A Flower for the Queen: A Historical Novel (34 page)

“But surely you must have known the truth about her from the moment he told you about Jane?”

“Jane changed her name when she moved to Canada to escape the scandal that surrounded her affair with Joseph Banks. She was shunned by her family and took work as my grandfather’s housekeeper around about the time my grandmother died giving birth to my mother. She was the housekeeper that Thunberg told Masson about. Robert’s story about her shooting the bear that almost killed him is absolutely true. What Robert didn’t know was that it was only after she saved him that my grandfather proposed, and so the housekeeper became Grandmamma.”

“What happened to Masson?” asked Oswald.

Jack took a long sip from his drink before answering. He felt the heat of the liquor course down his throat.

“Mr Masson never did go back to England. He passed away a month later on Christmas Eve. He spent his last days with us in that house, most of them in the summer kitchen, sitting beside Jane and trying to catch up on a lost lifetime.”

“I imagine there must have been so much to say,” said the publisher as he fiddled with the manuscript.

“Oh, they didn’t talk much. Masson’s life was there in his journal, in the pages and pages of drawings of the more than fifteen hundred specimens that he had collected, and it was all there in the one page that had changed everything.

“He filled up the last few pages with drawings of her. Not as the young flower that he remembered from that summer in the Cape, but as the treasure that he found in the glacial Canadian winter. In the end, their time together in Montréal was the same as that in the Cape, almost to the day. The difference was that when they parted for the second time, their reunion was never in doubt.”

“Well, Jack,” sighed Oswald, “as I told you before, we’re certainly keen to publish it. An under-gardener turned explorer turned spy turned free spirit and romantic hero, that story has got instant appeal. We’ll need to make a few changes, of course. I understand you may have an emotional attachment to the characters, but you know what it’s like: we have to give the readers what they want.”

“I understand. The most important thing is that his story is told. What changes did you have in mind?”

“I think the Africa part could do with some fleshing out.”

“Which part exactly?”

“You know. The lions and all that.”

Jack smiled. A wave of bitter-sweet nostalgia washed over him as he remembered Robert’s face in the light of the summer kitchen fire, enchanted by Francis Masson’s tales of adventure. Jack, so entangled in his complicated youth, had not known then that this would be one of the happiest times of his life. For one must often wait until the twilight of life to discover the treasure in simple moments: the ordinary miracle of a family together; the lasting pleasure hidden in a story well-told; and the serendipity in an encounter with strangers, who, with just a few heartfelt words, might illuminate entire lives.

“Of course,” Jack finally said.

“Excellent,” bellowed Oswald. “Well, if you could get me the revised version by the end of June, I think we may have a crack at the Christmas season. I’ve suggested a minor change to the title, but of course the final choice is up to you.”

The publisher put the manuscript back in its folio and handed it across his desk to Jack, who looked down at the title page. His neatly typed title had been crossed out, and just below in red ink was scrawled, “
A FLOWER FOR THE QUEEN — Or the Amazing Adventures of Mr Masson in the Fair Cape
.”

Jack opened his briefcase and placed the manuscript beside the leather notebook before shaking hands with Oswald and stepping out into the midday traffic. Looking at his watch, he realised that he had some time to kill, and so he walked down the Strand, past the Royal Society, before turning left into Covent Garden.

Amongst the myriad colours and perfumes of flowers from every corner of the globe that were being sold by bellowing cockneys, he found what he was looking for.

“I’ll take one dozen, please,” he said, pointing to the blue-and-orange star-shaped flowers.

“Excellent choice, guv’ner,” replied the cheerful young man from behind his table. “Did you know that this ’ere flower originally came from Africa …”

Jack smiled as he listened, losing himself in the market trader’s tale.

A Tale of Two Seaside Villages
By Caroline Vermalle and Ryan von Ruben

Where did it all begin?

CV: It all started in the small seaside town where I have spent my summers since I was a child. As I remember it, I was standing in line one morning in 2010 at the local fishmonger’s.

Actually, let’s rewind a little — if the truth be told, the real beginning of
A Flower for the Queen
is to be found on page 151 of the paperback edition of Bill Bryson’s
A Walk in the Woods
, a comic tale about a slightly overweight writer’s odyssey through the American wilderness. This may seem a strange place for a story such as this to start, but in this self-parody of a man’s struggle against an alien environment, Bryson touched on the trials and tribulations of early American plant hunters and something touched a nerve.

From
Indiana Jones
to Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
, I have always been captivated by stories of lost treasure. Here was a similar tale: only instead of pirates or buccaneers chasing gold ingots or jewel-encrusted relics, these were eminently more sensible people whose prize was something altogether more fragile, but which the circumstances of the time connived to make just as valuable: flowers.

The poetry of that quest for a strange new plant proved irresistible. After reading about the era and people who inhabited it, I found what seemed to be an endless list of potentially suitable heroes, but somehow, either by noble birth or by the gift of fortune, they were all too distinguished, too readily destined for greatness.

But then, lost in the pantheon of great plant hunters, I came across a fellow named Francis Masson. Neither a botanist nor a gentleman, here was a man who was not even a fully-fledged gardener, but a simple under-gardener who had never left the shores of his native Britain before sailing to South Africa on a flower-hunting expedition. He was too old, too awkward, too poor, and by all accounts was one of the unluckiest men to have graced the pages of history. And yet, against all odds, he managed to enrich London’s Kew Gardens with fifteen hundred new species of plants found in some of the remotest, most inhospitable places in the world. And did I mention he was a reluctant spy? Francis Masson was an ordinary guy living an extraordinary life. I knew instantly that he was the chap I wanted to write about.

I had my hero, but the story I wanted to tell kept eluding me until one fine summer’s day when I was queuing for freshly caught crab at the only fishmonger in a little seaside town on the French Atlantic coast.

There, on the counter, was a small and rather common arrangement of exotic flowers — so common, in fact, that I was probably the only one of all the waiting customers to notice it. But notice I did because it contained a
Strelitzia Reginae
—

a bird of paradise — discovered by none other than Francis Masson.

It seemed crazy that right there in front of us was the product of one man’s fantastic odyssey, and yet no one seemed to notice except me. Right there and then I knew that I had to tell this story.

So it’s a true story?

RvR: Let’s just say that most of it is factually correct, and what isn’t, we feel could be true — if not in fact, then at least in spirit.

The real Francis Masson was indeed sent on a botanical expedition to the Cape, spectacularly under-qualified for the job. Even if history implies that he went willingly, we know that nobody else applied for the position. The few scholars who cared to write about him seem to disagree on the issue of espionage — did he or didn’t he? We cannot be sure, but Sir Joseph Banks’s instructions with regard to False Bay were true enough. He might not have dreamed of a mythical garden, but this humble son of the British Isles definitely caught a serious case of wanderlust. Who knows what he was chasing in his decades-long, and oftentimes catastrophic, travels around the world? He certainly found (and lost) many flowers, but the paucity of information relayed by Masson in his letters and reports back to Banks leaves open many avenues for fantasy to fill in the blanks.

I am sure Carl Thunberg, that eternal over-achiever and lover of tall tales, would have enjoyed reading about his
doppelgänger
. We stuck to his biography, merely adding a bit of flourish. He did it all: the mapping of the South African flora, the sneaking into Japan under the guise of a Dutch surgeon and, above all, his very own poignant homage to his great mentor. Carl Linnaeus’s garden, painstakingly recreated over twenty years by his famous disciple, still stands today in Uppsala, Sweden.

Jack and his family, Masson’s mother, Constance, Boulton, Simmons, Schelling, Willmer and Eulaeus are all characters born out of our imagination, but our James Cook, Joseph Banks, Georg Forster (the younger) and Lord Sandwich are strictly loyal to their historical selves.

One person who might be spinning in his grave, though, is poor old Johann Reinhold Forster: in truth, Captain Cook did not disembark him at the Cape, and he was never imprisoned on Robben Island. He continued with his son on their voyage of discovery around the globe with the
Endeavour
. But most scholars will agree with James Cook and Carl Thunberg on at least one point: Forster the elder was an authentic pain in the neck, and Cook might well have preferred our version of events.

How did you come to write this book together?

CV: It turns out that my husband, who is also a writer, happened to be the only South African in that French Atlantic village, which was lucky.

So you brought your husband in because of his local knowledge?

RvR: When Caroline first told me about the story, I couldn’t believe the coincidence. The place where Masson first discovered the
Strelitzia
was practically a stone’s throw away from the small seaside village on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast where I spent my summers as a child. I hadn’t even known that the
Strelitzia
was indigenous to South Africa at all — some expert!

But the more we talked about it, the more captivated I became, because I realised that there was even more to the story than just flowers. South Africa has a unique history, and the Eastern Cape, which at the time was frontier country, has an especially significant and rich story. For Caroline this was a story about treasure, but for me this was a chance to delve into the story of the land that I loved but which I left behind when I moved to Europe. Researching and writing this book has been a way for me to spend time in the place that I remember so fondly from my youth, and even though things have changed a lot since the eighteenth century, you would be surprised by how much has stayed the same, especially with respect to the landscapes.

What was it like writing the book together?

CV: Very enjoyable. It’s easy to collaborate when you both have very clear roles and are able to take responsibility for certain parts of the work and can feel safe that the rest will be taken care of. I took my initial idea for the story and developed it so that the major themes, characters and sequence of events were all well established.

RvR: My role was then to take the story, which at the time consisted mostly of dialogue and spanned about one hundred pages, and work in the descriptions that would support the structure that was already there. In the process, the events contained in the story changed and characters were lost or added. Whenever this happened, though, we would always work together to make sure that the new material was true to the underlying ideas of the original story.

Was it difficult deciding which facts to keep?

RvR: The funny thing about history is that it’s always just one version of events, and even the best historians cannot possibly record all the minutiae of the events in question. I guess that’s why we have a love of artefacts, as they are pieces of history that we can see and touch for ourselves without having to trust someone else’s description. Whilst the history of the period is interesting in itself because it has been written by such a small group of individuals from a very European point of view, the landscape in which the story is set is almost like one giant artefact — when you look at Table Mountain from Table Bay, you see pretty much the same mountain that was there in the time of the VOC, even though Cape Town itself has changed a little! What really excited us about this story was that it offered a chance to exploit the gaps that exist in recorded “factual” history and to harness the qualities of this magnificent landscape that you can still experience in much the same way as Masson and Thunberg did. What results is, we hope, a fiction that is given life and depth by the real world in which it is set.

And what of the mysterious Mr Burnette?

RvR: The story is true. Someone calling themselves Mr Burnette arrived in Madeira under a letter of recommendation signed by Sir Joseph Banks and was duly received as a guest of the British Consul in order to await the arrival of the
Resolution
. A chambermaid accidentally discovered the ruse: Mr Burnette was in fact a lady. But the Consul swore the maid to secrecy. Only days before the
Resolution
reached Madeira, news arrived that Banks was not aboard, and “Mr” Burnette left almost immediately, leaving behind a fantastic tale to be recorded in Cook’s letters. So while the real damsel returned to England, in our version she becomes Lady Jane, a free-spirited heroine and the bloom closest to Masson’s heart.

So Masson’s love story was imaginary?

CV: Who’s to say? After more than thirty years collecting plants, Francis Masson passed away in Montréal on 26 December, 1805. As far as we know, he never married, nor did he leave any heirs. He did leave a short, unassuming journal of his travels to the Cape, in which he speaks with great modesty of his encounter with lions. He also left behind fabulous drawings of the plants he discovered.