The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2

by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  “What do you mean, you filthy creature? Sally is truer to me than anyone has ever been.”

  “Is she? Poor James, scratching out love letters to one whose heart is impregnable. Hold now: impregnable though Sally’s heart may be, another part of her anatomy is far more receptive to the fertility of your gestures . . .”

  “What do you say, what do you mean?” James nearly shouted, half-rising.

  The Owl sank back from Saint Lawrence and re-surfaced elsewhere as Saint Praxedes being mauled and devoured by the Hounds of Tindalos.

  “You know what I mean, James,” said the Owl. “She is pregnant, James. With your child.”

  James sat down so quickly the chair creaked.

  “No,” he said. “It cannot be. We were so very careful.”

  “But it can be and it is,” said the Wurm.

  “No, no, Sally would have told me,” yelled James. “You lie, you lie.”

  The Owl-Saint Praxedes said, “You want the evidence of research. Ask Sally yourself.”

  James rose again and strode the short distance to the print of Saint Praxedes.

  “I will,” said James. “She will tell me the truth. I know it.”

  “Do you? As a friend of the finer sensibilities, I must gently disagree with you there.”

  James thought of the garden at the Last Cozy House and of the locket.

  “It is I who have lied in the past to Sally,” said James, in a low, strangled voice. “Not her to me.”

  The Owl shook his head, and said, “No, my dear James. She wrongs you twicely. While you at least air your wrong-doings, Sally hoards her misdeeds deep, makes of them an ‘unsunned heap.’”

  James placed his palms on the worn wallpapering on either side of the Praxedes print.

  “What more can there be? Out with it, monster,” he said. “Since I have no choice but to listen.”

  “I aim only to help you in this, James,” said the Owl. “On my word, it pains me to think of Sally withholding her truth from you, even as you drink tea with her at Hatchards and enjoy the breakfast rooms together at the Tavistock. You, so blithe and unaware, so good and true; Sally, la belle sauvage, hoarding the truth unto herself, within herself, a spirit senseless to the claims you so rightfully have.”

  “The child is . . .” whispered James. “Mine. I am the father.”

  “Rightly said,” sighed the Owl. “So, here is the second bone of the riddle, the canines of the truth to be extracted from the jawbone of falsehood: Sally will not deliver your child.”

  James reared back, aghast, uttering no words but half-formed groans. “She goes with the McDoon’s cook this very morning to abort the baby growing in her womb,” said the Owl, turning his head almost right around and back again, hooming and making tsk’ing sounds. “To wash away the rose before e’er it blooms.”

  James cried out, “Why?”

  The Owl blinked slowly, “Did you really think she would have a child from you? In the end, you are naught to her but a prop for her ambition, an instrument for her vanity. Sally proposes to move a world, the greatest folly since Icarus or Archimedes. You figure in that plan no more than a mole might in the creation of a garden.”

  James punched the picture, breaking the frame and sending the print fluttering to the floor.

  The Owl laughed, “You strike at me who is only the messenger, not the author of this deceit.”

  “Leave me, leave me,” said James. “Sally loves me. She wants to marry me. She could never . . . abbreviate our child’s life!”

  “Wake up now, blind foolish James! Can you not see the truth of it? Sally is the daughter of a merchant-princeling, a family of wealth and honour and respect in the great City of London, known from Koenigsberg to Serampore. She—they—will never allow one such as you—an upstart magwitch, a chowser, a tattered slick-slack boy—to join them, except in the role of lackey, of servant. Marry you? You, a transported felon? Let you become part of the family? The giants will walk off the Guildhall clock first!”

  James hurled a book at the blank spot on the wall, uncertain where to aim his anger.

  “Goodbye for now, James. I came only to enlighten. I bear you no chafed feelings for your understandable outburst of emotion, which is emotion well sourced and in need of proper direction.”

  “For God’s sake, leave now!”

  “I will,” said the Owl. “But I will always return if you call. As your immediate wrath hardens into obduracy, think on my offer of goodwill and avail yourself of it.”

  The Owl left.

  James sat with his head in his hands, elbows on the writing table. He cried silently, while his mind leaped like a monkey through the forests of his grief.

  Billy Sea-Hen had begun to visit the Cook some time earlier, initially seeking remedies for his incessant colds and those afflicting Tat’head and the other Minders. He approached her cautiously, not liking what he saw as Cook’s imperiousness and her overly structured approach to life. The Cook was equally wary at first, liking neither what little she knew of his past nor what she deemed his insouciant fanaticism. As the visits became more regular, and each visit turned more conversational than strictly transactional, Billy and the Cook began to find common ground.

  One drizzly Saturday afternoon late in October, the Cook glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall and found herself wondering if Billy might be stopping in as he usually did around then. Almost as if she had summoned him, Billy Sea-Hen knocked on the kitchen door. Cook moved to the door more quickly than she herself realized, and let Billy in. At a bench in a corner, her niece the maid nudged Mr. Fletcher, both of whom grinned. Cook shot a blasting look at her niece, and at Mr. Fletcher for good measure, prompting more grins.

  Cook put the kettle on and soon the kitchen buzzed with the warm conversation of friendly spirits who are glad in one another’s company, especially while cold raindrops fell on the window panes outside. Talk turned to more serious topics.

  “Just you look at all these bills,” said the Cook. “Mr. Seddon the cabinetmaker in Aldergate Street demands back the chairs he sent, owing to non-payment. Here’s one from the druggist on Birchin Lane, and one from the garden in Chelsea for greengage cuttings and special food for Mr. McDoon’s smilax bushes (not that it has helped them much, poor things), besides more seeds for that little blue flower I never gave much thought to before, the bixwort.”

  “Lean times,” said Billy, wanting to be supportive.

  “Lean as a lark’s leg,” said Cook. “Mr. Sanford commands economy and thrift, and Mr. McDoon agrees in the partners’ room, but then—bless him, he can’t help himself—he comes ’round after to me, and begs for his Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, so what am I to do?”

  “He’s an original is Mr. McDoon, meaning no disrespect,” said Mr. Fletcher. “An ‘Old Original, like the Chelsea Bun House.’”

  All four nodded and smiled, thinking of the century-old establishment that served royalty and commoners alike with buns no imitator could rival.

  “We are jammed into a tight little dog-hole, and no mistake,” said Cook, her smile fading. “Soon we will have to buy all our clothes at second-hand on Monmouth Street.”

  “There’s many as are glad to have even that,” said Billy quietly.

  “True enough, and I shall not complain,” said the Cook. “Still, we aren’t hardly affording meat any longer—I get us mostly herring from the middle of the barrel, and soon it will be dried habardines to go with our potatoes.”

  Mr. Fletcher made a face at that.

  “Well now,” retorted Cook. “As Billy says, that still fills the belly and there’s many as can’t say even that in these hard times. Hallo you two, you are still young and should not be sitting here mardlin’ on such gloomy things with older folks. Be quick as Tibbert’s Cat, be off with you.”

  She pulled a little purse from her apron and pressed some small coins into her niece’s hand.

  “Really, why not go to The Dun Cow, across from Saint John Sacharies?” said
Cook. “You know you like their ale and their little mincemeat pie is not so very costly. ’Tis a Satur-eve after all.”

  “They make a handsome pair,” said Billy, after the maid and Mr. Fletcher had departed.

  The Cook agreed. She and Billy talked a while about the other two and their prospects for an enduring marriage, which topic gradually, almost imperceptibly, slid into a conversation about themselves.

  “Billy,” said the Cook. “You have been to the back of the North Wind—back behind the shoulder-blades of God for all I know—but I hear so clearly the voice of a Londoner, yet you never tell us of your upbringing. What do you call home?”

  Billy sipped his tea before answering.

  “Well,” he said. “It is a funny thing you asking me that just now, on account of I have thinking on that very question myself of late. Since I have—as you rightly put it, Mistress Cook—shipped out to some very distant parts.”

  Cook refilled his cup of tea, and pushed a plate of scones across the bench to him. (“Plain, no currants in ’em, and a day old, but they will have to do,” she thought.) Billy took a bite with gratitude.

  “I am born a true son of Queenhithe,” he started, naming the ward on the Thames that ran uphill almost to St. Paul’s Cathedral, slightly upstream from the London Bridge and directly across the river from Southwark. “In the parish of Saint Mary Somerset . . .”

  “Hold a moment,” exclaimed Cook. “Not the Saint Mary where the communion plate was stolen and never returned, maybe ten year ago?”

  “In aught-five, yes, that’s right,” said Billy.

  “Such a wicked deed!”

  “Yes,” said Billy hastily. “Weren’t me, of course, though I own that I might know the chowsers what did it. As you say, hard times then as now, though I agree that is no excuse to make off with churchly silver.”

  They both crossed themselves.

  “I was raised by my blessed mam alone in a chare that has no map-name but those what lived there called it Finger Alley, off Broken Wharf. Had the run of the hithe itself—where the corn hoys land from Kent and Suffolk—and was a duke in the tribe that wandered High Timber Street, Bread Street Hill, Three Cranes in the Vintry.”

  Billy sighed, glanced at the Cook’s face.

  “That’s a foreign country to me, your Queenhithe,” teased the Cook. Queenhithe was less than half a mile from Mincing Lane.

  “Oh come,” said Billy, rising to the bait. “Surely even you who live near the Tower have heard about the wonders of Queenhithe, as royal as the name makes it! Why, the Black Lion Inn on Saint Thomas Street is as famous for its veal pies as the Chelsea Bun House is for its buns. I had one once, a Black Lion veal pie, have never tasted its like since.”

  The Cook admitted that she might just have heard of the Black Lion Inn, and then confessed further that she had even been within the confines of the marvellous ward of Queenhithe. One of her Norfolk connections, another barney-bishybee, was in service to a mercer there. Once the Cook had even spent a Saturday afternoon being shown by her friend the glories of the Painters & Stainers guildhall on Little Trinity Lane, and looking upon Mr. Thornhill’s altar-piece mural at Saint Michael’s Queenhithe.

  “Saint Michael’s with the golden ship on its steeple-vane!” said Billy. “That is forever the sign of home, if no other sign exists for me!”

  “Well, you have city cunning, that’s for sure,” said the Cook, paring a dowl of cheese for Billy. “But you seem also to have a goodish share of what I will call country wisdom, and how you come by that, I do not know.”

  “Ah,” said Billy, thoughtfully eating the piece of cheese. “We were country folk on my mother’s side. My grandfather was Royal Under-swanherd, at His Majesty’s swannery near Staine’s Bridge, on the Thames not far from their castle at Windsor. Heard much about that from my mother, though she was herself only a child then, this being I reckon about the time our George came to the throne. A game of swans, and swan-upping, and what have you, and all the joys of a calm river-life, that’s what she told me.”

  “What happened?” said Cook.

  “Someone poached three of the royal swans,” said Billy. “My grandfather got the blame and was turned out. Like most unfortunates in such circumstances, he came into London, bringing the family. Hard times then, hard times now. He failed at most things here in the city—he died before I could know him, likewise my grandmother. My mother was their only surviving child. Worked hard all her life, some needle-trade though Queenhithe’s not really the place for that, then years as a dog’s-body in a throwster’s shop. A hard life. No man around once my father left for sea and never came back. He served on an East Indiaman, I am told, but I barely remember him.”

  Billy left a quarter of hour later. As Cook finished preparing the evening meal, she thought about what she had learned. Hearing about Billy’s Queenhithe childhood helped anchor him in known territory. His roots in the upper Thames Valley reminded her—with a sad jolt—of Mr. Harris. She disliked the fervour with which Billy talked about “gehennical fire” and “the immarcessible crown of glory,” and she remained disturbed at his embrace of the Cretched Man.

  “Needs much more explaining and by means unknown to me,” she muttered, putting an extra sprig of dill on a very attenuated filet of plaice, in hopes of diverting Mr. McDoon’s attention from the scantiness of his supper. “Cavorting with an eel-rawney, a conjure-man—who has in the past attacked this very house. I do not see how Billy can defend that connection!”

  She puzzled over this as she dished the boiled potatoes, trying to reconcile what she knew about the McDoon struggle against the Cretched Man with the obvious depths of Billy’s devotion to Tom.

  “Plain as the dragon on the steeple of Saint Mary-le-Bow, he loves that boy like his own son or nephew,” she thought. “He fought for Tom, saved his life sounds like, in the foreign places—against enemies worse than the Cretched Man or even Tipu Sultan. So maybe a crooked stick can hit a straight lick.”

  Holding a tray with dinner for the two partners, Cook surveyed the kitchen.

  “World is topsy-tosticated,” she said. “Enemies are friends, and friends may be enemies (what’s Mr. Sedgewick playin’ at?), and maybe the giants will walk down off the clock after all.”

  Later, alone as she scrubbed dishes, Cook came bit by bit to understand that the intelligence about Billy no longer alarmed or alienated her. The thought that he was sprung from similar origins persuaded her, against her judgment.

  “He calls himself an old dumbledore,” she said suddenly and out loud, pausing at her task. “And I am a barny-bishybee, which is the same thing said a different way. Hmmmm.”

  She could hear Mr. Fletcher escorting her niece home, the two younger members of the household kissing goodnight just outside the kitchen door. The Cook blushed to imagine it.

  “Fallabarty,” she thought, giving the pot she was scrubbing an extra vigourous swipe. “Me at my age and all!”

  Interlude: Cartulae

  [From The Proceedings of the Asiatick Society, Calcutta, vol. XXII, 1817]

  We have recently discovered in our collection a noteworthy painting, by the renowned miniaturist Ustad Mansur, court artist to the Mughal Emperor Jahangir a full two centuries gone; the painting depicts a species of pheasant not previously described for India (viz. Mr. Latham’s General Synopsis of Birds, and Mr. Pennant’s more recent View of Hindoostan). Mansur being famous for his extreme fidelity to Nature and graceful delineations of particulars, we are in no doubt that—far from being a product of his imagination—the pheasant he drew from a live, or (at most) preserved specimen. Beyond dispute, the bird portrayed is an Indigo Pheasant, hitherto known from Chinese examples only. Anyone among our correspondents who can shed light on the provenance of Mansur’s putative specimen is asked to write to the Society, care of Mr. Nathaniel Wallich, Curator and Superintendent of its Oriental Museum.

  [From Anders Erikson Sparrman, Notes on a Voyage to China Undertaken in the Years 1765-1767
(published in Stockholm, 1771; translated 1785 by Elizabeth Maria Grantham)]

  The Author of Nature has endowed even the most reclusive and cautious of birds, namely the partridges and pheasants, with plumage brought down from heaven, brilliantly reflecting the sun-beam in one case and imitating the rubicond lustre of dawn in another.

  . . . While in China I had described to me, on credible authority, a type of pheasant hitherto unknown to Europeans, a bird that despite my many and strenuous efforts I could not observe in vivo with my own eyes nor provide ocular evidence of any sort, not even to the extent of procuring a specimen. The Chinese call it, as near as I can tell, the Celestial-Pheasant, both because of its bold blue colouration and because it is of a mild and beneficious disposition when left undisturbed but fierce when provoked, willing to defend itself mightily against those so arrogant or malicious or unsagacious as to attack it.

  My hosts were at pains to indicate and emphasize the majority colour of the Celestial-Pheasant (there being also in its plumage many counter-hatchings of ivory and eggshell-white), stressing its importance as a matter of some urgency within their systems of philosophy and cosmology. Apparently our languages do not possess an identical equivalency for this colour, but when shown a sample of what this colour might be—in the form of inks stroked with the most conscientious of brushes—I would assay to describe it as a blue strongly undertinted with purple, and overwashed with the palest grey, approximating most closely that hue we know as ‘indigo.’

  Altogether the effect of this colour was simultaneously entrancing and elusive, being that of white and black balancing in perfect harmony, projecting a species of numinous impulsion, which is to say creating a mutability of shadow and light of the sort that I am told the Italian painters called ‘cangiante’ and that I would otherwise say supports the evidence of spectral images on the human retina described by Dr. Huyghens and confirmed by Dr. Boerhaave in their recent works.