Barnabas jumped out of his chair. “We can talk to Tom with this?”
Salmius Nalmius shook his head. “No, I am afraid not. It only communicates . . . it lets you know that he is still alive. As long as it holds its colour — see how red it is? — you know that Tom is alive. If it goes dark . . .”
Everyone stared at the pendant. The red was rich, deep. Sally saw colour swirl in the depths of the glass. A heart, Tom’s heart, on a string.
Barnabas cleared his throat, did a defiant arabesque. “Well, beans and bacon,” he said. “Let’s go to Yount.”
Chapter 6: Surprises Onboard
“What are we to do with her?” Barnabas said to Sanford. “Trip to Yount is much too dangerous for a girl. But she won’t have it, insists she must go. About as tractable as the Hellespont was to the King of the Persians. Never stops quoting that infernal Wollstonecraft woman! Can’t see that I am only trying to protect her, do what’s best. Sanford, old friend, I am at my wit’s end, I tell you.”
To Barnabas’s amazement, Sanford said, “Let her come with us. She may have foresight that you and I lack. As one uncle said to his niece long ago, ‘Who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this?’”
“Remind me,” said Barnabas.
“Mordecai. Esther. She saved her people.”
“That seems a grand burden,” said Barnabas. “Prideful to boot.”
“No grander than the one you have shouldered yourself, the burden we have all taken up now. Besides, it will be hard enough to explain to our commercial friends our sudden removal without leaving a key member of McDoon & Associates behind.”
Sally found another ally in Fraulein Reimer. One evening in the common room, the fraulein looked up from her needlework and said: “Es war einmal ein altes Schloss mitten in einem grossen dicken Wald.”
Sally nodded. “Once upon a time, there was an old castle in the middle of a deep dark forest . . . yes, that’s how the story usually begins, doesn’t it? And now we’re in the story ourselves, and need to have all our wits about us, like the Cinder-Girl and the Brave Tailor and the Wren who was King of the Birds. Or else the witch in the castle will win.”
“Figs and feathers, fairy tales have no part in the modern world — ” Barnabas began, then stopped, thinking of Tom held prisoner in a castle, and of Tom’s heart held by a cord.
“Not bricht Eisen,” Fraulein Reimer said. “Need breaks iron. Sally must be with you. I will travel with you also. I have the journey made several times, the first when I was only as old as Sally.”
Barnabas looked at Sanford, who only grinned the barest of grins, threw up his hands and said, “Enough then, I yield, I yield. Sally, you shall come with us — though I will never forgive myself if anything should . . .”
That settled, Barnabas and Sanford concocted a cover story. They let it be known that they were sending Tom to one of their correspondents in Stockholm, while the rest of the firm was moving to Cape Town, the better to serve its far eastern trading needs, since the South African way station on the East Indies route had recently been taken by Great Britain from the Dutch. The first leg of the journey to Yount would, in fact, be to Cape Town. McDoon & Associates’ London operations would be continued by the Landemanns of Hamburg and Salmius Nalmius in his guise as Oliveire de Sousa. A Landemann nephew who represented that firm in London, Johann Joachim Brandt, always a welcome guest at Mincing Lane, spent days in meetings with Barnabas, Sanford, and Salmius Nalmius.
“Wheat and whiskey,” said Barnabas for the tenth time one morning. “So the Landemanns — Old Johann and Friedrich Christian — and the Brandts too, have known about Yount all this time!”
Barnabas and Sanford did not mention Yount in the many meetings they had in the offices of the McDoon lawyers, Sedgewick & Marchmain near Austin Friars. Barnabas had never seen Marchmain, believed to be one of many lawyers involved in a famous Chancery case about the Jarndyce inheritance. Sedgewick, on the other hand, he knew intimately.
“Ah, Barnabas and my dear Sanford,” said Sedgewick. “How sad to hear of your imminent departure. Off like Jason and the Argonauts, hmmm? Seeking your Golden Fleece, how bold! Well, audentes fortuna juvat. I flatter myself that you will continue to call upon Sedgewick & Marchmain to provide you with legal services, given our history of navigating you safely through the reefs and shoals of the law, and insofar as we are entrusted with the legal wheel of your commercial vessel, Sedgewick & Marchmain will, exceptis excipiendis and, of course, mutatis mutandis, advocate for your interests while those interests and your corporeal selves are separated. Come, sirs, the porches of my ears await your news.”
Sedgewick, a short man with an oriel for a stomach, always talked like that, matching his rhetorical somersaults with flourishes of his pen. Sanford wondered if the lawyer breathed through his ears.
“Well, where to begin?” Sedgewick poured forward. “We shall need to find mollia tempora fandi to assuage any concerns the Rogers’ Bank and Praed’s Bank might have about their client decamping so unexpectedly. We’ll need to draw up and notarize spoke of powers of procuration for de Sousa and Landemann to handle the chirographic items. And then there is your collateral in . . .”
The lawyer’s wife asked to see Sally, so one afternoon Sally found herself sitting in the Sedgewick drawing-room with Mrs. Sedgewick, the Shawdelia Sedgewick. Sally had met Mrs. Sedgewick at McDoon Christmas parties, where she felt the lawyer’s wife was sizing her up for some task. Sally would have dismissed this regard in any other woman as relating merely to Sally’s matrimonial prospects (or lack thereof), but Sally sensed some other element, something unrelated to marriage, in Mrs. Sedgewick’s evaluating glances.
“Men are splendid creatures,” said Mrs. Sedgewick, using her spoon to indicate the doors of the inner office where her husband, Sanford, and Barnabas were meeting. “But then so are pismires, snails, and limpets. The secret, the trick, my dear, is to make sure they feel themselves the grandest of their sort: the Proud Pismire, the Superb Snail.”
Mrs. Sedgewick poured more tea for Sally, then continued: “Those three are fine men, I concede. I am fond of Mr. Sedgewick, a clever soul, rumbustious. But, Sally dear, they find it hard, harder than Gibraltar, to admit our intelligence. Intelligence in a woman they view as ‘proud defiance smothering all her softer charms.’”
Mrs. Sedgewick snorted, banged her spoon against her teacup. “I’m told that you are quite the little philosopher, a young Montague or Carter. No one to talk to about their ideas, I know, I know, but you and I will talk someday soon, I hope, young Sally. Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Mrs. Barbauld’s poems . . . so much we might talk about.”
She feels much older than she looks, thought Sally. The sending of an entombed spirit is what she is, a sphinx pacing in a narrow corridor with doors locked at either end.
“To the point,” said Mrs. Sedgewick. “I don’t know what sort of adventure McDoon & Associates is embarking on, but going to open a branch at the Cape is, at best, only part of the story. There’s much more to this than your uncle is letting on. I imagine my husband knows that but he is paid not to ask such questions. I am bound by no such protocol.”
Sally’s eyes narrowed.
Mrs. Sedgewick laughed thinly. “No cause for alarm. I can control myself that far. I won’t ask your uncle or Mr. Sanford what’s what. But your reaction confirms my suspicions. You are in on this, whatever ‘this’ may be. Business is but a part, maybe no part at all, or I am a turtle in a tree.”
Sally opened her mouth but Mrs. Sedgewick marched right over the unspoken reply: “Sally, young friend, you can always call on me, no questions asked, I promise, though I hope you’ll find me ally enough to include me in your confidences. I can help you if help you need. My husband does considerable business with the Admiralty, as did my father in his time, and there’s my sister, Arabella, the pretty one, who married particularly well, into the Tarleton family, with their sons scattered throughout the Admiralty and the Coloni
al Office.”
The door to the inner office opened. Mrs. Sedgewick looked hard at Sally, lowered her voice, spoke very quickly: “I had a dream, Sally, like the passage in Job, in which all the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy. They sang about a girl who would travel far, far away. You, Sally, you are that girl, I am certain of it. They told me to help this girl.”
Mr. Sedgewick stepped up just behind his wife. “Well,” he said. “Here is a cozy conclave! What are you two plotting? Revolution over the tea-kettle, a campaign for clavichords and carnations? Oh diem praeclarum, my doves, poppy-seed cakes, my favourite . . .”
Saint Botolph’s feast came and went, Midsummer’s Day passed. Young Brandt came to live in the Mincing Lane house, combining McDoon and Landemann operations in London under one roof. Yikes took this news by rolling over in front of the grate and falling back asleep. Chock preened, watching the German newcomer with a beady eye.
“A nice gentleman,” said the cook to her niece. “Though a skinny rotchet, needs good English cooking.”
“And maybe he will invite Mr. Harris and, um, Mr. Fletcher to dine with him sometimes,” said the niece, without looking at her aunt. “Seeing as how they have returned to their original employer.”
“By Mother Bryce, he might do just that,” said the cook, chuckling. “But in the meantime, the house is in a perfect scrimble-scramble. We’ve much work to do, what with crates and boxes being stored but others being readied for the journey. Here now, that trunk holds all the new vests Mr. Barnabas had special made from Fezziwig’s, and this trunk — mind the curtains! — is for his medicines. ‘I don’t care what they say, I must have with me my Bateman’s Pectoral Drops and my Turlington’s Balsam of Life’ — that’s what Mr. Barnabas said, and so he shall have them!”
All that remained were goodbyes. The firm of McDoon & Associates being so widely known and well reputed, Barnabas and Sanford had many calls to make before the voyage. The news of McDoon’s removal was overwhelmed that June of 1812 by other events, reports of which washed over the City’s coffeehouses: Napoleon had invaded Russia, and hostilities had begun between Great Britain and the United States of America. Still, the departure of one of London’s most respected merchants did not go unnoticed. Had the McDoons but known it, the “transfer of McDoon & Associates’ headquarters to Capetown” occasioned a file of its own at the Admiralty, assigned to a young clerk named Tarleton. Other, less official, ears pricked and tongues wagged in backrooms, cross-quarters, and shy-offices across the City about the departure of the McDoons.
Not oblivious to the rumours their actions created, but in haste now to pursue Tom’s tormentors, Barnabas and Sanford visited their closest connections to fortify their story. They squared accounts with the chandlers George & Son of Finch-House Longstreet, settled with Mr. Leobald Grammer (the London factor for the Luebeck firm of Buddenbrooks) and with the Caxeira and de Menzeu families in Bevis Marks, spoke of “hypothecation” and “sub-rogation” with Mr. Edward Gardner, the merchant in Gracechurch Street (whose niece, Elizabeth Bennet, when visiting from Longbourn in Hertfordshire, had become fast friends with Sally).
Barnabas and Sanford saved their final visit for Messrs. William Mercius Matchett and Robert Eustace Frew in Crosby Square near Bishopsgate, with whom they had done much profitable business.
“Something exceeding fishy here,” said Matchett to Frew, as they watched Barnabas and Sanford disappear down the street after the visit. “Preposterous, really, to think we’d believe they’ve sent the firm’s heir, the young Tom, to Stockholm — in wartime, mind you! — while the rest of them head to the Cape.”
“Unceremoniously too,” said Frew. “Not so much as a farewell party at the Jerusalem. It doesn’t answer.”
“McDoon can tell us he is simply out to secure new sources for Chinese smilax, but he’s always been better at what he calls ‘clarifyin’,’ than at the fine art of camouflage. I think we shall have to send out some enquiries of our own. Who is this Brandt fellow anyway?”
“More than that: we’ve heard rumours outside the sunlit channels, haven’t we, about a certain someone seeking something from the McDoons.”
“Curious, it is. We’ve done some work for Admiralty in our time, oh yes, there’s a whiff of their special branch in all this. I have a mind to call on young Tarleton, what say?”
“Yes. Tomorrow and oh so discreetly. We’ll investigate . . . as friends.”
The McDoons departed on St. Modwenna’s feast day in early July of 1812. Sally lingered in the kitchen as long as she could. “Goodbye, dear cook,” she said.
“But we needn’t weep so,” said the cook. “You will be back home again soon, won’t you?”
Isaak rubbed against her ankles.
Sally looked at the floor.
“Ah, our little smee,” said the cook. “I figured as much. Not so soon after all, is it then?”
Sally kept looking at the floor.
“Flying farther, are we?” said the cook in the tone she reserved for her own musings, when she had only her own reflection in a copper pot to talk to.
Still Sally said nothing, but looked up to meet the cook’s eye.
“Sometimes,” said the cook, “men haven’t a hen’s noseful of sense. They ought to see better, and sometimes they do, but mostly they don’t. That’s the way of it.”
The cook unbuttoned the top two buttons of her capacious blouse, reached in, and pulled the medallion from around her neck. It swung between her and Sally. “Here, our smee, take it,” said the cook. “My Saint Morgaine. When your fears come at you like a husk of hares and a dray of squirrels, hold tight to Saint Morgaine.”
Sally took the medallion.
“I don’t know all that is happening,” said the cook. “But I know that whatever it is, it is big, and that you will be needed. There’s that eel-rawney, the galder-fenny who has got Tom, for one. And more besides, only I don’t know what it is.”
Sally held the cook tight. Sally scooped up Isaak, clutching the Saint Morgaine in one hand. The cook held Sally’s shoulders, looked Sally up and down and said, “When you have gone and done whatever it is you must do — saved Tom, maybe saved Mr. McDoon — then come home.”
The oven fire hissed. Sally saw in the open cupboard the blue pheasant china, gleaming. Through the kitchen window, she saw part of the garden, where a row of early peas flowered white beside yellow campion and blue bixwort. Then her sight blurred.
“Thank you,” she gasped, hugged the cook one last time. She half-stumbled from the kitchen.
The carriage awaited. Mr. Fletcher held the reins with one hand, doffed his hat with the other. Mr. Harris stood on the footman’s step. Barnabas, Sanford, and Fraulein Reimer were already inside. Sally lifted a basket containing Isaak and climbed in.
“Tom?” said Barnabas. Sally brought out the pendant. It glowed red.
The last thing they saw as the carriage rolled down Mincing Lane was the cook and the maid waving in front of the blue-trimmed windows and the dolphin door knocker.
The Nax brothers awaited them at the East India Docks. The Yount-bound party said goodbye to those who would remain. Barnabas asked Mr. Harris and Mr. Fletcher to watch over the house on Mincing Lane and take care of the cook and the maid.
“With our lives, sir,” Mr. Fletcher replied, flourishing his hat. “Upstripe and downstripe, sir, upon my word, sir.”
“As he says, Mr. McDoon,” Mr. Harris said, shifting in his big brown boots. “If the smilax fails to take in the garden, sir, I trust you will not fault us.”
“Goodbye, but not forever,” said Salmius Nalmius. “I stay here as the merchant de Sousa, while my brother travels with you.” He turned to his brother. Grasping one another’s shoulders, looking straight into each other’s eyes, they whispered something that sounded like “Nahosh ulli posto” several times. Then they touched foreheads lightly, and drew apart.
The Essex, an East Indiaman of twelve hundred tonnes, got underway
. As it left the dock, church bells rang the hour. Barnabas murmured the old rhyme he had taught Tom: “Bell horses, bell horses, what time of day? One o’clock, two o’clock, time to away.” The Essex worked its way down the Thames, and gathered with other vessels on the Downs, to be convoyed through the Channel. Gulls appeared, raising McDoon spirits a little. Barnabas and Sanford busied themselves with other merchants and officers onboard, leaving Sally with the fraulein. Sally tried sketching the ships, not because she was very good at drawing, but because Tom drew well, so drawing reminded her of him.
As she leaned against the railing, sketching a brigantine, someone behind her said, “That’s a nimble likeness, if I may say so.”
Sally looked around to see a stocky young man, perhaps five years older, dressed well but not ostentatiously.
“Thank you,” said Sally. “But you flatter me with too much praise.”
“James Kidlington,” said the stranger, extending his hand. “Medical student, going out to join my brother as a doctor’s assistant in Bombay.”
“Sarah McLeish, of McDoon & Associates, merchant bankers of London,” said Sally. “But you may call me Sally. And this is my governess Miss Reimer, a German.”
“Sally it shall be, as you insist,” said the medical student, laughing. “My compliments to you, and to your companion.”
At noon that day the convoy moved down the Channel protected by two frigates against privateers from Calais and Dunkirk. Barnabas and Sanford felt a familiar thrill as the sails billowed. Sanford even capered a little, like a dobbin dancing. Barnabas remembered that Sanford had galumphed the same sort of jig the first time they had crossed the equator together. The only thing missing was Tom. Barnabas looked at the sails, waved the wind on with his hands: Haste, haste, haste, he thought. We’ll catch you this time, you crimson devil. We’re coming.
Shipboard life settled into a routine. The only thing unusual about the voyage was that the Essex was leaving so late in the season: East Indiamen typically departed England by late spring. The unseasonal departure was due to the Essex transporting part of a regiment to reinforce the Cape Town garrison. The Essex would overwinter at the Cape before proceeding to China in the spring or, more accurately, it would pass the southern hemispheric summer at the Cape and sail on when the monsoons allowed in the fall.
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