Birds of Paradise by Oliver Langmead (read any book .TXT) 📗

lowest of the low for his supposed depravity. Lesser men would have ended their life. Lesser men than my grandfather would have given in.

“But my grandfather went into hiding instead. He changed his name, and with the last of his money went to the Americas. There, at last, he escaped his curse. He prospered. He erected great orchards, and made a new fortune. He married, and his wife gave birth to my father. Then, only then, did he realise that the curse of his early life was not incorporeal. When he cast his memory back upon it, it was possible to see the malicious pattern of it. That there must have been an agent behind his systematic ruin. So, my grandfather decided to investigate. He sent private agents back through the ruins of his early life, to examine all the evidence and attribute it to somebody. Searching for the source of his supposed curse.

“And do you know what my grandfather found? He found a man. Or something pretending to be a man. It had been Martin Corvid haunting him, and deliberately causing him his every pain. Martin Corvid, spreading all the rumours, and causing all the mischief that was wrongly attributed to him, and turning everyone against him. So, my grandfather had Martin Corvid followed. And the reports were strange. Very strange. Because my grandfather’s agents all agreed that this Martin fellow was not entirely of the human race. That while outwardly he walked and talked like any man, he was in private a winged thing. A bird. And one of the lowliest among them. A wretched magpie.

“The mystery deepened when my grandfather returned to England and set careful watches on Martin Corvid. He saw that the bird who had haunted him so maliciously was busy, tremendously busy, with machinations involving strange and beautiful evergreen plants. That he was a collector, and that he was collecting a rare breed of undying flora. Fascinated by this revelation, my grandfather hired yet more investigators: forensic legal experts, to covertly examine the source of all of Martin Corvid’s funding, the prestigious Corvid & Corvid legal firm. And that’s where he found all the rest of them, hidden in Corvid & Corvid’s labyrinthine filing system. So many beasts of the earth and birds of the sky and fish of the sea, walking around, pretending to be people. A whole damned zoo of them. Then, at last, in the correspondence between two fowl, came the decisive clue to explain it all. They were reminiscing with each other about an ancient, lost place, you see. The place where they once lived. A biblical place. They even called it Eden.

“My grandfather, being the pious fellow that he was, realised what Martin Corvid was doing. He realised he was witnessing one of Eden’s wretched creatures trying to gather together the scattered pieces of its lost paradise.”

Frank Sinclair’s eyes widen. “That was when my grandfather decided to make his own collection. One not belonging to a mere scrabbling animal, but to a man. A man descended from you, Adam, and rightfully deserving of paradise. He went out to the depths of the Sahara following rumours of an immortal flower, and there found the rose. Eden’s rose. The rose you and your fowl stole from me.”

Frank Sinclair sighs, and leans back on his haunches in the mud. “But, I digress. You’re wondering why Martin Corvid haunted my grandfather. What my grandfather could have possibly done to deserve such a terrible curse. It took him a long time to realise. To remember that fateful day. Because it was such a slight thing. A childish, boyish act. My grandfather was at play in his garden, you see. Chasing cats with sticks. Flicking seeds at the chickens. Throwing rocks at the birds in the trees. And he remembered that he struck a magpie, that day. Hard enough that it fell from its perch. Hard enough that he ran away, in tears and repentance, convinced he had accidentally killed the thing. Hard enough that he prayed for that bird for a week afterwards. So small an act, Adam. So natural a thing for a boy at play to do. But I suppose it was portentous that such an unremarkable thing should eventually lead to such a remarkable discovery as my grandfather eventually made.

“Anyway. I should explain why I’m here.” He runs a hand through his rain-slicked hair, as if to casually style it. “I want you to see. I want you to watch as I take every last piece of Eden from you and your fowl. For the sake of what you did to my wife.

“Ada was such a timid girl, when I met her. Weighed down by her doubts. I remember the first day I saw her, in church. The pastor was making an extraordinary, impassioned speech, and she caught my eye because she was paying him no attention at all – she was staring instead at the sky through the window. I remember the way the sunshine fell on her, as if God himself were shining a spotlight on her. We spoke, afterwards. She believed in God, of course, but she had so many doubts in Him. She could never hear His voice through the sermons of the preachers, or even in the very words of His good book. When I showed her the rose, and told her what it was, it transformed her. Ada fell in love with Eden. And even when I told her my grandfather’s story, she didn’t want Magnus Corvid mounted on a wall – she wanted him caged, instead, so that she could admire him. She was always gentle, that way.

“Do you know how delighted she was, the day she found out that the first man was still alive? I still have an agent in Corvid & Corvid, you know. Monitoring the activity of that salacious firm. And when he brought us news that Adam himself was still wandering the Earth, we drank ourselves merry, and laughed