The Choir Boats (12 page)

Barnabas barely spoke except to say to Sally. “I swore to my sister
long ago to protect you and Tom.”

Sally said, “It’s not your fault, Uncle.” She took out her locket,
handed it to her uncle, who opened it. He looked down at his sister’s
picture, head bowed like the pelican who would pierce its own heart
to guard its young.

“She loved you then, she loves you now,” said Sally. “And so do I.”

Barnabas, vest rumpled, one stocking nearly to his ankle, hung
his head. “I hate that . . . man,” the merchant said with such a savage
expression that his niece stepped back. “This is . . . I hate his wicked
vermissage . . . is that a word?”

“I don’t think so, Uncle, but we all know what you mean.”

Barnabas snapped the locket shut, handed it back to Sally, and
said, “We’ll go to the ends of the earth if need be, beans and bacon,
we will.”

“Yes, Uncle, we will.”

“Chock,” said the parrot.

A knock followed on the door, so loudly that Sally jumped. Sanford
threw the door open, to find . . . no one — only a box on the doorstep.
Sanford rushed out the door, looking up and down Mincing Lane.
All manner of traffic passed, but nothing out of the ordinary. He
walked back, picked up the box. He turned around and scanned the
street one more time. There! High up on the house across the way
was a small bird-shape, like a wren only not so, with a dull blank
face. It disappeared behind a chimney. Sanford spat and went into
the McDoon house.

Barnabas looked at the box on the table. “Our troubles began
with a mysterious box . . .” he said, casting a glance at Salmius
Nalmius. This box held a letter and a glass pendant on a fine chain.
The pendant was claret red. Barnabas read the letter, nodded grimly,
handed it to Sanford, who read it aloud.

Dear Mr. McDoon,

You disappoint us. You violated the terms of our exchange. Therefore, and
alas, we are obligated to begin the journey without you. We will, of course,
take our guest with us, for his safekeeping. You know where we shall journey.
Our offer still stands, on the same terms, to be consummated at our journey’s
destination. Come as expeditiously as you can. Meet us at the Sign of the Ear
as soon as you are able. (Your new friends can tell you where that is.) We will
await you, though our patience is not unlimited. More there is not to say. By
the time you receive this, we will have departed. Make haste
!

With regrets, but with hope for a successful resolution,

I remain yours, sir,

Phlegyas

Postscript: As an affidavit of our good faith, enclosed is a token that will assure you of our guest’s continued well-being. Carry it with you if you desire to know
how he fares. Your new friends can enlighten you further.

“Now he’s ‘Phlegyas,’” said Barnabas. “More mockery, I guess. What
does he mean — do you recognize it, Sally?”

“I don’t know — Virgil, maybe . . . oh, what does it matter?” said
Sally.

“Where’s the Sign of the Ear?” asked Sanford.

“In Yount,” said the Purser. “I can show you the way.”

“What’s this for?” asked Barnabas, holding up the pendant.

“It is connected to Tom,” said Salmius Nalmius. “It is a kind of
ansible, a device for communicating across long, strange distances.”

Barnabas jumped out of his chair. “We can talk to Tom with this?”

Salmius Nalmius shook his head. “No, I am afraid not. It only communicates . . . it lets you know that he is still alive. As long as it holds its colour — see how red it is? — you know that Tom is alive. If
it goes dark . . .”

Everyone stared at the pendant. The red was rich, deep. Sally saw
colour swirl in the depths of the glass. A heart, Tom’s heart, on a
string.

Barnabas cleared his throat, did a defiant arabesque. “Well,
beans and bacon,” he said. “Let’s go to Yount.”

“What are we to do with her?” Barnabas said to Sanford. “Trip to
Yount is much too dangerous for a girl. But she won’t have it, insists
she
must
go. About as tractable as the Hellespont was to the King
of the Persians. Never stops quoting that infernal Wollstonecraft
woman! Can’t see that I am only trying to protect her, do what’s
best. Sanford, old friend, I am at my wit’s end, I tell you.”

To Barnabas’s amazement, Sanford said, “Let her come with
us. She may have foresight that you and I lack. As one uncle said
to his niece long ago, ‘Who knoweth whether thou art come to the
kingdom for such a time as this?’”

“Remind me,” said Barnabas.

“Mordecai. Esther. She saved her people.”

“That seems a grand burden,” said Barnabas. “Prideful to boot.”

“No grander than the one you have shouldered yourself, the
burden we have all taken up now. Besides, it will be hard enough
to explain to our commercial friends our sudden removal without
leaving a key member of McDoon & Associates behind.”

Sally found another ally in Fraulein Reimer. One evening in the
common room, the fraulein looked up from her needlework and said:
“
Es war einmal ein altes Schloss mitten in einem grossen dicken Wald
.”

Sally nodded. “Once upon a time, there was an old castle in the
middle of a deep dark forest . . . yes, that’s how the story usually
begins, doesn’t it? And now we’re in the story ourselves, and need to
have all our wits about us, like the Cinder-Girl and the Brave Tailor
and the Wren who was King of the Birds. Or else the witch in the
castle will win.”

“Figs and feathers, fairy tales have no part in the modern world — ”
Barnabas began, then stopped, thinking of Tom held prisoner in a
castle, and of Tom’s heart held by a cord.

“
Not bricht Eisen
,” Fraulein Reimer said. “Need breaks iron. Sally
must be with you. I will travel with you also. I have the journey made
several times, the first when I was only as old as Sally.”

Barnabas looked at Sanford, who only grinned the barest of
grins, threw up his hands and said, “Enough then, I yield, I yield.
Sally, you shall come with us — though I will never forgive myself if
anything should . . .”

That settled, Barnabas and Sanford concocted a cover story.
They let it be known that they were sending Tom to one of their
correspondents in Stockholm, while the rest of the firm was
moving to Cape Town, the better to serve its far eastern trading
needs, since the South African way station on the East Indies route
had recently been taken by Great Britain from the Dutch. The
first leg of the journey to Yount would, in fact, be to Cape Town.
McDoon & Associates’ London operations would be continued by
the Landemanns of Hamburg and Salmius Nalmius in his guise
as Oliveire de Sousa. A Landemann nephew who represented that
firm in London, Johann Joachim Brandt, always a welcome guest at
Mincing Lane, spent days in meetings with Barnabas, Sanford, and
Salmius Nalmius.

“Wheat and whiskey,” said Barnabas for the tenth time one
morning.
“So
the
Landemanns — Old
Johann
and
Friedrich
Christian — and the Brandts too, have known about Yount all this
time!”

Barnabas and Sanford did not mention Yount in the many
meetings they had in the offices of the McDoon lawyers, Sedgewick
& Marchmain near Austin Friars. Barnabas had never seen
Marchmain, believed to be one of many lawyers involved in a famous
Chancery case about the Jarndyce inheritance. Sedgewick, on the
other hand, he knew intimately.

“Ah, Barnabas and my dear Sanford,” said Sedgewick. “How sad to
hear of your imminent departure. Off like Jason and the Argonauts,
hmmm? Seeking your Golden Fleece, how bold! Well,
audentes
fortuna juvat
. I flatter myself that you will continue to call upon
Sedgewick & Marchmain to provide you with legal services, given
our history of navigating you safely through the reefs and shoals of
the law, and insofar as we are entrusted with the legal wheel of your
commercial vessel, Sedgewick & Marchmain will,
exceptis excipiendis
and, of course,
mutatis mutandis
, advocate for your interests while
those interests and your corporeal selves are separated. Come, sirs,
the porches of my ears await your news.”

Sedgewick, a short man with an oriel for a stomach, always talked
like that, matching his rhetorical somersaults with flourishes of his
pen. Sanford wondered if the lawyer breathed through his ears.

“Well, where to begin?” Sedgewick poured forward. “We shall
need to find
mollia tempora fandi
to assuage any concerns the Rogers’
Bank and Praed’s Bank might have about their client decamping so
unexpectedly. We’ll need to draw up and notarize spoke of powers of
procuration for de Sousa and Landemann to handle the chirographic
items. And then there is your collateral in . . .”

The lawyer’s wife asked to see Sally, so one afternoon Sally found
herself sitting in the Sedgewick drawing-room with Mrs. Sedgewick,
the
Shawdelia Sedgewick. Sally had met Mrs. Sedgewick at McDoon
Christmas parties, where she felt the lawyer’s wife was sizing her up
for some task. Sally would have dismissed this regard in any other
woman as relating merely to Sally’s matrimonial prospects (or lack
thereof), but Sally sensed some other element, something unrelated
to marriage, in Mrs. Sedgewick’s evaluating glances.

“Men are splendid creatures,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, using her
spoon to indicate the doors of the inner office where her husband,
Sanford, and Barnabas were meeting. “But then so are pismires,
snails, and limpets. The secret, the trick, my dear, is to make sure
they feel themselves the grandest of their sort: the Proud Pismire, the
Superb Snail.”

Mrs. Sedgewick poured more tea for Sally, then continued: “
Those three
are fine men, I concede. I am fond of Mr. Sedgewick, a clever soul,
rumbustious. But, Sally dear,
they
find it hard, harder than Gibraltar,
to admit
our
intelligence. Intelligence in a woman they view as ‘proud
defiance smothering all her softer charms.’”

Mrs. Sedgewick snorted, banged her spoon against her teacup.
“I’m told that you are quite the little philosopher, a young Montague
or Carter. No one to talk to about their ideas, I know, I know, but
you and I will talk someday soon, I hope, young Sally. Hume, Smith,
Voltaire, Mrs. Barbauld’s poems . . . so much we might talk about.”

She feels much older than she looks
, thought Sally.
The sending of an
entombed spirit is what she is, a sphinx pacing in a narrow corridor with
doors locked at either end
.

“To the point,” said Mrs. Sedgewick. “I don’t know what sort of
adventure McDoon & Associates is embarking on, but going to open
a branch at the Cape is, at best, only part of the story. There’s much
more to this than your uncle is letting on. I imagine my husband
knows that but he is paid not to ask such questions. I am bound by no
such protocol.”

Sally’s eyes narrowed.

Mrs. Sedgewick laughed thinly. “No cause for alarm. I can control
myself that far. I won’t ask your uncle or Mr. Sanford what’s what. But
your reaction confirms my suspicions. You are in on this, whatever
‘this’ may be. Business is but a part, maybe no part at all, or I am a
turtle in a tree.”

Sally opened her mouth but Mrs. Sedgewick marched right over
the unspoken reply: “Sally, young friend, you can always call on me,
no questions asked, I promise, though I hope you’ll find me ally
enough to include me in your confidences. I can help you if help you
need. My husband does considerable business with the Admiralty, as
did my father in his time, and there’s my sister, Arabella, the pretty
one, who married particularly well, into the Tarleton family, with
their sons scattered throughout the Admiralty and the Colonial
Office.”

The door to the inner office opened. Mrs. Sedgewick looked hard
at Sally, lowered her voice, spoke very quickly: “I had a dream, Sally,
like the passage in
Job
, in which all the morning stars sang together
and the sons of God shouted for joy. They sang about a girl who
would travel far, far away. You, Sally, you are that girl, I am certain
of it. They told me to help this girl.”

Mr. Sedgewick stepped up just behind his wife. “Well,” he said.
“Here is a cozy conclave! What are you two plotting? Revolution over
the tea-kettle, a campaign for clavichords and carnations? Oh
diem
praeclarum
, my doves, poppy-seed cakes, my favourite . . .”

Saint Botolph’s feast came and went, Midsummer’s Day passed.
Young Brandt came to live in the Mincing Lane house, combining
McDoon and Landemann operations in London under one roof.
Yikes took this news by rolling over in front of the grate and falling
back asleep. Chock preened, watching the German newcomer with
a beady eye.

“A nice gentleman,” said the cook to her niece. “Though a skinny
rotchet, needs good English cooking.”