The Choir Boats (16 page)

Maggie went to every seamstress, mantua-maker and dressmaker
between Holborn and Stepney. She got some piecework but nothing
steady. She bought dubious concoctions from druggists who she was
sure overcharged her. She sought help from cunning women who
sprinkled rosewater on hymnal sheets and then told her to burn the
sheets under her mother’s nose. She prayed every day, asked for special
blessings at the revivals by the brick-kilns in Bethnal Green and near
the bleacher’s fields of Mile End. She walked through the quadratic
equations she’d incised in the alley wall and asked the
ndichie
for help.
Nothing worked; her mother got worse. Some nights they shared a
single boiled potato, counting themselves lucky if they had bacon
drippings to go with it. They fell behind in rent. The rent-collector
said he would give them one week before he evicted them. “Would be
today,” he said. “But as I am a Christian man, and as your mum is sick,
I will give you the additional time. But one week only, do you hear?”

On the first day of August in 1812, the feast day of the rising
against harmation, Maggie went for aid at the local parish: St.
Macrina the Younger, known to all as “the Baby Macaroni.” She sat
in an airless room just off the vestry and looked at the gravy stains
on the overseer’s collar.

“Let me see,” said the overseer, licking the fingers of his free hand,
and waving a derelict pen in the other. “Maggie Collins. Collins,
Collins. Do you have proof of your settlement here? We cannot have
you unless you are chargeable to this parish.”

Maggie handed the overseer a piece of paper that indicated her
seven years at St. Macrina the Younger’s Female Charity School. The
overseer looked at it with distaste.

“Were they right then, I wonder, to let you in?” said the overseer,
more to himself than to Maggie. “Your kind are mostly over at St.
George-in-the East. St. George-in-the-East?! St. George-in-Africa is
more like it.”

He tossed the paper on the table in front of Maggie, who folded
it carefully and put it in her pocket. The overseer thumbed through
a large book, then looked up with a smile.

“We can offer sixpence for your mother’s medicines and a shilling
to help with rent,” he said. “Unless you and your mother wish to
enter the workhouse, of course.”

Maggie sat up so straight that the chair creaked. “We would
rather die than go into the lump,” she said.

“As you please,” shrugged the overseer. He opened a drawer and
took out several copper coins. He wrote something in the book.

“Make your mark here.” He indicated a place in the book.

Maggie signed her name. The overseer looked at her signature —
the
fact
of her signature — and had a minor epiphany.

“Of course, of course,” he licked his fingers again. “You are a
former student at our Female Charity School. Appears they actually
taught you something. Can you write beyond your signature, girl?
Oh yes, I think you can, I see it in your eyes. Now, why didn’t I think
of that before? Here, just you wait one moment.”

He opened the drawer again, fetched out a blank piece of paper
and scribbled a name and address on it.

“It’s your lucky hour, girl! Just yesterday one of the patronesses
of the Female Charity School adverted for a charwoman, someone
of good character and virtue, and the usual, with preference to go
to an old girl of the school who might have fallen on hard times.”
The overseer paused, smiled. “Well, by Mother Bryce, if that doesn’t
describe you to an exactitude!”

Maggie clutched the seat of the chair, thought of her Mama, said
nothing.

“Offers a bob a day, which you collect here,” said the overseer, a
trifle too hastily, so that Maggie knew the overseer was skimming.
(The wage was actually one shilling sixpence daily but the overseer
found that an outrageously high sum for a charwoman, a charitable
whim of a soft-minded patroness; he felt sixpence was a fair charge
for his time arranging the job and disbursing the wage.) Maggie
nodded her head.

“Look here, coffee-girl,” said the overseer. “You are lucky to be in
this parish, where we take care of those in need. I am not entirely
convinced of your settlement here, regardless of your history at the
Female Charity School. You take my meaning?”

Maggie nodded.

“Fine,” purred the overseer. “Mind you work hard for your
new mistress. She is important to us here. She is on the Board of
Patronesses — do you understand? — the Board for the Female
School. You can start with her tomorrow.”

He slid the paper over to Maggie. Maggie read what he had
scrawled there: “Mrs. Shawdelia Sedgewick, at corner Archer Street
and Pineapple Court, by Austin Friars.”

The
Essex
arrived at Table Bay, the roads for Cape Town, on
Martinmas eve in November, just over four months out from
London. The northwest gales that had propelled them so quickly
had abated, as winter turned to spring in the southern hemisphere.
Soon the prevailing wind would be out of the southeast, and in
the Indian Ocean the monsoon winds were shifting sea-wise from
India, meaning that sailing from the Cape to Bombay or Madras
would be nearly impossible until late March or early April. Kidlington
would therefore be staying the southern summer in Cape Town, a
prospect that heartened the McDoons.

McDoon & Associates “established their new headquarters” with
gusto. Barnabas and Sanford were happy to get back to “clarification”
as a way to contain their fears about Tom and their general desire to
come to Yount. They had letters of credit drawn on the Rogers’ Bank
and Praed’s Bank, and their connections were very good in that part
of the world, Cape Town being the entrepôt for the maritime trade
between India and the Far East and Europe. Sally had Kidlington
for long conversations about everything under the sun. Only Nexius
was as guarded as before, insisting that they were lucky onboard
and that their enemies had more means here, so close to the roads
to Yount.

“The gateway to Yount is near, but hard to measure,” said Nexius.
“Distances are different in your world than on the road to Yount.
Soon we leave your world, what we call in our language ‘Karketsoom,’ which means ‘Big Land.’ We call all of you ‘Karket-soomi,’ ‘Big
Landers.’ Yount is ‘Sabo-soom,’ that is ‘Small Land.’ We await the
ship that will carry us there, the
Gallinule
, translated into English.”

“Funny name for a ship,” said Barnabas. “When will it arrive? We
really need to push on.
Tempus fugit
, if you know what I mean.”

Nexius did not know the phrase but he understood its import.
“Very hard to say. We will leave as soon as we can, but time for
leaving is not possible to know. An East India ship can take three
months or maybe seven months to go from London to Cape Town,
all depending on wind and water, yes? It is the same for our next
ship, only more so.”

“I see,” said Barnabas, who did not. “How is that?”

“I lack the words,” said Nexius, with a gesture of frustration.
“Not just wind and water our next ship must face. Other things. You
will see. Be patient.”

“So we might be here for . . . some time then, is that right?” asked
Sanford.

“Yes,” said Nexius, who looked again at Barnabas. “Key still with
you always, yes?”

“Of course,” said Barnabas, checking beneath his vest (a silver
foulard).

“And Tom is healthy?” Nexius asked, turning to Sally.

“Yes, at least he was a few minutes ago when last I checked the
pendant,” said Sally. She dreaded yet cherished the pendant, hating
to look but driven to do so almost hourly.

“Good. You will be protected here as you were in London. Our
friends have arranged with the British Army and the East India
Company to put soldiers on guard for you. Tomorrow I introduce
you to these friends, good friends of Yount who know about your
mission.”

The next day Nexius brought them to the house of Cornelius
Pieterszoon Termuyden and his wife the
Mejuffrouw
Agnetha
Termuyden, wholesale merchants. And what a house it was. Large,
with a sprawling garden, it sat on the first slope leading to Table
Mountain, just off the Herrengracht, above the castle-fort and the
Dutch East India House, overlooking the bay. The McDoons fell in
love with that house and its owners almost at once.

“The house we call the
Gezelligheid
,” said Cornelius Termuyden in
beautifully accented English that made one want to sit up straight.
He pointed to a well-made sign above the main door. Two mermen
astride rearing hippocampuses, bearing tridents and blowing on
conch shells, bracketed the word “Gezelligheid,” while dolphins
swam below the letters.

“Which means ‘companionship,’” said the Mejuffrouw. She had
masses of white hair done up in a complicated style, and her eyes
were as grey as sea-waves.

“And ‘cosiness,’ like with good friends,” said Cornelius, whose
trim grey hair was framed by a dapper black hat. He and his wife
had pale skin turned rosy red from years in the Cape sun, and fine
wrinkles at the corners of their eyes.

“It’s the Last Cosy House East of the Sun and West of the Moon,”
declared the Mejuffrouw.

“Or the First,” said her husband, “depending on which way you
are going!”

Everyone smiled. The Last Cosy House . . . it put them in mind
of old legends.

“Do please come in,” said the Termuydens together.

There was something for everyone in that house. The library
overflowed with books in a dozen languages, smelling of cracked
leather bindings and slowly browning pages. There were rooms for
dining (they even had a set of the indigo pheasant china that Sally
adored) and rooms for talking, including a large drawing-chamber
called “The New Eglantine,” all equipped with mahogany furniture
and families of porcelain figurines on every shelf and mantelpiece,
and clocks short and tall striking in unison throughout, and prints
on every wall. Half a dozen guest rooms were occupied by banian-merchants from the Bengal and spice-doctors from Batavia, a
ship’s surgeon or Swedish apothecarist here, a London factor or a
supercargo from Dublin there . . . and not infrequently visitors from
Yount travelling under other guises. One room was for music, a little
old-fashioned without a pianoforte but with a large harpsichord (“A
real Blanchet,” said Cornelius) in one corner. Another room, encased
by windows looking up to Table Mountain and across to Signal Hill,
was an aviary with cages full of yellow and green lorikeets and large
papegaai
with rosy beaks from the East Indies, and canary-finches
that hopped from one bar to another whenever anyone entered.

Outside in the large garden were other birds, equally mysterious
to the McDoons: sugar-birds with long tails, rock-thrushes, the
bokmakierie
with its yellow throat and black mask, sun-birds, the
robin-chats that the Termuydens called “Jan Fredriks.” Best of all, by
the little stream running down from the mountain: kingfishers with
a versicolour breast! How they laughed when Sally said, “Look, look,
the kingfisher wears a vest just like Uncle Barnabas!” Thereafter,
they were “Uncle Barnabas-birds,” even to the Termuydens.

Other creatures inhabited the garden, first and foremost, the
Termuyden’s dog Jantje. “Johnny,” explained the Mejuffrouw. “Like
your jolly Jack-tar, our name for our sailors.” At first, Jantje took
offense at Isaak, who immediately sought to oust the canine pretender.
When a young baboon wandered down from the mountain, however,
cat and dog made common cause in defence of the garden and were
good friends thereafter. Isaak would spend many contented days
hunting the strange rodents and insects of the place.

Barnabas also spent many days in the garden. “Beans and bacon,”
he’d say to Sanford. “See what they can grow here. This might be the
first garden, the one in the Book, so much grows here.”

As summer advanced with unbroken sun day after day, the
garden and all of Cape Town blossomed in such profusion that the
McDoons nearly wept to see it. Barnabas’s horticultural joy was
complete when he found a smilax in one corner of the Termuyden
garden. “Sanford, what a beauty it is! A smilax, a real Chinese smilax!
To think it might be growing as we speak, back home in Mincing
Lane. Oh, what’s their word? Gezelligheid, it is, to be sure!”

Gezelligheid. The evenings especially were full of good cheer.
Some nights the English visitors would teach the Dutch (and
Germans and Swedes and so on, whoever might be in attendance)
the rules of whist, learning the rules to
Poch
and
Rapuse
in return.
Other nights were sing-songs. Kidlington, so frequent a guest that
the Termuydens considered him part of the McDoons, had a rich
singing voice. He was equally good on old English ballads like “Sweet
William’s Ghost” and “Barbara Allen” and on the newer London tunes
like “The Devil and the Hackney Coachman” and “Merry Miss Mary
of Mayfair.” Everyone laughed to hear the English stumble through
the words of Dutch songs, the lyrics for which the Mejuffrouw
provided.