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

  I am more convinced than ever that this Prinn is a grand-nephew of the Ludwig P. who wrote De vermis mysteriis.

  In nuco: hasten our business in Paris to its end, and return as soon as you may. We have work to do here.

  As always, your . . .

  On the Vigil of the Recrement,

  by the morning post,

  from Mrs. Sedgewick to the Miss Sarah:

  My dearest Sally,

  Words can barely express my pleasure at re-uniting with you since your return—seeing you these past weeks has raised my spirit beyond measure.

  Speaking with you has piqued my curiosity as well, since you tell such amusing and marvelous stories of your time abroad, and yet I sense that you hold much back. Why withhold details from one of your closest friends, one who can guide and support you?

  I have shared with you some of my premonitions and dreams, and I thank you for the courtesy you have paid in listening to me with sympathy—which is more than I ever get from Mr. Sedgewick, though I shouldn’t complain.

  Speaking of Mr. Sedgewick, and on a more convivial topic, I have persuaded His Old Badger-ness to hold a small rout, an assemblée (doesn’t that sound more elegant in French!), on Thursday next to honour the McDoons upon your homecoming.

  You will have discovered already my main goal, which is of course to bring you to the attention of select and attractive young men, with whom you might—if the flint reveals its spark!—form a liaison that might in due course blossom into something more lasting.

  Don’t blush or protest! You left us a girl and you have returned a young woman, and must needs be brought into society as best we can—despite all the drawbacks of your temperament (you have too much spirit!) and your education (you have far too much for any one of our sex!). Since you will have to attend such routs and ridottos regardless, where your temperament will be judged wanting and your education will be either dismissed or bevelled down, then you might as well attend one at the instigation and in the embrace of your closest friends—where we who love you can protect and steer you at least some little bit.

  Besides, Sally dear, the best cover for your scholarly pursuits is that of an accommodating husband.

  Also, to speak directly, I do not understand the dalliance you seem to have established with this Mr. Bammary whom you met on your travels. I do not dispute his impeccable manners and his learning—how could I, given his degree from Oxford? All in all, he is a pleasant enough fellow, almost a gentleman. Yet—and please do not think me forward here, I only think of your welfare, Sally, and what others might say against your reputation—he has the look of an Egyptian or a Hindoo and in the end he is no more an Englishman than you are an Indian. We must respect each other, of course, but the darker races can never be united with ours through the most intimate of relations, if you take my meaning. Think on it, Sally, and do not create in Mr. Bammary—or leastwise your self—hopes that can only be dashed here in London.

  Returning to the party: who shall we have there? Your friends the Gardiners would make a suitable addition to the gathering, as well as those lively fellows from our mutual friends at Matchett & Frew—with their droll tales and maggots to match your own.

  Also, through my sister’s relation and Mr. Sedgewick’s connections there, we shall have many naval officers and admiralty officials present.

  Two in particular spring to mind, but I will not tell you their names, so as to tease you and arouse in you the intellectual curiosity for which you are best known, thus to lure you out of your books and to the party. One is a lieutenant who fought in Wellington’s Army of the Peninsula; frankly, he is a bit on the morose side, but could—I am quite sure—be tempted out of his lugubrious ways under steady feminine influence.

  The other is a most peculiar yet wholly charming individual, recently returned from Australia (of all places!), who is clerking for Mr. Sedgewick. He—the young man, not Mr. S.—is trim and well-made, cutting a fine figure and clever in his speech. Mr. S. tells me that there is more to this young man than meets the eye, a mystery of unbalanced ballast beneath his painted sails—if Mr. S. means to warn me off then his words have had the opposite effect.

  So, there is my plot revealed—mischief I am crafting to benefit my young friend, meaning you, Sally.

  Please accept this invitation, which I shall follow up tomorrow with a formal letter to your uncle and the rest of your household.

  I had a quote to share with you from a poem by the newcomer, Mr. Keats, but now it has gone straight out of my head, and they will collect the morning post at any second, so I must postpone our Keatsian conversation until later.

  In haste, your ever affectionate

  —Shawdelia Sedgewick

  P.S. We have gotten a real pianoforte since you left. I will teach you all the new airs and melodies—it won’t do for you still to be singing “Lillibullero” and “Stepney Cakes and Ales” etc. from the last century! And the latest dances, though I know you dislike dancing, still you must do so if only to avoid the censure of a chattering public.

  P.P.S. Hoping the weight of your brother’s absence is not too heavy to bear. Will remember to honour him with a toast at our soirée. Post here, must go.

  Chapter 2: Many Meetings, or,

  A Long, Exact, and Serious Comedy

  “O charming Noons! and Nights divine!

  Or when I sup, or when I dine,

  My Friends above, my Folks below,

  Chatting and laughing all-a-row,

  The Beans and Bacon set before ’em,

  The Grace-cup serv’d with all decorum:

  Each willing to be pleas’d and please,

  And even the very Dogs at ease!”

  —Alexander Pope, An Imitation of the Sixth Satire of the

  Second Book of Horace, lines 133-140 (1737)

  “A man shall . . . sin, by which, contrary to all the workings of humanity, he shall ruin for ever the deluded partner of his guilt;—rob her of her best dowry; and not only cover her own head with dishonour,—but involve a whole virtuous family in shame and sorrow for her sake.”

  —Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy,

  Gentleman, vol. II, chap. xvii (1760)

  “Insensate doth the dreamer drift

  Upon dark Lethe’s course,

  While song immense from angel-choirs

  Whelms vast-flung night, rings swift oblivion’s source.”

  —Charles Oldmixon,

  The Caliper’d Heart, lines 121-124 (1774)

  Figs and fiddles! Sedgewick and wife have outdone themselves this evening, I must say!” Barnabas said to himself, as he surveyed for the third—or was it, fourth?—time the spread of food before him.

  “A knuckle of veal, a ham the size of a house (what a prodigious pig that must have been!), pies full of larks and woodcocks and other wingy little birds,” he chuckled. “Eels and burbots, pikelets, tench and trouts! Turtle soup, oh my, oh my. A forced hare. More kinds of beef and mutton than I can name, though ’tis a damnable shame to drown honest English roasts under so many sauces. What is this one?”

  He bent down to read the calligraphied card, folded like a miniature tent, set before the dish. Mrs. Sedgewick had missed no detail in preparing her rout to celebrate the return of the McDoons.

  “Les cotelettes d’agneau glacées à la Toulouse. Well, I’ll call it a lamb-chop in onion-butter, I will, and will make short work of it no matter what it calls itself!”

  As he ate, he thought, “I wonder that we won the war at all, since everything has become so very French. Once upon a time we called a duck a “duck,” but now we must call it a “moularde.” And whatever happened to the green bean—poor fellow, now he must answer to “haricot vert.” Truly, you’d think that old Nappy was at St. James, and not King George!”

  Barnabas turned his attentions now to the desserts.

  “I love Yount,” he thought. “But I must confess I have so dearly missed sweets. A singular lack, that, in Yount, there b
eing no sugar, just the odd dab of honey. Oh my, figs and farthings, what have we here?”

  He stood transfixed before heaps of oiled almonds, peels of candied lemon, golden currants, slabs of marchpain, creamy dariendoles, a great syrupy pulpatoon, a croque-en-bouche aux pistaches, pralines, glazed biscuits, an enormous Nesselrode Pudding topped with a froth of whipped cream, . . . all gleaming and glistening in the gas-light (the Sedgewicks being among the first to adopt the new form of illumination), beckoning, alluring with a seeming life of their own.

  His satisfaction was complete, nay, overwhelmed and utterly unbayed, when he came upon the selection of port, sherry, Madeira, claret and wine surrounding a most estimable punch bowl.

  “Oh Sedgewick, you have sailed clear beyond the Pillars of Hercules this night!” he said. “A most noble punch-bowl. Why, ’tis large enough to launch a ship in; indeed, I believe I detect a tide! Now, then, what about these bottles? No thin, washy stuff here, oh ho! Why here is, no it cannot be? It is! A bottle of Cahors, you remembered my old favourite.”

  Cradling the Cahors (near impossible to secure in England during the Napoleonic blockade), its contents the thick, deep red of bull’s blood, Barnabas considered the rest of the crowd.

  “Matchett looks very well,” he thought. “Nice brandy-coloured stockings, I must ask where he got them. And Gardiner, whose niece just married that Pemberley lord in Derbyshire, also nicely turned out—isabelline and vinegar rose, I’d call it, that cravat of his.”

  Barnabas turned so that his bretticoed vest in pale blue silk could be seen to best effect in the gas-light.

  “I must ask Sanford tomorrow how soon we can get the gas installed,” he thought. “Wonderful how it shows the colours!”

  Young and old, men and women filled the rooms at the Sedgewicks: bankers, lawyers, clerks, ’prentices, chandlers, naval officers, excise-men;—in the words of the song, “travellers, tapsters, merchants, and upstart gentlemen.” Gaiety prevailed. Banished by common if unspoken consent were all thoughts of the recent riots about the Corn Laws, the furor over Catholic Emancipation and the Irish Question, corsairs along the coasts of Barbary and Tremissa, or the volcanic eruptions in the Water Indies that had played such havoc with shipping between China and India. No one spoke of politics or war, of want or weather (so unseasonably cold and wet). Instead all and everyone talked of fashion and romance, of the new lotteries (especially the big one just established by the Confraternity for Saints Vanne & Hydulphe), of the Crown Prince’s latest indiscretions and his wronged wife the Queen-in-Waiting Caroline, of the latest adventures of Dr. Syntax on his doughty horse, the most recent plays at Covent Garden, the likelihood of ripe strawberries from Kent before St. Macrina’s Day, and a thousand other frivolities.

  When they tired of talk, they sang songs of fair maidens and coxcombs, of drunken livery-men and pert chambermaids, of Tibbert the Cat, of children shantled off by the fairies, of saucy wives and their husbands who stayed too long in the tavern, of Robin Goodfellow and the jealous moon, the King’s arms and Britannia, of the fall of Napoleon and the exploits of Sharpe in Spain and Lucky Jack Aubrey on the Main. When they tired of singing, they danced the “Orange-Blossom Water” and the “Ranelagh Trifle” and so many others that Barnabas quite lost count.

  “Tum tum de dum!” half-sang Barnabas, as he enjoyed the Cahors. “I like that one: ‘Bate me an ace, Morrison old jack, bate me an ace!’”

  His already mountainous love for all mankind now elevated to Olympian heights by the meat and the many desserts and, above all, by the punch and the Cahors, Barnabas sought among the convivial fellowship for his family.

  “Where has Sanford gotten himself off to?” he said. “Ah, there he is, solemn as ever, talking with Sedgewick in a corner. Looks suspiciously like business. I must upbraid them both. Later.”

  Spying an unusual figure in the throng, carrying dishes back to the kitchen, Barnabas thought, “That must be the new servant the Sedgewicks have employed, the young black woman. Not much the normal thing anymore, having a black servant, I wonder that they do so, though Mrs. Sedgewick has never been one for the proprieties. Sedgewick himself, now, what is it he said about this young woman? Something strange about her, I think.”

  Before he could remember what Sedgewick had said about the girl, Barnabas heard—or sensed, rather—a commotion from the entrance-hall, like the dull roar of a wave striking shore.

  “Merry as grigs are we, dum de dum de dum,” he said. “But where might Sally be? And her Reglum?”

  He made his way to the entrance-hall, greeting along the way a naval bureaucrat he vaguely knew (“one of the Tarletons who married into Mrs. Sedgewick’s side,” he thought) and also a Turkey-merchant he recognized from the coffee-houses.

  Pushing his way into the entrance-hall, Barnabas said, “Figs and . . . oh!”

  James Kidlington stood in front of the door.

  Sally was leaning against Reglum, her mouth working but producing no words, her eyes two lakes of despair streaked with hope. Reglum had one arm around her shoulders. He shifted his gaze from Sally to Kidlington and back again.

  Mrs. Sedgewick stood between and a little to the side of the two and the one.

  “I, I, this is . . . ,” she said. “This is the surprise, Sally, the one I told you I would . . . oh my, oh dear, a surprise it surely is, but not of the kind I wanted!”

  “Allow me,” said Kidlington, “to rescue this unforeseen moment, if I may. Sally, we must thank our mutual benefactress, Mrs. Sedgewick, for her hospitality. She invited, I accepted, and here I am.”

  He stepped forward and took one of Sally’s nerveless hands, raised it to his lips and left the faintest of kisses before releasing it.

  “At your service,” he said.

  Still Sally said no word. A wave coursed through her entire body, starting with the impression of Kidlington’s lips on her hand.

  Reglum felt that tremor. Tightening his grip on her shoulders, he half-stepped forward, extended his free hand to Kidlington and said,

  “I am Reglum Bammary.”

  Kidlington took Bammary’s hand, shook it once, twice, and then released.

  “James Kidlington, your humble servant, sir,” said Kidlington, raising one eyebrow. “Mrs. Sedgewick has spoken of you. A member of our Anglo-Indian elite I gather, a scion of the John Company.”

  Reglum neither nodded nor spoke.

  “Buttons and beeswax!” broke in Barnabas. “James! James Kidlington, here in London, free and knotless. Well, boy, out with it, tell us your story! Wait, ho, Sanford . . . someone get Sanford, he must hear this as well!”

  Kidlington told them a version of events, abridging it severely. He did not mention the angular gentlemen at the Admiralty at all.

  Sally heard none of it.

  “James,” she thought. “I hate you. Hate. Leave. Leave now. Why? Oh James. Not you, James. A wind. Wind in my heart, a storm. Oh Goddess, I love this man. Please, make him leave. Now. Make him. . . . Oh James, what did they do to you? In that place. Australia! As bad as the. . . . Jambres would understand. He has been in such chambers as you. No, no. Reglum! (—) Help me. Reglum (—), dear sweet Reglum. By my side. Always steady. We read Akenside together, we do. ‘Inspire attentive fancy,’ you like that line, my Reglum. ‘the lark cheers warbling,’ oh, ‘whose daring thoughts range the full orb of being, . . . the radiant visions,’ . . . I cannot remember more . . . ’the radiant visions where they rise’ . . . something, ‘through the gates of morn, to lead the train of Phoebus’ . . . But no more. . . . James (—) is back from the dead . . . a revenant. Flee him, flee him. . . Mother, mother, Saints Macrina, Adelsina . . . help me: I need James . . . but he will devour me. . . . Saint Morgaine . . . And there’s Reglum . . . who fought with us in Yount. . . . He loves Tom and Afsana. . . . He. . . . Oh, the Fraulein: . . . Reglum tried to help. . . . And with Dorentius too. . . . I. . . . Tom! You know me best of all. . . . What do I do? . . . Are you alive or dead, yourself? What of Afsana? . .
. Death, death, death. . . . Dear Uncle . . . and best of Sanfords. . . . You know . . . you know me from my acornage. . . . Save me. . . . Now I am ruined, my love all unfenced. . . . Fly, fly, all of us, from . . .”

  “. . . doom,” finished Kidlington. “An escape from doom, but perhaps God and the Devil conspired to bring me to this pass . . . A colossal jest, I just wonder who gets to laugh in the end?”

  The circle of listeners had grown, including now many who had no deep connection to the McDoons. Kidlington’s tale being as dashing and improbable as any of the adventures they had sung earlier in the evening, and his manner of telling it so bold yet self-deprecating, the audience was moved to clap and cheer at the story’s conclusion.

  “Why, Sally, you cry,” said Mrs. Sedgewick. “I hope you are moved by something other than melancholy? Oh dear, oh dear, I thought . . . from how you spoke in your letters from the Cape . . . about . . . Please, I did not mean to startle you with Mr. Kidlington, only to, oh foolish me, appeal to your finer sentiments. . . .”

  Mrs. Sedgewick petered out. Her husband’s smile was thin (“dearest dove, look what your cogibundity has resulted in now,” he thought). Sanford studied Kidlington carefully.

  “Uncle,” said Sally. “I fear it is late. . . Please take me home. Reglum, Mr. Sanford. “

  Kidlington, without even the shadow of a smile on his face, addressed himself to Sally.

  “Miss Sarah,” he said, his voice low and, if one were standing very close to hear, chafed as if with a surge of emotion barely restrained. “I—and you must know this, Sally—I truly did not mean to alarm you. My way back here has been strenuous, unanticipated, wholly in the hands of a capricious deity. . . . My pardon, Mr. Bammary, I do not mean to intrude. . . . Clearly my presence is not pleasant to you, so I will withdraw and not trouble you further. Good evening, and also to you Mr. McDoon, Mr. Sanford . . . and to you, Mr. Bammary.”