The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (18 page)

Your most esteemed servant
—Chas. Babbage

[Letter from Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, Director of the Prussian Royal Observatory at Koenigsberg, to Sally; translated from the original German]:

To the most genteel Miss Sarah MacLeish:

Thank you for your letter of the 12
th
of last month, which arrived via our mutual friends, the firm of Kulenkamp in Bremen.

Your query astonishes me—I had no conception that anyone else, let alone a young Englishwoman otherwise unknown to me (and one who writes in flawless German to boot!), could possibly be interested in such things.

Permit me to tell you that my soul is thrilled to know I am not the only person pursuing this line of exploration. I enclose some of my equations, to advise you of the current state of my own knowledge, and to ask how far these may corroborate your own work.

My goal is to demonstrate how measurements of the aberrations in the Earth’s nutation, precession, and rotation may be used to calculate distances of fixed stars and other objects within the deepest Aether. I am most interested in stars within the constellations we here call the “Globus Aerostaticus” and the “Coma Berenices,” which can be said to balance one another in their respective hemispheres. As you intimate, mapping through the seasons the relative positions of Horvendile’s Toe, the Great May Star, The Crossing Star, and The Ark Star may also repay the effort.

My best thinking at present is to use parallax calculations and the scalar range of the perpendicular in obliquity as the most effective means to derive the distances. Would that concur with your own thoughts?

With felicitations and friendly greetings
—F. W. Bessel

[From
Poor Robin’s Almanac for London Families for the Year 1817, Being a Florilegium of The Good, The Useful and the Entertaining for All Ages
]

[… . . . .]

Concerning the weather (inclusive also of the behaviours, activities and sentiments it brings forth), we may only hope that 1817 is better than the
annus horribilis
of 1816.

As must be known to all, it rained in 1816 on St. Swithin’s Day (July 15
th
)—which by popular understanding provides reliable foresight about the weather for the following forty days—and in fact the rest of summer and the entire fall saw an almost unbroken, cold downpour. One goodwife of our acquaintance in Southwark claims that her house-cat has learned to swim, and we receive reports from farmers across the country that their plough-horses are indistinguishable from those of their neighbours, all such creatures being one colour only: namely, that of mud.

Other reports are more ominous. The red sunsets witnessed everywhere have no natural explanation, nor the thick chilled fumes and fogs that seem to arise at every hand, reducing sight and sound for even the hardiest traveller.

London has been especially plagued by these atmospheric tumults. The Thames and all the other London rivers (the Effra chief among them) have threatened to leave their banks.

Cause for even greater dismay is what the great deluge and its attendant mists may portend. Many (in all of London’s many and varied parts, from Mayfair and Belgravia to Wapping and Rotherhithe) have reported seeing—or quarter-seeing, to be more accurate—strange forms and figures in the rain, giving rise to a multitude of odd stories that would seem to belong more to Fairyland than to our modern metropolis.

What sort of stories, a gentle reader might ask? Poor Robin has done his best to separate the oats from the ewendrie, and winnow out the quack-nonsense and tales of steeple-climbing pigs; he will not indulge or incite idle fancies, but he has no doubt as to the veracity of much that is related to him. Here he displays a mere handful of the great many verifiable anecdotes sent his way.

— One of our most reputable clockmakers, on St. John Street in Clerkenwell, has described unwanted attentions from three mysterious tall men in tall hats with long grey coats, who speak in antique accents and are not known in the neighbourhood; these men have appeared twice on the premises, emerging from the cellar without first having come through the door opening onto the street, both times in heavy rains at dusk; all the clocks in the workshop stopped at the very moment of the strangers’ appearance and could only be restarted with much labour by the apprentices; the three men made strange gestures and chanted what some said sounded like The Lord’s Prayer backwards and then vanished.

— One of our leading shipyards has been the scene of repeated affronts and affrays between its workers and various unsavoury individuals, some of whom are said to perform what can only be described as rituals out of a pagan past, with the likely object of frustrating the building of a ship whose keel was laid just this most recent St. Nicholas Day; one such individual is credibly described as having ears resembling those of a serpent, another was—upon close inspection—seen to have her left foot facing backwards, while yet another had no mouth visible though he was heard to sing (in a language no one present could identify).

— A laughing, raven-haired woman—dressed in shades of green—has haunted an eminent maker of pianofortes, on Wigmore Street very near to Cavendish Square in the West End; on several occasions the proprietor and his workers, arriving at the locked premises just before dawn, have heard one of their fine instruments being played; they unfailingly describe the music as rough, discordant, of the broken sort the Italians call “arpeggiare,” that awakens the blood; upon unlocking and entering the workplace, the piano-makers found this woman (no acquaintance of theirs) playing one of their finished instruments with a wild twitching of her arms and limbs, and having no earthly explanation for how she gained access to the place; most perturbing and least explainable, her arms were several feet longer than they had a right to be, and ended in stiff, small, coppery fingers that travelled too swiftly over the keyboard; when confronted, this person laughed, fled into the back of the shop and then seemingly disappeared; whichever pianoforte she touched went badly out of tune, and several even had to be destroyed.

[… . . . .]

[A farthing broadside, very popular in the winter of 1816-1817 throughout the South Bank and the East End. At the top of the sheet is a rough woodcut of a man wrestling a horned, two-headed dragon, with the Hand of God suspended in heaven above and between them, the hand pointing from its cloud in the direction of the man; various cherubim and winged fish adorn the skies, while the arena in which the two combatants battle is littered with fallen lambs, broken eggs, grinning skulls and scattered flowers; in the left-hand corner of the picture is a crowing cock atop a sheaf of wheat, in the right-hand corner a glowering owl, holding what appears to be a rabbit in its claws; the image appears to be recycled from the religious controversies of the 17
th
century. Scrawled on the verso side of the archived example are the words “December at Bell & Burbot, Bethnall Green—‘Thou art a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek’—burnt offerings at Gilgal—the sign of the baker’s peel, a key to the new Salem—anointure by trumpet?”]

“A Merchant Ship ought:

1.  To be able to carry a great lading in proportion to its size.

2.  To sail well by the wind, in order to beat easily off a coast, where it may be embayed, and also to come about well in a hollow sea.

3.  To work with a crew small in number in proportion to its cargo.

4.  To be able to sail with a small quantity of ballast.

[… . . . .]

. . . We can conclude nothing concerning the length, breadth, and depth of ships, since different qualities require conditions diametrically opposite to each other. We may succeed in uniting two of these advantages by a certain form and by certain proportions given to ships, but it is impossible to combine all four in an eminent degree. It is not possible to gain on one side without losing another.”

—Fredrik Henrik af Chapman
,
Architectura Navalis Mercatoria
(Stockholm, 1768;
translated by James Inman, 1820, ppg. 79-80)

“Porism: A proposition affirming the possibility of finding such conditions as will render a certain problem indeterminate or capable of innumerable solutions.

—John Playfair
,
in
The Transactions of the Royal Society in Edinburgh
,
vol. iii (1794)

“Her madness hath the oddest frame of sense, such a dependency of thing on thing, as e’er I heard in madness.”

—William Shakespeare
,
Measure for Measure
, Act V, Scene 1 (1604/1623)

T
he gloomy fall of 1816 calved an even more lugubrious winter. The sun, already half-forgotten through a rainy summer and fall, abandoned London and the rest of Great Britain altogether. Rain, mist and clouds muted everything, casting the world in the dull bronze-grey shades of bell-metal and the soft sheen of vermeil and pewter. When the sun did appear it shone with an eerie, oily, reddish glow, as if blood were seeping through the gauze of heaven. No one was happy except the makers of umbrellas and those who supplied them with oiled silk and baleen ribs.

The McDoon household was very unhappy that fall; the rain, though irksome, was the smallest source of their melancholy. Most of their distress and frustration ran like rivulets just below the surface, near enough at all times to keep everyone’s feet wet without completely drowning anyone. The only members of the house on Mincing Lane—the house with the dolphin-shaped doorknocker—who kept up their cheer were Yikes (for whom the ceaseless rain was simply an excuse to stay napping by the fire) and Charicules (who sang in time to the raindrops on the windowpanes and in counterpoint to the wind rattling the sashes).

The Project crept ahead, fitfully, with erratic eighth-steps.

By Martinmas in early November, the McDoons had raised only half the necessary capital but decided to proceed any way (“what choice do we have?” said Barnabas). Despite the lack of full financing but against various forms of additional surety and further rights in collateral, Blackwall’s agreed to lay the keel for
The Indigo Pheasant
. The McDoons felt strongly that laying the keel for a choir-boat should best happen on November 22
nd
, the day of Cecilia—patron saint of music—to capture and bind into the vessel “in broken air, trembling, the wild Musick, . . . in a dying, dying Fall” (as Pope had written a century earlier). Yet their fortune was ill-annexed: the momentous occasion was delayed until Saint Nicholas’s Day on December 6th, due to last-minute contractual controversies and to difficulties maneuvering the length of elm for the keel into the yard. An irritable fate continued to dog the McDoons: at the keel-laying ceremony, a windy tongue of rain washed off the rowan branch that Sally had tied onto the bow-end of the keel. Some of the shipwrights, carpenters and blocksmen muttered under their sodden hats that the ship might be cursed or at least resolutely wayward if it would not accept the rowan’s warding and guiding powers. The McDoons pretended not to hear such talk.