The Choir Boats (30 page)

Something had changed with the merging of voices to defeat
silence outside the world. For the first time, others — closer to
Maggie, almost nearby — had heard her voice, and had lifted their
heads like hounds scenting prey. Her song had gone forth like
a flare in the night, leaving a lingering trace. And Maggie sensed
their proximity. She felt vulnerable as she walked to and from the
Sedgewicks. She wrapped her old sailor’s jacket more tightly around
her as a muffin man stared at her in the street. A group of boys
playing marbles stopped as one when she passed them, vulpine
faces tracking her movement, flickers of silent intelligence shared
between them. Even the streets seemed to conspire against her,
misplacing themselves, softening corners, running into courtyards
that went nowhere.

“Why am I on Artichoke Lane?” thought Maggie. “I need to find
Finch-House Longstreet. . . . Look up, look up, follow the rooks.”

Mrs. Sedgewick detected something amiss with her protégé.
Maggie was even more distant than usual, evasive when questioned,
saying only that she needed more time with this book or that book, please, ma’am. Mrs. Sedgewick’s tutelage of Maggie was detected by
the entire household; eventually, the head-maid told the footman,
who told Mr. Sedgewick, who was otherwise oblivious, being so
immersed in his work.

One morning, Mr. Sedgewick said over pilchards at breakfast,
“Mrs. Sedgewick, dove of my heart, you have been found out:
cave
ancillam
, beware what the maid said indeed!”

“Whatever do you mean, Mr. Sedgewick? And try to speak more
plainly for once.”

“Yes, yes, I shall do so, my veprecose swan,” said Mr. Sedgewick. “I
am always supportive of your follies and projects,
toties quoties
, but I
am more than moderately curious as to what your expected outcome
is this time. That is to say — am I being clear enough, my sweet? —
what possible gain can be found in giving books on mathematics to
a charity school girl, and one whose, shall we say, tincture is a bit on
the darker side?”

Mrs. Sedgewick counted to seven before responding. “George
Gervase Sedgewick, you must be born under the haunch of Saturn
to utter such a thing. And to question my motives is . . . honestly,
this is so beneath my dignity.”

Mr. Sedgewick paused long enough to spear another pilchard onto
a slice of bread, and said, “Yes,
infra dig
it may be, but what is your
intent? To show off this prodigy at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly
or at the Bartholomew’s Fair in Smithfield? ‘Come see the Amazing
Cushite Woman Who Does Sums!’ She’d look good, wouldn’t she,
right alongside the ‘Savage Prince of Patagonia’ and ‘Tom Thumb of
Kent and his Bride’?”

Mrs. Sedgewick counted to nine, and then left the table. Her
husband chuckled at the whims of women, and then returned to the
ongoing mystery of the McDoon departure, wondering that he had
never heard of the merchant de Sousa until Barnabas announced his
removal to Cape Town. He had forgotten his breakfast conversation
long before his wife had even begun to forgive him for it.

The feeling grew in Maggie that someone or something was
searching for her in London. She heard rumours of men asking
questions throughout the East End about women who sang.

“Maggie,” said the servant at The White Hart. “Uncanny, I calls
it. Two men, not from around here to judge from their clothes and
their voices, were asking last night about the strangest things: did
we know any girls who sang, and what did they sing, and where
might they be found? At first I thought they might be agents for
Covent Garden or Vauxhall, as they’re always on the lookout for
stage-girls, but then these mokes started mixing their talk with
stories about the Singing Crucifix and the Talking Book, which I
reckon are popish things, and other bits from the Bible, but not in
a way that you hear it from the preachers, so I got scared somewhat
and turned my ears away.”

Maggie mulled this on her way home, scanning the street for
possible trouble. In the cellar by candlelight, she read another chapter
in the treatise on fluxion and listened to her mother’s troubled
breathing. She listened too for footsteps on the stairs. Squaring her
shoulders, she thought,
Let them come. We’ve faced worse. We’ll fight
force with force
.

“Just wondering how you was getting on,” said Billy Sea-Hen to
Tom late in the afternoon of their first full day in Sanctuary. “And
whether you might care to join us for a spot of tea, what Tat’head
and the other northerners like to call ‘baggins.’ So this would be
‘baggins on the beach,’ if you are partial.”

A cluster of cottages sat on a shingle jutting into the cove some
ways down from the house with the flagpole. On the beach the four
other Minders had made a fire from kelp, and were boiling tea and
frying some rabbitty-looking creatures that one of them had caught
in the heath behind the dunes. (“No game laws here! We can hunt
as we wish and not be called poachers,” said the Minders.) Slivers of
potato fried with the meat.

“Where are the sailors?” asked Tom.

“Oh,” said Tat’head. “They do not much like tea — not a Yountish
taste, I reckon. Not that we haven’t invited them many a time.”

“They’re good blokes, though,” added Billy, to which the other
four nodded in agreement. “Strong and quiet, knows their jobs,
sticks to it. No fuss, you can depend on it.”

“No whittie-whattie either,” said Tat’head. “‘Straight on,’ says
their captain, and that’s that, straight on, it is.”

“So, the sailors are Yountish, are they?” said Tom. “I wondered,
but never could get a word with any of them. I just assumed they
were dashedly shy, that’s all. Do they stay on the ship then, when
you come here?”

“No,” said Billy. “There, look, see a smittick farther down the
beach? You can just see the tops of chimneys — those are their
houses.”

“Some of ’em have wives there, most I do believe, and children
too,” said Tat’head. “So they wanted a bit of space for their own.”

“And none of you has a wife?” asked Tom.

“No,” said Billy, as the other Minders looked into the fire. “Since
we joined with Him and put our feet on the Road to Redemption, we
have sworn ourselves to go without wives.”

“Our only wife shall be the imperishable Crown of Glory,” said
Tat’head.

“The
immarcesible
Palm of Heaven,” said Billy self-consciously.

“By the sweet fancy Moses,” said Tat’head. “That’s a word for us
all!”

“Immarcesible,” repeated Billy. “I learned that word off His Grace,
the Cretched Man.” The others nodded.

Someone said, “Amen.”

Billy poured the tea. One of the Minders produced a tiny snuff
box filled with sugar. He offered it first to Tom, who stirred a pinch
into his tea, and then passed it to the others.

“’Tis only smouch,” said Billy. “Old tealeaves used thrice over,
with this wee snip of sugar, but it is as close to paradise as we are
like to come within the next hour.”

“Too true,” said Tat’head. “And here is our rabbit, to make this
real baggins.” As the afternoon shadows lengthened, and the surf
washed on the shore, and the wind rustled in dune and heath, Tom
and the Minders had their baggins and felt — for a while — content.
The fire was burning low and dusk upon them, when Tom turned
the conversation to the Cretched Man.

“By Wee Willie Hawken,” said Billy Sea-Hen. “He is as different
from us as chalk and cheese, there is no denying.”

“What do you reckon he is?” asked Tom.

“Hard to say, harder to know,” said Billy. “He is as He is.”

“Besides, it signifies little what we think,” said Tat’head.

“The point is, Master Tom,” said Billy, with the fire reflected in
his eyes (Tom thought again that Billy looked like somebody Tom had
known in London). “The point is that He is leading us on a righteous
road. It’s like this, isn’t it, lads? Most folks is blind or greedy or both,
and just take orders and follow leaders like tantony pigs. It’s not like
that with the Cretched Man, is it, boys? He is seeking along with us,
and He speaks with us before we commit to any kind of action, and
He never asks us to do anything we don’t think ought to be done. It’s
that simple. Sort of a House of Commons the way it ought to be.”

“Look,” said Tom. “I don’t mean to press you, and will respect
your answer if you tell me I press too far, but I feel I must ask. How
do you know he is what he says he is, or what you think he is? That
he can offer redemption at the end of your road?”

The sun’s last rays shone off the waves as Billy answered: “As I
said, on this road we walk not as blind men or greedy, but as ones
what have thought things through, often in a very rough school.”

Tat’head said, “We know what the Book says about false apostles
and how Satan can appear as the Angel of Light.”

“So we won’t be fooled,” said one of the other Minders from the
other side of the dying fire. “We are forewarned.”

“The Book talks of healing as a powerful sign of righteousness.
Just look how He cured you, made you as right as you could be after
the monster bit your poor fingers off,” said another Minder.

“And don’t the Book talk of the releasing of those in bondage as
another sign of holiness?” said yet another Minder. “Why, that’s
what the Cretched Man has done — for us and, most of all, for the
sailors who were all slaves once, slaves of the wicked Ornish in
Yount, before they escaped to Sanctuary and got protected by His
Grace. No longer slaves but brothers beloved, both in the flesh and
in the Lord.”

“You see,” said Billy. “Please, Mister Thomas, do not think that
red, raw hands and slow speech means ignorance and no book-learning. We can all of us read, and have all learned that one book,
if nothing else.”

“I see,” said Tom. “And you know I meant no disrespect, asking
only from concern and curiosity. You’ll allow that my own manner
of joining this company was, shall we say, a little less voluntary than
your own?”

All the Minders nodded in assent.

“Still,” said Billy. “We are right proud to count you as one of our
own, if you wish, and maybe whether you wish it or not, Tommy
Two-Fingers. Without you, Tat’head here might be dead, and maybe
those two Yountish sailors, and maybe more of us. We know a test
when we see one, and you, sir, met that fortune with the best of
character.”

The others murmured “huzzah” and “Amen.” Tom waved his
bandaged hand as if to say he’d sacrifice the fingers from his other
hand to save any one of them a second time, and was surprised to
realize that he would do just that, and that they would do the same
for him. At that moment, a slender moon rose over the sea.

“Ah,” said Billy. “The moon. Another reason why we call this place
Sanctuary. First moon we have seen since we left our own world.
Few places on the bent and mazy roads have a moon. Yount has no
moon.”

From the houses farther down the beach, where the Yountish
sailors and their wives and children lived, came a burst of song. No
one around the baggins fire needed to know Yountish to feel the joy
expressed in that song. “They’re singing to the moon,” said Billy Sea-Hen. “Come on, lads, let’s sing out too!”

So they did, with Tom joining in. Out over the waves and into the
silvery dark arc’ed the song:

The Man in the Moon

Has carelessly strewn

The pack from his back.

Where can it be?

Oh, where can it be?

Like a fish or a dolphin it fell in the sea,

That’s where it be, oh

That’s where it be!

Like a fish or a dolphin it fell in the sea!

He’ll climb down now. . . .

Backwards and seawards and over his head

To fish for his pack and his lacy-f sheen

In the dark and the coldness of ocean and sea

The Man in the Moon used ankle and knee

To swim for his pack in the dark and the deepy and briny-f sea.

Like a fish or a dolphin it fell in the sea,

That’s where it be, oh

That’s where it be!

Like a fish or a dolphin it fell in the sea!

He’ll swim through now. . . .

Backwards and sidewards and under his tread

To fish for his pack and his glowing-f beam

In the dark and the coldness of ocean and sea

The Man in the Moon met cuttle and weed

To search for his pack, his unhoused pack,

In the dark and the vasty and briny-f sea.

Like a fish or a dolphin it fell in the sea,

That’s where it be, oh

That’s where it be!

Like a fish or a dolphin it fell in the sea!

He’ll swim home now. . . .

Homewards but sadwards and slowing his tread

No luck for his pack and his shiniest beam

In the dark and the coldness of ocean and sea

The Man in the Moon met bad luck and worse