The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (5 page)

“Must I forgive him?” thought Maggie. “Mother, he is so unfair.”

“I did, sir, and only I,” she said.

“Why do you persist so?” said Mr. Sedgewick. “Patently not true, girl! I have a reputation, this house has a reputation, and you sully it with lies! Now, tell me the truth!”

Maggie rose from her chair, her body so taut she thought she would break. Her tongue nearly cleaved to her palate. Her eyes stung.

“I did not steal this idea, I swear to Saint Macrina!” she said.

“There, surely that suffices, cease this interrogation!” said Mrs. Sedgewick.

“No, my dear, there is more here than your pet reveals,” said Mr. Sedgewick. “She plays Caliban. I sense a Prospero in all this. That’s it: I shall call her henceforth ‘Calibanna.’”

Maggie stood as still as a pillar while her mind steeplechased.

“‘I dare do all that may become a man; who dares do more is none,’” Maggie said.

“So you know the reference, do you? Well, do not quote
The Tempest
back to me,” said Mr. Sedgewick. “You test my limits, girl.”

As Maggie measured her own temerity, the clock ticked onward from under the mirror.

“It’s not
The Tempest
, master sir,” she said. “It’s
Macbeth
I quote.”

The lawyer heaved himself up, jowls quivering.

“Out, out, out!” he said. “I will not abide your insolence any longer, leave us now, back to the kitchen or wherever your duties require you!”

Maggie left, bumping into a small table as tears blinded her.

“Oh great Mother,” she thought. “What am I to do? I cannot leave this house, it is all I have but I cannot stand that man. Show me the way, please help me.”

But, if the Mother heard, deep in her ancient slumber, she gave no sign.

Mr. and Mrs. Sedgewick quarrelled long that afternoon. In the end, they declared a stalemate and Mrs. Sedgewick withdrew.

Alone, the lawyer contemplated Maggie’s model and felt rising the checks of remorse.

“Perhaps you were too harsh,” he said, looking up into the trumeau mirror. “Yes perhaps you were. She quotes Shakespeare. She knows the algebra and—
mirabile dictu
—even the calculus.”

He poured himself a glass of sherry.

“Nay, this girl could not . . . she is a creature of Demerary,” he said.

He inspected the model, with only the ticking of the clock for company.

“Ingenious,” he said. “A bizarre clockwork, I make it. Tick tock. A meditation on torsion and balance,
multum in parvo
. But what is it for, I wonder? Beneath these salpincial tubes and nautiloid ’scapments, what is its purpose?”

He sipped his sherry.

“More to the point,” he thought. “What is
her
purpose? Calibanna!
Fateor, paradoxa haec assertio.
Mystery walks with her, and something dangerous lives within her. If only I could tell Mrs. Sedgewick . . . which I must, and then the McDoons! But how?”

He looked at himself in the mirror again and spoke aloud.

“Diplomacy won’t work here,” he said. “The plainest of plain talk only. They must know what the Scottish court papers document, which I have validated by my own means: that this little daughter of Caliban is a member of the McDoon family. There, I have said it aloud, and no devil or angel has stopped my mouth.”

Mr. Sedgewick finished the sherry and said:

“Maggie is a cousin to Miss Sally, a niece of sorts to Barnabas. Whatever is the world become?”

“Beans and bacon, it will cost a considerable great sum,” said Barnabas.

“Thirty-five thousand pounds at 25 pounds per ton,” said Sanford. “And that with much hard bargaining. Copper bottoming, iron for the knees and braces, good Suffolk oak, scantlings more robust and spacious than is the norm . . .”

“Which only covers the ship itself,” said Reglum. “Then there will be the cost of outfitting and victualling . . .”

“Precisely,” said Sanford. “Say, another 4,000 pounds at the least on the one, and—with 120 crew and maybe 230 souls recruited by Billy Sea-Hen—that’s, let’s see . . .”

“Eighteen guns, at least,” said Reglum. “With their ordnance . . .”

“It will take some years to complete,” said Barnabas.

“Two years at the earliest,” said Sanford. “If fortune favours us.”

“It will mean a rigorous focus of our minds, a
menagement
of colossal proportions,” said Barnabas.

“Especially as it will need be done in complete secrecy,” said Reglum.

“Not to mention—oh, figs and farthings!—the cost of the Fulginator,” said Barnabas.

“Which none of us knows can even be built, let alone the cost of building it,” said Reglum.

Sally waited, holding Isaak in her lap.

After a long meeting, they had just bid goodbye to three visitors: the owner of the Blackwall shipyard on the Thames, his master marine architect, and the surveyor-general of the Honourable East India Company. Outside the house with its dolphin door-knocker on Mincing Lane, a woman hawked eggs and a linnet sang from the lone lime tree adorning the entire street. The endless traffic on Fenchurch, Cornhill and Leadenhall thrummed under one’s feet, mixed with the distant lowing of cattle being driven to Smithfield and punctuated with the calls of rooks and choughs from the Tower. Inside the McDoon office ticked a clock framed by Prudence and Alacrity wrought in bronze.

Sally spoke, “Yet it must be done, whatever the expense, however long it takes, no matter the challenges of oversight and governance.”

Barnabas, Sanford and Reglum nodded, with varying degrees of reluctance.

“Yes, of course, Sally dearest,” said Reglum. “We’re just considering the logistics.”

“As we must,” said Sally. “But not too long or with too much parsimony.”

Sanford flinched almost imperceptibly.

“I’m sorry dear Sanford, I meant that not so barbed,” laughed Sally.

“Oh, we’ll stretch the shilling, to be sure,” said Sanford, with one of his rare half-smiles. “But not at the risk of failure.”

“Having said that, we cannot merely wish away the costs,” said Reglum.

“Quite right,” said Barnabas. “Hence the need to find investors. Quiet partners, investors who won’t ask too many questions.”

“The East India Company appears willing to commit,” said Reglum. “And without probing too far into the nature of the voyage, so long as we guarantee them a specific profit.”

Sanford clamped his jaws.

“The Landemanns and the Brandts will invest; they know all about Yount,” said Barnabas. “Most likely our good friends Matchett & Frew also—they suspect we are up to something, and probably know more than they let on.”

“The Gardiners don’t know, but they trust us and will follow our lead,” said Sanford. “Droogstoppel in Amsterdam, I’ll wager, and possibly Buddenbrooks in Luebeck. Old Osbaldistone might take a punt. Chicksey Stobbles & Veneering, the drug merchants . . .”

“. . . such snobs,” said Barnabas.

“Yes, well, be that as it may, their money is solid.”

“Those newcomers said to be risk-hungry, what is their name?”

“Dawes, Tomes Mousley & Grubb?”

“That’s the very one!”

“We’ll get the Anglo-Bengalee Disinterested Loan & Life with us, they won’t delve too deeply. We could ask Domby but his son is so sick, I wonder . . .”

Isaak toured the office as the McDoons, including Reglum, debated investment strategies and ship design for the rest of the afternoon.

“We need a name for the ship,” said Sanford.

“Sally, this is your conception,” said Barnabas. “What do you propose?”

“Thank you. I have thought long on the matter. What keeps coming to mind are the birds that have inspired us on our journey so far. The
Gallinule
. The
Lanner
. All the ospreys. The nursery rhyme runs in my head: ‘White crow, blue gawk, black swan, red hawk/ Fetch you home yon’digo pheasant.’ So let it be the
Indigo Pheasant
.”

The three men smiled and shouted, “Huzzah, huzzah! To the
Indigo Pheasant
! Godspeed the
Indigo Pheasant
!”

At that moment, the cook appeared in the doorway.

“Well, as a quab is a queen: call it coincidental, or call it what you will, but an indigo pheasant is printed on the pattern of the china plates I just laid out for your dinner,” she said. “I am serving good English plaice in a butter sauce, with roast potatoes in their jackets and mashed peas. Come along now, all of you, tick tock, before your food gets cold.”

Isaak followed them into the dining room.

“Ah, the echoes of this orb, the colliding humours of this world,” said N.C. Strix Tender Wurm. He had just stepped through the casement of a long-case clock into a quiet house off Hoxton Square in London.

He moved his jaws from side to side, licked his lips. It had been a very long time since he wore this form. His words came out with a spilching sound.

His skin was the white of mutings and sputum and ash. His head was too large for his body, a great round head, bald, with enormous, yellow-tinged eyes set far forward. His lips were thin but a vivid dark red, a colour darker than brick, almost black. His legs were long, sheathed in tight silk the colour of an old tooth; his barrel chest stretched out a white coat with long, cut-away tails that reached well below his knees. Small black chevrons ran intermittently in hatched bands across the back and sleeves; his high stiff collar was cottised with the same.

Of the millions of worlds God created, the Wurm liked this one best, with its Cairo and its Delhi, its Peking and its London. Of the millions upon millions of species that Goddess created to inhabit those worlds, Wurm liked the ones on this world best. Humans, above all. Humans, who most closely resembled the creatures he imagined as his own children, step-children of his cold fever-dreams.

He loved (if such a word could be applied to the Wurm) the sounds here. He widened his ears and sucked in a river of human sound: the ceaseless murmurs, pleas, vain invocations, threats, idle boasts, a mussitation of folly, greed, lust, arrogance and every variety of venality, a chorus of cruelty interlarded with occasional notes of mercy (“ah, but ‘nothing emboldens sin so much as mercy,’ he thought, “To that extent, they know themselves full well.”) He chuckled an awful wheezing chuckle.

He looked around his house. The long-case clock kept several forms of time, the time of London being only one of those. Its face was a dusky ozmilt-grey and featured white owls pursuing dryads and satyrs—at midnight the owls caught and devoured their prey. Inscribed around the clock in gold were “Ex Hoc Momento Pendet Aeternitas” and “Qua Redit Nescitis Horam.”

“‘On This Moment Hangs Eternity’ and ‘We Do Not Know the Hour of His Return,’” he read the inscriptions. The Wurm chuckled again, at his own wit.

“Ah, I have returned, and soon you will know this hour all too well.”

He looked around the house, long unused, only partly in this world, shielded from the eyes of all but the most perceptive. He sat in chairs, not having done so for so many centuries. He walked up the stairs to the second floor, just to experience again the sensation of human motion. He riffled through books and hefted cutlery. He opened drawers and doors and windows.

At the topmost window, he stopped and looked out over Hoxton Square. The sun was setting. He savoured the sounds of the street traffic: comings and goings at the fruiterers (he always liked their traditional sign, depicting Adam & Eve), drinkers at the Eagle & Child trying to out-sing their counterparts next door at the Boar & Bible, dogs whining, ballad-rollers and running patterers debouching their rat-rhymes and hornpipe verses into the evening air, pious folk gathering at the Three Cranes meeting house, lullabies sung by young mothers and old grans. He nodded at the rooks and magpies that swirled noisily around the rooftops, told them to hold their tongues and mind their manners or he’d have them in a pie for his supper. The birds flew off.

The Wurm sent his thought out across London. He touched on Little St. Helen’s in Bishopsgate, on the workhouse at St. Leonard’s in the Kingsland Road, on St. Anne’s-upon-Hemsworth, and on the Geffrye almshouses. His mind swooped over the great hospitals in Whitechapel and by London Bridge, crossed Old Street, over Finsbury Circus and the Wall, soared down Fenchurch to pause at Dunster Court and finally hover over Mincing Lane.