The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (39 page)

“Cannot find its way through the Interrugal Lands,” said Sally by way of explanation. “It will drift a-wandering without these parts of its machinery.”

“We can, of course, have them re-made and re-fitted,” said Maggie. “But that will mean several more months delay, heaped onto the long delay we already suffer. We would most likely be unable to replace these parts before winter sets in.”

“Which means missing yet another sailing season,” said Sanford.

Maggie nodded.

They surveyed the theft.

“The
Pheasant
’s in-sung defenses would not suffer any of the Owl’s people to pass,” said Maggie.

“No,” said Sally, an uneasy recognition blossoming within her.

“The
Pheasant
would only allow someone into its most vital places whom it knows and trusts,” said Maggie.

“Someone who, in turn, knows the inner workings of the
Pheasant
,” said Sally. “Intimately.”

The small group standing in the Fulgination Room said no more but shared looks told each person that the others were thinking the same thing. The name of one person, and one person alone, had formed and crystallized in their minds.

“Not you . . .” Sally thought.

That person’s name never entered the accounts of the Battle, cursory as they were. The Home Office started an investigation but dropped it when the Peterloo Massacre a month later in Manchester superseded the Battle in the minds of the public. (The Admiralty Lord had a quiet word with the Home Secretary and with the Lord-Chancellor, just to be sure the affair was forgotten). The important inquiries were conducted by those much closer to the events.

“Here then, Billy,” said the cook the following week, handing Billy a copy of
Clarke’s Weekly Observer & Miscellany
. “Did you really say what is reported here? Something about ‘a worm with great veiny wings and teeth like hot pokers,’ coming to eat up small children?”

“Well, somewhat like that,” began Billy.

“Well, by Saint Morgaine, I never,” interrupted the Cook. “No wonder you stirred up such a fuss, Billy Sea-Hen! You cannot go around scaring your parishioners, you know, with sermons like that!”

“No, I mean . . .” said Billy. “You know it wasn’t me. It was that scoundrel Peasestraw at the start, and then the awl-rawny took advantage of the confusion to send in his monster-folk. I never meant any of that mess to happen, especially not the deaths of those brave lads. You know that. You know that, right?”

The Cook put her ample arms around his neck, looked him square in the eye, and said, “Billy Sea-Hen, prince of Queenhithe, as I live and breathe! Of course, I know that, of course I do.”

She kissed him on the lips. Billy blushed.

“Wondrous day, an old dumbledore can still learn a new trick!” he said, and then returned the kiss.

The one report that deeply interested Sir John was a very confidential memo prepared by Captain Shufflebottom on the remains of the creatures that had attacked the
Indigo Pheasant
. Most of the fallen Others had dissolved in the first dawn’s tweenlight, leaving little more than scattered teeth and bones, streaks, smears, and olivaceous sludge on the ground to attest to their having been present at all. Dr. Murray at Guy’s & St. Thomas’s Hospital examined the bones, declaring little about them to be human (“e.g., lacking diaphyseal trabeculae, possessing dual rather than singular linea aspera, tibia and fibula fused in several cases, a sacrum with three—not the requisite five—fused vertebrae”). More interesting still was the discovery of tunnels bored into the embankments all around the western flanks of the East India Docks and the northern aspects of the Blackwall Shipyard, tunnels containing digging and cutting tools made of alloys that no one at the time could identify, bits of parchment (covered with pnakotic script), glaucous bottles filled with dried herbs, nettles and the bones of small animals, and miniature lead coffins.

(Shufflebottom’s report is marked “highly confidential” to the present day. An addendum was written in 1893, when the boring of the Blackwall Tunnel at the south side of the East India Dock Road, uncovered various, still-unnamed items that caused the tunnel-labourers to threaten strike. The Home Office called upon Sherlock Holmes to analyze what was found; his notes are allegedly affixed to the expanded report. A small section of the parchment unearthed is on view in an obscure corner of the British Museum, listed only as “Putatively attributed to the Pnakotic civilization, provenance unknown.”)

Shufflebottom himself held his own counsel. No one had marked him in the hold of the
Indigo Pheasant
on the night of the Battle. He had tracked his quarry through the entire melee, right up until the assault on the tar-house. Forced to join that desperate affray, he had—so uncharacteristically—lost the one he followed.

“Well, well, well,” he had thought while leaving the shipyard unobserved in the dawn’s first light. “Slipped by me this time. Only because I was detained elsewhere. Your very prime fortune. Not the next time. I know you have taken items of essential value, without which the
Indigo Pheasant
cannot fly. But fly she will, mark my words, or my name’s not Shufflebottom.”

He smiled, and adjusted his smoked-glass spectacles. He was Captain Shufflebottom of the Corps Venatical. He knew where his quarry would go, sooner or later.

“I have seen you with the Widow,” Shufflebottom said to himself. “Sooner or later, that’s who you will visit . . . or she will visit you . . . and then I will have you.”

Even as Captain Shufflebottom spoke those words—at dawn on the Sunday morning after the Battle of Blackwall—James Kidlington was in a post-coach on the way out of London. He was wearing the smart grey herringbone suit, with the foulard sportily knotted. He held a large valise on his lap. He was heading to the coaching inn at Slough.

“I am James Kidlington,” he thought. “I have the keys to paradise in my bag here. I have what they all want, and I will make them bargain for it. Bargain hard. The coin I demand will come with an influx of respect, while I collate all the sins and misdemeanours they have committed against me. I will show them all. Every one of them. Teach them they cannot command me as if I were their pet monkey. No, no, am much too clever for them. I diverted Thracemorton, I did. To the devil with the Admiralty. I wish I could see the look on Sir John’s face when he hears this news, oh truly I do.”

London’s western suburbs rolled by.

“The Widow thinks she owns me—‘get the items we agreed to, and come straight away back to me, my darling boy, and I will reward you richly.’ Yes, indeed you will, dearest widow. I know you for what you are. Richly indeed!”

The coach rolled past Gunnersbury and Kew on its way to Slough.

“Slough,” thought James. “Oh Sally. I will call for you here. I cannot live much longer this way. Could your love for me still loiter in your heart? I will call for you.”

The coach passed Hounslow. James patted the valise, could feel the outlines of the items he had gathered off the
Indigo Pheasant
, as well as a pair of pistols.

“We can negotiate with these toys,” he thought. “What will your family care, if they must ransom these back to help you regain your true happiness? I will beg your forgiveness, as you will beg mine—we can start anew. I promise.”

The coach arrived at Slough, to change horses for the journey on to Bath. James descended from the coach and entered the inn. With almost the very last of his pocket money, he rented a room for a week.

“Here, boy,” he said to the ostler’s lad. “Do you see to it that this letter I give you is posted back directly to London. To this address, on Mincing Lane, do you hear?”

James smiled, clutching the valise with its precious cargo.

“I will show you Sally. I will show them all,” he thought.

[From the preamble of
A Modest Treatise on the Art of Fulgination
, by Dorentius Bunce,B.A. Cam., with Notes by Margaret Collins, original draft held in the Admiralty archives, c. 1820]

Though Fulgination is assuredly based upon the most highly defined and sophisticated terms of mathematics and natural mechanics, it is ultimately expressed through the language of music, so that it is truly more an aesthetic endeavour than an abstracted action of logic and rational philosophy. Its finest practitioners understand that the success of their Fulgination depends in the last instance on their ability to conjure forth a sentiment, a sensation of the Sublime, that will cause the dissimilar points of the compass and the unlike elements of the human heart to coalesce into a Unity that delivers the Fulginator and his or her vessel and its contents (along with his or her companions on the journey) to the desired and calculated destination. Fulgination proceeds from general principles, building thereafter upon a wide range of minute experimentations, aleatory probes and bold tatonnement. Put another way, we can also say it is a kind of mapping of empathetic impulses, allowing us to re-order and re-create the Space and Time originally laid down by the Divine, enabling a faithful translation or even re-translation of the World, or a part thereof. The ablest Fulginators will agree that the art uses rhythm and harmony to unite the Outer Corpus and the Inner Essence of a thing, thereby capturing the two-in-one in song, which song is then re-sung in a new space, leaving only empty silence behind.

[From
Notes on Various Styles of Music
, by Muzio Clementi, 1815—a copy of which had many comments written by Sally, and later Maggie]

T
he realization of any significant piece of music must . . . be free from fault in the execution but not at the expense of feeling and character, be supple and lively without being merely ornamental, be sublime without overwhelming or offending the ear and in every respect ingenious without being superficial.

[From
Stoddard’s Cyclopedia of the Arts & Sciences
(London, 1783; second edition, 1805), volumes X and XIV]

Indigo
(from the Latin “
indicum
,” derived from the Greek “
indikon
,” meaning “dye,” highlighting the origins of said colouring agents in India during ancient times): A colour, familiarly deemed to be a sort of blue, but more formally a separate hue, as Newton demonstrated in his
Opticks
—the seventh universally fundamental colour, completing but not entirely subservient to the spectrum, and distinct from the cerulean or cyaneous that is “blue.” Newton connected indigo thus to the seventh note in the Ionian scale of music, the key to augmented unison in harmony, and also to the polynomials of cubic planes in the calculus. As the seventh colour, indigo enjoys notoriety for its eccentricity and idiosyncratic ways. Indigo is the colour uniting but also differentiating the other six in the trichomatic scheme devised by Th. Young; we might say it is akin to the universal solvent among chemical elements or perhaps to the Sabbath as Queen of the Week. The poets consider indigo a fugitive, liminal, well nigh magical species of colour, “a vagrant cool flame/ whose orbit eclipses both sense and sensibility” as Oldmixon has it in
The Caliper’d Heart
. Our divines, influenced in part by Jakob Boehme on the seven days of the Creation, associate indigo with Our Lady, with the intercession of St. Adelsina and with the effulgence of the Beata Carolina. Shewing yet again the universality of revealed wisdom, we learn recently in the translations by Wilkins and Anquetil-Duperron of ancient philosophical texts by the Indians that indigo is the colour of what the Hindoos call “The Third Eye,” which we might call the “divine inspiration.” Likewise the Jesuits have recorded that indigo is the colour the Chinese philosophers reserve for “the most subtle of understandings, those that translineate worlds and find meaning in oblique spaces between other, more commonplace destinations” (to quote Staunton in his newest work).

Pheasant
(from the Old French, “
faisan
”, derived from Greek “
phasianos
” via Latin “
phasianus
”, possibly from the same root as “
phase
,” meaning “to appear, to make visible, to shine,” primarily used in reference to the moon; compare also “phantasm,” from the same root): A bird of the gallinaceous sort, characterized by bright and splendid plumage (typically variegated, with lunules and reticulated patterns), a bristly retractile crest, a long stiff graduated tail, and sharp unciate tarsal spurs with which it defends itself against all foes. Sometimes called “the Egypt Bird,” for its pharaonic appearance. The origins of the pheasant are mysterious. Buffon believes that the pheasant is the source for the tale of the phoenix in Pliny. Cuvier supposes that the Argonauts brought the pheasant to Europe from Colchis in Asia Minor. Alain of Lille writes in
The Complaint of Nature
: “The pheasant, after it had endured the confinement of its natal island, flew into our worlds . . .” Chaucer, in
The Parliament of Fowls
, his revision of Scipio’s Dream, attributes strange powers to the pheasant. Hemmelincx in
Seven Spheres
refers to the pheasant’s mutability and even hermaphroditic qualities, as suggested by its secondary designation of “tiercel-hen.” All authors agree on the pheasant’s hardy, robust nature, its wary shrewdness, and its unerring ability to navigate hidden paths, mussets and small-ways amongst brambles, hedgerows and the like.