The Choir Boats (17 page)

The longer they stayed, the more the McDoons felt at home,
embraced by the oddness of the house itself. The oddness, Sally
decided, was paradoxically a familiar oddness, like a dream one
forgets in the morning but remembers in the afternoon. “Or like the
glimpse of a bumblebee in the flowers,” she thought as she watched
Isaak stalk something in the garden. “Only the bumblebee is violet
or purple. Familiar but not.”

The garden contained more secrets than the smilax. Its upper
reaches, as it extended into the foothills of Table Mountain, were
given over to massive hedges that created a maze. “We call it a
doolhoff
in Dutch,” said the Mejuffrouw. “‘Confusion garden,’ you
could say in English.”

“The hedges are very old,” said her husband. “They were here
before we arrived.”

“Oh, long, long before we arrived,” said the Mejuffrouw.

“Indeed,” agreed Cornelius. “Legend has it that these hedges have
roots that go down for miles.”

“Well,” said the Mejuffrouw. “As for that, it seems that the
hedges have no roots at all, since I would swear — yes, swear — that
the paths in the maze change from season to season.”

“The Mejuffrouw is right,” agreed her husband. “And sometimes
the hedges rustle as if with wind when all else is still in the
garden.”

“I am not so sure of
that
,” said the Mejuffrouw, her sea-grey eyes
twinkling. “But I do know that the birds won’t nest in the
doolhoff
.”

The house held secrets as well. At the far end of the library,
behind a lacquered Chinese screen, was an alcove full of curios and
souvenirs left over the years by appreciative guests. The alcove was
a jumble, what the cook would have called “a right hember-dember
auction.” Stuffed animals (including a baboon that Isaak liked to
challenge) competed for table space with rock specimens, antelope
horns, seashells, ivory figures, porcelain, and carvings from the East
Indies. Nearly every inch of wall space right to the ceiling and almost
down to the floor was covered with paintings, prints, silhouette
drawings, medallions, fine textiles, ladies’ fans, and more.

“Figs and fiddles,” Barnabas said to the Mejuffrouw one day,
as he bent over to examine a silhouette drawing. “Is this really Sir
Barrow?”

“
Bien sur
,” said the Mejuffrouw. “I remember him well: tall and
thin, with deep eyes. You cannot see his eyes in the silhouette, of
course, but you would always remember them if you had seen them.
He stayed with us for a long time back in, let’s see, it must have been
’01. This was his base when he wrote his book about the Cape. We
have a copy here, inscribed by him.”

“Figs and fiddles,” said Barnabas again, whistling. “The Second
Secretary of the Admiralty, Sir John Barrow himself, only I guess he
wasn’t yet the Second Secretary then, but no matter! Wonderful! I
shall have to tell Sanford.” Barnabas grimaced, wishing he could tell
Tom too and remembering how much Tom loved the Navy.

His gaze landed on a small, carved box. With a start, Barnabas
reached down. “Sandalwood,” he said. “Lovely, lovely example this is
of Indian art. Do you know where it comes from?”

“Bombay,” said the Mejuffrouw, looking intently at Barnabas.

“I thought as much!” said Barnabas. He turned the box over and
over, opened its lid, admired the fine jointry, surreptitiously inhaled
as much of the sandalwood smell as he could. He felt the pressure of
the Mejuffrouw’s deep grey gaze. “Do you remember who gave this
to you?”

“
Bien sur
, I remember the givers of all these gifts,” said the
Mejuffrouw. “An Indian merchant, his wife, and their niece stopped
here from Oman. They were taking the girl for special schooling.”

“Ah,” said Barnabas. He ran his hand over the lid of the box. “Just
reminded me, this box did, of something . . . someone.”

The Mejuffrouw said nothing but Barnabas was acutely aware
of her scanning his face. “I have a box like this at home, you see,”
Barnabas said, looking at the box and not at the Mejuffrouw. “Back
at Mincing Lane. Gave me a turn, that’s all, to see a similar one
here.”

The Mejuffrouw nodded, as if she had heard the answer to a
question she had long asked herself. “Come,” she said. “Perhaps that
is enough for today. You look sad now, and that is not what we want
you to be in the Last Cosy House. Come out to the veranda where the
birds are. Sally is there, you can tell
her
about Sir John Barrow.”

Sally pretended great interest in her uncle’s description of Sir
John Barrow, but she was far away in troubled thoughts. The night
before she had dreamed a vision that not even the cosy magic of the
Gezelligheid could keep away.

Like the pelicans on the beach here
, she thought.
I am flying, gliding
like a pelican above a bay, as far above the water as the spire-top of St.
Jakobi’s in Hamburg, or maybe even St. Paul’s dome in London. Why I am
not frightened, I do not know! But then I am frightened because there is
no moon in the sky. No moon!

She knew with the certainty dreams give that the moon was
not simply full-waned or in eclipse. The moon, in this sky, was not.
Ahead she saw a promontory plunging into the bay, with waves
rolling around its base. She floated just over the promontory. The
outthrust land was smooth towards the sea but its interior was
ridged and wrinkled. The landmass behind it was heavily wooded,
but the small cape itself was grass- or moss-covered except for five
massive, wind-twisted trees, four in a square and one at the entrance
to a structure in the middle of the square.

A building with a fissured roof and pillars dislodged, made of white
stone, marble maybe
, recalled Sally.
A temple, a place for offerings
and thanksgiving and grief. No one there, not on land or at sea, not in
the forest, not on the lawn, not in the temple, but then I heard voices,
hundreds of voices
.

Sally was certain they sang in a language not English but that
their words were being translated in the dream for her benefit.

A kiss for the wind in the moonlight,

A thief made bold, in the unbright.

Ride away, run away, run away, hide.

Then she woke up. She wondered at the words and the voices that
spoke them. The accent was, she remarked this particularly, a deep
Northern one, so that “unbright” came out as “oon-bright,” and so
rhymed with “moonlight.” She thought it funny how spellings didn’t
always answer to the sounds of words, as when the Purser spelled
his name “Salmius Nalmius” but pronounced it “Salms Nalms.”

When she had the same dream three nights in a row, Sally decided
she had to tell the others. The captain emeritus from Yount was, for
the first time since any of them had met him, nonplussed. He looked
at Sally with something bordering on awe, and — Sally thought — a
streak of fear deep in his eyes.

“How you could see this, or be shown this I do not know,” said
Nexius Dexius. “You saw the most holy place in all Yount: the Sign
of the Ear.”

“The Ear!” Barnabas said. “That is the place where I am to be
exchanged for Tom! Where the Cretched Man will meet us, that
devil.”

Sally said, “The promontory
was
like a giant wrinkled ear
protruding from the mainland.”

“Yes,” said the man from Yount. “But it is hard to see that except
from a high place.”

“I saw a row of hills on the mainland, like a necklace around a fat
throat,” said Sally. “Only ears don’t have throats.”

“Yes,” said Nexius. “Those hills are the
Mavkuzem monhudde
.” He
paused, looked to the Termuydens.

“Hills of the Temple,” said the Mejuffrouw.

“We have many stories about the Sign of the Ear,” Nexius said.
“Some believe that it is the ear of the god who brought us to Yount.
Only her ear remains above the ground, the rest of her under the
earth, sleeping but always listening to the
sasa serxim
, prayers, of
her people above the earth.”

Sally leaned forward. “That’s why the temple is there — to bring
the prayers directly into the ear of God.”

“Yes,” said Nexius. “That is the reason. We must pray to her
because only she can take us away again, make Yount free, bring us
to the place we are supposed to be.”

“But then why was the temple deserted, ruined?” said Sally. “If
you need to pray to God directly for . . . ?”

Nexius put his hands on his collarbones and bowed his head,
looking pained as he said, “We do not all agree in Yount, any more
than you do here in Karket-soom. We’ve had terrible wars. You can
hear all about these from the Learned Doctors if we reach Yount. For
now, it is enough to know that the temple has been broken.”

Sanford thought, “
God created man in his own image . . . male and
female created he them
.” He shook his head and asked, “You say ‘she’
and ‘her.’ How can that be?”

Nexius shrugged and said, “The god we pray to in Yount is a
Mother, not a Father. I cannot explain better than that.”

Before Sanford could query him again, Nexius turned to Sally
and asked, “You saw the five trees?”

“Yes,” she said. “A quincunx with one tree and the temple in the
middle.”

“And the trees had their leaves?” asked Nexius.

“Yes.”

“There is our hope,” he said. “As long as the trees are alive, we
believe that the temple can be rebuilt. The trees must live, and the
moon must return. The key is to help bring us back the moon.”

A shiver passed through Sally. No moon! There was no moon in
Yount!

That evening, as he prepared for sleep, Barnabas looked hard at
the key, turning it over and over in his palm. “Buttons and beeswax,”
he said, and gave a low whistle. “A key to bring back the moon. No
wonder the Cretched fellow and the Wurm-brute want it. Strange
though, it hardly looks like it would open the door to the attic in
Mincing Lane, let alone draw down the moon. . . . Ah, the Man in
the Moon came down too soon . . .” And then, grasping the key, he
fell asleep.

Sally’s dream, especially when it returned to her twice more,
broke the spell of calm cast by the Gezelligheid. Sally tried to delay
the onset of sleep by spending hours gazing at the stars and the
moon, “lunaticking” as Tom had called it in London to tease her.
The Gezelligheid had a star-walk around the cupola at the peak of
its roof. Sally lost herself for hours in the heavens, the clarity and
immensity of which were unlike anything she could see in London.
James Kidlington joined her once or twice, but the Mejuffrouw was
Sally’s steady companion as the moon waxed and waned and the stars
wheeled. Looking north, Sally and the Mejuffrouw on December
nights saw the Milky Way running in a great arc from the northwest
to the southeast. The Pleiades and Aldebaran in Taurus shone
brightly in the middle sky, pointing to Orion’s Belt and, brightest
of all, Sirius overhead. Turning around, they could see Fomalhaut,
Achernar, and Canopus — the Three Torches — aligned just above
the rim of Table Mountain. Something tugged at Sally’s mind as
she looked at these stars. She traced the lines of the stars, and kept
coming back to Adhara, the Virginal Star, outshone in Canis Major
by Sirius: Adhara was a seventh star, sitting at the intersection of
the lines formed by Aldebaran-Orion’s Belt-Sirius and the Three
Torches. Adhara the Maiden also looked at the Mother, Maia in the
Pleiades, just to the northwest of Aldebaran. Melody and meaning
hid in the pattern: “
This
picture,
this
gathering of the stars,” Sally
murmured. “But why, and for what?”

The moon rose, fuller and fuller, an old friend to ease Sally’s
fears of dreaming and her frustration with the patterns in the stars.
The moon illuminated the garden maze, the Doolhoff, behind the
Gezelligheid. Sally thought for a moment that the pattern of the
maze matched that of the stars centred on Adhara overhead, but
then the pattern disappeared or the hedges moved or the moon
shadows shifted, Sally was not sure.

“‘You Moon,’” she said, quoting the great German poet. “‘Your
mild eye gazes over my fate, as I wander between joy and pain in
loneliness; what I know not wanders in the night through the
labyrinth of the heart.’” The Mejuffrouw, remembering her own
youth, put her hand on Sally’s shoulder and led the young McDoon
back inside.

The McDoons and Nexius grew ever more anxious to voyage on
to Yount.

“Still no word from the
Gallinule
,” Nexius announced glumly each
day.

“Wheat and whiskey!” said Barnabas. “And worse!”

Sally was the only one whose sense of urgency was blunted. She
spent most of her time with Kidlington, usually under the discreetly
watching eyes of the British regimental soldiers standing guard
around the Gezelligheid. Sally and Kidlington talked of everything.
Sometimes the topics were intellectual: medicine, politics, the works
of Erasmus Darwin or the postulates of Malthus.

“I am not at fault, Tom,” she whispered to herself. “I do not tarry.
The ship has not come.”

One Thursday, Sally and Kidlington were in the Gezelligheid
garden, in the swings attached to a yellowwood the Termuydens
called “L’Escarpolette.” The sun washed the yellowwood and the
jacaranda trees, and made Isaak glow as she pounced across the
grass. Through a screen of flowering bushes could be seen one of the
regimental guards.

Kidlington sighed. “I am content, Mamsell McLeish. Here with
you and in this place, I am held in a nutshell yet feel myself king of
the universe.”

“Hold, Mr. Kidlington,” said Sally, laughing. “You run too fast!”

“No, I speak truly,” protested Kidlington. “Your presence is the
cure for the canker of my discontent. I envy you McDoons, and
would like nothing more than to be the most humble planet in your
family’s solar system, the merest Uranus, a late-comer and outrider
yet still held by your attraction.”