The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  Of course Mr Gunn said nothing of his recollection—one does not say, I remember noticing you, years ago, when you were wretched!—but he was quite sure that this was the same Robert Chambers. The profile was distinctive, and so was the limp.

  In those days, Mr Gunn had been in his own strapping prime, just past thirty; lusty and strong; with a hale happy wife and three young sons, all thriving. And suppose I too had chosen, Mr Gunn thought, to make of myself a writer, a scribbler, a publisher—and not a gardener? I might have done so, for I, too, am a reader, a thinker; I, too, started with nothing and have made my way by honest industry. But this garden would have been much the poorer without me; who would have fostered the linden walk; the clipped yews; the orchard; the rose beds? True, all were blasted now by frost (except the yews, which never changed), but all would revive next spring. My own labour produced this. My own life has not been wasted.

  All three of the Spring Gardens pigeons returned, together, before noon. Mr Gunn caught the birds and helped the girls detach the messages they carried: three tiny notes, each rolled into a cylinder and tied to the leg of a bird. The girls carried these little quills, numbered 1, 2, and 3, to their mother, who smoothed them flat and read her husband’s message in three parts:

  1. Landlord declines expense of chimney sweep for comfort of mere Balderstones.

  2. Landlord insists No Fires—until chimneys are swept.

  3. Mr B begs Mrs B engage sweep earliest, at Mr B’s expense.

  “Very shabby, I call it,” said Mrs Chambers, of the landlord’s conduct, to Lady Janet. “How he can call himself a gentleman, I do not understand, be his name ever so ancient.” She sent immediately for the chimney-sweep who, with his assistant, arrived within the hour.

  The rest of the day was required to clear the chimney in the library; and all the next morning to clear the day-nursery’s chimney. From above and from below, the sweep and his assistant knocked down and hauled out bushels—amounting to a cartload—of sticks, litter, straw, bird droppings, soot, mud, feathers, dust, old eggshells—and the desiccated carcass of a half-fledged jackdaw. The children were fascinated, and loath to leave their observation post, not even for meals. All their talk and all their study was of the marvelous jackdaws—clever, ingenious, industrous jackdaws!—which had dropped all this filth, litter, tinder, and kindling down the chimneys, to make nests for their hatchlings. “Cawdaws,” the sweep called them; and declared that they mated for life, more faithful than men—or women.

  “Ha! ‘The swans will sing when the jackdaws fall silent,’” Hopey had retorted, as if to herself.

  When the sweep had finished his work and gone, the Twinnies together dragged upstairs a scuttle filled with sea-coal; and Hopey lit the day-nursery’s first fire since no one knew when—just as a sleety rain commenced to stream down the window panes. The children drew the thick curtains and lay, elbows on the hearthrug, chins on palms, admiring the flames through the tall nursery fender, praising the luxurious warmth; and so fulsomely did they petition (“Oh! Dear, good, kind Hopey! Sweet Hopey! Beautiful Hopey! Do say yes!”) to have their tea there, on the rug, that fond Hopey agreed.

  There Constantia found them, their flushed faces lit up by fitful flames, while they turned buttered stale bread over the fire on toasting forks. How beautiful, those glowing young faces! Then her eye was arrested by the thing which stood upon the mantle, leaning against the chimney breast. Shaken, she went closer, the better to see it.

  “Isn’t it grand?” cried Annie. “Mary made it!”

  “Very clever indeed,” said Constantia. Of course it was not a fossil; it was only the bird skeleton which had been recovered from the chimney, salvaged by Mary from the sweep’s cart, and now, transformed. Mary had dissected it, bone from hollow bone, and then glued these bones onto a piece of pasteboard in a lifelike—though flattened—airborne pose. She had written beside each bone its name in ink: upper and lower mandibles; furcula; coracoid; sternum. Both wings were fully extended for flight, complete out to the dainty phalanges.

  The children were still full of the wondrous ingenuity of jackdaws, especially of their being so thoroughly jackdawish without, presumably, the benefit of lessons: “But how do jackdaws know what sort of nests it is proper for them to build?” asked Tuckie. “How do they know they ought to look for chimneys, to drop sticks down?”

  “It is instinct,” declared Annie, very positively. “They know by instinct.”

  “Extinct?” asked Jenny.

  “No, silly; instinct. Quite different.”

  “Jemmie stinked!”

  “Did not!” cried Jemmie hotly.

  “Did so!”

  “Ha! Dropped it! Jemmie dropped his bread in the fire!”

  “But ‘instinct’ only means ‘inborn,’” said Nina. “It is only a word, only the name of the phenomenon; and merely pronouncing the name of the phenomenon is no explanation. The question is, how can it be inborn?”

  “It’s the quills I wonder at,” said Annie. “Do the bird’s own quills, embedded in its skin, poke it unbearably? A feather mattress or a pillow is bad enough—but imagine a whole skinful of quills, poking without mercy!”

  “Perhaps that is why birds are so very restless; so flighty,” said Mary. “Never so easy nor comfortable as cats, napping in their fur.”

  Constantia watched for her opportunity, and a day or two later, upon finding the day nursery briefly deserted while its fire still flickered in the grate, she burned the letter from Mrs Fleming, poking it to a crumble of grey ash.

  One Sunday evening when the parental Chamberses had gone across the river to Musselburgh to dine with Dr and Mrs Moir, Lady Janet came upstairs to conduct the weekly catechism of the children. This was a duty properly their father’s, though by him sadly neglected. She appeared so suddenly and unexpectedly that Constantia, who had been helping Tuckie sort her collection of feathers, had no time to retreat to her own room. “A coal fire!—in the day-nursery!—and before Martinmas!” exclaimed Lady Janet from the doorway. “How excessively luxurious! My father never dreamed of such a thing. You are most fortunate little children. I hope that you have been studying your questions? No? I am very sorry indeed for it. I daresay that you, Mrs MacAdam, might hear the children in their questions, when you find yourself at leisure of a Sunday evening. Ah, leisure! how pleasant that must be! Now, what is this little book? The infamous Vestiges! Still! In the day-nursery—and on a Sunday!” She opened the little red-bound volume at random, and for a moment her eye roamed the page. “Miserable twaddle,” she said. “Listen: ‘That enjoyment is the proper attendant of animal existence is pressed upon us by all that we see and all we experience.’”

  The children exchanged surreptitious glances with one another, but no one ventured to speak, until Constantia said, “But what objection can your ladyship have to that?”

  “My objection? Only that it is heresy. What is the first question, Miss Mary?”

  Mary looked perplexed, and Lady Janet said sternly, “In the Catechism, of course.”

  “Oh, the Catechism,” said Mary, stalling for a moment; but then she had it: ‘What is the chief end of man?’”

  “And Miss Anne, I hope, can oblige us with the answer.”

  Annie could, and grudgingly did: “‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever.’”

  “There, you see,” said Lady Janet.

  “But I do not see at all,” said Constantia. “Even the Catechism concedes that we are made for enjoyment.” Then, finding herself perilously near to engaging in yet another argument with Lady Janet in front of the children, she excused herself and retired to her own room. There she was at liberty to indulge in vehement imaginary arguments with Lady Janet, such as this, on the controversial subject of coal:

  LADY JANET’S (IMAGINED) DECLARATION: “Here is yet another instance, only one of the Almighty Creator’s many contrivances both wise and good, only one proof of His personal and superintending will wrought upon every ato
m of His universe—and that is the existence of coal! Coal, we are told by the naturalists, is the fossil remains of the primeval forest which covered much of the earth in former ages, untold eons before God created Adam. Rich and inexhaustible are those deposits which He hath caused to be laid down! Coal—which fires our furnaces, our mills, our steam engines—and cheers our hearths as well, from the grandest castle to the most humble cot! Coal, which fuels all that is best and most advanced in human endeavor and progress! Now, Mrs MacAdam, what reasonable person can doubt that this gigantic forest was called into existence by the personal and superintending will of an Almighty God who careth for His creatures; proof of His goodness—His foresight—His great plan—His generosity? For no other purpose than to provide for the future needs of the human race, His beloved children, whom He even then intended to call into being, in His own image, in the fullness of His own good time? Is not Coal an irrefutable proof of God’s goodness; of His might; of the vastness—and also of the minuteness—of His great plan?”

  CONSTANTIA IMAGINED FOR HERSELF VARIOUS REPLIES, SUCH AS THIS: “No, although it would be pleasant indeed to think so. No doubt it was pleasant to suppose, in former days, that our Earth must lie at the center of the Universe, a yolk cradled in the center of its egg. Alas, that it does not! Alas, that it spins instead, we know now, at the edge of an unremarkable galaxy, among countless other galaxies! But let us now consider bed-bugs, Lady Janet. Or, if you prefer, lice; or mosquitoes. By your logic, you are obliged to conclude that the Author of us all created humankind not out of any great or particular love for us, not because we are the apple of His eye; but only by way of provision for those insects, apparently so beloved by Him, which thrive upon our bodies. Did the Creator provide humankind as their playground, their Eden, wherein they might thrive? Are we—our very bodies—provided only to succour them? Are they the crown of His creation; is it they who are created in His own image? And is not humankind, then, demoted to a role very like that of those prehistoric forests, now coal? What then of your personal, superintending, wise and good God?”

  OR THIS: “No. Coal is proof only that primeval forests existed, during former ages of immense duration. And humankind’s enthusiastic use of those fossil remains, in this present age, demonstrates that thus far, the ingenuity and luck of our kind has been sufficient to obtain our survival; sufficient, thus far, to permit of our perpetuating our own kind, drawing upon only those materials which do exist, though they are far from ideal—for there is nothing else; quite literally, and by definition, nothing else!”

  OR THIS: “No. Coal is, as you say, important to our continued existence, our advance in the courses of civilization. But the infinite trouble, danger, and great expense of painstakingly and laboriously extracting that coal—of delving it from the depths of the earth—would tend to prove instead that the deity to whom you refer cannot possibly be paying attention. It will occur to everyone that a great many far superior arrangements might have been devised, by any truly superintending Creator—who careth for his creatures—Almighty and all-wise! Might, and ought, to have been devised! Does this look like the careful husbandry of a loving Father? (Aye, like that of Abraham, filicidal Patriarch!)”

  LADY JANET’S (IMAGINED) RETORT (FOR SHE WAS DETERMINED, EVEN IN THESE IMAGINARY ARGUMENTS, TO HAVE THE LAST WORD): “Well! Sea-coal is to be had, easily enough! Free for the picking-up, off the sands!”

  TUCKIE, the youngest of the girls, was of a serious disposition. She could not always bear the noisy society of the day-nursery, and sometimes asked to come into Constantia’s little room. One evening, while quietly studying an atlas on the rug at Constantia’s feet, she looked up from a map of the Antipodes and gravely said, “But Mrs MacAdam, what are people for?”

  Constantia took an instant’s consideration before she replied, “A very good question—and many clever and good people have devoted their lives to studying just that. Some people believe that they know the answer. But as for myself, I do not know; and I am not convinced that anyone truly knows.”

  Tuckie nodded, and turned to the next page in the atlas: Japan.

  But later, Constantia thought, what are people for? What is the chief end of man? Such good questions.

  ON THE 22ND OF AUGUST IN 1833, when Constantia was ten years old, she had been jolted awake in the middle of the night, not by her mother’s careful return to their bed, but by an earthquake. The beams overhead creaked, complained; and litter rained down from the thatch upon her head in the darkness; still the jolting went on; and there was a deep rumbling which she first took for heavy iron-bound carriage wheels on a wooden bridge; and then for thunder. It was neither wheels nor thunder, but the groaning of the earth.

  Sleepily, she had turned over and, finding herself alone in the bed, had instantly sat up, fully awake.

  A tall cabinet toppled, crashed. Voices cried out, nearby, within the house and the outbuildings; and further away, in the town below: male and female voices, oaths and prayers. There was another crash in the next room, and a cry. The end of a beam smashed down upon the loom which stood in the corner, crushing its web, destroying the length of striped silk which her mother had been weaving. Constantia rolled off her mattress and crouched on the floor with her blanket over her head, too frightened to squeak, her fragile spine awaiting the smashing blow whenever the heavy beams overhead should come crashing down.

  On; and on; and on, the jolting continued. When would it stop? Why didn’t it stop? It could not go on, and on! could it?

  Would it stop? Would it get worse? Would it continue like this, henceforth?

  Constantia had felt plenty of earthquakes in her ten years, where she and her mother lived in the Khasiya highlands between Assam and Burma. A jolt, a shaking, a rumble, a rattling. Earthquakes were common enough, though not nearly so frequent as the torrential rains which fell so heavily here, so steadily, that for months at a time it was like living under a waterfall—and earthquakes were therefore less quotidian, more remarkable, more fun. “Ah! Did you feel that?” her mother would say, amused, when the writing-case rattled on the shelf, when the stew pot hanging over the fire swayed on its chain, when ripples suddenly chased each other back and forth across the surface of the water in the basin. “Just a little one. Didn’t you feel it?” If you were outdoors—playing, climbing, wading, running, always moving—you might not even notice an earthquake; they were more noticeable when you were inside a house, where you had to be still. A jolt, or two, or three; then it was over and you laughed; how exciting, that the earth, too, could move! Even the earth.

  Constantia almost always fell asleep beside her mother, in the bed they shared, in the quarters they had to themselves, in the Rani’s mansion. Her mother would lightly rub her back, and Constantia would stroke her mother’s hair as they fell asleep together. Lately, though, Constantia had sometimes awakened in the night to find herself alone in the bed. When that happened, she would lie awake, rigid with dreadful imaginings, until her mother came back. Sometimes it was nearly daylight before her mother came back. She would creep silently into their bed smelling of . . . what? Not herself. Constantia always pretended to be asleep, but she was not asleep.

  When day dawned hours later, revealing the appalling wreckage wrought by the immense earthquake, Constantia’s mother hadn’t yet come back. At noon, she still hadn’t come back; and after that, she continued not coming back. Went on and on that way, not returning.

  That is when Constantia had been brought by the Rani Anibaddh to live with her own children, and study under their demanding tutors.

  WHEN CONSTANTIA had parted from her husband, she had brought away with her four sturdy pigeons for carrying messages back to him, at that place where he was to remain. It was true (as Mr Gunn had observed) that she knew little about pigeons; and that little, picked up during her India childhood, was quite foreign to any Scottish pigeon-keeper’s ways. In India, breeders would distinctively perfume the bath-water of their various flocks, so that birds indist
inguishable to the human eye could be sorted by scent. The birds of this line, this loft, might smell of sandalwood; those, of vetiver; while still others, when they flapped their wings, filled the air with jasmine—attar of roses—holy basil—or cinnamon. While a clean well-tended doocot in Scotland might smell of ripe (or overripe) grain and guano, a pigeon-loft—a kabootarkhana—in Lucknow or Patna smelled like heaven.

  Or, perhaps, more like the zenana, the women’s quarters in an Indian palace.

  To Constantia, the pigeons she had brought with her smelled of their place of origin: of salt grass, and lamp oil, and the wind off the leaden sea . . . not so very distant from here.

  She had by this time flown three of her pigeons back to her husband, carrying three messages. First, on the 24th of July: “Twins, boy and girl, 21st July.”

  Then, on 28th August: “Our girl christened, Livia; but our poor boy lived only 34 days.”

  And, on September 1st: “Going to Mrs Robt Chambers, Musselburgh.”

  She had sent no messages since then, though she sometimes tried composing them in her mind. They had to be so very brief! They had to be so very important! But nothing worth the sending was to be told in ten or a dozen words; and her one remaining pigeon might be required for carrying some future message of great importance.

  EARLY IN NOVEMBER, Lady Janet gathered up her goods and chattels—her cabinet, pens, pen-knives, inkbottles and brushes—and quit the Robert Chambers family at Spring Gardens. It was time for her to return at last to the house of Mr and Mrs William Chambers, who had come belatedly home from their extended Italian tour. Upon her departure she offended the Spring Gardens servants by tipping them stingily—and mortally insulted Mrs MacAdam by tipping her, too, and presenting her with a little book of sermons.