She wondered if once again she was to be little more than a bargaining chip in a game between men. The bruise on her arm screamed in dull alarm, echoing the shrieks in her head.
The sea was astonishingly clear. He could see the mass of the island declining away beneath them, down into depths he could not possibly fathom.
Something gigantic swam past them in the water, bigger than a man, fat and slow and incurious. It was a sea-cow slowly making its way away from Seale’s boat, like a baronet disturbed at his club by a member of the lower classes. The sight of it calmed him.
He turned his head back to the rocky cliff. For a moment he could not see the opening to the cave; the tide had swept them along a little, shifting the angle such that he could no longer work out where the cave was. They had been pushed southwards, clockwise around the island. The boat was now in front of Prosperous Bay, and he saw the other boat pulled up onto the beach there. ‘We need to go back against the current,’ he said, and Seale moved the tiller.
Two heads broke the surface and watched them, and he almost cried out in alarm. They had heads and whiskers like dogs, though no ears that he could see, their snouts as slick as oil on the surface of stone. Sea-lions, come to watch the strange sight of humans struggling in their realm. He remembered seeing these creatures when he was on board the Phoebus.
The island’s rocky sea-face enclosed them as they came close to the cave, passing over a line between light and dark, under the shoulder of the island itself. The mast of the little boat would soon scrape the rock itself, which was turning over the top of them. The current suddenly changed, as if the island was sucking the boat into itself, and Seale hurriedly threw out the anchor behind them.
The rock’s surface was ribbed with little seams of strange phosphorescence. This was interesting, but it did not help them move away.
‘So deep behind us,’ said Seale. ‘The anchor is not . . . Ah, there it is.’
The cable stiffened as the anchor gripped onto whatever lay below them, and Seale began to haul them out. Looking up into the mouth of the cave, Horton imagined an opening below them. They may have been suspended above a gigantic opening in the side of the island, the top of it just visible above the water’s surface as a cave. He looked down at the water, expecting to see nothing but utter, desolate darkness, but instead he saw a bottom, where he least expected there to be one. It looked loose, not compacted like a sea bed or hard like rock, like a rockfall beneath the water, and it fell away steeply into the depths where Seale had nearly lost his anchor.
The idea of the boat hanging above that opening was vivid and terrifying. Where did those sea-lions come from? Were there colonies of creatures down there, waiting for a visitor, hungry and aware and somehow capable of sight in the pitch-blackness?
The current was strong, and Seale made little headway at first, so they remained suspended over that odd rockfall. Is this where Halley had descended in his underwater suit, a stargazer in Neptune’s realm? The idea seemed preposterous.
The sea-cow returned, anxious to see its visitors.
Abigail and the devil stood on the windswept point, watching the little boat below bob in the waves. She could see the heads of two creatures swimming in the sea around Seale’s boat – perhaps they were seals, too. The boat had emerged from beneath them as if exiting the island itself.
‘The brave constable puts himself about, does he not?’ said Burroughs, beside her. He turned away from the cliff, pulling her arm gently but with nonetheless indecent force. ‘Shall we take some tea at my residence?’
They walked away from the cliff top. The abandoned Dutch fort was above them and to their right. They walked away from it, down a hill and up another, until they came to what looked like a farm on the point opposite the fort. But there were no animals to be seen and nothing was being grown, as far as Abigail could make out. The house itself was well tended, and behind it stood a barn which looked just as cared-for.
Burroughs walked them past the buildings, and after another five minutes’ walking they came to another simple dwelling, on its own, in a sort of garden enclosed by a stone wall. Several huge green plants dominated this space, and the smell of them and their morphology led Abigail directly to identification.
‘Cannabis sativa, Mr Burroughs?’ she asked. ‘Have you been intoxicating yourself?’
‘I am impressed, Abigail,’ he replied, opening the front door of the little house as he spoke. There seemed to be about a dozen different locks and keys. ‘Yes, those are indeed cannabis plants. The stuff grows like weeds here. My father told me about it. He also introduced me to a delicious way of consuming it. The Indians call it bhang – one adds it to milk. It is quite intense.’
The door opened at last.
‘Now, if you please.’
She hesitated at the entrance. She felt as if she were going into a mouth. His smile was fixed and devoid of anything. She went inside.
She was very scared, but had, she thought, a clear view of the situation. Burroughs wanted something from her husband. That odd remark about Charles ‘discovering secrets’ had stayed with her. She was, she supposed, a kind of hostage, but she was only worth anything to Burroughs unharmed. She was in danger, certainly, but perhaps not of an immediate nature.
The house was of a similar size to Seale’s – a simple parlour with a kitchen off it, stairs leading up to an upper floor. There was some decoration, most of it appearing to come from India. There were also a great many books.
‘What now?’ she asked.
He sat down in a chair, crossed his legs and watched her.
‘Now, I would like to talk,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I could make us some tea?’ she said, and she saw that he was surprised and pleased. ‘The tea here on the island is quite magnificent.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Burroughs. ‘I’m sure Major Seale has an excellent supply. He keeps the stores, after all.’
Again, he had disturbed her. He knew so much about their movements and about their home. He seemed determined that she realise it.
‘Your tea is in the kitchen?’ she asked.
‘Yes. In a jar with a Hindoo motif. I can see it from here.’ He pointed into the kitchen, and smiled.
‘And the kettle?’
‘In the sink. I shall light a fire.’
While he lit the fire, she heard him whistling something tuneless and mildly irritating. Her botanising satchel was still over her shoulder, such that she could reach into it easily enough. She put some leaves into Seale’s little kettle, added water, and took it through to the parlour. The fire was already blazing.
‘Thank you, Abigail,’ he said. He placed the kettle on the fire.
‘Do you add milk?’ she asked.
‘Milk?’ he replied. ‘In tea? Hmm. I do keep milk, but usually for bhang. Well, Abigail, I believe in experiencing new things. I will fetch some milk, and some cups.’
He went into the kitchen, and returned with two cups and a jug of milk, which he set down on a table by the fire.
‘Now. Do sit.’
He pointed to a chair, and she sat down. She looked at the kettle, and wondered how long it would take to boil, and whether there would be an odour.
‘What will happen now?’ she asked.
‘What will happen? Nothing will happen. We will wait for your husband.’
‘How will he know where to come?’
‘He is an investigator, is he not? Think of this as a little test for him. The latest of many such tests.’
She did not know what he meant by that.
‘May I read a book?’ she asked.
‘By all means,’ he said, waving at the bookshelves in his hand. ‘I know how much Abigail Horton relies on her books.’
She shivered as she stood and walked over to the bookcase. The man’s knowledge of her was obscene. Her mind raced with anxiety as she pretended to look at the books, their spines blurring into one leather-bound miasma, until a few came into focus.
; The selection of books seemed odd. It featured ancient philosophers and mathematicians – Aristotle, Plato, Euclid – but also more esoteric stuff she had not seen before: Roger Bacon, Trimethius, Ramon Gull, Pico della Mirandola – these names tugged at her mind and her memory. And there, another name: Cornelius Agrippa, the man whose name John Dee had evoked.
The kettle boiled, and Burroughs stood up to pour two cups, while she froze with her hands outstretched, frantically sniffing the air for any odd odour. She thought she could smell something. But could he? She heard the sound of liquid going into cups – first the tea, then the milk. Then, the sound of him sitting back down and sipping, carefully, from the hot drink.
On the next shelf, she found a set of works by John Dee: the Propaedeumata Aphoristica; the Monas Hieroglyphica; the Mathematicall Preface. And the rarest of all, the one she had never seen – the Libri Mysteriorum.
‘This milk idea is excellent,’ he said from behind her. ‘The goat’s milk of the island works wondrously well in bhang, too. Will you not sit and drink?’
‘I am just perusing your books.’
‘Ah, yes. Interesting, are they not?’
‘You have some marvellous editions of John Dee’s works.’
‘Dee! Ha! Yes, indeed.’
She did not understand this strange exclamation. She took a book from the shelf – the Libri Mysteriorum – and affected to read it with her back to him, her heart so loud in her chest that she was sure he must be able to hear her tell-tale anxiety. But he said nothing. After a few minutes, he made a small grunting noise, and then there was a crash as he fell sideways onto a table.
She put down the book, and stood and walked over to him. She picked up her satchel from beside the sink and looked at the leaves inside, the remains of the ones she had added to the devil’s tea.
‘Hmm. Cherry laurel, after all.’
She went to find some rope.
He’d expected to find a cave, an entrance into the island’s innards. He’d expected to find a way up inside the hill, a passage which ended, perhaps, at a bolted door inside an abandoned Dutch fort. That was the picture he had constructed in his mind; an internal construction, a repository of secrets and perhaps something more.
He remembered the sight of that loose rock and stone beneath the surface. It had not been the sea bed; it had consisted of larger rocks piled up unknowingly high. A place for sea-lions to scamper in, a place for Royal Society astronomers to lose their footing.
He helped Seale prepare the boat for their return, and they lifted the anchor and stowed it in the stern. Seale turned the bow away from the wind, and raised the sail, and they ran before the south-easterly back around the island. The old abandoned fort slipped away behind one of the island’s steep headlands.
He needed to think of another way. That old locked door within the fort had taken on a symbolic weight. Behind it, he had begun to think, was the essential secret of this whole mystery: the reason for the deaths of the Johnsons, and before them the deaths of St Helena’s assistant treasurers. It was the motivation he had been unable to uncover. He had sailed halfway around the world, only to stand before a door he could not open.
It seemed to take no time at all to sail back to James Town, and as he helped Seale tie up his boat Horton looked up into the island, up the valley to the peaks beyond. Somewhere in there lurked the new assistant treasurer, the elusive Edgar Burroughs. What was he about? Why did the island have need of this secretive post of assistant treasurer? And why did the holders of the post have to die?
Because they held a secret, he thought. A secret that Emma Johnson discovered. A secret valuable enough to blackmail Captain Suttle with. A secret deep enough to kill her for.
Their rope work finished, they walked back to Seale’s house, nodding to the guards at the drawbridge like old friends. He had not been stopped in his investigations by the Governor or any of his militia. For now, his story of investigating the island’s flora seemed to be holding. It might hold for some weeks, or a ship from London could arrive this very day with letters from the Company which proved his tale false. He had an unknown schedule to unlock an unseen mystery.
Abigail was not at the Castle when they arrived, and this brought the inevitable stab of fear. Where was she? The afternoon was drawing on, and the shadows of whatever trees Abigail walked within must be lengthening on the ground. Why would she not stay in one place?
Seale made them tea, adding the delicious goat’s milk. Horton stood staring at Seale’s map, calculating vectors of visibility and distances between dwellings, trying not to think of Abigail.
She appeared after an hour of this, coming through the door in a hurry, her bonnet dishevelled and her face reddened. Wherever she had walked from she had done so at an incredible clip.
‘Husband,’ she said. ‘I have met your assistant treasurer.’
‘What . . .’
‘Wait, I must rest.’ She sat down in one of Seale’s chairs, and Seale went to fetch her water. She sipped it and sat back with her eyes closed for a few moments, steadying herself. Horton saw no injury or sign of struggle. He went to sit next to her, taking her hand.
‘I met him up by Halley’s Mount,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘He took me to a house near the fort, quite a small place near a larger farmhouse.’
‘Did he force you to go with him?’ asked Horton, his voice tight.
‘He did, husband, yes. Oh, he never as much as touched me. But the threat of it was in everything he said.’
He’d known, of course, that this was possible. But now, facing it, he felt a dull helpless anger, and imagined another knife in his hand and Edgar Burroughs laid out on a table before him.
‘What did he tell you?’
‘He knows all about us, Charles. Where we live. What your work is. He said he had a job for you.’
‘A job?’
‘Yes. He said he wanted you to work for him. For us to make our future here.’
It was puzzling, this, extremely so. Unexpected and, in its own way, interesting.
‘But he let you go?’
She smiled, at that.
‘Ah, not quite. I drugged him with cherry laurel leaves, and tied him up.’
Horton turned to Seale, who was standing with a thunderous face in the door to the kitchen.
‘You are quite the oddest couple I have ever encountered,’ Seale said. ‘And I find myself wondering why a botanist needs to poison our assistant treasurer.’
CONSTABLE HORTON AND THE DEVIL
There followed a difficult conversation, in which Horton was forced to abandon their pretence to Seale and take the risk that the man might expose him. The man’s reaction surprised him.
‘The fort, you say?’ he said when Horton had finished. ‘I’ve always thought there was something odd about that place. You’ll need a horse.’ And without another word he left to secure one. Horton silently prayed their host did not go straight to the Governor.
Abigail wanted to come with him, of course, but he insisted that she stay with Seale, arguing that a carriage would be impossible over such ground and it was too far to walk, and securing two horses would be twice as difficult as securing one. He did not wish to make his way across the island in the gathering dark alone; but he wished to do it with his wife even less.
The horse Seale brought to the door was unimpressive and unimpressed – though he had not had time to visit the Governor, Horton reckoned, and thanked Seale warmly. The horse looked at Horton as if he were an empty bag of feed. Seale gave him an oil lamp, and he wondered if the oil in it had come from the Martha – if he had not in fact witnessed its ocean harvesting.
It was now full dark. He rode with one hand on the reins, the other holding the lamp. Its whale-oil burned a corridor through the night, and down the corridor he rode.
It was a distance of four or five miles to the eastern tip of the island, the last third of it bisecting the treeless plain that Seale had called Deadwood. There, surrounded by flat
ground over which St Helena’s peaks stared seawards, he felt like a flea abandoned in the cosmos. If a dragon had swooped down and carried him away across the Atlantic, he would only have been mildly surprised.
The land rose, and he could see the silhouette of the Dutch fort. He rode past it, and past the big house and barn which Abigail had seen. No light came from either. A few minutes later he came to the assistant treasurer’s residence.
This time, there was a light. Burroughs must have escaped Abigail’s knots. Horton tied up the horse at a lonely tree some distance away, and walked carefully up to the place. He extinguished the lamp, allowing himself to be folded into the night air.
Burroughs appeared at the door so suddenly that Horton had to throw himself to the ground to avoid being seen, perhaps thirty yards away. The grass was dry, but cold, holding the promise of night-time moisture. This was Horton’s first glimpse of the man who, until now, had been only a name, a shadow at the edge of the story.
He stood in the doorframe, lit by the light within. He did not look like a man who had, until recently, been tied to a chair by a woman after drinking a mild poison. He looked like a man under astonishing self-control. He imagined Burroughs standing in that Kent icehouse over the dead bodies of the Johnsons. He imagined him marking their bodies with that device, Dee’s Monad. But the question still pertained: why?
The dark-suited devil turned and shut the door behind him. The house stood silent again. Horton could not approach very closely, as there was no cover. But behind the house there were cairns and clusters of rocks. Horton crouched and ran around the house, keeping as much of his attention as he could on the door, in case Burroughs should reappear. He settled down to wait.
It was perhaps another hour, though it felt like eternity. At the end of this first hour, the light in the house went out. Had the assistant treasurer gone to bed? He waited a while longer, just to be sure.
He made his way towards the dark house. He reached its side wall, put his back against it and quickly glanced into a window. There was no light or movement from inside. He worked his way around to the front door at which Burroughs had stood earlier.
The Detective and the Devil Page 24
