The Dale Heron

Part 3 - The Ornithologist's Townhouse

That the boy found his way to London is likely no surprise to you; I have told you myself that I came from there. How the thing happened specifically is unclear to me – maybe the brocade of old Cowslip curtains was draped across an oversized birdcage, likely some awkwardness and barking shrieks on a north-south train, refusals turned into acceptances by cash-flashed hackneys and the like – but by 17 the boy was living in the home of an ornithologist who worked at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. It was a spectacular white townhouse in a long row of spectacular white townhouses on a road parallel to Palace Green. Rust-painted rooms stuffed with the glories and detritus of ancestral Grand Tours. Emerald-painted dens lined like piano keys with two-metre high mirrors and mahogany bookshelves. A marble-based double-height entryway in mustard yellow flooded by sunlight from the pyramidal glass above, bestowing an artistic shadow to the lines of Kairos, busts and urns.

Most magnificently, at the back of the townhouse stood an appended behemoth of an orangery of Moorish design, tiled in mosaics. There were fountains and hothouse specimens, even the more commonly evolved plants that were similar but different to Bridbydale's. It was in this large hundred-paned greenhouse with retractable roof that Ardea, under the ever-present affection and care of her father and a specialist in the care of birdlife, lived the next three years.

Ardea spent her first months learning every part of it: the crook of shade under a row of four lemon trees, trunks sunken below floor level in an Alhambra fashion, to escape August suns; the ferny mound at the back where she would hunt, beak to tight to the ground, the dormice and small grey squirrels her father would set loose every week; the large central platform clad in a glistening calacatta oro tile, like the centre of a hammam, where her long neck would arch upwards to the sky as she danced until weariness took her as her biology told her she must.

Yet, it was just one room. A grand one, certainly, and ten times bigger than the cottage rooms in Bridbydale, but the same four walls day after day. Often, after her tiring dances, a natural ritual she was incapable of resisting, Ardea would perch at the edge of a fountain, looking up with a sad fascination as seagulls or pigeons would cross the bit of sky visible through the glass roof, a feeling embedded within her that she had no hope of articulating.

At some point, I suspect at the ornithologist's request, Ardea's father, for that is how she viewed him, began leave the townhouse for several hours each Wednesday evening to pick up the essentials for her care. Both reluctant at first, having been scantly separated since her birth, a routine became established, and Ardea learned to savour those hours in her own company encased though she was in a well-appointed prison.

Soon, though, the ornithologist began returning home from the museum earlier each Wednesday, the smell of alcohol on his breath, accompanied by one sometimes two young men each time who he befriended at the museum, luring them to the townhouse with the promise to see a truly magnificent creature caged within, maybe two if they were lucky – wink wink. Stumbling over the orangery tile, hazardously balanced arm-over-shoulder of that day's companion, the ornithologist would first point at Ardea's component parts, then poke at her and stretch out her wings for inspection, then kick at her spindle legs. With surprising dexterity, he could do all this while drunkenly nibbling at the ear of his friend, sniffing at their cologne or nuzzling against their curled locks, before disappearing from the room with them. The muted moans would follow soon after, heard distantly behind locked doors.

On one such visitation, a cherub-faced young man begged from pouted lips to see Ardea fly, fitfully lunging to spook her. The ornithologist tapped the man's nose, a flirtatious telling-off, saying, "No. No. No. Bad boy," with a leery grin. The disappointed young man pressed himself against the ornithologist, rubbing the front of the older man's trousers with an impish "Pleeeease." Not wanting to disappoint this other beautiful specimen, the ornithologist went to the wall and depressed the retractable roof release, eyeing the young man with a sustained bite on his lower lip.