The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

  And there was the way that Shanks’s wraith was attired, wasn’t there? The spectre had been dressed in clothing from the time not of the crofter, but of the settlement. It was a detail that could not be glossed over or blithely ignored.

  The slave-ship master had brought something evil with him to New Hope Island. It had festered and grown and destroyed his community. This unearthly affliction had been spiteful and destructive. It had not arrived from another galaxy, aboard a spacecraft armed only with enlightened intent.

  The events bringing McIntyre around to this belief did not stop with Lassiter’s ordeal at the museum. His respect for the ex-detective was growing all the time, but there was other, compelling evidence. It came from the war hero, Sergeant Paul Napier, and it suggested that what Ballantyne had introduced still capered darkly on New Hope.

  McIntyre had made light to Lassiter of Blake’s disappearance. He could not so easily dismiss the empty boat Napier and his people had just found. No one was yet admitting to having organised this attempted spoiler, but someone would have to, soon. There would be high profile broadcast journalists among the missing. They would be familiar faces on the nation’s television screens and they could not simply cease to exist without shock and comment and somewhere, without grief. They were dead. McIntyre, a man who had always trusted his profitable instinct, felt a cold certainty about that.

  Napier had told him about the sound recording on the camera. Speaking over the weird pitch of the radio static, the war hero had sounded measured and calm and phlegmatic. And McIntyre had asked him what he thought was going on there. And through that banshee wash of sound, Napier had said, ‘I think the Island is haunted, Mr McIntyre. I think there are spirits living here. They are not abstract. They take physical shape. They conceal themselves, but we sense their presence around us. They are angry and malicious and they wish us terrible harm.’

  Earlier in the evening, he had spoken to the psychic Alice Lang. He had asked her was she really convinced of the authenticity of her gift. Was it not just the power of her intellect, channelled through a gift for intuition? She had smiled and said she wished it were simply that. Her life would be less complicated if it was. He had pressed, asking her how she could authenticate such a vague and insubstantial talent.

  She had told him about the suicide of David Shanks, slipping gratefully into the abyss, watched by a gleeful figure bigger than a man and far darker than the night surrounding it. And he believed her, because he knew that she was confiding what was for her, a grotesquely reluctant truth.

  He sipped the last of his brandy. It was either very late or very early and he knew that he ought to go to bed. His mood was gloomy and his disappointment growing and there was something else; something like trepidation, a strong and urgent conviction that even now, at this eleventh hour, he could and should call the whole thing off.

  But he could not do that. That would be inconceivable. The sense of betrayal felt by the readership would be something from which the paper would never recover. Neither would his own global reputation as a newsman. He was committed to this. They all were. Projects planned on this scale developed their own momentum and the New Hope expedition was now an unstoppable juggernaut of hype and expectation.

  He rose, wearily, to go to bed. He glanced at his desk and the spacecraft modelled for him by the NASA rocket men at such outrageous expense. They looked in the jaundiced light like children’s toys. Things will seem better in the morning, he said to himself, knowing in his heart, it was a lie.

  Degrelle knelt on the waxed wooden parquet of his cell floor wearing the hair shirt in which he habitually slept. The shirt was the nightly penance paid for his vanity, which he knew was his great weakness and sin. He faced the simple wooden crucifix hung from a nail on his wall. He focussed on the bronze figure of Christ writhing in his death agony nailed there under his crown of brutal thorns. And he prayed for all of them.

  He prayed for Alice Lang, whose gift he considered an endowment of the Devil. He believed that this second-sight of hers was authentic. But its real purpose was to prevent her from entertaining faith in the only power beyond the physical world embodying goodness and purity and nobility of purpose. He had spoken to her at McIntyre’s party and considered her in great peril. He thought that the island could cost the psychiatrist her sanity. He knew from experience that Satan relished such ironic jokes.

  He prayed for the Catamite Jesse Kale and the worshipper of false idols, Karl Cooper. He beseeched God on behalf of Patrick Lassiter, a moral man with a strong intellect and a strength-sapping weakness for drink. He prayed for Jane Chambers, a rational woman who believed that the only cure for any malaise was concocted in a laboratory. He feared that New Hope Island would confound and contradict her and erode the foundations of her already fragile sense of worth.

  He said a special prayer for Lucy Church. He did so because it was his experience that the most buoyant seeming are sometimes the first to sink when the storm is delivered. He liked her. Of all of them, he thought her the warmest and kindest character; the one among them possessing the most of what gave God’s chosen species their distinguishing humanity. Finally, he prayed for Carrick, who had looked to him at the party like a soul already lost.

  When he had muttered the last of his improvised liturgy and kissed the rosary clutched between his fingers he rose on knees numbed by his weight and sat on his truckle bed and pondered on what he knew about New Hope Island and what he had learned in his conversation with the Cardinal when the Cardinal had called and pressed him with all of his temporal authority to join the expedition.

  Ballantyne had experienced his moment of epiphany in the autumn of 1799. By that time Wilberforce and the other abolitionists had already been campaigning again slavery for some years. But the slave trade would not be abolished by Great Britain until an act of Parliament was passed outlawing it in 1807. And slavery itself would persist in most of the British Empire until it was finally banned in 1833.

  Even after that, ownership of slaves persisted in most of what was regarded as the civilised world. It flourished in America, the cradle of democracy and national champion of the notion of individual liberty, until the 1860s and the Civil War.

  The idea that Ballantyne had been an evil man redeemed was a modern conceit, a bit of crude historical revisionism. In his lifetime, he would have been regarded as a successful and prosperous sea captain, not some tyrannical sadist. His later conversion to a faith of his own devising would have seemed the scandalous part.

  Through modern eyes he was the practitioner of a barbaric business who tried to pay for his crimes against humanity by establishing a community based on basic Christian principles. He forswore the comforts his ill-gotten wealth had accrued. He sacrificed his status and so lost his wife and well-placed friends. And he chose deliberate exile for himself and his followers in a harsh island wilderness.

  Most right-thinking people of his own time would have considered Ballantyne converted mad, bad or the victim of a cruel delusion. He was a demagogue and his followers no more than vulnerable fools.

  He preached to his growing Liverpool congregation until 1810. That was the year the New Hope Island settlement was established. So he must, Degrelle concluded, have been thinking about it for a decade. He had leadership and maritime skills and the planning must have been meticulous, because the community prospered. It did not just exist on a meagre subsistence level. It did sufficiently well to produce the surplus to trade.

  The vanishing was discovered in the early spring of 1825. A trader called Matthew McCloud had been buying the island’s whisky. He docked to pick up his regular order of a dozen oak barrels of the stuff and discovered to his bewilderment that the New Hope settlers had all disappeared. Lichen grown over the cold peat in the grates of their fires suggested to McCloud that they had been gone about six weeks.

  It was a pioneering piece of forensic examination of which Degrelle thought Patrick Lassiter would probably have been proud. He thought it
likely to have been fairly accurate too.McCloud dealt in whisky but had not shared Lassiter’s taste for the stuff. He was totally abstemious, his judgement completely sober.

  Some of the livestock on the island were discovered by McCloud living feral. Most of the beasts had starved to death in their pens when they ran out of food. The extent of the decomposition of the carcasses was another clue as to the date of the vanishing. The trader put it at about the third week in March.

  McCloud did not dwell for very long on New Hope. He had sailed there with his regular boatman and a burly labourer called David Cantrell. Cantrell was the sort of highNapier who won caber tossing competitions when he wasn’t brawling in taverns or sleeping one off. He was a giant with a troublesome reputation, but he could lift and haul a full whisky barrel between the ham-locks of his arms which to his employer, was a useful accomplishment.

  After a thorough search of the settlement, the three men decided to eat the meal of mutton broth and barley cakes brought with them aboard the boat. The outward leg of their voyage had been stiff and they needed sustenance before the hard tack across the water back to the mainland.

  They did not at this point fear anything. McCloud though the disappearance singularly odd. Bowls had been left half finished, the bread rolls grown stale on the tables beside them. Fishing nets lay on the quayside in a state of semi-repair. The catch still sat, rotten and stinking now, in the hold of one of the anchored smacks. Books lay open halfway through an arithmetic lesson in the small schoolhouse; coats and shawls still on pegs and shoes laid in a neat row at the door.

  But he knew from his business dealings with the settlers that Seamus Ballantyne was a mercurial man, governed entirely by the messages in his head delivered by a capricious God. He assumed they had gone in the way that they had originally come, 15 years earlier, on their leader’s whim and without a single murmur of disobedience. He thought they must have chartered a couple of large craft from one of the mainland ports and set out to start again, somewhere else.

  It was only after he sent Cantrell to forage for kindling for the fire to heat their broth that McCloud suspected anything really sinister afoot on New Hope. Cantrell habitually sang as he worked, songs delivered in a strong dialect and a sweet tenor voice. McCloud became aware of an abrupt silence and rose from where they had planned to eat before departure and went to find his quieted man.

  He came across Cantrell sitting on the ground, cross-legged and weeping, outside one of the settlers’ dwellings. Drool hung from his lower lip and he pointed a shaking finger towards its closed door. McCloud observed that his man was rocking slightly back and forth, like elderly people did in their fireside chairs sometimes when age had robbed them of the capacity to think.

  McCloud opened the door. The single room inside was cold and dark and empty. There was an odour the trader later described as a mixture of camphor and fish oil but it was very slight and could have been of no real consequence. He took off his boat-cloak and placed it around the mighty shoulders of the trembling man and coaxed him to his feet as someone might an infant child or someone feeble minded.

  Cantrell never disclosed what it was he saw on New Hope that day. Whatever confronted him, if anything actually did, remained forever a mystery. Nor was he ever heard to sing again. The story was that he never uttered another single word until his premature death, a few years later, at the tender age of only 28.

  Thus was the legend of New Hope born, to be fostered and then distorted down the years and passing decades. The truth was elaborated. Then stories were simply invented. The island became unlucky, or cursed, or haunted; depending upon to whom it was you spoke. Facts were in short supply concerning either the island or its pious, vanished tribe.

  More was known, though, than existed in the public domain. Degrelle had hinted as much to McIntyre when McIntyre came wooing. He had only recently then heard for himself the new detail from the Cardinal when he nearly let some of that slip. Excitement may have prompted the indiscretion, he thought, though more probably it had been down to fear.

  In February of 1823, a 14 year old boy called Samuel Trent had fled the island in an open boat. Against the odds, he had survived the crossing and made landfall about eight miles from Ullapool. He was on the shore, aboard his stolen craft, dying of exposure when a shrimp fisherman found and rescued and resuscitated him. He was grateful to the shrimper, but he never told the man from where it was he had come.

  Five years after the New Hope vanishing, in 1830, Trent converted to Catholicism, wishing eventually to take instruction and enter the priesthood. He was by then 21. He had successfully kept his personal history a secret to that point from everyone he had encountered in his years on the mainland. He made his first confession. And what he had to say about his life on the Island so disturbed the priest to whom he made it, that he broke his own vow of confessional secrecy and disclosed the information to his bishop.

  It was the detail of Samuel Trent’s confession that the Cardinal had shared with Degrelle to help prepare him for the expedition. He was told about the sins committed on the island. And it was the exorcist’s considered opinion that if his new colleagues on this adventure knew what he was now aware of, they would not for one moment entertain the prospect of going.

  Chapter Nine

  Philip Fortescue was fairly confident that he had successfully identified and located Horan, the Andromeda’s physician. Working on Lassiter’s hunch, he had discovered that a doctor by the name of Thomas Garland had settled in St Bride’s parish in Barnsley in the summer of 1797.

  That was a full two years before Seamus Ballantyne swapped slavery and seafaring for the freelance saving of souls; but the chronology was still convincing enough. Horan had in all probability resigned his commission in disgust in the period during which the vessel he had served aboard still plied its lucrative trade.

  Garland had been married to a woman named Martha. He had fathered two daughters. Both of the girls had been baptised at St Bride’s. Fortescue did not know whether or not he had been a pious man. Everyone had been a church-goer in the period in which the doctor had lived. Thankfully for genealogists, everyone had been baptised and every surviving parish was obliged to keep its records.

  The bad news was that Horan had no living relatives. There was no cache of papers in a precious family archive stored lovingly in a loft trunk at an ancestral pile somewhere. He was not going to get the fairytale ending to this particular quest he had hoped for. The last of the doctor’s bloodline had expired in the summer of 1916 on the Western Front in the First World War when his great-grandson was blown to pieces taking part in a dawn assault.

  Fortescue wasn’t put off by this. He had asked the vicar of St Brides could he look at the Parish records personally and had been granted access and an interview with the amenable cleric. He was a professor, after all. He had academic credentials and a job title and every justification for researching a man who had served as an officer aboard a mercantile vessel with the home berth of Liverpool harbour at the end of the 18th century.

  He drove through the sunshine and rain showers across the Pennines, wondering what it was he would find when he got to his destination. There had been no municipal library yet built in Barnsley at the time of Garland’s death. No one called Garland had donated papers to any of the two likeliest scholarly archives he had identified in the locality. It was possible that Garland’s account of life aboard the Andromeda existed in private hands. An advert in the local paper was something he would place only as a last act of desperation.

  At the wheel of his Saab, with rain wicking off the canvas roof, he couldn’t help smiling to himself. He was going to Barnsley at the urging of an adolescent girl. He was doing so because she claimed a ghost had asked her to find something important written by a man in secret. She had asked for his help and he was giving it and the Barnsley bit was his idea because the song the ghost had taught the girl to sing in a dream was sung in life by a singer from the locality.

&nbs
p; He wondered which part of all of this was the most tenuous and ridiculous. And then he stopped wondering because Patrick Lassiter had found none of it funny and he had come to think Lassiter a clever and hard-headed and intuitive man.

  He started to hum to himself. The sun splayed onto the road in a riot of gold and odd patches of vermillion from spilled fuel and the clouds parted before him. It was only when the rain had stopped completely, when it was no longer drumming on the taut fabric above him that he became aware the melody he hummed was, of course, The Recruited Collier.

  The Reverend Deal was plump and red faced and as friendly as he had sounded over the phone. He was obliging in the access he offered Fortescue to his registers of births, marriages and deaths. He showed his visitor the christening font at which the Garland girls had been baptised. But he could offer no enlightening clue about a man who had first settled in his parish more than two hundred years earlier.

  ‘Typhoid killed him,’ he said of the physician who called himself Thomas Garland. ‘I can tell you that. I can tell you he received last rites administered by one of my own predecessors. I can show you the family plot. But I can tell you nothing about the life or character of the fellow whatsoever.’

  The family plot. Fortescue wondered would Horan have had his clandestine journal buried with him. Was it clasped in the grip of his mummified arms? Did he literally take his secret to the grave? For a wild moment he imagined himself in the churchyard at midnight, shovelling out the earth, a hurricane lamp swinging from a handy tree to light the scene as he toiled to pry the lid from a lead-lined coffin.

  He wouldn’t do that. He wasn’t the type. It was against the law and would cost him his job and it was a ridiculous course of action even to contemplate. He looked at his watch. It was midday. The expedition members would be in the sky above the Atlantic aboard their Chinooks, clattering towards the island. Lassiter would not be able to talk to him on his mobile now, not with the deafening engine noise inside one of those. Nor would he be able to do so when they landed because there was no cell phone signal on New Hope.