The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 (21 page)

“Sit and mardle a piece with me, Miss Maggie?”

The two talked for a time, while Isaak lapped at her milk.

“I don’t suppose Miss Sally is upstairs, is she?” asked Cook.

“No. She is out again this evening.”

“You know, it may not be my place to say so, but I think this house would feel better in its bones and kidneys if you and Miss Sally were on better terms. Meaning no disrespect there, of course.”

“I try, I really do,
chi di
,” said Maggie, reaching out to help Cook polish the forks. “But Sally won’t have me. Surely you see that, you who know her best.”

“Hey-along there, Miss Maggie,” said Cook, with a smile but gently pushing away Maggie’s offer of help. “You have no need to do that. My place to clean the forks and all the rest of this.”

Maggie smiled in reply.

“On the matter of Miss Sally,” said Cook, returning to the topic. “My head has hattled long on her, and on you, these past months. Here is what I reckon: she thinks you will take her place.”

Maggie rose in protest, saying, “But I barely feel a part of this house, as it is!
Me
, take over
her
place?”

They talked a long while. As Maggie made to leave, the Cook said, “When we sift and shred it, the fact is: Miss Sally
fears
you are taking her place. She thinks you are trying to steal something from her.”

“By Macrina, I don’t want to steal
anything
from
anybody
,” said Maggie, loudly. “Why would she think that? Except maybe because . . . why do so many white folks think blacks are thieves?”

The Cook looked uncomfortable. Just before Maggie left the kitchen, Cook blurted out: “I thought so too, when you first came here! I took to countin’ the spoons and such.”

A hole opened in the air between the two. Maggie stood so still that Isaak might have been forgiven for thinking her a statue.

“What would you have me say?” said Maggie, crossing her arms.

“By Morgaine, I am so ashamed,” said the Cook. “I don’t even think about counting spoons or any such things now. Can you forgive me?”

Maggie did not answer right away. At length she said, wearily, “Yes, I can . . . but not straight off, not at this moment. In my own time.”

Cook looked simultaneously miserable and relieved, saying, “I understand, I do. My confession tastes yarrish in my mouth.”

“Not half so bitter as it does in mine upon hearing you,” said Maggie. Then—stately as a queen, with astringent grace—she walked out of the kitchen.

Two nights after the Cook’s sad, embarrassed confession, Maggie took the battle to the Owl. On tiger’s feet, she strode through the long-case clock in the shrouded house on Hoxton Square.

The Owl was shocked. No one, in all his endless memory, had ever walked through that gate without his invitation or else being under his orders. Despite himself, he admired her bravery and wondered at her skill. How had Maggie sung herself through the mazy gate, over the wickets and hurdles, past the wide-awake guardians? What song had she sung to unlock the locks, unbolt the bolts?

He bowed. His black-red lips stretched very wide in a sardonic smile, he said that her audacity was out of all proportion to her frame, and that her impudence was matched only by what he called “the finitude of her strength.”

Maggie did not bow in turn. Putting her hands on her hips, she surveyed the interior of the Owl’s earthly demesne. Completely against her will, she found herself admiring his taste in furnishings: the subtly carved oak armoire (dolorous faces, their tongues sticking out; a phoenix wreathed in ivy); snakes and frowning dolphins twining the candelabra, gleaming in the candlelight; dark grey draperies patterned with chevrons the sweet, deathly red of bryony; a hanging in pale slate bordered with symmetrical rust-coloured pilcrows; the ceiling painted, a great oval, slightly cupped, with a procession of robed figures bearing books, staffs, carpenter’s tools, sextants and musical instruments, led by a man dressed in sheeny satin white, with on his head a red mitre, carrying before him in both hands a monstrance, the ensemble surrounded by solemn putti; another wall covered almost entirely by a map of the world, delicate black and umber inkings on sepia, a multitude of sea-horses and spouting physeters in the seas, elephants with impossibly long trunks, insouciant smooth-legged camels and shaggy lions disporting themselves in the corners; engravings of fleeing nymphs being transformed into trees and birds, centaurs being shot with arrows, other forms of martyrdom ancient and modern, Saint Anthony in the desert, comets over cities with conical towers, annunciations, Saint Fulgentius at his labours. She let her gaze linger on the many, overflowing bookcases.

Swinging out his right arm in an elegant arc, the Owl said, “A universe of knowledge, all yours for the taking, if you just accept a few words of recommendation from me.”

Maggie said, “I can take whatever knowledge I want, without your recommendations, without conforming in any fashion to your will.”

The Strix regarded her. He rubbed his long lean white hands (a meticulous silken twist of his fingers), shifted slowly from foot to foot. He wondered—and was amazed to be so wondering—what she had come to do: interrogate him, warn him, command him,
threaten
him? He thrilled to the novel feeling that the game had turned to confront its pursuer.

Maggie hummed a small theme, that uncurled around the room as if inspecting the engravings, the map, the putti on the ceiling.

“You cannot win,” said the Owl, hooting in the back of his throat. “You are all alone in this foolish quest.”

Words, faint, indistinguishable, entered Maggie’s hum. The Owl blinked twice, brinched his globular head sidewise.

“Your so-called family,” continued Wurm. “Do you really think the white people trust you? Respect you? Let alone love you? Hoom, you are no more than a ragged shadow that has somehow come attached to them.”

Maggie paused, her song dwindling back to a hardly audible hum.

“Yes, you see that, don’t you?” said Wurm. “Mrs. Sedgewick, as one example very close to home, so solicitous when you were naught but her plaything: does she visit you now; does she invite you into her own drawing room?”

Maggie said, “I myself am not so friendly towards Mrs. Sedgewick, I cannot refute that, but what you did was cruel, exceeding so. She did not deserve such.”

The Owl laughed and said, “‘Deserve’ has nothing to do with it. Do you deserve
her
antipathy, her scorn? She blames
you
for what befell her. Someone else breaks the window, but she blames you for the glass that shattered into her eye.”

Maggie started her song again, wisps of melody that barely escaped the Owl’s swiping hands.

“Sally mocks you,” hoomed the Wurm. “She writes and receives letters in German, knowing you cannot read the language. She never includes you on her calls, in her meetings—she is credited with all your invention, all the fruits of your genius. No one has heard of you, except in a backhanded, bored way; they view you (to the extent they see you at all) as a freak, a ‘Calibanna’ who has learned a few tricks for the parlour. No one will ever believe your claims to original thought. Where is your invitation to breakfast with the great Sir Joseph Banks? Do you sit with Sally when she visits the Royal Institution?”

The Owl crushed with his long, adroit fingers Maggie’s incipient motet. He made a tremendous gulping sound, and his chest hove up.

Maggie staggered back. She remembered her lone visit to the Royal Institution, a month earlier. She could hardly sleep the night before. Sanford had escorted her. An excitable young man—an acolyte of Davy—had lectured on advances in chemistry, especially the recent discoveries of barium, iodine, magnesium, potassium, and (her two favourites) niobium and colianasthium (which the speaker advocated calling “terentium”). What she most recalled, however, was not the content of the lecture, but the fact of her being the only dark face in the audience. White heads turned constantly to stare at her, dozens of viscounts, bishops, bannerets and banneresses, pointing, snickering, sending her (and Sanford) a thousand darts of icy, margravine pettiness.

Dear old Sanford. Maggie realized she was very fond of him. Perhaps ‘fond’ was too emollient a word; she would need to think of one more fitting. Sitting by her side, the two of them isolated in the back of the Institution hall, Sanford had pointedly ignored all the gaping, all the whispers. Sanford, she decided, was like an old medlar-fruit: tough and acerbic on the outside but, with time and mellowing (“bretting” is what Cook called it), his inner core turned soft and sweet.

Sally had ostentatiously decided not to attend the Institution that evening, despite being somewhat familiar with the speaker. Maggie remembered that too.

“Do not pretend to deny it,” said the Wurm. “You are condemned otherwise to suffer the delusions of Hope’s lacquered mime.”

The Owl advanced on her, arms outstretched, slowly swooping, his mouth a slit to swallow her.

Maggie stumbled backwards. The long-case clock, tunking and tinking to the rhythm of a distant place, pressed against her back and would not admit her.

Then, faint but sure, she heard Charicules singing—a nightingale far off, his assuasive tune unabridged and never ending. Small harlequin herald of the Great Mother, sing on! Farther off still, the Mother sighed and smiled in her long dream.

The Owl hesitated, veered away. Maggie pushed herself off the tall case of the huge clock, and stood so erect that she cast no shadow by the candlelight.

“Hollow-throated dragon-owl,” she sang. “See how you by the wick of your tongue bring up venom to scorch me, and how it does me no harm! Hear you how the Mother anoints me even as she sleeps? Oh yes, you feel that, I know you do. Who is deluded now, spiry worm?”

The Strix took a small step backwards, eyes blazing. He closed his mouth.

“I am beyond you, Old One,” sang Maggie, a deep, rapid trill that gained strength in the singing. “For all your grey-wether wisdom, you do not understand me. I re-fortune brass with my singing, annealing it with melody so smooth that one’s fingers are cut by the air when they leave the surface of the metal. I read a sundial by moonlight, etching with my madrigal the mathematics I derive there. I sing now the
abu oma
, a psalm of steam flowing through the whorled chamber and of the cylinder turning, of the wheels so finely made they define for us anew the word ‘circle.’ Nay, Old Nightmare, I am a student of new things, while you have passed your meridian—your philosophy vinewed, your insights decayed.”

The Owl retreated no further, but neither did he move towards her. In the deepest part of his mind, he experienced for the second time within an hour an emotion he had not felt for eons. First astonishment, now fear—the faintest flutterings of fear.

“Hoom, hoom, human,” he boomed. “I am a Dominion in the hierarchy that precedes the creation of your world. My time is always and forever.”

Maggie’s song beat down upon the Owl’s shoulders and head.

“I sing now of your sin—which was indecision and cowardice,” sang Maggie. “You sided in your heart with the rebellious ones, but you did not dare to declare yourself openly. Oh no, both sides derided you in the cataclysmic struggle, did they not? And still do, since that struggle is not ended. Lucifer will ever be remembered, proudly pent in his hell, but you—half-fallen, vicious but timid—you are just quaint mummery. Yours will only be a cenotaph, an empty tomb with its name effaced. I, on the other hand,
I
am very decisive. I will sing myself and all of my people free.”

The Owl surged forward, with such wells of malevolence in his round eyes that the clock stopped ticking.

Maggie sang even louder, with notes pure and true.

The Owl grappled with the air around her, but could not seize his prey.

Maggie smiled as she sang. The clock, starting up again, yielded this time to her, as she stepped backwards without taking her eyes off the Owl.

“Old Owl,” she sang. “
Chi di
, your day is coming very soon now.”

She stepped back through the clock. The Owl was rebuffed, could not follow her.

That night, residents in and around Hoxton Square trembled in their beds, as anguished groans and cries of rage filled the air.