‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘Do not hurry yourself. We do not wish to interrupt you.’
He was confused, and almost scared. He pointed to his mouth and shook his head.
‘You cannot speak?’
No, his head shook. He took a medal out from inside his shirt, which hung on a piece of leather around his neck. He bent down so she could read its face.
On one side of the medal the words HONEST DILIGENT FAITHFUL SOBER had been stamped and on the other was a name – HAMLET – and a year of issue, 1805.
‘Your name is Hamlet?’ she asked, and the giant nodded, almost happy now. She found herself wondering why he didn’t speak, and whether his tongue had been removed, and whether that happened before or after 1805.
‘Well, Hamlet, is there a tavern down this street? Somewhere we may get some food?’
He nodded, and pointed down the street towards the sea.
‘Thank you, Hamlet. Making your acquaintance has been a pleasure.’
And she offered him a curtsy and he looked astonished. She took her husband’s arm and they walked on down James Town’s main street.
How odd, she thought. She had been thinking of Prospero, but then she had met Hamlet.
‘Land or sea?’ said Seale, back at the house in the early afternoon.
‘Land,’ said Charles. ‘We have been at sea enough.’
They turned out of Seale’s front door, and walked up the valley away from the sea. As the town reached an end, they followed a path, climbing further into the interior. The way became steep, and Abigail had the distinct feeling of walking into the island, as if James Town were simply the front entrance to a secret world.
The island was crossed by a central ridge, explained Seale, that ran roughly south-west to north-east. The highest peaks of the island rose from this ridge, and now the morning mist had lifted she could see them clearly, touching the sky. She saw steep brown rock walls plunging vertiginously into green bowls, within which tendrils of fog still stirred like the breath of dragons.
The higher they went, the stronger the wind blew. It was extraordinarily constant, with none of the moist stop-start fecklessness of an English breeze.
‘I think of the island as the peak of a mountain,’ Seale said, ‘for such it must be; a tall mountain which descends down into the depths of the ocean around us. There may be an entire range of mountains beneath us, with this as the tallest peak. But I also imagine a catastrophe here, of a volcanic nature. This may once have been a peak as elegant as any of the famed Alpine mountains, but at some time an explosion tore half of the peak away, and left this behind.’
The conception seemed, to Abigail, a brave but unprovable one. But it had the virtue of explaining the impossible situation of this place, and also the jagged aggression of its topography.
Seale pointed upwards to the south.
‘Those are the main peaks of the island: Diana’s Peak, Cuckold’s Point, Acteon and Halley’s Mount.’ He moved his finger along the vista, as he named the mountains.
‘Halley’s Mount is named for the astronomer?’ asked Abigail.
‘Yes. I believe he visited the island soon after the Company took ownership of it.’
‘He had a telescope or some such up there?’
‘He did. There is only a small ruin now.’
Seale now pointed to the eastern end of the central ridge.
‘On the far side of the ridge there is the flattest part of the island, the nearest it has to a plain. It is called Deadwood. It was once a huge forest, though there are few trees upon it now.’
‘What happened to them?’
Seale began walking down the hill, southwards again.
‘Mankind happened to them,’ he said.
They walked for hours, and for much of the time Abigail was quite exhausted by it, despite the delightful climate, which combined heat and breeze in measures seemingly designed to promote endurance. She and Charles had trouble keeping up with Seale, who bounded from rock to rock like one of the goats which, he said, infested the island despite numerous attempts to kill them off.
‘The Portuguese left them when they first came here, and the first English settlers encouraged them also,’ said Seale. ‘Now they own the island. We are outnumbered by goats, rats and blacks. That at least is the common saying.’
She lost her bearings more than once, and began to use the peaks as a way of regaining them. They came to a glorious confusion of steep mountainsides cascading down to the Atlantic which Seale said was called Sandy Bay. At the edge of some of these peaks Abigail spied impossible pillars of rock, like ancient columns from some uncompleted temple. This, argued Seale, must have been where the calamity happened which blew the top off the island untold aeons ago. ‘Imagine,’ said Seale, his face lost in an ancient unseen narrative, ‘a volcanic explosion so immense as to tear the top of the mountain away and plunge it into the sea. Then came the tides and the wind and the actions of Time, and what must have been a jagged horror was turned into this smooth green landscape.’
Abigail, who thought the landscape was not particularly smooth at all, knew there were blasphemies in Seale’s imagined histories. Did not the church argue that the world was barely four thousand years old? How long would time and tide take to wear down jagged volcanoes? Seale’s tales of aeons appealed to her more strongly than Biblical narratives.
Half a dozen smart little houses dotted the steep Sandy Bay hillsides, and Seale pointed out one of them.
‘That is the residence of Sir William Doveton, the treasurer of the island.’
‘Treasurer?’ said Charles, catching his breath. ‘I should talk to him.’
‘Of plants and gardens?’
‘It would be a courtesy.’
‘And what of those?’ said Abigail, changing the subject. She pointed to two of the tall columns of rock, standing like sentinels on their own peaks.
‘We call those Lot and Lot’s Wife.’
They turned their backs on these columns, as Lot and his wife had so failed to do, and walked eastwards onto a large flat plain.
‘Deadwood,’ said Seale, and Abigail noted how the dreary old English word sounded mournful on his tongue.
‘Have your family been long on St Helena?’ she asked.
‘Since the first settlement. My ancestor Benjamin Seale had an allotment of land down there’ – Seale nodded over his shoulder, to the south, on the other side of the ridge to Deadwood. ‘They call it Seale’s Flat now; it’s at the upper part of Shark’s Valley. We no longer farm it.’
He carried on walking. A house he called Longwood sat in the middle of the Deadwood plain, and there were a few dozen small copses of gum trees, but the overall impression was of undressed land, denuded of forest.
‘This was all once known as the Great Wood,’ said Seale. ‘It was almost gone a hundred years ago. They tried replanting it, putting a wall round it, everything. But it was an easy source of firewood. The islanders treated it as a commons, and such was its tragedy.’
From here, up on the plain, she seemed to be standing on a platform above the world. The wind blew in her face from somewhere over there in the south-east, from impossibly distant seas where whales hid from whalers beneath the white mountainous icebergs.
She caught her breath for a moment, and thought herself to be gliding above the world, a London nurse with a good mind, gazing upon the infinite.
MRS HORTON’S ODD MOMENT
The next morning, Charles left early to make his way to see Sir William Doveton, the island treasurer.
Abigail did not mention the prickly feeling she had experienced once again the previous evening, while she washed the dishes and listened to the two men talk in the parlour. She had opened the window onto Seale’s little garden – she had been thinking of their first evening in St Helena, when she had seen her reflection in the glass and had felt a moment of profound unease, remembering her sessions with Dr Drysdale.
With the window open she could see into the
darkness, and this should have made her more comfortable. Yet that unease persisted. The feeling was vivid that there was someone out there, in the dark, watching this little house. She thought of the whores down by the sea wall, the slave Hamlet, the boys Ken and Hippo. Were they all watchers? Did they all file reports?
She thought she had heard him, then. Heard him breathing out in the dark. But it must surely have been the wind moving in the hills.
She took her time getting dressed the following morning, allowing Charles to leave early. He asked what her plans would be – and he asked carefully, she was pleased to see, lest his solicitude affront her. She told him she would investigate the churchyard beside Plantation House, the country residence of the Governor. About an hour after Charles had left, she made her own departure, walking back up the valley as they had the previous day.
Plantation House was at the end of the valley in which James Town was set. The tidy little churchyard consisted almost entirely of individual graves and headstones. There were perhaps half a dozen family mausoleums, recording what she supposed to be the oldest families on the island, or at least the ones who had stayed the longest. One of them, she saw, belonged to Seale’s family.
She hoisted her little leather satchel over her shoulder, and walked east towards Deadwood plain. It was a walk of almost two hours, and on the way she saw perhaps a dozen whites, all of whom greeted her with the same cheerful lack of embarrassment that had marked their first encounter with Seale. These people expressed a good deal of curiosity as to her presence on St Helena, but it was not of a suspicious kind. The residents of St Helena were used to strangers, it seemed, despite the extraordinary distance of the island from any other human habitation. She wondered at this, and imagined the talk over St Helena tables this evening. ‘Saw a woman on her own walking from James Town. Said she was collecting flowers!’
She also saw a number of Chinese as she walked, though these were working away on the ground of the plantations. They looked at her silently as she passed, then chattered to each other, as if she was the victim of a tremendous shared joke. There were no Negroes, and Abigail wondered if they had been supplanted by these Chinese workers. Were the Orientals slaves, then? Or some kind of indentured labour?
At Deadwood she spent some time investigating the treeless, scrubby plain, watched only by some curious goats. It was then that she stumbled upon something of a mystery.
There was a little gut in the middle of the Deadwood plain, not quite a valley and with no stream running down it, although something about the ground at the bottom of the gut suggested it did get particularly wet, presumably at a time of significant rain. She climbed down into the narrow defile in the flat treeless plain, for what she had seen from above was worthy of inspection by a woman with botanical eye.
She was proved right. The gut was, indeed, filled with mulberry trees. She could not count them but there must have been hundreds, crowding the defile like ladies with parasols at a horse race. She walked between them, inspecting various trees closely, noting their long leaves with serrated edges, the male and female catkins, the white fruit, which she picked and tasted. It was sweet but uninteresting. After some thought, she guessed that the tree must be white mulberry, she thought Morus atropurpurea, though she was surprised by the colour of the fruit, which was normally purple in the wild and from which the tree got its Latin name. The white fruit was normally only on cultivated plants.
Many of the trees had silkworms on them, which caused her to wonder whether these trees were perhaps native to St Helena, though she had seen nothing like them anywhere else on the island. Had the Chinese she had seen planted these trees, or brought silkworms with them? Was such a thing possible?
The island certainly contained a remarkable hybrid of botanical specimens, a symptom presumably of its fecund climate and its status as a stopping-off point for ships from the Indies, first Portuguese and now British. She snipped a few leaves and fruits from the mulberry trees, and added them to the little bag she used for specimens.
It was pleasantly sheltered in the defile, so she put the specimen bag on the ground and took her other bag, removing from it a flask of water and some bread and cheese acquired in James Town. She sat on the ground at the edge of the trees and ate some lunch. When she had finished she lay down for a while, and drifted into sleep.
She woke suddenly at the sound, she imagined, of someone walking through the trees, but when she sat up there was nothing, only the sound of wind passing through the mulberry leaves. She picked up her lunch bag and walked out of the defile, heading back to James Town.
She was at the edge of the plain when she remembered the specimen bag, and shook her head in irritation with herself. That little nap must have discombobulated her. She turned and walked back to the gut of mulberry trees.
But when she walked down into the trees, she could not find her bag. She spent a half-hour walking around the secluded and dark copse, but every tree looked exactly the same, growing close together as if for comfort against the bleak plain outside the defile. Astounded at her own stupidity, and mourning the little specimen bag with the literal fruits of the day’s walk, she gave up and walked back towards James Town.
That evening, Abigail cooked for them again. It had only been three evenings, but already an odd domesticity had descended. Seale’s readiness to welcome them into his home was in keeping with the openness of the other islanders she had encountered. They had become used, it seemed, to putting up sailors and other visitors from vessels at anchor off James Town. She thought Seale must be lonely, and filled his life with drink and women and now, perhaps, with the intrigue of a botanical husband and his wife.
Charles and Seale poured themselves drinks, and gazed over an elaborate map that Seale had made of the island: the template, he said, for a planned model he wished to construct.
Once again, she looked out into the dark from the kitchen, though this time she felt no watching presence out there. Or, to be more accurate, her mind did not seem to invent one.
Charles had visited Sir William’s house, Mount Pleasant, while Abigail had been exploring, finding mulberries, and losing her specimen bag. He had described Mount Pleasant’s situation as ‘Cornish, in its way, though sharper, higher and altogether wilder than Cornwall’, and the house as having ‘a chimney breast which would nestle comfortably in Suffolk or the Cotswolds.’ He had a way with description.
Sir William had been at home, and had greeted Charles kindly enough. Charles had given Sir William a flavour of the same story he had told Seale: how he worked for the Royal Society as a botanist. But he had added a new element – that he was a cousin of one Captain Burroughs who, he understood, had recently taken on a new role as assistant treasurer. Assistant, presumably, to Sir William.
Edgar Burroughs had arrived on the island, Sir William told Charles, two weeks before their own arrival. He did not live in James Town, but in a house on the eastern edge of the island, above a place called Prosperous Bay. He had only visited Sir William once, two days after his arrival. Sir William had stated this was not unusual; the assistant treasurer, he told Charles, ‘is not responsible to me, but to East India House. I have no dealings with him or his predecessors, and never have had.’
Charles said the old fellow had seemed aggrieved by this, and suspected there had been bad blood between him and London about it. Indeed, such was his resentment that he seemed to positively welcome any suggestion of impropriety that might attach itself to the assistant treasurer.
‘Did Sir William believe your story?’ asked Abigail.
‘I think he did. I flattered him terribly, called him the most prominent man on St Helena, after the Governor, by virtue of his long years of service to the Company and the island. I fancy he is not used to such talk so far from England.’
‘You are turning into a politician, husband,’ she had said.
‘I do not welcome the development, wife,’ he had replied.
So it was that Prosperous Bay was
the object under discussion with Seale – though Charles covered his interest beneath the disguise of botanical interest.
‘Prosperous Bay?’ said Seale, looking down at his map. ‘An odd place to site any kind of botanical garden, Horton. No one even lives up there, as far as I know. Other than the Baxters, of course.’
‘The Baxters?’
‘An old island family. Been here as long as anyone. They live out that way, too. There.’
The two men leaned over the map, and Abigail returned to her cooking. She listened to them murmuring, and tasted the fish stew bubbling over the little fire in the kitchen. It needed a good deal more cooking, so she left it to bubble and returned to the parlour. She stood behind the two men, and looked at the map over their shoulders.
‘The abandoned Dutch fort is here,’ Seale was saying, pointing to a scribble on the edge of the island. His map was richly detailed and, to Abigail’s surprise, magnificently drawn.
‘And these?’ said Charles, pointing to the map.
‘Two batteries: Gregory’s and Cox’s. They guard the east side of the island, which is where the bulk of shipping appears off the island. You will have gone round Barn Point here, to the north-east of the batteries and the fort, when you arrived. The winds dictate this passage.’
‘What else is over there?’
‘It is not at all populated; the landscape is the most unwelcoming on the island. Very little grows there. There is a quarry a little inland, and there are two small bays: Turk’s Cap, which is virtually impossible to land at, and Prosperous Bay just to the south.’
‘Why is it called Prosperous Bay?’
‘It was the first place an English ship landed when retaking the island from the Dutch.’
‘And the Baxters – which is their house?’
Abigail saw Seale look at her husband. There was clear suspicion in his eyes.
‘Here.’ Seale pointed to a significantly sized square shape on the map, between Turk’s Cap Bay and Prosperous Bay. ‘Baxter’s Gut, it’s called. That’s how long they’ve been there.’
The Detective and the Devil Page 21
