Splintered Icon (20 page)

Damn.

At four fifteen, we made our second crucial discovery. It was on a platt record, a map showing the boundaries of a plantation. The ink was almost gone and we could make very little sense of it. But one name stood out amongst the others.

Plantation map drawn to a scale of 5 chains in an inch... Charles Atkinson Esq & Company.

... Martin Tebbit.

1250 acres no. 247, St Ann's, Jamaica.

There was a map showing some irregularly shaped property bounded to the south by a river and to the north by coastline. The compass points were marked. We could hardly make out the text below:

... to which an Order unto me directed by the Hon. Charles Thomas Lynch, Kent,

... his lieutenant governor and commander in chief of the island of Jamaica...

... and laid out unto Martin Tebbit senior...

... a mountain and land situated in the precincts above and in the form and manner described by the platt and council and .. .

... on the site thereof as performed April 10 1674.

Cyned John Horn.

Tebbit.

The archivist was clearing her throat again. Zola leaned forwards. I got a whiff of perfume. 'We need more time,' she said in an urgent whisper.

'What can we do? It'll have to be tomorrow.'

'Harry,' she hissed. 'Are you forgetting the bad guys? They're a full day ahead of us.'

Debbie pulled her chair back and walked over to the archivist. There was a lot of animated muttering and shaking of heads, and then they approached an older, grey-haired woman. Zola and I watched, mystified, while the archivist left the room and the grey-haired woman lifted a telephone. Debbie gave me a mischievous wink. Then there was more chat, and now heads were nodding, and Debbie was telephoning, then writing something. She joined us again. 'We'll grab a snack and come back at six o'clock. They're opening up for us until midnight. The security desk are prepared to work overtime and the archivist will stay on to keep an eye on us.'

I gaped at her. She gave a triumphant smile: 'I just donated twelve thousand US dollars to their Repair and Binding Section. It's Sir Joseph's money, of course. Fancy a McDonald's?'

Outside, in the quiet street, Dalton was sitting in the car next to a couple of cannon flanking a bower made of white Italian marble and shading a statue of some admiral underneath it. Dalton's face was wet with sweat. We headed downtown, past a cathedral and a grim, walled prison. Men waved at us through a big grill. 'About fifteen men waiting to die in there,' Dalton volunteered, and I wondered how he knew.

We found a McDonald's in a busy shopping mall. Dalton excused himself and made for the toilets. I gave it a couple of minutes and left the queue, heading in the same direction. As I turned a corner he was about thirty yards ahead of me, speaking into a mobile phone in businesslike fashion. He turned, saw me, and dropped the phone into his back pocket with a smile. There was something odd about the action, but I couldn't have said what.

After a quick snack, Dalton joined us in the National Archives: since we were working past its official closing time, Cassandra and friends would not expect us to be there. We were now buying time at two thousand dollars an hour. Gradually, as the archivist wheeled hefty volumes back and forth, a Sinclair family tree emerged. There was no Ogilvie, no clue as to how he had reached Jamaica, nothing to lead us to the True Cross, if it even existed any more. But running like a thread through the plantation records had been a single constant theme: two journals, handed down from generation to generation. Winston Sinclair had given us one of them. I needed the other one like a man in the desert needs water.

'I've been reading up on this,' Debbie said. 'It was the British who introduced the plantation system and they didn't conquer the island until 1655. They won't have anything earlier than that.'

'It's not quite like that, miss.' The archivist was holding about twenty kilos of records in her arms. 'It's true the British invaded in 1655 and they destroyed Iago de la Vega, which we now call Spanish Town. But the Spaniards had time to clear out and they took their valuables with them, and probably a lot of records too. They held out on the north of the island for another five years, round about Ocho Rios.'

'You mean...?'

'Chances are some documents survived and were carted to the north side of the island, and from there to Cuba. It seems a lot of the Spaniards thought it was only a matter of time before Spain reconquered Jamaica. So they buried their valuables and money. There are rumours of tunnels right under your feet. Anyway, an official list of the hiding places was drawn up. In the nineteenth century a historian by the name of Edward Long was told that the official list still existed and was somewhere in Cuba. Nobody knows where.'

'But the Spaniards never came back...'

The archivist smiled. 'Meaning that there's treasure buried all over Jamaica.'

Debbie said, 'Wow!'

'You people aren't looking for buried treasure, by any chance?' The archivist tried to make it sound like a joke.

'Of course not.' Debbie carried off the lie with total conviction.

206

Zola said, 'You mean you have no records going back earlier than the British conquest?'

'That's about it. But so far you people have just been looking at the public and ecclesiastical records. You could try the private ones. We have letters and accounts written in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and even Latin. It happens we have some stuff donated from Cuba recently, from Santiago de Cuba, just across the water.'

We hit it an hour before midnight.

While Debbie and Dalton had moved back in time through the centuries, Zola and I had moved forwards, tracing the journals as they were handed on through the generations. My throat was parched in the dry air and the centuries-old dust of the records. Debbie was pencilling in gaps in her family tree. The archivist, bleary-eyed, had wheeled in a tea chest of documents recently donated by the Eldridge rum factory.

The StClairs had built a rum factory on the grounds of their plantation. Winston Sinclair, the last of Debbie's Jamaican line, had drunk the products and gone bankrupt, dying in Trench Town poverty. The new owners of the rum factory had handed over the paperwork to the National Archives. It was the end of the line for the journal, if it still existed.

I bent over the tea chest. Why I don't know, but my eye was caught by a thin heap of quarto-sized papers tied together by a pink ribbon. I thought I recognised the writing. I lifted the bundle out and undid the ribbon. My hands were beginning to shake. I flicked through a few of the faded, browned sheets. I felt as if an electric current was trickling through me.

I said, 'Hello, old friend.' I'd said it quietly, but my voice seemed to penetrate every corner of the building. The others froze.

Pure Caribbean gold.

Ogilvie's second journal.

CHAPTER 25

'We'll never copy this before midnight.'

'I have a camera in the car,' Dalton said.

'No photographs,' said the archivist. 'We're quite strict about that.'

I flicked carefully through the fragile sheets. 'With four of us on it, we could get through this in two or three hours.'

'The deal is we close at midnight, sir. That's in fifty minutes.'

Debbie said, 'Pity. I'd have loved to donate another two thousand dollars to your Repair and Binding Section.'

The archivist said, 'Since you put it that way, I'll speak to the security girl.'

'So will I,' said Debbie. 'What's her name?'

'Ruth.'

I split the pile into four. Dalton, Zola and I got busy copying as quickly as possible. Debbie came back a minute later. 'Ruth's mother is looking after the baby, but she was staying the night anyway. Ruth's not allowed to accept a personal gift but the double time suits her nicely. And there was nothing in the rules to stop me donating something to Grandma.'

Around two in the morning, we thanked the weary archivist and Ruth at the security desk, and emerged from the building into a blustery wind. Debbie took the wheel as before: she seemed to enjoy driving. The early hours Kingston traffic was light but anarchic; Debbie drove swiftly through it. I was beginning to get the hang of this exuberant city and I used a map to navigate us up the Old Hope Road to Matilda's Corner before turning right and taking the road skirting the University of the West Indies. By the time we were starting on the mountain pass the wind was gusting strongly and I began to worry about falling trees, not to mention the prospect of being blown over the edge. We reached our 'hideaway' safely at about three o'clock in the morning. Subdued lighting lit up the steep, bush-lined driveway; the pool and the jacuzzi were still illuminated. The insect noises had gone; instead we had the rushing of a powerful wind through the trees.

Our 'chalet' - actually a substantial villa - was one of half a dozen scattered over a few acres of ground cleared from the rain forest, with a deep gorge to its rear and the swimming pool out the front. Debbie spread her notes on the big dining-room table. Dalton disappeared into the kitchen and Zola emerged from her bedroom in the same pyjamas and dressing gown she had worn in her Greenwich flat.

We'd reached that state of exhaustion where we couldn't stop. We sipped at tea while Debbie, lost in concentration, started to sketch out her family tree, the occasional
Wow!
or
Yes!
disturbing the peace. After an hour of that, she came through the door and said, 'Come and see.'

We leaned over her little tree. James Ogilvie had married a Fiona McKay and they'd had three children, all girls. The youngest, Agnes Ogilvie, had been born in 1630, late in Ogilvie's life. Marmaduke StClair, meanwhile, had married Inez Teriaca, presumably a local Spaniard. Their child, Eduardo StClair, had married Agnes Ogilvie. The families must have been close. The products of this marriage were Inez StClair (b. 1649) and Eduardo StClair Jr (b. 1651). Inez StClair had married a Robert Tebbit, and the Tebbit line had continued through James and Martha Tebbit, eventually dying out in Jamaica. The line through Eduardo StClair Jr had continued all the way to the recently deceased Winston Sinclair.

Zola said, 'Well done, Debbie. So the Ogilvie and StClair families were united by marriage, one of the descendants married a Tebbit giving a Jamaican Tebbit line, the other giving a straight line to Winston Sinclair.'

'One mystery solved,' I said. 'The Tebbits were the nearest relatives to Winston.'

Dalton was leaning over Debbie's chart, Rommel studying a map. 'It proves we're on the right lines. Nice one, kid.'

Zola said, 'That is amazing. But how could James Ogilvie and Marmaduke StClair possibly have reached Jamaica in the first place?'

'Exactly. How did they get here?' Debbie asked. 'And anyway, wasn't Jamaica under Spanish control at the time? Why were they allowed to settle? Why didn't the Spaniards burn them at the stake or something horrible?'

'Maybe Ogilvie's notes will tell us.' I was itching to get at them.

'Maybe.' Zola was sounding even more impatient than me.

'And James Ogilvie married Fiona,' I pointed out.

'His childhood sweetheart?' Debbie smiled, enchanted by the romance.

'Must be.' I wondered about that, tried to visualise him trudging up the long road to Tweedsmuir, only to turn back again with his child bride. More likely he had sent a letter, on the basis of which the young Fiona had left home and family to cross an ocean by herself. 'Whatever, it was quite a journey for a young girl in those days.'

Zola said, 'And Marmaduke married locally. The families must have been close - their sprogs eventually married.'

'I wonder why they didn't go back to England?' Debbie murmured.

I yawned. Every muscle in my body was exhausted. 'I'm played out. I'm going to bed with Ogilvie's journal.'

'Can I join you?' Zola asked, and we all laughed.

In bed, I looked at my watch. It was four o'clock and I was bone weary. I put my light out, closed my eyes and listened to the high wind in the trees and the creaking and groaning of the villa. I drifted into an exhausted sleep.

What wakened me an hour later I don't know. I lay in the dark, listening to the wind, which was now even stronger. I dragged myself up and half-staggered to the window. I don't know what I expected to see. There was a car at the entrance to the driveway, about thirty yards to the right. It had no lights but its outline was just visible in the subdued light from the pool. Someone was leaning into it, talking to the driver. As my eyes adapted to the dark I saw there were two people in the car. Then it was reversing, and disappearing quietly back down the steep road, silhouetted against the lights of Kingston as it went.

And walking back from the car, a bundle of papers gripped firmly to his chest, was Dalton.

CHAPTER 26

You cannot know how I have longed to tell this story. I hope that one day it will be read by someone of my own country. The adventures which befell me in the Americas are so strange that I can hardly credit them myself. Let me begin by describing the fears which were aroused in me as we approached that distant continent, and how these fears were first dispelled, and then returned with double the fury.

'What is
auto da fe?'

'In God's name, does Scotch know nothing?' The Turk said, 'It is the Spanish for "act of faith", James.'

'Why is it so feared?' The sails were cracking gently but the sea was good and I was swaying gently in my hammock. The hatch above was open, but the cool air we had been used to was gone, and now a heavy, sticky heat was settling down on us from above. The Northern Crown was outlined in the great oblong of the overhead gratings, the stars coming and going through the little squares as the ship swayed. I thought I could count five or six faint stars within it.

'He knows nothing,' came from a corner of the berth. 'Nothing.' This was followed by a hacking cough.