Peacock and blossom branch drawing

The bird came off the Plymouth steamer in the spring of 1931, in a crate stencilled Fragile, Not Fowl. Captain Amos Tregear had bought it in Colombo from a trader who swore it could count to nine. Amos never got it to count anything but the herrings on the quay, but it screamed at the sea every dawn and the gulls learned to leave the north wing alone. We called it Admiral. It was the only creature in Carrow Bay that ever looked a visitor straight in the eye and didn't blink.

Mrs Tregear planted a cherry tree against the garden wall that first summer, and the Admiral took to walking its lowest branch at blossom time, slow as a verger, shaking petals loose. Guests who came in with a story that didn't hold up would find a single feather on their pillow in the morning. Nobody asked what it meant. Nobody needed to. Mr Pell, the insurance man, left in a hurry one Tuesday with a feather tucked in his hatband and a cheque he'd been too proud to hand over.

When Amos drowned off the Dogger, the widow kept the bird and kept the feathers too, a drawer of them, each one with its eye turned up. She told me once, the year before she died, that the ninth eye on the longest feather was still blank. Waiting, she said, for whoever at supper last told the truth without being asked. I've been watching that table for forty years, love. Eight of them have never owned a thing. So go on and tell me your name, and we'll see whether the bird finds you worth the ink.