Chapter 5: A Delayed Beginning, or,
Brisk Entanglements of Wisdom and Folly
“These speculations may appear wild, and it may seem improbable that they will ever be realised, to persons who have not extended their views of what is practicable by closely watching science in its course onward; but there are many mysterious powers, many irresistible agents with the existence and with some of the phenomena of which all are acquainted.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley,
quoted by Thos. Jefferson Hogg in “Shelley at Oxford,” in
the New Monthly Magazine, 1832
Shelley and Hogg were close friends at Oxford in 1810)
“There is some Angel that within me can
Both talk and move,
And walk and fly and see and love,
A man on earth, a man
Above.”
—Thomas Montague Traherne,
“An Hymn Upon St. Bartholomew’s Day” (c. 1665)
“He sat in his grotto, tormented in his breast by longing [Sehnsucht], hot tears on his cheek, wishing that a star in heaven might enlighten his shadowed path, when suddenly a beautiful woman emerged from the woods surrounding the grotto, the fullest rays of the sun falling upon her angelic face. ‘The holy St. Emerentia!,’ he cried out. ‘No, no, even more than her;—my highest Ideal!’”
—E.T.A. Hoffmann,
“The Church of the Jesuits in G.,” (in Night-Pieces, 1817,
translated by Dorothy Elisabeth Ridgeon, 1820)
Jambres sat alone in his house in Sanctuary, in the room that overlooked the enclosed garden, the path to the beach, and the bay beyond. Early morning sounds filled his ears through the open window: the ascending trills of larks, the songs of chaffinches and wheatears, the gustling of pheasants in the fields behind the house, the steady pulse of the surf in front. In the garden the summer flowers—the glossy yellow St. John’s-wort, the pale white campion, the brash orange hawkweed—were retreating in favour of the fall flowers—the bunched purple of the aster, the tall, feathered golden of the solidago. The first fox-grapes—rusty sheened, heavy—had appeared the day before in the hedges, while the last of the hawthorn fruits had fallen.
Jambres sat secluded in his thoughts, buoyed by the sounds and smells. He heard the day’s first stirrings of the sailors and soldiers bivouacked further down the shore, the freedmen and refugees from Yount who continued the fight against Orn. He smelled their breakfast cook-fires, heard their banter and complaints. Someone played a few runs on a mouth-organ. A baby cried out for its mother.
Jambres heard Tom, already issuing orders. He heard Afsana say something to one of the armourers. “The Crippled Queenlet,” they called her. The bullet on the quay had shattered her right hip, the night the last tough-ship had sailed bearing Sally, Barnabas, Sanford, Reglum, Dorentius and the others back to Earth. Afsana had almost perished, first from the bleeding, then from the infections. But she refused death, pulling back from the threshold time and again, using the pain as her ladder back to life. (“And Tom,” she said. “I could not leave the poor man to fend for himself, so here I am.”) Tom had fashioned for her a brace; supported by her brace and using a cane made of strongest oak, Afsana returned to lead the Yountian troops.
The Crippled Queenlet and Tommy Two-Fingers . . . the Yountians would follow these two anywhere at any time, to whatever end. Their world reduced itself to the war, a war that the Ornish were winning. As Nexius Dexius had predicted, the Ornish had taken Yount Great-Port and overrun almost all of Farther Yount. The Arch-Bishop held several small Yountish islands with his Sacerdotal Guards and troops from Optimate houses siding with the Learned Doctors and the Gremium. Separately, Nexius led the resistance in the name of Queen Zinnamoussea, the Queen Who Is, and Afsana, the Queen Who Will Be, a resistance consisting of the remnants of the Royal Navy, those Optimate houses loyal to the Hullitate dynasty, and the freedmen of Sanctuary. Based in Sanctuary, the Hullitate forces conducted hit-and-run raids on the Ornish, harried Ornish shipping, supported sabotage and covert actions in Yount Great-Port and other cities of Farther Yount. The forces of the Arch-Bishop and those commanded by Nexius rarely communicated, and never coordinated their attacks. The Ornish consolidated their conquest and—if they could not eradicate the threat posed by the Arch-Bishop and that of Queen Zinnamoussea—they had little to fear militarily; the Ornish lion disliked the thorns that pricked its paws, but was otherwise unfazed.
Jambres picked out the low growl of Dexius. The Yountian general was conferring with Tom and Afsana and their gathered lieutenants, preparing for another sortie against the Ornish, another foray in what promised to be a war without end. Dexius barked an order; Tom did the same, the troops huzzahed in a quiet, determined way that was infinitely more chilling than the parade-ground bravado of untested recruits. Every man and every woman on the detail had been under fire, seen friends and family killed, had taken life. Sails billowed, ropes were thrown, the squadron was made ready as the soldiers waded out to the ships.
The Cretched Man recalled recent conversations with Tom, Afsana and Nexius—each of whom wondered what news Jambres might be able to give about the return of the other McDoons, preferably with a reinforcing army. Afsana was quick to doubt, prone to criticize. Having only just gotten to know a father who did not know of her existence until very recently, not wholly convinced that he would not ignore or evade her again, Afsana voiced her distrust with increasing vehemence.
“And Sally, dear as she may be to me, yet for all her talk of—what do you call it in German, Tom?—Sehnsucht, is it?, right, Sehnsucht—and the glorification of longing, homecoming, a grand re-arrival, where is she? I feel as if Yount barely figures in her thinking anymore, maybe not in any of their thinking. We are become an after-thought, at best. What is that saying about ‘out of my sight, out of my mind’? Is that the saying in English, Tom? Yes, well, then that is what it feels like to me, that they have left us to our fate, abandoned us.”
Jambres—sending the raiders a blessing—turned to look into the ansible-telescope, as he did twice a day every day. He searched long with the device, seeking to pierce the veils of the Interrugal Lands, to discover news about Sally and the other McDoons. He searched fruitlessly; the ansible showed no clear images, sent no clear messages, but provided only a stream of blurred and enigmatic signs, penny-pictures of saints and beatas, a tarot-reading of half-visible portraits.
“The Owl flares his wings, clouding all,” murmured Jambres. “Wreathes the Earth in white-winds and sounds of death, blinding me—barring me from the gates and streets back to London or any other place on Earth.”
Jambres saw distant flashes in the night-time of his mind, like lightning or cannon-fire just below the horizon. He heard hollow mutterings, a shailing, shooking sound as of nuts being shaken in their shells, and the creaking of stairs under clandestine weight. He sensed doorknobs being tested, cries muffled by uncaring hands, and weeping in deserted places.
“He’s called in a multitude, nurselings of foreign climes. The desiccated ones. The half-fallen, the horse-saints, the illicines and alcharates.”
Jambres peered for hours into the ansible, but got no news of the McDoons. He felt Sally’s anguish and her fall into betrayal but received none of the details. He sensed the distress of Barnabas and Sanford but discerned nothing of why.
“Billy, my precious Sea-Hen. Your preachments cast vibrations even this far, well done my fighting deodandus, but I cannot hear them directly. Yet I sense that you, too, are frustrated and uneasy. What is it, Billy, what troubles you?”
Jambres sat long into the day, feeling for the signs. He mused on Afsana’s characterization of an absent father, and felt much the same way himself about the Great Mother’s consort (“an empty throne, abandoned in favour of some other universe more congenial than this one?”). He saw heaven’s bureaucracy continuing to grind away at its tasks even in the absence of the Father, even as the Mother slumbered: companies of angelic clerks an
d under-secretaries making entries into the Liber Berosianus Superioris, the Great Book of Repentance and Rue; seraphic tabellions and notaries summing, erasing, reckoning. Once even—to his great and lasting surprise—he spied a House he had not seen before (let alone visited), a House of Gentle Februation overseen by a Dominion of Patience, a House of Mercy in the garden of which sat the archangel Gabriel guiding the hand of St. Luke as the latter painted the Great Mother, on the flower-strewn lawns of which the infant-saint Sambandar laughed and sang in perfect harmony with the stars even as he was born and re-born over and over again.
With such fleeting, slender visions did Jambres keep his own hopes alive, buttressed more closely at hand by the singing he heard among his charges.
“I would tell you, Sally, Barnabas, Billy, about our youngest singer, the little Malchen, how she is growing, how her voice is maturing. She will be ready, selah.”
The Cretched Man scratched at his face, the skin of which—the white, white skin of which—had been itching him exceedingly for days. He peeled off a layer, shed it like a snake, a long translucent sheet that he sent floating out the window into the evening and across the beach. He marvelled at this.
He thought above all about the mysterious singer in London.
“I see you in glimpses, I do, young brown-eyed princess, child of Africa as I am (once long ago). As it stands in Lamentations: ‘What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion?’ The Owl stands between us.”
Jambres had felt the Owl shudder and he felt the Mother swim-singing towards wakefulness.
“Is this your doing, beautiful dark singer? Who else, if not you? You challenge the Owl—no one has done this before, at least not on our world. You are nigh to waking the Mater Magna. Unheard of! Such deeds as these are boastworthy; I would meet you just to honour you.”
Jambres smiled to think of the Owl’s discomfiture.
“You advert it not, dread Wurm, but I feel your fear from afar. How does it feel, your half-holiness?”
He picked at a shred of skin on his left cheek, pushed unbidden thoughts of the Tailors and the House of Decortication out of his mind, focused instead on the McDoons.
“One more piece of news I would desperately share: Afsana is pregnant. She and Tom will have a little girl (I have not told them but they will know the child’s sex soon enough). In the midst of our losses and the threat of the Owl, new life! New life, a new little song, a new voice for the Great Song, selah!”
The Wurm-Owl sat in his house in (but not of) Hoxton Square. His chieftains sat across the table.
Coppelius could have passed for a vicar or alderman. He had to coach himself to blink and swallow regularly.
Prinn fiddled with his glasses. His fingers strolled across his face, tarrying over his features.
The Widow Goethals was resplendent in a dark-green dress, with roan piping and a subdued black floral pattern. She smiled, shaking her long, black hair.
“No more frivolities,” said the Owl. “We strike hard now. Understood?”
Coppelius, Prinn & Goethals (Widow) nodded.
The long-case clock ticked a commemoration of their enfleshment.
Talk turned to stratagems, especially relating to the legal and financial occupation of the Indigo Pheasant by the firm. They then discussed the matter of Maggie.
“For her impudence, she will offer us hecatombs of hearts, drained and rendered,” said the Owl.
The clock tocked an alien rhythm.
“Quatsch, and more than Quatsch,” said Barnabas, rubbing his well-worn vest (an old favourite in times of stress, a champakali design picked out in chalk blues and sharp reds). “How do we handle ’em, Sanford?”
Sanford shook his head. No one could read a balance sheet better than Sanford; he knew a conspiracy of debits threatening to overwhelm the credits of McDoon when he saw one.
McDoon & Co. was beset on all sides, and everywhere the firm of Coppelius, Prinn & Goethals (Widow) cropped up.
Charles Matthew Winstanley—their new lawyer, a young man with the face of a whippet, and the habit of being the first through every door—cleared his throat and produced a mass of papers from within a satchel that could easily have housed several changes of clothes and possibly a small tea-service. He beckoned Barnabas and Sanford to sit. Young as he was, Winstanley came highly recommended by Matchett & Frew, and had already secured himself a seat in the Lowtonian Society and other leading legal associations.
“Mr. McDoon, Mr. Sanford,” he began, rapidly fanning papers out on the table, long rows of remittances, factura, bills of exchange, bills of lading, invoices, claims and counter-claims on insurance and salvage, letters of hypothecation, bottomry bonds and respondentia, exemptions for demurrage, waivers on edulia and other duties, writs of cassation, reclamations for Danish Sound Tolls paid, connoissements, contrati de arrendamiento financiero, rescriptions, subrogations, documents relating to virement, supervenience, cession and assignment, certificates of contingent remaindership, licenses for disjunctive distribution and for non-abatement, lettres pour l’aiguillage et le gaspillage, shares in tontines, deeds of title, lien and encumbrance, records of dadny advances to merchants in Surat, Calicut, Cannanore and Oddeway Torre, cowl-namah agreements with traders in Tranquebar.
The three passed a long afternoon planning the McDoon position and counter-attack. Winstanley darted quickly to cases. He recommended, in short declarative sentences inviting little argument, that McDoon & Co. sell immediately its shares in a wide range of miscellaneous assets: the one-sixteenth part of a timber, flax, and hemp warehouse in Riga, the sixteenths and eighths held in brigantines, galleases and other ships home-harboured in Hamburg, Luebeck, Stockholm and Danzig, the two dozen wine-barriques held by a correspondent firm in Porto, the consignment of salt from Setubal, the raze of ginger jointly held with the Muirs out of Bombay, and so on. He advised delaying payment on this bill of exchange, refuting the usance on that one, calling for a moratorium on this debt due, disputing the traheration of the other.
Barnabas was fascinated. Winstanley’s angular phrasing formed a complete contrast to the oleaginous rondure of Sedgewick’s words. Charicules noticed as well, singing softly and without sidebars at an andante pace to counterpoise Winstanley’s clipped allegro.
Sanford experienced something in the neighbourhood of joy, despite the grim situation. If every cloud has a silver lining, then this was a most stormy cloud and Winstanley appeared to be most refined silver.
Sanford had argued for years that McDoon & Co. needed to sell its many idiosyncratic, small, and random holdings (“fleas,” he called them), to consolidate and focus on its core business. But Barnabas consistently objected, in each case with a different but equally strongly held rationale, at core based on immoveable loyalties to kin, swelling convictions about the goodness of humanity and the utility of trade, a boundless bent towards the curious and the assymetrical.
Thus, whenever a fellow Scot wrote to implore or induce, Barnabas would invest as a matter of nationalistic pride and faith in Scottish character. As Sanford observed, Barnabas’s Caledonian loyalties resulted in McDoon & Co. owning five shares in The Company for the Dredging of Harbours in the Baltic (sponsored by Scots located in Stettin, Koenigsberg, Memel and Libau), ten shares in the Gothenburg Arctic Whaling Company (founded by a Murray, a Cameron and two Gordons), a claim in the bankruptcy estate of Tulloh, Ramsay & Halyburton in Madras, and—Sanford’s favourite—one ticket in the New Lottery of The Argentine (purchased from a Mackay in Glasgow, whose brother-in-law was an organizer of the lottery in Buenos Aires; one of Barnabas’s great-grandmothers had been a Mackay out of Glasgow).
Likewise, Barnabas felt compelled to show support for any project promoted by the Landesmanns and Brandts in northern Germany—our “cousins-germaines” as he would pun. Which placement of trust led McDoon & Co. to possess—among other curiosit
ies—a handful of shares in a sugar refinery in Altona, in a tileworks in Flensberg, and in the Diskonto und Kurant Bank of Hamburg.
But the amount of cash that might be raised through sales of assets held far and wide, from the realization of long submerged, half-forgotten, ill-defined and phantasmal profits, from the accelerated ravening of debtors and from delayed or halted payments would still not be enough to meet the ever-mounting demands of the Blackwall shipyard, the Maudslay engineering firm and all the other contractors and vendors on the Project. Nor was it enough to meet the capital call precipitated by Coppelius & Co.
Winstanley, looking like a stage-magician as he swiftly put some papers back into his valise while pulling others from out of the bag, said that he could find legal ways to stall Coppelius but that the ultimate call and claim were based very solidly on the Indigo Pheasant’s articles of association.
“So, beans and butter,” said Barnabas. “We could actually lose the ship, if we don’t find additional capital.”
“Yes,” said Winstanley.
Sanford said (stressing in his broadest Norfolk accent all the adjectives and adverbs, emphasizing how seldom he used either part of speech), “We need that meeting with Sir John Barrow at Admiralty. Also with our erstwhile silent partners at the Honorable East India Company. I suspect there is little difference in this case between Admiralty and the John Company. Whoever precisely is on whose lead-strings, they are our last, best hope to keep control of the Pheasant.”
The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 16
