The Choir Boats (20 page)

“Oh, not you, James!”

Maggie scrubbed the fire-grate in the Sedgewicks’ kitchen on her
first morning of charring, while the pantry maid nattered on.

“The Sedgewicks are good to us, for the most part,” said the maid.
“Bit odd, the pair of ’em, if you ask me. He is a lawyer, a princum-prancum sort with his words that none of us can understand, but
harmless, really. Enjoys his meat and drink, mind you, but otherwise
hardly pays us much heed, which is better than my last employment,
where the master was always pinchin’ my bottom and tryin’ to, well,
you know . . .”

Maggie knew. Men always tried that. She was groped in the
street almost daily. Most women were. Maggie wished she knew an
equation or trigonometric expression for that.

“The mistress pays us mind,” the maid went on. “But mostly in a
friendly sort of way. Most of the time, she is nose-down in a book,
not at all like the ladies in my other place or those I hear about from
the other girls I know in service.”

Maggie pricked her ears up.

“Mrs. Sedgewick will be very interested to meet you, to be sure,
you being, well, different. Not that I mind, of course. I know your
colour don’t rub off, not like what my friend Nancy says about black
people. I am more ed-u-cated than that!” The maid drew out the
syllables of her last sentence.

“But I must tell you — Maggie, is it? — that I ain’t never seen such
hair before, not back in Shropshire and not here in London neither,”
continued the maid. She reached out and, before Maggie could
protest, touched Maggie’s hair.

Mrs. Sedgewick summoned Maggie upstairs around lunchtime.
Maggie stood stiffly at attention, wishing her clothes were less
ragged.

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, surveying Maggie from head
to toe. “You
are
a sight. From the charity school at St. Macrina’s,
right? Good. I remember you — how could I not? — from the Holy
Thursday processions.”

Maggie relaxed a little. She had always liked the Holy Thursday
processions, the annual event where every charity school in London
marched its students to a special service at St. Paul’s. Maggie remembered the beadle waving his white staff at the front of the St. Macrina
students in their green uniforms. She remembered singing “Great
God . . . ’Tis to thy sovereign grace I owe That I was born on Christian
ground” as they trooped through the streets. She remembered singing
a hymn she liked much better in the cathedral as the assembled boards
of governors, trustees, and patronesses listened:

I will shew you what is strong.

The lion is strong . . . the wild beasts of the desert

Hide themselves, for he is very terrible.

The lion is strong, but he that made

The lion is stronger than he: his anger

Is terrible; he could make us die in

A moment, and no one could save us

Out of his hand.

Maggie found herself humming this hymn while she faced Mrs. Sedgewick. Her new mistress smiled.

“Ah, I like that one too,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, and sent Maggie
back below stairs, but not before noticing that Maggie had looked
with longing at the bookshelves lining the study.

Mr. Sedgewick caught a glimpse of Maggie when she left for the
day. Over dinner he said to his wife, “Well, my dear, my euryalic
dove, I noticed today that you have hired a daughter of Calabar.”

Mrs. Sedgewick looked at her husband with dangerous patience.

“Now, from the abundance of my heart, my mouth speaks,” said
Mr. Sedgewick, rubbing the abundance of his stomach and reaching
for a lamb-chop. “I wonder if you have not taken in this dusky child
as something of a pet, a project to fulfill the maternal feelings
unfortunately thwarted by your body’s resistance to conception.”

Mrs. Sedgewick put her fork down and took up a sharper weapon.
“George Gervase Sedgewick, Locke was right to say that a learned
man has no long way to seek for examples of his own ignorance.”

Pausing as he chewed, Mr. Sedgewick said, “Ah, my voracious
pigeon, no mere lawyer may slip a word in with you before you refer
to the Grammar of Palaemon and damn him for a fool. Yet your
argument is incomplete,
cetera desunt
, the rest is missing. You must
steeve your points in more tightly for the ballast of your argument
to hold.”

Mrs. Sedgewick counted quietly to five before she said, “You mix
lobster with canary, Mr. Sedgewick, and would I fear eat both if they
were put before you. I took on this child, as you call her — and her
name is Maggie Collins, by the by — because we need additional help
in this household and because I felt a duty — not maternal in nature,
by the by — towards the school of which I am a patroness.”

“Well, then, the defendant withdraws his plea of not guilty and
confesses the indictment,” chuckled Mr. Sedgewick. “
Nolens volens
,
and more unwilling than not, but there, ’tis done, and now would
you kindly pass the potatoes, my love?”

Maggie dreamed that night of a hedgerow as tall as a cathedral
and as long as the Oxford Road. Scattered at its embrangled roots
were the bones of small creatures, and some not so small. She heard
faint triumphant singing: “Take force by force.” Across the face
of the moon flew the King of the Eboes, with an army of floating
warriors, each wielding a fire-tipped spear. When she woke up she
thought for one moment she was no longer in a cellar and that her
Mama was no longer sick. The refrain (“Take force by force”) hung
doggedly in her mind.

She was only allowed upstairs at the Sedgewicks to clean out the
fireplaces and remove the chamber pots and fetch down brass items
for polishing in a vestibule off the kitchen. Mr. Sedgewick she saw
seldom. He worked with clients in his ground-floor office, a room
she was forbidden to enter (she had no idea how he had that room’s
fireplace cleaned). On the few occasions when she saw him, a brief
encounter in the hall or on the stairs, he always smiled as if to a
poodle. Mrs. Sedgewick seemed to avoid her, though Maggie was
sure that Mrs. Sedgewick scrutinized her through half-open doors
or from the corner of an eye when Maggie came in to empty out the
coals.

Maggie made every excuse to visit Mrs. Sedgewick’s study, and
the larger library on the third floor. She had never seen so many
books. Just smelling them intoxicated her. She memorized titles
and made up their contents on her walks home. One day she recited
twenty titles to herself over and over again as she hid on the way
home from a mob of typesetter’s apprentices; although they were
rioting for higher pay and shorter hours, such disturbances easily
got out of hand, something any woman knew and knew to avoid.
Another time, forced to take a detour as the carcass of a whipped-dead horse was being hauled off her usual route (she noticed that
someone had already sliced off its hooves, presumably for the glue
factory), Maggie organized and reorganized the books she’d seen
that day on a shelf she imagined in her cellar.

Maggie succumbed to temptation not long after. Mrs. Sedgewick
was at tea with some other ladies. Maggie had emptied the old coals
from the study fireplace, and put in new coals for the evening fire.
She had replaced all the candles, carefully putting the stubs in one
place for counting by the head-maid. The late afternoon house at
Archer Street by Pineapple Court was dozy. Maggie shut the study
door almost all the way, leaving it just ajar enough to allay suspicion,
and went to a bookcase. Hesitating only for a moment, she selected a
book and sat in the big chair behind the escritoire to read it.

The study door opened some time later and Mrs. Sedgewick
walked in. For a second she and Maggie stared at one another. Then
Mrs. Sedgewick did something that Maggie would never forget: she
laughed, stepped inside, and closed the door behind her.

“Well, well, well,” said Shawdelia Sedgewick. “So there are wind-wagons on the plains of Sericana, after all!”

Maggie looked to see if Mrs. Sedgewick had anything in her hand
with which to hit Maggie. Not seeing anything, Maggie relaxed a
little.

“Come, my dear,” said Mrs. Sedgewick. “I won’t bite you, though
perhaps I ought to. What are you reading?”

Maggie’s hand did not tremble and she kept her chin jutted out
as she held up the book.

“
Aeneral Equations of Motion in a Dynamical System
,” read Mrs.
Sedgewick. “Remarkable! I understand almost nothing that stands
in this book, and not for lack of trying, I can assure you. Do you
comprehend it? Speak truthfully.”

Maggie had only read a little in the book. What she had read
sent a shiver through her, excited her to draw notations in the air
with her fingers. In the voice they had taught her at the charity
school, she said, “Not all, ma’am, but enough to inspire further, um,
reflection.”

Mrs. Sedgewick laughed again. “How well you speak, especially
since you are . . . since, well . . . I believe you, though I suppose I
ought to test you, but then again, I cannot because I don’t know
enough to do so.”

She went to the bookcase and pulled down another book, saying, “Here, have a look at this.
Isoperimetrical Problems and the Calculus of
Variations
by Woodhouse. Even more impenetrable, I’m afraid, but
perhaps not for you. Herschel and Somerville recommended it to
me. Mr. Sedgewick knows nothing of my studies, would scorn them
if he did. What do you say, girl?”

Maggie did not know what to say. She dropped her eyes, then
stopped herself and brought them level again with Mrs. Sedgewick’s.
The two women regarded one another for some time. Maggie relaxed
a little more. At last, Mrs. Sedgewick smiled and said, “Well, there is
a great deal more to you than anyone could ever suspect, isn’t there?
Oh yes, a great deal more.”

James Kidlington looked at the judge, who was about to issue the
sentence. The McDoon household sat in the front row. Sally could
neither take her eyes off Kidlington nor stand to look at him.

Only two weeks had passed since Sally’s discovery of Kidlington
in her room. In an action unheard of in England, the judge had
ordered a speedy trial. This was not to be like the cumbrous
machinery of the law at home, where a case might take months or
years to come to trial at the Old Bailey, where a suit such as that
of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce could last indefinitely. No, here at the
furthest rim of Great Britain’s expanding empire, in a place where
British rule had only just been secured, and where the military was
the essential authority in a time of war, the case of James Kidlington
would be adjudicated quickly. He was offered up, pulled in to be made
an example of, to show the Cape that English law and justice were
fair, swift, and awesome, altogether different from the lackadaisical
application of Dutch law the Cape had known before.

Sally had not wanted this. Hardly able to think, she had held
fast to the hope that this was all a grotesque misunderstanding or,
failing that, nothing that should become a matter for the courts
and, worse, public speculation. Kidlington might have wronged her,
but surely the best court to set his punishment was the court of her
own heart. She pleaded with Barnabas and Sanford to have the case
dropped. Hurt and puzzled, Barnabas would possibly have done so,
for her sake, but he had no control in the matter.

Sally kept returning to the events of that evening.
Why
, she
thought,
did I insist on
Roderick Random
? More than that, why did
I cry out so?
Over and over she opened the door, saw Kidlington in
the candlelight, an enigmatic smile on his face. Time had frozen
right then and there. Kidlington had not moved. She wanted him
to, would have let him go if he had asked. But he did not. He had not
moved even when the soldiers had grappled him.

“How’d this man get by us?” the corporal yelled.