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

Night by night, the plan became clearer.

“
Chi di
, we need seven singers,” she whispered to the thrush. “Not you, little friend, but six others besides me. The white girl and the brown girl . . . they are two. I heard others when those two sang, but I cannot see them.”

Maggie traced a pattern on the brick of the wall below the thrush.

“The ghost-stitches of our wanderings,” she explained to the bird. “Another girl also sings alone, like me. A girl with black hair, very straight, and she has pale golden skin. I see her when I dream, I watch her sing, but I hear no music from her. She is very, very far away. I think she must come to me or else the great machine cannot work.”

Maggie shivered and wondered if the machine needed the distant girl to be the seventh singer or to be something else.

“Ancestors—
ndichie
—help me,” thought Maggie.

Only the thrush responded, singing more loudly as night fell and the moon rose.

“Seven singers . . . and blood to glaze the enamel, burnish the copper, oil the engine, to wax the casings. I wish, oh Mama I wish it wasn’t so . . . but I see blood in the machine’s making . . . I fear this, but the calculations are quite clear on the matter.”

The head-maid called from the house, sharp words. Maggie sighed and hoisted the ash-pot.

“Here I am little better than a slave,” Maggie said. “That Mrs. Sedgewick treats me like her pet, a fancy monkey who does tricks.”

Maggie walked towards the house.

“White folks think they know us but they don’t, not at all,” she whispered. “Not sure but I should take my machine to Maryland, Mama, when I am through with it in the other place.”

At that moment, a phantom echo—a shriek not heard but felt in the marrow—crossed the moon and the thrush stopped singing. Maggie did not flinch. She shook her fist at the sky.

“You are not seen, but I feel you,” she said.

Halting at the doorway to the house, she sensed that the thrush was gone from the wall. He would sing no more this night.

“No more pint o’salt,” she said and went inside.

Sally had the carriage stopped at the corner of Mincing Lane, unable to go on.

“What is it, niece?” said Barnabas.

Sally could not say. Ever since landing at London’s East India Docks that morning, on the Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes, a chilly day in early May of 1816, Sally had felt uneasy. In the carriage, passing what should have been familiar places, she could not shake the feeling that something was—as Mr. Sanford would put it—“out of place.”

“Figs and fiddles,” said her uncle, when she confessed her fear to him. “Just getting your land-legs back is all, I reckon, after all our months at sea, first on
The Gallinule
through the foggy, complainin’ places, now so many more months on an East Indiaman from the Cape.”

Isaak stood with her two back legs anchored in Sally’s lap, peering here and there and back again through the carriage window, face framed by her two front paws. Isaak lashed her tail, a threat and a greeting combined.

“Perhaps Uncle, and maybe,” Sally said, holding Isaak by the belly. But she thought the streets of London felt even narrower and more askew than she remembered, the rooflines subtly unbalanced, the dome of St. Paul’s minutely off centre. The rooks overhead seemed even shiftier and louder than she remembered.

“I fear a trick of the Owl,” she said to Reglum and Dorentius. “Might he not have altered our course, magicked the Fulginator to send us to some
other
London on some other Karket-soom?

“Especially with me so badly hurt, that’s your thought is it not?” said Dorentius, shifting his amputated leg as the carriage jounced along a particularly poorly surfaced section of the Great East Road.

“No, no, dear Dorentius, I did not mean . . .” said Sally, putting her hand out to the place where his leg used to be, then withdrawing it with a little gasp.

“You could never offend me, Sally, you know that,” said the Yountish chief-fulginator. “Only Reglum here can do that, given that he insists on Oxonian superiority in all matters!”

Sally smiled at the jibe, her heart full of relief and love for the brave Dorentius, whose leg had been shattered by a cannonball as
The Gallinule
escaped from Yount Great-Port. The night Afsana fell, shot by the Arch-Bishop’s Guards . . . Sally’s smile was short-lived.

“I do not doubt the Wurm has power to cozen even the leys and vortices of the Interrugal Lands, but I do not think our Fulginator played us false, especially not with both of you doing the fulginating,” said Reglum.

“Could be just that we have been away so long,” said Sanford. The others listened intently—his pronouncements were famously laconic. “Bonaparte’s been defeated, for one. For the other, we McDoons have grown accustomed to being very nearly the only white people in our gatherings. It is strange to say it, but it is odd now to see so very few brown and black faces.”

His speech at an end, Sanford settled back into customary silence, his eyes keen and bright as they surveyed the London cityscape through the carriage window. He looked for all the world like an old setter, nose outthrust.

“Why, ’tis true, of course, old Sanford has it precisely, in fact, I declare that I never saw so many pairs of blue eyes in all my life!” said Barnabas. “There, Sally, your fancy is nothing more than getting your senses reacquainted with what has now become foreign to us.”

Still, Sally could not bring herself to travel the final hundred yards to the house on Mincing Lane.

Sally thought of Tom, as she did every day. She looked at Tom’s boon companion Billy Sea-Hen, sitting quietly next to Mr. Sanford. She thought of Afsana . . . dead? She thought of Jambres, the Cretched Man. She thought of the Fraulein Reimer.

“She’ll never come back,” Sally whispered. “‘The solace of salvation’, that’s what she put on the needlework. . . .”

“Ah, alas, well no, she cannot come back,” said Barnabas, blowing his nose to hide tears.

“Dearest,” said Reglum, clearing his throat, holding Sally’s hand, offering a handkerchief to dry her tears. “I feel this to be London, the real and true London, not some Wurm’s illusion . . . and surely you know London far better than I do.”

“Dear, sweet Reglum,” she thought, looking at Reglum, dabbing at her cheeks.

And then there
he
was, alive in all his pleadings, uncoiling in her mind: James Kidlington.

“James!” she shouted in her mind. “No, no, not you, James Kidlington . . . ‘I speak not, I trace not, I breathe not thy name’ . . .”

“Sally?” said Reglum.

Sally sat up, squeezing and then releasing Reglum’s hand.

“’Tis nothing, dearest,” she said. “Verily.”

She folded Isaak to her breast, and said, “I can go on.”

Sanford rapped on the roof of the carriage and the horses moved.

Suddenly there it was, their home on Mincing Lane, with its blue trim (recently repainted, as Sanford noted with satisfaction) and its dolphin door knocker. They had sent a messenger on ahead of them from the dock, so they were expected. The door to the house flew open even as they spilled out of the carriage and Isaak bounded up the steps.

“Salmius Nalmius!”

“Why, Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Harris in the flesh, looking very well indeed!”

“I must ask you straight away, lads, about my smilax root . . .”

Sally did not dismiss her fears even then, not until. . . .

“Here now, you lot, let me through this moment or I will clout you black and blue!” said the cook, pushing her way past her niece and Mr. Brandt and all the others. A fleshy avalanche, smelling of dough and mustard-sauce, the cook enveloped Sally.

“Mr. Sanford, Mr. McDoon, sirs, it is good to have you back at last!” said the cook. “And here is our Isaak-tiger come home to us as well!”

The cook fair thundered her next:

“Best of all, may all saints and their servants be praised, sirs, it’s Miss Sally, our own little smee! Welcome home, welcome home, welcome home!”

James Kidlington marvelled at his clean fingernails, at his fresh-pressed clothes, and the new hat on his head.

Standing on Effra’s Bridge, where the Fleet River met the Thames, James shifted his attention from himself to the spectacle of London on a cold day in May of 1816. He followed the movement of barges and wains, loaded with coal and grain, and the rumbling of great carriages bearing travellers from as far away as Glasgow and Liverpool. He listened to a thousand voices raised in devotion to commerce, finding one among the clamour especially intriguing.

“Wheaten buns,” sighed James, as he tracked the vendor who dodged and danced his way through the crowd. Not even the tannic stink of the rivers could blunt James’s craving for a hot, blanch’d bun.

James made as if to approach the bun-seller but stopped at the sight of the tall figure next to him.

“Might I just pause for . . . ?” said James.

“No time,” said the man. “No time, we are late enough as it is.”

James sighed again, gave one last lingering look at the blanch’d bun, quieted his lust, and resignedly followed his escort. After all, the man had a gun and an evident ability to use it, while James was unarmed . . . and his hands were bound.

“Well,” thought James. “No bun for now, but I had lost all hope of ever eating one again anyhow, so I can wait another few hours for that. In the meantime, I will at last be enlightened on the not-so-minor matter of my liberation. This fellow, and all the other guardians who have been with me every hour of every day since I was released from the . . . that hell-hole in Australia, they’ve all been as talkative as the dead, no word of explanation from them no matter how hard I tried. Not that I quibble, mind you, since I am free in comparison to where I was. But James Kidlington knows that no one is doing this as a favour. Oh no, oh no, the labour and the . . . torment . . . have not dulled my wits to that degree. What I want to know is: who is my ‘benefactor,’ and what does he want from me in return?”

With competence born of long practice, Mr. and Mrs. Sedgewick ignored each other as they breakfasted on the morning after the Lesser Feast of the Vicissitudes.

“. . . back at last from their myriad adventures, the palmers return from the Land of Prester-John or the Golden Chersonese or wherever they may have been,” said Mr. Sedgewick, contemplating the note just delivered from the McDoons. “And we are bid to see them this very afternoon, my dendritic day-lily.”

Mrs. Sedgewick nodded, but listened more closely to her buttered toast than to her husband.

“Now we shall hear the truth of all the rumours and speculation,” continued the lawyer, remarking naught of his wife’s inattention. “Certainly and manifestly not lost like poor Mungo Park seeking Timbuktoo! So that’s one hypothesis reduced to marmalade! But what transpired at the Cape? Did they, as some suggest, roam to India? To the wild Carmanian waste? We shall shortly hear all, direct and unimpeded from the mouths of the McDoons themselves. No longer will we rely on the hearsay of others. Nay,
nullius in verba
. . .”

Mrs. Sedgewick heard only the echo in her mind of the whispers she’d listened to in the dark. Of late she had dreamed of a man—at least something in a man’s tall shape—dressed in a white fancy-coat, with cut-away tails reaching to his calves. He, or it, was tall but stocky, with a barrel chest and a power in his arms even as they hung at his sides. She could not fully make out his face, but thought it must be very round, plate-like, with two great unblinking yellow eyes.