The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  Sanford spoke. “I remember. By Saint Adelsina, I do. It was the only time I ever saw her, Barnabas’s Rehana. The night before we sailed, Adnan held a great feast to celebrate both the business and the betrothal. Rehana sat between her mother and her father, across the table from us, but I will never forget her dark eyes or her glossy black hair.”

  Barnabas said to the Mejuffrouw, “That day in the curio room, the sandalwood box? That last night, at the feast before we sailed, Adnan gave me a box like that. ‘Into this box,’ Adnan said, ‘I put the memories and good wishes of my house, and a command that you return as soon as you can to rejoin the one you have already claimed. Remember always that you have taken Rehana’s heart with you: it is in this box.’”

  Sally sat back. How many times had she sat in the partners’ office at Mincing Lane and smelled sandalwood, toyed with the box? Like a memento from an aunt she never had.

  “So we sailed for London,” said Barnabas. “Never has a heart been as full of joy and hope as mine. I counted the hours and wished for magical powers over the wind. All that remained was the blessing of my uncle. Upon our return, good Sanford here pleaded my case to old McDoon, and I pressed it too. Hard. But my uncle was harder in reply. He would have none of it. It would, he said, ruin our standing and reputation to marry an Indian, to become a Muslim. Beneath us, because of her nation, her religion, and the colour of her skin.”

  Clutching his vest, Barnabas finished.

  “My uncle forbad the union, and threatened to disown me if I pursued it. Banish me from McDoon & Associates. Disinherit me. I did not have the courage I ought to have had. I betrayed my Yarico, abandoned my Sacontala. I never returned to Bombay. I never saw her again.”

  Sally contemplated the wickedness of some uncles and the goodness of hers. “Oh, Uncle,” said Sally, and stood up to hug him. As she did so, she noticed that the Mejuffrouw had shifted her gaze from Barnabas to her husband. Cornelius appeared to be on the verge of saying something, but the Mejuffrouw’s eyes enjoined him to silence.

  The party broke up as the candles guttered. Barnabas was unsteady on his feet but insisted on making his own way to bed. Kidlington asked Sally to walk out with him to the gate.

  “Remarkable story,” he said. “I take it you had no idea, none at all, about any of this?”

  “None,” said Sally.

  “Well,” said Kidlington. “I am truly sorry for him, poor man. A broken heart for all these years. It is a thing beyond reckoning. For my part, I hope I have the courage to be with the one I love, when the time comes.” Before she had time to react, Kidlington bent over and kissed Sally on the mouth, lightly and just for a second. With that, he turned, opened the gate, and disappeared into the night.

  The effect of Uncle Barnabas’s revelation, plus that of Kidlington’s parting comment and kiss, sent Sally’s heart in a dozen directions at once. She touched her lips. She put her arms around herself. She was not sure if she could breathe. Only later, much later that night, as she sought sleep in vain, did she recall the oddest thing of all about the evening. Nexius Dexius had not said a single word all night, but he had followed every remark the way a fencer follows the moves of his opponent. And he had kept constant watch on the Mejuffrouw, just as she had been absorbed in Barnabas’s words. As she lay awake in the Gezelligheid towards dawn, Sally grew ever more convinced that Nexius was the only one — besides Sanford — who was not surprised by Barnabas’s story.

  “That old badger knew all about Uncle Barnabas and his Bombay love, Rehana with the dark eyes and glossy black hair,” Sally whispered to Isaak. “I am sure of it. Another mystery to add to all the others we have collected since that mysterious box landed on our doorstep in Mincing Lane.”

  Sally had no chance to ask Nexius her questions. Either through contrivance or happenstance, the captain of Yount was rarely at the Gezelligheid in the next week. He was at the barracks, mostly and, presumably as a result of some conversations he had there, the number of regimental guards at the Gezelligheid increased. Nexius said he felt the presence of lurkers and wanted to bolster the McDoons’ security, especially since the Gallinule had signalled its imminent arrival.

  “We each have an ansible device,” explained the Mejuffrouw, as she unlocked a room on the topmost floor. The room had just one small grated window, set high up, and was bare except for sea charts on the walls, and a table with four chairs. On the table was a mahogany box full of copper wires and cylinders, cut crystal shafts, and brass knobs.

  “Can you talk to the ship?” asked Barnabas.

  “No,” said the Mejuffrouw. “They send a sort of noise, a blast through the ether that registers on our instrument here. Makes it hum and gong when it gets close enough. We can send a similar report to them but no more.”

  “How far away are they?”

  “Very hard to say. They are not yet . . . in our world. Just close enough to send the first alert through on the ansible. It could be a week or a month before the Gallinule arrives.”

  The McDoons prepared for the next leg of their journey, careful not to hint at anything to outsiders, especially Kidlington. Kidlington’s own ship to Bombay was also outfitting, so the long-dreaded parting would soon be upon them. As a result, Kidlington spent less time with the McDoons and the Termuydens, attending to necessary preparations himself. Or so he said, though Sally had other suspicions.

  “He avoids my company,” she said to herself as she looked through a German herbal in the Gezelligheid library. “I do not know why. He has not spoken with me, not in private, since the night he kissed me. It is not his way to be so cack-handed so I must believe he intends to avoid me.”

  She tried to read a page in the book, something about the uses of Bichskraut. That’s German for bixwort, she thought. The little blue dye-flower we keep in the garden at Mincing Lane. For a moment, she saw the house in London, heard the cook clattering in the kitchen. Her loss of Mincing Lane and her grief at leaving James collided. She ran her finger across a picture of Frau Luna, the Mistress Moon, surrounded by leaping dolphins, sagittaries, comets and stars, but did not see the image through her tears.

  “He leaves soon and so do I, but not together,” she said. Isaak looked up at her, whiskers undulating. “Whatever shall I do? I long for Yount . . . and James cannot know, much less come.”

  She pulled out the ansible pendant: it glowed red. “Tom, Tom. You would like James. He could be a brother to you.”

  Sally’s room looked out over the Gezelligheid’s front garden (where two British soldiers stood at attention by the gate) and across the harbour. On clear days she could just see Robbens Island, a smudge on the horizon seven miles from shore. A prison sat on Robbens Island. As Sally thought about Yount and Tom and James, and about Uncle Barnabas’s astounding news, she imagined the prison squat and slit-windowed on the island. Even as she gazed at the dark spot on the horizon, she saw a sloop head across the harbour bound for Robbens Island. She could make out figures in shackles being shuffled across the deck. She shuddered, and turned away.

  Sensing the pall, the Termuydens held a small supper party the next evening for the McDoons: the first of many farewells, as the Mejuffrouw put it. They served — on the indigo pheasant plates they knew Sally loved — goat stew spiced with cumin, nutmeg, and ginger, along with a red wine that Cornelius insisted was the perfect accompaniment. After several bottles, everyone at the table readily agreed. A perfect meal in every respect, except from Sally’s perspective since, as so often recently, Kidlington was missing — dining with other medical students bound for Bombay.

  “Pity,” said Barnabas. “Because he has missed a very passable hara masala, for which we give thanks. Though I dare say he will be able to get the original article soon enough.”

  The others looked expectantly at Barnabas, but there was no repeat of the disclosures over the port-wine. Having erupted like a volcano that no one even knew existed, Barnabas had said no further word about Rehana or the Khodja merchants since that eve
ning. Sanford was just as resolute in his silence, though that was less to be wondered at.

  “A reading would be nice,” said the Mejuffrouw, steering the conversation away from waters in which Barnabas clearly did not want to sail.

  “Beans and bacon,” said Barnabas, arrayed in a fine vest, periodically tapping the key in its pocket. “Fine idea. What shall it be?”

  Sally said, “I know, something from Roderick Random, in honour of our adventures. I found a copy in the library here, and have been reading it in my room at night. Let me fetch it down.”

  Sally left the table and made her way up the great central staircase to the second floor. It is a funny thing about a house that, when all the occupants are gathered in one room, the rest of the house begins to feel as deserted as if no one lives in it at all. As Sally ascended the stairs, candle in front of her, the shadows seemed very long, and the jovial sounds from the dining room made her feel more and more alone. At the top of the stairs, Sally hesitated. Without knowing why, she was disinclined to proceed down the long, dark corridor to her room at the front of the house. Surprisingly faint now came the sounds of conversation from the room below, too indistinct to make out individual words. The quiet outside the house seeped into the upstairs hallway.

  In the quiet, Sally suddenly heard an unexpected noise: a rustle of papers. A rustle of papers in a merchant’s house is nothing remarkable — unless it is late at night, and no one is supposed to be at home. Sally was instantly back at Mincing Lane. She stopped, thinking she should tiptoe back downstairs. But it is probably nothing, she thought. A breeze, or my imagination. The others will just laugh at me.

  The rustling came again from the other side of her bedroom door. She froze. Who could be there? The Gezelligheid was guarded night and day; who had slipped through the pickets? Sally stopped breathing, padded towards her door. Without a doubt someone was within, very quietly searching for something. She stood at the door until she ran out of breath, then with a sudden shove, she launched herself into her room.

  It was a moonless night. Sally could make out a figure by the side-window, holding her commonplace book in his hand. The window was open. In the light of her wavering candle, Sally saw other books (her letter copy-book!) by the lockbox on the table. The lockbox was open! She raised the candle. The figure, a man, stood calmly, almost as if he had been expecting Sally. He turned to face her with a smile, a sad smile she could just see in the dimness.

  Seeing his face, Sally let out the shout that would change her life forever, and that of the man in front of her. One shout, one explosion of sound (how many times would she wish to recall that cry, have it suppressed, obliterated?), and the world was changed. Sally’s shout, almost a scream, was loud enough to find the ears of the two guards posted by the gate under her window. Her shout brought Uncle Barnabas and Sanford to their feet in the room below, and all the others. As the soldiers pounded on the front door and all was turmoil below, Sally looked in despair and wonder at the face in front of her. She had barely the strength to keep her candle aloft. She heard cries of “Sally, Sally” and the sound of many footfalls in the hallway. In the few seconds before the others burst into the room — the last few seconds she would have alone with the man in front of her — time stopped, Sally’s eyes held his and his held hers. She exhaled four words:

  “Oh, not you, James!”

  Interlude: Entertaining Angels Unawares

  Maggie scrubbed the fire-grate in the Sedgewicks’ kitchen on her first morning of charring, while the pantry maid nattered on.

  “The Sedgewicks are good to us, for the most part,” said the maid. “Bit odd, the pair of ’em, if you ask me. He is a lawyer, a princum-prancum sort with his words that none of us can understand, but harmless, really. Enjoys his meat and drink, mind you, but otherwise hardly pays us much heed, which is better than my last employment, where the master was always pinchin’ my bottom and tryin’ to, well, you know . . .”

  Maggie knew. Men always tried that. She was groped in the street almost daily. Most women were. Maggie wished she knew an equation or trigonometric expression for that.

  “The mistress pays us mind,” the maid went on. “But mostly in a friendly sort of way. Most of the time, she is nose-down in a book, not at all like the ladies in my other place or those I hear about from the other girls I know in service.”

  Maggie pricked her ears up.

  “Mrs. Sedgewick will be very interested to meet you, to be sure, you being, well, different. Not that I mind, of course. I know your colour don’t rub off, not like what my friend Nancy says about black people. I am more ed-u-cated than that!” The maid drew out the syllables of her last sentence.

  “But I must tell you — Maggie, is it? — that I ain’t never seen such hair before, not back in Shropshire and not here in London neither,” continued the maid. She reached out and, before Maggie could protest, touched Maggie’s hair.

  Mrs. Sedgewick summoned Maggie upstairs around lunchtime. Maggie stood stiffly at attention, wishing her clothes were less ragged.

  “Well, well,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, surveying Maggie from head to toe. “You are a sight. From the charity school at St. Macrina’s, right? Good. I remember you — how could I not? — from the Holy Thursday processions.”

  Maggie relaxed a little. She had always liked the Holy Thursday processions, the annual event where every charity school in London marched its students to a special service at St. Paul’s. Maggie remembered the beadle waving his white staff at the front of the St. Macrina students in their green uniforms. She remembered singing “Great God . . . ’Tis to thy sovereign grace I owe That I was born on Christian ground” as they trooped through the streets. She remembered singing a hymn she liked much better in the cathedral as the assembled boards of governors, trustees, and patronesses listened:

  I will shew you what is strong.

  The lion is strong . . . the wild beasts of the desert

  Hide themselves, for he is very terrible.

  The lion is strong, but he that made

  The lion is stronger than he: his anger

  Is terrible; he could make us die in

  A moment, and no one could save us

  Out of his hand.

  Maggie found herself humming this hymn while she faced Mrs. Sedgewick. Her new mistress smiled.

  “Ah, I like that one too,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, and sent Maggie back below stairs, but not before noticing that Maggie had looked with longing at the bookshelves lining the study.

  Mr. Sedgewick caught a glimpse of Maggie when she left for the day. Over dinner he said to his wife, “Well, my dear, my euryalic dove, I noticed today that you have hired a daughter of Calabar.”

  Mrs. Sedgewick looked at her husband with dangerous patience.

  “Now, from the abundance of my heart, my mouth speaks,” said Mr. Sedgewick, rubbing the abundance of his stomach and reaching for a lamb-chop. “I wonder if you have not taken in this dusky child as something of a pet, a project to fulfill the maternal feelings unfortunately thwarted by your body’s resistance to conception.”

  Mrs. Sedgewick put her fork down and took up a sharper weapon. “George Gervase Sedgewick, Locke was right to say that a learned man has no long way to seek for examples of his own ignorance.”

  Pausing as he chewed, Mr. Sedgewick said, “Ah, my voracious pigeon, no mere lawyer may slip a word in with you before you refer to the Grammar of Palaemon and damn him for a fool. Yet your argument is incomplete, cetera desunt, the rest is missing. You must steeve your points in more tightly for the ballast of your argument to hold.”

  Mrs. Sedgewick counted quietly to five before she said, “You mix lobster with canary, Mr. Sedgewick, and would I fear eat both if they were put before you. I took on this child, as you call her — and her name is Maggie Collins, by the by — because we need additional help in this household and because I felt a duty — not maternal in nature, by the by — towards the school of which I am a patroness.”

  “W
ell, then, the defendant withdraws his plea of not guilty and confesses the indictment,” chuckled Mr. Sedgewick. “Nolens volens, and more unwilling than not, but there, ’tis done, and now would you kindly pass the potatoes, my love?”

  Maggie dreamed that night of a hedgerow as tall as a cathedral and as long as the Oxford Road. Scattered at its embrangled roots were the bones of small creatures, and some not so small. She heard faint triumphant singing: “Take force by force.” Across the face of the moon flew the King of the Eboes, with an army of floating warriors, each wielding a fire-tipped spear. When she woke up she thought for one moment she was no longer in a cellar and that her Mama was no longer sick. The refrain (“Take force by force”) hung doggedly in her mind.

  She was only allowed upstairs at the Sedgewicks to clean out the fireplaces and remove the chamber pots and fetch down brass items for polishing in a vestibule off the kitchen. Mr. Sedgewick she saw seldom. He worked with clients in his ground-floor office, a room she was forbidden to enter (she had no idea how he had that room’s fireplace cleaned). On the few occasions when she saw him, a brief encounter in the hall or on the stairs, he always smiled as if to a poodle. Mrs. Sedgewick seemed to avoid her, though Maggie was sure that Mrs. Sedgewick scrutinized her through half-open doors or from the corner of an eye when Maggie came in to empty out the coals.

  Maggie made every excuse to visit Mrs. Sedgewick’s study, and the larger library on the third floor. She had never seen so many books. Just smelling them intoxicated her. She memorized titles and made up their contents on her walks home. One day she recited twenty titles to herself over and over again as she hid on the way home from a mob of typesetter’s apprentices; although they were rioting for higher pay and shorter hours, such disturbances easily got out of hand, something any woman knew and knew to avoid. Another time, forced to take a detour as the carcass of a whipped-dead horse was being hauled off her usual route (she noticed that someone had already sliced off its hooves, presumably for the glue factory), Maggie organized and reorganized the books she’d seen that day on a shelf she imagined in her cellar.