The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 7

  Alas, their Creator was not their sole judge. Sibby became with child and when she could no longer hide this state, her husband realized it could not be his (he not having had carnal relations with his wife recently enough) and became devoured of an evil anger, ‘his brow dark with hot climates.’ Rumour enough there was to lead her husband to Mr. Ba.

  My brother-in-law had his vengeance in full. He had Mr. Ba gelded and otherwise mutilated in front of an audience (all within his rights according to the laws of Maryland), before having Mr. Ba put to death.

  Sibby most forcefully insisted that I promise to note this next, to convey the full depth and gravity of her husband’s conduct, that—as is customary in the American plantations—all members of the community were required to attend the torments in audience. Even at the Gallowlee near Calton Hill or at London’s Tyburn, those attending come of their own accord; none are compelled as Sibby was to watch the rending death of a beloved.

  Sibby also wanted it known that—again as is commonplace on the American plantations—the deceased’s teeth were extracted from his head and used to make dentures, in this case for the merchant McDoon himself.

  When the baby was born, my brother-in-law had it taken immediately from Sibby’s arms, not five minutes old, and given to the slave-women in the rude dwellings behind the main plantation house. As soon as Sibby was recovered enough to travel, my brother-in-law took her and returned to Scotland. Sibby, of course, never saw her baby again and I have been blocked in all my efforts to gain any further intelligence of the child, whether she be alive or dead, etc.

  Here the story stops; I have no more to say, but am relieved and enheartened to have it writ down so that the Truth be aired and now archived.

  In final conclusion, I confirm what I have made explicit in my fully executed last will and testament, namely, that I—Belladonna Eulalia McDoon, born Brownlee—do recognize the existence of my niece, the only daughter of my sister Eusebianna Eudelma McDoon, born Brownlee, by whatever appellation this daughter may have received or currently bear, and wheresoever my niece may be, and in whatever situation she may find herself. Furthermore, in absentia but having the full force of our law, I declare, recognize and embrace my niece, and any children or grandchildren she may have or will have, to be among my heirs, and I morever direct, instruct and require that my already indicated heirs, being my son and my daughter, to likewise recognize and embrace my niece and any children and grandchildren she may have, as being co-heirs with all rights attached thereto.’”

  Sedgewick handed the paper to Barnabas.

  “Sanford,” said Barnabas. “This explains so much. . . .”

  “Yes, as I listened I saw your uncle the day he refused your suit for Rehana,” said Sanford.

  “And then he flung you out of the house, honest Sanford, for your support of my declaration,” said Barnabas.

  “You are not your uncle,” said Sanford, putting his hand lightly on Barnabas’s shoulder.

  “Thank you, old friend, but now to you Sedgewick: a painful if important piece of McDoon family lore, but I see as yet no connection to your serving maid.”

  Sanford broke in before the lawyer could respond, “Wait, wait. Let us use the girl’s name? How is she called?”

  “Maggie Collins,” said Sedgewick. “And with her name our tale continues. I did not start to wonder about her provenance only when the Belladonna’s papers came to me. No, I felt something was amiss with her, Maggie, when my wife brought her to us. Perhaps the story rightly begins with her, with my wife that is, ma petite calebasse, whose whims I am long resigned to, and so I had no more than desultory quibbles when she announced the arrival of the dark-skinned Maggie.”

  Sedgewick stood up, his belly caparisoned in a carpish-yellow waist-coat, his neck looped with a glaucous green cloth. He went to inspect the porcelain figurines on the mantlepiece.

  “Gentlemen, I was convinced this whole thing was a tale of a tub, a wobbly nonsense,” Sedgewick said, his back to Barnabas and Sanford. “But there is an uncanny element to that girl, a set of abilities she exhibits sub rosa that I have seen myself and—am forced I tell you, not to my liking!—to own are real. Maggie possesses an extremely developed faculty for mathematics. Hard as it is to credit, she is capable of the calculus, beyond what I can achieve myself or in fact what most anyone outside of Woodhouse and Babbage could aspire to. That makes her a freak, but a potentially useful freak.”

  “Yes, I can see how that might upset you,” said Barnabas, leaning over to pet Yikes. “I sometimes feel that way about Sally and she is my own niece!”

  “How does Maggie’s mathematical skill tie her to the McDoons?” said Sanford, pouring more tea.

  “Ah, you are right, I divagate,” said the lawyer, turning from the fireplace to face the other two. “Her obvious intelligence, coupled with her obstinate and porpentine nature, prompted me to wonder as to her origins. So, as a diversion from my daily rounds of legal lucubrations, I inquired at the place from whence Mrs. Sedgewick hailed her, that is, at the Saint Macrina’s School. A greasy little person there informed me that Maggie and her mother arrived on a ship from New York, and that it appeared they had taken their surname from that of the ship’s captain. I thought that interesting, in an idle sort of way, but there I let the matter dangle . . . until I received the Belladonna papers.”

  Barnabas said, “A hunch, then?”

  “Yes,” said Sedgewick. “A hunch, a presentiment, suspicio tenuissima. No clear and evident connection, but the more I read of the Scottish court papers, the more I felt there might be some link. Reading about the African mathematician kept reminding me of Maggie. In any case, I found Captain Collins, now retired in Rotherhithe, who easily recalled Maggie and her mother. He had seen a fair few black sailors in his day, of course, but not many black females aboard ship, especially as paying passengers. That led me to the port-records in the Pool of London, where I discovered that their passage had been paid in part by a person named Weatherby and his confreres in the Free Abyssinian Church in New York.”

  “Bit between the teeth, old boy, bit between the teeth,” said Barnabas.

  “No denying it,” said Sedgewick. “I used connections at Thomas Wilson & Co. to track down ‘Weatherby’ and the church in New York, which was soon done. Church members told Wilson’s agent that Maggie and her mother had come as fugitive slaves, together with Maggie’s father, from Maryland. Someone said the words that set all the pieces in place: ‘Blair Plantation.’”

  “Beans and bacon,” said Barnabas.

  “I paid Wilson’s man to go to Blair on the Choptank (marvelous names they have in the New World!). Under various pretenses, he gleaned the outlines of the story that Eusebianna told Belladonna. One of his informants said the capstone word: ‘McDoon.’ The dates and ages all work out. There can be no doubt. Maggie’s maternal grandfather was an African savant, from Timbuktu no less; her maternal grandmother was your aunt, Sibby McDoon. Q.E.D.”

  “Does she know?” said Sanford.

  “No, but I think she suspects something—she is unholy sharp-witted, has what I should call ‘forward-looking peripheral vision.’ The real question before us is the legal one. Certain rights of evantage, combined with the doctrines of tresayle and cy-pres, most probably apply and govern here, which would likely prove strong defenses against claims for estoppel based on abatement, annulment, non-recognition, disownment and repudiatio.”

  “In clear text, sir,” said Sanford.

  “Ad rem, Maggie may be one of your heirs, Barnabas, and thus have a claim on the company’s equity.”

  “Wheat and whiskey!” said Barnabas. “First Afsana and now Maggie!”

  “In an eggshell,” said Sanford.

  “What do we do, Sanford?” said Barnabas.

  “What does your heart tell you to do? This is—meaning no offense, Mr. Sedgewick—not foremost a legal matter, though the law will certainly tell us what we can not do. No, this we must decide as our consciences direc
t us.”

  The clock ticked in the room that smelled faintly but always of sandalwood. Rodney forever pursued the French, the many souls perpetually drowned as the East Indiamen went down. Barnabas looked suddenly at Sally’s favourite picture on the wall, the one showing the black man saving the white boy from the sleek grey shark. He stared at it for a dozen ticks of the clock, then wheeled with Barnabasian alacrity, his hand arabesqued in his ‘clarifying’ mode.

  Sanford smiled, short but deep, knowing what Barnabas would say and agreeing wholeheartedly in advance.

  “We invite Maggie to tea,” said Barnabas. “Beans and biscuits, by God, we invite her to a family tea!”

  “Dextrous thief of my affections,” said Sally, staring out her attic window towards Dunster Court on the afternoon after the Sedgewick’s party. “What is the height of your character?”

  She had slept no more than an hour or so since returning to Mincing Lane.

  The bells of the City, and beyond, tolled four o’clock. She heard the maid admitting Mr. Sedgewick and the thump of the door to the partners’ room. She heard dimly that Cook was preparing their dinner, while mardling in the kitchen with Mr. Harris and Mr. Fletcher—familiar and comfortable sounds that came as if from a sidereal distance, providing no comfort at all.

  Papers were pinned and tacked up on every wall in the room, in an order known only to Sally, containing spidery sketches, calculations, annotations in a cryptic language (or so it might seem to an outside observer), reefs of mathematical symbols (often crossed out, re-done, written over), lop-sided geometrical processions, more scribblings, here profusely hinched together, there languidly curving over the page—a rubato of the mind. The papers engulfed the maps and prints already on the wall. In one place Sally had continued to write onto the wall; if she removed that paper, her equation would start mid-tempo.

  A napping Isaak yawned and rolled over on the floor, making a new indentation in the shoals of books and pamphlets, nestling herself between The Visible World Pictured by Comenius and Busching’s Description of the Earth.

  “Fly back to regions far from my heart, beyond the steeps of India and the hayles of China,” Sally said. “Go walk some other path, with the stars beneath the horizon. For you will not have me, not again.”

  Sally saw the figures passing by in Mincing Lane below her window, but only as a blurred martingale of movement, darts and spangles of colour in a shimmering shadow.

  “Sankt Jacobi,” she whispered, “Sankt Nicolai. All the foundations of the earth are out of course. Selah. Hatred is too noble an emotion to spend on him. No, I cherish my hatred, I glut on it. No, no, I do not mean that! I would harbour your love forever. Here I stand shorn of all defenses, my mind unroofed, my heart unlaced. This is a source of my most infinite regret but no human foresight could guard against it. Guard against it? Ha ha, no fence against a flail. But now, at last, I cast off childish things, the rattles and cobs, taws and tottums of my youth . . . Tom! Do you remember how we played at chuck-farthings as children, here in this house? Tom, Tom, is that you?”

  Isaak came to Sally, nozzled about her shins.

  “Oh, my little golden one, you at least are constant, blessed tes muddry.”

  Sally kicked aside books, knocking Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children to the one side and Smith’s Minor Morals to another, upending Wakefield’s Juvenile Anecdotes, making a scree of sermons by Spener, Thomasius, Tillotson, and Tyndale.

  “What use are any of these? Wagonish ideas: big, boxy, creaking-noisy and . . . empty!”

  Rooks cried outside. Bells tolled again: the deep clamour of St. Margaret Patten around the corner on Little Tower Street, the higher chime of St. Dionis Backchurch across Fenchurch, the claudicant banging of St. Birinus with its imbalanced carillon.

  “Ring away, ring away! All you voices of the pia munera . . . you succour me not.”

  Sally sat with Isaak in her lap, staring out of the window as the foresummer sun began to set.

  “Quatsch. No, I shall not speak so. Fraulein would not have me do so. Notbricht Eisen.”

  The upper skies turned pickerel-grey, flecked with gleaming streaks of the colour one sees on ripening sickle-pears. The line of the rooftops across the street dissolved slowly, slowly, into the sky, limned by a murky vinaceous red.

  “‘O that false fire which in his cheek so glowed;

  O that forced thunder from his heart did fly . . .’”

  Delinquent streaks of sun slanted into the room, now the grey of opals, now the grey of a pigeon’s breast with hints of cream in the underfeathers, now the grey of slates.

  “‘He came on tiger’s feet, with borrowed emotion seeming owned. He would yet again betray the fore-betrayed, and corrupt anew a now-repentant maid.’”

  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.