Early one morning, our monarch Richard Coeur de Lion was awakened by the first light of dawn breaking gently over his garden wall. As he arose, Richard knew that this particular morning was somehow different. On this day, for the first time in nearly 30 years, the nightingale had not sung its morning song. Richard quickly moved to the golden cage that hung in the shelter of the plum tree at the far end of the garden. The cage, glittering in the morning light was intact, but Ku Na, a wonderful golden nightingale and a gift to Richard from his mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was gone.

The King of Siam had presented the nightingale to Eleanor years before when Richard was a boy of 10. The songbird was so magnificently exotic and Eleanor’s stories of far off Siam so captivating that Richard had spent hours at his mother’s knee enthralled by the Queen’s colorful adventure stories. Eleanor made a special gift of the songbird to her most favored son and heir to the throne of England and from that day until the morning of Ku Na’s disappearance from the garden, Richard had listened with delight to the morning and evening songs of the nightingale. Now, so many decades later, with all his power and the vast wealth of a kingdom, the golden songbird was still Richard’s most treasured possession.