The Detective and the Devil (26 page)

Her husband laughed in the Castle’s parlour. Quite suddenly, his laugh was not a happy sound.

Her father was angry with her, but here at the foot of Halley’s Mount she could forget that and feel the warm grass on her bare back, the sunlight on her blushing face
and the hot,
hot
skin of the man who had just made love to her.

The sky was so blue and so endless. Once again she imagined floating up into that sky, up and away from St Helena, this beautiful island prison in which she was trapped by obligation and custom.
It had been the cause of her latest disagreement with her father. She wanted to leave the island – not forever, just to see England, to spend some of the money which she knew was hers by
right. But her father had said she was too young for such a trip – that she was needed here, in any case.

Perhaps she could escape with this man beside her, into the cold North. Or would he take her up into the sky, in one of those balloons she had read about and had even thought of building? The
two of them floating to England on the incessant bloody wind.

His name was John Burroughs, and he was a captain in the island militia. His body was as thick and squat as one of the giant tortoises that lived on the island, his hair was as red as Company
wine, his hands as hard as ship wood and as gentle as the silk which was her only hobby.

‘That was nice,’ she said, looking round at him lying naked on the ground.

‘Nice?’ John said, and running her eyes down his body she noticed that he was already thinking about taking her again. ‘That was more than nice, Mina. I don’t know what
you’ve been reading, but whatever it is you should read some more of it.’

She reached for him with her hand, and he moaned delightfully, and although the sun was still high and the grass was still warm, she was no longer thinking about those things.

It was falling dark by the time she walked back to the old Dutch fort, leaving John to walk alone down to James Town. He knew nothing of the fort or what lay beneath it, nor would he ever learn.
She may have been indulging herself in physical transports, but she would never transport herself enough to reveal her father’s secrets to one outside the family.

Her grandfather’s secrets. Her grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s secrets. Not her secrets, of course. They had never been
hers
. And yet this baleful
inheritance was all she had. Stuck on this island she had never left. Her mother had told her when she was a child that she might leave one day, and she had painted word-pictures of the London she
had herself been born in for her mesmerised daughter, a mighty place of dukes and duchesses, palaces and pleasure-houses, where everyone dressed in Paris fineries and there were dances every night.
Her predecessors on the island had come and gone as they pleased. But not her father. He remained, stubbornly and desperately since the death of his wife, his daughter chained to him by unrelenting
obligation.

Somewhere between Halley’s Mount and the fort, Fernando appeared. He was never far from her, she found, even though he was supposedly busy working in the mine. But her father was ill, she
reminded herself. There was probably less work for Fernando when that was the case.

His broken face glared at her, the face which so terrified the children of the island but which she had been seeing since the day she was born. It bore no fears for her, although she found she
resented it more and more.

‘What? What is wrong with you? Stupid bloody Cannibal.’

He hated her calling him that. It was the name the island children had given to him, years ago. She used to wonder whether he watched them playing their games in the square of James Town, one of
them pretending to be him, hiding one hand up a sleeve and making awful slobbering noises as he (it was always a boy) lumbered around trying to catch his playmates.

‘Were you watching us?’ she said to him now. ‘Were you? You disgusting fiend. You were, weren’t you?’

Fernando was no longer glaring. He now looked crestfallen, like the dog she had never been allowed to have. He walked in front of her.

‘I see you watching me. I see it. You’re disgusting. I hate you!’

She was screaming by now, her previous calm happiness punctured. As they climbed to the fort, she actually found herself sobbing. Fernando made strange noises, perhaps words in his own tongue,
perhaps sobs of his own. She pulled the heavy magnet from her bag, the thing she had to carry around with her wherever she went, and opened the door to the fort.

It was so quiet inside. So still. None of the noises she’d come to associate with the fort; the noise of rock falling onto rock, of rock falling into the sea at the bottom of the fissure,
the noise of her father shouting at Fernando, the harsh chemical smell from the processing chamber.

The fort felt like it had died while she had been out in the sun enjoying John.

She found herself unable to sob any more. A panic gripped her as she descended, passing through the big central chamber with the fissure cut through it, over the old wooden bridge and into the
chambers beyond. Fernando scurried along beside her, very dog-like now, as if he too had detected the strange stillness in the place.

There was a glow coming from the processing chamber, as if the life of the room were not yet extinguished. But when she entered and saw him lying there on his back, on the ground, she saw that
the light had lied. There was no life in this room. Only the memory of it, and the bitter stench of almonds.

With a shriek, she rushed to her father’s side and took one lifeless hand in hers. Her other hand she laid across his cold brow, recoiling from it as if it had been ice – though she
had never seen ice, she had only read about it in the books. And then she laid her own brow on the bed, the top of her head against the still infinite immensity of her father’s side, and she
wept for the life she had never had and the life that now, at last, was to come.

She would never leave the island, now.

She was watched by the Cannibal, whose eyes spoke only of love and loss.

The unpleasantness that broke out with Charles the next morning was of a piece with similar disagreements in London. Seale left early to perform some work at the stores,
promising to return later in the day and show them around the island. Charles planned to look around James Town while they waited, and had suggested Abigail wait in Seale’s house while he did
so, ‘with a book, perhaps’.

She clapped her hands, once and sharply, and sat down in a chair in Seale’s parlour. She felt suddenly as drawn-tight as a drum. She had become furious.

‘Husband, sit thee down.’ She said
thee
with an acid tone, precisely as she meant to say it. He looked alarmed, almost as if she had raised a hand to him, but he sat down as
she had ordered
.

‘This will end, now, if you please,’ she said.

‘This?’

‘Husband: I am not some sensitive plant that must be preserved from wind and rain. I am not a milk-skinned duchess hidden from the farm-hands. I am a nurse, I am intelligent, and I am made
of more robust substance than you give credit for. Look.’

She held out her bare forearms (though not her upper arm, where Rat’s bruise lay beneath her sleeve). He looked confused.

‘Do you not see?’ she demanded.

‘See?’

‘My skin is brown from the sun. My hair is blonder than it has ever been. I have been changed by this voyage, husband.’

‘Abigail, I do not understand you.’

‘No, husband, you do not and nor do you attempt to. It is part of a woman’s burden to be misunderstood by men. Know this, then: I have sailed halfway around the world with you. Not
to escape whatever awaited us in London. I am here because you are here. If either of us is in need of protection, it is not me.’

She stood at this, and turned her back to him at the house’s front window.

‘Here we are on a rock in the Atlantic, thousands of miles away from home. Is this where you will squirrel me away? Hide me from the bad men? Wrap me in muslin and put me in a box so that
none may harm me?’

‘But of course I wish to protect you from harm.’

‘But what
am I
? Have you considered that? Am I just the woman who cooks you meals and reads her books? Or am I something else? It has not been easy being a woman of my type: too
poor to marry well, too educated to sell fish or pick hops or sew dresses or go into service. I became a nurse, but then you came along, and I stopped being a nurse. Or at least I became a wife to
a man who needs a nurse.’

‘I need a nurse?’

‘You need a nurse, you need a confidante, you need a confessor. You are the most frighteningly unhappy man I have ever met, Charles Horton. Only one thing makes you happy, I do believe,
and it is myself. So you preserve me from danger, you wrap me in muslin. And this will
stop
, husband.’

She turned to face him again, and felt something surge up within her, as if a poison she had ingested long ago was finally being released into the open air.

‘Because never forget, husband, not for one instant, who is looking after whom.’

There.

She understood a new life was being laid out before them. The whale ship had been a voyage from one life to another, as if that great leviathan had been sacrificed for some new conception of
themselves.

If I ever return to London, I shall not need Dr Drysdale
.

Devils and demons had danced around her head, and now they were silent.

‘Well, then, wife,’ Charles said, coming towards her. She had troubled him, she saw. ‘It seems we have some things to talk about. Perhaps a walk in the sun?’

James Town’s single street possessed only a handful of crossings. It ran up the valley, climbing into the interior of the island which, despite the heat of the morning,
was once again shrouded in fog – or, perhaps, the peaks were high enough to pierce the clouds.

The climate was still astonishingly pleasant, though breezy. The people out on the street seemed friendly enough, and greeted them with open faces and smiles. They seemed used to strangers.

Abigail wondered as to the island’s population; it must run into the hundreds, perhaps even the low thousands. This was the only town, and it was the size of a good-sized village: a few
dozen homes, a few hundred residents. The population must, she thought, be swelled significantly by the number of blacks, whose faces were everywhere, all seemingly occupied in some burdensome
activity: carrying, cleaning, pulling, sweeping. Some of the Negro men were shirtless, and many of them had vivid white-and-pink scars whipped into their backs.

There were groups of Chinese, too: mainly men, but the occasional small knot of women. She could not guess as to their provenance or purpose, and they took no notice of her or of anyone else.
They talked among themselves and moved with single purpose.

Charles said he had little plan other than to find Captain Edgar Burroughs, the new assistant treasurer. He had not asked the Governor for this information – for what would a Royal Society
botanist have to do with a new Company bureaucrat?

‘But he may know we are here, already,’ said Charles. ‘I have little doubt that the message has reached Captain Burroughs of our arrival. I half expect the man to make himself
known to us directly.’

‘We have no idea of the fellow’s appearance.’

‘No. None at all. He cannot be any more than forty years of age, by my reckoning.’

‘He has recently arrived, though. He may still have his London pallor.’

Charles laughed.

‘We have lost ours, wife – as you have this morning demonstrated to me.’

There was an idiosyncratic simplicity to the place, one at odds with Charles’s stories of unexplained murders, and with the older, murkier story that had been told by Sir Joseph Banks, and
which Charles had retold to her in that little cabin on the
Martha
: of Edmond Halley’s visit to the island, the strange creature he had found there, the secrets which seemed to go
back centuries.

She thought of John Dee’s house in Mortlake. She had had time to give Halley’s strange tale much thought (when she had not been thinking of Rat, or Drysdale, or lingering with
self-indulgent misery on
herself
). She had read something of John Dee and his library, though this reading had only brought confusion. Dee seemed to have a profound understanding and
reverence for Euclid’s mathematics; indeed, seemed to find mathematics almost the language of God. But he also had a parallel set of beliefs which she found mystifying: that the stars and
planets were fixed in their orbits around the Earth, that their influences worked upon humankind through their rays, that there were angels and demons and that mankind could ascend to the Godhead
through knowledge and, indeed, through mathematics. And that a man once ascended might live forever.

She looked up at the peaks of St Helena’s interior, and remembered Edmund Kean’s Prospero casting spells on the stage at Drury Lane, back on that night when this strange narrative
began. Had Prospero’s island been like this one? Had it had peaks and valleys, streams and rocks, green fields and jagged edges? Did another Ariel ride the winds up there, and was Caliban
lurking within the hillside shadows?

‘I have been remembering Sir Joseph’s odd tale – of John Dee and this island,’ said Charles, interrupting her reverie.

‘And I was thinking of the play,’ she said.

‘The play?’

‘The Shakespeare we saw. It is a strange coincidence, is it not?’

‘Edmond Halley met Caliban, did he?’

Her husband was smiling.

‘He met someone,’ she said. ‘I have read some of Halley’s work. He was not a man given to dramatisation.’

‘A mystery. One that needs looking into, does it not?’

Now it was her turn to smile.

‘A mystery for you, and a mystery for me, husband?’

‘It would seem the fairest arrangement.’

‘Well then. I shall walk in the steps of Mr Halley, and you shall pursue your killer.’