The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (32 page)

“They make a handsome pair,” said Billy, after the maid and Mr. Fletcher had departed.

The Cook agreed. She and Billy talked a while about the other two and their prospects for an enduring marriage, which topic gradually, almost imperceptibly, slid into a conversation about themselves.

“Billy,” said the Cook. “You have been to the back of the North Wind—back behind the shoulder-blades of God for all I know—but I hear so clearly the voice of a Londoner, yet you never tell us of your upbringing. What do you call home?”

Billy sipped his tea before answering.

“Well,” he said. “It is a funny thing you asking me that just now, on account of I have thinking on that very question myself of late. Since I have—as you rightly put it, Mistress Cook—shipped out to some very distant parts.”

Cook refilled his cup of tea, and pushed a plate of scones across the bench to him. (“Plain, no currants in ’em, and a day old, but they will have to do,” she thought.) Billy took a bite with gratitude.

“I am born a true son of Queenhithe,” he started, naming the ward on the Thames that ran uphill almost to St. Paul’s Cathedral, slightly upstream from the London Bridge and directly across the river from Southwark. “In the parish of Saint Mary Somerset . . .”

“Hold a moment,” exclaimed Cook. “Not the Saint Mary where the communion plate was stolen and never returned, maybe ten year ago?”

“In aught-five, yes, that’s right,” said Billy.

“Such a wicked deed!”

“Yes,” said Billy hastily. “Weren’t me, of course, though I own that I might know the chowsers what did it. As you say, hard times then as now, though I agree that is no excuse to make off with churchly silver.”

They both crossed themselves.

“I was raised by my blessed mam alone in a chare that has no map-name but those what lived there called it Finger Alley, off Broken Wharf. Had the run of the hithe itself—where the corn hoys land from Kent and Suffolk—and was a duke in the tribe that wandered High Timber Street, Bread Street Hill, Three Cranes in the Vintry.”

Billy sighed, glanced at the Cook’s face.

“That’s a foreign country to me, your Queenhithe,” teased the Cook. Queenhithe was less than half a mile from Mincing Lane.

“Oh come,” said Billy, rising to the bait. “Surely even you who live near the Tower have heard about the wonders of Queenhithe, as royal as the name makes it! Why, the Black Lion Inn on Saint Thomas Street is as famous for its veal pies as the Chelsea Bun House is for its buns. I had one once, a Black Lion veal pie, have never tasted its like since.”

The Cook admitted that she might just have heard of the Black Lion Inn, and then confessed further that she had even been within the confines of the marvellous ward of Queenhithe. One of her Norfolk connections, another barney-bishybee, was in service to a mercer there. Once the Cook had even spent a Saturday afternoon being shown by her friend the glories of the Painters & Stainers guildhall on Little Trinity Lane, and looking upon Mr. Thornhill’s altar-piece mural at Saint Michael’s Queenhithe.

“Saint Michael’s with the golden ship on its steeple-vane!” said Billy. “That is forever the sign of home, if no other sign exists for me!”

“Well, you have city cunning, that’s for sure,” said the Cook, paring a dowl of cheese for Billy. “But you seem also to have a goodish share of what I will call country wisdom, and how you come by that, I do not know.”

“Ah,” said Billy, thoughtfully eating the piece of cheese. “We were country folk on my mother’s side. My grandfather was Royal Under-swanherd, at His Majesty’s swannery near Staine’s Bridge, on the Thames not far from their castle at Windsor. Heard much about that from my mother, though she was herself only a child then, this being I reckon about the time our George came to the throne. A game of swans, and swan-upping, and what have you, and all the joys of a calm river-life, that’s what she told me.”

“What happened?” said Cook.

“Someone poached three of the royal swans,” said Billy. “My grandfather got the blame and was turned out. Like most unfortunates in such circumstances, he came into London, bringing the family. Hard times then, hard times now. He failed at most things here in the city—he died before I could know him, likewise my grandmother. My mother was their only surviving child. Worked hard all her life, some needle-trade though Queenhithe’s not really the place for that, then years as a dog’s-body in a throwster’s shop. A hard life. No man around once my father left for sea and never came back. He served on an East Indiaman, I am told, but I barely remember him.”

Billy left a quarter of hour later. As Cook finished preparing the evening meal, she thought about what she had learned. Hearing about Billy’s Queenhithe childhood helped anchor him in known territory. His roots in the upper Thames Valley reminded her—with a sad jolt—of Mr. Harris. She disliked the fervour with which Billy talked about “gehennical fire” and “the immarcessible crown of glory,” and she remained disturbed at his embrace of the Cretched Man.

“Needs much more explaining and by means unknown to me,” she muttered, putting an extra sprig of dill on a very attenuated filet of plaice, in hopes of diverting Mr. McDoon’s attention from the scantiness of his supper. “Cavorting with an eel-rawney, a conjure-man—who has in the past attacked this very house. I do not see how Billy can defend that connection!”

She puzzled over this as she dished the boiled potatoes, trying to reconcile what she knew about the McDoon struggle against the Cretched Man with the obvious depths of Billy’s devotion to Tom.

“Plain as the dragon on the steeple of Saint Mary-le-Bow, he loves that boy like his own son or nephew,” she thought. “He fought for Tom, saved his life sounds like, in the foreign places—against enemies worse than the Cretched Man or even Tipu Sultan. So maybe a crooked stick can hit a straight lick.”

Holding a tray with dinner for the two partners, Cook surveyed the kitchen.

“World is topsy-tosticated,” she said. “Enemies are friends, and friends may be enemies (what’s Mr. Sedgewick playin’ at?), and maybe the giants
will
walk down off the clock after all.”

Later, alone as she scrubbed dishes, Cook came bit by bit to understand that the intelligence about Billy no longer alarmed or alienated her. The thought that he was sprung from similar origins persuaded her, against her judgment.

“He calls himself an old dumbledore,” she said suddenly and out loud, pausing at her task. “And I am a barny-bishybee, which is the same thing said a different way. Hmmmm.”

She could hear Mr. Fletcher escorting her niece home, the two younger members of the household kissing goodnight just outside the kitchen door. The Cook blushed to imagine it.

“Fallabarty,” she thought, giving the pot she was scrubbing an extra vigourous swipe. “Me at my age and all!”

[From
The Proceedings of the Asiatick Society
, Calcutta, vol. XXII, 1817]

We
have recently discovered in our collection a noteworthy painting, by the renowned miniaturist Ustad Mansur, court artist to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir a full two centuries gone; the painting depicts a species of pheasant not previously described for India (viz. Mr. Latham’s
General Synopsis of Birds
, and Mr. Pennant’s more recent
View of Hindoostan
). Mansur being famous for his extreme fidelity to Nature and graceful delineations of particulars, we are in no doubt that—far from being a product of his imagination—the pheasant he drew from a live, or (at most) preserved specimen. Beyond dispute, the bird portrayed is an Indigo Pheasant, hitherto known from Chinese examples only. Anyone among our correspondents who can shed light on the provenance of Mansur’s putative specimen is asked to write to the Society, care of Mr. Nathaniel Wallich, Curator and Superintendent of its Oriental Museum.

[From Anders Erikson Sparrman,
Notes on a Voyage to China Undertaken in the Years 1765-1767
(published in Stockholm, 1771; translated 1785 by Elizabeth Maria Grantham)]

The Author of Nature has endowed even the most reclusive and cautious of birds, namely the partridges and pheasants, with plumage brought down from heaven, brilliantly reflecting the sun-beam in one case and imitating the rubicond lustre of dawn in another.

. . . While in China I had described to me, on credible authority, a type of pheasant hitherto unknown to Europeans, a bird that despite my many and strenuous efforts I could not observe
in vivo
with my own eyes nor provide ocular evidence of any sort, not even to the extent of procuring a specimen. The Chinese call it, as near as I can tell, the Celestial-Pheasant, both because of its bold blue colouration and because it is of a mild and beneficious disposition when left undisturbed but fierce when provoked, willing to defend itself mightily against those so arrogant or malicious or unsagacious as to attack it.

My hosts were at pains to indicate and emphasize the majority colour of the Celestial-Pheasant (there being also in its plumage many counter-hatchings of ivory and eggshell-white), stressing its importance as a matter of some urgency within their systems of philosophy and cosmology. Apparently our languages do not possess an identical equivalency for this colour, but when shown a sample of what this colour might be—in the form of inks stroked with the most conscientious of brushes—I would assay to describe it as a blue strongly undertinted with purple, and overwashed with the palest grey, approximating most closely that hue we know as ‘indigo.’

Altogether the effect of this colour was simultaneously entrancing and elusive, being that of white and black balancing in perfect harmony, projecting a species of numinous impulsion, which is to say creating a mutability of shadow and light of the sort that I am told the Italian painters called ‘cangiante’ and that I would otherwise say supports the evidence of spectral images on the human retina described by Dr. Huyghens and confirmed by Dr. Boerhaave in their recent works.

. . . Allow me here to elaborate some of the many legends associated with this indigo pheasant, as told to me by my Chinese hosts, starting with the one about how the bird spits fire when goaded into defense. . . .

“It flies with an easy untroubled flight,

This fearless pheasant . . .

With its martial crest and

Its plumage bright . . .”

—Anonymous
,
“The Pheasant,” in the
Shih Ching

(
Classic of Poetry
, or,
The Odes
),
c. 800 before the Common Era

“The tall grasses on the river-bank rustle to the breeze,

The tall mast of the boat sways,

Alone in the starlight (that washes the wide flat fields),

Now the water shines too with moonlight . . .

Floating, skimming to the here and there,

I am a bird aloft between earth and deep heaven.”

—Tu Fu
,
“Nocturnal Reflections While Travelling” (c. 765 C.E.)

“T
ermites, fleshy ghosts,” thought Mei-Hua, as she, her brother Shaozu, and their guardian, Tang Guozhi, were being given a tour of yet another pagoda in London (the “Great Pagoda” in Kew Gardens; they had already been taken to see the “Pagoda Gardens” in Blackheath). “Building hollow imitations to match their white words.”

The three Chinese had been in London for months. They were increasingly frustrated and despondent. No one knew quite what to do with them. As accredited emissaries from the Jiaquing Emperor, they were unique and honoured guests—and were subjected to every kind of official visit, tour, and meeting. The Prince-Regent received them; they were trooped through Westminster Abbey and the Tower. They sat for hours with the faculty at the East India Company’s college for its civil servants, newly established at Haileybury just north of London (and based on what little the English knew about the two thousand-year tradition of civil service in China), helping the EIC compile the first-ever Chinese-English dictionary. Society matrons tumbled over themselves to host the strangers at fetes, routs and of course elaborate tea parties—the Chinese were the season’s sensation. Lady this and Banneresse that vied with one another to escort the Chinese to the British Museum at Montagu House, and to the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Mei-Hua had been brought to hear the orphans sing at The Foundling Hospital on Great Ormond Street, had been shuttled to see Hogarth’s “Pool of Bethesda” at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital, had accompanied a viscountess on a walk of the wards at the new Universal Dispensary for Sick and Indigent Children near Saint Andrew’s Hill. And so on, for months.