The Bedlam Detective (27 page)

Evangeline said, “With all that cargo, how large was the party?”

“Thirty Europeans in the main party, with a hundred and fifty Portuguese-speaking laborers set to join them for the land and river journey. As well as the guides and quartermasters he had an astronomer, a chief engineer, and a surveying team with an instrument maker to maintain and repair the survey equipment. He had a mapmaker and a botanist who doubled as the expedition’s doctor. It seemed as if Sir Owain’s plan was to overcome all challenges by simply assembling the full weight of modern civilization and driving it through them.”

“All the same,” Sebastian said. “Who’d take a woman and child into such a situation?”

“I think he took a landowner’s attitude to the world. Wherever he might care to go, he would have it tamed to his purpose like one vast country garden. He and his family would picnic in the jungle, if he so chose.”

“For most men,” Evangeline observed, “planting a flag will usually suffice.”

“We sailed along the coast to the point he’d selected for the start of the land journey. His Portuguese-speaking
camaradas
had a camp set up and had been waiting there for a month at half pay. They set about the unloading with eagerness, happy to break the tedium and impatient to start earning their full rate. But as the riverboats were disembarked, and the gangs of men struggled to manage the weight and the bulk of them, I could see looks being exchanged.

“Over the boats, for one. They were of a badly chosen design. The Amazon is a broad, slow river that’s easy to navigate. Its tributaries are anything but. They twist and drop through falls and rapids, and the only way to make progress is to leave the water and carry your boats and cargo down to the next calm stretch. These boats were made of steel, and very heavy. It took six men or more just to lift one.

“But there were other, more immediate problems. They faced two months of overland travel before they’d even reach the river; they had a hundred mules and fifty oxen and, most spectacular to our eyes, five huge steam cars each carrying two tons of freight.”

He shook his head, as if the memory of those great mobile machines impressed him still.

He said, “They ran on wheel-driven tracks that made short work of mud or dense foliage. But of the seven steam cars that had set out, two of them had already failed on the way.

“Without the full complement of vehicles, there was insufficient hauling power for all of the gear. We crew watched from the rail as a hasty conference was held to determine what should be taken and what left behind. Sir Owain ordered the erection of a canvas gazebo so that his wife and child might have shade. And there they sat, on drawing-room chairs in their linen and buttons and lace, waving away mosquitoes like abandoned French royalty.

“A number of boxes were finally separated out for leaving behind. These were stacked up on the shore with a net thrown over them. For all I know, they’re standing there still.

“Sir Owain and his family were to ride in a sprung observation car that was towed by one of the engines. It had a sumptuous interior and a daybed, and various private facilities. He’d designed it himself and had it constructed at the Great Western works in Swindon, and shipped it out in advance of the expedition.

“They went without a smile, a wave, or even a look back at us. The great steam cars led the way, huffing and roaring like monsters, breaking down jungle as they went, while the
camaradas
walked behind with the mules. The pace was such that the mules had no problem keeping up. Even when the caravan had passed from our view we were able to track their progress by the plumes from the steam cars’ smokestacks, rising above the trees. When it came time for us to leave on the next tide, their smoke was still within sight.”

Wilder took a moment. Sebastian wondered how often he thought on these images. The master’s mate seemed to have been drawn into his own tale and it was almost as if, in his mind, he was back there now. Then:

“Our orders were to sail on down the coast to the mouth of the Amazon. We were to travel up the river as far as our ship could safely navigate, and then send a boat party onward to meet the expedition at the end of its journey. I was assigned to lead the greeting party. Through circumstances outside our control, we reached the point of confluence some fifteen days late.

“It was of no matter. Sir Owain and his people had not yet appeared. The captain sent me inland to look for them. I took my men some way farther up the tributary river and we made camp at a convenient spot, where we settled down to wait.

“Days passed, and then weeks. I stopped expecting them to appear around the river’s bend at any hour and was gripped by an increasing certainty that something terrible must have happened. As our presence became known in the area, Indians came to our camp and showed us items that had washed downstream. A straw hat. Some rope. A champagne bottle with its label washed off—it had miraculously survived being smashed in the rapids.

“I sent a message back to my ship, asking what I should do. The captain’s reply came back. He said that we were being paid to wait, so I should wait. So we did.

“Finally, the survivors came floating out of the jungle on a crude raft. There were only two of them. Sir Owain, and one other. They’d been deserted by the
camaradas
and their boats and equipment were lost. Everyone else in the party had perished. Sir Owain’s wife and child were dead. The other man was limping on a gangrenous foot.”

Evangeline said, “Who was the other man?”

“The botanist, I think. Sir Owain was delirious and raving, and both had to be carried. We got them back to the ship as quickly as we were able, where our ship’s doctor dealt with them as best he could. Sir Owain was terribly thin but seemed physically intact, though he raved and rambled and made little sense, and eventually had to be doped and tied to his bunk.

“That was after he’d got hold of a gun from somewhere and run to the stern, blasting away at the sea and swearing that there were great serpents following us. It was a tragic sight.”

Sebastian said, “Was anything actually there?”

Wilder shook his head. “Nothing at all,” he said. “Over the next few days, Sir Owain seemed to recover. He was more or less rational by the time we reached port. As his mind cleared he asked for ink and paper and began to write furiously. Our ship’s doctor spent a lot of time with him, reading the pages as they came.”

“What of the other man?”

“That same doctor saved most of his foot. Our ship’s carpenter made him a crutch. Neither man would say much about their ordeal. They acted like men walking away from a battle with most of their scars on the inside.”

Evangeline said, “Do you remember your doctor’s name? Can we locate him?”

“The botanist? It was Doctor Summerfield, I think. Or Smithfield. Something like that.”

“I meant your own ship’s doctor.”

“Oh,
him
,” Wilder said. “Of course. That was Sibley. Doctor Hubert Sibley.”

S
O THAT WAS
W
ILDER’S TALE
. H
E WALKED THEM OUT, THROUGH
long corridors in need of repair, emerging into a part of the college that felt to Sebastian like a massive Roman cloister. Greenwich was a place of tides and fog, and the fog had filled the cloister up while they’d been inside. The air hung still, and in this stillness was a creaking sound. It came from large iron lamps that hung from plaster roses in the ceiling of the colonnade, moving slightly under some imperceptible influence.

Sebastian thanked him, and Evangeline offered her hand and said, as Wilder took it and bowed his head, “Mister Wilder. May I ask—”

“Yes?”

“We were told that injury ended your time at sea. Yet you seem …”

She seemed unsure of how to put her question, but he understood immediately.

“Without any obvious impediment?” he said. “I understand. The air by the river was thick with mosquitoes and biting flies. As we waited for the party to appear, all in our camp were laid low in their turn. My infection took a long time to appear and even longer to leave. Eventually I recovered my strength, only to find that my balance had been permanently affected. Now I can’t take the motion of a boat. Any boat. The sea crossing home was perfect hell.”

“So it left no direct mark,” she said, “and yet it keeps you from the life you wanted. My sympathies.”

“Thank you,” Wilder said, and belatedly realized that he had not yet released her hand. He blushed.

Sebastian and Evangeline went on their way. Sebastian was thinking about those mighty steam cars, their component parts forged in Sir Owain’s foundries and assembled in his shipyards, now swallowed up into the jungle and gone. Somewhere they rusted, the bones of the dead scattered all around them.

But what a sight they must have made as they set off! Like Robert’s dime magazine airships and steam-driven men and ironclads of the plains, made real for this dawning age.

Once he and Evangeline were out in the open, they could see how dense the fog had become. Sebastian offered his arm, and Evangeline took it. With some hesitation, he sensed, but she took it all the same.

As they made their slow way toward the West Gate, Evangeline said, “There’s a photograph of all the expedition members in Sir Owain’s book. His wife and child were not among them.”

“That picture was faked in a studio,” Sebastian said. “Like all the others. If you look closely you can see the same man twice, in different whiskers.”

“So he conjured his dead loved ones all the way out of existence? What did Sir Owain think he was doing?”

“Rejecting the reality of his situation. He finds it too terrible to contemplate, so he’d have us believe in another.”

“That makes him more of a rogue than a madman.”

“It’s madness if he believes it as well.”

As the pillars and wrought iron of the West Gate took shape in the fog before them, Sebastian said, “How goes it with your employers?”

“I’ve been pleading a recurrent indisposition,” she said. “When concern for my health gives way to irritation at my absences, I’ll stage a quiet recovery.”

“I’m surprised at men of the law being so easily misled.”

“The men of the law don’t concern themselves with the likes of me. I only need to fool our clerk. He’s a terrier with the males. But if a woman so much as touches his arm, he stammers. I’ve had him stammering a lot.”

“Miss Bancroft!” Sebastian said, feigning shock and causing her to smile.

Although it was only a short walk to the boat pier, in the fog it was a distance to be covered slowly and with caution. The few people they saw were anonymous shapes, emerging and fading again like hulks at sea. One cart went by, its driver dismounted and leading his horse by the bridle, rapping his way along the edge of the pavement with a heavy staff like a blinded pilgrim. After its passing bulk and the noisy shaking of its iron-bound wheels over stone … silence.

The pier gates were closed and locked, and a notice hung upon them. Wisps of fog curled around it. It was as Sebastian had expected. No steamer captain would take passengers onto the river in such conditions. Disaster was guaranteed.

But Evangeline seemed surprised. “Oh,” she said. “Are we stranded? What are we to do?”

“Don’t be concerned,” Sebastian said. “We can cross under the river and pick up a North Greenwich train.”

“A tunnel.”

“Right there.” He pointed to where, visible on the embankment a few yards away, there stood a round building with a domed roof. It resembled some moon-bound projectile lifted straight from the engravings in a Jules Verne romance, a brick-and-glass bullet seated firmly on the earth.

They went across to the building, which housed lift machinery and a stairway. As they waited in the white-tiled rotunda, Sebastian could see that Evangeline was not happy at the prospect of a descent.

To distract her mind, he said, “We should look for this botanist. Summerfield or Smithfield. Whatever the man’s name is.”

“If he’s alive. And in a fit state to speak.”

The lift arrived from below. Some half-dozen people emerged, but only Sebastian and Evangeline boarded. Early in the morning, the foot tunnel would be choked with a press of workers heading from their homes in Greenwich to the docklands across the river. All would flood back again at the end of the day. The wood-paneled lift was of a size that could carry eighty or more at a time.

The old-soldier operator waited less than half a minute, and then closed the doors. During their fifty-foot descent the cage seemed to falter, like a cart rolling over a bump, and its overhead light flickered. The operator showed no reaction, but Evangeline drew in a breath.

Then the doors opened, and there it stretched before them. The quarter-mile tunnel was circular, lined with white glazed tiles, lit from above by electricity, and fog-free. Because of the way that it angled down under the river and then climbed again after the halfway point, it was not possible to see to its far end. A dozen people waited to enter the lift. More could be seen down the tunnel’s length.

They started to walk. Something in Evangeline’s attitude betrayed her and Sebastian said, “Do shut-in places make you nervous? You should have told me. Take my arm again, if it reassures you.”