The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  I sat, carefully, not wanting to look too exhausted from the tiny walk up through the building. But Clem was right; I had been getting better in London, much better. He kept the house warm and he had towed me out to buy new clothes because, he said, the Spanish Embassy didn’t want me slouching about in a wax jacket that had probably seen action at Trafalgar, so now I was neat in black and grey, and a coat he had paid for with a blue cord collar. He had been buying gear for the expedition at the same time and it had been bizarre to see him order six shirts and four jackets all at once. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought anything new and I’d forgotten how thick unworn cotton felt.

  Sing studied me. Although he wasn’t an expressive man I saw the dismay go through his eyes. I’d known I must have aged in the time we had been apart, but it was a shock to watch him notice it. He didn’t mention it. ‘So Markham seems like an idiot who signed up to all this in the interest of having a jolly good jaunt and discovering something irrelevant and Incan. Is that a fair summation?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s a geographer-anthropologist, not an idiot. Of course he’s interested in the Inca.’

  ‘In the context of expeditions like these, anthropologist and idiot are wholly interchangeable terms.’ His Dutch accent was gone now, except on perhaps one word in ten, where it could have been anything. He let his hands slip down to the file and rested his fingertips on the margins. ‘So, I haven’t invited him. I don’t think I can stand to talk to someone like that at this time of the morning. I’d be in great danger of having him transported to Australia.’ A ghost of a smile lined his eyes when I laughed. ‘Anyway. Cinchona trees; tell me how you mean to do it.’

  I sat forward so that I could talk with my hands and trace shapes along the edge of his desk. ‘Seeds will sport, so we’re going to take cuttings. Those cuttings will need to be about two feet long for trees like this. We’ll pack them up in Clem’s map cylinders. The difficulty is getting them back across Peru in time. They need to be planted within a month. We’ll plant them in Wardian cases – those will be waiting for us at the port, in Islay; they’re too delicate to transport inland on dust roads – and then ship them to India that way. Even in cases they won’t survive very long at such low altitude, so the sea route is going to have to be direct.’

  He frowned. ‘You won’t get many out in map cylinders.’

  ‘The point is to bring out viable scion cuttings of high-yield plants. Quality over quantity. If those are successful, more cuttings can be taken from them once they’re established in India. About Malabar? Clem said that’s where we’re going with them.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Climate’s wrong. Do we have land in Ceylon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There please. Sheltered ground, nothing rocky, rich soil, lots of ferns, between four and five thousand feet above sea level. They’re very particular trees.’

  ‘That’s rather a—’

  ‘I’m telling you the conditions required for their survival. I was at Kew yesterday, and they’ve only confirmed all this. Previous efforts at transplantation have failed because insufficient attention was paid to their natural environment. That’s why the Dutch plantation in Java is such a catastrophe. It’s on a rocky hillside, no shade, wrong elevation – of course they can’t grow anything, even the hardy low-yield stuff. You’d do better trying to grow these things in a jar.’

  He smiled a fraction and I realised he had wanted me to gardening-babble, to make sure I still could. ‘So, Ceylon,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll arrange it, then.’ Perhaps it was only that I was older now, but there was a fragility about him that seemed new; or perhaps it was new, and born of holding on to everything as the sand shifted under him. ‘You don’t look well,’ he said.

  ‘Well – I’m not fit enough to walk through the Amazon, no one’s saying I am. Clem wanted me to supervise, that’s all. But if you’d rather send someone else—’

  ‘I don’t care if you’re preserved in a jar of turpentine if he can get you there,’ Sing said. He paused. ‘We’re on the edge of quinine riots in India. The cost is madness now. We’re having to sell it at a loss just to keep the tea plantations open. The monsoons last year – did you see in the papers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Vast. Malaria everywhere.’ He shook his head once and then, in a way that sounded involuntary, ‘I had it too. It’s ridiculous. Half the plantation labourers have fled, the harvests are abysmal. Tea left on the plants because there’s no one to bring it in. Do you know how much of the trade revenue of the British Empire comes from tea?’

  ‘A lot.’

  ‘A lot,’ he said, tundra-arid and mostly to the file in front of him. He was quiet then and I saw him trying to decide whether or not to tell me anything else. Five years ago he wouldn’t have, but he looked tired now. ‘I think you’ll do it. But nobody else involved has any such confidence. The new managers here have . . . no concept of the correlation of risk and gain. They’re civil servants, not traders.’ When he said trader, it had a weight; he meant it in the way other people would say statesman. ‘What they know is what will fit into a morning briefing and that is as follows. The calisaya cinchona woods are remote in the extreme. The last expedition was Dutch; three men vanished in the rainforest and the survivor had to hide for so long that most of his trees died . . . only two made it to Java intact—’

  ‘Two would have been enough if he had just taken care of the damn things properly.’ Hasskarl was the worst gardener I’d met since one of my uncles had insisted ferns grew best in salt.

  ‘Oh, you know that, I know that, but the new managers think we live in the pinnacle of human accomplishment and if it hasn’t been done yet then it can’t be. What they do know is that Charles Backhouse’s whole expedition was lost before that, in ’fifty-one, along with fifty soldiers, to hostile Indians. Worse, they know we have no maps. Hasskarl didn’t get any – he didn’t go to the forest himself, and the men he sent in are dead. A guide brought him the trees. Said guide was then hunted by informers for the quinine suppliers and killed. Backhouse didn’t send anything either. The Peruvians must have maps, of course, but they’re hardly eager to provide us with nice charts to the only high-yield quinine forest in the world. So in their lofty and infinite W,’ he finished, with the worrying fluency he sank into sometimes when he was talking to or about his colleagues, something he did to prove they weren’t ever going to overshoot his understanding with slang or Latin, ‘the India Office has written the idea off.’

  I frowned. ‘Then . . . how was this expedition ever approved?’

  ‘Markham was chosen because he’s a respected and capable member of the Royal Geographical Society, and he makes exceptionally good maps.’ He watched me for a long moment. ‘And you . . .’ He flicked his eyes to my cane. ‘On paper you’re going because your whole career with us has been difficult smuggling runs with difficult plants and because you have links to the area. But no one will be surprised if a crippled gardener can’t get it done, and you’ve no proper family and no connections, so it doesn’t cost us anything if you die out there. You’re a way for this office to save face.’

  I would have been quicker two years ago. I might even have seen it the moment Clem came to Heligan. ‘This expedition isn’t really about the trees at all, is it? It’s about getting a decent map, for if – when – the army has to go.’

  ‘Yes.’ He wasn’t the kind of man who would report his unsuccessful efforts, but hanging heavy in the air around him were meetings and meetings where he had argued against the appointment of an anthropologically inclined geographer. I knew the sort he would have wanted to lead the thing. It would have been one of the old expeditionaries from the Company, someone fast who could shoot well, ex-cavalry – a bodyguard for the gardeners. ‘If you cannot reach the cinchona woods for whatever reason, then make a spark. There must be a political reason to send troops, however thin. You know how it is. Something small but
inflammatory.’

  ‘Get myself shot somewhere public?’

  ‘No, get Markham shot somewhere public. A promising young knight of the realm with a pretty widow will make the front page. You wouldn’t even be in the obituaries at the back.’

  ‘He’s my friend, you know. We were in the Navy together.’

  ‘I know. I believe you met because he had you flogged.’

  ‘You once had me kidnapped and traded for a racing camel, but I still wouldn’t chuck you to a load of angry Indians.’

  He sighed. I’d known him for years before he admitted that it hadn’t been an accident and he did indeed have a policy about not promoting expeditionaries who couldn’t get themselves back to Cairo from a Tuareg slave train in the desert. ‘Just fetch the trees,’ he said. ‘That would be far simpler. On that note.’ He opened the file he had in front of him. ‘What do you know about New Bethlehem? Did your father and grandfather keep notes?’

  ‘They didn’t really. I know it’s . . . a mission colony, or it was originally. It’s high up, a good few thousand feet, and it’s on the edge of an alpine section of the forest. There’s a river, but I don’t know the name of it. The cinchona trees nearer the Andes were killed off because traders barked them so badly, but if this place is as remote as I think, not many people will ever have reached it to look for more. It will be a decent starting place for an expedition further into the rainforest, anyway. And I know they’ll know my name. My father was born there. But that’s all.’

  He had listened carefully. ‘Did they ever have any problems with Indians? I mean forest tribes, not the villagers. Were they ever attacked?’

  ‘Dad never mentioned anything like that. But I was eight when he died. I didn’t get a very objective account. Honestly, though, if there are territorial tribes there, then tough,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to cope. New Bethlehem is the only place we can ask for without being obviously there for quinine. It might just about fly that I want to find some coffee and visit people my father knew, but if we try to go anywhere else, no.’

  He was quiet while he thought about it. ‘Look, I know it sounds steep when we stack it up like this, but if you want to be paid, you need to bring back something. Whether it’s the trees or the army’s reason to go. I notice that Heligan is in danger of falling to ruin. Do this and I will see to it that you have work afterwards.’

  ‘Sing,’ I said, ‘did you wait to do this so I’d be good and desperate when you asked me?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  I smiled. ‘I missed you.’

  ‘I’m glad you see it that way.’ He settled forward on his forearms. ‘Merrick. I would suggest that Backhouse’s main problem was not Indians or quinine suppliers but that he was twenty-one and an idiot. You’re old Company; you know how this sort of thing is done. If you can’t go around, find someone to take you through those woods if you have to. Find some Indians, lie, cheat, bribe, use your father’s name, sleep with the chief, I don’t care. This is smuggling, like everything else we ever did. There’s always a way.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Feeling all right about it?’ he said, which he had never asked me before. ‘Aside from having been chosen for exactly the wrong reason for what might be suicide.’

  ‘I wish the papers weren’t full of shipwrecks and frostbitten bits of the Franklin expedition, but you know.’

  He smiled, but only enough to show his incisors. I realised suddenly that he must have had not just edges knocked off but whole walls blown through by the dissolution of the Company and its restructuring. It seemed ridiculous now that I hadn’t written to him to ask how he was. ‘You’re not off to find the Northwest Passage on a thousand-mile plain of ice populated by six Esquimaux and an owl. It’s only Peru.’

  ‘No, I know.’ The Illustrated London News had run an article a few days before, with pictures of things that were recovered. They had found a watch, some zigzag-pattern mittens, a pair of reading glasses, snow goggles, bone tools; ordinary things that people had had in their pockets, things made at home to help, things the natives had given them. Humanity on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to get the Franklin expedition to where it needed to go and the only real difficulty had been the weather. In the far north of Canada, there had been no one trying to shoot them, no animals that could hurt them, not around their guns, no diseases to slow them down. There would be no one trying to help us and the interior of Peru was even less charted than the Arctic. ‘I’ll try.’

  He nodded. He would never tell me if someone in the upper management had threatened his job if this were to fail, but it was a pressure behind the quiet.

  ‘The Great Eastern is launching today, did you see?’ I said.

  He tipped his eyes towards the window, more like his old self. ‘Monstrous thing.’

  ‘Have you been to look at it?’

  ‘No,’ he said, as if I’d asked him if he had been in a pornography shop.

  ‘It’s not monstrous. It’s the biggest ship that’s ever sailed, with the most powerful engine that’s ever been on the sea. It could make the run to Australia without stopping to refuel, with four thousand passengers. Honestly, it’s incredible. Come with me and see it off. It’ll be good, there are people all up and down the river now.’

  ‘I’ll be impressed when the bloody thing sails to Mars. Send me a telegram the day before you go if all’s running to time. I’ll meet you in Ceylon in May.’

  I frowned. ‘You’re coming?’

  ‘This is the India Office. Its employees do occasionally make an appearance in India,’ he said, annoyed to have been caught fretting. He sighed. ‘Get it done, please. And stop waxing lyrical about maritime pedantry before the summer or I’ll feed you to a tiger.’

  So I took a cab up to Greenwich by myself, into the crowds there. The ship was impossible to miss. It was ten times bigger than anything else on the water, almost too big for the bends in the river. When the tugs guided it out, the cheer felt like it was coming up through the ground. There were four anchors chained to the prow, each one ten times the height of a person. Each link in each anchor chain was taller than me. Thousands of people stood on deck, waving and laughing. I had a horrible feeling that it was all too big and it would sink, but it didn’t. It sailed gently out of sight, out towards Gravesend and looking wrong because it was so leviathan it didn’t belong with anything else. I followed it in the papers because more and more it mattered that not every stupid endeavour ended frozen to a glacier with the Illustrated London News reporting what it had in its pockets. Off Dover there was a fire aboard, but the ship was so big that not even lightning would have bothered it and news came the following week that it had reached America seamlessly, ahead of schedule.

  SIX

  I made Clem practise taking cuttings every day until we ran out of apple trees. He still couldn’t do it very well, but he was seasick and I hoped it was the nausea making him unsteady, not his natural clumsiness. He kept to their cabin except at mealtimes and Minna moved into the mess room, where she took over the long table with charts and squashed the crew, who didn’t know what to do with her, down one end.

  ‘Evening,’ she said when I stopped to sit down and have a rest between the hold and the kitchen on Christmas Eve. The crew had made an effort, which had surprised me, because left to myself I would have forgotten about it; but there were as many candles as the mate would allow, and wreaths on all the narrow doors, full of oranges pincushioned with cloves that made all the passageways smell of the holidays. The cook, who was German and had grown his moustache like Prince Albert’s, had made nearly nothing but mince pies and mulled wine for three days and it was wonderful. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten so badly or so happily. ‘Eat my pie for me,’ Minna added. ‘I haven’t wanted it. I’m off everything except tooth powder.’

  ‘You’ll have to call it Minty. What are you doing?’ We had met some rough water, and above the table copper pots and pans swung on their hooks. Their shadows oscillated
over the chart she had been looking at. A few of the candles tipped wax on it but we pretended not to notice. The mate was threatening to put them all out if they proved too hazardous. The pipes under the grille floor rattled as someone turned the heating up. Nearly at once, hot air drifted up round our ankles, pumped round from the engine furnace. Minna dropped her set of compasses when the table tipped and lifted her hands to surrender.

  ‘I’m planning your route. I was trying to work out what would be quickest. And cheapest. The India Office accounting forms are formidable.’

  I twisted my head so I could see it upside down. My spine twanged. I tried to ignore it. ‘How long will it take, do you think? Cuttings are all right for a month but anything after . . .’

  ‘All being well, from the coast to the Andes, it’s about ten days. Through the Andes – it isn’t too far as the crow flies but of course it will be longer. I can’t find any record of how high the pass through the mountains is, so I don’t know the real distance. But I’d say give that a few days as well. Then there’s a river called the Tambopata – you’re close when all the place names go into Quechua – and after that . . . no one knows. New Bethlehem isn’t on any maps. It’s too far into the interior. That’s when you’ll need a guide. So say three weeks there, three weeks back? But that’s an absolute guess.’

  ‘You keep saying you.’

  ‘I can’t come like this,’ she said quietly. Her eyes went briefly past me to be sure Clem wasn’t here yet. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to carry it to term anyway but . . . I don’t want to take the chance of falling off a mule or drinking something horrible. I don’t even know what the altitude does. Do you?’

  ‘Do you think I’ve got a clutch of other female acquaintances in a cupboard somewhere? I haven’t. I don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Really? Handsome bachelors tend to know . . . sometimes . . .’

  ‘No bastard children kicking round China, sorry. I’m not that exciting. What will you tell Clem?’