The party continued its vivacious course, all the more so for the many who believed the episode with Mr. Kidlington to be just another of the eccentric entertainments planned by Mrs. Sedgewick, but a tumultuous pall had settled upon the McDoons, who made to leave just minutes after James’s departure.
“Sally, sweet friend, I miscalculated and I am heartily sorry for that,” whispered Mrs. Sedgewick.
“You could not know,” said Sally. “At least, not in full.”
The McDoons left. No one—not the McDoon party, not the Sedgewicks—noticed that, silent on the periphery of the audience in the entrance hall, Maggie had stood listening to every word of the exchange with Kidlington. Late into the night, as she washed dishes in the kitchen long after all the guests had left and the Sedgewicks retired to bed, Maggie mulled the tale told by Kidlington. Mostly she considered what she felt was missing in what she had heard.
“Chi di,” she murmured to herself, all alone except for the battery of pans and utensils. “Kidlington is a puzzle—there’s a much larger story just below the surface of his fine words. I sense the mark of the Owl on him, and also something else. The McDoon woman, she too is full of mystery—I know her, I think. She is the white one who sings.”
The lone gas-light sputtered. Maggie looked at her face, distorted and blurred, in the depths of a copper pot.
“Tonight were many meetings, not all of them acknowledged by those who met, selah,” she yawned. “Bammary is no Indian, that I would wager. Mrs. Sedgewick all out of words—a rare thing, never saw that before. Her husband, the little . . .”
Maggie jabbed at the bottom of the pot.
“. . . the fat little weasel, oh yes, he sees much more than he says, or says much but never about the things he wants to hide.”
Dawn was not far off when Maggie finished. The four hours of sleep she would be allowed were all the more precious for being so few.
“Sally is the girl, the one with the cat, the golden cat in the window,” she said just before sleep came. “One of the six I need, the engine needs—with me, that’s seven. ‘For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice, and shall see the plummet in the hand of Zerubbabel with those seven; they are the eyes of the Lord, which run to and fro through the whole earth.’ Oh Mama, the Book speaks truth exactly. And we women, we must be as strong as elephants.”
“Buttons and beeswax,” said Barnabas. “That was a right ra-tat-too last night, meeting Kidlington like that! I don’t think I could take two such blows in a lifetime.”
Barnabas sat with Sanford in the partners’ room in the house on Mincing Lane, taking tea on the afternoon after the party at the Sedgewicks. Everyone had slept late. No one had seen Sally yet, though the Cook had been up to the attic room and left a tray of tea and buttered buns.
“Is Sally going to be alright, do you think?” said Barnabas.
“She will withstand the initial shock,” said Sanford. “More lasting effects, of that we cannot yet say.”
“Hmmm, I fear you are correct, old friend,” said Barnabas, helping himself to another cone of sugar for his tea.
The two sat for a while in the wonted silence of partners, punctuated by the clinks of spoons on teacups and the impartial ticking of the clock on the mantlepiece. Barnabas savoured the smell of the sandalwood box, and let his sight roam over the prints of Rodney defeating the French and of Diana pursuing Actaeon. Sanford looked at the prints of the East Indiamen submerging, reassuring himself that no such shipwreck was imminent for McDoon & Co. Yikes—ageless hound, who seemingly had not moved in all the days and months of their absence—slept by the fireplace, snoring slightly. (Chock the parrot had died while the McDoons had been in Yount). All was as it should be in the house with the blue door and dolphin-knocker on Mincing Lane.
The clock chimed four, echoed at various distances by church bells around the City.
“I say, Sanford, that is four o’clock just gone, and no Sedgewick,” said Barnabas. “You said he was coming at four, I distinctly heard you say that, though I won’t hold it against him, not after that splendid tarra-ma-do last night, and particularly the bottle of Cahors.”
At that moment, the maid opened the door and announced Mr. Sedgewick.
“Gentlemen, as scheduled, as promised,” said the lawyer. “Speaking of Cahors, dear Barnabas, I have brought you a second bottle—a little something to accompany your supper this evening!”
“Most esteemed of colleagues and most capital of men,” said Barnabas. “All forgiven, or rather, nothing to forgive you for! Now, sit, and let us talk more about the Project. For one thing, we have finally named it, the ship that is. We shall call her The Indigo Pheasant. Was Sally who hit upon it, clever girl. So, anyway, you can insert the name into the Articles of Association and all the other legal papers. What, is there something wrong with that name?”
Sedgewick had begun to shake his head about halfway through Barnabas’s statement.
“No, no, that’s not it,” said Sedgewick. “Indigo Pheasant is a perfectly good name. I rather like it in fact, has a cavalier ring. Certainly unusual, without lacking respectability. Strong yet unassuming. I will duly record the name wherever it needs recording. No, nothing to do with the name of the ship.”
“Well, what then? I know that shake of the head and those pursed lips, you have something difficult to divulge. Come on then, after the eye-opener with Kidlington yesterday, I do not believe there is much you could tell us that could surprise us further.”
Sedgewick coughed, the polite sort of cough lawyers use just before they deliver portentous and usually unpleasant news. Sanford made a burring noise in his throat at the same time.
“Ah, figs and feathers, I knew it, you are unmasked the both of you,” said Barnabas. “I saw you two up to some sort of commercial conversation at the rout yesterday, I did—‘a conspiracy,’ that’s what I called it, and now I am proven right. Come on then, out with it.”
“Kidlington’s news—that is, the news that is Kidlington, his resurrection and return and perambulations amongst us—is most definitely an eye-opener,” said Sedgewick. “But you must brace yourself for an even greater revelation than that, friend Barnabas.”
Sedgewick pushed aside his tea cup, opened the satchel sitting between his feet, and brought forth a pile of tawny, flecked and dog-eared papers.
“Barnabas, what I told Sanford last night, is that I need to talk to you today about something other than the Project. Something even more important—yes—and assuredly more needful of prudential action, the discretion of Caesar’s wife, the caution of the most cautious enterpriser in murky waters.”
Barnabas sat back, mystified.
“Pray proceed,” he said.
“Did you happen to notice our new serving girl last night, the black one?” said Sedgewick.
Nothing Sedgewick could say could have nonplussed Barnabas more. In fact, had Sedgewick inquired as to the likelihood of parrots standing for parliament or asserted that the Man on the Moon was coming down for dinner that very evening, Barnabas would have been no more flummoxed.
“I, well, yes,” he said. “But what on earth does that have to do with anything, with anything at all?”
“A great deal, I am afraid,” said Sedgewick. “There being no nice way to express this, I will come simply to the facts. I believe my Africk serving girl is your first cousin once removed, Barnabas, which thus makes her second cousin to Sally and Tom.”
“I . . .” said Barnabas, stroking his vest (snuff-coloured, with dashes of Zoffany red). “Beans and bacon . . .”
“Start at the beginning, Mr. Sedgewick,” said Sanford.
“While you were away, I had some adventures of my own, if I may call them that,” said Sedgewick, closing his eyes. “Nothing as brash or brawny as what I presume you endured, certes, but nevertheless picaresque enough to disturb the equilibrium of my small, lawyerly world. Among other things, a bailiff of Edinburgh’s courts delivered to me the last wi
ll and testament of—be staunch again, Barnabas, here comes another shock—of your mother, Belladonna McDoon, born Brownlee.”
Barnabas stood up, so great was his excitement, nearly overturning his tea cup and the slops-bowl.
“Yes, yes, I know,” said Sedgewick, opening his eyes. “I should have told you earlier but it has been ridiculously hard, even for me, to bring myself to the point. Three times I wrote letters to you on the subject, and thrice I tore them up as being inadequate to the task. I deemed it best to reveal all this in person—and of that judgment I remain convinced, especially now that I see your reaction. Sanford, it was, who cemented my resolve, in the brief conversation you observed us conducting at yestereve’s assembly.”
Sanford poured more tea for Barnabas and said, “To the point now, Sedgewick, to the most acute point you can make of it.”
“Indeed,” said the lawyer. “I will leave for you both the will itself and all the other papers I received; it will take you a while to encompass their entire meaning. But this afternoon, allow me to guide us through the most strange and brocaded of their contents, namely, the events Belladonna relates about her sister.”
“My aunt?” said Barnabas. “The Old McDoon never, ever talked about her, his wife, who died long ago. Some sort of scandal, all hushed up, but my uncle was harsh on absolutely everyone . . .”
“Eusebianna McDoon,” said Sedgewick. “Born Brownlee. Two sisters who married two brothers. Less common now than it was then, but still no seldom thing. Two Brownlees becoming two McDoons.”
Sanford stood, walked to the window with teacup in hand, watching the traffic on Mincing Lane as Sedgewick unreeled the story.
“The two sisters were very close to one another, and united it seems in the odd rumours that swirled about them. Barnabas, I will not yield to superstition, but the statements contained in these papers defy my most reasoned approach. What is clear is that the good burghers of Edinburgh saw the Brownlee sisters as witches, hard as that is to countenance or explain.”
“I have heard something about that, but not while I was a boy,” murmured Barnabas.
“Yes, well, allegations of witchcraft and intercourse with the fairies have never done women any good, not even in this enlightened age. Yet that amounts to no more than relics of a bygone time, a curiosity for the antiquarians. There the matter would rest and have no further concern for you, Barnabas, and the House of McDoon such as it is today, were it not for another matter altogether—assuming the two are not somehow linked in ways obscure.”
Sedgewick pulled out a paper.
“This is a long essay, or memorial, written by your mother, dated not long before she died,” he said. “Listen well:
‘I come now to delicate and disturbing matters that I must commit to paper, as I am the only one who knows the unadorned truth. I write this to honour the memory, and above all the actions, of my beloved sister Eusebianna, and I do so knowing that few will believe what I tell, and those who believe will repudiate the tale and call me liar and worse.
I have absolutely not the least doubt that her husband will deny every word I write and will seek to have my words exposed to the most horrid forms of obloquy, if he can not have them obliterated altogether by the Court or other means that may come to his disposal. I beg the Court not to allow this to happen, i.e., to ensure instead that my statement be entered into the judicial record. In the end, all we have is our honour and the trust of those who love us; so says the Psalmist and likewise Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and many other of the Ancients.
Sibby—for so I called her all her life, as she called me Belle—travelled with her husband, the merchant Anthony Macarius McDoon, to what was then the colony of Maryland in America, in the last years before the rebellion that created the United States. My brother-in-law had business interests there, relating to his import of tobacco, and centred on his quarter-share in the Blair Plantation at the confluence of the Choptank River and the Chesapeake Bay, in the area the colonials called ‘the Eastern Shore.’
The two, having married only months before they sailed from Scotland, settled in rooms within the plantation house (the McDoons being related on their mother’s side to the Blairs). Sibby wrote me eight letters during the initial part of their time there, which I have preserved as being my property (and clearly my sister’s intent was that they should be and remain so in perpetuity, no matter what my brother-in-law has alleged and attempted via this Court);—I attach all eight as adjuncts to this memorial.
What Sibby described in her eight letters veers between her extreme pleasure at the landskip, the bird-life, and the beauty of the foliage and flowers (which are apparently of a lushness and richness unknown to us in Scotland), and her equally advanced displeasure at what she called the ‘debilitating nature of human relations’ that she witnessed on the plantation. ‘Slavery written about by its apologists or commented upon by merchants, jurists and political men, disconnected and at a distance from the reality of the situation, bears no resemblance to the degradation, the inimical bonds placed upon human beings, that I saw with my own eyes’ is what Sibby wrote to me; she then proceeded to document all she could in her ensuing missives.
She disagreed openly and violently with her husband about this state of affairs, and sought to have him sell his share in the plantation and withdraw entirely from the tobacco trade. He was furious with his new wife for her temerity, not least in front of his friends and colleagues, who belittled and tarrowed him without cease about his ill-tempered and illogical spouse. He forbade her to talk about such things in any public place, and he commanded her to discontinue her conversation with the slaves, which was widely remarked upon in the neighbourhood as unfitting for any white woman and especially for the wife of one of the owners.
Sibby, of course, obeyed her husband in neither of these respects (for, if she had, there would never have been a tale to tell, much less the many court proceedings), and their marriage was clearly in a deeply troubled way already, when she took the step that ultimately proved fatal to her reputation and so much more.
In her second letter already she mentioned for the first time meeting an extraordinary slave, someone unlike any other on the plantation or any other person—free or slave—of Sibby’s acquaintance. He was what they on the plantation called a ‘house slave,’ which meant he was employed in the capacity we in Great Britain would recognize as that of a butler or head-servant. Most unusually for a slave (but we shall come to this soon) he could both read and write. He was only a few years older than Sibby and his name was Abubaker Ba—I have spelled it as Sibby did, though I do not believe there is any standard or required way to do so, at least in English.
Mr. Ba (and I will honour him with the title) was born in Africa, of the Fulbay, also known as the Fulani, people;—he was a Mahomettan. In these two aspects, he was highly distinct from the other Africans on the plantation, since they were all Eboes, a people near the coast, who are not followers of Mahomet. Not only was he a Mahomettan, he was one of their great teachers, having been a tutor (to use the closest proximation in our tongue) at what he called the University of Sankor in the city of Timbuktoo, which he said is near a great river in the desert very far from the coast.
My sister believed him, and I see no reason to doubt her faith in Mr. Ba. I know that no white person has seen Timbuktoo and that many believe it to be legendary, like the caves of Serendib or the gardens of Prester-John. Yet the fact that we have not seen it is not prima facie proof that it does not in fact exist; I would rather say that Mr. Ba’s voluminous and very detailed account to my sister—which she in turn wrote down assiduously in her letters to me—is deserving of far more acceptance as proof and evidence than otherwise.
Mr. Ba told Sibby that he had been captured in a war with a rival kingdom, called Bambara, and sent down the great river to Calabar, from whence he was added to a cargo of Eboes being shipped to Maryland. When she met him he had been in Maryland for six years, long enough to have mastered the Engli
sh language, which Sibby said he spoke with great ease and grace, using turns of phrase that most speakers born to the tongue do not conceive or use.
Her final letters to me suggested an increasingly close form of intercourse with Mr. Ba. Sibby spent more and more time with Mr. Ba, as much as they could find in a small place where eyes and ears were at all times primed for transgressions of any sort, especially when it came to relations between the whites and the blacks, the free and the slave.
According to Sibby, they spoke of many things: the stars and the planets, the possibility of other worlds, the likelihood that laws might be universal for all men. He was a mathematician and an astronomer. The two would slip away at night to watch the stars, along the banks of the Chesapeake.
No letters came from Sibby after her eighth; I became very anxious and sent many letters to her and to my brother-in-law to ascertain her well-being. Almost a year passed before I received any news, which was only a short note from my brother-in-law that they were sailing for Edinburgh and to make ready.
Sibby was changed out of all features when she arrived, disjacketed, despondent, déboîtée. I scarce recognized her for the gay sister whom I once knew so well. My brother-in-law allowed us only the briefest of reunions and thereafter he had as little to do with me as possible. As the Court knows, Sibby died within two years of her return; of grief and anguish I say.
Just before she died, she wrested from her husband several hours of time to be alone with me privately. In those few, precious hours, as she neared her end, she told me all that had happened, which I now relate.
She and Mr. Ba had become lovers—there is no other way to say it. She knew and I know that such behaviour (the pastors have many words for it, ‘adultery’ being the least of those) is contrary to all our moral and legal codes. It was the same for Mr. Ba, whose Mahomettan faith likewise prohibits such congress between individuals who are not married to one another. Yet, no matter how keenly the two felt remorse for their sin, they felt much more keenly the purity of their love for one another, a love born from the felicitous intertwinement of their minds as they naturally conversed about matters of mutual interest. I say they loved each other, as men and women have loved one another since the Beginning. If that is a wrong thing, then they will each suffer judgement and penalty as they stand before their Creator; let no other than the Creator be their judge.
The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 6