Creation (13 page)

Anonyme cocks his head; the black beads that are his eyes glisten.

“Bad luck! Bad luck! Bad luck!” Audubon’s visions of fire at sea, of flailing until he sinks under the frigid grey water, of his drawings washed out and flung on the winds, all these are conjured by the pilot. The knowledge that he is in Godwin’s power is enraging.

He paces.

The raven paces, too, on Audubon’s wrist, lifting and placing his feet as if kneading the man’s flesh. He caws gently, craning his neck. Only when Audubon talks does the tame bird become silent.

“You are still young,” the artist murmurs to the bird. “But when you are my age you will notice how strange are the circles of life, that I should encounter a man who worked for Vincent Nolte here, in this place. It is strange but it is not meaningless. I fear some evil pursues me.”

Anonyme stretches his head, nudging the artist’s finger from underneath. Audubon lifts and turns the bird’s head so that its black eyes are directed toward his lips and about six inches away. “Bodes ill,” he says again.

“Bodes,” says the raven.

Audubon smiles and rewards the bird with a piece of bread. “The globe is a smaller place today than it was a decade ago. The man who
is disconcerted by the closing of these distances is he who resists capture. The man whose truth is out there, in the wild.”

The bird rests his beak on the very edge of the man’s lips. “Anonyme,” says Audubon. “You have been taken from your element.”

He feels a sudden, intense pity for the raven. Its name suits it much more than it had his poor cousin, long ignored in France. But he regrets bringing the bird, and the name, on this journey.

He likes the past to stay behind him, not to loop forward and menace him from the front. Nolte’s reappearance threatens him: but why should it? He tries to see this coincidence as other than a bad omen. It was Nolte’s kind introduction, after all, that had led him to the Rathbones, in Liverpool, and the Rathbones to his first success in England. It was pure luck that he came upon Nolte in the first place, and better luck that he approached him for aid before the cotton market collapsed. If he is frightened by the spectre of Vincent Nolte it is because the merchant personifies the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And most tellingly, the man saw through him. Recognized him as kin. Saw through to his inferiority. And appeared to like Audubon nonetheless. It puzzles him and it shames him.

W
ITH THE WEST WIND IN ITS SAILS
, the
Ripley
flies up the coast. Audubon is young again and riding hard on that little Indian pony, Barro, that he bought for Lucy for twenty dollars. Racing on a trail along a high ridge in the Allegheny Mountains, he came upon another rider. The man wore beautiful oxblood leather boots and sat on a tall, glossy stallion. They were going the same way. The stranger suggested a race to a little inn in Laurel Hill. Whoever got there first would buy dinner. Audubon arrived and saw nothing of the man so he went to bed, certain that he’d won.

He was having breakfast the next morning when the landlady asked could a gentleman join his table: it was very cold and he was by the fire. The tall man with the oxblood boots entered the room, hearty, handsome and wearing a topcoat. He realized how rich Nolte was when he said he’d had to bail out Congress, which had promised Lafayette two hundred thousand dollars but had no money to give
him. When he asked Audubon about his nationality, the artist said he was an Englishman. After all, he had married Lucy.

“You are no more English than you are American,” roared Nolte into the stillness of the breakfast room. “You are French and not a regular Frenchman at that!”

Audubon admitted it. It turned out the merchant had his own confused background, Italian and German and Swedish all mixed together and descended from an Austrian deserter to France. He too had become an American through the Louisiana Purchase. But Nolte had succeeded in business where Audubon failed; Nolte had connections with everyone from Napoleon on down. Encouraged by the other man’s bluster to tell his own tales, Audubon made his father an admiral, and his painting teacher, David, the king’s drawing master.

“David. He’s the clever one, changing horses midstream,” said Nolte, peering at Audubon. “First the king’s painter, then Napoleon’s.”

Audubon had to admit he was out of touch.

“When were you born?”

“The year 1785. The same year,” he smiled exquisitely and sadly, “as the little lost dauphin.”

“Where?”

“In Paris, of course.” It was easy to plant the hint; he’d done it before. The son of the beheaded king and queen was just his age. “But I was taken away by the family members who survived. For a time I was imprisoned. That’s how I came to love the birds. My keeper made me an aviary so that I could watch them. They were free, and I was not.”

But he had told this story to the wrong man; he often did.

He and Nolte rode together all the way to Lexington. Audubon showed him the few bird portraits he carried. Nolte squinted at them and asked why he didn’t paint classical subjects. “You’d find more ready buyers than with birds. Or go around to the military camps and paint the generals and heroes of the day. There’s a market there.” Nolte confessed that he had wanted to be an artist, but his father discouraged him. “You will have to feed on crusts,” the old man said.

When they parted, Nolte revealed he was no ordinary victim of Audubon’s charm.

“There are men who cannot tell the truth,” Nolte had said as they shook hands. “There are men who, if they tell you they are lying, are still lying, so that only a fool would believe them. It is a mark of genius, and I would never accuse such a man of chicanery. I believe scarcely a thing you say, but you have entertained me well. I wish you good luck with your paintings. You will need an iron will and much perseverance, but I suspect you know that already. Good day to you, sir.”

Audubon had stood awash, first with a kind of delight in being seen through, and then with regret that pride would likely prevent him ever seeing the man again.

But that pride had deserted him when he was desperate.

When Lucy was a governess at Bayou Sarah and Audubon was living on crusts, he went to New Orleans. He knew Nolte was in the town. He even saw him in the streets, so tall, so charged with energy, followed by this one and that to do his bidding. We met as equals once, thought Audubon, fading into the shadow of the public house where he stayed. He was ashamed to look him up.

Later, armed with his dream and Lucy’s savings, he humbled himself before Nolte. He told him that the Americans mocked him, and that he must launch himself in Europe to make his book.

Nolte was no less amused than he had been the first time they met. He offered an introduction to his partner Richard Rathbone, a Quaker cotton merchant in Liverpool. “Please do all you can to help this fine artist,” he wrote, “of European birth and well connected.”

Audubon wonders now if Godwin had been there at that meeting, lurking in the background, out of the candlelight? Did he watch the rough frontiersman; did he wonder if he was a danger to the rich?

W
ITH HIS PORTFOLIO
and his box of watercolours, a fugitive from debt and a disappointment to his family, he boarded the
Delos
, bound from New Orleans to Liverpool, on the 27th of May, 1827. He carried Nolte’s letter to prove that he was a man of consequence. There were other letters, but now, looking back, they did not matter at all.

Boarding, he was fired as if from a cannon into his future, the one he must invent. Then the wind failed and the
Delos
sat, becalmed, just out of the harbour. He was frightened of what he would find in Europe; he had been schooled by the scorn of the Americans, who smelled something suspect in him. He read Byron’s
The Corsair
and identified with the hero. “Feared, shunned, belied, ere youth had lost her force.”

He watched dolphins leap around the ship. The sailors caught a shark that had ten live sharks inside, only one of which made its slippery way out into the sea and away. He took this as an omen and conjured the multiplication of his successes.

He drew terns, warblers, green herons. He wrote in his diary. Sat, sat, sat, with no wind and a heart that was sad, excited, torn and set. He fretted for Lucy and his children: he imagined what disasters might befall them without his protection. He was occasionally stricken with horror that he should be so bold as to try to conquer England, grand England, whose language he butchered daily.

W
HEN AT LAST THERE WAS WIND
and the
Delos
began to fly, it was as if the sails had filled with his own fear. The wind carried them south and across the equator. “Why south?” he asked the Captain.

“To catch the favourable trade winds.”

To go east, to Europe, he had to go south, to the world of his past, of his island birthplace. In his diary he alluded to this southern place as his home, to this mixing of dark and brilliant sun, to the remembered yellow, red and turquoise. To his name: Jean Rabin, Creole of Santo Domingo.
Obscene child
,
born of whoredom
: that is the language of the law. He was created by heedless behaviour, and kept by connivance. A man such as he made his way in the world only by a constant application of will.

The captain of the
Delos
taught him a little navigation. What were Bayfield’s words? Where I stand, where I strive to be and the fixed point which defines the two.

T
HE WIND CARRIED
him eastward. When it dropped, he was set down.

At British customs his drawings were passed from hand to hand
and examined with dull prurience; his work was declared American (little did they know!), and payment of fourteen pence per pound exacted. Beyond the customs house he was free.

Liverpool delighted him, viewed from the water. But when he stepped on land he discovered that the air was black with coal smoke. It was a black that stayed on every window, and soon filled his own throat. He hoisted his portfolio to his shoulders, and strode from door to door. Many of the people he had letters to, including Lucy’s relatives, snubbed him. He forgot their names. They were insignificant. None of it mattered — not the waiting, the cold-eyed servants, the quizzical matrons — because Nolte’s letter to the Rathbones bore fruit. The Rathbones took him to their bosom overnight; the children clustered at his knee and pulled his long coiled locks, the women fanned themselves and extended to him the clever little tendrils of conversation that only ladies can invent.

And praise! They exclaimed over his drawings. The mother was called the Queen Bee. The daughter was Hannah Mary. A sense came on him the instant they met: she was his kin; she saw into his heart. When he showed his drawings, when he made the sounds of the wild birds, and told his tales of adventures in the wilderness, Hannah Mary was stirred. She giggled when he leapt a gate rather than open it. She called him spider legs. His strength, gained from days on horseback and week-long walks, could be tamed for a cotillion and his touch was delicate enough for a cup of fine china, his eye sophisticated enough to see the beauty in old books. Her too-frank brown eyes could not hide her feelings, could not leave his. In her presence he knew himself to be a conquering hero. And he was comforted. The shore was not so strange.

It was, of course, the world of Lucy’s past he was seeing. He wrote to her, describing the delights of Hannah’s person, her slowness and grace, the low and musical constancy of her voice. He told Lucy she would love Hannah, and the Queen Bee, and described to her the musical evenings and the games of cards. His joy flowed back to him, joy in the shapes, sounds of English hills and English houses, English birds and English talk. He saw himself in Hannah’s eyes, and the vision gave him courage.

He drank up his hosts’ affection like a man who has been lost in a desert and suddenly finds water. In America, there had been a pressing sense of familiarity, a dangerous tendency to bring him down to the level of others, to bring in information from his history. But here in England he had none. The behaviour of ten years before, or twenty, was of no interest. He was remaking himself; all that mattered was what he would be.

He lied, although it did not feel like lying. His father was that admiral. He himself studied with David. He did not calculate these lies, he merely applied them. He told the story that the moment required. There was no way to stop. He had no control over his lies, if that is what they were; they were impulses.

And yet he did not always lie. He told the truth one night to Hodgson, Rathbone’s partner. Hodgson, who also had a letter of introduction from Nolte, had invited Audubon to his country house; the painter spent a night. He watched the children say their prayers, and played French lullabies on his flageolet for them. Before bed, he confided to his host that he was Haitian: Jean Rabin, Creole of Santo Domingo.

A secret is a seed; it lies in darkness until it meets its season. Scattered carelessly, it most often dies. But rarely, it finds a hospitable place where it swells and sets down roots. Hodgson was surprised but not concerned by the news; he noted it in his diary and went to sleep. When the artist began to attract admiring notices in the press, Hodgson might have denounced him as a liar. He did not. Instead he left this puzzling contradiction of nativity to lie in his leather note-book, where it might have turned to dust but where, instead, it came to light a century and a half later. Perhaps he understood. Audubon lied but he sometimes told the truth and that was the trouble. Perhaps Hodgson saw that Audubon was doomed to a lifetime of arriving, of using every fibre of his considerable will to win over the stranger.

T
HE NEXT DAY AUDUBON
was gone before dawn to walk through the fields to the seashore, and finally home to Rathbones. He returned to Hannah Rathbone’s loving eyes, her hands laid in his open palms
and he, facing her, square-shouldered and almost of a size. He did not tell Hannah his secret. He could not risk the loss of her good opinion. One can never have too much love.