Under a Wild Sky (43 page)

The more imminent their reunion became, the more nervous Lucy was about it. Once Audubon was back in America, the pace of their correspondence quickened and the issues between them came into sharper focus. And it turned out that much of the trouble really
was
about money—a subject Audubon had belabored seemingly out of all proportion. But Lucy now took her turn.
Although she had begun packing and said she looked forward to joining him in England, she told Audubon that she wondered if he could truly afford an “idle wife.”
Lucy said that if she remained in her current teaching position at Beech Grove, she expected to earn $1,800 in the coming year. What, she wondered, did he think of that? Having been on the receiving end of Audubon's convoluted pleadings—for every time he'd begged her to join him there was a matching instance when he'd told her not to—Lucy now offered him an equally ambiguous proposition. She was packing, Lucy said, but was prepared to stay on at Bayou Sara if necessary. She hinted that the financial security of doing so was worth considering. Obstinately, she refused to say whether staying was or was not her preference. Instead, she insisted that Audubon decide, and that once he had made a careful “deliberation,” she would follow his wishes.
“You
must choose
what I shall do,” Lucy said. “In the meantime I am getting all in readiness till I hear from you again.”
Lucy added that her savings would amount to between $700 and $800 once her “accounts” were settled at the end of the current term, though she could not be absolutely sure of this. “I am not famous for my economy,” she wrote.

Lucy's wariness about Audubon's prospects was understandable. The
failure of his businesses in Henderson had plunged the family into poverty for nearly a decade, a period during which Audubon was mostly absent and making little more than token contributions to their support. Then, with a glimmer of success before him in England, Audubon had turned ambivalent.
“I thought that I would feel sufficiently settled, after balancing my accounts, to write to thee to come directly to England,” Audubon had written her more than a year ago, “and I hoped so the more, as I am really and truly in want not only of a
wife
, but of a kind and true friend, to consult and to help me by dividing with me a portion of my hard labours—yet thy entire comfort is the only principle that moves me, and fearing that thou might expect more than I can yet afford, I refrained.”

“I leave thee,” Audubon had concluded, “from my heart perfectly at liberty to do whatever may be most agreeable to thee.”

Lucy now demanded absolute clarity. If she joined Audubon in England, she expected that her days of providing for the family were over.

“I do not look to anything like labour after I give up these toils,” Lucy said. “Do not think me harsh . . . but it is absolutely necessary for our happiness to be
sincere
.”

Lucy's anxiety was not limited to financial worries. She hated the idea of traveling anywhere alone.
Lucy still hoped Audubon might come all the way to Louisiana for her, but if not he could send one of the boys down from Louisville to accompany her back upriver. More tellingly, Lucy also wrote to Audubon wondering how much they'd each changed.
When Audubon told her he'd cut his hair recently, Lucy answered that she was glad to hear it. It was, of course, quite handsome when long, she said, adding mysteriously that she didn't like to think of it long, as that brought “associations to mind which I wish ever to
bury.
” Whether Lucy was talking about some former intimacy between the two of them, or a painful recollection of someone else's fascination with her husband, Audubon presumably knew what she meant. As for herself, Lucy thought Audubon would find her not much like the sweet, shapely, dark-haired young woman he'd left more than three years ago.
In fact, she'd grown older in just the last few months and thought she might be entering menopause, though she could not yet be sure. Lucy said she felt she was likely to live many more years, but that was something she never took for granted.
“I live, and regulate all concerns relative to me as if I was to be called to the other world at any moment,” she said.

Independent of the outward changes going on with her, Lucy assured
Audubon that she still loved him and always would.
“I am gray quite,” she said. “No teeth and thinner than ever I was and of course older. But my heart [and] my head [are] the same and yours ‘for better and worse' as the saying is.”

Lucy, however, was unsure that Audubon could say the same. She wondered if Audubon's anxiousness about money was covering up something else. Did he, she now wanted to know, still love her?

“You say you must not speak as a ‘man in love,'” she wrote to him. “I do not see why, if you do love, which there seemed some doubt of . . . I beg of you my husband to be plain and clear in your reply. If any circumstance has occurred to change your affection for me as you rather insinuate be explicit and let me remain where I am.”

Audubon changed his mind about going to Washington.
Instead he collected his gun and dog and got on a coach for Pittsburgh in late October. At Pittsburgh he transferred to a steamboat headed down the Ohio River, the once-adventurous passage now a regularly scheduled boat ride. At Louisville a few days later, Audubon rushed to the countinghouse run by Lucy's younger brother William, where Victor was working.
Victor was so much taller and more mature-looking than he remembered that Audubon at first did not recognize him. Now he began to feel a pull he hadn't anticipated. After a few days visiting with Victor and Johnny, Audubon caught another steamboat, this one bound for Louisiana. Late one night in the middle of November, Audubon arrived at Bayou Sara, and once again made his way through the dark to Lucy's apartment.
At dawn he walked in on her, tears streaming down his cheeks.

With Lucy at his side again, Audubon was now focused completely on the work ahead of him in England.
One of the subscriptions he'd managed to sell in America was to the United States Congress, which he and Lucy had visited on their way to New York. They'd also had a brief audience with Andrew Jackson that must have reminded Audubon of how far he'd come since he'd posed as the president's body double years earlier.

Before leaving Victor and Johnny in Louisville, Audubon had drafted his will, virtually all of which concerned the continuation or disposal of
The Birds of America
in the event that he died before it was finished. Thoughts of death often came to Audubon just before an ocean crossing. He would leave it up to the boys, and to Lucy if she survived him,
whether to press on with Havell or to abandon the project and sell off all of his original drawings. Audubon was meanwhile preoccupied with worry about the engravings.
Children had written to say that Havell was working hard in his absence, but that Audubon should not stay in America a day longer than necessary. Children, fretfully monitoring the quality of the colored prints, had lately enlisted a friend from the British Museum to assist him. But only Audubon could really do the job.

Audubon wrote to Havell that he and Lucy expected to sail for Liverpool in early April, after a brief rest in Louisville. Mrs. Audubon, he said, was in good health but her “frame is delicate.” Meanwhile, Audubon assured his engraver that he was taking full advantage of his time in America, having traveled some four thousand miles in the past two months. Audubon said he'd made a number of new drawings, shot and skinned lots of birds, shipped tree and shrub samples to England, and had managed to capture fourteen opossums and a “beautiful male turkey,” which he had already sent to friends in Liverpool.

After they got to England, Lucy briefly went to stay with relatives in Liverpool while Audubon devoted himself to collecting moneys due and attempting to woo back lapsed subscribers—managing pretty well on both counts.
When the Audubons finally got to London they got the unexpected good news that Audubon had been elected to membership in the Royal Society just months before.
He went to a meeting and paid his dues of $225, taking a seat in the society's long meeting room and feeling quite out of place among the institution's past and present luminaries. He was well aware of the shock wave news of his election would generate back in America, especially in Philadelphia.
George Ord, who had been conveniently abroad during much of the time Audubon was in Philadelphia the previous spring, had stopped in London and visited the Royal Society. The thought of Ord picturing Audubon rubbing shoulders with the society's august membership was delicious for Audubon.
He immediately directed Havell to place the initials F.R.S.—Fellow of the Royal Society—first among the growing list of honorifics that followed his name on each plate of
The Birds of America.
A short while later, Dr. Harlan back in Philadelphia wrote to say that Audubon's election to the Royal Society had “confounded your traducers” and produced some “cadavourous stares” at the Academy of Natural Sciences, but that many people there had been happy for him.

Havell was by now at work on the seventeenth Number, bringing the
total count of drawings engraved to eighty-five.
Havell sent Audubon a note updating him on plates currently being colored. Page by page, Audubon's birds were multiplying—flying and attacking and perching daintily on the great white planes of Havell's double-elephant-sized paper.
The paper itself—heavy linen stock from the J. Whatman Company—was thick and textured and amazingly durable. Audubon's original prints remain sturdy and supple today, after almost two hundred years. Each Number was shipped in a flat tin case. Eventually, most subscribers chose to have the prints bound in enormous leather volumes, each consisting of around one hundred plates.

Audubon learned after arriving back in England that many of the lapsed subscriptions were due to disappointment with the quality of the printing work, which he discovered had eroded in his absence. While Lucy visited her relatives in Liverpool, Audubon toured several English cities and got an earful. Mostly, people were unhappy with the finishing of the plates, especially the hand-coloring, which had become careless and in some cases unnatural-looking.
Worst of all was a scathing letter from Charles-Lucien Bonaparte, echoing these complaints and also adding that some of the legends to the plates contained errors in the common and scientific names of the birds depicted. Audubon remained desperate for Bonaparte's approval, even though the prince had moved to Rome for good and was, at least in theory, a competitor because of his continued work on the expansion of Wilson's
American Ornithology.
Enraged, Audubon wrote to Havell insisting that he fire his letter engraver, and demanding an “overhaul” of all the coppers to correct engraving errors, plus a much closer supervision of the coloring.
Chagrined at not having caught the mistakes himself, Audubon said he'd hung all of the Numbers up on a wall and was horrified at their unevenness.
He warned Havell that if his firm could not fix the plates and improve the prints, he was prepared to abandon
The Birds of America
and “return to my Own Woods until I leave this World for a better one.”

Stung, Havell fired back. He was “extremely hurt” by the tone of Audubon's letter. He granted that perhaps a few subscribers might have reason to complain, but he was not aware of any dissatisfaction among the London subscribers. And he insisted he could not believe the small corrections that were needed would impede future sales.

There may have been another reason for the growing uneasiness some
subscribers felt about Audubon's work. During his visit to England in the spring of 1829, George Ord had renewed his attack on Audubon to anyone who would listen, and apparently some people did.
Swainson sent Audubon a sarcastic note complaining about several people—including Charles-Lucien Bonaparte—in which he said he was “sick of the world and of mankind.”

“Another
friend
of yours has been in England,” Swainson said. “Mr. Ord . . . has been doing you all the
good
he can: if these are samples of American Naturalists, defend me from ever coming in contact with any of their whole race.”

Ord had written to Alexander Lawson—the Philadelphia engraver who'd dismissed Audubon's drawings out of hand—that Audubon was not entitled to the kind of success he was enjoying, and this was beginning to sink in. Ord went on to say that he himself had “long ago predicted this result” and reminded Lawson that he had shared this opinion. Ord was amazed that Audubon could find anyone willing to engrave his drawings, since “no one of taste and knowledge can behold these monstrous engravings without feelings of dissatisfaction, if not of contempt.” Lawson's work, meanwhile, was much admired throughout London, Ord said. His recent plates for Bonaparte had caused a stir in London when they had been compared to Audubon's. So simple and elegant were the prints made for the prince, said Ord, that people were reassessing their estimation of Audubon. An uncolored proof of one of Lawson's engravings he had personally presented to the British Museum had been judged better than anything being produced in England, colored or not. Ord said he was now convinced that Audubon's reputation was in steep decline, and that “many of those who have afforded their patronage to the contemptible imposter, will blush to think that they ever made his acquaintance.”

Lucy had joined Audubon on his trip to repair the subscription list, which took him north through Birmingham, Leeds, York, and Newcastle. She was thrilled to see England again, and impressed by the industrial advances in evidence everywhere. In Manchester she and Audubon toured a cotton mill seven stories high that employed nine hundred people.
Lucy wrote about it to Victor and Johnny, describing an amazing contraption—a
“platform” in the middle of the building that rose at a “good speed” when they stood on it, stopping at each floor as it went. The machine conveyed them back down the same way, “rather faster” though not disagreeably so.