The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (34 page)

Mei-Hua listened intently as Maggie, and with much reluctance from Sally talked about the Owl. In response, she told Maggie and Sally about the glimpses of Strix that she had had in dreams. She talked about the demon-owl known as
chi xiao
and the malevolent god-let named the
shashen
, and about the intimations of his coming written in the ancient
Bowu zhi
(that is, the
Annals of Strange Things
), leading his armies of fox-women, crane-wives and famished ghosts.

“One world, many names,” said Maggie, pouring more milk into her gunpowder tea. (Mei-Hua had learned not to remark upon the desecration of the tea; some abominations even your friends and allies must be allowed). “One song to defeat him, sung by many voices.”

As if on cue, Isaak appeared in the doorway. She approached Mei-Hua slowly, on her stalking feet, inspecting the young Chinese woman.

“Oh, most honoured one!” said Mei-Hua. “I have a cat like you at home, only not so hunterly (can I say that in English?). Your coat is the emperor’s colour, which is the most good luck.”

Isaak relaxed, started to purr, rubbed Mei-Hua’s shins. All three women laughed, even Sally (Sally most of all). Mei-Hua told them about Lu Yu, who in his celebrated
Book of Tea,
dedicated a well-known poem to the cats who protected his library, and about the famous scholar Chang Tuan who had seven beloved cats whose names were legendary throughout China.

“One was called ‘White Phoenix,’” said Mei-Hua. “One was ‘Pattern of Cloud,’ another was ‘Silk Sash With Fine Threads of Raised-Up Gold and Silver.’ So, in memory of Chang Tuan’s seven cats, I give this little hunter a name in Chinese which means ‘Emperor’s Sharp-edge Flows-like-the-Sun.’”

Mei-Hua wrote the Chinese characters for this on a piece a paper.

“Oh marvelous,” said Sally. She later gave the paper to the Cook, who hung it in the kitchen next to a small devotional portait of Saint Morgaine (right by the the rack from which depended the soup and stew ladles).

“What do you think of that, Isaak?” said Sally and Maggie nearly in unison (to each other’s amazement). Isaak meowed, dropped and rolled, wriggling her back on the floor, half-exposing her sweep of pale-golden belly fur, while half-extending her claws.

Sally added, “Mei-Hua, your name for Isaak is very much of a piece with the one the Yountians gave her:
tes muddry
, the ‘golden claw.’ Well done, I should say.”

“Yount,” whispered Mei-Hua. “Tell me about Yount.”

Over the days and weeks that followed, Sally spoke at length about Yount, and Maggie laid out the plans for the return voyage. The three young women spent hours in the partners’ room poring over charts and calculations, joined frequently by Dorentius and occasionally by Mr. Gandy. (Mr. Gandy was unsure whether all the talk of fulgination and Yount was just an exceptionally rococo game or madcap hoax, but did not care; he loved the play and elegance of it, had decided he would be unfazed if Yount turned out to be real, and regardless he would do anything for Maggie). Equation by equation, egged on by the songs of Charicules, they solved the fulginatory, chulchoisical and xanthrophicius challenges confronting them, and resolved the nautical, hydrostatic and aerodynamic design issues that otherwise threatened to hobble the
Indigo Pheasant
.

After one long debate about abaxile properties and the need to allow the ship to tralineate without losing its way, Dorentius shifted his amputated leg and whistled, “Point to you, Miss Mei-Hua. Cleverly done, your differentiating the epenthetical from the cissoid curve—never mind the specific words, I will write that down for you and you can compose them in proper Chinese later. Was your thinking here that cleared our vision, or I am a pine tree.”

Mei-Hua blushed. Working with Maggie, Sally and Dorentius on equations was like a dance, like the rush of wings moving in unison. She felt like the magpies must have felt when they (every magpie in the world!) made the bridge among the stars on
Qixi
, the “Night of Sevens,” uniting for that one night the herdsman Niulang with Zhinu, she who spins the thread, seventh daughter of the Goddess. She told the story—a legend almost universally known the length and breadth of China—to Maggie and Sally, pointing out on a celestial atlas the positions of the stars in the story.

“Your Niulang is our Altair, which we are told means ‘the eagle’ in the original Arabic,” said Sally, reading the notes in the atlas and momentarily forgetting to be depressed as lexicographical fervour gripped her. “Zhinu is Vega, ‘the vulture landing,’ not very inspiring I fear. I prefer the Chinese there. Your magpie-bridge cruxes at our Deneb . . . which name hails from ‘the tail of the hen,’ thus also known in Europe as Gallina, the Hen. . . .”

“Close enough to ‘pheasant’ for me,” said Maggie.

“My friend the German astronomer has written me,” said Sally, pausing as she flushed and looked away from Maggie. “He says that he believes Deneb may be a blue-white star, based on the latest observations through his new telescope. The Herschels in Slough suggest the same.”

Maggie ignored the memories of Sally’s correspondence with astronomers on the German Baltic (letters that Maggie could not read and was, in any event, not invited to hear in translation). Maggie also ignored the memories of talks being held at the Royal Society by the King’s Astronomer Sir Friedrich Herschel and his sister Caroline (talks to which Maggie was not invited).

Instead Maggie said, “A blue-white pheasant flying across the Milky Way, buoyed by all the magpies in the world, and heralded by a piebald swan (burnt offering whom we will honour forever). The Owl has met his match!”

“Remember the
Lanner
,” murmured Sally.

Charicules, as close to a magpie as never mind, raised his soft singing and slung notes around the room.

Mei-Hua said, “My brother Shaozu and I brought something all the way from Tsinan Fu, something that I must give you now. I had a dream before we left. I had a painter paint what I dreamed. I did not know why I had this dream. I did not know why I had to have the dream painted or why I must bring it to the West. I only knew these things when we came to London. Working now with you, Miss Maggie and Miss Sally, I know it is the right time to give our gift to you.”

She took out from her bag a parcel wrapped in heavy cloth, about one foot square. She unwrapped it, revealing two identical porcelain tiles. Each depicted a pheasant. The background was white, the pheasant delineated in exquisitely fine and lively black strokes, and painted in a rare bluish shade that seemed to skew now greyish, now green-like under the translucent glaze as Mei-Hua moved the tiles in the sunlight.

“We call it
qingbai
porcelain in China,” said Mei-Hua. “No one here or there seems able to translate
qingbai
—
qing
is part blue but not all blue, sometimes green but not fully green.
Qing
is a colour all its own, see? It is not possible to define it. Blue, green and something else.
Qing
is youth, is spring coming to us, is the colour of life. This is a bold pheasant—see how he holds his head, how his tail is like a sword?—painted in
qing
colour.”

Sally and Maggie each took one of the tiles. Isaak jumped from one lap to the other, eager to get a better view.

“For the bow,” said Sally.

“Yes,” said Maggie. “One on each side. Eyes to guide us, a figurehead for the
Indigo Pheasant
.”

“I wish I could see the
Indigo Pheasant
,” said Mei-Hua.

“You shall,” said Maggie. “Soon. I am working on the arrangements.”

The lawyer Winstanley was central to all Maggie’s arrangements. Sir John had appointed Winstanley as the daily liaison between the Admiralty and the Chinese delegation, aware of course that Winstanley was working closely with the McDoons. Moreover, Winstanley already had an indirect connection with the Chinese: one of his cousins was a partner in the Canton firm that had issued the letter of credit for Tang Guozhi and his proteges, the letter that enabled the Chinese delegation to draw down money on London banks for their local needs. (The credit was large; the English hong relied on guarantees issued to it by a leading
shanxi
remittance bank in China, which based its support on the sizeable amount of imperial silver Tang Guozhi had deposited with the
shanxi
). Winstanley, with a surgeon’s dexterity and the implacability of a boxer, steered Sir John towards a more accommodating (if not truly trusting) opinion of Tang Guozhi’s aims and goals. More cynically, Winstanley emphasized what a good-will gesture of this sort might buy the English in terms of negotiations with the Chinese (thinking of Lord Amherst’s embassy currently in Peking). Winstanley said a little theatre—showing off the
Indigo Pheasant
, for instance, without displaying the inner working of its steam engines or its other, more rarefied and innovative, equipment—should mollify Tang Guozhi, while denying him anything of real substance.

One day in very late January, Winstanley came to the house on Mincing Lane, to announce Sir John’s (grudging) approval for a (limited) visit to the Blackwall Yard.

“But why so glum then?” said Winstanley, taken aback at the subdued reaction from Mei-Hua and Shaozu.

“No, we thank you sir,” said Shaozu.

“Something else makes us sad,” said Mei-Hua.

“What is it, my friends?”

“The Spring Festival, the
chun jie
, begins very soon home in China,” said Mei-Hua. “The New Year on
zheng yue
.”

“The biggest, most important time of the year, but here no one knows anything about it, and even your calendars are different,” said Shaozu.

England’s foreignness was nowhere heavier, more opaque, more knotted than in the reckoning of time and the seasons. The Chinese felt wholly out of place in this regard, unmoored from their own calendar. Bells tolled the hours, but announced feast-days that held no significance whatsoever for them. The seasons differed. New Year’s Day had already come as far as the English were concerned, and winter would not end in the English mind for another six weeks. Mei-Hua, Shaozu, and Tang Guozhi had continued to maintain the Chinese calendar privately, marking the passage of each day in a special diary that Tang Guozhi kept, so that they would not forget the proper order of the months and the timing of the festivals they cherished. From the Cape forward, they had laboured over this, reminding one another every day what day and month it was, keeping China in their minds even as their bodies moved through an entirely different world. Mei-Hua sometimes thought she was a shadow sent out from China, that her real self remained at home, cupped and floating within the rhythm she had known all her life.

Winstanley had some inkling of what Mei-Hua, Shaozu and Tang Guozhi must feel. His cousin had written him from Canton about the strain of living in a country where the calendar itself differed. Yet at least his cousin could ignore the strain, surrounded as he was by countrymen and other Westerners in their rigorously separated enclave. Apparently the English carried on their traditions blithely under the Cantonese sun, celebrating New Year’s on January 1
st
, hunting the wren on St. Stephen’s Day, carrying the rattle on St. Adelsina’s Day, and so forth, quite indifferent to the flow of time outside the walls of the Thirteen Factories. Mei-Hua, Shaozu and Tang Guozhi had no such luxury.

Winstanley went directly to the Admiralty and persuaded Sir John to

“. . . pay for a feast, in fact an entire series of feasts, for the Chinese!”

Winstanley said, “Yes, Sir John. You will recoup your investment many times over, I am sure of it. Think about the feelings of warm gratitude you will generate in their hearts, the seeds of benevolence you will plant in their breasts, whose fruits you may harvest when His Majesty’s government has need.”

“Yes, yes, you with your taffeta phrases. You make very free with the government’s money. Clever little quab. Treasury will turn itself in knots over this, will howl for my head when it is known that His Majesty’s government is laying out a hundred pounds to indulge in oriental festivities, subsidizing their food and drink. The
Chinese
are the ones with all the silver, not us—there will probably be an inquiry in parliament about all this. Oh no, young Winstanley, I want you right by my side when the bill falls due and Treasury sends its most humourless accountants after me.”

“As it is said, Sir John, the daw knows naught of the lyre,” said Winstanley.

“All the more reason to have you standing beside me, to face the minions when they come shaking their ledgers and quills. Let us see how unblinking your guile is then, my boy.”

So, armed with a hundred-pound draft issued by the East India Company as instructed by the Admiralty, Winstanley set out organizing a Chinese Spring Festival at the house in Mincing Lane. Mei-Hua and Shaozu could not believe their good fortune, throwing themselves into the planning. Tang Guozhi understood what prompted the sudden outpouring but was nevertheless swept up in the congenial mood, his own yearnings for home outdistancing his more clear-headed political deductions. Barnabas was delighted, immersing himself in the details of preparation (“Figs and fiddles! Parties, with red lanterns! And every kind of dumpling!”). Sanford gave his support, once satisfied that the outlay would not impinge upon the straitened McDoon finances. Sally urged herself to better spirits, but thinking how much Tom, Afsana and Nexius Dexius would have enjoyed the gatherings clouded her mood, which led her to dwell on the absence of Frau Reimer and of Mr. Harris . . . and on the loss of Salmius Nalmius and the doughty Noreous Minicate. Then she realized that she could invite neither Reglum nor James, much less the Sedgewicks, and began to bear something of a grudge against the entire proceeding, no matter that she had grown fond of the inquisitive and gifted young Mei-Hua.

Cook was anxious, uncertain about the recipes let alone their execution.

“We do not have such things in all of England, no more than a sheep has wings,” said Cook, looking at the list of ingredients (many vaguely worded or in need of far more precise translation) that Mei-Hua had excitedly given her. “Whatever shall we do?”