The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (46 page)

Sanford stirred himself and said, “And your aunt Eusebianna born Brownlee. Mustn’t forget her. She would be most proud of all, to see what her granddaughter Maggie Collins did.”

The low, gentle sound of humming soothed their ears.

“Yes, too right,” agreed Barnabas, sipping his wine on the uproll of the ship.

“Nothing will ever be the same now, not for us and most certainly not for Maggie,” said Sanford, undertones of melancholy belying the briskness of his words. “King Solomon spoke 3,000 proverbs and had 1,005 songs, but Maggie has more. No, nothing stays the same for her.”

Barnabas finished his wine and, feeling as if his happiness would explode his rose-and-slate calicosh vest, he flung his wine-glass into the sea.

“Ah hah, now the sea really
is
wine-dark!” he chortled.

Barnabas surveyed the McDoons gathered around him. He smiled, hummed a scrap of the Great Song that echoed in his mind, and then said loudly, “Buttons and beeswax! Maggie, you did it! You brought Yount home!”

Maggie smiled and said, “No, cousin,
we all
brought Yount home, not I alone.”

Barnabas slashed an imaginary cutlass through the air, bowed slightly, and said, “Fairly spoken, dear cousin, though you led the effort! And now, if I may speak for everyone: home for us as well! I yearn at last for nothing more than to sit by the fire drinking a glass of my best Cahors, and to muck about growing smilax root in the garden . . . at home on Mincing Lane!”

As every schoolboy and schoolgirl knows, Barnabas did not entirely get his wish. The McDoons had become—whether they would or not—very public figures. Sanford was right: nothing was ever the same for them, least of all for Maggie.

Inevitably the sudden and unlooked-for return of Yount changed global history. In the nearly two centuries since the Return, every sphere of human inquiry and every plane of human activity have been radically altered. Most profoundly, we now understand that we are not alone in the universe: others—some like us, some not—are out there.

Sir John Barrow, almost immediately upon the
Indigo Pheasant
’s return to London, began sending British exploratory expeditions into the Interrugal Lands. Among the most famous of “Barrow’s Boys” was Captain Shufflebottom, who led the ill-fated voyage in search of fabled, sunken R’lyeh. Shufflebottom’s final message, sent by ansible-telegraph from a coordinate near the Cackling Isle in 1831, has been parsed endlessly since its sending: we remain baffled by its meaning, just as the existence (let alone the location) of haunted R’lyeh continues to elude us.

Many consider the discovery of the Interrugal Lands and the history of Yount (its Loss & Return, as we now style it) to be unalloyed positives for humankind—in some quarters, what we have learned is deemed a divine revelation. Others are much more sceptical; some reject, deny, refute, attack. A cost-benefit analysis of the Return must be impossible, but that has not stopped philosophers, politicians, economists, theologians and thinkers of every sort and persuasion from making the attempt. How does one draw up a meaningful balance sheet, using counter-factuals and speculative hypotheses as part of the evidence? Wars have been fought as a result that might not otherwise have been fought, but most likely wars never happened that would otherwise have been fought. The Return saved many millions of lives when it was discovered, in the mid-nineteenth century, that the Yountians were immune from cholera (that terrible pandemic scourge of the 1800s), which led subsequently to the hugely successful vaccine based upon various Yountian antigens. On the other hand, the Yountian weasel-rat as an invasive species has caused great damage to rice crops across southern Asia, and remains a durable, if mostly contained, pest. And so on and so forth.

More directly, the Return sparked a global political crisis in the 1820s, one that reshaped the world into the channels we know today. As is well known, Great Britain claimed Yount as a protectorate, based initially on its role in financing and equipping the
Indigo Pheasant
and then also on its key role in supporting Farther Yount in the civil war against the Ornish. When Farther Yount defeated the Ornish and Queen Zinnamoussea named Afsana and Tom her heirs and successors, Great Britain then augmented its imperial claims with the argument that Tom was a British citizen. As is also well known, China contested Great Britain’s claim, and the Indian Ocean became the scene of several tense stand-offs between the British and Chinese navies. The fact that the Chinese possessed a blue-water navy by the late 1820s, and one able to resist British assertions, is clearly traceable to the Return: Tang Guozhi made sure that China swiftly adopted Yountian technology and persuaded the Celestial Emperor to overturn the centuries-old ban on long-distance Chinese maritime activity.

In the end, the friendship between Mei-Hua and the McDoons helped defuse tension, at least enough to keep Great Britain and China from outright war. Mei-Hua became one of the most famous women in nineteenth-century China, exerting significant influence over foreign policy. She never forgot her time in London and on the
Indigo Pheasant
. She remembered always the kindness the McDoons had shown her—the Chinese New Year at Mincing Lane glowed undimmed in her memory until the day she died. She remembered that the McDoons, the Sons & Daughters of Asaph, and even British soldiers, had stood as allies and co-combatants with her and her brother (and grim old Tang Guozhi!) in a titanic struggle against otherworldly powers. Above all, she cherished the love with which Maggie had embraced her—she would always be Maggie’s “little sister eagle.”

Equally important was the active influence of the lawyer Winstanley, who became one of the great reform politicians of the age, serving in Grey’s Whig government and drafting elements of the First Reform Act of 1832. Winstanley (strongly supported by his wife) rallied the opposition to British claims in the Indian Ocean and eventually led the anti-imperialist faction in Parliament. Winstanley remembered well and fondly Mei-Hua and her brother, and recalled Tang Guozhi’s asperity with respect.

Most scholars, both Western and Eastern, point to Mei-Hua as a chief—if informal—architect of the Anglo-Chinese Trade Treaty of 1840 (the so-called “Canton Concord”) that resolved the major issues between the two nations and granted the Chinese trade concessions throughout the Indian Ocean. Winstanley helped draft the terms of the treaty, and he co-sponsored its introduction into the House of Commons. The Canton Concord was the model for the later agreements that ultimately, right after World War I, saw China gain with British support commercial enclaves as far away as Heligoland off Germany and at Naples in Italy.

Other factors were also influential in the confrontations over Yount in the 1820s and 1830s. Tom and Afsana did not accept British suzerainty, nor did they wish to be dependent on a resurgent China. They forged an alliance instead with the Tamil princes in the Carnatic, who were convinced that Yount represented the lost, once-submerged Tamil kingdom of Kumari Kandam. As a Gujarati, Afsana also received aid from that Indian realm as well as from neighbouring principalities (Kutch, Sind, Baluchistan). The Bengalese Indigo Rebellion of 1826, inspired by the ethos and exploits embodied in the
Indigo Pheasant,
was the decisive event galvanizing the entire Indian sub-continent. Under Afsana and Tom, its armed forces, led by Nexius Dexius, Farther Yount (together with the reformed Ornish islands) assisted the Bengalese, almost leading them into war with Great Britain.

Here, at least, the story has something of a fairy tale ending: the dynasty Afsana and Tom started is, of course, still on the throne in Farther Yount. Farther Yount became a constitutional monarchy in 1908, the same year the British left their last possessions in India, and is one of the Seven Nations of India created in 1920. In a very nice touch, the Empress herself appointed one of Mei-Hua’s great-grandchildren to the Chinese delegation that witnessed the signing of the joint constitution at the famed Seven Nations Conference in Calcutta.

The
Indigo Pheasant
also inspired the slave revolts on the indigo plantations of South Carolina and Georgia that helped cause the American Civil War. “Not one iota for indigo,” the rallying cry of President C.F. Adams when Confederate troops besieged Washington DC in 1851, is among the most widely known political slogans in the world. Holcroft’s Union troops targeted the indigo plantations on the March to the Sea in 1854; when the North finally prevailed over the South, not one indigo plantation remained of any consequence anywhere in the Confederacy.

These sanguinary conflicts were decades in the future when Barnabas, Sanford, Sally, and Maggie returned on a morning to the house with blue trim and the dolphin door knocker on Mincing Lane. Billy Sea-Hen was with them, and also the most unlikely house-guest of all: Jambres, his own skin still reveling in the taste of the wind and the feel of the sun.

“Welcome home,” said Cook for the tenth time, tears in her eyes. “Oh, we have missed you, from the beet singling season to the fall of the small moon. Come here, you most particular, Billy Sea-Hen of Queenhithe!”

She crushed Billy to her bosom.

Later, in the partners’ room, Cook and her niece (and Mr. Fletcher) asked for a hundred explanations and received a hundred responses.

“And that brainy Mr. Bunce, him so courageous with his one leg missing?” asked Cook.

“In fine form, very fine form, when we saw him last,” said Barnabas, enjoying a glass of Cahors. “Has remained at home, hasn’t he? With dear Tom and Afsana, and Nexius Dexius, the lot of ’em, in Yount.”

Cook looked troubled, glanced at Sally before asking, “With Captain Bammary, as well then?”

Barnabas paused, also shot a glance at Sally (whose face betrayed no emotion) before replying, “That’s correct, Captain Bammary has chosen to return to Yount too, and why not? That was part of the point, wasn’t it? To find Yount, reunite everyone there?”

Sanford made a low noise like a mule, deep in his throat. The images in the pictures on the wall—the drowning souls spilling out of the wreckage of foundering East Indiamen—seemed to move of their own accord, though presumably that could only have been a trick of the candlelight.

Isaak jumped out of Sally’s lap and strode to Cook.

“Well, by Saint Morgaine, you seem no the worse for wear!” laughed Cook, leaning over to pet the cat.

“Where is the beautiful bird?” ventured the Cook’s niece. She had so loved Charicules’s singing.

“Another migrant to Yount,” said Barnabas. So attached had Charicules and Malchen become that the saulary elected to stay in Yount, where it was considered a national treasure. Malchen became Yount’s First Ornithologist, establishing the Grand Aviary at the university. In one of their first acts as King and Queen, Tom and Afsana named the saulary as the national bird of Farther Yount—who has not seen the saulary featured prominently on Yountish currency and stamps?

Some semblance of normalcy resumed at the house on Mincing Lane, but no more than a semblance and nothing resembling life before the Return. Matchett & Frew, quick to capitalize on trading opportunities with Yount and staunch backers of forays into the Interrugal Lands, were frequent visitors. The Gardiners of Gracechurch Street also dined often with the McDoons, and sometimes the Darcys when Elizabeth was in town and could persuade her husband to go out to visit. The Darcys escorted Sally on her occasional visits to the Babbages, the Somervilles and other houses. Winstanley dined with the McDoons every other Wednesday evening, often bringing his wife so that the talk at table expanded to include many more topics than Winstanley on his own might have explored. Mr. Gandy frequented the house on Mincing Lane, his eccentric wit never failing to enliven a gathering; he included many Yountish examples in his magisterial
Art, Philosophy and Science of Architecture
(published in 1835).

The Sedgewicks and the McDoons never fully reconciled. Seeking to assert his claims on the
Indigo Pheasant
patents, the lawyer Sedgewick pursued various fruitless suits in Chancery and in the High Admiralty Court, eventually appearing before the Queen’s Bench. Thus the ghost of James Kidlington stalked the lives of those he affected so forcefully while he lived.

Mrs. Sedgewick never visited the house on Mincing Lane so long as Maggie resided there, but she did host Sally for tea and meet Sally at other venues.

Sally declined Tom and Afsana’s several invitations to join them in Yount, but lived out a life of increasing seclusion in London, surrounded and protected by Barnabas, Sanford, Isaak, Cook, and Billy Sea-Hen. Ironically, while she appeared less and less often outside the house on Mincing Lane, Sally became ever more famous as her central role in the Return became known. Babbage, Somerville, and other leading scientific lights of the era recommended Sally for honours and appointments. For the most part she declined these, shunning public attention, preoccupying herself with her translations of the Yountian classics. In so doing, she—again, ironically—kept herself in public view, not least when she helped start the Saint Macrina’s Library of Yountish Literature, with their distinctive indigo-coloured covers (which influenced Harvard to start the Loeb Classical Library decades later).