The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (47 page)

Sally corresponded regularly with the Termuydens. When the Termuydens died, and the Last Cozy House was shut, its contents to be dispersed in accordance with their will, the correspondence with Sally filled several very fat folios—which were returned to Sally and later came down to her heirs.

Once a year Sally visited James’s grave in the small yard by St. Helen’s Bishopsgate.

Among the few outsiders whom Sally habitually sought out was Lieutenant Thracemorton. Sally coveted every scrap of memory the lieutenant had about James, every observation and analysis of James’s mentality, scruples, manner, and behaviour. Graciously at first, but with growing depth of feeling, the Lieutenant shared his remembrances and—surprising himself—gradually became a confidante. He and his wife (and eventually their children) were among the very few regular callers on Sally in her declining years.

Isaak died at age twenty-five. Cook found her stretched out in the kitchen, claws extended, as if she had expired while hunting. They buried Isaak in the backyard, the small mound of her grave marked by a carved wooden stele, surrounded by a bed of blue bixwort.

No other cat ever lived at the McDoon house.

Cook married Billy Sea-Hen, and the two of them moved into the back-house at Mincing Lane. While Billy travelled to Yount several times and founded—in Queenhithe—the Society of Asaph (which continues its global social justice campaign to the present day), Cook continued to care for the McDoons.

“Too old to have children,” said Cook, whose name was Elizabeth Adelsina Grove. “But the little smee needs lookin’ after, and Mr. Barnabas too (though he won’t admit it). And Mr. Sanford likewise, though he is even less able to admit it. You have your big flock to minister to, dearest Billy, and I have my own little congelation.”

Her niece the maid—Anna Emerentia Grove—finally married Mr. Fletcher. They set up house in a proper street near All Hallows-by-the-Tower, just a few blocks over from Mincing Lane, and were often to be seen visiting at the McDoons. Their daughter, Alice Elizabeth Fletcher, married an ambitious costermonger named Allen, who—through hard work and clever deals struck with Fortnum & Mason and other leading purveyors of specialty foods—amassed a tidy fortune. The oldest daughter of that union was none other than Richenda Mary-Elizabeth Allen, one of the first graduates of Somerville College at Oxford, who helped pioneer the “new biology” based on her discoveries in the Interrugal Lands. Their second daughter was Mary “Zinnamouse” Allen, the eminent historian of the Return, who married the American classicist Edward C. Townsend, joining him on the faculty of Columbia University in New York City.

Elizabeth Adelsina and her Billy, and Anna Emerentia and her Mr. Fletcher, were pall-bearers at Sanford’s funeral.

“Oh
Quatsch
,” cried Barnabas on that day, leaning heavily on Sally. “What ever shall I do without my oldest friend?”

Less than a year later, Barnabas died. They buried him in his favourite calicosh vest. The Yountish embassy in London reported to Sally that Tom and Afsana did not eat but only drank water for five days upon hearing the news of Barnabas’s death, and that they declared an official day of mourning in Yount. Through his tears, Tom wondered if the inscription on his uncle’s tombstone included “beans and bacon” or the like. (It does not, as you can attest for yourself by visiting the site at Saint Macrina’s Infra).

Sally left the house on Mincing Lane even less often thereafter.

Not many years later, Cook found Sally dead in the attic room, slumped over a sheaf of notes on the Yountish poet Lemmisessurea the Younger. After the funeral (Sally rests next to her uncle, one over from Sanford), after the Yountish representatives had returned to the embassy and the newspaper-men had gone to Fleet Street to write up their stories, Cook sat with Billy in the kitchen.

“Little smee flown home for good this time,” she said, and then she sobbed.

Cook was startled and even dismayed when Winstanley unsealed the will and informed her that Sally had named her sole heir.

“Oh, fallabarty,” said Cook. “What will I do with all this money, and the house, and the garden and all?”

The McDoons having recouped much of their depleted and endangered fortune as a result of very favourable terms of trade with Yount after its Return, Cook and Billy were able to invest large sums in the Society of Asaph and other charitable, humanitarian organizations in London and in Yount Great-Port. They lived in the house on Mincing Lane until the end of their days, caring for it as keepers of a sacred museum, a fane of light and longing in an uncertain world—many seekers and wonderers made what became a pilgrimage, wanting to hear what Billy had to tell them about Yount and the struggle with the Owl and the immarcessible crown of glory, and to hear from Cook all about the McDoons both before and after the Return. Cook took pains to preserve Sally’s papers exactly as Sally had left them.

The house on Mincing Lane passed to the Fletchers and then to the Allens in due course. The Allen sisters made the first exhaustive studies of Sally’s papers, which today are archived in the special collections at Columbia University.

Most readers will know that the house itself was destroyed in the Blitz, on the very same night that bombs gutted the
Indigo Pheasant
, which had been dry-docked for visitation at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. Much has been made of the simultaneous destruction, many claiming that the Owl guided the Luftwaffe on that night—and who is to say that Strix did not?

The Allen family salvaged the dolphin door-knocker from the ruin of the house and had it installed on the front door of their London pied-a-terre, a terrace house on Elvaston Place in South Kensington. That house has passed into other ownership, but a small National Trust plaque remarks upon the door-knocker (still there) for those who care to read it.

Of course, the house and all the rest of the McDoon equity were Sally’s to bequeath because Tom and Afsana had long since renounced all claim as heirs, given their status as rulers of Yount.

And because, just over a year after the
Indigo Pheasant
sailed back to London, Maggie had disappeared . . .

. . . disappeared, taking Jambres with her, from London as wholly as if she had never existed there at all, without any clue or evidence for anyone to track her.

She gave no forewarning and left no explanation beyond a short note placed by the sandalwood box in the partners’ room. The note read:

Dear cousins:

Bear this parting with love and understanding, I ask you. I am compelled; my journey moves me forward, with Jambres as my consort and with the blessing of the Goddess. The Return of Yount is only one more step in the never-ending battle we wage with the Owl—I know this now in my bone and heart. Where I go, not even the
Indigo Pheasant
can carry me. Farewell, and cup the flame of my love within you forever, as I will bear your love with me. Such a song we made!

P.S. For Sanford. I thank you for helping me see the truth of what Saint Anthony wrote: ‘spiritual geometry measures dimensions not as quantities but as virtues within the divine.’

P.P.S. For Sally. If I could, I would ask you and Isaak to come with us, but you are needed more in your present time and place. Be well—we women are the strength of the world.

Putting down the letter and pushing aside his ink bottle, quill, blotting paper, and quizzing glass, Barnabas said, “Well, buttons and beeswax. What do we make of this?”

Into and around the ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece, Sanford said, “I think, my friends, that Maggie . . . and Jambres . . . are gone for good, and quite clean out of our time altogether.”

Sanford, as usual, had perceived the heart of the matter completely.

[From Charles Burney,
History of Music
, vol. 5, 1803; Maggie read this at the Sedgewicks, who gave it to her as parting gift when she moved to the McDoons; her copy is heavily annotated in her hand]

T
he mind’s operation, when influenced by the emotions piqued through music, is a river of conflicting eddies channelled into one harmonious flow. The system of temperament, whether equal or well, whether founded upon the Pythagorean comma or some other arranging concept, impresses upon us the learning of the affects, such that we—though creatures infinitely small in the thoughts of Heaven—may nevertheless ascend with tentative and trembling souls some distance on the circles that lead to Grace and the Divine. In this regard, some of the more novel approaches taken by the Italians and the Austrians in recent centuries might—with some adaptations to suit the British sensibility—be usefully employed on our shores. I will speak here firstly of the alternative or cross-tuning known in Milan and other Italian centres as ‘scordatura,’ with reference also to the delightful though today under-utilized
viola d’amore
and the passacaglias of mystery described by H.I.F. Biber of Salzburg in his
Harmonia Artificioso
.

[From Olaudah Equiano’s
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, The African
(1789), which Maggie read and annotated at the McDoons]

At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow.

[… . . . .]

This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated.

[… . . . .]

I also now first saw the use of the quadrant. I had often with astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think what it meant. They at last took notice of my surprise; and one of them, willing to increase it, as well as to gratify my curiosity, made me one day look through it. The clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they passed along. This heightened my wonder: and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.

“‘The history of men’s follies,’ says the inimitable Fontenelle, ‘makes no small part of learning; and, unhappily for us, much of our knowledge terminates there.’”

—Ephraim Chambers
,
Cyclopaedia
, vol. I (1728)

“If I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it.”

—Giovanni Battista Piranesi
,
c. 1760, as recorded by Jacques Guillaume Legrand in
“Notice historique sur la vie et les ouvrages de J.B. Piranesi” (1799)

“It is necessary to make a ruin of a palace so that we have thus rendered it an object of interest.”

—Denis Diderot
,
Salon de 1767

“. . . imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them. . . . He makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them.”