Ceylon, 1861
When we met Sing in Ceylon, we had fifty-four cinchona cuttings in the Wardian cases, and three whitewood shoots. I planted the latter in the coldest set of shadows I could find, north-facing, and sat staring at them nearly as much as we all stared at the cinchona.
I’d never seen plants dealt with more seriously. The gardeners and I made paper cases to carry the sprouting cinchona cuttings out with their tiny new root systems and the soil around them intact, and planted them with tape measures against their stems to make sure we didn’t bury them too far up. The ground Sing had acquired for us was perfect and they grew quickly. I stayed for almost a year to see them through. In that time, the whitewoods shot up like silver birches. No one else touched them; I didn’t tell anyone what they were, but they were the first thing I went out to every morning.
It was late in the boiling summer when I found Sing sitting at the base of one with a book and the unflustered air of someone who had been born to Asian weather. After the mountains round Bedlam, it was scorching. People hurried inside to get away from the sun like Englishmen avoided thunderstorms. It was easy to spot white people, even from behind; we moved too quickly for the heat and ended up in exhausted heaps before mid-morning.
Sing had managed to acquire a little table and a tea set, with lemons. I died a bit at the thought of drinking anything hot and had to shake my head when he lifted the teapot towards me. Down in the valley below us, the wind ruffled the new cinchona canopy. The cicadas started up a mechanical shriek.
‘So what are these?’ he asked. I’d kept them out of my report. I’d left out everything after I’d followed Raphael to the city. I knew Sing must have seen gaps. My timings added up wrongly; it had only taken me a week to get back across to Peru with the cuttings, and there was no way I should have been able to do that without help from a cavalry regiment. Even then, someone should have stopped me and asked about Martel and his men, though of course I’d completely bypassed Azangaro, three thousand feet up. But Sing hadn’t asked me. I was glad, because I didn’t want to tell anyone. Whenever I thought about it, the idea felt like cutting off an arm.
I sat down beside him. It was awkward, even with the whitewood band, because the muscle was still damaged even if my weight didn’t pull at it any more.
‘I’ll tell you when I know if they’re doing what they should or not.’
He looked to the side. ‘You’ve already taken cuttings from them.’
I had. There were six, much tinier saplings scattered about around them now. It looked all right so far – they had taken root – but the sawdust didn’t float yet. ‘If I’m right about them, they’re going to be valuable. More than quinine. I was wondering if I could shanghai a plantation in the Himalayas.’
‘For a mysterious project of unknown yield,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Since you’re the India Office’s new golden boy. Speaking of which. I’m happy to hand off the cinchona to more junior gardeners soon if you are.’
I nodded.
‘Good. Where would you like to go next?’ he said, as if it was nothing. ‘There are rubber expeditions going out in Africa now. Some Arctic exploratory stuff, if you wanted a change of scene. And the Foreign Office are mooing for anyone who speaks Chinese to get on the diplomatic service in Japan. It opened to trade while you were away,’ he explained when I started to ask since when had there been a diplomatic service in Japan.
‘Did it?’ I said, surprised.
‘Well, the Americans shelled them until they said yes.’
‘Oh, right. Yes, Japan please.’
‘Really? It won’t be gardening.’
‘Just – for a while. Can I?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He watched me for a second. ‘But then we really will want you in the Congo.’
‘Yes.’
We sat in silence. Down the hill from us, Minna was walking with the baby and the new ayah, a cheery girl who danced whenever she swept the veranda. Minna had had the baby a month early, which had nearly given me a heart attack but hadn’t seemed to worry her. It was, she pointed out, far too hot to be penned up somewhere airless, even when that somewhere was your own mother.
‘Is she going with you?’ he asked.
‘No. Why would she be?’
‘Isn’t that what people do, marry their dead husband’s friends?’
‘Awkward when I killed her husband.’
‘No, you didn’t. You allowed him to be stupid for the general good of mankind. And of that village, I might add, to which we now have no need to send the army. You’re not going to have some sort of angst-driven breakdown now, are you?’ he added warily. ‘I’d encourage you not to.’
I laughed. ‘No. But I can keep a secret from someone I see only occasionally. Harder to keep it from my wife.’
‘No. True.’
He was looking at the rosary around my wrist, but he had never asked about that either. He had a pretty firm stance on religion, which was that the less people bothered about it, the fewer huffy trade impediments there were going to be. I pressed my other hand round it and squeezed until the beads printed my arm, and half the cross. I’d thought that I would stop thinking about it all after a few weeks, but I hadn’t. I’d found that if I sat still for too long without doing something useful, the way ahead – twenty years – looked as far as the stars. To Raphael’s way of thinking, you only had to sit still and the future would catch up with you from behind, but I was starting to feel like I was facing the wrong way. It got further away the longer I looked.
‘Right, morning rounds,’ I said, unable to sit quiet any more. We had slipped into talking about the cinchona plantation as if it were a hospital ward. ‘Coming?’
‘I think I’ll stay here,’ he said, for the first morning since we had arrived.