The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (17 page)

Mr. Gandy arrived right on time. The first Sally and Maggie saw of him was a pair of energetic, well-trousered legs and worn but nicely brushed shoes below an enormous birdcage carried by two ink-stained hands. In the cage was a thrush-sized bird, glossy black with a single sharply tranched white bar on each wing and an equally well-demarcated white belly. Its tail was long and black with white edges. It sang prodigiously, filling the house with tumbling, soaring, darting notes, small eruptions, a rill of effervescence.

Yikes sat up and stared. Isaak circled the cage, which Mr. Gandy set down on a chair.

“I work best this way,” he said, without any other introduction. “Hope you do too. Song, melody, makes my mind dance, draws forth all the best propositions. Beauty isn’t he? I have no name yet for him, only bought him yesterday you see, at the bird market by White Lion Street, on Great St. Andrew’s, so I pray you, help me name him, will you?”

“What is he?” said Sally. “Looks like a wagtail waxed over-large, or a nightingale dressed as a domino.”

“He is a Dial-Grackle from Bengal, a Magpie-Robin, but I like best what the Indians call him: asaulary.”

“I name him Charicules,” said Maggie without hesitation, pronouncing it to rhyme with “Hercules”. “Like the heroine from the
Aethiopica
, he’s half-black, half-white. If he is to inspire our work, then he—like Chariclea in the romance—must be ready for every sort of adventure and peril, including the possibility of sacrifice to Heaven.”

“Well and finely expressed. Charicules it is,” said Mr. Gandy. “Further apt by chance or foreknowledge (it does not matter which) because saularies fight as well as they sing. The Bengalis and Burmese pit them against one another, just as we do gamecocks. Perfect little pugilists, these birds!”

Yikes went back to sleep (the bird might be a herald but not of lunch, so what was the point in staying awake?); Isaak stared at Charicules; the bird ignored the cat and spooled out a leaping line of melody; the three humans spent the rest of the morning, and all afternoon until tea, engrossed in the Great Plan.

Mr. Gandy had a bulimic approach, swallowing information of every possible kind (no matter how obscure or ill-defined) and in every variety of configuration (no matter how contorted, complex or conspiratorial), then sluicing most of it back out again, in new and unexpected patterns. He half-sang his thoughts, in a multi-contrapuntal conversation with Charicules the saulary and with Sally the smee and Maggie the shrike, with dormant Yikes and Isaak the restless, with the clock on the mantlepiece, with the clink and swankle of Cook in the kitchen below, and the swish and rustle of the maid here and there throughout the house, with the voices of wheels, winches, cogs and pintles from the street.

“Oh, here you startle the spirit of geometry . . .

. . . unlike anything I have ever seen . . .

. . . with steam to breathe large the melody . . .

. . . sleek and shimmery as greylings under a physic moon . . .

. . . my query is only percontative, you understand . . .

. . . the shipwrights will need a helping hand . . .

. . . to attain an agreeable motion and fervent attitude . . .

. . . needs here modillions, and there postiques . . .

. . . zealous fermatas will suspend time, and the delicate hemiola . . .

. . . pour passion into the vasty hollow breves . . .

. . . the basso continuo steps with grace up nautiloid casings . . .”

“But can we get this built, Mr. Gandy?” asked Maggie.

Mr. Gandy scratched his head, his eyes very bright, smiled, and said, “Yes, with much time, money and devotion, but the more consuming question is:
what
is it that you are having built, and why?”

Maggie said, “Are you willing, sir, to put a final answer aside—for now—and accept an answer deliberately elliptical?”

Mr. Gandy pulled up his chair and nodded, “So long as the tale is a good one in the telling.”

“Oh, it is,” said Maggie. “Do you know about imaginary numbers?”

“Of course, the square root of less than nothing, but—as an architect and draftsman—I find them of no interest except as objects of eccentric contemplation when I have finished a good bottle or two of sherry, late at night, when my birds have quieted themselves in their cages and my mind roams over the chimney-pots.”

Maggie and Sally laughed.

Maggie continued, “Yet what we propose is to use a mechanics and an architecture as real as the bricks of this building to drive a ship along a road defined by . . . imaginary numbers!”

Sally added, “Expressed musically, and swelled through the application of steam power!”

Mr. Gandy looked to the birdcage and said, “Hello Charicules, here’s a fairy tale of grotesque proportions! Bring us our seven-league boots and our flying carpets! Set sail for Laputa and Brobdingnag!”

The women laughed again.

“You must meet Mr. Bunce soon,” said Sally. “He can explain this in mathematical terms that may overcome the opposition of your logic.”

“Which
I
can also do, at least in outline before Cook brings us our tea,” said Maggie.

For the next hour, Maggie (with only occasional interjections from Sally) spoke of four-square unity as demonstrated by Euler and Gauss, of construing this unity into planar space as Lagrange theorized, of thus rotating one’s self into spaces on the “other side of the axis,” of finding congruency between the spaces there and here. She expounded on the budget of paradoxes, the method of fluxions, and the doctrine of chances, relating these to what she called “the trigonometry of voiced rhythm” and “an oratorio of brachistochrones.” She emphasized the central role of indeterminancy, of multiple interpretations and improvised solutions, the role of porisms and the skewed metre, the note held and bent and elongated into new space, the chord liberated, the harmony released. She covered a dozen sheets of paper with secants, catenaries, tangents, axes, musical notation sprawling into four planes, sprays of curving lines, florettes of co-sines, numbers becoming a new array of stars.

Mr. Gandy sat mostly silent throughout the lecture, only now and then asking a short question about a shape or a form, a vector, arc or trajectory. When Maggie finished, he sat up very straight, looked at Charicules and hum/whistled for a full minute along with the bird, which began to respond, matching notes in new variations.

“You are mad, the both of you,” said Mr. Gandy, suddenly stopping his duet with Charicules. “Mad as moonrakers, as the men from Gotham in their tub, the dropsy knight asleep in his cockle-boat. Trying to catch the wind in a net, making ropes from sand!”

Gandy paused, for full effect, and finished in a laughing rush, his words somersaulting from his mouth: “Therefore and thusly: I am wholly yours, all in, enthralled, bewitched, ready to believe whatever you whistle up. These ideas—mapping a terrain that exists only in our minds yet is as real as Westminster—I do not even know what that means but it captures me. All in, my young women, all in. Miss Maggie, I dub thee now ‘Lady Improvisatrice’ and ‘Dame Calculus.’ What did you call it? ‘A rhapsody of the equations’?”

Sally looked out the window.

“You—we—will be roundly ridiculed, possibly condemned, about this work, even without observers understanding its true purpose,” said Mr. Gandy, his laughter gone. “Having the East India Company as an investor may actually worsen the matter, as it will attract much more public scrutiny than if this were an entirely private matter. Worse, given the public’s low regard for John Company. How shall we call this chimera, this star-crossed hybrid?”

“It’s ‘incertae sedis,’” said Sally in a tight voice. “‘Of uncertain placement.’ We are outside all natural taxonomy.”

“‘Indigo Pheasant’ fits well then, a creature of fable, wit and passion,” said the architect. “Certainly not a bird seen in the market on Great Saint Andrew Street!”

“Anger, Mr. Gandy,” said Maggie. “Do not overlook ‘anger’ as one of its chief virtues, and a prime element in its creation. Our construction will be a pianoforte—nay, a pipe organ—filled with wrath. A selah-machine.”

Bemused, Mr. Gandy could only say, “You have given me a long explanation of the
what
, but only very oblique glimpses of the
why
. Yet, as I begin to grasp your hopes—while freely admitting my confusion about the ultimate ends to be achieved—I feel I can content myself with your descriptions. For now, at least.”

He paused to bend over and rub Isaak between the ears. Standing upright again, he said, “I have never met anyone like you, Miss Collins. You articulate your thoughts with force and facility beyond what anyone could anticipate from someone of your . . . original situation, meaning no disrespect. Your acquirements strike me and will surely strike others, should there be a way to bring your facility to their attention.”

Neither Maggie nor Sally responded, the former because she disliked the back-handed nature of the compliment, the latter because she had not been complimented at all.

Mr. Gandy seemed oblivious to the emotions he had inspired, but—like Charicules—he brabbled happily on.

“Speaking of attention and scrutiny,” he said. “Have you thought of protecting your invention, getting a patent? Not sure how you would disallow claims of prior art, the
Indigo Pheasant
and all its accoutrements being such a welter of differing ideas all incorporated as one. There may be more than one patent here, for that matter, though it would require much stamina and very adroit composition to describe what you have invented. Not an insuperable task though, I imagine.”

Departing, he left Charicules for the household, as a token of friendship, a promise of his return in the near-future, and—as he put it with a grin in his voice—to keep a spy under the McDoon roof, an agent who could uncover more of what the
Indigo Pheasant
’s ultimate purpose might be.

“Rum fellow, I told you so,” said Barnabas when he came home for dinner and found a black-and-white magpie-robin filling his house with liquid notes that swivelled around corners and stretched themselves into the eaves. “Left us a what? A saulary, did you call it? Well, whatever it is, it chirps a sight better than old parrot did; plus, this one never sings the same note twice!”

[Extract from a report by Lieutenant Thracemorton to his superiors at the Admiralty]

Mr. Kidlington continues to seek money from me, which I constantly refuse, and to complain of the short budget he feels your Honours have forced him to abide with. To this end, he has also sought the resources provided by money-lenders and pawnbrokers. In particular, he has visited one Mr. Smallweed, an invalid of vicious nature (in my estimation, this individual is reprehensible in all his parts and behavior), who appears to have extended to Mr. K. a loan of one hundred pounds. I was unable to determine the tenure or terms of the loan, but as this Smallweed operates on the margins of propriety, I can only surmise that Mr. K. has received this money on conditions not fully favourable to himself.

I believe Smallweed is known to the lawyer Tulkinghorne, whom Mr. Sedgewick, Esq., has warned us about.

[Letter from Charles Babbage to Sally]

Upon the Interdiction of the Maculate Angels,

at the waning of the Mercury Moon,

5 Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London

Dear Miss MacLeish:

It gives me great joy to respond to your letter of last Thursday; I am particularly delighted to learn that your colleague, Mr. Dorentius Bunce, knows my esteemed tutor, Robert Woodhouse, from their time together at Caius College; and moreover, that you yourself have been in correspondence with my friends the Herschels (if ever a family was more devoted to the study of the stars, then I have not heard of it).

In direct response to your query, allow me to note the following:

The best use of hypothesis is not confined to those cases in which they have subsequently received confirmation—it may be as great or greater where the hypothesis has defeated the expectations of its author. I go so far as to say—in support of what I understand your own inquiries to rest upon—that a hypothesis possessing a sufficient degree of plausibility to include various facts at the outset will help us arrange those facts in correct order and will suggest to us experiments to confirm or refute the hypothesis.

I recommend to you the work of Laplace, and—among the earlier students of mathematics—de Moivre, Bombelli, and Bachet. Given your questions to me, I stress to you Argand’s
Essai sur une manière de représenter les quantités imaginaires dans les constructions géométriques
, a copy of which I could supply you with. Argand is, like you, a gifted amateur—proof that a tenth Muse exists, inspiring us to follow the path of Mathematics!

My wife Georgiana and I will welcome you to tea or dinner in our home, should you wish to visit. The younger Herschel dines frequently with us, also from time to time George Peacock, Olinthus Gregory, and other men whose investigations of mathematical phenomena would—I am sure of it—excite your interest.