The Devil's Making (35 page)

‘You mean you don't think he had a sexual life? A mistress, for instance?'

‘Damned if I know. I did meet him a few times at the Windsor Rooms, 'cos he suggested it. He thought I might enjoy it – suggested it as we were riding into town one Sunday evening, from the Farm.'

‘Why would he think you'd enjoy it?'

‘'Cos I asked him, as a man who seemed to know his way around, though he had not been in Victoria very long, what there was to do there. I manage to go there rarely, since San Juan is so far. I'm too busy fighting the Pig War, you see. Silly business, damned boring, and no society on San Juan really, since they are such a rustic lot.'

‘So you visited the Windsor Rooms with McCrory.' I was already tired of going round in circles. It was as if we had been talking an hour, not just a few minutes, Beaumont was so opaque.

‘That's what I said, old boy.'

‘And you weren't a patient of his?'

‘Don't be silly. Animal magnetism? Mesmerism? Rubbish!'

‘You think so?'

‘Of course. He was a very
silly
man – a sort of intellectual worm with a digestive system which would reduce all facts to, well, earth.'

‘But you liked him,' I said, playing for time while I considered Beaumont's unexpected image of the intellectual worm …

‘One does what one can. I mean, do I like
you?
Beaumont was still looking straight ahead. ‘You're a bit pi, I'd expect. Not really much fun, not the sort of chap I'd choose as a friend really. Yet here we are, strolling along cheerfully enough.' His pace did not falter.

‘When did you hear about McCrory's death?'

‘In the
British Colonist.
A day or two late. When it reached English Camp. I forget what date it was.'

‘What were you doing the day he was killed?'

‘I don't know. I'd have to think. Could have been on duty or off – we're not very busy. Was it a Wednesday or a Thursday? I forget.'

‘Wednesday.'

‘I went rough shooting on the island. Super grouse.'

‘Do you ever come over here by boat on your own?'

‘I've done it. I'm here now aren't I? But not often. We have a sort of skiff with a centre board. I've rowed and sailed her across but it's awfully hard work. Better on the way back, with the wind. Not worth it really, since it's a long walk to Victoria from Telegraph Cove, and it's not always easy to hire a horse.'

‘Where do you put up when you stay the night in town?'

‘Hotel Argyle. McCrory recommended it to me, actually. Frightful bore, Mrs Larose, but it's better than the more expensive one I'd stayed at before, the St George.'

‘Ah yes, Mrs Larose,' I said, giving up my interrogation for now. I went on to describe my arrival in Victoria. I knew that if I continued questioning Beaumont we would arrive quickly at accusation and denial. I decided, on the spot, that I would have to go to San Juan somehow and find out more about this inscrutable machine-man. But now we were, after all, going to spend a Sunday afternoon together.

*   *   *

At Orchard Farm we were met by the three Somerville sisters, all fluffy and filmy in their summer dresses over crinolines, who had been waiting for us in the sun. They maintained a certain poise, like flamingos in a park, on the rough grassy patch in front of the house. But they were excited, in a breathless, girlish way, about the project of going for a walk up Mount Douglas. At least the youngest two were excited, above all Cordelia who called out gaily: ‘Mamma has a headache so she's staying to talk to Mr Quattrini. He, poor man, is most upset at the death of his Irish servant girl in a fit of hysteria. Do come with us. Jones will bring us the first part of the way, then we can walk. It's such a
perfect
day.' And in her voice there was the thrill of the other perfect thing: that there were three girls and three young men. Firbanks or other admirers were nowhere to be seen. Typically going slightly beyond good taste, Cordelia mentioned this: ‘Three escorts! What more could we ask?'

This frothiness was not quite shared by Aemilia, I sensed, but even she was, as at the church, less sombre than the previous week. As we waited for Mr Jones to come up with the buggy, it was natural for us all to pair off and stand talking. Frederick, come out of his sulk, with the bubbling Cordelia; Beaumont, the wooden man, with the insipid Letitia; me with Aemilia. I asked her about music. My mind and senses had been so indelibly marked by my encounters with Lukswaas that I found it unnerving to be standing close to a young woman yet not embracing her, not being aware of what she was like underneath her clothes. It was a struggle between surges of impersonal man-woman lust and a refined conversation which seized on everything ethereal – whether it was the cadence of a phrase of Handel, or the clear light on the few puffy clouds – as evidence that here were two souls talking, not two bodies.

Yet I told myself I did not actually lust after Aemilia. It was the awareness of her as a physical woman that was new. The barrier of my former innocence had broken through. At the same time I could, to my pleasure, feel Aemilia warming to me. Her grey eyes lingered more in mine than they had before, and her body, tall and slim like Lukswaas but seeming to reflect or emit more light, perhaps because of her dress, swung to and fro slightly as she leaned on her parasol, its point pressed into the rough grass of the ‘lawn'.

Mr Jones appeared, driving the four-wheeled buggy pulled by two horses, with its facing seats under a canopy, his own seat raised in front. He was not exactly in livery – this was, after all a free country and the Somervilles not aristocrats. But he was wearing a dark coat, which must have been stifling in the heat, with silver buttons. It looked not unlike my police uniform coat, a fact which Frederick, no doubt in revenge, latched upon. ‘We should have Mr Hobbes here recruit you into the police, Mr Jones,' he said, as patronizing as if he were a young squire at home in England, not an ironmonger's clerk stranded in a Colony. ‘You and he would make a great show together.' The girls laughed merrily.

‘Do you wear a
uniform,
Mr Hobbes?' Aemilia asked. We were getting settled, side by side, Beaumont on the other side of her, and Frederick ecstatically between the other two girls in the seat opposite. I could not tell, in the bustle, whether Aemilia was teasing or not.

‘Oh yes. Brass buttons an' all, wiv a brand new Sergeant's stroipe, or chevron, on the sleeve.' I said this in a joke Cockney voice, imitating a London ‘Peeler', then realised that such an accent would be foreign to these girls who had never been to England.

‘Tell me where you come from in England, Mr Hobbes,' Aemilia said gently.

I realized she was saving me from making a fool of myself, and I melted with gratitude. I went on to talk about Wiltshire at this time of year – the miles of green corn waving in the wind, with the few forlorn oaks and ashes in clumps on the high ridges which the Romans and Saxons had used as roadways, the scattered prehistoric stones and ramparts of earth where in places burnt bones and pottery shards could be dug out, the villages of pink brick houses covered with climbing roses – no, it would be wisteria coming into bloom now, as it had on the peeling stone walls of the quad in Univ. Here there was a diversion to Oxford in the late Spring, and the medieval carols sung from Magdalen tower on May morning at dawn. Then back to the sky larks hovering in song over the windswept Wiltshire downs: they never sang for more than three minutes, I was saying. But I was interrupted by Frederick beginning to chatter about Kent. Then Beaumont in his dry voice was saying that the bleakness of the North Yorkshire moors was ‘most agreeable when a man has grown up in it'. A general competitive cacophony intervened, with me talking merely to keep my end up. For a moment I had felt like an English skylark trilling a solo for Aemilia's ears, but now I was more like one of the Vancouver Island bluejays who in flocks of three or four, iridescent inky blue, black-crested, and quarrelsome, would squabble over last year's berries with raucous cries.

So we gabbled away about England, that Mecca of civilisation which all three of us men for one reason or another had left – although in that respect Beaumont had most assurance, since as the Queen's man wherever he went was a sort of England. The buggy was lurching along a dusty road, not much more than a path, between newly cleared farms in the valley bottom, with the thick firs of Mount Douglas forest behind, the mountain itself rising above the treetops, rocky and scrubby and singularly uninteresting from this distance. At length Mr Jones steered the horses up a trail through firs and cedars – like those on the other side of the mountain. As so often around Victoria, the impression was of having suddenly crossed aeons of time. This quiet, dark forest, with its trunks as straight and bare as masts, tufted branches far above, and its undergrowth of broad leaved bushes and ferns, its lack of birdsong except for very occasional, muffled twitterings, its grudging admittance of sunlight in the form of narrow shafts striking down like lightning bolts here and there, seemed primeval.

The trail came to a fork, each side of which was too narrow for the buggy, which stopped. Mr Jones would wait for us here. The men and I jumped down and handed the ladies out. As Aemilia stepped down, a few inches of bloomer showed, tied with pink ribbon at the ankle. Formerly it might have caused me to lose a night's sleep in wondrous retrospect. Now it seemed rather ridiculous. Must she not be hot? My own grey trousers were heavy and itchy.

We walked, as three couples, up one of the paths. It became steeper, and dustier. We stopped to examine the bark of a huge fir, perhaps six feet in diameter at chest height. Its deeply ridged bark was studded with layers of resin, some of which had swollen to bubbles and burst, so that trickles of it ran down the trunk, fragrant, and sticky to the touch – but leaving the fingers stained with black, as the over-eager Frederick discovered. We began walking again, almost climbing now, and gradually the path rose up along a ridge to the levels of the fir tops it was leaving behind, and was surrounded by another kind of vegetation – oaks and brambles among rocks and dry gullies.

Then the path broke out onto the shoulder of the mountain and we entered a third sort of region, where the oaks were suddenly dwarfs not much taller than a man, and there were grassy patches between rocks and boulders, carpeted with pink, yellow, and purple flowers. The resinous smell of the forest was replaced by the smell of dry grass. The sun beat down. The dwarf oaks were twisted, gnarled, and sparsely leaved. There were occasional arbutuses, blotched with green bark peeling from red, dense with thick green leaves, although last year's lay yellow on the stony ground.

‘We shan't look back until we reach the top,' Aemilia announced. We kept on climbing, the dainty shoes of the girls becoming dusty, we men offering our arms from time to time but just as often having to scramble for ouselves. The girls had courage, I thought, but they obviously had made the climb before. It was an odd struggle: to climb a mountain on a fiercely hot day, and yet to preserve civility. On my own I knew I would have cursed at the dry rocks, panted and puffed. As it was, our little procession mounted the narrow path serenely, at least in appearance, even as the wind began to tug at the bonnets of the girls, and the frock coats of the men.

At the top was a cairn of stones. A cool wind blew strongly around us. We now turned to look at the view, admiring it with oohs and aahs. It was very much the fashion to admire such ‘prospects'. We had come from the Southwest side, where we looked down over scrub and rocks to the top of the fir forest, then further to the fields of the valley, and rolling, forested hills all the way to the Western horizon. To the South, across forest then oak woods on steep small hills, we could see Victoria, about five miles away, nestling on its tiny mirror-like harbour, and beyond it the Straits with a fog bank starting about half way across, and above this, about twenty miles away, in Washington Territory, the bluish wall and level snowy crests of the Olympics or, as Aemilia explained to me ‘Hurricane Ridge.' To the East was dense forest covering a wide peninsula indented with bays. There was Cormorant Point. I thought I could see wisps of smoke from the camp fires, hovering above the trees, although the prospect was more hazy to this side. Across Haro Strait, San Juan Island was a gentle, wooded green. I could hear the dry voice of Beaumont trying to indicate to Letitia where English camp was, and saying ‘Dash it, I should have brought my field glasses.' To the North, where the slope pitched away from us steeply, we looked out over the long peninsula of Saanich, spread out as if on a map, mostly wooded but with a few clear patches of farmland, its coast curving away from us; then the archipelago of the Gulf Islands stretching Northward, intensely green in a dark blue sea.

The vivid colours, the huge distance on all sides, the sense of standing windswept and suspended in space with all the land falling down and away from us, the heat of the sun somehow pulsed by strong breeze, provoked in me a sense of excitement which the others must have been sharing: the girls' voices, though not Aemilia's, reached me in shrill tones, the men's sharp and pitched more high than usual.

We began to wend our way downward, on the Eastern side, over rocky hillocks tumbled with boulders, with dwarf oaks and arbutus growing out of the rock at odd angles, then becoming gnarled in turning to reach up as high as the wind would let them. There were hollows and small grassy plateaus between the rocky outcrops, which were sheltered from the wind. Aemilia picked her way down, using her folded parasol for occasional support, looking like a gauzy lilac and white butterfly, wisps of her chestnut brown hair blown loose from under her bonnet. I followed. The other couples were heading in different directions, as if the energy of the mountaintop had entered into them and was provoking them to be somewhat risqué about the normal conventions. Aemilia and I reached a grassy hollow where we were suddenly out of the breeze in a baking heat which made the grass smell like hay. Aemilia sat down, very carefully, as her dress required, on a smooth rock. There was nowhere similar for me to sit, yet I felt like resting, so I sprawled down as elegantly as I could on a grassy slope facing her, as if I were a young peasant, and she a lady shepherdess sitting demurely on her rock.