‘An impressive house?’
‘No, I would not say that. I confess to only having seen it twice, both times from the sea. One could almost assume it abandoned. It must be terribly exposed to the winds.’
‘And yet it sees ships arriving. Indeed, is it not the best dwelling on the island for such a purpose?’
Seale frowned at the map.
‘Yes. I believe it may be. It is why the Dutch built a fort there.’
Charles leaned into the map again.
‘And this?’
Seale looked at where Charles’s finger touched the map. It was a point just south of Turk’s Cap Bay, about Baxter’s Gut.
‘Halley’s Point? It’s said he fell in there and had to be rescued.’
‘Who fell in? Edmond Halley?’
‘That is what is said.’
‘He explored by water, too?’
‘Well, that is what is said.’
Charles frowned.
‘A lonely point below an abandoned fort,’ said Abigail, to no one in particular. ‘An odd place to find a stargazer.’
1776: THE YEAR MINA BAXTER’S SON WAS TAKEN
He came for their son amidst thunder and rain.
The knock sounded on the door of the house soon after dark. Edgar was in bed and, for once, sleeping soundly. Her breasts were sore. He was getting too big to be fed by the breast, though island women often did so well past the age of two.
Did she know, during those first two years, that this night would come?
She opened the door, and there was John. He had come alone. The rain had drenched his hair and face, water dripped down his nose and his oilcloth coat let water fall down onto the floor.
‘It’s time, Mina.’
He stepped over her threshold, she was pushed back, and it was the first act of violence between them, despite all the arguments of the last two years. When she had fallen pregnant, he had assumed she would come back to England with him, that they would marry and raise the child. Even when she had told him that her future was on the island, he had not raised a hand to her. He had not even raised his voice. He had simply frozen over, like a tray of water in an icehouse. She remembered the warmth of him in her hand. It was like a memory from childhood: warm, unclear, impossibly distant.
He walked through the parlour, dripping water as he went, towards Edgar’s room. She went with him, and began to pull back on his arms.
But even then, even while she pulled, she held back. She had known this moment would come. She knew her choices. Go with him. Kill him, or die trying. Or let him take her son.
Even now, those words ‘her son’ felt misaligned. Not wrong, precisely, but not quite right, as if the wrong planet had appeared in the wrong constellation. Her breasts still ached with the violence of the child’s feeding, and there was a bruise on her upper arm where his little hand squeezed her skin tight as he fed, his eyes on hers, determined and hungry. She had looked into those eyes countless times, and on the lonely nights when she and Edgar sat together in this distant house on the eastern tip of the island, the abandoned fort looking over them, on those nights she had tried to find it in herself to love this oddly intense little creature. And, as often as not, she had failed.
What was wrong with her?
She pulled back on John’s arms, and casually he stopped, turned, and smashed her away with the back of his hand. A hard, calculated, fierce blow to her face, it knocked her down both with its force, and with its meaning.
Keep away, bitch. You could have been my wife. Instead you have ruined me.
She stayed down on the floor while he went into Edgar’s bedroom. She watched the dark square of the opened door, heard his tender words to the child and the child’s sleepy wordless responses. Drawers opened and the wardrobe banged, and then John reappeared with Edgar wrapped in a blanket and held within his oilskin coat.
She stood then, propelled by what remained of the maternal instinct in her ravaged breast. The sight of the child looking out at her with its father’s eyes was almost too much to bear.
‘John, please.’
‘Come with me, then, Mina. It is not too late. Come with me, tonight, and be my wife. We’ll have more like him. We can live with my brother in Seal. We can prosper and be happy.’
His flat, unsmiling face told the lie of his words. He was speaking things he did not feel. A final speech, for form’s sake.
Except he was not the only one acting out a role. She was as dishonest as he. She knew, she had always known, that her place was here. Her obligation to her father was too strong, her sense of her family too unyielding, the burden of their history too, too heavy.
And this man and this . . . boy. They were not her family.
How could that be?
She looked at the child’s face. It looked back, a slight frown on its chubby brow. Its father’s red hair stood untidily from its scalp, threatening to thicken and lengthen as John’s had done.
It seemed to smile. Heavens protect her, it seemed to smile.
She looked down at the floor and though no words were spoken, her meaning would haunt the rest of her existence. She heard a curse, the slam of the door, and they were gone.
MRS HORTON ENCOUNTERS A MONSTER
Seale had to report for work the next day in the Company stores, but Charles and Abigail had their own plans. They had discussed them in bed the previous evening, their voices low and urgent while the incessant wind blew outside the window.
Charles had decided he would explore the land over by Prosperous Bay, but it had sounded a bleak place in Seale’s telling. Abigail said she would walk up to Halley’s Point to find the remains of the astronomer’s observatory. She saw Charles’s relief that she was not coming with him, which suggested he anticipated some danger from the assistant treasurer, if he was at home. She imagined a table of potential risks in his head, against which he plotted her movements and her exposure to danger. She wondered if he realised quite how transparent he was to her.
They left early, walking into the island together. They separated on a path around a steep defile called the Devil’s Punch Bowl on Seale’s elaborate map.
‘Take care, wife,’ he said, and he hugged her to him, an unusual gesture.
‘And you, husband,’ she replied, and walked away from him, up the path that climbed the hill called Halley’s Mount. She looked back once and saw him watching her, standing some twenty yards below, his dark hair blown off his face by the wind. He lifted his hand, turned and walked towards the east. She, in her turn, watched him for a minute or two. So like our marriage, she thought. He watches me and I watch him.
The mist was low, astonishingly so, such that she walked into it as if climbing up into a cloud. After only a few minutes, the visibility became appalling; she could barely see six feet in front of her. The air was moist on her skin, and her hair began to feel like a damp cloth wrapped around her head. She walked slowly, taking tiny and careful steps, acutely aware of the steep rocky slopes which must fall away to her side, could she but see them.
How was she ever going to find the 150-year-old remains of an observatory in this fog? But the concern was misplaced. Whoever had built this path meant for it to lead directly to Halley’s observation point. Perhaps Halley himself had laid it out. After ten minutes of careful going, she saw a low wall at the side of the path, overrun with what she took to be wild pepper. She climbed over the wall, feeling the ground on the other side with her foot as she went.
Inside the wall, the ground was flat, artificially so, and she spied the shapes of half a dozen rocks and manmade stone platforms. It might have been a house, of course, one which had fallen into disrepair. Or it might have been the haunt of an astronomer.
She sat down on one of the rocks, and looked around her into the grey wall of the mist. What an ironic disappointment it was, to sit so, perhaps in the same position as a man who had been charting the stars. Halley gazed across the universe. She could barely see her own feet.
; The only sound that penetrated the mist was the wind: constant, almost (but not quite) maddening in its persistence. But then she thought she heard something else, under the wind. The sound of something moving beyond the wall of the observatory, carefully exploring the landscape she could not see.
A goat, perhaps? Or something else?
She held her breath, because the sound she could hear had a purpose to it, and there was a clear moment of terror when she realised this was the case. Had she been followed? Was there someone out there in the mist seeking her out, unable to spy her in the mist just as she was unable to spy him? She swallowed, and the sound of it in her ears was like the rumbling of a reawakened volcano.
The noise continued for a minute that felt like a century. Then it subsided, and all that was left was the sound of the wind, and she was forced to ask if her imagination was once again playing vicious games with her.
Perhaps I shall be revisiting Dr Drysdale after all.
The mist began to loosen. Was it rising, or just dissipating? She wondered about the relativity of observation. How would it look from another peak? She was being revealed to the world. Or was the world being revealed to her? The sun began to pick out the colours of the wall, the rocks, the ground.
After a few minutes, the vista opened out to her, and if there had been any doubt before, it lifted with the sun. This was indeed where Halley had placed his observatory. The mist dissolved like salt in heated water, and she was up above the world. The blue Atlantic Ocean stretched all around, and above it the stupendous vault of the heavens. She felt a single, pure moment of ecstatic awe in the face of Creation, and then she saw her leather satchel.
It was sitting on the low wall over which she had climbed. If it had been there when she’d arrived, she may not have seen it.
But why would it have already been there?
She stood up from her rock, walked over to the wall and picked up the bag. She looked around her to see if the island had an explanation for this rematerialisation. It had nothing to say on the subject.
She opened the bag. She was certain that someone else had rifled through the inside. The specimens from yesterday all seemed to be there, but there was a tidy order to them which she did not remember imposing. She had just stuffed the leaves and shoots and fruits in, planning to order and perhaps categorise them back in James Town. She had not even looked inside while she botanised, but she was sure the order that now persisted inside the bag could not have emerged spontaneously.
A crack of a twig, then, and she looked around sharply. Only the path and the hillside and the spectacle of the view.
‘Hello? Is there somebody there?’
Answer came there none. Yet there was a sudden (imagined?) watchfulness to the place, a sense of purpose . . .
‘Nonsense.’ She spoke the word aloud, as if this would convince her. She would not allow her mind to indulge in ridiculous fancy. She knew where such indulgence ended. Madness, visions, fantasies of pursuit.
And yet . . .
She put the satchel over her shoulder. She looked around the remains of the little observatory, seeing only rocks and bricks and flattened ground. She stepped over the wall again, back the way she had come, heading down the hill, but then, on an impulse, she stepped behind a high lonely rock by the side of the path, which had seemingly rolled down from somewhere further up the hill.
She waited, controlling her breathing, listening to the sounds of the island, which were now audible after the lifting of the mist. The wind in the hills, a noise always there. A goat braying some distance away, another goat replying. And, almost beyond the range of hearing, a slow, steady creep along the path from further up the hill. Her breathing became a little ragged, and she forced it to smooth over. She should leave, now. Why this infernal curiosity?
A figure appeared. A man. But when she shrieked and he turned his face towards her, she saw it was not a man at all but some ugly beast: no nose, no ears, and when it raised its arm towards her, no hand either. Its dark skin and almost bald head were covered in evil scars, and its eyes were as dark as caves. It reached out towards her, both arms (there was a hand on the left arm, but it had no thumb), and she was on the point of swinging the satchel at the thing’s head to buy herself time to flee when the figure froze, and sniffed the air, and said something which sounded like an angry curse in an incomprehensible tongue, then turned away and ran down the hill.
Abigail stood still for a while, her eyes straining wide, her heart running at a frenzied gallop. After a few minutes, she felt calm enough to look around the edge of her hiding place.
Whatever the thing had been, it had gone. She followed in the same direction, though she would dearly like to have chosen another, and thought of Caliban. It was only then that she remembered Edmond Halley’s own encounter with an island ogre – one with no ears, no nose, and a missing hand.
‘Did you feel threatened?’ was the first question Charles asked, somewhat predictably.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not at all. I was scared, of course, but once the initial shock had passed I felt sorry for it.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Yes. There seemed to be a kind of longing about it. Like it wanted me to approach it – that was why it left my bag behind. And then the way it scurried down the hill . . . I swear, Charles, it was more scared of me than I was of it. It was like some kind of animal.’
They sat in Seale’s parlour, waiting for him to return home from the stores. Abigail had made some tea, to which they added fresh goat’s milk. The taste of the Company tea with the island milk, which was still new to both of them, was exquisite.
‘Can it be, Charles? Can it really be true that this is the same creature Edmond Halley encountered?’
‘There may be other explanations.’
‘Such as?’
‘I do not know. A conspiracy, perhaps, to make us think this is the same man. If indeed it is a man.’
‘But why?’
Charles shook his head.
‘I do not know, wife.’
‘And what of your day?’
‘I walked out to the old Dutch fort on the far eastern side of the island.’ He described it to her: a plain stone building built during the short Dutch occupation of St Helena. Anything of value – weaponry, or iron of any kind – had long since been removed from the place. The only mystery about the place had been a single locked door, with no external metalwork at all.
‘It looked like a large sheet of ancient wood shoved directly into the doorframe. It was impossible to open.’
He had tried getting through that door – had tried shoulders and kicks, smashing it with rocks, forcing the edges with his pocket knife. But all to no avail. The door had remained steadfast, in such a way that strongly suggested to Charles that it was bolted from the inside. But given there was no obvious means of ingress, how could that possibly be?
‘You believe someone is hiding something within?’
‘It is possible. I walked around the place several times, but then I looked over the cliff face beside the fort, down to the little bay below – we saw it on Seale’s map. Prosperous Bay. Is that not a name to conjure with?’
‘How so?’
‘Abigail, I was a Kent lad and, what is more, I was a north Kent lad.’
He described to her the stretch of coast between Margate and Gravesend, the southern border of the stretch of water where the Thames and the Medway gave up their individual identities to become the North Sea. A coast with numerous beaches and landing places, looked over by little houses, stalked by men carrying torches and lamps, men in oilcloths and hats pushing carts and barrows. Smugglers, all of them, exploiters of the financial gaps which Whitehall ministers were prone to open and close with their incessant fiddling with duties and taxes. Charles had remembered the beaches these illicit men used, and they had something of Prosperous Bay about them. Wild and lonely on the surface, but filled with possibility.
‘Did you walk down to it?’
‘Then what use can it have as a smuggler’s cove?’
‘I asked myself the same question, but for different reasons.’
‘What were they?’
‘Looking down on the bay from the fort, I saw a boat pulled up onto the beach. I found myself wondering who it belonged to.’
1815: THE YEAR IN WHICH MINA’S SON RETURNED
Mina did not immediately recognise the man from the Company. There had been no warning of his arrival; she had received no visit from the Governor to tell her that East India House was despatching a new man. It had been eighteen months or more since Captain Suttle had taken his wandering eyes and hands back to England. Such a hateful man – even a woman of almost sixty years had not been able to avoid his disgusting glances and leering smiles. He had talked of the females of the island to her, had boasted of his dalliances with various whores, and had seemed to expect her to be excited by it.
Mina had despised him. She had enjoyed the peace since he had left. The work under the fort continued with new efficiency, the Chinese labourers of whom she had once complained now so efficient that output had almost doubled. Suttle had been pleased with the results, but Suttle had also come back, time and time and time again, to the subject of the Opera.
She had tried deflecting him or even ignoring him, but Mina was far too intelligent a woman to pretend to herself that the Company would lose interest in the Opera. It was all they cared about. Every missive to her from London mentioned it; Putnam, the new manager of the private trade office who now wrote all this correspondence, begged and cajoled and threatened. She must reveal the Opera to them. She had no offspring. Her family was at an end. The reason for keeping the Opera secret no longer applied. When she reached death’s threshold, there would be no other Baxters to protect and no other Baxters to remember.
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