The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (26 page)

Frustrated with James, Sally drifted into reverie, finding herself lost in the scenes on the Meissenware service. The painters had used masterfully delicate strokes and vibrant glazes. Sally would have sworn that the scenes weren’t paintings at all, but frozen images of a distant reality, the people and animals, the trees and even the water all merely in a state of suspended animation, ready at any moment to come back to life.

Looking closely, Sally realized the scenes powerfully reminded her of the Last Cozy House, and the idyllic times she and James had spent in the garden at that house. In the pictures on the teapot, she could smell the breeze off scented bushes, could hear the bokmakarie birds and the scarlet-winged lorikeets, could see Isaak and the Termuydens’ dog Jantje hunting the baboon through the undergrowth.

The last Edenic afternoons before his fall . . .

She peered at the scene on the interior bottom of her cup: a well-dressed gentleman standing under the arc of a swooning willow tree, doffing his hat to an unseen person. Who was the invisible person (surely not the tea drinker, or was it)? Why was the tree bending at such a precipitous angle? Did it bow to the same person to whom the gentleman paid his respects? Or was it attempting to seize the gentleman? Was that a small dog cavorting at the man’s feet, or something else, a less salubrious creature? Were those butterflies flitting around the willow branches, or mice with wings?

Sally pulled back, a moue creasing her face.

She avoided James’s puzzled glance. She thrust aside memories of the days in the Last Cozy garden.

Immediately after, she suppressed thoughts of Reglum. She pushed down her emotions about Maggie. She fled from the faces her conscience showed her of her uncle and Mr. Sanford. Tom, Afsana. . . . She rushed away, away.

Exhaustion loomed. The tea had only revived a part of her.

Looking again at the image at the bottom of her tea cup, a picture now skewed under translucent brown dregs in the soft flimmer of gaslight as evening drew on, Sally turned away quickly and begged to be taken home.

She was certain she had seen the gentleman in the cup put his hat back on, but dared not check to confirm that her eyes might have deceived her.

As Sally drank tea with James, and as Barnabas and Sanford made their way back to Mincing Lane, Maggie was visiting Mr. Gandy in the debtor’s prison at Giltspur Street Compter.

He sat alone, unshaven and dishevelled, enveloped by and part of the baggy stench of the place. A fresh bruise adorned his left cheek.

“Oh hello, hello, Miss Maggie, so very, so very,
very
good to see you! Oh thank you, you are my only visitor this past sennight, so I am so very obliged. Do you know, I shall be out soon, or so my creditors say, if I may believe them, which I am forced to do, I have no choice, you see. How is Charicules? Singing as always, I hope. No birds in here, how I miss my little fellows, excepting the poor pigeons that find their way through the holes in the roof, can’t fly back out. The lads in here trap them, turn them into dinner.”

Maggie brought out a basket containing a small roast chicken, a loaf of bread (with whipped butter), and a roast onion, a gift from Cook. To bring it in, Maggie had bribed the jail guard using her own pin money. Gandy’s eyes went wide, his nostrils likewise. He inhaled the smell of the chicken and onion, and then let out a sigh crinkled with laughter and tears.

They talked of minor things, the latest sayings from the London streets, novelties of expression, curiosities and quiddities, while Mr. Gandy ate. He tried to be polite but could barely contain himself, sometimes putting a second and even third bite in his mouth before finishing his first. Maggie fully understood the needs of the stomach, and was—truth be told—impressed with his futile attempts at genteel behavior for her sake under such brutal conditions.

When Mr. Gandy finished, having eaten every scrap and ounce, he said, “Now, tell me Miss Maggie, more about those dreams of yours, the ones you began to tell me about on your last visit to my palace here, about the very pale man in his very red coat, he sounds so delicious and divine, the one who flickers, shimmers in your mind.”

Maggie and Mr. Gandy talked until evening began to come on. He looked stunted, attenuated, as the shadows lengthened, a dreamer caught in a very wrong dream. The other inmates made lewd comments about Maggie, and from some other room came a muffled moaning.

Just before she left, Maggie handed Mr. Gandy a small, thin empty bottle, with a cork, the sort of bottle apothecaries use for individual sales of powders and solutions. Maggie had gleaned it from a scrap pile on one of her roamings through Clerkenwell and Holborn (despite the improvement in her clothing, passers by did not see her as a lady or any other variety of respectable person; the one advantage in that being the freedom it allowed Maggie to move about on her own and explore some of the queerer parts of London). Maggie grinned as Mr. Gandy pulled the cork and shook the bottle up and down.

“It’s Essence of Isaak,” she laughed. “I had Isaak breathe into the bottle, then stopped it up. Just for you!”

The two of them laughed until tears came. The other inmates hooted at first but quieted in the face of genuine and unperturbable emotion. Their snickers (“oddster loves blackbird,” that sort of thing) petered out.

On her way out, Maggie watched the charity boys lining up in their blue coats at Christ’s Hospital across the street from the prison. She scanned their faces—anxious, bold, dulled, alert—and remembered walking not so long ago in her charity jacket at St. Macrina’s.

From the debtors prison in Smithfield near Newgate it was only a short walk to the house with the dolphin door-knocker in Mincing Lane. As always, Maggie marvelled at the proximity of the two worlds, one world really with a top and a bottom tightly if sometimes invisibly wound together, inextricably entangled.

As she walked the short width of the City that evening, Maggie also noticed other things. She caught sight of wizened faces staring down at her from behind chimney-pots, gnarled hands clutching roof-beams. In the crowds were figures that slipped and sidled away when she turned to see straight on what her peripheral vision had glimpsed. In the mouths of alleys were eyes that flashed unnatural colours as she passed by, eyes that receded into the gloom, in the manner of predatory fish pulling back into their grottoes when deciding that the creature before them is too strong to be prey. Behind the normal cries of London at even-tide, beneath the calls of rooks home-bound for steeples, under the tolling of the bells, was a slurred note, and scufflings and scritchings as if centipedes had mated with rats in the walls, and a shobbling as of too many mouths at a trough.

She noticed everywhere—obscured in plain sight—chalkings on walls and pavements, daubs of murky colour, and here and there affixed to grates or hanging from lampposts pieces of carved wood nailed together, leather pouches filled with rattly things and shooks of withered wheat bound with horsehair. She could not read the symbols fluently but she knew them for what they were: trollish calligraphy, etchings by the Owl’s folk, wayposts for the half-fallen as they sought to map London onto the hours and liturgy contained in their own looking-glass version of the psalter.

Maggie shivered—not for herself, since she could rout the gathering ones with a few casual notes of her song, but for the innocents of London, walking about their streets, scrapping for their livings, ignorant of the forces marshalling in their midst.

“I’ve been to set a warning on the Owl, that
akakpo
. ’Tis time to rouse our Mother from her sleep.”

Maggie sat long that night mardling in the kitchen with Cook, feeding tidbits to Isaak.

[Letter in full from Elizabeth Darcy, née Bennet, to Sally]

                       
, 1817

(Honouring the Three-Fold Feast of St. Anne)

My dearest Sally:

Our friendship continues to be an importance to me; I will not see it marred or disturbed, though I suspect some of what I write below will test your feelings for me. Please, dear one, know that I write only with your best interests at heart, and would never do anything knowingly to harm you or your family.

I discussed at great length and in utmost seriousness with Mr. Darcy your proposal that we invest a substantial sum in the building of the
Indigo Pheasant
at the Blackwall yard. Alas, we cannot, for many reasons good and solid. As you are a merchant’s niece—and, in your commercial perspicacity, practically a merchant in your own right—and because I so value your affection, I spell out here those reasons in greater detail than I would for another correspondent.

* We have lately had to assist my uncle and aunt, the Gardiners of Gracechurch Street, whom you know well are themselves investors in the
Indigo Pheasant
. My uncle lost a not inconsiderable sum—as I believe you have heard—on an entire cargo of oranges and lemons that, defying all rational explanation, went rotten in the course of a single night.

* We must set aside funds for my remaining sisters’ dowries. I will hear no end of it from my mother if Kitty and Mary cannot present possible suitors with impressive dowries, while I have it in my means to help them.

* Mr. Darcy’s aunt, the Lady de Bourgh, has still not forgiven him for marrying me. As a result (and here I will spare you the details, as it has most to do with a more familial matter, as I am sure you will understand), she has sued us over certain monies, rights and appurtenances—a spiteful action, and one that I do not believe she can prevail in, but nevertheless an affair we at Pemberley must take seriously to the extent of allocating some of our finances towards her suit, as a contingency. (Am I not sounding like a merchant now myself? You have taught me well!)

* Finally, let me say that Mr. Darcy’s readily available means are far less than many might surmise, given the wealth over which he does dispose. Most of our wealth is tied up in our rent-rolls. Most of our leases were set before passage of the Corn Law in 1815 which established a minimum price for wheat, etc., which means—as you surely know—that our leases do not reflect the increased value of the land. Our tenant-farmers enjoy long leases; we cannot re-negotiate for years to come in many cases.

Pray do not think ill of me for what I feel compelled to say next. Mr. Darcy also felt disinclined to invest so long as you continue to consort with Mr. Kidlington—he says Mr. Kidlington reminds him far too much of Mr. Wickham. I cannot but agree with my husband on this point—and you know how capable I am of disagreeing with Mr. Darcy on so many other points! Please be the sensible Sally I knew when first we became friends—do not allow this Mr. Kidlington to assume too much influence in your life, as I fear his behaviour is not above conjecture and his brashness may lead you both into errancy.

I know you read these words now with a hotness on your brow and a tart response leaping to your lips. Please, do not allow my words to call down such a rugosity of spirit as to strain our friendship.

Allow me to explain myself more fully, and in person over tea, at your convenience next week when I am in town. Come to me at the Elvaston suites by Grosvenor, or else we can meet at Hatchards.

You can tell me then more about progress (as I know it will be) on the
Indigo Pheasant
, and also about your application for patents (which is most exciting news—I have never heard of a woman doing any such thing). Also, please remind me to tell you about a Mrs. Goethals, a widow who is part of a merchant house recently established here from Germany. She has also been advertising for investment into the
Indigo Pheasant
, which is confusing at the very least, and has in particular been asking me and others in “the Grosvenor set” about you and your family. Though she is perfectly charming and correct in her bearing, there is something unsettling about the manner in which she pursues her questions.

With much love,
your affectionate friend Lizzie

P.S. Thank you for referring me to Wornum the maker of pianofortes. We have ordered two from him: one for Mary at Longbourn and one for Georgianna here at Pemberley.