had been looking around the clearing, but at this he stopped and looked sharply at the man beside him.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, sir,” the steward began uncomfortably, “I don’t pretend to know anything for certain, but the women in the village always held that being her father’s daughter, she was…Well, you know, sir. Coming from a family like that.”

If he hoped his employer would take pity on his embarrassment, he was disappointed. Banks’s questioning gaze forced him to continue.

“Well, there was a lot of talk, sir. About where she went and who she went with. There was no talk of her marrying, sir.”

“Really, Nicholson! That sounds like no more than common gossip.”

“I don’t know, to be sure. But I saw her for myself, sir, just once since she left here. It was up in Louth on market day. I don’t usually go that far, but there were some horses I wanted to see. I saw her quite plain up near the church and, well, she was very smartly dressed, sir. Not like we’d ever seen her here in Revesby when her father was alive.”

Banks looked down at his feet while he digested this.

“And she was alone?”

“With Martha, sir. The woman who used to look after her father.”

Banks looked up, his features firmly set and a little stern.

“Thank you, Nicholson. That is very interesting. But of course it is taking us very far from a proper valuation of all this timber…”

With that the two men turned toward the Abbey and continued their inspection, leaving the clearing empty but for the sunshine and a pair of small birds that fluttered quickly to the forest floor when they were gone.

It was another three days before Banks was able to find the time to ride to Louth. During that time it occurred to him many times that there was no reason for such a visit, yet he went anyway. The fortunes or otherwise of his former neighbors were, he knew, no concern of his, but his return to the woods had stirred memories, and he was in a reflective mood as he guided his horse into Louth marketplace. He was frowning as he dismounted.

In Louth he called on friends and inquired after her by name. They were delighted to see him and insisted on his taking tea or wine or luncheon, but none of them could help with his inquiry. Next he tried a friend of his father’s, a local magistrate who knew the town and its surroundings better than anyone else. He seemed puzzled by the request.

“Most likely she is married,” he concluded. “I probably know her by a different name. You have been away too long, Joseph, to expect everything to stay the same. She is probably the mother of two strapping young boys by now.”

“Indeed.” Banks smiled, uncertain of himself. “It was only a passing thought. If you had known her whereabouts, I would have liked to offer my condolences for the loss of her father.”

“Yes, of course,” replied the older man. “Very proper. Now, why not step this way and sample some of the very excellent port wine that has been sent me by my nephew?”

It was another hour before Banks was once more at liberty. Uncertain how to proceed and feeling a little foolish at the rashness of his expedition, he made his way across the market square toward the church where Nicholson claimed to have seen her. It was late afternoon and the town smelled hot and airless; coming to the churchyard, Banks was happy to sit for a moment in the shade of the lych-gate, where the air seemed cooler. With the market over for the afternoon, the whole town seemed to have fallen silent in the heat, and the churchyard promised shadow and solitude. The church was an old one, with an impressive spire, the foot of its walls green-mossed by the passing years. He looked out across the gravestones of the parish. Some were fallen into angles and nearly obliterated by lichen, where others were clean and poignant. A private, hidden place. Leaving the shade, he began to make his way around the church, pausing at some of the stones to read their messages, pleased to be thinking of something other than his own foolishness. After a leisurely circling of the church he returned to a long green stone sunk into the grass near the lych-gate. It seemed, if possible, even older than the rest, but he was unable to decipher its inscription. Coming to it again, he lowered himself onto his haunches and began to scrape with his fingernails at the lichen that hid the names of the souls at rest there. Engrossed by the task, he worked quickly, and the first name was almost legible when a voice spoke behind him.

“Lichen pulmonarius,” it said.

SHE OFTEN walked that way in the afternoon when the heat in the little town was oppressive and the churchyard offered peace. It was always a quiet place at that hour, and it was rare for her to encounter anyone else within its walls.

But then, on that unremarkable August afternoon, she turned into the lych-gate at an hour when the town was quiet, and was confronted by a figure crouching by a gravestone. She recognized him instantly, from somewhere deep inside, and the shock of it disarmed her. In the days before her father’s death, she had often imagined how the moment would be if she were to meet him again. But that had been long ago, in Revesby, before her life had changed. She had never imagined seeing him in Louth. Even when she had heard, fifth-hand, that he had returned and was safe, she had put him out of her mind. It was easier that way.

On seeing him in the churchyard she could only stare. His back was turned. His hair was dressed differently. She must be mistaken. It was too unlikely, it was too impossible. In that hesitation, any thought of escape was lost. He was no more than eight yards away from her, and the urge to observe him was too strong for her. She heard Martha approaching from behind and held out a hand to make her stop. Then she stood in silence and watched as he worked at the green stone with his nail, until she realized with amazement that she knew what he was scraping at. The words escaped her before she’d even decided to speak.

HE TURNED and looked up so suddenly at the sound of her voice that he almost lost his balance. Standing at the lych-gate, slight and straight, watching him, she was partly concealed by shadow but was instantly familiar, her figure and her face exactly as he remembered. A beautiful face, he thought suddenly, though he had not always thought so. Then she moved so that the light fell differently, and in brighter sunshine he noticed differences. She was paler now, he decided, looking for the freckles he remembered and finding them fewer and less prominent. As if she has been too much indoors, he thought.

As he began to step toward her, she seemed to move back but then stopped and stood her ground, her face serious and her eyes meeting his. He opened his mouth to speak, to call her by her name, but as he began she shook her head and held up her hand.

“No, you must not call me by that name. I have a different name here.”

He stopped, no more than a pace away from her.

“Then you are married?”

The shake of her head was almost imperceptible.

“No, I’m not married. Here I am known as Miss Brown.” Her eyes were still meeting his. He looked around awkwardly, not sure what he planned to say or do. Then he met her eyes again.

“Our acquaintance was very short, Miss Brown. There are too few botanical artists in the world for me to neglect them when I meet them. Fewer now than when I saw you last. I would very much like to hear how things have been with you.”

She looked down for a second or so before speaking.

“Martha,” she said, indicating the seat near the lych-gate. “Please wait for me here. I have something to say to Mr. Banks.”

He held his arm out to her. When she took it he paused at the touch of her hand and then she moved forward and they stepped out a little awkwardly from the lych-gate shadows.