The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (40 page)

“Our cage

We make a choir, as doth the prison’d bird

And sing our bondage freely.”

—William Shakespeare
,
Cymbeline
, III:iii, 42-44 (c. 1611)

“. . . The sound

Symphonious of ten thousand harps, that tun’d

Angelic harmonies.”

—John Milton
,
Paradise Lost
, VII: 558-559 (1667)

“Or, on thy instrument, with touching grace,

Awaken all the witcheries of sound . . .”

—Matilda Betham
,
“To Miss Rouse Boughton . . .” (1808)

“Tell me, moon, thou pale and grey

Pilgrim of heaven’s homeless way,

In what depths of night or day

Seekest thou repose now?”

—Percy Bysshe Shelley
,
“The World’s Wanderers” (1820)

“In an age far-off and yet to come, Ocean will unbind the chains, revealing thereby a great land; Tiphys will unveil broad new worlds, and Thule will no more be the Ultimate.”

—Seneca
,
Medea
, 369-374 (60)

J
ames had a splendid Sunday. He was exhausted but his mind strode over such physical concerns, emulating the stilts-men at Billy Sea-Hen’s camp meeting. James could not rest while awaiting Sally’s response—and then possibly Sally herself.

He walked all around the village of Slough, reliving the gay escapades and intimate moments from the time he and Sally had purloined from the magazines of propriety. The July sun was out, the sky an eggshell blue. He peeked at the Herschel Observatory, recalling how he and Sally had done the same, marveling at the huge telescope set on the lawn. He wondered if Sir Herschel or his sister might be at home, but—even in his febrile state—thought the better of intruding on the astronomers.

He strolled south to the Thames, a dark glittering thread this far upstream. He looked across at the playing fields of the Eton School, and beyond to the dense oak of Windsor Forest. He doffed his hat and bowed in the direction of Windsor Castle.

“Your most faithful servant, Your Majesty, back from enjoying your fine hospitality in Australia,” James said, putting his hat back on at a slight angle to his forehead. “You shall hear of me, as well, if I have anything to say about it.”

At supper, he received Sally’s response.

“She is coming!” he said to himself, wanting to shout the news to the innkeeper and all the many guests taking their Sunday meal in the public room. “She is coming. ‘Dearest James’ . . . it starts. ‘Dearest,’ she writes. ‘Dearest James, I will come by the first coach out Monday morning. Expect me then. Do not leave The Red Lion. Yearning for your embrace once more, yours forever, Sally.’”

James could hardly eat. Elated and dizzy, he surveyed the bustling room. He watched people stream in and out, the door with the inn’s name painted in festive curlicues on a pane of frosted glass swinging open and shut: Red Lion . . . noiL deR . . . Red Lion . . . noiL deR.

“Come join me, dearest, in our land of Noilder,” he thought. “Where all will be well again. Together, we will spy out all the nells and heals of our little empire, you the Queen and I your most loyal King. Banners of tarragon, chervil and rushwort will flutter over our castle. Tamarind ropes shall lift the drawbridge. The roof we’ll coat with nutmeg-paste.”

Looking out the window, James thought the air itself was alive, so incised and bright were the colours, so defined the shadows that stirred in the high-summer evening. It seemed his eyes and ears, all his senses, had been touched by Robin Goodfellow. He heard greenbottles buzzing against the panes on upstairs windows, horses champing on their mash in the stables, the creak of the pump-handle in the back-yard, the hiss of beef-fat dripping from the joint on the spit in the kitchen.

He re-read Sally’s note for the tenth time, then carefully folded it and put it in his breast-pocket.

“Sally: your kindness is a minister to your deeds, your mercies supple and strong,” he murmured. “Come, enter this kingdom with me. Nay, it shall be a queendom, where the elves dance on the green in your honour.”

James was Jack o’the Green, Sir Thomas under the hill, Titania’s consort. The cider at the Red Lion was the best he had ever tasted. The bacon, cheese and pickles came from Cockaigne.

“I hear the larks ascending from the hay-stubble, singing to greet the eventide, I witness the preminent auburn sunset,” he thought. “I am as the pilgrim in Miss Stillingfleet’s poem—Sally, you will remember it, we read it as we sat on the banks of the Thames not a half-mile from here!—the ‘pilgrim lonely,’ who ‘in a chaos weary of disarray waits for the moon to climb, waits and stays his wrath, waits for a love sublime.’ I am that patient pilgrim, Sally, I am.”

James barely slept that night. He was up before dawn, anxiously awaiting the first coaches from London. Several arrived, bearing the morning newspapers, but none carrying Sally.

Reassuring himself that Sally would arrive no later than the noontime coaches, James tried to distract himself with the newspapers as he sat by the window in the Red Lion’s public room. He scarcely grasped what he read about the campaigns in India or the sailing of His Majesty’s men-of-war from Ceylon. News of corn prices and canal companies slid away from his eyes. The only items that caught his attention were those relating to the events at Blackwall the day and night before.

“‘The preacher, the one with the bizarre appellation of Sea-Hen, came with the sidling thunder of a modern-day Wycliffe to his peroration, having sufficiently aroused the passions of his multitudinous listeners, agitating them into a temper that over-toppled all reason, when—as a natural consequence of such Lollardy—the crowd stormed the sermonical stage and caused all manner of pandemonium to ensue,’” read James.

“To put it mildly,” he chuckled.

Morning drew on. The July sun beat down on Slough. James dozed at his table, at all times cradling the valise in his lap. He grew increasingly worried. He thought he heard a kingfisher diving into the Thames from the branch of an alder tree. He was certain he heard hares carefully insinuating themselves through the hedgerows, and the stealthy padding of stoats behind them. He was convinced of these and a thousand other sights and sounds, each pellucid, the tinking and tacking of elven smiths at their forges deep within his mind.

Shouts from the courtyard roused him. The first of the noontime coaches had arrived. He sat straight up, looked out the window.

Sally stepped out of the coach.

James looked to the door of the inn. A few moments later it opened (nioL deR became Red Lion and then nioL deR restored itself). Sally stood there, searching for James, found him. She smiled at him over the heads of the intervening lunchtime crowd.

The world was in perfect equilibrium for that moment. The hares in the hedges, the greenbottles at the windows, the kingfisher hovering above the river . . . all paused, poised in a perfect balance.

“Everything is just right,” thought James.

And then it wasn’t.

James noticed that Sally’s head shook a little: a warning, a stifled sob, a surge of fear? He saw that she had tears on her cheeks.

He turned to look out the window. Sally had not come alone, as promised. From the coach issued Sally’s uncle Barnabas, and his partner Sanford, followed by the slender black woman, Maggie, and then Mr. Fletcher, Billy Sea-Hen, and Lieutenant Thracemorton.

His motions slowed as if he were swimming in sun-thickened honey; James turned back to Sally—who, immobile at the door, shook her head more forcefully. She appeared to be speaking, but James could not hear over the hubbub in the inn.

James had once seen a hawk take a pigeon in Piccadilly, strip and eat its prey on a roof all unobserved by the throngs below, a pantomime of violence no more than twenty feet over the heads of hundreds. The hungry, busy, news-seeking people in the coaching inn ate and bustled and talked all around James, unaware of the drama unfolding in their midst.

Another coach clattered into the yard. James, keeping track of Mr. Fletcher and Lieutenant Thracemorton as they appeared to be heading around the building, paid little heed to the second coach until he noticed the passenger who stepped down: the Widow Goethals in her dark green dress. She wore a small hat with one long metallic blue heron’s feather trailing from it, the better to highlight her waves of bold black hair.

“Well,” thought James. “That settles matters.”

He pushed back his chair, put on his hat and picked up the valise. He put a small coin on the table for his lunch (“Some want to believe otherwise, but James Kidlington is no thief,” he said to himself). Seeming casual and unhurried, he made his way towards the kitchen.

“James!”

He turned and looked at Sally, seeing only her face across the crowded room.

“My Goddess,”he thought. “You are a beauty—even in your despair.”

Still mired in the honeyed air, James slowly waved his free hand. Sally waved back, tentative at first and then with increasing fierceness.

“James!” she cried.

Suddenly released from the layers of heavy, occluding atmosphere, James spun around and darted into the kitchen. He nearly bowled over startled kitchen maids and pot boys, losing his hat as he rushed out the back door.

He sprinted south down the Windsor Road : “See! ‘From the brake the whirring pheasant springs; And mounts exulting on triumphant wings.’”

Behind him he heard a general outcry, pierced by a horse neighing.

Gasping for breath, he risked a look over his shoulder. A horse and rider were rounding the inn and entering the Windsor Road. The rider wore dark glasses (“like the ones the overseers wore in the Australian camps,” he thought, momentarily surprised).

The valise hampered him but he would not drop it unless he were dead, and maybe not even then. On he ran, out of the village. Tall hedges lined the road, with a fringe of larkspur, convolvulus, daisies, and masses of pink and purple Sweet William. Through occasional gaps in the hedges, he caught ragged glimpses of long-stalked red poppies waving on the margins of the fields. With each hot breath, he inhaled the deeply satisfying smell of the tedded hay as it dried in the sun.

He heard behind him the nearing sounds of a fast horse. Another sound overrode the beat of hooves. Looking back, James saw the Widow Goethals racing along the tops of the hedgerows, laughing, her brilliant white teeth flashing in the sunlight. Green dress billowing behind her, her black tresses whipping the air, the witch-widow whirled and skimmed, “a-whistlin’ and a-wheeplin’ o’er the haws.”

James cursed and leaped forward. He heard another noise, even closer, from just the other side of the hedgerow to his left. Out of the corner of his eye when he raced past one of the openings in the hedge, James caught a glimpse of two small men loping like apes over the hay-strewn fields. Green-hued men. Naked green men.

A little over a quarter mile down the Windsor Road, desperate to elude his various pursuers, James shanked left onto the road to Upton Court Farm. He had to go to ground. He knew that the only chance of refuge now was Saint Stephen’s Church, some six hundred yards further on.

His lungs burned, his legs bent under the pressure of his speed. He slowed for a second to shift the valise from one hand to another, and to check on his pursuit. The rider had pulled even with the widow. Over the hedges and down upon the rider leaped the two green men. The rider adroitly maneuvered his horse to avoid the onslaught. As the two men rebounded off the surface of the road and reached for the reins, the rider fired a pistol at immediate range. One of the grappling men collapsed backwards.

James had no more time to watch the battle. The widow was nearly upon him, dancing like a beautiful spider on the leaves and spines of the hedgerow above him. She laughed as she held out long, stiff fingers to grab him. James sprinted again.

The final dash into the church was a rust-and-brown-tinged blur. James had no more energy but his will drove him on, his will and the great fear at his heels. He stumbled through the churchyard gate, urged himself past the elms and yews, made for the massive, ivy-mantled Norman tower.

“Why run, my darling?” said the Widow, at his neck, her voice silvery, melodious. She might have been asking him if he wanted more tea at Hatchards, so calm and entrancing was her tone.

James almost slowed despite himself. Instead, he threw himself in one final spasm towards the church door . . . and prayed it would be open on a Monday at noon.

It was. The day was Saint Morgaine’s, the patron of bakers, the leavener of dough and protector of the hearth. On this day, churches opened their doors for the poor, who might receive at the altar a free loaf of bread.

James crashed through the door, into the nearly derelict Saint Stephen’s Church. The Widow Goethals followed.

James felt the Widow’s long nails on his shoulders, as he ran down the nave. He knocked over the worm-riddled rood-screen as he scrambled into the apse. He hurtled onto the altar, scattering half a dozen loaves of bread as he slid across it. He dropped onto the floor on the other side. With nowhere further to run—the sacristy wall blocking his way forward—James turned at bay to face the Widow.