Free The Indigo Pheasant: Volume Two of Longing for Yount: 2 by Daniel A. Rabuzzi Page B

now to you Sedgewick: a painful if important piece of McDoon family lore, but I see as yet no connection to your serving maid.”
    Sanford broke in before the lawyer could respond, “Wait, wait. Let us use the girl’s name? How is she called?”
    “Maggie Collins,” said Sedgewick. “And with her name our tale continues. I did not start to wonder about her provenance only when the Belladonna’s papers came to me. No, I felt something was amiss with her, Maggie, when my wife brought her to us. Perhaps the story rightly begins with her, with my wife that is,
ma petite calebasse
, whose whims I am long resigned to, and so I had no more than desultory quibbles when she announced the arrival of the dark-skinned Maggie.”
    Sedgewick stood up, his belly caparisoned in a carpish-yellow waist-coat, his neck looped with a glaucous green cloth. He went to inspect the porcelain figurines on the mantlepiece.
    “Gentlemen, I was convinced this whole thing was a tale of a tub, a wobbly nonsense,” Sedgewick said, his back to Barnabas and Sanford. “But there is an uncanny element to that girl, a set of abilities she exhibits
sub rosa
that I have seen myself and—am forced I tell you, not to my liking!—to own are real. Maggie possesses an extremely developed faculty for mathematics. Hard as it is to credit, she is capable of the calculus, beyond what I can achieve myself or in fact what most anyone outside of Woodhouse and Babbage could aspire to. That makes her a freak, but a potentially useful freak.”
    “Yes, I can see how that might upset you,” said Barnabas, leaning over to pet Yikes. “I sometimes feel that way about Sally and she is my own niece!”
    “How does Maggie’s mathematical skill tie her to the McDoons?” said Sanford, pouring more tea.
    “Ah, you are right, I divagate,” said the lawyer, turning from the fireplace to face the other two. “Her obvious intelligence, coupled with her obstinate and porpentine nature, prompted me to wonder as to her origins. So, as a diversion from my daily rounds of legal lucubrations, I inquired at the place from whence Mrs. Sedgewick hailed her, that is, at the Saint Macrina’s School. A greasy little person there informed me that Maggie and her mother arrived on a ship from New York, and that it appeared they had taken their surname from that of the ship’s captain. I thought that interesting, in an idle sort of way, but there I let the matter dangle . . . until I received the Belladonna papers.”
    Barnabas said, “A hunch, then?”
    “Yes,” said Sedgewick. “A hunch, a presentiment,
suspicio tenuissima
. No clear and evident connection, but the more I read of the Scottish court papers, the more I felt there might be some link. Reading about the African mathematician kept reminding me of Maggie. In any case, I found Captain Collins, now retired in Rotherhithe, who easily recalled Maggie and her mother. He had seen a fair few black sailors in his day, of course, but not many black females aboard ship, especially as paying passengers. That led me to the port-records in the Pool of London, where I discovered that their passage had been paid in part by a person named Weatherby and his confreres in the Free Abyssinian Church in New York.”
    “Bit between the teeth, old boy, bit between the teeth,” said Barnabas.
    “No denying it,” said Sedgewick. “I used connections at Thomas Wilson & Co. to track down ‘Weatherby’ and the church in New York, which was soon done. Church members told Wilson’s agent that Maggie and her mother had come as fugitive slaves, together with Maggie’s father, from Maryland. Someone said the words that set all the pieces in place: ‘Blair Plantation.’”
    “Beans and bacon,” said Barnabas.
    “I paid Wilson’s man to go to Blair on the Choptank (marvelous names they have in the New World!). Under various pretenses, he gleaned the outlines of the story that Eusebianna told Belladonna. One of his informants said the