A Flower for the Queen: A Historical Novel (33 page)

“But,” he continued quickly, knowing that he had to get it all out before it was too late, “I still want you to have the land and my mother’s cottage. They are all I have in the world, and they will make you a wealthy woman and hopefully bring you happiness. They are yours. Keep them.”

Constance fought back the tears as she turned away and ran back towards the house, leaving Masson standing alone as the clouds moved in and blocked out the sun, thunder rolling in from the distance.

As the rain poured down, quenching the thirst of the land, Masson took shelter underneath the hornbeam and said goodbye to Hollingbourne as he watched the rain soak into the bone-dry soil.

C
ANADA
, 21 N
OVEMBER
, 1805

The room was silent except for the peaceful breathing of Robert, fast asleep on his mother’s lap, and the distant chiming of icicles in the gentle evening wind. When the old man spoke again, his voice had acquired a strange quality, so profoundly serene that it sounded almost youthful.

“I left for Plymouth straightaway with only the money that I received for the flower and was relieved to find that the
Swallow
had not yet arrived. Every day I went out before sunrise and waited by the breakwater for the ship to come into view, making conversation with the fisherman in the hope that they would bring me early tidings of the
Swallow
’s arrival and spending the rest of the time drawing and sketching the life in the harbour.

“Word began to come through that the
Swallow
had been sited at the southern entry to the English Channel and that she would be in Plymouth within the day. Wanting to make a good impression, I went into town and purchased a new suit of clothes and made arrangements to rent a pair of neighbouring cottages on the outskirts of town with views out over the bay.

“I cannot tell you the excitement that I felt when I caught site of the square-rigged sails of the
Swallow
as she drifted in off the Channel and into the port. I had hired a small sloop, bought up all the freshly cut flowers that were to be had in the port and then sailed out to meet the ship with the rest of the skiffs and tenders who would unload its cargo.

“What a sight I must have seemed to those hardy seamen and stevedores — all dressed up in my new clothes, scrubbed from head to toe and standing at the prow of a sailboat filled with flowers. But I didn’t care — for the first time in my life, I had cast caution aside and rushed head-on to meet the destiny that I had chosen for myself. It was all I could do to stop myself from diving into the water and swimming those final few yards, such was my excitement.

“As we approached that great wooden hull, its sides tarnished with barnacles and pockmarked by the teredo worms that had burrowed into the planks above the water line, I searched for her face amongst the crewmen and passengers that lined the gunwale, but could not find her. I called out her name and expected to see her at any moment blushing with embarrassment at the display. But she did not appear. Such was the spectacle that even the Captain himself hailed me and asked me my business.

“When I shouted out that I was searching for the lady that had joined him as a passenger at Cape Town, he invited me aboard and ushered me into his cabin. He explained that he could well understand my enthusiasm, for he had found Jane to be an enchanting and wonderful lady, and if he had not already been married himself, he would have been even more vexed to have been forced to say goodbye to her at Lisbon some weeks before, where she had disembarked when the ship had stopped for supplies.”

“She was gone?” asked Jack in disbelief.

“I could not bring myself to believe it. But it seemed so.” The old man stopped and paused for breath, his eyelids clamping down on the sadness that was plain for all to see in the depths of his eyes.

“But then I received a letter from Banks asking me if I would be willing to undertake a further expedition, this time to Portugal. I decided that this was no accident of fate, but rather a clear and unambiguous message: I had chosen my path and I had to follow it through to its end.

“I accepted Banks’s offer and some weeks later I arrived in Lisbon, only to find that Jane had already left on a ship bound for the Caribbean. Over the following months, I faithfully completed the tasks that Banks had set me, all the while trying to glean any information about where Jane might have been headed. With a terrific collection of plants but little else to show for my efforts, I returned to England and asked Banks if he could send me west. He agreed.

“And so it went. Following in Jane’s trail, I explored and collected flowers along the way. In the beginning, I refused to accept that my search was hopeless. After I arrived in Granada, the trail ended, and I was about to give up when I was captured by the French invaders. I was only released when Banks intervened on my behalf, but I lost my entire collection. With no option but to continue on the route I had agreed with Banks, I travelled next to Saint Lucia, where I discovered to my relief that Jane had settled for a short time before travelling north to the mainland. But as I was readying myself for the journey, disaster struck again, and all of my new collection together with all of my equipment was destroyed in a hurricane. I was lucky to escape alive and almost drowned trying to save my journal.

“I was forced to return to England. Even with Banks’s influence and his personal friendship with Benjamin Franklin, tensions between America and England meant that for the time being I had to give up my search. But it was a flower that had led me to Jane in the first place, and so I reasoned that if I kept collecting them, one day they would lead me back to her.”

The old man paused to rest his gaze on his notebooks. He whispered, “In my lifetime, I have collected more than fifteen hundred species of flowers. All of them plucked from faraway lands, most previously unknown to Western science, many admired by artists and men of importance. And yet … I still search for the one flower that escaped my grasp that day in Table Bay.”

All in the room were silent and hanging onto the old man’s words.

“Thunberg was right. The winds of change did blow through the Cape, and when it was taken by the English, I went back and spent many years collecting and travelling the same paths that we covered together. Each time I spied the orange petals of a lion’s tail or inhaled the pungent aroma of the moonflower, it would awaken in me the memories that were growing fainter every year, just as the ink faded in the sketch in my journal. And with each new discovery, despite the years that accumulated, I felt that I was somehow one step closer to finding her.

“Eventually I was called back to England and to Kew, but there were no new discoveries to be made there. My time was only spent sifting through the finds of other flower hunters. But my time at Kew held one advantage: I was able to correspond with collectors all over the world, and so I sent out letters asking if anyone had knowledge of a lady botanist with a knack for shooting lions.

“I heard nothing until one day I received a letter from Thunberg. He told me a story about a friend of his who had once attended a tea party at a house in Montréal. The friend had been surprised to find a freshly cut
Strelitzia Reginae
decorating the table: somehow the Queen’s flower had found its way to Canada.

“When he had enquired as to how the host had managed to procure such an exotic flower, he had been told that his host’s housekeeper had a way with plants and had somehow brought them to flower in the greenhouse.

Despite my age and on the flimsiest of premises, Banks agreed to send me on one last expedition. When I arrived, the first thing I did was visit the address that I had been given, a
seigneurie
at Saint-Hyacinthe, but I found the house sold, the greenhouse dismantled and the new occupants to be tenants who had no certain knowledge of the previous owners or the mysterious housekeeper.

“Sadly, the rest of my time here yielded nothing further. My ship was due to sail back to England when the foul weather and the fear of ice meant that it was held in Montréal for another few days. I decided to use the time to collect one last specimen and had just finished doing so when we met so calamitously on the road.

“It is most odd, is it not, that after so much life that has been lived, this most fleeting of instants so long past should claim so much space in my heart?”

He looked down at the pages of his journal. The faded portrait of a beautiful young woman was positioned opposite the bird-shaped watermark. When Jack looked more closely, he could see that with nothing to separate the two pages, through time and exposure to moisture, and perhaps from constantly being kept so close to the old man’s heart, the watermark and the sketch had superimposed themselves onto each other, their forms overlaid so that it was difficult to know where one started and the other left off.

“Poor Jack. You wanted heroes, and instead I give you an old fool who spent a lifetime chasing a moment.” His hands traced the outline of the portrait one last time before he gently closed the book and turned to Jack’s mother. “I’m sorry that your guests decided not to come, Mrs Grant. In my humble opinion, they have done themselves a great disservice in not taking advantage of such warmth and hospitality as I have seldom come across in all my travels.”

“It is us that should be grateful to you, Mr Masson. I am only sorry that your story could not have had a happier ending,” Mary Grant replied.

“You really are too kind, but I feel that I have overstayed my welcome. I really am feeling much better, and I wonder if it would be too much to ask for the use of your carriage in getting me back to my lodgings. They are only just the other side of Pointe-Claire.”

But then a voice came from a forgotten corner of the room. “Mr Masson will remain here.”

The old lady had spoken for the first time all afternoon. Judging by the reaction her statement induced in her family, it may well have been the first statement she had uttered for quite some time, as all eyes turned towards her.

From the shadows, she was staring at the window, her eyes moist. Her hands had stopped their needlework but were still clinging onto a single golden thread of silk that remained tethered to the piece of white linen stretched within its circular hoop frame.

As she turned from the window, the hoop tumbled from her lap and rolled across the floor before coming to a stop against Jack’s foot. He leaned down to retrieve it and then stopped, his breath caught in his chest.

Within the confines of the wooden hoop, set against the pure white backdrop of the linen, the loops of coloured silk combined to form an image that had been in his thoughts every day for the past three decades. That same design was embroidered on the corners of every napkin in the Grant household. It was cast into the great bronze knocker that hung on the front door which every guest and visitor used to announce their arrival. It had even been marked out in stained glass in the south-facing windows of the first-floor ballroom so that when the sunlight streamed through in the afternoons, the shapes and colours traced their way across the wide pine planks.

In silken thread of deepest emerald green, a single narrow stem had been stitched from memory alone without the need of a pencil pattern. At its end, the stem turned and opened out, like a maiden’s upturned palm, and perched within was a crown of the most delicate petals and sepals, like tears of liquid gold amidst shafts of midnight blue. The petals were arranged like the feathers at the end of an eagle’s wing and seemed to tremor in anticipation at taking flight. Jack knew then that the design his grandmother had stitched, the design embedded in the very fabric of her life, was derived from the same source as the watermark in Masson’s journal:
Strelitzia Reginae
, the Queen’s flower.

“A fine work to be sure, so very true to nature,” the old man whispered. “I would never have dreamed that my African flower could blossom in such cold latitudes.”

When she smiled, it was like a desert flower receiving water after a long drought. Her face, which before had been drawn and tight, began to soften and unfold, and her voice was as clear as the dawn. “A flower such as this is hard to forget, is it not, Mr Masson?”

Their eyes met, and when they held each other’s gaze, everybody in the room understood without another word being uttered that after all the years and all the voyages, through oceans, tempests and tragedies, the old man had finally found his home. His frailty forgotten, he stood up from his chair and walked across the room, kneeling before her and taking both of her hands into his own. He whispered with a quiet, contented smile, “Impossible, Ms Burnette, impossible.”

J
UNE
24, 1845, L
ONDON

Jack Grant poured himself a double measure of Scotch and replaced the crystal decanter on the polished walnut console. He looked out the window of the mahogany-panelled office and watched the bustle of Charing Cross Road as he waited for his publisher, Oswald Smythe, to finish reading his manuscript.

The clock’s brass pendulum swung silently back and forth as Oswald’s stubby fingers flipped each page, reminding Jack of the coachman’s whip all those years ago.

At last Oswald finished and removed his spectacles from his nose so that he could rub his eyes.

“It was all true,” said Jack, as if in reply to Oswald’s silent question. “After Mr Masson’s visit, I checked at the library of the
Gazette
. His journals had been published in 1776 in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in London
. It’s all there, the lions, the flowers, the mission for the King, everything. And my Grandmamma confirmed the rest.”