A Flower for the Queen: A Historical Novel (32 page)

Next to the gate, hanging from one of the moss-covered pillars that supported the gates was hung a simple wooden sign with a single word:
LINNAEUS
. The simple block letters had been etched into the wood, painted black on a white background that had begun to peel. Underneath the sign, the lichen had recently been scratched away, and two words had been etched into the cracked and crumbling stone. An epitaph of sorts, written in crude, jagged strokes:
PRINCEPS BOTANICUS
, or Prince of Botanists
.

Immediately beyond the gate lay three ponds which had once formed the grand entrance to the garden’s main boulevard, but now were only partly filled with putrid water home to swarms of mosquitoes. The boulevard divided the garden into two main parts, each enclosed by a hedge that had become unkempt and overgrown. Within the hedge borders lay the two halves of Linnaeus’s legendary botanical garden — flooded and utterly ruined.

Thunberg leaned against the gates and tried to force them open, but a rusty chain held them shut. He walked along the fence to where it abutted a two-storey, dilapidated stone house that squatted by the side of the street. Between the wall of the house and the edge of the fence, he found a hole that he was able to climb through.

He picked his way along the wet alleys of the garden and stopped to look at what had become of the thousands of shrubs and flowers that had been lovingly collected, labelled and planted according to their taxon. He kneeled down to examine the broken and decaying stems, searching for anything that might be salvageable and then simply for any signs of life. Most of the wooden sticks that bore the names of the plants lay in the mud, broken and illegible. Snails and weeds covered everything.

He surveyed the garden and knew that the extent of the damage was so severe that nothing could be done. If only he had come back earlier. He turned and walked back, head down, towards the hole in the fence, but this time taking the longer route past the orangery.

And then he saw it.

A bloom so white that it leapt out from all the sodden debris. Somehow it had survived in the broken glass in a corner of the greenhouse, even as it was on the verge of being strangled by a thorny weed.

Thunberg delicately removed the weed. When this was done, he saw that the flower was his jewel from Paarl. Amongst all the destruction, it alone had survived. Then he saw the wooden label that lay in the pile of broken glass. It was newer than the others, and after cleaning the mud off it, Thunberg read the name that Linnaeus had written in his own, steady hand:
Gardenia
Thunbergia
.

In that very moment, the explorer felt a knife in his heart. His fingers, still burning from the touch of the cold earth, seemed to be holding more than a flower. Suddenly they were cradling something even lighter, even more delicate: the idea of a whole new world.

Thunberg replaced the label in the pot, picked up the plant and left the orangery, stopping one last time to look at the garden, the immense sea of broken stems and new beginnings.

C
ANADA
, 21 N
OVEMBER
21

“Although the floods and neglect had made sure that Linnaeus’s garden could not be salvaged, many of the plants themselves were saved or resurrected. Thunberg convinced the King to donate his own private garden as a replacement and then set about rebuilding Linnaeus’s garden as a testament not only to the greatest botanist that had ever lived, but also to the man he considered a father.

“His greatest wish had not been the pursuit of adventure or the fulfilment of some great destiny, he simply craved recognition from the man that he admired above all others. It was Linnaeus that had sent him to Paris to become a surgeon, and it was Linnaeus who sent him to the Cape so that he could pass as a Dutchman in order to travel to Japan. Linnaeus had been at the root of every significant choice in Thunberg’s life, and when he came back from his travels a hero, rather than bathe in the glory of an adoring King and public, he simply wanted to feel the warm embrace of a proud smile, a firm handshake and a fatherly, ‘Well done!’

“He knew then that his true calling lay in continuing the work that Linnaeus had started and stone by stone, flower by flower, leaf by leaf, he re-built the garden from its ruins and dedicated himself to ensuring the continued survival of Linnaeus’s work. Kingdoms pass from generation to generation, but ultimately they are lost to history. But Thunberg’s legacy, and the knowledge that we have gained from the plants that surround us, will live on for all time.”

The room went silent as a gust of wind rattled the windows.

“Does that help your story, Jack?” asked the old man.

All eyes turned to Jack, who had stopped writing and was now looking wistfully out of the window.

“When you write it, you won’t forget the lion, will you Jack?” said Robert.

Jack smiled wryly before replying to his younger brother. “It seems that the lions are about the only thing there is to write about.”

“Come, come, Jack. It’s not as bad as all that!” George Grant walked over and stood next to his son, putting his hand on his shoulder. “You know, sometimes you just have to write the story as you find it. It may not be what you want to hear, but then they seldom are, are they?”

“But what about the flower, Mr Masson — did you take it to England? Did you meet the King? Did you tell him about the lions? What about your garden?” asked Robert effusively.

“The world of science kept its promise and named the flower Strelitzia Reginae, in honour of our Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. And Banks was at least true to his word — I did get all that was promised to me,” Masson said with a sad smile.

K
ENT
, J
UNE
1773

The Tor-grass had yellowed and the wildflowers had been burned away by an unrelenting summer sun and a reluctant sky that refused to shower the ground with rain. But the angry clouds that gathered on the horizon promised a deluge that would at last bring relief from the drought. A rough fence comprising some rope and wooden stakes had marked out a parcel of land upon which men and women gathered and talked in jovial tones around makeshift tables bedecked with cakes and tea.

A hastily painted sign had been leaned against one of the fencepoles that bordered the road read, “Masson’s Nursery”. Children played games in their Sunday best, trying to make the most of the day before the rain sent them indoors. At the centre of the gathering, lavished by every guest with praise and congratulations on both his achievements overseas and his upcoming nuptials, stood Francis Masson. Never leaving his side, beaming with pride, was his fiancée, Constance Everidge.

Masson had set foot on English soil only a week before and had arrived in Hollingbourne that very morning. He had little time to grieve for the death of his mother, as a surprise party had been organised by Constance and her mother to celebrate his return. He was surrounded by family and friends. He was rich, and his garden dream had come true. And after three months at sea, he was home.

And yet never in his life had he felt more out of place.

Constance was practically out of breath from chatting to all the guests, giddy with the glory of being the woman of the hour, waltzing from group to group, dragging her reluctant fiancé behind.

His attention kept drifting away from the incessant blather around him to the neatly demarcated fields and paddocks of his homeland. He was struck by how, in the Cape, one was always in sight of some piece of wilderness; there was a constant battle to tame the earth, and if the fight was paused only for a moment, the surrounding wilderness would instantly reclaim any encroachments that had been made.

Even in its sun-bleached state, the English landscape differed vastly from the one he had just recently left. Here, the chalky rock, exposed in crumbling patches on the hillsides, seemed to give so easily of itself, nourishing the downs and giving them their vibrancy and variety as they blended and feathered into the land. Whereas the massive strata of Cape sandstone and granite had seemed always to be in the process of a titanic struggle, resisting the elements and giving nothing back to the land except that which was wrenched from them by incredible force. Everything was bigger there. Land, sky, and life itself.

The clarity of the picture in his mind of that last day in the Cape was matched only by the pain that pierced his breast and spread through every cell in his body every time he thought of it. The memory of Jane had invaded his being. That sunrise, that touch, her lips. How could a mere memory be so potent, so real? Sadness and elation blended together to form a melancholic brew that, for Constance’s sake, he did his best to hide.

When Constance’s mother pulled her daughter aside to discuss the plans for the wedding, Masson excused himself and wandered over to the patch of woodland, finding respite on the great stump of an oak that now lay in the shade of a hornbeam.

Since leaving Cape Town, he was never without his journal. Here, safe from the curiosity of Constance and the guests, he pulled it from his pocket and let it fall open at the page upon which Jane’s portrait was sketched and which yanked at his heart every time he looked upon it.

That morning, Masson had received a letter from Thunberg carried by the VOC ship
Jonge Thomas
, which had left Cape Town the week after Masson had departed but had been held up after being damaged in a storm in the Bay of Biscay. Thunberg told Masson that Jane had obtained passage on an English merchant vessel, the
Swallow
. After taking account of the delays suffered by the
Jonge Thomas
, and assuming that the
Swallow
had not suffered any misadventures of her own, Masson calculated that Jane would be disembarking within a week at Plymouth.

As he followed the lines of black ink, he could still feel the weight of the reed pen in his fingers and the tug of the paper on its nib as the light from that last sunrise reflecting off of her face had unlocked his hand and allowed it to fly unrestrained and unhindered across the page.

A stab of panic caused him to gasp as he realised that already the ink had started to fade. But what had not faded, but had instead been perfectly preserved as if suspended in time and space, was the intensity of emotion that he had felt as his hand traced out the lines of her face, not at the will of his mind, but at the bequest of his heart.

Afraid that the emotion would overwhelm him, he put the journal down on the stump and turned and walked a few paces until he was out of the reach of the cooling shade of the hornbeam and once more within the warming embrace of the sun. As he had done countless times since leaving the Cape, he closed his eyes and allowed the afterimage of the drawing to coalesce in the cauldron of his memory until all that remained in his mind’s eye was the perfect image of the woman he had left behind.

“Francis? Francis?”

Masson was yanked from his reverie by Constance, who was standing next to the stump, her face dappled by the shadows that were cast by the branches of the hornbeam. Merriment had seized the party, and the star attraction of the gathering was no longer the young couple but instead the antics of a few happy farmers, made happier by a little too much of the local cider. But as Constance stepped towards him, holding out his journal, he saw that it was still open and that Jane’s portrait was gazing out at them both.

Constance numbly asked, “Were there many flowers like this on your travels?”

He paused before answering. “No. There was only one,” he said, so softly that it almost did not carry above the sound of the wind.

Upon hearing his answer, Constance turned her back on him, wiping away the tears that coursed down her cheeks. Masson was rendered immobile, torn between the instinctive urge to comfort Constance and the knowledge that if he did, he would be helping to renew a lie — a lie that had been thrust upon him not by a desire for happiness or fulfilment, but by fear. Fear that he would disappoint his mother and follow in the footsteps of a father he had too hastily condemned as reckless.

“Will there be any others?” she asked, her back still to him.

Before he could answer, a sudden, grave truth descended upon him. It was as if his world had been cleaved by a woodsman’s axe.

“No,” he said with a certainty that crushed him. He had felt that fate had set a curse upon him when he went to the Cape, but he now saw without the faintest hint of uncertainty that it had not been a curse, but rather a gift. And he had spurned it. After a few moments, Constance straightened her shoulders, pushed out her chin and then closed the journal and put it back on the stump.

“Well, then,” she said, her voice regaining its strength with every breath, “there’s no need to speak of it any further, is there?”

Masson knew that at that moment he would have to choose between accepting the life that had been made for him and the love that he had turned away from but which would be arriving in Plymouth in only a few days’ time.

“When I left, Mr Boulton said something to me that I did not understand,” he said. “He told me that it was who I was when I came back that would be important, not the man I was when I left.”

He paused. Constance’s bright smile was beginning to fade at the corners as confusion crept onto her face. “A trip like this, it changes a man. And coming back …” His voice faded as he gathered up the strength to say what had to be said.

“I want to do the right thing, Constance. I don’t want to hurt you, but I … I cannot marry you.” He looked at her and expected the inevitable reaction, but instead there was nothing. It was as if she had not heard. The only trace of comprehension was the ever-so-slight shaking of her head as the meaning of his words slowly penetrated and then shattered the armour of her joy.