“Oh no, oh no . . . you are entirely unwelcome!”
“What have we here?” came a voice gliding. “Does Sally sing the compline, buttressing the glory of God with the beautiful strength of her selfless voice? Nay, I hear something more selfish: a most earnest and pathetical contemplation, it would seem, based on the irrefutable proof of the body, yes? The moon is a most punctual herald, wouldn’t you say, my dear Sally?”
Sally tried to move and tried to sing, but could do neither. She even thought about calling out to Maggie, only to have her voice falter on her tongue.
Atop a newel-post of her bed a small white owl emerged from the darkness, shining in the darkness, a miniature Strix. It grinned an awful grin and bobbed in a parody of a bow.
“What entry does this fall under in the encylopedia of happiness?” chuckle-rasped the Owl.
Sally managed to moan.
“Perhaps your orchidaceous yet virtuous continent was overwhelmed by an army of brigands, your aromatic coast savaged by a fleet of pirates? Some action to which you did not consent and against which you had no defense?”
The Owl winked out atop the newel-post, to reappear a second later on the mantlepiece.
“Oh no, oh noooo-hooom. That was not it, not at all.”
The Owl hopped from one foot to the other, vanished from the mantlepiece and popped up momentarily on the wash-stand.
“Let’s see then, the only mystery remaining is who the father is.”
The Owl flickered off the wash-stand, snapped into view again on another newel-post.
“No, actually I see no mystery there, and I am very sure others won’t either. To learn the identity of that fine fellow no one will need to read the pattern of tossed hemp-seed on All Hallow’s Eve or look backlengths into an old mirror.”
Sally looked around wildly for an object to throw at the tiny Strix.
“Stay your hand, Miss Sally,” laughed the owlet. “I have not come merely to mock your hypocrisy, your pretensions or the transgression of your body, though clearly you deserve all the censure you will receive. (Say what you may about me and my kind, yet we uphold the strictest of moral standards, that we do to a fault).”
“What then, hated one?” said Sally, hoarsely.
“A more polite bearing might be called for, given that you are dancing with fettered legs upon ropes. Still, I am the epitome of forebearance this night, so will overlook your rude outburst. Hearken closely now, girl. I have come to make you an offer, one that I will make just this once.”
Sally sat still as an urn.
“You cannot lawfully discharge the treadle from the egg. Barring some unforeseen accident, the child within you will quicken and be delivered from you. Much sooner than that (the moon’s passage being implacable), very soon indeed, the child will announce its presence to all with the swelling of your belly. What an impression that will make on Lady Somerville and Mr. Babbage and all your other fine new friends.”
The Owl flitted to the table-top. His eyes were like flares.
“I can spare you that. I could take the child as it is now in your womb, as yet unformed and nearly invisible, with no harm to yourself, and with no one ever to know.”
Sally nearly retched. When she caught her breath, she said, “Even if I consented . . . how loathsome even to say those words. . . .”
“Spare me your piety,” snapped the Owl. “You lost that platform when you willingly entered into this state.”
“Monster! I did not wish to bear a child. Nor does James wish for paternity. We . . . we love each other, and for our . . . conversations . . . I have no regret. What I bear is an unintended result.”
The Owl opened his beak, half-opening his head, revealing a gullet seeming larger than his diminutive body.
“What will James say when he finds out?”
Sally shuddered.
“Ah, hoooo,” said the Owl. “You play the Corinthian Maid, painting an idealized portrait of your beloved Endymion while he sleeps. Charming, I am sure, but a wallow on a foundrous road. Your James will want this child, once he learns of it and can confirm it is his. You know that! It is his one sure way to gain the family and the fortune he needs. You will be in no position to deny his suit when the child comes. More important, your uncle and your brother, the uprighteous Sanford, the little queen, Afsana . . . and Maggie, who has supplanted you in the affection of all, . . . none of them will be able to shut him out, either. Such disgrace you will otherwise bring upon your family, a house already struggling under the weight of financial distress and likely ruin.”
Sally tried to sing down the Owl, but her voice held no potency and she lost the melody after just a few notes.
“You have forfeited much of your power in this matter,” laughed the Owl. “Here is the tender proof of it!”
The Owl capered on the table top, his fork-tail knocking over a bottle of ink.
“I must be off now,” he said. “I am not as soft-hearted as Rumpelstiltskin to give you three days to make up your mind, but in my mercy I will allow you twenty-four hours to decide. Look for me tomorrow night at this time. You do not have much choice in the matter, but I will grant you the illusion of free will, as a balm to your pride if nothing else. Hooooo!”
The Owl popped out of view and did not return.
Sally had no more tears to cry. Her insides were cold ash powder, her thoughts sat scattered like scoria in the dry plains of her mind. She slid down into sleep that bordered on death.
Isaak woke her up in mid-morning, walking imperiously on Sally’s pillow and butting Sally in the face while purring loudly enough to rouse a graveyard. Cinereous light filled the room. Sally heard a carriage rumble by in the street and the cry of an oyster-man. She thought it might be the Beata Audomara’s Day, then vaguely remembered that it was the Week of Lustration and a Tuesday (or was it Wednesday?) so must be the feast-day for either Saint Emerentia or Saint Bavo. Not that any of those things mattered any longer.
Holding Isaak close, Sally lay in bed for an hour. Gradually her thoughts flowed again, the cold within lessening. In her mind, she could see James, laughing, sipping tea with her at Hatchards’. How dashing he looked, especially framed by the bookshop’s tasteful wallpaper, his marvellous hands stirring sugar with an elegant spoon. He spoke animatedly about the patents for the Fulginator and the shape of the hull on the Indigo Pheasant, of making one’s fortune in the world and of sailing to find the nutmeg of one’s desire below the horizon. He talked of marriage and family (didn’t he?). Of children?
“I have sailed clear out of this world, driven by Sehnsucht and the flourish of fallacy,” she thought, stroking Isaak. “Cinnamon-trees and cloves receding ever before me, calentures, mirages induced by the mocking waves.”
She sat up, felt dizzy, noticed the overturned ink bottle.
“Mute the dulcet string of hope, though desire remains unabated. A wan lustre stands upon my brow, my heart trembles, deaf to the entreaties of my conscience. I sing this grey morning the doom of the first-born world, wherein impiously a woman and a man essayed to scale the battlements of heaven. Yet surely mercy plays some small role in this drama? ‘Canticum autem exultatio mentis de aeternis habita,’ as Saint Aquinas says. Do you hear me, God? I quote your scholar-saints to you.”
Uncle Barnabas cautiously called up the stairs for her. Dimly she heard the others below, smelled cabbage being stewed (more of Cook’s economizing) for their lunch. She made noise sufficient to reassure Barnabas and send him back to the partners’ room.
“‘Ich muss im Dunkeln sein.’ Dear Frau Reimer, how I miss you. What would you have me do? Nay, ’tis my decision and mine alone. Were you here, I would not place this burden upon your estimable shoulders, nor sully you with the blood of it. Still, how much I would give to hear your words of consolation.”
Sally dressed herself indifferently.
“And you, Owl. Threatening angel, speaking ass, in worm-smooth silk composed. You may think to exploit my sin, you may dance o
n my decayed virtue, but you shall never possess the child. I know what things you would do to it, you doctor of sarcology, molder of flesh. Implanted in some nurturing filth of your devising, the little life-spirit you would twist into a homunculus, a changeling wholly enslaved to your will, a pseudo-James or a doppelganger of me. A torment to me through all my days that creature would be, and I have no doubt you would ensure its propinquity.”
Isaak nudged her ankles.
“And Strix not tell anyone? Of course he would. Betrayer, pinnated liar. He would certainly inform James at the earliest opportunity.”
Accompanied by Isaak, Sally went down to join the others. She had forgotten: today Mr. Gandy rejoined them after his stint in debtor’s prison. Cabbage notwithstanding, the lunch was warm, tasty and reasonably plenteous—in all, fit for a reunion. Though Mr. Gandy was the ostensible object of attention, the McDoons most closely inspected Sally (none more closely than Sanford, though at a distance, with his neck and head retracted like a camel’s or an old stork’s). Barnabas pattered gaily but walked on the points of his toes around the subject of his niece.
Sally surprised them all—and was herself surprised—at her positive participation in the afternoon’s discussion about the status of the Indigo Pheasant. She contributed thoughts on the Fulginator’s tractices and how the apical pulse might best be amplified. She congratulated Bunce on his use of the Ludolphian number in solving one of the knottier problems in their likely navigation. To surreptitious looks shared around the table, Sally even supported Maggie on the coordination of the septuary brachistochrones—a topic on which all who understood the mathematics knew she had hitherto opposed Maggie’s proposal. Maggie herself raised an eyebrow but courteously thanked Sally. Above all, Sally provided masses of detail on her recent mercantile negotiations, and gave Sanford and Barnabas excellent recommendations on several key points.
“Peacocks and peonies,” thought Barnabas. “Sally has come back to us. Smart as ever. A little tired looking perhaps, but her head is filled with the best commercial stratagems. How she can handle ’em! Well done in every particular!”
Running his hands over his vest, Barnabas added to himself: “Well taught too, I dare say.”
Sanford was not so easily fooled. He watched how Sally periodically looked at the pictures on the wall and how quickly she averted her gaze from the sea devouring the crews of the East Indiamen and from the boy about to be eaten by the shark. He saw boundless hollow spaces behind her gaze, and the tattered fragility of her mien.
“Something to do with James Kidlington, I warrant, or I am a tambalacoque tree,” he thought.
Nor was Maggie deceived. Distracted as she was, she nevertheless felt the forced nature of Sally’s afternoon behaviour.
“The Owl has infiltrated,” Maggie thought. “I felt him slip through an accidental caesura, a splintered eighth-note quaver. What turpentine has he uncorked into Sally’s mind? She fairly seethes with it.”
Dinner passed likewise with fruitful discussion and convivial small talk. Cook was gratified to see Sally at table twice in one day, but she observed how little “her little smee” actually ate.
“Not correct as in Cocker,” thought the Cook as she helped clear the dishes.
So, the Cook was not as surprised as she might have been when Sally came to the kitchen much later that evening. The rest of the household was already abed, even the maid. The Cook was organizing the cutlery one last time for the day, and making mental notes of the groceries she needed to buy first thing in the morning.
“Sally, whatever is it, my love? You have not visited me in my kitchen for so long that you being here is almost like seeing an owl in the ivy bush.”
Sally shivered at the reference. She put her candle next to the hooded lamp on the cutting-board table. The annatto glow from the two candles reflected off the polished chesnut furnishings and copper utensils. The resulting rufuscence made the dark in the corners of the kitchen seem even deeper. The candlelight projecting from below made Cook look like Judy of the Punch & Judy show—Sally did not know whether to laugh or to flee from the apparition.
“I am so sorry, dear Cook,” whispered Sally. She had invoked the small gods of the hearth, asking for the strength not to cry, but they had not heard her prayers.
“Oh no, my little smee,” said Cook, enveloping Sally in her arms. “Hush, wipe those tears. Come on now, tell me straight and I will help you defeat any bugbears that plague you. You know I will.”
Sally left the Cook’s embrace, leaned back to rest against a table, and told Cook about James and the pregnancy. She did not say anything about the Owl’s intrusion the previous night, let alone mention his offer.
The Cook said nothing while Sally told the tale.
“Well, my dear, this is a real pig’s mackle, and make no mistake,” said Cook when Sally finished.
Sally nodded.
“The real question is, what do you plan to do?” said the Cook
“I have thought on that question more than any man can ever know, all this week, and with the vigour of Diana all this day,” said Sally.
Cook leaned forward, shadows dimpling her Judy-face, making her eyebrows look like brooms.
Sally breathed deeply and said as softly as she could and still be heard, “I cannot deliver this child.”
Cook-Judy leaned even closer in. Her eyes reflected candlelight. After her heart beat once, twice, three times, four times, Cook took Sally to her bosom.
“Oh Sally, oh Sally, so be it,” she said softly, choking back tears.
In 1803 Parliament had passed an act (43 George III c. 58, to be precise) making abortion a capital felony.
“Tell no one of this,” said Cook. “Not James. Not Mr. Barnabas or Mr. Sanford. Not Tom, should he return from wherever he is. Not even your friend Mrs. Sedgewick. None can ever know.”
Sally nodded, fully resolved.
“I know a woman, someone we can trust. One of my country-women from Norfolk, a barny bishy-bee, lives now in Stepney. She can help. She’ll use the old recipe: savin, dittany, mercury-oil, hellebore. I can take you. I am sure she could see us well within the week, a sennight latest.”
Sally agreed to go to Stepney with the Cook as soon as could be arranged.
A few hours later, sometime after midnight, Sally refused the Owl’s offer to his face. The pygmy owl raged about her room, upsetting books and papers. No one besides Sally could hear him though, his wrath reduced to squeaks by the protective songs woven round the house on Mincing Lane.
Regaining his owlish composure, Strix glared at Sally and said, “Unlike Rumpelstiltskin, I am not rent in two by the stamping of my feet. You and I will most assuredly meet again. I will not be so tranquil at our next encounter.”
His sending vanished with a popping sound.
Sally, though shaken, dismissed Strix from her mind. She thought instead about the woman she was going to visit in Stepney.
“What’s this?” hissed the Owl. “Une petite bambochade très amusante, a most charming and piquant little scene from everyday life.”
James Kidlington sat alone in the room rented for him by the Admiralty. He sat at the writing table, a sparse affair badly constructed, its spindly legs uneven.
The Owl had made his way in through a picture on the wall. The landlord was a devout soul who supplied the rooms he let with prints depicting the lives of the saints, hoping thereby to inspire his tenants both to pious reflection and to punctual payment of the rent. The prints he purchased very cheaply from the used-book stalls on Paternoster Row (such prints being so abundant that they were often used to stuff cracks in windows or as kindling to start fires), but he did not simply pin them to the streaky wallpaper—he took pains instead to install them within frames he made himself from strips of cast-off wood, the perfect compromise between respectability and economy. The irregular angles of the home-cobbled frames gave Strix his entry-point, and the presentation of virtuous models to produce commercial behaviour acted as
a beacon.
The Owl replaced Saint Alphege in the print of the medieval martyr being stoned by the Danes in Cheapside. Flapping his wings as if to ward off the missiles, the Owl-in-the-picture said to James, “What might we title the pleasant bambochade that my eyes bestride?”
James put down his pen, turned, and said, “You do not frighten me, you know. Nor even amuse me. I wish you really would become Saint Alphege—I would gladly pelt you to death just like a Shrovetide cock.”
“I esteem your depth of spirit, James, I really dooooo,” hooted the Owl. “Fitting indeed for our amourous amiger, the little squire in the lists of love.”
James waved his hands in disgust and turned back to his table.
“Let’s see,” rasped the Owl, reviewing the scattered books open on James’s table. “He pens a letter to his Thisbe. What does he use for inspiration, besides the prints on his walls? Oldmixon’s Caliper’d Heart, yes of course, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets (nice to see them coming back into style again). Donne. Herrick. Golding’s Ovid. Your tastes are a bit old-fashioned for one so young. No wait, here are two sharp newcomers—Keats and Shelley—to demonstrate the modernity of our bold Pyramus in the nineteenth century.”
James shook his head. The Owl disappeared from the print of Saint Alphege’s martyrdom, reappearing in a print portraying the Roman emperor Valerian frying Saint Lawrence on a gridiron.
“Away with you, ghost-snipe, trouble me not with your mocking wit,” said James.
The Owl-Saint Lawrence hopped up and down, as if the iron in the picture really were searing his feet.
“Not before I advise you, as all good nightmares should,” laughed the Owl. “You are Abelard, she is Heloise: ‘crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight.’ You think to impress Sally with the melody of your worded love. You believe she moulds herself to your design, overcome by the fervour of your expression. Yet what do you know in truth of her heart’s untuned nature, of the voices her blood carries to her brain?”
James frowned.
“Nay, James, your desired one harks to others before she gives her loyalty to you.”
The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 21
