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

by Daniel A. Rabuzzi

  James stood, held her chair, kissed her hand.

  “Oh, a most glorious afternoon to my merry widow,” he said. “Mrs. Goethals.”

  Sanford had come after supper to the kitchen (Maggie, Mei-Hua and Sally were engrossed in the partners’ room) to review the household accounts with the Cook.

  “Well done,” he said, his finger ticking off debits and credits on sheets of grey-green, lined paper. “You’ve stretched a pea into a pie. Thank you.”

  “Made old soup bones young again, made three meals out of one small potato,” said Cook. “As my mother used to say, if women ran the government, there’d be none of this national debt we read about in the papers, nor the fuss over e-cono-mizin’ so as to pay back our creditors.”

  “I remember your mother well. Formidable woman. I dare say she might have been right.”

  Sanford’s family and the cook’s family had been connected for several generations, beginning with service in Norwich.

  “Mr. Sanford, sir, before you go, I need to ask you your opinion on the status of this house, if I may. Speakin’ more broadly than just about the money and the accounts.”

  Sanford paused and considered before responding. In the garden a chaffinch sang in the spring. The first bixwort flowers had appeared, and the vetch was blossoming as it sent out creepers up the wall.

  “Of course you may,” said Sanford. “In fact, I am glad you asked. I have been meaning to get your ear for some time—so many wretched, pressing things get in the way of a good meeting.”

  Cook nodded and made tea (a really fine lap tay souchong, the last of the left-overs from the Chinese Spring Festival).

  “Well, I worry about Mr. Barnabas,” said the Cook. “How stands it with him, in truth, beneath all of his jollity and jump-up-and-strike-the-roses?”

  “I worry too, dear Cook,” said Sanford, sipping his tea. “He calls forth his best Gaelic temperament, but is pretending to more levity than he feels. Tom is a constant weight upon his mind. And the daughter he never knew he had, the lovely fierce Afsana whom you have not met (but will I hope).”

  A linnet joined the chaffinch singing outside. From the partners’ room, Charicules answered.

  “She sounds lovely, from all you and Mr. Barnabas have told me,” said Cook. “Bless me, I would not have believed it except that now there is a Miss Maggie too. Not a daughter, of course, but close enough. The house of McDoon has many rooms, it seems.”

  “Yes, it has. Tell me: what is your impression of Miss Maggie?”

  “Nothing but the best, Mr. Sanford, nothing but the best. She has the spirit of ten lions. Impatient, doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but why should she? And you, sir, how does she impress you?”

  “In the same way. She thinks like a razor, and acts like one too. Providence sent her to us in the barest slice of time. We have great need of her as the storm bears down upon us.”

  Cook jutted out her chin and said, “Storm is comin’, and that’s a fact, Mr. Sanford. My niece and me—Billy Sea-Hen and Mr. Fletcher—we all feel it, we do. That great galder-fenny is flyin’ all around us, with his Orkney skolds and Lapland witches. We see his grizzle-merchants in the streets, and hear Rat-a-tosk the Squirrel skitterin’ up on the roof-beam.”

  “Yes, but fear not. We are no easy prey,” said Sanford. “Especially now that the massy swift choir boat is nearly complete at last. We will go on the attack soon.”

  “Good. I’ll stick ’em with my largest knife, if I can. Time to avenge our losses: the brave Miss Reimer, our dear quiet Mr. Harris with his muddy boots. Your friends with the funny names, Mr. Salmius and Mr. Noricate.”

  Sanford and the cook said no more for a while.

  “And Miss Sally,” said the Cook. “Part of her has gone missing too. Poor little smee. I do not think she will ever be the same.”

  “No, nor I. But come, you and I: we are Norfolk born and bred, strong and sensible. We must continue to be a foundation for this house. Sturdy as our Norfolk clay, right? And we must be wise as Wisdom herself, who ‘hath builded her house,’ who ‘hath hewn out her seven pillars’ and ‘killed her beasts.’”

  “Wisdom ‘mingled her wine,’” nodded Cook. “What’s that other part, the bit about ‘furnishing her table’? I like that.”

  “Yes, you would. This is my favourite part: ‘She hath sent forth her maidens.’”

  The Cook nodded, touched the portrait of St. Morgaine, and bade Sanford a good evening. Just before going to bed, she poured a little milk in a bowl for Isaak. Watching Isaak drink the milk (with a dainty tongue that could as easily down blood), the Cook murmured, “‘She hath sent forth her maidens.’”

  “The Battle of Blackwall” is typically considered—when it is considered at all by modern scholars—as at best a prelude to the infamous Peterloo Massacre that took place a month later in Manchester and that galvanized the entire nation. This tendentious judgment—that the Battle was a minor incident almost immediately overshadowed by much more important events—was cemented early and has seldom, if ever, been challenged since. For instance, Macaulay, in his History of England, dismissed the Battle of Blackwall as “religiously inspired thuggery, without the political import of either the Spa Fields Riots of 1816 or Wedderburn’s agitations of 1818, let alone Peterloo.” Lord Acton, in his Historical Essays, relegated Blackwall to a single footnote in his study of Chartism’s precursors. To the present day, the Cambridge University Press’s authoritative Companion to Nineteenth-Century British History contains not one reference to the Battle.

  To which, the Cook would have said, “Fallabarty!”

  The Battle began innocently enough, as a summertime meeting advertised by Billy Sea-Hen to be held in the fields straddling the Blackwall Causeway and Poplar High Street, where the latter ended at Naval Row by the East India Dock, abutting the Blackwall Shipyard. The Hen’s-Men organized coaches and ferries to bring the anticipated thousands from across the East End and the South Bank. Starting at the noon-time ending of working hours on that July Saturday, hundreds of coaches began their runs from Goodman’s Fields in Whitechapel, St. Anne’s Limehouse, Dawson’s Gardens on Commercial Road and St. George’s-in-the-East (familiar to all with its “pepperpot towers”), while dozens of ferries stopped at Wapping Old Stairs, Shadwell Dock Stairs, The Pageantry, Millwall Quay on their way around the Isle of Dogs to Blackwall.

  So they came, in their tens of thousands—women, men, boys, girls, with dogs barking by their sides, cats carried in baskets, canaries and bright-eyed rooks in cages,—some landing at the Blackwall Stairs and pouring up the Causeway (no few stopping for refreshment at the many alehouses there), others arriving by coach and wain at the East India Dock Tavern, still others walking a mile or two from whatever court, lane, chare, yard or alley they called home in the eastern warrens of London. By late afternoon, under warm clear skies, a great sea of humanity (Bell’s Monthly estimated sixty thousand, The Morning Chronicle thought as many as eighty thousand) had formed all around the Blackwall Yards: the “lambs of Limehouse and tribulations of Tower Hill,” coal-heavers, brickmakers, mechanists, “Whitechapel doves and Rotherhithe wrens,” sempsters half-blind from working by candlelight, washerwomen, junior officers and clerks minor on half-pay, “abandoned men and dissolute women, insolent people harboured in noisome and disorderly houses,” porters, fishwives, serving maids.

  So vast and cosmopolitan had London become, so powerful and transcendent the call of Billy Sea-Hen, that its centripetal impulsion drew to Blackwall that day representatives from five continents and many dozen lands. We know this in part because William and Catherine Blake joined the throng, and William described (in a letter to Coleridge, rarely cited by scholars, perhaps because it is seen as too fantastical even for Blake) encountering “pilgrims, sages, and mystics of every stripe, disembogued upon our shores—viz., a gnossienne from the Vaucluse; sailors from Tamil-land carrying small bronze statues of their saints; marabouts from West Africa; a Mohock of the Howdenosawnee, who had sh
ipped out from New York and elected to remain in London when his vessel sailed back; a tobacco-processionary from Bahia, with a tray of braided feitissos, as he termed them; bearded Hebraic saddiks, dressed in long, black coats despite the heat; alumbrados from Castile, bearing portraits of their beatas held high (very colourful).” Coleridge’s reply, if he sent one, is lost to us—but one can imagine his chagrin at not himself being present in Blackwall that day.

  Any multitude in London—especially one gathered on a Saturday afternoon and evening with fine summer weather—attracted platoons of entrepreneurial souls, selling everything from sweets to gin, votive offerings to souvenir trinkets. Political opportunists, petty demagogues, haranguests passing out broadsides and pamphlets, all these and other members of the chattering tribes swarmed to Blackwall, joined by jugglers, tarot-card readers, stilt-walkers, puppeteers, fire-eaters, and professional writers of love-letters. And, of course, thieves, pickpockets, slick-slack men, and chowsers answering every description in the complex catalogue of London’s underworld.

  Falling into a category all his own—or fitting simultaneously into several categories, depending on an observer’s prejudices—was James Kidlington. James had joined the cavalcade at the Sun Tavern Fields, arriving at Blackwall in late afternoon. He had eaten a small mince-pie and had drunk a small pot of ale. He had laughed heartily at the antics of Punch and Judy, and listened courteously to the prelusive elements on the program. Anyone watching him—had anyone wanted to keep track of one fish in that colossal shoal—would have thought him content, possibly happy, willing to succumb to the festive embrace of the crowds.

  By all reports, the crowds were in a festive mood at the start. They sang hymns, carols and ballads in various English dialects and several other tongues, chanted Matabrunian marching-anthems, roared out the latest burlettas and stage-songs by Mr. Dibdin and Mrs. West. They raised impromptu maypoles, festooned with bixwort-wreaths, strands of yellow thyme, dog-rose, vinaceous sanicle and celandine. They danced to the beat of drums and bodhrans, to the elegiac slide of the penny-whistle, drawing forth emotions broad and emotions narrow, “fat as the bullock’s thigh, more slender than the quill of a crow.” Kites flew. Flags and banners caught the breeze: “London Cabinet Makers Trade & Benefit Society,” “Amicable Assembly of Saint Macrina’s Charity School,” “Sons & Daughters of the New Shiloh,” and hundreds of the like.

  Looming over the masses were the three masts, bare rigging, bowsprit and lone steam-funnel of the Indigo Pheasant, the rest of the great ship obscured behind the revetements of the shipyard— embodiment of their hopes, nave for the oratorio of lustration and deliverance, a visible reminder of their purpose for gathering.

  In the slanting rays of the high summer evening, with gossamer motes gleaming in the hazy air, the circumambient smell of sweat, wood-smoke, dung, tobacco, tar, and beer lush in everyone’s nostrils, after his lieutenants had laced the atmosphere with vatic pronouncements and intimations of marvels to come, Billy Sea-Hen took to the platform.

  “Cousins, friends, roadsmiths, diminished franklins and fallen friars, fellow AMATEURS and SEEKERS of the FIERY HEART,” he began, and the crowd surged forward, those in front repeating quickly to those behind what Billy said, so that his words coalesced in a rippling wave back through the throngs.

  He preached them to the mountain-top and he preached them through the valley. He warned them of the Great Enemy, whose malice was no flaccid, carious conceit but a force ceaselessly exercised and promoted.

  “He is a serpent, sleek and sinewy, swift and slithery,” hissed Billy. “A winged serpent, a many-footed serpent, whose shanks are made of stained and sharded steel.”

  The crowd recoiled, with an “ohhhh” sweeping from their lips.

  “He breathes a resinous gall, a cloud of antimony. He opens a mouth full of teeth: angry-yellow, scorching teeth, teeth longer than your fore-arm! He rises, rises, rises on veiny wings to swallow your sweet children!” boomed Billy. “The ancient snake will have you stretched out on the scalding wike, helpless, naked to his claws! Is that what you want? Tell me, is that what you WANT?”

  “NO,” the crowd roared, pushing towards the stage again. “We are with YOU, Billy Sea-Hen, we are with YOU!”

  The crowd preached his words back to him, half-repeated, phrases murmurating, ramifying. He spoke of the massive choir boat sitting nearly finished just there, fifty yards from the platform on the other side of the Blackwall Shipyard palisade. He reminded them of its imminent voyage, and the Great Song to be sung, into whose notes all their voices would be woven. Unasked, members of the crowd passed forward to the platform objects to be placed on the ship of hope: talismans, deodands, mementoes, placards, twists of bright, hand-woven cloth, lustral carvings and figurines; pictures and statues of a hundred saints, of holy men and women, of sacred animals; and scraps of paper covered in names, prayer and numerical symbols.

  “Thank you, thank you, dear visitants,” shouted Billy. “This ark will be gilt with your gifts and etrennes, a thousand splendid shillings and high-sheltering arms.”

  The many thousands shouted back their approbation.

  “Selah!” said Billy, and the many thousands quieted. Over the tidal rush of the nearby Thames, Billy half-sang the words of the angel Uriel to Noah:

  “Now hast thou Noah

  Heard the whisperings of baleful Beezlebub,

  Crowned in his writhen shadow,

  His tongue a smoldering arrow.

  As you measure your vessel,

  Span its keel and masts,

  A glistering ship, many cabin’d,

  You might yet construct.

  So, son of Eve, Enoch’s offspring,

  What chuse thou?—:

  Earth’s blandishments, seeming safe, or

  The long-road of brine, a storm-wrought way?”

  The makeshift congregation on its eucharistic parade-ground responded:

  “The sea, the sea, we take to the briny roads!”

  Later, when those present tried to disentangle what Blake called “a delicious frenzy” and the Cook “a most perfect hattled scrimble-scramble,” the McDoons agreed that this was the juncture at which the mood began to change. Adherents of the rival preacher, Mr. Peasestraw, being numerous in the acre nearest the houses on Naval Row off the Poplar High Street, and seeming to coordinate their actions, started heckling Billy. Billy’s (far more numerous) supporters attempted to silence the Peasestraw faction. Scuffles broke out. As dusk seeped into darkness, and a thousand lamps and torches were lighted, and Billy’s sermon reached its climax, the contest became more intense. Pitched battles with clubs and knives erupted in corners of the fields, still on the fringes of the main body of the crowd but ominous, like the forerunners of a slowly but inexorably unmoating thundercloud.

  In the flickering play of torchlight and shadow, under the sway of fervid rhetoric and themselves praying for the opening of the visionary’s way, crowd members began to sense the presence of the very force that Billy had warned them about. Above their heads in the molasses air, some saw in glints the slow swirling of sliverous beings, others the jagged, jinxy flight of slick, scaly cherubim.

  “Goddess save us,” some in the crowd cried. “Saint Macrina protect us.”

  Panicky sounds welled up in their throats.

  Some thought they saw man-shaped figures with blurry faces on the edges of lamplight, coarse bonelets wandering in the lanes leading off the Blackwall Causeway and in the ropemaker’s fields by the Shipyard.

  Many in the crowd instinctively sought shelter closest to Billy and the speakers’ platform, closest to the sacred ship. Billy looked out at the waves of his followers pressing ever closer against the hoardings of the dais. He smelled the tang of passion and inchoate fear. He knew the meeting was turning out of his—or anyone’s—control. He could no longer be heard above the mounting roar of the crowd. People pushed and jostled the platform. In the crazy torchlight, Billy thought for a moment that he saw James Kidlingt
on move past the dais, towards the walls of the shipyard.

  At the nape of midnight, someone slammed with the dolphin knocker on the door of the house in Mincing Lane, and called urgently for Barnabas and Sanford.

  “Wheat and whiskey! Winstanley?” said a sleepy Barnabas. “At this wicked hour?”

  “I’m afraid so, and no time to lose,” said Winstanley. “Sir John sent me himself, with dispatch—the Indigo Pheasant is under attack!”

  “No, oh no!” said Barnabas, electrically awake. “Come on, we can handle ’em!”

  Barnabas—dressed only in his satin night-gown (a pale grey with vermillion florettes; very stylish, if now rather worn)—ran straight past Winstanley and into the street, waving an invisible cutlass and brandishing an imaginary pistol.

  Sanford collected Barnabas, sent him upstairs to get properly dressed.

  As Winstanley waited in the partners’ room, someone else clacked away on the door with the dolphin knocker.

  “Quatsch,” yelled Barnabas down the stairs. “Who is it now?”

  The Cook let in Mr. Fletcher, accompanied by a scarlet-jacketed marine.

  “A thousand apologies, my lords,” said Mr. Fletcher. “But, chip chap chunter, Mr. Bammary sent this good sergeant to me, with a vital message for you.”

  Sally and Maggie followed Barnabas into the partners’ room. The Cook’s niece brushed sleep from her eyes, followed Mr. Fletcher’s every move as she bustled with coats and hats in the hallway.

  “Billy Sea-Hen,” started Winstanley.

  “Billy what?” said the Cook, putting down a plate of shop-bought wheat biscuits and a jar of ginger jam (the best she could provide on such unusually short notice, but no one was going into battle on an empty stomach if she could help it). “Oh, my pardon, I . . . its just . . .”