I was further induced, Miss McLeish, by your declaration that the subject and substance of the technologies etc. described in the patent applications are the product of your intellectual labours, i.e., matters over which you can dispose and command, separately from your uncle and Mr. Sanford (who you assert have had no hand in the devising of the patentable materials). I rely fully upon you, Miss McLeish, to preserve the comity and concord within your family that is central to any success you might wish to have in applying for the Indigo Pheasant patents.
With best wishes for a swift and complete accomplishment at the Court of Chancery,
I am your humble servant,
—Sedgewick, Esq.
[Excerpt from a letter to Sally from Mrs. Sedgewick]
By the Palustral Moon,
in Veneration of St. Euthina.
Dearest Sally:
I regain my strength a little piece every day, though I will never regain it all, or so I fear. Among other things, I hear always—at the very lowest level of hearing, but never absent—a feathery wind blowing.
[… . . . .]
You know how much I support your bold ventures at the Court of Chancery, with the aid of my husband (who is, at bottom, not a bad creature, though he can be trying even when the sun is shining in full). I was pleased to be able to help you by providing the two hundred fifty pounds sterling you and Mr. Kidlington required for the application fees—this is very nearly my entire personal wealth, from the inheritance I brought to my marriage.
You strike a blow, Sally, for the emancipation of woman-kind, with your fearless step here. Why should men lay claim and assert suzerainty over Thought itself, and harvest all the fruits thereof?
[… . . . .]
I confess to the prickings of conscience where it concerns Maggie. I was perhaps too rash in my turning aside and abridgement of communication, yet at the same time I do not feel, nor have I ever felt, the gratitude and warmth of true affection that I feel she owes me—I who have done so much for her, while receiving so little in return. Her coarse, indelicate and precarious status should compell her to it, yet she owns it not—which is to me insupportable.
[… . . . .]
[Confidential memorandum from Sir John Barrow to Lord Melville, head of the Admiralty]
Your Lordship:
The following will memorialize the steps you have approved the taking of, in the matter of the Indigo Pheasant, and to further acquaint you with the material facts of this affair:
The Admiralty shall invest in the Indigo Pheasant project a further twenty two thousand pounds sterling immediately (“Tranche Two”) and up to an additional eight thousand pounds sterling (“Tranche Three”) as, and if required, under terms and conditions laid out under separate cover, for a grand total in all three tranches of up to forty thousand pounds sterling.
As before, all Admiralty investments shall flow through and under the name of the Honourable East India Company (see agreements between them and us, under separate). The Governor-General of the E.I.C., Lord Rawdon-Hastings (who is grateful for the support you gave him in the recent bestowal upon him of the Marquisate of Hastings) readily agreed, as did Canning in his role as President of the E.I.C. Board of Control—after the revocation of its monopoly rights in 1813, the E.I.C. is keen to shelter under Admiralty’s wing.
With the disbursement of Tranche Two, the Admiralty and thereby His Majesty’s Government becomes the de facto majority owner of the Indigo Pheasant and all equipment and technologies belonging thereto (the latter described in full also under separate).
The hitherto lead partner, the private firm McDoon & Co. (London), shall remain as a minority interest, and shall continue as a co-manager of the Project and as co-ship’s husband, with the Admiralty—in consultation with the E.I.C.—as equal co-manager and co-husband, with final approval on all actions and statuses pertaining to the Project.
The firm of Coppelius, Prinn & Goethals (Widow)— which has acquired a plurality of shares outstanding in the venture, and which has in accordance with the partnership association agreement called for remaining in-payment and declared their right to buy out the remaining partners—can be expected to contest our actions. We will see to it that they have little grounds upon which to stake their case (reasons of state alone will suffice, if more narrowly defined arguments arising from within the laws of commerce cannot be found), and less likelihood of success in the courts. We may need to guard, however, against their taking extra-judicial measures against the ship and its equipment, as we have reason to believe that they are not a conventional firm of merchants in the normal sense of the designation.
In a separate but related matter, a member of the McDoon household, aided by the lawyer Sedgewick (whom your Lordship may recall has done much work for the Admiralty over the years, and whose patrons include the Tarleton family) has filed an application for six patents connected to devices and instruments to be fitted to and carried by the Indigo Pheasant. It is my considered opinion that the Admiralty must control or outright possess any such patents as the Court of Chancery and His Majesty may grant—the patents are of vital interest to the Crown, to the Empire, and to the well-being of our island Nation. I will write further under this heading in the near-future.
Concerning the raising of the necessary funds, which you can expect to be subject of intense scrutiny by the Treasury and against which the Home Secretary and possibly the Prime Minister himself will opine: We have sterilized the impact through re-allocating certain monies by virement from one part of the budget to another, and most satisfactorily through placing the primary burden on those we vanquished: Lord Castlereagh at the Foreign Office has negotiated additional payments from the French for our restoration to them of Pondicherry and Chandernagore in India, from the Dutch likewise for our restoration to them of Pulicat, Tuticorin and Negapatnam, and from the Danish for our forebearance in not seizing Serampore and Balasore and for our returning to them Nancowrie and the Nicobar Islands. Also, Lord Castlereagh has arranged with the Kingdom of Prussia that a portion of the loan it is raising via the Rothschilds shall be used to pay us for our allowing them use of Heligoland in the North Sea.
Also, the presence of the Chinese alters all our strategic possibilities and forces us to draw under the mantle of raison d’état many threads that previously existed separately in our thinking. Ensuring our control of the Indigo Pheasant, for the reasons I have told you in strictest confidence, has become a matter of imperial exigency. You can expect the Duke of Wellington and also Lord Bathurst at the Colonial Office to support you in this. Incidentally, as you so astutely supposed, our support for the Regent in his so-very-public and increasingly embittered discussions with his wife about her impending royal prerogatives has also gained the Admiralty his patronage—which can be useful vis-à-vis his faction in the House of Commons, should any of our business be made the target of parliamentary inquiry.
In closing: I recommend to you the lawyer Winstanley, who has been remarkably useful to us in constructing this entire plan. He is connected to me through my wife’s family, and can also call the Duke of Wellington a patron.
As always, your servant,
—Sir John
Addendum: I agree with your Lordship that Mr. Kidlington has not been wholly the asset that we had hoped he would be—he is the template for rakish inconstancy. However, neither has he wholly disappointed, and I think he may prove even more useful in future. He has communicated some unique and incisive information—albeit sporadically and with many lacunae—about those Others of whom I have spoken, and the nature of the foreign Land that is their and our focus of interest and that we hope to acquire for the British Empire. Above all, Mr. Kidlington has played an essential and irreplaceable role in precipitating the application for patents by the McLeish girl—upon which so much else hinges in our machination.
Chapter 6: An Awakening, or,
The Publication of a Marred Peace
“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the hor
ses of instruction.”
—William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793)
“I ascend into the holy, inexpressible, mysterious Night. Far off lies the Earth, fallen into a deep chasm, desolate and alone. . . . I will intermingle myself with the ashes, fall back and dissolve into the ocean of dew.”
—Novalis,
Hymn to the Night (1799, translated by
Emilia Emeryse Smallwood, 1805)
“There, with malignant patience,
He sat in fell despite,
Till this dracontine cockatrice
Should break its way to light.”
—Robert Southey,
“The Young Dragon” (1829)
Maggie went looking for the Mother.
“She must wake up,” said Maggie to Charicules, perched on her shoulder.
“No more sleeping,” Maggie said to Isaak, who trotted along beside her.
At first they had moonlight, but then they walked a long way in a lightless place that became narrower and narrower. The ground beneath them flattened, walls flowed beside them.
At last, they saw ahead a sharp, thin line of light perpendicular to what had become a smooth floor under their feet. Making their way towards it, Maggie knocked a hammer from a shelf on the wall, reflecting the shaft of light for a moment as it fell. Isaak jumped three feet in the air when the hammer banged and hopped along the floor of the tunnel.
The line of light was a gap between two doors. Maggie reached out, pushed the doors, and stumbled blinking into a brightly lighted hallway. Isaak, regaining her poise, stalked gracefully out of the doorway. Her pupils got very small but she did not blink.
They had exited from an enormous armoire made of mahogany. Turning and peering back into the cabinet, they saw rows of hammers, files, rugines, bores, crimps, and many other tools neatly hung or stacked on hooks and shelves, gleaming, dustfree, ranks of implements diminishing into the gloom.
“Ah, there you are, right on time,” said someone behind them in the hallway.
Startled, Maggie spun about, dislodging Charicules from her shoulder. Isaak’s tail burst up and her claws went wide. A large woman wearing a body-length leather apron over a black muslin dress stood before them. She was consulting a golden pocket watch.
“Well, tick tock, come along then, mustn’t keep her waiting,” was all the woman said before putting the watch into an apron pocket, spinning on the heels of her sturdy boots and proceeding briskly down the corridor.
Rooms and rooms they passed, each providing a blurred glimpse of women—and men—working at drafting tables, blowing glass, hammering on strips of metal, twisting wire, weaving, cording, painting, colouring, carving stone and wood.
Beneath and around the sound of the work—all the tapping and clinking, the burring, bending and clanking, the sound of voices raised in debate, praise, and exhortation—was a low, steady humming, like a thousand bees at a thousand beeskips, a hum that rose and fell rhythmically. Or maybe the humming was the sum of the sound of the work, not external to the effort, but the quintessence, the very circling, soaring spirit of the effort, rising and falling, opening and shutting, spire and respire, always coming back to its source.
Charicules began to harmonize atop the basso continuo of the humming.
Eventually they came to a very large room, filled with people coming and going. Two hundred yards across and five storeys tall, the room was ringed with balconied gangways on each of the upper storeys. Overflowing bookcases were built into every wall, a seamless expanse of books interrupted only by great louvered windows letting in rivers of light, by framed maps, drawings, paintings and charts celestial and nautical, and by vitrines filled with tools, specimens, maps, maquettes, models, and objects less describable. Four large brass-figured clocks stood on columns one storey high, one at each major point of the compass. Floating at the centre of the roof was a rose-window skylight.
On the floor in the very middle, directly under the skylight far above, was a massive wooden bench, surrounded by dozens of people. On the bench was an incomplete model of a ship, seven feet tall. Blueprints, sketches and maquettes surrounded the large model.
Maggie pushed her way into the crowd around the bench and stared hard at the model, the blueprints, the maquettes. Charicules flew up and perched on one of the ship’s spars, singing notes of inquiry. Isaak, after a prodigious leap to the top of the bench, explored the rudder and pintle—purring all the while with suspicion. Murmurs and whispers ran through the crowd, right ’round the bench. Everyone watched her.
The woman who had met Maggie at the tool-case in the hallway disappeared into the throng. A smaller, older woman walked up to Maggie.
“I know you,” Maggie said. “Saint Macrina.”
“Indeed, well met again,” said the older woman. “Be at home here in the House of Design, the workshop of desire and architective joy. But I think you already know your way around this place, though perhaps you do not yet fully remember.”
Maggie looked upon Saint Macrina wonderingly, and mused a while. She felt the humming in her ears and mind and heart, a melody she knew but could not quite name. She shook her head at last.
Saint Macrina smiled, took Maggie’s hand, and led her out of the great workroom. Charicules flew along side them in the hallways and Isaak trailed, stopping frequently to interrogate the tools in a glass cabinet or to challenge the leather boots of a worker.
They walked for about an hour, through corridors and across other workrooms—none so vast as the one containing the large ship model, but none of them small either—and up many staircases. Isaak was a bounding ball of gold as they ascended.
Opening a blue door, Saint Macrina ushered Maggie, Charicules, and Isaak into a garden encompassing a roof two hundred yards long and one hundred yards wide. Crenellated brick walls five feet tall enclosed the garden, espaliered with rose canes, clematis, small pear, quince and plum trees. Beds of herbs, brambles, shrubs and flowers—most notably the blue bixwort, grace-noted by hedge mustard—constituted the garden proper, traversed by winding brick walkways and dotted with a profusion of fountains. Hundreds of bees worked the flowers, bending down stems under their temporary weight, flying off in minute showers of pollen. Hundreds of butterflies dappled the air just above the blooms: sylvanders, marbled yellows, ecailles, great coppers, tortoise-shells, apollos no larger than a half-penny piece, lucines the size of a horse’s hoof.
Charicules and Isaak lost no time losing themselves in the garden. Maggie followed Saint Macrina more slowly to the centre of the garden, where a white-columned, blue-roofed pavilion sat, raised ten feet up on a dais. A large, white-faced clock, encased in a ruddy metal, crowned the pavillion. The saint left Maggie at the foot of the stairs. Maggie went up the stairs and found there another woman, seated at a table.
“Sit with me,” said the woman.
Maggie and the woman sat across from one another, saying not a word for many minutes. They looked out over the garden and beyond, at a city that stretched to the horizon on every side. The garden sat on a roof that was nearly forty storeys high, taller than the top of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the tallest building in London. The upper air was clear, the lower smudged by smoke issuing from many chimneys. The humming took on an even thicker note, an accumulated bass line. The bees in the garden syncopated that line; the butterflies slip-winged and worried it.
“Impressive,” said Maggie. “But I am not here to enjoy a view, no matter how glorious. I am seeking the Mother. She must be woken. Can you help me?”
“Of course I can,” said the woman. “Yet not so hasty, if you please, dearest. Let us dine first. I have not eaten in a long time, you see, and I am very, very hungry.”
Maggie could not recall seeing food or drink on the table when she arrived, but now two pale yellow plates sat there filled with beef tripe-and-eggs on boiled potatoes and two tall glasses of cloudy deep-golden beer topped with a mass of foam.
“Ah, the Hefeweiss, I have
dreamed of this!” said Maggie’s host, before taking a long pull at the glass.
The two ate in silence, the host because she was utterly engrossed in the eating and the drinking, Maggie because she was examining every feature of the woman across the table. The woman resembled Maggie, except for the addition of a decade or perhaps fifteen years (though around the eyes and the corners of the mouth she seemed much older still).
Maggie thought, “Well, Mama, if you could see me now. Your little eagle has flown very high.”
Polishing her plate with a last bit of potato, the woman said, “Now then, Miss Maggie, ask me your questions, or else I fear you might burst.”
Maggie, pausing before her response, said, “I have come a very long way and will not burst now of a sudden at this final step.”
The woman laughed merrily and said, “I felt your spirit come to me on tigerish feet while I dreamed! I see now that your precursor was but a weak outline of your fierce reality, my child.”
Maggie said nothing to this, though the woman’s tone was disarming and seemed to invite a reply.
“You seemed quicker to speak when I saw you in my dreams, but perhaps that was the element of your character that your shadow-self overweighted,”continued the woman, puzzlement creasing her face for a moment. “Howsoever that may be, here you are now. You—not you alone, by the way, please do not presume so highly—have wakened me. Though be warned that I am still very sleepy, and some part of me sleeps still, while yet another part of me yearns to return to my bed. It is hard to rouse oneself in the middle of such a sleep, and a well-deserved one at that.”
The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 Page 19