A Flower for the Queen: A Historical Novel

  I am sure Carl Thunberg, that eternal over-achiever and lover of tall tales, would have enjoyed reading about his doppelgänger. We stuck to his biography, merely adding a bit of flourish. He did it all: the mapping of the South African flora, the sneaking into Japan under the guise of a Dutch surgeon and, above all, his very own poignant homage to his great mentor. Carl Linnaeus’s garden, painstakingly recreated over twenty years by his famous disciple, still stands today in Uppsala, Sweden.

  Jack and his family, Masson’s mother, Constance, Boulton, Simmons, Schelling, Willmer and Eulaeus are all characters born out of our imagination, but our James Cook, Joseph Banks, Georg Forster (the younger) and Lord Sandwich are strictly loyal to their historical selves.

  One person who might be spinning in his grave, though, is poor old Johann Reinhold Forster: in truth, Captain Cook did not disembark him at the Cape, and he was never imprisoned on Robben Island. He continued with his son on their voyage of discovery around the globe with the Endeavour. But most scholars will agree with James Cook and Carl Thunberg on at least one point: Forster the elder was an authentic pain in the neck, and Cook might well have preferred our version of events.

  How did you come to write this book together?

  CV: It turns out that my husband, who is also a writer, happened to be the only South African in that French Atlantic village, which was lucky.

  So you brought your husband in because of his local knowledge?

  RvR: When Caroline first told me about the story, I couldn’t believe the coincidence. The place where Masson first discovered the Strelitzia was practically a stone’s throw away from the small seaside village on South Africa’s Eastern Cape coast where I spent my summers as a child. I hadn’t even known that the Strelitzia was indigenous to South Africa at all — some expert!

  But the more we talked about it, the more captivated I became, because I realised that there was even more to the story than just flowers. South Africa has a unique history, and the Eastern Cape, which at the time was frontier country, has an especially significant and rich story. For Caroline this was a story about treasure, but for me this was a chance to delve into the story of the land that I loved but which I left behind when I moved to Europe. Researching and writing this book has been a way for me to spend time in the place that I remember so fondly from my youth, and even though things have changed a lot since the eighteenth century, you would be surprised by how much has stayed the same, especially with respect to the landscapes.

  What was it like writing the book together?

  CV: Very enjoyable. It’s easy to collaborate when you both have very clear roles and are able to take responsibility for certain parts of the work and can feel safe that the rest will be taken care of. I took my initial idea for the story and developed it so that the major themes, characters and sequence of events were all well established.

  RvR: My role was then to take the story, which at the time consisted mostly of dialogue and spanned about one hundred pages, and work in the descriptions that would support the structure that was already there. In the process, the events contained in the story changed and characters were lost or added. Whenever this happened, though, we would always work together to make sure that the new material was true to the underlying ideas of the original story.

  Was it difficult deciding which facts to keep?

  RvR: The funny thing about history is that it’s always just one version of events, and even the best historians cannot possibly record all the minutiae of the events in question. I guess that’s why we have a love of artefacts, as they are pieces of history that we can see and touch for ourselves without having to trust someone else’s description. Whilst the history of the period is interesting in itself because it has been written by such a small group of individuals from a very European point of view, the landscape in which the story is set is almost like one giant artefact — when you look at Table Mountain from Table Bay, you see pretty much the same mountain that was there in the time of the VOC, even though Cape Town itself has changed a little! What really excited us about this story was that it offered a chance to exploit the gaps that exist in recorded “factual” history and to harness the qualities of this magnificent landscape that you can still experience in much the same way as Masson and Thunberg did. What results is, we hope, a fiction that is given life and depth by the real world in which it is set.

  And what of the mysterious Mr Burnette?

  RvR: The story is true. Someone calling themselves Mr Burnette arrived in Madeira under a letter of recommendation signed by Sir Joseph Banks and was duly received as a guest of the British Consul in order to await the arrival of the Resolution. A chambermaid accidentally discovered the ruse: Mr Burnette was in fact a lady. But the Consul swore the maid to secrecy. Only days before the Resolution reached Madeira, news arrived that Banks was not aboard, and “Mr” Burnette left almost immediately, leaving behind a fantastic tale to be recorded in Cook’s letters. So while the real damsel returned to England, in our version she becomes Lady Jane, a free-spirited heroine and the bloom closest to Masson’s heart.

  So Masson’s love story was imaginary?

  CV: Who’s to say? After more than thirty years collecting plants, Francis Masson passed away in Montréal on 26 December, 1805. As far as we know, he never married, nor did he leave any heirs. He did leave a short, unassuming journal of his travels to the Cape, in which he speaks with great modesty of his encounter with lions. He also left behind fabulous drawings of the plants he discovered.

  But his legacy is not limited to items that can be found in dusty archives. After all, he went to the ends of the earth so that we can now find the most exquisite treasures in our own gardens or at the counter of a local fishmonger’s.

  He also left us to imagine what his own dreams might have been as he was discovering new worlds and making history. But above all, he left us to wonder what part of a man’s life is most precious when that life has become a legend, when the journey has gone from ordinary to extraordinary. He left us to remember that, of all the battles and all the prizes won, the only one worth dying for is so ordinary and yet so elusive, one that can be lost and won in a heartbeat: love.