James pulled out one of the pistols, aimed it unsteadily at the Widow, who only smiled.
“I,” said James, still out of breath. “I, . . . I . . . know who, . . . what you are . . .”
The Widow said, “Yes, I know you do, dearlet, sweet little wren of mine. After all, are you not also one of us?”
James tried to cock the pistol, while shaking his head as energetically as his exhaustion allowed him to.
“No,” he whispered, his breathing returning slowly to normal. “Whatever else . . . I . . . may be, . . . I am, . . . I am not, . . . not . . . of your kind.”
“Tu es adorable,” said the Widow. “Très adorable.”
She sighed, shook her head and reached out with her bronzey conjure-hands.
“Hold!”
The man in dark glasses, holding a pistol in each hand, advanced up the nave. The Widow spun around.
“You again!” she hissed.
“Never far away,” said the man, moving at speed, pistols level. “I killed your children.”
The Widow yelled, a sound to scare the magpies from their tower nests, to freeze the marrow of the grey thrushes in the elms.
James fell back, covering his ears, without releasing his pistol.
Hex-fire arced across the nave. The man in the dark glasses threw himself to the epistle side, rose on one knee, aimed one of his pistols and fired. The Widow staggered back but, laughing wildly, she rose up ten feet into the air. As the man raised his other pistol, she descended upon him in the nave, half-chanting, half-laughing an emerald song of destruction.
Another melody answered hers. Bursting into the church, limpid notes of healing blue shattered the witch-song. Maggie ran through the door, followed a moment later by Sally. Both sang, united, a wave of mathematical power.
James shielded his eyes as the dark green chant rallied against the indigo aria.
Maggie ran straight at the Widow Goethals, roaring an unendurable cobalt theme. Sally walked slowly forward, echoing Maggie’s song.
The Widow Goethals seemed to expand, becoming a bloated green mass in mid-air, framed by a gorgon’s nest of oiled black hair. Her eyes blazed—she was a dragonness of grim proportion. She turned to look down upon James.
“James, your friends arrive to save you,” she said. “But what friends are these? Trust them at your peril, my sweet. Their music, c’est une étude sur la folie. They will take from you what is rightfully yours. What is ours.”
“Fly now, witch,” said Maggie. “Or I will destroy you.”
The Widow stared down at Maggie.
“Here James is Diana, come to hunt down Actaeon,” cold-laughed the Widow. “She will rend you like a stag, nail your skin to the mock-tree.”
“Now, Owl-mistress,” said Maggie. She began to sing again.
The notes sped from Maggie’s lips as darts of blue-black fire, taking geometrical shapes as they struck the numinous green mass of the witch.
“I leave you now, James, to your jailer’s retinue, in the sickle-sinny drift, as they hie you to the gallows pole,” said the Widow. She growled at Maggie, who sang on unaffected.
The Widow Goethals, with a curt laugh, disappeared in a blaze of greens, slates, and mackerel greys, a star fading into the bottom of a very deep well.
Maggie ceased singing.
Into the sudden silence that fell upon the church, walked Barnabas, Sanford, Mr. Fletcher, Billy Sea-Hen and Lieutenant Thracemorton, all with pistols drawn.
The man in the dark glasses stood up, both pistols still in his hands.
Barnabas broke the loud silence.
“Figs and farthings,” he said. “Who are you? Declare yourself, friend or foe?”
The man bowed slightly and said, “I am Captain Shuffle-bottom. I work for the same masters as Lieutenant Thracemorton. He can vouch for me, though he has seen me but once or twice before.”
Though greatly puzzled, the lieutenant walked to the captain. The two conversed in low voices for a minute, exchanging passwords.
“Quite right,” said Lieutenant Thracemorton, whistling softly. “This is Captain Shufflebottom. He is on our side.”
The entire party looked to the apse. James was no longer visible. He was sitting on the floor, leaning against the altar, facing the sacristy wall.
“James,” said Sally. “James, dearest?”
James did not respond.
“James, please. Please? We must talk.”
James drew the valise closer to himself. The items within scraped with a muffled sound across the floor.
“Oh, dearest,” said Sally, voice shaking. “I never meant you any harm. I wish so much had not come to this pass.”
Without rising, James said, “The Widow may be a demon, but that does not necessarily make her words untrue.”
Sally let out a small sob and balled her fists. Maggie moved to her shoulder and said, “James Kidlington—you are no fool. We are in the halls of the Bemmuo, the mansions of the spirits. You know full well who speaks truth and who speaks falsehoods.”
James snorted, “As may be, Miss Collins. But the Widow’s enmity for us both does not mean you and I must be friends. You lead the griffins to flay the deer, do you not?”
Maggie started towards the altar. Sally pulled her back.
“James,” said Sally. “Please stop. You only make matters worse.”
“Oh Sally, I want so much to believe you, my beautiful Sally. But you did not come alone, as I implored you. For your heart’s malpractice, Sally, who paid you your thirty silver shillings?”
James continued in a louder voice, “I sense the Admiralty behind this! Do you hear me, Thracemorton and you, the other one, with the glasses? Tell Sir John I am not bought so easily as the McDoons!”
Barnabas moved forward, followed in close order by Sanford and Mr. Fletcher.
“Odd’s wrinkles,” Barnabas said. “Come out, James, you villain.”
“Soon enough, my dear sir—whom I once hoped to call ‘Uncle’ or the like—soon enough, now that we have a quorum for the final act, in this fane to a God gone missing and a Goddess who slumbers idly by. Sally has a replica of her love here entrapped, a fairy tale hare primed for the skinning, as I suppose she thinks him. How meekly she disembowels me, how softly she prises out my heart for its further disposal.”
Shufflebottom signaled to Thracemorton. The two special agents of the Admiralty began to flank the altar.
“Sally, are you listening?” called out James. “The longing continues unabated, doesn’t it? Here, there, in your precious Yount, what does it matter? The yearning, always starved, always unsated. Your heart’s longing will never be cured.”
The McDoons moved towards the altar.
“James, enough, my love,” begged Sally. “Return the machinery. Come back to me.”
“Oh ho, is that all? Your Indigo Pheasant needs its wings, and then I am free to go? Pennons of love and respect she’ll fly for me, but she’ll not allow a knave loose in her nave.”
James cocked his pistol. The sound rang out clearly in the church. The McDoons stopped. The Admiralty men continued to advance.
“Do you know,” said James. “I believe this church is in need of a new bell. Sally, do you remember? The curate told us that when we visited him once upon a long time ago. Seemed to think we might contribute to the fund for it.”
Sally said, “Yes, I do, James.”
“Well, Sally, I think it is time to make that contribution. ‘Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, and all the air a solemn stillness holds.’ Remember, Sally, we read that poem together, you and I, under the elms outside, in the yard to this very church?”
“‘Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,’” whispered Sally. “‘And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.’ Oh no, Goddess, it is still noon, not evening, dear James . . .”
James said, as he heard the Admiralty agents reach the far side of the altar. “Everyone knows that the best-sounding bells need a little blood coursed into their
founding . . .”
Many things happened at once then, and no one after had precisely the same recollection—though the outcome was clear and irrevocable, the interpretation of its proximate cause will forever remain subject to the whims and quirks of individual perceptions.
The main facts:
James stood up.
Sally shouted, “James!”
Five pistols fired more or less simultaneously.
James
fell
back
dead.
James’s pistol had discharged. The thought occurred to several that he was attempting suicide, in a flamboyant, melodramatic way that suited his character. Others were more or less charitable, depending on one’s views and prejudices, in positing that James was aiming at the McDoons or at the Admiralty men, and simply missed. Or that he could not decide which of several targets to focus upon. The bullet from his gun was not recovered but the hole it left in the opposite wall was on a tangent that meant the bullet passed between Sally and Maggie. No one wanted to dwell on the fact of its trajectory.
Mr. Fletcher, Sanford, Lieutenant Thracemorton and Captain Shufflebottom had also fired their guns. James had two wounds, one to his chest, one to his throat.
The blood spilled on the valise, pooled on the floor, created a small lake around one corner of the altar.
Sally was inconsolable.
Maggie retrieved the valise and would not let it out of her hands until its contents were reinstalled on the Indigo Pheasant. When that time came, she was careful to scrub from the stolen gearbox and steam-engine jointure the blood of James that had seeped through the valise. Some blood remained in the narrowest seams, impossible to remove without harming the metal itself, a thin dark script embedded in the technology.
Barnabas leaned on Sanford, both of whom looked old.
“Figs and fiddles, I would have done anything to spare her that, my poor, poor girl.”
“We all would have, old friend,” said Sanford. “Be not over hard on yourself. No power on Earth could have deterred James Kidlington from cutting open the latter pages of his own book.”
Billy Sea-Hen, with Mr. Fletcher, carried James’s body out of the church. Billy came back and cleaned the congealed blood from the floor, his hands surprisingly delicate as he wiped the stains from the base of the altar.
That afternoon and in the days to come, Lieutenant Thracemorton and Captain Shufflebottom dealt with the local constable and magistrate, as well as the vicar of Saint Stephen’s Church. The Admiralty handled everything. The McDoons were held blameless after a short inquiry.
They buried James Kidlington in the small graveyard by Saint Helen’s Bishopgate in the City of London.
In the carriage back to Mincing Lane that afternoon, Maggie held Sally’s hand and thought, “Mama, I miss your wisdom. What am I to say? Such a terrible thing, this blood-letting that did not have to be. A rogue he was, and perhaps deprived of his reason when he most needed it, but he did not deserve this end, I think.”
Out loud, Maggie said, “Stay with us, sister, the Indigo Pheasant needs you. I need you.”
Sally could say nothing, but almost imperceptibly she squeezed Maggie’s hand.
“Women have to be as strong as elephants,” thought Maggie.
Two months after the Battle of Blackwall (and the burial of James), in the waning days of September and thus late in the season to be embarking on such a voyage, the Indigo Pheasant sailed down the Thames.
Lloyd’s List, the chronicle of all things maritime, reported that sizeable crowds gathered, “‘curious to see off such a hermaphrodite of a ship, notorious also after the riot that broke out in the Blackwall yard; further, despite the remarkable secrecy that has surrounded the oddly named vessel, we have it on good authority that the Indigo Pheasant contains some of the latest in steam-driven machinery, to what purpose is not fully conceived by this paper’s editor, though we put our faith in the sagacious heads at Admiralty and the East India Company as to means and ends, for, as Horace has it, we salute a science—even one we little understand—that brings results.’”
We have a good many third-party impressions of the day because the Babbages, the Somervilles, and other members of London’s intellectual elite made a special trip out to Blackwall to see the launch of the Indigo Pheasant (the pleasant prospect of tea and cakes to follow, at Bromley Hall on the leafy River Lea just north of Blackwall, was surely an additional inducement). For example, the eminent chemist and geologist Arthur Aikin wrote to his aunt, the poet and essayist Anna Laetitia Barbauld, that “most strange—to my eyes at least—was the presence of many females onboard the ship, a fact that will I believe support your own hopes for improvement amongst us.” The philosopher and novelist William Godwin, writing to his daughter Mary Shelley (in Florence at that time with Percy Bysshe Shelley), exclaimed “what a sublime sight, dearest Mary, this great ship filled not only with soldiers and the tools of war but with men and women of more intellectual and spiritual propensities together bent on adventure of the highest moral order.”
We even have a pencil-and-crayon sketch of the Indigo Pheasant itself, by none other than J.M.W. Turner, made as he stood at one of his favourite places, on the Marlborough Terraces at Woolwich. Well preserved at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the drawing clearly shows the indigo-tinted fore topmast staysail, the jib and the flying jib, that is, the three sails rigged between the foremast and the bow, the three giant triangles that lead the ship forward. If one looks very closely, one can discern what must be the “eyes” of the ship, the qingbao porcelain plates that Mei-Hua gave as figureheads.
Mei-Hua, on tip-toes, peered down at the qingbao pheasant on the right-hand side of the bow (the “starboard” side, as she had learned to say in her now nearly perfect English). She was elated, seeing the pheasant’s glazed eye pointed towards the morning sun. Attached in rows behind the porcelain plate, like scintilla from a racing star, reflecting the sun, were amulets and talismans given by Billy Sea-Hen’s adherents; the three mighty masts were also emblazoned with similar tokens, in their hundreds. Also reflecting the sun was a great round gilt-edged clock with a white porcelain face, which Maggie had had attached to the mainmast—a timepiece made by the specialists in Clerkenwell, a timepiece directly connected to the Great Fulginator below decks by corded silver wires, a clock to tell time in timeless places. Mei-Hua hugged herself, wanted to run and hug her brother and even the severe old Tang Guozhi: the voyage, the real voyage, had at last begun! Still and always the daughter of a state official in a provincial capital city of the Celestial Empire, Mei-Hua managed to compose herself, but not before she squeezed Maggie’s hand.
Maggie stood beside Mei-Hua at the bow of the Indigo Pheasant as the ship passed close by Woolwich on the south bank. Maggie admired the three indigo-coloured sails, so distinctive from the regular white sheets unfurled everywhere else on the ship. Colouring the three foremost sails indigo had been her idea, one she had insisted on even when its significant additional cost caused indigestion among the accountants at the Admiralty.
“No other ship in the world has such sails,” they’d said. “It’s unheard of!”
Moreover, Maggie had refused to allow use of the indigo dyes from South Carolina or from the Bengal, despite their low prices, since in each case the plant was grown and processed by unfree labour.
“Not one item on the Indigo Pheasant will be produced by enslaved people,” she said with a finality that brooked no rebuttal. She made sure that the dye used for the ship’s sales came via the Parsee merchant and Yount-friend Sitterjee, and had its ultimate source in free labour on farms in Gujarat.
“Your scruples as a result have doubled an already unconscionably high cost!” the E.I.C. accountants had wailed. “Most extraordinary and unheard of!”
“My point succinctly,” she’d replied, without so much as raising an eyebrow. “The Indigo Pheasant is unlike any other ship that has ever been built.”
Ma
ggie looked back along the deck towards the stern. The nominal captain, ship’s mates, and petty officers, supplied by the E.I.C., clustered near the wheelhouse. Sir Barrow had himself instructed the captain on the nature of the trip, and made it clear that—while the captain and his officers might have command in all things considered traditionally nautical—Maggie was the final authority on all other exigencies and eventualities requiring executive decision-making.
Standing a little off to the side of the E.I.C. men, all on his own and saying little to anyone but watching everyone through his smoked-glass spectacles, was the tall figure of Captain Shufflebottom. Sir John had named Shufflebottom as the Admiralty’s primary representative onboard the ship, a supercargo to whom sharp powers had been delegated.
Billy Sea-Hen stood amidships, with many of the men and women he had chosen, his pilgrim-warriors, known as “the sons and daughters of Asaph.” They numbered one hundred and twenty-eight, replicating the number of musicians who had returned to the Holy Land from the Babylonian Captivity, the musicians who were descendants of Asaph. (The quarrel with the rival preacher Peasestraw had revolved in part over the accuracy of this number, which is so stated in the Book of Esdras, whereas the Book of Nehemiah gives the number of the post-exilic returnees as one hundred and forty-eight; the Admiralty, caring little for such exegetical niceties but very much about budget and commissary constraints, had only granted space on the Indigo Pheasant for one hundred and twenty-eight). Each of the sons and daughters of Asaph wore an armband made of left-over material from the indigo-tinted foresails.
In addition, and despite the warmth of a September sun, Billy wore a long, blue woolen scarf—knitted by the Cook and a gift from her the evening before.
“I know it isn’t much, my Billy of Queenhithe—I have a beetle’s fingers when it comes to knitting,” Cook had said, fighting back tears in the kitchen in the house on Mincing Lane.
“No, no, say not such things, I’ll not hear them,” Billy had said, likewise struggling to keep from crying.
“Now, you listen well, Billy Sea-Hen. You go wherever it is you and the McDoons are going. You find and fight the awl-rawney until he is good and dead, and then you come straight back, d’you hear? Straight back home. Letting no harm or damage come to you and any of the others, d’you hear?”
The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 29
