The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Read online

  “Well,” thought James. “No bun for now, but I had lost all hope of ever eating one again anyhow, so I can wait another few hours for that. In the meantime, I will at last be enlightened on the not-so-minor matter of my liberation. This fellow, and all the other guardians who have been with me every hour of every day since I was released from the . . . that hell-hole in Australia, they’ve all been as talkative as the dead, no word of explanation from them no matter how hard I tried. Not that I quibble, mind you, since I am free in comparison to where I was. But James Kidlington knows that no one is doing this as a favour. Oh no, oh no, the labour and the . . . torment . . . have not dulled my wits to that degree. What I want to know is: who is my ‘benefactor,’ and what does he want from me in return?”

  With competence born of long practice, Mr. and Mrs. Sedgewick ignored each other as they breakfasted on the morning after the Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes.

  “. . . back at last from their myriad adventures, the palmers return from the Land of Prester-John or the Golden Chersonese or wherever they may have been,” said Mr. Sedgewick, contemplating the note just delivered from the McDoons. “And we are bid to see them this very afternoon, my dendritic day-lily.”

  Mrs. Sedgewick nodded, but listened more closely to her buttered toast than to her husband.

  “Now we shall hear the truth of all the rumours and speculation,” continued the lawyer, remarking naught of his wife’s inattention. “Certainly and manifestly not lost like poor Mungo Park seeking Timbuktoo! So that’s one hypothesis reduced to marmalade! But what transpired at the Cape? Did they, as some suggest, roam to India? To the wild Carmanian waste? We shall shortly hear all, direct and unimpeded from the mouths of the McDoons themselves. No longer will we rely on the hearsay of others. Nay, nullius in verba . . .”

  Mrs. Sedgewick heard only the echo in her mind of the whispers she’d listened to in the dark. Of late she had dreamed of a man—at least something in a man’s tall shape—dressed in a white fancy-coat, with cut-away tails reaching to his calves. He, or it, was tall but stocky, with a barrel chest and a power in his arms even as they hung at his sides. She could not fully make out his face, but thought it must be very round, plate-like, with two great unblinking yellow eyes.

  The man muttered in the darkness, half-whistling in broken Latin, punctuating phrases with snappings, clickings, sounds of whetting.

  Morning after morning she awoke, with a lingering image in her mind of this unwanted visitor, an abscess in the half-light. She could not tell Mr. Sedgewick; he would only scoff. Oddly, she thought of telling Maggie, but what sense could there be in confiding in a servant, no matter how skilled in arts and letters? Sally, Sally . . . she wanted to share this dream with Sally; Sally would know what it meant and perhaps how to end it.

  “Yes, dear,” said Mrs. Sedgewick to Mr. Sedgewick. “Yes, the Miss Sally, as you say, it will be very fine to renew my conversations with her. I am most glad she is back, you are as always quite and irrefutably right.”

  The Mejouffrouw Termuyden met her husband at the front-door of The Last Cozy House, as winter approached the Cape in May of 1816.

  “Here you are, at last!” she said in English, less to her husband than to the three people he ushered into the house.

  “You must be Mary,” said the Mejouffrouw to the Chinese girl—twelve, maybe thirteen years old—standing before her. “You can have no idea how delighted we are to meet you. We have heard so much about you from our colleagues in the East.”

  “Her English is not good,” said the lean young man standing close behind her. “I am her older brother. You can speak to me.”

  “Very well,” said the Mejouffrouw, peering at the young man (perhaps eighteen or nineteen years old) for the first time.

  “Her name is not Mary, it is Mei-Hua, but none of you have the tongue to say that, so you all say instead Mary. Misfortunate. Mei-Hua means ‘Beautiful Flower.’”

  The third guest—around sixty years of age— stepped forward and said, “Please forgive Shaozu. He sometimes forgets his manners. Allow me, please: I am Tang Guozhi, special sending from his excellence, the Jiaquing Emperor . . .”

  All three Chinese bowed at the name of the emperor, prompting a bow and a curtsy from the Termuydens.

  “. . . Xie Shaozu and Xie Mei-Hua are my responsibilities. We thank you for receiving us. His heavenly Emperorship himself has much interest in this matter.”

  “We are indeed flattered, then,” said the Mejouffrouw. “But it is we who forget our manners! Let us understand each other better over tea and small-cakes in our withdrawing room—the tea is genuine oolong, brought to us on an East Indiaman much like the one that brought you here yourselves.”

  An hour later, under the gentle ministrations of the Termuydens and the benevolent influence of The Last Cozy House, even the stand-offish Shaozu began to feel at home.

  Offering Shaozu yet another slice of gingerbread, the Mejouffrouw said, “Tell us again about the wisdom Mary studies . . . we cannot pronounce it, I am so sorry . . . the . . . ?”

  “The luli yuanyuan . . . it means . . . wait, I have written it down for you in English,” said Shaozu, taking the gingerbread with one hand, while drawing a paper from his satchel with another. He gave the paper to his hostess.

  “Sources of Musical Harmonics and Mathematical Astronomy,” read the Mejouffrouw, her brow furrowed. “Ah, hmm, precies . . .”

  “Mei-Hua is . . .” the young man paused. “I have not the word. She is the . . . she is special. She can do the jie-fang-shen in her head. That is what you call the al-ge-bra. Mei-Hua is blessed, that is the word. She can do huan zhong shu chi better than anyone in China, and that means the world.”

  The Mejouffrouw said, “That’s what we were told as well. That’s why we were asked to inquire about Mary. She is needed.”

  The emperor’s emissary, Tang Guozhi, said, “The philosophers in The Forbidden City have studied these things for many lives. I remember their conversations with the English when the Lord MacCartney visited China.”

  “Ah, so you met Lord MacCartney,” said Mr. Termuyden. “Did you know Sir John Barrow, his secretary? Sir John stayed here with us many times during his long stay in South Africa, after the end of the Chinese embassy.”

  “Yes, I knew Sir John a little,” said Tang Guozhi. “I knew the boy best, the one who spoke Chinese so well: Thomas Staunton. He was then about the same age as our Mei-Hua is now.”

  “Curious thing, as you mention Staunton (Sir Staunton and now a baronet like his father); he is here in Cape Town as we speak,” said Mr. Termuyden. “He is assistant-commissioner in Lord Amherst’s embassy to China. Their two ships landed not a week ago for replenishment on the way to Canton. A curious coincidence . . .”

  Tang Guozhi nodded but said nothing.

  Mei-Hua broke the ensuing silence with a query in Chinese to her brother and Tang Guozhi.

  “What Mei-Hua asks is . . .” began Shaozu.

  “In my head,” said Mei-Hua, speaking in English directly to the Termuydens. “What is the place I hear in my head? When I dream?”

  The Mejouffrouw put down the tea-canister, and said, “Yount. It is called Yount, in English. We will tell you all you need to know. Your journey has, I fear, only just begun.”

  A dirigible he was, floating over endless plains of pocked and riddled dust and the frozen spume of long-dead volcanoes. In the distance were the teterrimous mountains, with peaks of sheared bronze. On the horizon, beyond the mountains, burned cold fires.

  It might have been May of 1816, possibly on The Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes. Here was all time and no time at the same time.

  His shadow, sleek, loomed alternately larger and smaller as he flew over ridges, incising the earth with the shadow of his scissor-tail. That shadow, cast by the moon, lingered for a moment or two after he had sped on far above.

  “I have seen Orpheus fail here,” he said to himself, and his thoughts caused the dust down below to eddy upw
ards.

  “No door will open easily here,” he thought, and that thought became a whisper that became a wind through the mountains.

  His vast whiteness sailed through the darkness, smothering any pretense of hope that distant atmospheres might conspire to insert into his domain.

  Yet, he was troubled deep inside the sines and secants of his being. With his tympannic ears, he heard a humming, a very far-off music in many voices.

  “Oh no, oh no,” he boomed. “Orpheus could not do this thing, and neither can you!”

  On he cruised, eyes seeing every grain of grey sand, every sliver of mica, every edge and ripple of every mountain-side.

  On he cruised into the dark, straining to hear the music on his borders.

  Chapter 1: Many Plans, or,

  The Most Superbly Ludicrous Project Ever Devised

  “They who find themselves inclined to censure new under-takings, only because they are new, should consider, that the folly of projection is very seldom the folly of a fool; it is commonly the ebullition of a capacious mind, crowded with variety of knowledge, and heated with intenseness of thought; it proceeds often from the consciousness of uncommon powers, from the confidence of those who, having already done much, are easily persuaded that they can do more.

  “Projectors of all kinds agree in their intellects, though they differ in their morals; they all fail by attempting things beyond their power, by despising vulgar attainments, and aspiring to performances to which, perhaps, nature has not proportioned the force of man: when they fail, therefore, they fail not by idleness or timidity, but by rash adventure and fruitless diligence.

  “Whatever is attempted without previous certainty of success, may be considered as a project, and amongst narrow minds may, therefore, expose its author to censure and contempt; and if the liberty of laughing be once indulged, every man will laugh at what he does not understand, every project will be considered as madness, and every great or new design will be censured as a project. [… . . . .] Many that presume to laugh at projectors, would consider a flight through the air in a winged chariot, and the movement of a mighty engine by the steam of water as equally the dreams of mechanick lunacy.”

  —Samuel Johnson,

  “Projectors Injudiciously Censured and Applauded,”

  in The Adventurer, nr. 99 (October 15, 1753)

  “We were the first that ever burst

  Into that silent sea.

  Down dropped the breeze, the sails dropped down,

  ’Twas sad as sad could be;

  And we did speak only to break

  The silence of the sea!

  All in a hot and copper sky,

  The bloody sun, at noon,

  Right up above the mast did stand,

  No bigger than the moon.

  Day after day, day after day,

  We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

  As idle as a painted ship

  Upon a painted ocean.”

  —Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

  “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”

  Part II (published 1798)

  “We own you, Mr. Kidlington,” said the one on the left, an angular man, a knitting needle come to life. “Understand me well. Notwithstanding the change last century in the laws of this United Kingdom, to wit, forbidding such things, His Majesty’s Government in effect and for all intents and purposes . . . owns you.”

  Kidlington gazed coolly at the speaker, who was dressed in black but for a shockingly white, old-fashioned neck-cloth.

  “How do you receive this intelligence?” said the one on the right, similarly dressed, rounder in outline, with enormous hands splay-gripping the mahogany table behind which he sat.

  Kidlington adjusted his own neck-cloth and examined his own hands before responding.

  “I thank m’lords for their candour,” he said. “If I may be so forthright in return, I find all that has happened to me since your man plucked me from the shores of Australia to be wondrous strange indeed, a torquing of fortune that I can only be grateful for.”

  Kidlington hated his interlocutors as a matter of the marrow, his right by birth. He knew their type: the second sons of great landed families, bullied by custom and thwarted by the laws of inheritance, seeking retribution, recompense and glory on the backs of others.

  “If, as you assert, I am owned still by the Crown, well, that is no change from my status on the wrong side of the Earth, is it?”

  Kidlington looked from one to the other, and back again. “Needle and Ripper,” he thought. “Dart and Harrow. That’s what I shall call you.”

  “Still and all, ’tis yet a form of lenity contrasted with my most recent circumstance, so for that I thank His Majesty for his wisdom and his mercy.”

  The only immediate sound in the ensuing pause was the ticking of a large ormolu clock, flanked by ebony hippocamps, sitting on the mantlepiece behind Kidlington’s two questioners.

  … . . .

  … . . .

  From outside the Admiralty came dimly the cry of rooks, the muffled sounds of the Horse-Guard filing down Whitehall, the dull susurrus of movement from Birdcage Walk and St. James, of traffic on the Thames.

  “Do you know why we called you hence?” said Needle.

  “It is a curious tale, to be sure,” said Harrow.

  “I cannot say aught, m’lords, than that I am all ears for the hearing,” said Kidlington.

  “Indeed, you cannot,” said Needle, smiling. His teeth were long and yellow.

  “Mr. Kidlington, have you ever heard of a place called Yount?” said Harrow. “Ah, you have, we see the truth in your eyes, so do not deny it. No coyness in here, no need to pretend ignorance, we are His Majesty’s most special branch, the Admiralty’s bureau of inquiry and subtle response.”

  “The Crown’s agentes in rebus,” said Needle. “The House Venatical, his Majesty’s most devoted hunters.”

  “The Office of the Caviards, the Arm of Redaction,” said Harrow.

  “In short: we seek, we find, we solve . . . if necessary, we erase,” said Needle.

  “Which brings us back to you and your case, and what that has to do with Yount,” said Harrow. “We aim for panopticality, Mr. Kidlington, and this is what we saw: a promising young man, with a medical bent, who got himself imbricated with the worst sorts of people here in London, and who then further entangled himself with a highly respectable merchant and especially said merchant’s niece, until you yourself could not differentiate where your loyalties lay, not until the whole wretched mess collapsed about your ears. Am I on the slot so far?”

  Kidlington gave the barest of nods.

  “Why would this sordid petty affair trouble His Majesty’s Government?” said Needle. “Because we caught wind of Yount being somehow a thread in it. Ah yes, Yount . . . a whisper, a rumour, tales told by rummy old sailors in harbourside taverns, stories that also appear in learned texts, all the way back to Plato.”

  “Great Britain has an interest in discovering the truth about Yount,” said Harrow. “Raison d’état, old chap, the needs of state: colonies, commerce, the expanding imperium, all the more so now that Napoleon is vanquished and our glorious nation has a window of opportunity through which to thrust.”

  Needle said, “A jailor at the Cape, on Robbens Island, passed along to the magistrate an odd tidbit (for money, of course; we do not assume all His Majesty’s subjects are as selfless as those who serve the Admiralty). He revealed this—inadvertently, as we specialize in gleanings, half-truths and keyhole observations—to one of our men. In any event, the jailor overheard one day, from within one of the cells, a most queer sort of confession. By a young Englishman accused of larceny and unbecoming conduct towards a young lady . . . whose name was Sarah . . . Sally to you, yes? . . . I hardly need spell this out, do I?”

  Kidlington shook his head once. “Not you, James Kidlington,” rose through the walls of his mind’s defenses; he used all his will not to slump in his seat—he would not give the Admiralty th
at satisfaction.

  “Do not rebuke yourself too much, Kidlington,” said Harrow. “We have long had certain individuals at the Cape under surveillance as it relates to Yount. Meaning those eccentric Dutch personalities, the Termuydens. Ah, that brings back memories for you, doesn’t it?”

  The clock ticked in the lull.

  `… . . .

  … . . .

  … . . .

  … . . .

  “Oh yes, the Termuydens,” said Needle. “Our propinquity goes back a long way. Why, the Second Secretary himself, Sir John Barrow, was their guest on many occasions in the nineties. Quite a file we have on the Termuydens, a long prolix archive.”

  “Do you wonder what happened to your Sally, to the McDoons, after your unfortunate detention?” said Harrow.

  “So do we,” said Needle. “We have pieced together bits of their story. A strange story, not to be believed . . . but we believe it.”

  “And now the McDoons have returned to London,” said Harrow. “Ah, ah . . . you did not know this? But how could you? How does this revelation find you?”

  … . . .

  … . . .

  … . . .

  … . . .

  “As we thought it would,” continued Harrow. “Which is why we come now to the pith of the matter.”

  “We will have you reunited with the McDoons,” said Needle. “Return of the lover wronged, of the resurrected hero. You will be a hero, won’t you Kidlington? Such a turn—it is ludicrous, is it not? So sublimely ridiculous that only Jonson or Shakespeare—or His Majesty’s most secret instrumentality—could concoct its like.”

  “We will house you in modest but respectable accommoda-tions, just off Fenchurch, not far from Mincing Lane,” said Harrow. “We remand you to the oversight of a lawyer we know, a Mr. Sedgewick. Talks in circles, does Mr. Sedgewick, but do not be fooled: he thinks in very straight lines, and the shorter the better. He has done Admiralty work for years, and is the essence of discretion.”