The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (11 page)

Luminescent shadows piled—oozed—into Sally’s attic-room. Grey dimmed to the rust- and umber-mottled colours of the cricket’s carapace, with an under-tint of jade, forming and reforming in the corners of the chamber.

Isaak jumped down from Sally’s lap, lambent in the mantling dusk.

“I shall cut a window in the night. I shall cast there this malign desire.”

“No, no, I cannot.”

“You must, you must.”

In the corners the greys arrayed themselves, the greys known as mignonette and massicot, as gunpowder and grume, as deepest umber and most finely metalled grace, a series of silhouettes in soft plumbago.

“‘Felled by a prompture of the blood—upright now with the compress of reason.’”

Motes arose in the circulating greys, a dull white that fascined all other colours, subordinating them to its will.

Sally peered into a corner and said, “Now balefire, come you to mock me in my luckless time?”

A voice congealed in the corner, or so it seemed to Sally. It said:

“Feeling like Dido abandoned, still wanting her false Aeneas even as she burned on the pyre she kindled with her own hand?”

Sally said nothing. The voice continued.

“Indulge in private compline, a parvity of a song for your service. Extinguish the candles at your own Tenebrae, if you will; no aid, no solace, no ’suagement will come of it.”

Sally reached for Isaak. The white form (forms?) swirled slowly within grey veilings.

“Mutinous imagination, all debrided, plies her dangerous arts. You think this man a deceiver, yet what is it you now consider in your own place? Will you not deceive in your turn, betray the man from Yount who loves and trusts you wholly?”

Sally sprang up and ran half-blind towards the corner. The white figure laughed and moved to another corner.

“Monster, leave this place!” Sally cried, slipping to one knee on the books strewn across the floor. Isaak leaped forward, knowing an enemy but unsure where the foe found himself.

From the whiteness issued bony sounds.

Sally picked up a book and flung it at the corner. The white dispersed, the greys swallowed the book, which fell harmlessly to the floor.

“James . . .” said Sally, just before she fell to the floor herself. “Reglum.”

Isaak ran to Sally’s side.

“James,” said Sally, just before exhaustion overwhelmed her.

“Where’s Tom, that’s what I want to know,” said Cook. She was holding court in the kitchen, with the maid, Mr. Harris and Mr. Fletcher attending.

“I mean, the whole point of their skipping and skimbering off to quince-pot places was to fetch back Master Tom,” she continued. “Yet here they have come back . . . without him! Inadmissible, I call it, and meaning no disrespect to Mr. McDoon and Mr. Sanford.”

She finished barding the chicken for the evening supper and set it in the oven.

“It
does
appear to be a confusion,” said Mr. Harris (who, as ‘clerk’ to the Naxes at the Piebald Swan, knew precisely where Tom was). “Plowing with dogs even, but I think we must trust the McDoons to know their business.”

“Agreed,” said Mr. Fletcher (equally in the know). “The McDoons say Tom is safe and soon to return by separate means. So, no reason for us to fret on their account.”

Cook shook her head and waved her serving fork, saying, “And there is the poor Miss Reimer, taken by the plague, dead and all in foreign parts. She did not reckon with that, I suppose. God rest her soul.”

All four in the kitchen crossed themselves.

“Still,” said Mr. Harris in his broad West Country accent. “Even that may have had some part in the great plan of things, don’t you think?”

Cook looked at him severely.

“No,” she said. “I’ll be coked and slagged, if I do. I don’t hold with ‘great plans’ that regular folks have no say in, and mostly mean the misfortunate ends of people. There, I said it!”

The maid looked mildly shocked, peering about her as if expecting a curate to pop out of a cupboard to excommunicate her aunt.

“Strike the deacon, the devil is in the hemp,” laughed Mr. Harris, joined loudly by Mr. Fletcher.

“I mean no blasphemy,” said Cook. “It is just that something remains deeply askew and ahoy about this whole affair, if you ask me. I feel that in these old bones of mine.”

“There, you are right about that,” said Mr. Harris, growing serious. “The game is still afoot, though it is not clear to me what the game is. For instance, the Miss Sally is acting even stranger now than before she left. . .”

“. . . And that is saying a mouthful,” half-whispered Mr. Fletcher.

“Don’t you be speaking ill of Miss Sally,” said Cook, swiping at Mr. Fletcher with her dish-towel. “Or you will have me to account with!”

Mr. Fletcher nodded his apologies, while looking to the maid for support.

Mr. Harris continued: “For instance, just yesterday Miss Sally asked me to accompany her to the West, . . . all the way to Devon, no less, . . . in search of something she calls ‘china clay.’”

“Chinese clay?” said the maid. “In Devon?”

“It’s a sort of coal, I think,” said Mr. Fletcher, ever eager to show off, especially to the maid. “No idea why they call it ‘china,’ but it is a stuff you pull out of a mine.”

“What’s it used for?”

“No idea.”

“There,” said Mr. Harris, shrugging. “That’s what I mean. I am happy to oblige, of course, not least because I can call in on my brother and his family in Somerset on the way, but I cannot say I understand the purpose of the trip.”

Cook put a pan of carrots and onions in the oven beside the roasting chicken, and then said, “One good thing though: while they were away in wild countries, we had no more visits from that . . . galder-fenny, the crafty man.”

All four crossed themselves again, especially as the dark was growing, making the candlelight seem smaller, feebler.

“Brrrr, wicked as Bishop Hatto, that one,” said the maid. “I hope he gets eaten by rats too.”

“Will take more than rats to end that one,” said the Cook. “At least so I hazard.”

“While you are escorting Miss Sally to the West Country,” said Mr. Fletcher to Mr. Harris. “I will be doing the same for Mr. McDoon, who travels again soon, only this time no further than to Edinburgh.”

“What’s his errand, Mr. Fletcher?”

“I do not rightly know, but—as he is Scots originally—it seems perfectly reasonable that he might want to go there. Me, I have never been farther north than Luton, so I confess to some excitement.”

“But there you are,” said Cook. “Barely home from years away, and already fitcheting off again. Edinburgh, my soul! He should be staying home, here on Mincing Lane, for a spell, get back to regular ways with regular people, rather than heading straight up to the far North.”

Talk turned to other topics—the high cost of wheat, the riots in the East End, the scandalous Prince of Wales—as the dinner cooked and night came on.

Taking the chicken out of the oven, moist under its bacon-wrappings, Cook said, “Oh, then I must say something about this Billy Sea-Hen who has come back with the McDoons. No Tom, but a Billy Sea-Hen instead! More London even than you, Mr. Fletcher. But that’s not the problem. Londoners are fine. No, it’s his preaching I wonder about. I have not been to his meetings, but I hear folks talking of it. The Bible, yes, but a whole lot more is how I hear it described. Makes that Southcott woman and the Muggletonians sound correct as Cocker, from what I hear. What’s this Billy got to do with the McDoons?”

No one having an answer, Cook fried on.

“No Tom come back, and the German miss dead (and she will be much missed!), but we get a preachin’ sea-hen and two Indian gentlemen instead. Very polite and all, most in particular the Indians, I have no complaints, always praise my cooking, most respectful of this house. Feel sorry for the Mr. Bunce, him with just one leg now, reminds me of Nelson at Trafalgar. And then Mr. Bammary, the most politest man I think I ever met. Attends very carefully on Miss Sally, so I can only think well of him.”

As she spoke, she took out the vegetables. She paused. When she spoke again, she emphasized each point she made by shaking the vegetable spoon; droplets of melted butter sprinkled her listeners.

“Lieutenant Bammary loves Sally, that much is plain as the eyes on my face. Like a great beagle, he is, lump lump lump after her, would fight all the wolves of Tartary to protect her, he would. I dare say he deserves our respect for that.”

The other three nodded their heads.

“But, not that it is any of our business, but one cannot help but care and wonder . . . does Miss Sally return the favour? Outwardly yes, no doubt. But I know our little smee. . . . She is wrestling inside over something. . . . Even now, has not eaten all day, shut up in her attic. . . . Well, no use speculating and, like I said, not our business to be speculating about.”

She emphasized this last point with a very sharp glance at her niece.

“One more thing, before I take ’em their dinner. The Mr. Sedgewick, who is here now with ’em. . . . He is a schemer, poking his lawyer nose into all sorts of sense and nonsense. His wife is even stranger! I hear mumblings from some of the Sedgewick servants.”

Seeing no demurral from her companions, Cook ended the conversation and took the chicken, carrots, and onions out to the partners’ room.

“Clever that lawyer is, no doubt,” she said, over her shoulder as she headed out of the kitchen. “He always finds a way to be here with Mr. McDoon and Mr. Sanford right around dinner time!”

“Take that as a compliment to your cooking,” said Mr. Harris as the door shut behind Cook.

“Huummpphh” could be heard clearly through the door.

Two days later, Maggie sat in the partners’ room in the house on Mincing Lane. She looked across a table—specially set with a blue-and-white porcelain tea service—at two men of middle age and a young woman (who clutched a large, golden cat on her lap), who sat beside Mr. and Mrs. Sedgewick.

“Oh Mama,” thought Maggie. “You told me that Tortoise says ‘always travel with your musical instruments because you never know when you will meet other musicians.’ Well,
chi di
, I think I just met the oddest musicians of all: the very ones who must sing with me.”

“. . . so, to conclude: Maggie, that is, the Miss Collins, is a cousin,
omnibus rebus consideratus,
” said Mr. Sedgewick. “Mag . . . Miss Collins, the McDoons are willing to accept you as such.”

“Rat,” thought Maggie. “Chubby little rat, clever
okelekwu
, mouth chattering while mind runs unseen elsewhere.”

“Well, ah, thank you Mr. Sedgewick,” said Barnabas, waving his hands about, sloshing tea from his cup and very nearly upsetting the cup from Sally’s hand entirely. “So then, Miss Collins. . . . That is, ha ha ha, . . . what I mean to say, . . . oh,
Quatsch
, here, try these pastries, the ones with the powdery sugar on top, Cook got them special. . . .”

“Mr. McDoon,” thought Maggie. “Roundish in the corners, but not soft. Strong I think under that bubbly-skittery front. Misplaces words but not their meanings. Bit of a popinjay! Mama, you would like the needlework on this man’s clothes.”

Everyone sipped their tea and nibbled on the pastries, searching for what to say.

Maggie scanned the room, slowly exploring it in her mind. She noted the porcelain figurines on the mantlepiece—the Four Continents, seemingly conversing, but what sort of conversation might Africa be having with Europe?—and the ornate clock, steadily marking the seconds, the minutes, the hours. She looked at each print framed on the wall, ran with Diana hunting Actaeon, sailed up the Trave to Luebeck and unloaded cargo on the quay at Riga, swam with the survivors of a shipwreck, hoisted a white boy out of the water and away from a shark’s jaws.

“What Mr. McDoon is trying to say, is ‘welcome,’ Miss Collins,” said Sanford.

“Not met anyone quite like you before, Mr. Sanford,” thought Maggie. “You guard your thoughts well. A ribbon of very deep spirit I sense, coiled and tucked in a weathered case, a burning coal kept in a cold chalice.”

“Thank you,” said Maggie. “This is the strangest turn of events . . .”

“Indeed, indeed,” interrupted Barnabas. “But, well, here it is: you are family, so unexpected, like . . . like something out of all those romances, where the heir turns up all unexpected and everyone is reunited. . . .”