Chapter 32

“There’s nothing said about the bird in Lady Francis Verney’s _Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century_, to be sure. I looked. And it’s pretty certain that Sir Francis didn’t have the bird when he died in a Messina hospital in 1615. He was stony broke. But, sir, there’s no denying that the bird _did_ go to Sicily. It was there and it came into the possession there of Victor Amadeus II some time after he became king in 1713, and it was one of his gifts to his wife when he married in Chambéry afte…