The Colony

by F. G. Cottam

  Two hours later, he was showered and seated in his favourite chair and had just watched a spoiler bulletin on the TV news about New Hope Island. For once, the station had an item of hard information to compete with what emerged daily on the pages of the Chronicle. A team from an American broadcast channel had been lost off the Hebrides. Their mayday distress signal – the last contact with them – had been made two miles from the west coast of New Hope itself.

  They had completely vanished and 48 hours on were believed to be dead, the victims of a freak wave. There was speculation the wash from a super-tanker could have swamped their rigid inflatable. A helicopter search had proven fruitless and though contact with the island was, according to the coastguard sporadic, the expedition security chief, the decorated Afghan War veteran Sergeant Paul Napier MC, was adamant no bodies or wreckage had washed up there.

  Fortescue shook his head. He felt a stab of sympathy for Alice Lang. If wreckage did wash up, they would hand a piece of it to her and she might close her eyes holding this fragment and hear the drowning cries of the crew and passengers as they struggled in the freezing water and thought wretchedly of the spouses and children they would never lay eyes on again. The more he thought about it, the more horrible an affliction her gift was and the more Patsy Lassiter had his work cut out taking care of her.

  He un-wrapped his oilskin package to reveal a stiff-backed book about a foot wide and fourteen inches high. The cover was marbled and the pages within edged in gold leaf. It was about an inch thick. Horan’s name was written in a bold hand on the flyleaf when he opened the volume, carefully, so that the stiffness of all the time it had spent closed would not crack the spine when he did so.

  Being an account of the voyage of the Andromeda, it said on the title page; July 3rd to August 30th in the year of Our Lord, 1794.

  Fortescue slipped on his glasses and licked his lips and began to read.

  When Napier finished speaking, nobody said anything for a moment. They were still gathered in the recreation suite. His attempt to communicate Carrick’s disappearance to HQ in London had been a frustrating failure. They were completely isolated. None of the radio equipment functioned and no one could get an internet connection and the storm meant that for the present, they were stuck where they were.

  The only recreation taking place was alcoholic. Lucy had raided their supplies for a couple of bottles of wine and two six-packs of beer. Everyone except Lassiter had accepted a glass or a can of something.

  Cooper spoke first after Napier’s account. He said, ‘It doesn’t really amount to anything. A copper forced into early retirement by a drink problem gets spooked in a museum basement. An ex-soldier undone by battle trauma gets freaked out by a bit of dental enamel. Both of you could do with a dose of objectivity and a healthier perspective.’

  ‘So what’s happened to Carrick?’ Jane said. ‘I mean, what’s happened to him from your healthy perspective, Karl?’

  Lucy said, ‘And who told you about Lassiter’s drinking?’

  ‘McIntyre did.’

  ‘You told me you didn’t know Alexander McIntyre.’

  ‘That was a little white lie.’

  ‘You denied it on the record.’

  ‘Nobody likes to be thought of as teacher’s pet.’

  ‘Deceit seems to come very naturally to you.’

  ‘I’m like the son he never had to your proprietor. You might want to bear that in mind, Lucy.’

  ‘You’re disregarding the word I saw written on the hearth when I went to the crofter’s cottage that day with Davis,’ Napier said.

  ‘If you saw it,’ Cooper said. ‘Davis didn’t see it. If it was there, it was a practical joke, done by one of your own boys, homesick and bored, trying to cheer a bleak situation up with a bit of ghostly mischief.’

  ‘I think it highly unlikely that Blake would have wrenched out one of his own incisors,’ Jane said. ‘The pain would have been extreme.’

  ‘He was a suicide,’ Cooper said. ‘Maybe he was a self-harmer, someone who despised himself. You’d have to despise yourself to take your own life. Anyway any other explanation is absurd.’

  Kale turned to Alice. He said, ‘Earlier I called the atmosphere at the settlement menacing. I’m interested to know what you made of it.’

  ‘It didn’t suggest anything specific to me,’ Alice said. ‘The events there are too remote, I think. Beyond a feeling of desolation and gloom there was nothing. And as you remarked, I think we all felt quite similar there. It’s a sombre place.’

  ‘Except for Karl,’ Jane said. ‘Karl thought it was just like Alton Towers.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Cooper said. ‘If you can’t say anything positive, just keep your fucking trap shut, Jane.’

  Napier said, ‘Why don’t you step outside with me, Mr Cooper? You need to learn good manners. I’ll teach you some.’

  ‘You’re not taking anyone outside,’ Lassiter said. ‘You’re going to behave professionally. We all are.’

  Cooper grinned and pointed at Napier. ‘As soon as we re-establish radio contact, you’re fired,’ he said. ‘You’re history, soldier boy. You’ll be off this island and back in the Job Centre before you fucking know it. You have a great future, guarding the booze aisle at Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘I’ll hitch a ride out with you,’ Kale said, looking at Napier, ‘if that’s okay.’

  Lucy said, ‘This expedition is in crisis. We’ve been here less than 24 hours and already we’re in meltdown.’

  ‘Our pretty little scribe, panicked into cliché,’ Cooper said.

  ‘It’ll make good copy,’ Kale said, ‘at least, it will if we ever re-establish contact with the outside world.’

  ‘We don’t need your waspish little one-liners,’ Lucy said. ‘What we do need is a viable plan of action on which we can all agree.’

  Degrelle stood. He said, ‘I’m going to my room.’

  ‘I don’t think now is the time for sleep, Father,’ Lucy said.

  ‘I don’t intend to sleep,’ Degrelle said. ‘I intend to pray for James Carrick in the hope of his safe deliverance.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. There’s no need.’

  ‘Lucy’s right,’ Lassiter said. ‘We need to put our differences aside and agree on a crisis strategy.’

  ‘We can’t do anything until the storm abates,’ Napier said.

  ‘We can,’ Jane said. ‘We can stop arguing.’

  ‘That’s a bloody good idea,’ Cooper said. ‘I for one apologise for what I’ve said tonight. I mean that, folks. I’m sorry. We’re in this together, whatever it is. And we do need some strategic thinking.’

  ‘One, Napier keeps trying to re-establish radio contact with the mainland,’ Lassiter said. ‘Two, As soon as daylight returns and the storm dies down enough, in tandem with Napier’s team, I will co-ordinate a thorough search for James Carrick.’

  There was a silence, a series of collective nods.

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  Alice cleared her throat. She said, ‘In the morning, as soon as the weather calms, I intend to go to the cottage built and occupied by David Shanks. This is my idea and I do it voluntarily. But I’d like someone to come with me, if anyone’s prepared to.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Lucy said. Then Jane said, ‘I’ll come too.’

  Degrelle left the room. After he’d closed the door behind him, Lassiter said, ‘anyone else notice how subdued our famously obstreperous cleric has been since our arrival here?’

  ‘I don’t think he likes this place very much,’ Jane said.

  ‘Amen to that,’ Kale said. He emptied the dregs of his beer can down his throat and immediately reached for another.

  McIntyre looked out at the view from the boat shed at the Ardanaiseig Hotel on Loch Awe. The loch was tranquil. Its surface was only ruffled occasionally by the odd salmon or trout swimming towards the lure of the evening light. From here he could see the mountains on the far bank rise high above their own tree
lines to where the verdant green surrendered to patches of ochre and pale brown. The seaplane that had delivered him there floated on the loch on its pontoons, white and elegant, like a craft from a more serene and stylish time.

  A hundred and fifty miles to the north-west, in the Hebrides, he knew that a great storm raged across the Atlantic. It had severed radio communication with his team of experts there. They had the pictures of their arrival on New Hope and the rather good piece penned by James Carrick that afternoon, but they had lost contact since it was sent and nobody could tell him when the lines of communication would be re-established.

  He was not worried about the following day’s edition. Drip-feed was the successful way to build and maintain circulation with a story as compelling as this one was. They had enough material to make an impact in the morning. He was more concerned about his own growing suspicion that his people on New Hope faced dangers he had not really dreamt they ever would.

  He knew now that his own presumption and prejudice had blinded him to the facts about the island. Shanks had not conjured the spectre of the little girl that had confronted and then teased and finally terrified him into leaving. And to call it a revenant, as Karl Cooper had, dismissed the threat it represented. Cooper had trivialised the thing Shanks had filmed because it had been in Cooper’s interest to do so. Cooper was a glory hunter, blind to any possibility but the one he sought to prove.

  But Cooper was wrong about New Hope. McIntyre now believed that something ancient and malevolent had claimed the lives of the vanished community. It had turned on Seamus Ballantyne. It still possessed sufficient power to make mischief in the present day with those possessions the slave ship master had once owned. McIntyre should have set much more store by what Lassiter had discovered. Lassiter had integrity. Cooper’s glamour had blinded him to a vain man’s obvious failings.

  Vanity had contaminated the whole project, when he considered it. He thought that Cooper and Jesse Kale and Jane Chambers and Degrelle had all signed up more to raise their already exultant public profiles than as sincere and genuine seekers after an answer to the mystery. There was such a thing as hubris, wasn’t there? He wondered what awful price they would be obliged to pay on New Hope for their conceit.

  His conscience troubled him. He knew it would trouble him further if anything bad happened to Alice Lang, who had gone on the expedition out of nobler motives than some of her companions. He cared too about the fate of Lassiter and the security chief, Napier; men of principle who had gone along because they were on his pay role. And he cared about Lucy Church, plucky and talented and far too young and beautiful a woman to lose her life.

  Was that a possibility? McIntyre thought that it was. No one had tried to settle on New Hope since Shanks. Shanks had been the beneficiary of a very narrow escape. He had gone on escaping, running all his life. But that life had been a blighted one after his experience on the island and according to Alice Lang, he had brought about its end deliberately. He had escaped. In doing so, he had never really got away.

  A recent letter had provoked this train of thought. He had joked about the fate of Richard Blake to Lassiter. He’d believed at the time that Blake had probably walked deliberately into the sea. But that didn’t excuse the callous levity he’d demonstrated sipping tea on his sun terrace, jesting about Blake screaming only because the water was cold when he entered it.

  He’d been sent the letter by Blake’s widow. There was a child too, only yet a toddler. He had responded with a generous cheque and some gracious words of condolence. But in masterminding the New Hope expedition, it had never occurred to him that he might be jeopardising lives. The certainty he now felt that he was, weighed dreadfully on him. He could not help but wonder what had made Blake utter that scream.

  The hotel had always been a rich man’s refuge for him. It was in the Highlands and remote and the scenery had an epic grandeur that never failed to raise his spirits. He always stayed in the boat shed rather than the hotel building itself. The boat shed had been cleverly converted into accommodation that was more stylish than luxurious. He enjoyed the privacy and he honestly thought the view through the floor to ceiling windows unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

  It was quite something to wake up to on a sunny summer morning when the loch shimmered and the trout leapt and the birds loudly sang.

  It was twilight now. Sunset came very late in early June to this part of the world. But it had finally arrived. He was standing looking out over the loch from the boat shed balcony. Beneath him was the stone jetty alongside which they tied up the boats hotel guests would take out on fishing and sightseeing trips. He could hear the water lapping gently. Mercifully, this close to the water, there were no midges to torment him. He thought, out of the corner of his eye, he could see a tallish figure moving around down there.

  This was curious because it was too late to take out a boat. McIntyre walked to his right to lean over the wooden rail and take a proper look. At first he assumed the figure on the jetty to be a member of the hotel staff. But she was not dressed right. She wore a black tailored coat that seemed heavy for the season and her hair was not tied back, the way the women on the hotel staff wore theirs for reasons of hygiene.

  Hers was black and loose and worn in a longish bob. She turned and raised her head and looked at him and he saw that her lips were a vivid red before her frank gaze of appraisal became disconcerting and he backed away and went inside.

  He thought about complaining to the manager about this intrusive hotel guest. Short of levering herself up from the ground to look in at him from the edge of the balcony, he didn’t think she could have done much more to breach the privacy he’d always enjoyed there.

  Her stare had been rude and almost, he thought, hostile. He actually picked up the phone intending to call reception before telling himself that life was too short and a complaint would be petty as well as pointless. She would have wandered off by now.

  There had been something familiar about the woman. It bothered him, this vague sense that he had seen her before or knew her from somewhere. He was on the point of sleep in bed an hour later before he remembered Lassiter’s account of his unnerving visit on his museum trip afterwards to a Liverpool pub. And he remembered the description Lassiter had given of the woman who had spoken to him there and he remembered, of course, who the woman had been.

  July 3 1794

  Tomorrow we will barter for the able bodies of men using cloth and rum and flintlocks to make the trade. Tonight the captain is in excellent spirits as a consequence. The Atlantic was in serene mood for most of our outward voyage and we made good time in our passage. We are high therefore on stored rations and low on the discontent afflicting crews when the sails are listless and the men are become bored in the doldrums.

  We are tied up at a port in the Gulf of Guinea. War afflicts the West of Africa so constantly that the supply of slaves is ever bountiful. The winners of these conflicts seek to profit from victory by selling the men taken prisoner in battle. Any commander could see the logic of sending his foes into exile and being paid with guns to do so. Pity never intervenes in this ruthless commerce. The tribes are pure in blood and never intermingle and so the notion of common humanity is alien to the African Negro.

  Last night I dined at the captain’s table. He is a charismatic man. He possesses a deep and mellifluous voice and is passing eloquent on every conceivable subject under the sun. He suggests much formal education in his erudition. But he claims this is contrary to the case.

  He learned his seamanship and navigation skills at the naval college in Pompey. The rest, he says, comes from a gluttonous appetite for books allied to a prodigious memory. He says curiosity is the key to the accumulation of knowledge and he has always been fierce curious to know more about the physical world.

  I told him about my own enthusiasm to know more about what lies beyond the coast of Africa. I confessed that I would like to venture into the hinterland within. He laughed uproariously at this
and told me any such exploration would constitute a journey fatal for its taker. The tribes are territorial and merciless in their hostility to interlopers. You would be killed.

  Capture would signal the same fate because captives are routinely sacrificed to their pagan Gods. The king ruling one country in West Africa will not trade a single slave with the white merchants, Captain Ballantyne told me. All of his war captives become victims of human sacrifice instead. This king is called Simonal. The land he rules is called Albache .

  The Portuguese and the British have tried to persuade him. So have the Spanish and the Dutch. He will not be swayed concerning the fate of his prisoners. He believes he gains more from their blood than in barter for the white man’s manufactured goods.

  The neighbouring kingdom of Dahomey, by contrast, sells almost all its captives as slaves and has grown enormously wealthy on the trade. Yet a European cannot travel in Dahomey either. To do so is forbidden and anyone defying this rule would pay for their disregard for the custom of the country with their life.

  The captain has very strong opinions concerning religion. He confided in me on this very subject over our meal together last night. He does not differentiate between the cruelties of the Counter-Reformation in Papist Italy and the current barbarism of the Albacheian king. He says that worship of a Deity thrives on ignorance and that it amounts to no more than superstition dressed up in robes and rituals to appeal to gullible men.

  He does not dismiss the possibility of a God. On the contrary, he says that the visible world makes a compelling argument for a creator. It is the conventions of religious belief he rails against. He says that they are arbitrary and a curtailment on the right of thinking men to speculate. He is a believer in science and scientific method and he argues that science would have made greater strides in discovery and progress were it not for such doctrinal concepts as blasphemy and heresy.