Gulliver led the way on the crooked path, which was sometimes gravel, sometimes cobbles, and sometimes only a flatter line of moss along the edge of the lawn. Once we were close to the big tree, the roots pushed up underfoot in bumps and contorted twists. There had used to be rainforest flora all around them: a great litter of orchids, plate-leaved lilies in the marshy patches, and clusters of carnivorous things with spines that closed fast if you poked one. Charles had had it all torn up when he moved the driveway to iron out the hairpin bend. It had made things difficult for the apple carts. I paused to tell the gardeners to save some timber for the roof. They snatched a glance between each other and said of course. They knew better than to ask why we couldn’t bring in workmen from Truro for proper repairs.
Having found early on after coming home from China that I couldn’t sit in the house all day, I’d gone exploring and rediscovered the old greenhouse. It was down in the valley, which hadn’t seen any work since our grandfather had been alive. Because the wind funnelled right up from the sea sometimes, the trees there were blasted and strangely shaped. Some had leaves only on one side and one yew had bent right forward over the glass roof, old and dead and brittle. No matter how often I came in and out, the doors rained moss and spiders. When I’d found the place it had been overgrown. Nobody had asked for it back, so I stole it. I’d never be a gardener again, not like I had been, but although the loss of the profession had smashed over me like a tsunami, the interest behind it had turned out to be waterproof. I had forty-two types of fern and rescued tropical plants growing inside now, so densely that they pressed up against the walls.
The greenhouse stood on the edge of a tiny graveyard. The graves looked like somebody had dropped them there. They were a random, leaning clutter, some far spaced and some not, one half-hidden by the roots of a wind-warped tree that had spilled over the granite and tipped it sideways. There had once been a chapel, but all that was left of it were some stone steps and half a window frame. Dad’s grave was the only one noticeable straightaway. There was a statue that looked down at the headstone, or it did usually. After the storm, one of the trees had fallen where the statue had been, but somebody prescient had moved it fifteen feet to one side.
When I got to the greenhouse, I saw that I’d left the door open, again. It worried me, because no matter how often I did it, I could never remember. I checked the inside lock without much hope. The key was gone, which wouldn’t have mattered, but the same ring had my housekeys on it too. It was the third time I’d left it open since coming home, and the third time the crows had stolen the keys. It had taken me days to work out what had happened the first time and even then only when they brought the keys back to swap for a shilling I’d left on the bench.
I took down the jar of nails and coins on the shelf and sat for a while shining them up with turpentine. When they were gleaming I set them out on the step. I paused when I saw the floor was damp, dripped on, but there was nothing wrong with the roof. The little mechanisms that misted the air in the summer were bone dry. Not for the first time, I wondered if it hadn’t been me who had left the door ajar at all, but someone else coming in to get out of the rain. But I’d asked before, and everyone had always said no.
In stealing the keys, the crows had knocked the map of Peru sideways. I straightened it up. I’d taken it from our grandfather’s collection. It wasn’t all of Peru, only the part he’d lived in. A district well into the interior, Caravaya. Half of it was beyond the Andes and after the line of the mountains there wasn’t much, but he had sketched on a dragon with an amiable face and folded wings. At first glance it was a piece of whimsy but I knew why he had drawn it. There was a river there, in the shape of a dragon, but the territory was uncharted and he’d never taken the measure of the land. I only knew because whenever I saw the little picture, a nursery rhyme floated about at the back of my mind. It was about a dragon and a river and a mountain, but I couldn’t fit the words into the tune any more.
Peru had been where I was meant to go, where I was meant to be now, if nothing had happened to my leg; I was supposed to be fetching cuttings from calisaya cinchona trees to begin a new plantation in India. The only cinchona forests in the world grew in Peru, and the only treatment in the world for malaria was quinine – derived from cinchona bark. Malaria was getting worse and worse in India, which was doing unpromising things to the trade revenue of the India Office. I’d put the map up when I’d thought I might recover enough to go. Still holding it between my fingertips I realised that all it was now was the fossil of a dead chance. I was never going to go. I propped it up on the floor instead, facing away.
Wanting to get it over with, I pulled open the letter and unfolded it against a tray of pansy seedlings. The paper was embossed and thick. Across it was my old manager’s beautiful handwriting in dark black ink.
Tremayne,
Expedition to Peru going ahead. December start. Report to the India Office for November 15th at the latest.
Sing
I turned the paper over and cast around for the pencil I used for plant labels.
Dear Sing,
Cannot go to Peru. Cannot walk. Ask Charles Ledger, he’s good.
Yours
Merrick
I stuffed it back into the envelope, readdressed it to India House, tied it up with string and dropped it in the spare plant pot to take out later.
A crow bumped into the glass in front of me. It fell on to the grass but hopped up again, ruffling its feathers. I tapped on the window to see if it was all right. It looked, bright-eyed and alert still. Another fluttered down next to it, and another shot overhead. There were dozens of them, everywhere, and most were fluttering in a great funnel above the graves. Some were far up in the sky, circling as though they were looking for something. I thought it was carrion at first. I went out.
‘Anyone got my keys?’ I called, then stopped walking, because I had almost come to what they were interested in. It was a broken amphora, the one that usually rested against the statue, but whoever had moved the statue had forgotten about it. It had spilled a spray of glass shells and tiny vials across the leafy moss. I frowned, because I hadn’t known it had anything in it at all. The shells were bright and winking even in the drizzly sun. I went down on my good knee to pick one up. It came attached by a dead weed to three or four others, which plinked together and trickled old sand over my knuckles. Caught in the glass were burned imperfections and bursts of odd colour where scraps of iron or copper had been mixed up in it. There were dead sea things in two of them.
The vials were sealed shut. I broke the wax on one. Inside was something fine and white. I leaned down to it. Salt.
Not liking my being there, the crows wheeled away, towards the house and their nests in the big tree.
When I went back to the greenhouse, the crows had traded some glass shells for the pennies, but there was still no sign of my keys. Gulliver whined and nudged at me as I sat down. I stroked her ears. It made me jump when she barked. In the little space it was loud.
‘Ow. What?’
She whined again and hid under the old couch. A couch is an odd thing to have in a greenhouse, but it had always been there. It was Regency, all twirling mahogany scrollwork and sun-faded upholstery. I couldn’t tell what colour it had been, and some patches were so worn out that the calico lining showed through. I’d never sat on it – I couldn’t lean back if I was sitting down now – but there was an impression of a person on the left side that must have been my father or his, which I liked.
I couldn’t lean down from sitting either, so I had to take my feet off the ground and ease down on my hands to see underneath.
‘Come on, girl.’
St Bernards have human mannerisms. They sigh a lot when they’re fed up, and Gulliver, at least, always put her paw over her eyes when she was unhappy. I laughed, but then stopped when I saw what was by my hand. It was the watermark of a bootprint. The sole was a different pattern to mine, no pattern at all, and much bigger.
It shouldn’t have worried me as much as it did, but I’d been skittish since I’d hurt my leg. I got up and took Gulliver twice round the greenhouse, then into the trees a little way in four directions, but we didn’t find anyone or any sign of anyone. The only human shape was the statue, which kept catching my eye. In the end I gave up and tried to get on with things in the greenhouse, but the crawling feeling of being watched was heavy on the back of my neck and it wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t concentrate and when Gulliver nosed me, restless too, I took her out again and started back up the hill, thinking vaguely that we might both feel better for a cup of tea and a biscuit. Gulliver generally had the biscuit.
As we walked towards the house, I smelled something burning. It was so clear that I turned round twice, looking for smoke, but I couldn’t trace where the smell was coming from and after a few seconds, in the way you lose sight of a star if you stare at it too long, I couldn’t catch it at all any more.
It was only once we were on the driveway that it came back. Something bright half-blinded me and I looked up, worried there was a fire in the house, but the light wasn’t coming from that way. It was in the tree. There were starry points all through the canopy. The glass shells were in the crows’ nests, winking where the sun came down through the loose edges. Where one of them made a dot of brightness on the ground beside me, the pine needles were starting to smoke. They went up with an odd blue flame while I was watching. Gulliver squeaked and hid behind me. Points on the branches and the trunk were smoking too. Through the grey haze, more fires burned thin and chemical-looking. The gardeners weren’t there; they were sitting on the kitchen steps with the tea that Sarah always provided at ten on the dot, unbeknownst to Charles.
‘Tree’s on fire,’ I called.
The head gardener twisted back. I had a feeling his name was something brilliant, like Sisyphus, but although he had worked here since we were both children I wasn’t confident enough to say it and we had never had a proper conversation. I’d been away too much. ‘What?’
I pointed with my cane.
‘Jesus!’ There was a clatter as teacups clanked down on the steps. Men ran past me and I stood still so that I wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. ‘How in God’s name is it on fire?’ Sisyphus demanded of the world more than of me. ‘It pissed down in the night.’ Then he flushed. ‘Sorry, sir.’
I shook my head, although Charles had trained them too strictly not to swear for me to convince anyone I didn’t mind. ‘The crows have been collecting these, look.’ I found the one I’d had in my pocket and showed him. The glass was thick enough that the spiral of the shell winked and lensed the light. The little spotlight it made on my palm felt warm. Sisyphus took it and moved it to and fro over a handful of pine needles, then gasped and dropped them when they caught alight with a hissing crackle. Gulliver nudged me further away from it.
Sisyphus was still embarrassed and when he spoke, the gorse and the ferns in his voice withered until there was almost no Cornwall left in it at all. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t well spoken. Charles was and, as far as the gardeners were concerned, I was only a taller, blonder extension of him. I’d never had the energy to sit them all down and explain I didn’t go through their faults with him nightly over dinner. ‘But that ought not be hot enough to – should it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The tree’s from the Amazon. God knows what it should and shouldn’t do.’
In the end there wasn’t much they could do but put out what fell to the ground and hope nothing really got going. The fires only hissed damply, and after about ten minutes a misty rain started and we all stood just shy of the canopy, watching. Some of the smoking patches were on the rotten branch. Close to, the angle at which it hung above the house was mad. It was held on by nothing but one last string of wood and a pretty fungus.
‘Better get it down sooner rather than later,’ I said towards the cut the hawsers had made in the trunk. ‘While it’s raining.’
He nodded and called to some of the other gardeners. They were nervous, but they began to saw again anyway and I smiled, proud of them. Sisyphus watched too, his hands pressed over his kidneys.
‘Sir – are you sure you should be living up near the attic?’
‘I haven’t got anywhere else to live.’ I didn’t want to explain Charles’s refusal to clear out all the boxes of ancient gear and books on the first floor, or that it wouldn’t change now just because there was a tree about to fall through my room; it hadn’t when I’d nearly lost a leg, despite three sets of stairs. He was only asserting his ownership of the house, reminding me that living there didn’t make anything mine, but it was so stupid that it didn’t deserve any more oxygen.
‘Honestly, I’d camp in the greenhouse if I were you. Even forgetting the tree, that roof could go at any minute. I mean, look at it.’
I inclined my head to say it was a fair point, then put two and two together and felt stupid. The gardeners must have been in the greenhouse because they’d moved the statue. ‘By the way – can you tell whoever moved the statue, thanks?’
‘What statue?’
‘By Dad’s grave.’ Charles would have said old Sir John’s grave. That sort of thing sounded right in his voice but not in mine. In mine it sounded like I had a rod down my spine.
He frowned. ‘No one moved that. Christ – don’t reckon you could move that thing with five men and a winch.’
‘They must have. Someone moved it out of the way of the trees yesterday night before the storm. And someone was in the greenhouse.’
He gave me an odd look. ‘Yesterday was Sunday. There was no one here but you and Sir Charles. No one came in till six this morning. The storm was all over by then.’
‘Look, I don’t mind if people use it – it’s not mine, nothing here is mine, there’s no need to cover for anyone. If they could just shut the door, though. Otherwise the crows steal my keys.’
‘I’m not covering for anyone, I promise.’
‘I’m sharing the greenhouse with a ghost, then. With boots bigger than mine. I found footprints.’
He was still frowning. ‘There’s . . . no one that tall here.’
‘Well, there’s someone out there,’ I said. ‘Has been for a while, I think.’
‘We’ll have a look through the valley. If we’ve got tramps drifting about the greenhouses, we need to know. There’s valuable things lying about.’
I felt like a damselling idiot for not being able to help. ‘Don’t turf them out if there’s no need. It isn’t as though we’re using that particular thousand acres.’
He looked like he might have argued with me, but he didn’t have the chance.
It seemed to happen in slow stages, although it couldn’t have. The gardeners were looping ropes around the trunk, ready for it to tip, but it leaned before they were ready, only a couple of inches, and the dead branch swayed. It fell, smouldering, straight down into the damaged section of the roof, which broke. Tiles slid down in a flint landslide and smashed on the drive. I was sure that I heard those sharp crashes well before the bigger, deeper bang of the branch smashing into the main stairway inside, for all that would have made Galileo wrong. There was a moment of quiet in which things seemed to settle and there was no sound but pine needles falling and the little hissing of the remaining fires in the rain. But then, inside the house, something exploded.
It blew out the windows nearest to us and dust and smoke plumed everywhere. We were just far away enough not to be hurt and for a second it was nothing but beautiful, because the peach-coloured sun was still filtering through the tree and now the light came down through the smoke like threads in a loom. The taste of burned paper and brick scratched the back of my throat. Men must have been shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of the gravel where Gulliver had jerked in front of me. The first real thing I heard was when she barked.
She must have been able to see or smell something else through the smoke, because she ran around the house, towards the front door. I followed her as best I could and by the time I reached her, pacing up and down, the smoke was clearing; part of the wall had been blown clean through, and the one between the hallway and Charles’s study.
‘Come on, let’s find him,’ I said. I gave her a push inside.
She understood and hurried over the scattered bricks. Her normal pace was a sort of ooze, but she was quick now. I followed. There wasn’t much to climb over and the doorways were more or less all right, but just inside the hallway now was what was left of the exploded branch. It had sprayed pieces of itself everywhere and each one burned like a phosphorous torch, smoke pouring from them. The hearts of the flames were bluish green. Gulliver barked again. She had found Charles; he was in the corner near the desk. She nudged him out towards me. He was all right, but he had banged his head and there was blood just under his hair. He was unsteady even with both crutches.
‘Charles—’
‘Of all the bloody juvenile things!’ he shouted at me. ‘What, you can’t bear to see the wretched tree come down, so you douse the thing in turpentine?’
‘I didn’t do anything, don’t be stupid.’ I put my arm around him to help him over the rubble near the door.
‘Get off me,’ he snapped.
‘Look, it takes something to go from sniping at each other to blowing someone up, doesn’t it?’
‘You’d do it in the right mood,’ he said. ‘And you know you would. Your idea of benign and acceptable violence is nearly crucifixion.’
‘Look at this,’ I said, gesturing to the brilliant fires.
He did look. Though he had shaken me off, he leaned on my arm while he stood still, the top of his dark head not quite to my shoulder. He was so frail it didn’t feel like touching a human being. ‘Why is it burning like that?’
‘I don’t know.’
Once we were safely out, I cast around for a decent-sized shard of wood. I found one just outside the door. It was warm when I picked it up. I held it to my nose, waiting to catch the smell of dynamite, but there was nothing until I tipped it to the light. It was honeycombed with tiny holes, minuscule. The combined surface area inside must have been vast.
‘What is that, some sort of disease?’ Charles murmured.
‘I don’t . . . God, feel that. It’s light.’
I put it into his hand and his arm bobbed upward because it weighed so much less than it looked.
‘There’s nothing on it,’ I said at last. I hooked my cane over my arm and found some matches in my pocket. He frowned but watched me hold a flame to the corner of the wood. Nothing ignited on the surface, but I threw it away from us, on to the grass, just in case. After a second it went off like a bomb and left a little crater in the lawn.
‘It explodes,’ he said slowly.
‘Listen – you’ve got a concussion, your eyes aren’t even. Sit down.’
He did as he was told. I perched on some of the ruined brickwork too. Gulliver put her nose on his knee. He didn’t usually like her, but he stroked her ears. I rubbed some ash off his jacket. He smacked my hand.
‘Don’t,’ he said. He sounded more tired of me than he ever had. ‘How did this happen?’
‘There was some glass on the ground. The crows took it, the sun was out . . .’
He seemed not to hear. ‘What are we going to do about a hole in the wall?’
‘Some of the bricks will be all right. We can board it up for now,’ I said, knowing it wouldn’t just be for now.
The rain turned harder and the fires in the main tree went out. The gardeners were in the hall with buckets. All that was left of the rotten branch were chunks of charcoal. I helped Charles around to the back of the house and the kitchen door, ashamed, because two years ago I could have carried him. I got him to sit down at the big table, where there was some abandoned dough because Sarah must have gone outside to see what was going on. I poured him some rum, some of the strong fantastic Jamaica kind. I bought it from smugglers in town. I could probably have bought it legally, but edging into the back of the Creely brothers’ bakery was a tradition I was trying to keep alive from when Dad had taken me when I was tiny, and in any case, I liked the idea of bakers smuggling in rum from Calais.
He told me to stop fussing before long, but I left Gulliver with him. I went out into the rain to see if the gardeners were all right and rounded them up to count heads. They were all there, though some of the younger ones were shaken. Aware that Charles wouldn’t like it but deciding that now was a nice moment not to care, I herded them all round to the kitchen to share the tea. In fact, Charles seemed relieved to see other people. The gardeners, big men for the most part, were just as relieved to have somebody fragile to be kind to and within a minute or so they were all talking as if they had always belonged together. Gulliver wagged her tail, pleased.
Sisyphus came to stand with me by the stove, where I had the small of my back propped against the hot part just above the oven. I didn’t remember jolting anything, but something right under my spine hurt and the heat helped. He smelled of sweat and grass. I breathed in slowly, because I missed it, being fit enough and quick enough to sweat over real work.
‘Where did you say that tree was from?’ he said.
‘Peru.’
‘They must have problems out there.’
I smirked into my cup.
He was quiet for a while. Then, ‘Right. I’ll get them to have a look through the woods. Give them something to do, find your mystery man.’
I nodded and waited with Charles and Gulliver. It was nasty of me, but I liked Charles a lot better when he was upset than at equilibrium and we laughed together for the first time in years. But when the gardeners came back, they hadn’t found anything. The greenhouse was empty and so were the woods, which were too overgrown to walk through without a struggle. Even the old charcoal pits were impenetrable. There was no one there and in the end I doubted what I’d seen. It must have been my own footprint in the greenhouse, but hazed and distorted as the water dried.
I felt uneasy when I went back out the next day, but the greenhouse was the only warm place I could go. By the time I came to open the glass door, I was convinced that I must have been telling myself stories. But someone had put the map of Peru back on its hook. I eased aside the ferns and looked under the couch. There was no one, but the statue had moved again. It was back by the grave, but not like it had been before the storm. It was facing me this time. No one would admit to having moved it.