The Bedlam Stacks

  I took it carefully. ‘Am I allowed to have . . .’

  ‘No. But if there are other whitewood forests, no one will care too much about this one, will they?’

  I sat studying the seeds and finally understood why Harry had planted an explosive tree at home. He had been seeing if whitewood would grow elsewhere. But it hadn’t grown properly; the wood had been light but it had never floated. It had failed because Heligan was at sea level. The whitewoods would need mountains, high. The Himalayas.

  Someone else came into the room behind us, a stewardly man who gave the impression he had been just outside all along waiting for the scribe to leave.

  I got up. ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ I said, a bit loudly, in case the steward had enough Spanish to guess at some English. ‘Do you want some?’

  ‘Please.’

  While I looked in my bag to find the coffee, I slipped the seeds through a worn patch and into the lining. The steward had stoked the brazier and brought some water.

  It only took me a minute to make some coffee, but it was too much. Raphael was gone by the time I went back out. I sat with him for a little while longer, in case vestigially he was still there, but I didn’t think he was. Before anyone could see – I don’t know why – I took his rosary.

  I called to the steward, who called for doctors. I waited for half an hour before one of them explained in unsettlingly good Spanish that this wasn’t one of the short spells.

  Without him they didn’t like my being there. I stayed close to my bag in case I had to run, though I had no idea how I was supposed to escape from a floating city, but when the soldiers arrived it wasn’t to arrest me. The doctor translated, gently, that they wanted to know where I should be taken, because there was a heavy chance I would die of the altitude in the next twenty-four hours. Any visitor was usually required to stay on the mountain for at least a month before risking the extra height of the city.

  ‘One of the markayuq told me I wasn’t meant to be here,’ I said, still slow and proving their point. The more I tried to speak the more I realised they were right. It was worse now than when I’d first woken.

  The doctor winced. ‘Correctly. The border is closed. But frankly to refuse a retinue for turning markayuq is idiotic, and an unintended side-effect of the quarantine laws. Unfortunately many of our laws are made by markayuq and so it can take . . . rather a long time to change anything.’ He said it quickly, not liking to criticise them. ‘You brought him home safely. At this point I rather think it would be political suicide for anyone to say you shouldn’t have.’

  I nodded and felt like I was going to cry. I must not have looked well, because the doctor gave me a cup of chocolate, spiced with something warm.

  If Clem had been there he would have loved it. The soldiers had their hair shaved back from their temples and gold hoops around their arms that showed, I found out a lot later, their rank. They were the closest to Incan I’d ever seen in real life or in a book, but sitting there with them, I couldn’t summon up any curiosity. They seemed just to belong to the place. I wasn’t surprised to see orders passed along on knot cords; that the short swords they carried were made of obsidian, not steel; that their armour was gold-plated squares that rippled when they turned, or that they spoke that older Quechua which Raphael had taught me for the prayer in the forest. I had a faint, faint sense of being lucky to have seen them. It felt like having been dropped into a place where Rome never fell and there were still Caesars, but broad principles are hard to catch when the thing at hand is to work out how to read latitude on someone else’s map.

  They had brought me a Spanish map, but it was old and I struggled to find Arequipa on it. Once I had, I sat back and felt hollowed out. The doctor sent the soldiers away and they went, oddly too respectful. I had a feeling it meant something here, that I’d arrived with a markayuq, but nobody said what it was.

  I left a note for Raphael with my address on it, the same one Harry had left, feeling hopeless, because I couldn’t promise that anyone would still live at Heligan by the time he came around. They said it would be, by their best calculation, twenty-one years and six months.

  They took me at night. The ship was small, but the sails caught the wind well and once we were above the forest, there was a blackout on board. I sat in the dark in a loop of rigging rope. I’d tied it myself and no one had stopped me. I swung gently, pushing off a little sometimes from the rail. There were lights under the clouds, a big spray of them that might have been Azangaro. I had been sitting straight, but something about seeing a familiar place took the last strength out of the bones in my spine and I let my head bump against the ropes.

  Twenty-one years and six months. It was a long way. Looking at the distance made me feel so tired I didn’t even want to begin. Even if it had been less, there was no one to walk with. It ought not have been surprising. I’d never thought there would be anybody and it was spoiled to imagine that I had any right to company. In a few weeks, or months, I wouldn’t be sad any more and back to all my old indifference, which was ordinary enough, but just then it seemed monstrous. I squeezed the cross on Raphael’s rosary until my hand bled.

  They left me just outside Arequipa. The ship couldn’t dip below a certain height – the whitewood lift was too much – but they let me down on a rope wound to a silent pulley. To anyone watching from the ground it would have looked like I was being lowered by a considerate cloud, though I don’t think anyone saw. The fields outside the town were deserted. I walked the last of the road up to the house where Minna was staying. The upstairs window was alight. Although I stared at it for a while, I couldn’t go up. I asked a beggar for the next nearest inn, where, because it was the off season for the herders, most of the rooms were empty and as good as free.

  PART FIVE

  THIRTY-ONE

  Ceylon, 1861

  When we met Sing in Ceylon, we had fifty-four cinchona cuttings in the Wardian cases, and three whitewood shoots. I planted the latter in the coldest set of shadows I could find, north-facing, and sat staring at them nearly as much as we all stared at the cinchona.

  I’d never seen plants dealt with more seriously. The gardeners and I made paper cases to carry the sprouting cinchona cuttings out with their tiny new root systems and the soil around them intact, and planted them with tape measures against their stems to make sure we didn’t bury them too far up. The ground Sing had acquired for us was perfect and they grew quickly. I stayed for almost a year to see them through. In that time, the whitewoods shot up like silver birches. No one else touched them; I didn’t tell anyone what they were, but they were the first thing I went out to every morning.

  It was late in the boiling summer when I found Sing sitting at the base of one with a book and the unflustered air of someone who had been born to Asian weather. After the mountains round Bedlam, it was scorching. People hurried inside to get away from the sun like Englishmen avoided thunderstorms. It was easy to spot white people, even from behind; we moved too quickly for the heat and ended up in exhausted heaps before mid-morning.

  Sing had managed to acquire a little table and a tea set, with lemons. I died a bit at the thought of drinking anything hot and had to shake my head when he lifted the teapot towards me. Down in the valley below us, the wind ruffled the new cinchona canopy. The cicadas started up a mechanical shriek.

  ‘So what are these?’ he asked. I’d kept them out of my report. I’d left out everything after I’d followed Raphael to the city. I knew Sing must have seen gaps. My timings added up wrongly; it had only taken me a week to get back across to Peru with the cuttings, and there was no way I should have been able to do that without help from a cavalry regiment. Even then, someone should have stopped me and asked about Martel and his men, though of course I’d completely bypassed Azangaro, three thousand feet up. But Sing hadn’t asked me. I was glad, because I didn’t want to tell anyone. Whenever I thought about it, the idea felt like cutting off an arm.

  I sat down beside him. It was awk
ward, even with the whitewood band, because the muscle was still damaged even if my weight didn’t pull at it any more.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I know if they’re doing what they should or not.’

  He looked to the side. ‘You’ve already taken cuttings from them.’

  I had. There were six, much tinier saplings scattered about around them now. It looked all right so far – they had taken root – but the sawdust didn’t float yet. ‘If I’m right about them, they’re going to be valuable. More than quinine. I was wondering if I could shanghai a plantation in the Himalayas.’

  ‘For a mysterious project of unknown yield,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right. Since you’re the India Office’s new golden boy. Speaking of which. I’m happy to hand off the cinchona to more junior gardeners soon if you are.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Good. Where would you like to go next?’ he said, as if it was nothing. ‘There are rubber expeditions going out in Africa now. Some Arctic exploratory stuff, if you wanted a change of scene. And the Foreign Office are mooing for anyone who speaks Chinese to get on the diplomatic service in Japan. It opened to trade while you were away,’ he explained when I started to ask since when had there been a diplomatic service in Japan.

  ‘Did it?’ I said, surprised.

  ‘Well, the Americans shelled them until they said yes.’

  ‘Oh, right. Yes, Japan please.’

  ‘Really? It won’t be gardening.’

  ‘Just – for a while. Can I?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He watched me for a second. ‘But then we really will want you in the Congo.’

  ‘Yes.’

  We sat in silence. Down the hill from us, Minna was walking with the baby and the new ayah, a cheery girl who danced whenever she swept the veranda. Minna had had the baby a month early, which had nearly given me a heart attack but hadn’t seemed to worry her. It was, she pointed out, far too hot to be penned up somewhere airless, even when that somewhere was your own mother.

  ‘Is she going with you?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Why would she be?’

  ‘Isn’t that what people do, marry their dead husband’s friends?’

  ‘Awkward when I killed her husband.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You allowed him to be stupid for the general good of mankind. And of that village, I might add, to which we now have no need to send the army. You’re not going to have some sort of angst-driven breakdown now, are you?’ he added warily. ‘I’d encourage you not to.’

  I laughed. ‘No. But I can keep a secret from someone I see only occasionally. Harder to keep it from my wife.’

  ‘No. True.’

  He was looking at the rosary around my wrist, but he had never asked about that either. He had a pretty firm stance on religion, which was that the less people bothered about it, the fewer huffy trade impediments there were going to be. I pressed my other hand round it and squeezed until the beads printed my arm, and half the cross. I’d thought that I would stop thinking about it all after a few weeks, but I hadn’t. I’d found that if I sat still for too long without doing something useful, the way ahead – twenty years – looked as far as the stars. To Raphael’s way of thinking, you only had to sit still and the future would catch up with you from behind, but I was starting to feel like I was facing the wrong way. It got further away the longer I looked.

  ‘Right, morning rounds,’ I said, unable to sit quiet any more. We had slipped into talking about the cinchona plantation as if it were a hospital ward. ‘Coming?’

  ‘I think I’ll stay here,’ he said, for the first morning since we had arrived.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Cornwall, 1881

  When I came in from the garden, Minna and Cecily were putting holly up around the house, which was now full of people because they had invited everyone they knew. There were trees and candles everywhere too. More than anything it looked like the garden had moved into the house for the holiday. There was a brandy, Christmas-cake smell drifting up from the kitchens and someone was playing the piano in the parlour, a beautiful version of a carol whose words I’d forgotten. I couldn’t believe how warm it was with the roof and the windows all in good repair and the fires going. It felt like another house altogether. I hadn’t been there often enough in the intervening years to have remembered it any other way than how it was when I’d left it before Peru. When I was in England, which was rare, I stayed with Sing. I could have bought a house of my own, but I didn’t want to. Silence in empty rooms whistled.

  Minna turned around where she sat on the stairs twining holly round the banister.

  ‘Oh, Em, there’s someone here for you,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ I said, confused, because I’d been sure that everyone I knew well was already here. Minna and Cecily had invited themselves and promptly redecorated because they said it was bleak, and I’d invited Sing, because it was a sort of unspoken pact to have Christmas and New Year together if both of us were in the same place, which was not every year. We were the only people either of us knew who didn’t disappear off into extended families for the holiday. Even Sing’s servant went back to the Netherlands towards the middle of December. Usually we would have been at Sing’s house in London, but Charles had died in November and I’d been back at Heligan since then, going through everything. I had a feeling Minna was there more to keep an eye on me than to put up new wallpaper.

  ‘He says it’s a surprise,’ she laughed.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the parlour. He’s the one with the piano.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone who plays the piano. Do I?’

  ‘You do, dear,’ Cecily said. She sounded exactly like Clem. The red hair was glorious on a girl and in all the Christmas candles she might have been something shined up from Byzantium. ‘But he’s been keeping it secret.’

  I went through slowly, looking at the candles and the decorations. The man at the piano was dark and slight, with a grey tweed waistcoat and shoes with a Japanese manufacturer’s mark on the heels. He smiled at me. He was sitting to one side of the piano stool so there would be room.

  ‘Keita,’ I laughed. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Surprise.’ He finished the carol and let his hands drop into his lap, although he had hooked down the pedal and the sound resounded. ‘I heard about your brother; I’m sorry.’

  ‘You didn’t come all the way from Tokyo for that?’

  ‘Well, and it’s Christmas,’ he said awkwardly.

  I smiled. I didn’t touch him, though I would have if I’d thought for a second he wouldn’t, Tokyo-ishly, take it as assault.

  He was a changeable thing. He was a late bloomer just like I’d thought, and he was coming into himself more and more every time I saw him. He had been fragile as a young man, but he was in his thirties now and glowing. Nothing else about him had changed. He was still exactly the same pensive person he had been in China, and when I’d found him watching a cricket match at his school fifteen years ago.

  There were women I didn’t know taking up all the chairs at the other end of the room, so I took a tray of tea things and made it on top of the piano. He closed the lid over the keys so we could use it as a counter. Once the tea was poured and cooling, I saw how he was looking at my wrist, which still had Raphael’s rosary wound around it. I rested the heel of my hand on the edge of the piano lid, the beads imprinting the underside of my arm. He didn’t tell me not to, although it was a nervous habit he must have noticed before.

  ‘Who are all these people?’ he said instead.

  ‘Apart from Minna and Cecily, no idea. Their friends.’

  ‘Why are they inviting people to your house?’

  ‘They invited themselves and then said it seemed empty. I think I might be Minna’s winter project. She’s worried that I’ll be upset about Charles. And apparently when you say in a moment of good-willed absentmindedness that you’ll be someone’s godfather, it turns out that you’re actually signing
away all your worldly goods to her, including your house and any available Christmases. Actually I quite like all the noise,’ I admitted.

  He smiled. ‘Me too. Listen, did I imagine that you’re going to Peru in June?’

  I hadn’t told anyone, but that was no more a barrier for him now than it had been twenty-five years ago. ‘No, I am. Why?’

  Somewhere upstairs, where they had renovated Dad’s study into a new, bigger parlour, Cecily had taken over the music. She played the violin and she had begun the same carol Keita had been playing, but she was pretending not to know all of it and, in the joking way musical people can, bridged the gaps with ‘Ode to Joy’. The fireplaces here and there lined up and I could hear people laughing through the chimney.

  ‘Could you send me some of the pollen from the forest? Only a vial.’ He paused. ‘I’m making some fireflies.’

  I laughed. ‘To Tokyo?’

  ‘No, Knightsbridge, please.’ He gave me a piece of paper with an address on it. Filigree Street.

  ‘Holiday?’ I said.

  ‘No, to live. Not for very long, only a few years.’

  ‘Lovely,’ I said, and waited to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t. For his country he was a tall man, and he held himself like one, but every so often there was a fragility around him when he was coming up to something that seemed especially insurmountable. I poured him some more tea and watched the moving steam catch his eye and tug him slowly into the present.

  ‘Is she playing “Ode to Joy”?’ he asked at last.

  ‘She is. She’s joking. She means you should go upstairs and say hello.’ They had met before. Minna had come on holiday to Japan once when Cecily was about four. Keita had taught her to read, in about two afternoons, with the efficiency of someone who didn’t like children and wanted a proper human being to talk to.