The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (31 page)

Sally nodded, fully resolved.

“I know a woman, someone we can trust. One of my country-women from Norfolk, a barny bishy-bee, lives now in Stepney. She can help. She’ll use the old recipe: savin, dittany, mercury-oil, hellebore. I can take you. I am sure she could see us well within the week, a sennight latest.”

Sally agreed to go to Stepney with the Cook as soon as could be arranged.

A few hours later, sometime after midnight, Sally refused the Owl’s offer to his face. The pygmy owl raged about her room, upsetting books and papers. No one besides Sally could hear him though, his wrath reduced to squeaks by the protective songs woven round the house on Mincing Lane.

Regaining his owlish composure, Strix glared at Sally and said, “Unlike Rumpelstiltskin, I am not rent in two by the stamping of my feet. You and I will most assuredly meet again. I will not be so tranquil at our next encounter.”

His sending vanished with a popping sound.

Sally, though shaken, dismissed Strix from her mind. She thought instead about the woman she was going to visit in Stepney.

“What’s this?” hissed the Owl. “
Une petite bambochade très amusante
, a most charming and piquant little scene from everyday life.”

James Kidlington sat alone in the room rented for him by the Admiralty. He sat at the writing table, a sparse affair badly constructed, its spindly legs uneven.

The Owl had made his way in through a picture on the wall. The landlord was a devout soul who supplied the rooms he let with prints depicting the lives of the saints, hoping thereby to inspire his tenants both to pious reflection and to punctual payment of the rent. The prints he purchased very cheaply from the used-book stalls on Paternoster Row (such prints being so abundant that they were often used to stuff cracks in windows or as kindling to start fires), but he did not simply pin them to the streaky wallpaper—he took pains instead to install them within frames he made himself from strips of cast-off wood, the perfect compromise between respectability and economy. The irregular angles of the home-cobbled frames gave Strix his entry-point, and the presentation of virtuous models to produce commercial behaviour acted as a beacon.

The Owl replaced Saint Alphege in the print of the medieval martyr being stoned by the Danes in Cheapside. Flapping his wings as if to ward off the missiles, the Owl-in-the-picture said to James, “What might we title the pleasant
bambochade
that my eyes bestride?”

James put down his pen, turned, and said, “You do not frighten me, you know. Nor even amuse me. I wish you really would become Saint Alphege—I would gladly pelt you to death just like a Shrovetide cock.”

“I esteem your depth of spirit, James, I really dooooo,” hooted the Owl. “Fitting indeed for our amourous amiger, the little squire in the lists of love.”

James waved his hands in disgust and turned back to his table.

“Let’s see,” rasped the Owl, reviewing the scattered books open on James’s table. “He pens a letter to his Thisbe. What does he use for inspiration, besides the prints on his walls? Oldmixon’s
Caliper’d Heart
, yes of course, and Shakespeare’s
Sonnets
(nice to see them coming back into style again). Donne. Herrick. Golding’s Ovid. Your tastes are a bit old-fashioned for one so young. No wait, here are two sharp newcomers—Keats and Shelley—to demonstrate the modernity of our bold Pyramus in the nineteenth century.”

James shook his head. The Owl disappeared from the print of Saint Alphege’s martyrdom, reappearing in a print portraying the Roman emperor Valerian frying Saint Lawrence on a gridiron.

“Away with you, ghost-snipe, trouble me not with your mocking wit,” said James.

The Owl-Saint Lawrence hopped up and down, as if the iron in the picture really were searing his feet.

“Not before I advise you, as all good nightmares should,” laughed the Owl. “You are Abelard, she is Heloise: ‘crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight.’ You think to impress Sally with the melody of your worded love. You believe she moulds herself to your design, overcome by the fervour of your expression. Yet what do you know in truth of her heart’s untuned nature, of the voices her blood carries to her brain?”

James frowned.

“Nay, James, your desired one harks to others before she gives her loyalty to you.”

“What do you mean, you filthy creature? Sally is truer to me than anyone has ever been.”

“Is she? Poor James, scratching out love letters to one whose heart is impregnable. Hold now: impregnable though Sally’s heart may be, another part of her anatomy is far more receptive to the fertility of your gestures . . .”

“What do you say, what do you mean?” James nearly shouted, half-rising.

The Owl sank back from Saint Lawrence and re-surfaced elsewhere as Saint Praxedes being mauled and devoured by the Hounds of Tindalos.

“You know what I mean, James,” said the Owl. “She is pregnant, James. With your child.”

James sat down so quickly the chair creaked.

“No,” he said. “It cannot be. We were so very careful.”

“But it can be and it is,” said the Wurm.

“No, no, Sally would have told me,” yelled James. “You lie, you lie.”

The Owl-Saint Praxedes said, “You want the evidence of research. Ask Sally yourself.”

James rose again and strode the short distance to the print of Saint Praxedes.

“I will,” said James. “She will tell me the truth. I know it.”

“Do you? As a friend of the finer sensibilities, I must gently disagree with you there.”

James thought of the garden at the Last Cozy House and of the locket.

“It is I who have lied in the past to Sally,” said James, in a low, strangled voice. “Not her to me.”

The Owl shook his head, and said, “No, my dear James. She wrongs you twicely. While you at least air your wrong-doings, Sally hoards her misdeeds deep, makes of them an ‘unsunned heap.’”

James placed his palms on the worn wallpapering on either side of the Praxedes print.

“What more can there be? Out with it, monster,” he said. “Since I have no choice but to listen.”

“I aim only to help you in this, James,” said the Owl. “On my word, it pains me to think of Sally withholding her truth from you, even as you drink tea with her at Hatchards and enjoy the breakfast rooms together at the Tavistock. You, so blithe and unaware, so good and true; Sally,
la belle sauvage
, hoarding the truth unto herself, within herself, a spirit senseless to the claims you so rightfully have.”

“The child is . . .” whispered James. “Mine. I am the father.”

“Rightly said,” sighed the Owl. “So, here is the second bone of the riddle, the canines of the truth to be extracted from the jawbone of falsehood: Sally will not deliver your child.”

James reared back, aghast, uttering no words but half-formed groans. “She goes with the McDoon’s cook this very morning to abort the baby growing in her womb,” said the Owl, turning his head almost right around and back again, hooming and making tsk’ing sounds. “To wash away the rose before e’er it blooms.”

James cried out, “Why?”

The Owl blinked slowly, “Did you really think she would have a child from you? In the end, you are naught to her but a prop for her ambition, an instrument for her vanity. Sally proposes to move a world, the greatest folly since Icarus or Archimedes. You figure in that plan no more than a mole might in the creation of a garden.”

James punched the picture, breaking the frame and sending the print fluttering to the floor.

The Owl laughed, “You strike at me who is only the messenger, not the author of this deceit.”

“Leave me, leave me,” said James. “Sally loves me. She wants to marry me. She could never . . . abbreviate our child’s life!”

“Wake up now, blind foolish James! Can you not see the truth of it? Sally is the daughter of a merchant-princeling, a family of wealth and honour and respect in the great City of London, known from Koenigsberg to Serampore. She—they—will never allow one such as you—an upstart magwitch, a chowser, a tattered slick-slack boy—to join them, except in the role of lackey, of servant. Marry you? You, a transported felon? Let you become part of the family? The giants will walk off the Guildhall clock first!”

James hurled a book at the blank spot on the wall, uncertain where to aim his anger.

“Goodbye for now, James. I came only to enlighten. I bear you no chafed feelings for your understandable outburst of emotion, which is emotion well sourced and in need of proper direction.”

“For God’s sake, leave now!”

“I will,” said the Owl. “But I will always return if you call. As your immediate wrath hardens into obduracy, think on my offer of goodwill and avail yourself of it.”

The Owl left.

James sat with his head in his hands, elbows on the writing table. He cried silently, while his mind leaped like a monkey through the forests of his grief.

Billy Sea-Hen had begun to visit the Cook some time earlier, initially seeking remedies for his incessant colds and those afflicting Tat’head and the other Minders. He approached her cautiously, not liking what he saw as Cook’s imperiousness and her overly structured approach to life. The Cook was equally wary at first, liking neither what little she knew of his past nor what she deemed his insouciant fanaticism. As the visits became more regular, and each visit turned more conversational than strictly transactional, Billy and the Cook began to find common ground.

One drizzly Saturday afternoon late in October, the Cook glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and found herself wondering if Billy might be stopping in as he usually did around then. Almost as if she had summoned him, Billy Sea-Hen knocked on the kitchen door. Cook moved to the door more quickly than she herself realized, and let Billy in. At a bench in a corner, her niece the maid nudged Mr. Fletcher, both of whom grinned. Cook shot a blasting look at her niece, and at Mr. Fletcher for good measure, prompting more grins.

Cook put the kettle on and soon the kitchen buzzed with the warm conversation of friendly spirits who are glad in one another’s company, especially while cold raindrops fell on the window panes outside. Talk turned to more serious topics.

“Just you look at all these bills,” said the Cook. “Mr. Seddon the cabinetmaker in Aldergate Street demands back the chairs he sent, owing to non-payment. Here’s one from the druggist on Birchin Lane, and one from the garden in Chelsea for greengage cuttings and special food for Mr. McDoon’s smilax bushes (not that it has helped them much, poor things), besides more seeds for that little blue flower I never gave much thought to before, the bixwort.”

“Lean times,” said Billy, wanting to be supportive.

“Lean as a lark’s leg,” said Cook. “Mr. Sanford commands economy and thrift, and Mr. McDoon agrees in the partners’ room, but then—bless him, he can’t help himself—he comes ’round after to me, and begs for his Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, so what am I to do?”

“He’s an original is Mr. McDoon, meaning no disrespect,” said Mr. Fletcher. “An ‘Old Original, like the Chelsea Bun House.’”

All four nodded and smiled, thinking of the century-old establishment that served royalty and commoners alike with buns no imitator could rival.

“We are jammed into a tight little dog-hole, and no mistake,” said Cook, her smile fading. “Soon we will have to buy all our clothes at second-hand on Monmouth Street.”

“There’s many as are glad to have even that,” said Billy quietly.

“True enough, and I shall not complain,” said the Cook. “Still, we aren’t hardly affording meat any longer—I get us mostly herring from the middle of the barrel, and soon it will be dried habardines to go with our potatoes.”

Mr. Fletcher made a face at that.

“Well now,” retorted Cook. “As Billy says, that still fills the belly and there’s many as can’t say even that in these hard times. Hallo you two, you are still young and should not be sitting here mardlin’ on such gloomy things with older folks. Be quick as Tibbert’s Cat, be off with you.”

She pulled a little purse from her apron and pressed some small coins into her niece’s hand.

“Really, why not go to
The Dun Cow
, across from Saint John Sacharies?” said Cook. “You know you like their ale and their little mincemeat pie is not so very costly. ’Tis a Satur-eve after all.”