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Irregularity

Page 18

by Nick Harkaway


  We walked into town, Grandin offering scurrilous commentary in crude English on the sights and sounds of the capital. The chaos of the streets, the stench of blood and effluent, the riot of races all appalled me, and made me long for Kingston and the English temper.

  Devereux lived in the lower rooms of a large house that seemed on the brink of returning to the forest, so entangled was it by creeping plants. The man was propped on a banquette and deathly pale and it was evident he was not fit for travel. He tamped his bluish lips with a square of white linen, and drank some medicinal concoction that swirled chalky white. Grandin scurried away from the death-bed.

  “You find me at a disadvantage,” Devereux said in educated tones that relieved me. “I could not trust my servant to find you on the docks; accept my humble apologies. Is Mr Craster well? I have fond memories of your City. I did not expect to die here, in a hovel on the edge of the world.”

  I did not have the courage to ask what ailed him. He had arranged for Jericho, a trusted overseer from Cranache, to take me by curricle the forty miles. He had been waiting for several days, and was anxious to set out.

  “Is all in order there?” I asked, simply. “Mr. Craster fears some irregularities.”

  “There are... complications,” Devereux laboured to say. He waved vaguely with his hand.

  “And Sangatte? Will I meet him too?”

  He was too weak or indifferent to register surprise. It was as if I had merely resumed an imaginary conversation that had much absorbed his reveries amongst the clutter of this stifling slum of a room.

  “Sangatte,” he said, struggling to light a candle in the gloom, “is a man of great wisdom. All Europe contributed to the making of Sangatte. He is a great philosophe, perhaps the greatest France ever produced. At least, he was, before his... nerves went wrong. He was great; immense, vraiment. Yet none will know what he achieved here.”

  “And what is that?” I asked.

  “Circulation, monsieur: Circulation. He will be the envy of every man of Science.”

  13 December 1790

  Wearisome journey over the jungle paths completed. Jericho is a garrulous mountain of a man, who chattered merrily the entire distance, but in a language of which I understood less than one eighth. I am too wearied to document that execrable road, the villages of a hundred staring eyes, silent and sullen people holding clubs and machetes, the hexes and marks that litter the roadside, the pathetic signs of vaudoux. The terrible roar and chatter of the forest: will I ever get it out of my memory? I must sleep.

  14 December 1790

  The Cranache plantation. We arrived in the jet black of night after a long day under the sun. I am a long way from home in a savage place.

  We entered the gates of the plantation, tall solid doors with the family arms mounted in relief. The doors are heavy and designed as defences, but they stood open, one with sunken hinges so that it had cut into the soft ground. The large house was on a rise, where the front windows had a magnificent view out towards the coast. Most of the blinds were drawn and there was an air of abandonment. I assumed that the bulk of sugar cane fields were hidden behind, and the prevailing wind at first concealed the smell.

  In the morning, there was consternation amongst the house servants, who had not been expecting visitors. Black faces peered from the door to the kitchen as I interrogated the senior household servants, Jericho at my side. One or two had a vestige of English. When I asked for the master of the estate, I was given a brutal answer that even I could understand: “Mr Cranache — he dead.”

  I was thunderstruck; this had been several months ago, but no report had reached Mr. Craster. I asked what had happened to his wife and children, but there was much averting of eyes and Jericho was unwilling or unable to translate the mutterings around me. Later, I spied the melancholy spot of a row of graves with Christian markers under a large tree not far from the front verandah. If they are not in France, the family is dead. I wonder if it was from poison.

  After the initial confusion, it transpired that Cranache’s elderly mother was still alive and resided in a suite of rooms above. I was relieved to find some proper order preserved, and requested urgent counsel. There were more pained looks and evasive machinations. My insistence was such that one of the head servants, a man named Trac, took command of that rabble and led me upstairs to an elegant reception room with French furniture in the modern Louis style. With a mix of French, English and mime, I gathered I was to wait.

  I spent the morning there, arranging my papers, wondering how best to impart the concerns of Mr. Craster and the London market about the state of the plantation to an august lady of the clan. My experience of the French was limited to the men of the Royal Exchange. I was weary and must have fallen asleep; I awoke to find afternoon had arrived and yet still the maid-servants offered continual excuses. I had wasted much of the day in formal expressions of conduct that I realised would not be returned: she would not receive me, or was unable to do so. There was something in the air that I distrusted, whispering and stifled laughter in the corridors, that signalled a breakdown in the regular order. I resolved myself, went downstairs and demanded to see Trac.

  Eventually the servant acknowledged that Madame Cranache was old and confined to her bed where she took vapours to ease her breathing; she had entirely ceded the running of the plantation to the overseers. The task then was to find an overseer who might converse with me.

  Trac bowed and asked me to follow him. We went through a series of interconnecting rooms, the last doors opening on to the back verandah of the house.

  The stench of rotting cane caught me at once and near caused me to vomit.

  Stretching beyond limit were fields that had not been cleared of a crop perhaps several months old. The tall canes may have been cut, but the harvest never occurred, and the rot had set in. The fields contained not a single worker and the place seemed abandoned.

  “Have you come to rescue us?” a voice asked in a cynical snarl. It came from a degenerate blanc in an accent I could recognise came from Louisiana. The man identified himself as Vincent. He was dressed in patchwork clothes and rested on the smashed remains of a chair below the verandah, in the midst of cleaning his whip. There were rags stained with blood at his feet.

  “I have come to see Sangatte,” I replied with as much authority as I could muster.

  It had the desired effect; I had the advantage of intelligence.

  “He is at the factory, la bas,” he pointed at the horizon. “He won’t come back to the house now, not whilst he is so close.”

  “Close? To what?”

  The man smiled broadly through a ruin of teeth, rotted by cane. So I did not know, after all. He looked up at the sun, calculating the time.

  “It is too late today, Monsieur Englishman. We can visit tomorrow, if Sangatte is in the mood for receiving guests.” He laughed bitterly, looked me up and down. “What are you: a lawyer? A bookman? Yes? You want to know where the sugar has gone, yes? Your money, yes? But soon Sangatte will give you all the money in the world.”

  Vincent offered me liquor from a bottle, shrugged when I refused. He warned me to be careful of the food and drink I took; the hills beyond the plantation were teeming with freed or absconded slaves, massing for Revolution, poisoning the old masters. Although I ventured to steer the conversation, I received only snippets of knowledge.

  “Sangatte”, he said, “is one of the godless ones. He made a great name for himself at the Academie Francaise, in Paris.” About what, Vincent could only say it had to do with blood and circulation. “He will tell you tomorrow. The maestro: he will explain.”

  I have resolved to venture to Sangatte’s “factory” tonight without my disgusting chaperone.

  15 December 1790

  Who can speak of San Domingue, the black night, the drums in the honforts scattered through the mountains?

  I waited until after midnight, when a sliver of moon rose above the horizon. That glint of light was enough to guide
me. I navigated as silently as I could to the labyrinth of doors on the back verandah and stood adjusting to the darkness. Infernal insects screeched their songs and attacked my eyes.

  The first fields behind the plantation house carried the worst of the rot. The smell of decay forced me to hold a kerchief over my mouth. I thought this would be just the beginning of a very bad story, but oddly the plots further on revealed a fresh crop of noble canes rising in regular rows, bulbous beets glinting in the moon. These were ordered and well-tended fields.

  I had only the memory of Vincent’s vaguest gestures to guide me, but soon I found the first huts of the plantation workers, all quiet, and I steered a path to avoid alarms. I followed the line of the canes, jet shadows with leaves blinking moonlight.

  There was a faint depression in the landscape; presently I was following the path into a hollow, the horizon of cane rising above me. Things crashed and jabbered in the trees; I stilled to adjust my eyes.

  Up ahead was a clearing and three huts, placed in a triangular pattern. Weak candlelight came from the window of the furthest hut, and stopping to listen, I heard the thrum of some mechanical device. The clearing was otherwise empty. It was not a factory that one might see in London, but I thought this must be where Sangatte worked.

  As I ventured down a rough path, I came across a gully bridged by logs. It was only as I took my crossing that the stench below assaulted my nose. I reeled. It was animal matter, something unburied. I beetled to the other side and peered into the hollow, but without artificial light saw only slicks of shadow below. I thought it might be where the beasts of burden had been hurled once they died.

  I need to be steady with my quill to reconstruct the sequence of what happened when I entered that clearing. The moon had waxed a little; light was better. As I passed near the first hut, I noticed the ground beneath my feet had a scorched quality, the dust coating my tongue with a cloying tang. Nothing grew there. The strangeness of the scene was heightened by the silence of the insects and susurrus creatures, as if they had all sensed my transgression and held their breath.

  The cadence of the device was low and peculiar; not the grinding of metal parts; nor something worked with screws. I crouched at the corner of the first hut, a mean thing with an unravelling thatch. It was good fortune that I stopped. Something grunted and lurched out of a door, scraping feet across the powdered earth before fading into silence. A beast of burden, perhaps? I couldn’t imagine what the dark held. I looked hard, and saw then that the whole clearing was criss-crossed by threads or filigrees of thick wire, pulled taut a yard or two off the ground. There was an immense network of these cords that seemed to run back and forth between the huts. I glanced up and saw that I was near one connected to my hut. I reached up to touch it, but was repulsed by its oddly warm and sticky feel. It glistened with black grease and it thrummed with the regular rhythm of the mechanism from the far hut, where the candlelight glistened.

  I shifted my course, walking the perimeter of that blasted land towards the furthest hut.

  Candlelight is magic. It colours the night where moonlight gives a world of stark black and white.

  There, in the flicker cast beyond the window, I saw that the ground of the whole clearing was stained a dull ochre. The cords that stretched from the window were livid blue, slopped with the red of human oil. They did not thrum; they pulsed.

  I was standing among the warp strings of Sangatte’s vast machine.

  I very much desired not to see what lay beyond the window. I did not wish to disturb Sangatte in his night studies.

  I moved with caution towards the edge of the hollow, thinking I might find pick my way back through the canes back to the house. I felt I had sufficient an answer to Mr. Craster’s inquiries to leave at once, willing to walk the further miles to Cap-Haitien if necessary.

  It was my position and the angle of the moonlight that revealed the stacked bodies. There were the slaves of the Cranache plantation, limbless and staring, the bodies ripped open for their sinews in this experiment in efficiency, in circulation. The slops trailed to the choked gully.

  19 December 1790

  I barely recall the last days, but I must have walked and scrambled back along the road to Port-au-Prince without rest, night and day. The last miles I was near delirious, carried on a cart pulled by a man with the smile of a smashed cemetery.

  I wait for an English boat to take me home, resting here under a narrow awning.

  This climate does not suit me. I feel feverish and distempered. My thirst rages. In the cheval glass, my features seem pallid, my lips blue.

  I wait for an English boat.

  The Darkness

  M. Suddain

  From the Diary of Samuel Pepys

  Thursday 30 August 1666

  Out early, and met Greatorex along the way. At an alehouse he showed me his new Armillary Sphere, and spoke eagerly of his plans to construct one 35 feet high for display at Greenwich. Spoke, too, of his calculations for shooting a rocket up towards the heavens, powerful enough that it could take a steele chamber into orbit around us, and look down upon the Earth from the sky. He says the chamber could be built large enough to carry a monkey, or a bear. When I asked why the craft should carry a monkey, or a bear, he became agitated and said, “Well it could be a dog!”

  Then to Westminster by Tunnelcar, and to my barber’s, overtaking Captain Okeshott in his silk cloak, whose sword got hold of many people in walking. Then to the Swan to see Herbert’s girl, and lost time a little with her.

  So to my Lord Crew’s and dined with him. Then to the Beare-garden, where I have not been for many years, and saw some good sport of the bulls tossing of the dogs: not quite into orbit, but one into the very boxes. But it is a rude and nasty pleasure. Then about nine o’clock to Mrs. Mercer’s gate, where her son and some other young sparks had gathered with an abundance of serpents and rockets; and there got mighty merry till about twelve at night, flinging our fireworks, and burning one another and the people over the way. A little fire is a restorative thing.

  Friday 31 August 1666

  Up at six to go by appointment to my Lord Bellasses, but he out of town, which vexed me. So I to Greenwich, where Doctor Pett’s brother shewed a draught of the new ship which they intend to build for the King, and which can take him to near the same great heights as our spy ships. It has its own pleasure garden, with fountains, a pianoforte, even cages for lions and bears. Seems no one any more can take to the skies without at least one bear for company.

  Thence by Skycar to Gresham where I had been by Mr. Povy proposed to be made a member of the Virtuosi. Was this day admitted by signing a book, and being taken by the hand by the President, my Lord Brunkard. It is a most acceptable thing to hear their discourse, and see their experiments. This day there were talks upon the nature of fire, and particularly of the new Plasmatic Fire, which can be concentrated in spheres, and to near the heat of the sun. There were proposals for a “waste-disposing sepulcher” which could turn corpses to powder, and also a kind of weapon, which could do the same to French and Dutch sailors. All were impressed, but for our young Mr. Fernod, who has recently returned from school in France, and has learned much, the French being eager to intimidate Englishmen with their advancements. He claims they have already made weapons with Plasmatic Light: such that they successfully destroyed, from 1500 feet away, a small boat containing a bear. There are already, he said — somewhat smugly —plasmatic privies in Versailles. But more critically, he said, the French have begun experiments with Darke Materials. In attempting to describe the nature of these materials he explained how there is far more material “not” in the universe than there “is”, and so managed to confuse even the formidable brains of his assembled elders, and took some pleasure in it, I think. He told how a physicist called Le Fougue had demonstrated at their school a vortex which, though open for a blink, took a mouse away, apparently for ever. Our assembled were unimpressed, with Boyle saying he saw a man make a mouse vanish at B
artholomew Fair the previous week, and Hooke saying that it wasn’t the first time the French had gotten excited over discovering nothing. Young Fernod became flustered at our laughter, and seemed to wish a hole to vanish into. Here excellent discourse till ten at night, and then home to bed.

  Saturday 1 September 1666

  Up and at the office all the morning, and then dined at home. Got my new closet made mighty clean against tomorrow.

  Sunday 2 September 1666

  (Lord’s Day.)

  Some of our maids sitting up late last night to get things ready for the feast today. Call up from Jane at three in the morning to tell us of a strange disturbance in the City. I rose and slipped on my nightgown, and went to her window, but saw only darkness, as all the lights in the City were out. Jane said, “But listen, the church bells are running backwards.” It was very black, even under moonlight, but no flames. Thought I could see a glow around Fish-streete, as of lamps crowding in, and leaning out we could hear the bells, and the cries of many people. Told her it was no fire, just an outage, that people were panicked to stop their goods from being looted. Stayed to soothe Jane for as long as she needed, and her I, then back to sleep.

  About seven woken by still more bells, and rising cries of panicke from the city. Rose to dress myself, and there looked out the window, and saw fireships floating above the place around Fish-streete. But still no flames, and not even the smell of smoke, though saw now that St. Magnus’ steeple was vanished.

  Could make no sense of it, so to my closet to set things to rights after yesterday’s cleaning. By and by Jane comes and tells me that there is a fire gone out of control, but it is a black fire, burning without smoke or heat, and it is beyond London Bridge already, as high as Cannon Street, as low as the river, almost, and has taken St. Magnus away. She hears that beyond 300 houses have been eaten by black fire, and that this inferno grows bigger by the hour.

 

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