Cornwall, 1881
When I came in from the garden, Minna and Cecily were putting holly up around the house, which was now full of people because they had invited everyone they knew. There were trees and candles everywhere too. More than anything it looked like the garden had moved into the house for the holiday. There was a brandy, Christmas-cake smell drifting up from the kitchens and someone was playing the piano in the parlour, a beautiful version of a carol whose words I’d forgotten. I couldn’t believe how warm it was with the roof and the windows all in good repair and the fires going. It felt like another house altogether. I hadn’t been there often enough in the intervening years to have remembered it any other way than how it was when I’d left it before Peru. When I was in England, which was rare, I stayed with Sing. I could have bought a house of my own, but I didn’t want to. Silence in empty rooms whistled.
Minna turned around where she sat on the stairs twining holly round the banister.
‘Oh, Em, there’s someone here for you,’ she said.
‘Who?’ I said, confused, because I’d been sure that everyone I knew well was already here. Minna and Cecily had invited themselves and promptly redecorated because they said it was bleak, and I’d invited Sing, because it was a sort of unspoken pact to have Christmas and New Year together if both of us were in the same place, which was not every year. We were the only people either of us knew who didn’t disappear off into extended families for the holiday. Even Sing’s servant went back to the Netherlands towards the middle of December. Usually we would have been at Sing’s house in London, but Charles had died in November and I’d been back at Heligan since then, going through everything. I had a feeling Minna was there more to keep an eye on me than to put up new wallpaper.
‘He says it’s a surprise,’ she laughed.
‘Where?’
‘In the parlour. He’s the one with the piano.’
‘I don’t know anyone who plays the piano. Do I?’
‘You do, dear,’ Cecily said. She sounded exactly like Clem. The red hair was glorious on a girl and in all the Christmas candles she might have been something shined up from Byzantium. ‘But he’s been keeping it secret.’
I went through slowly, looking at the candles and the decorations. The man at the piano was dark and slight, with a grey tweed waistcoat and shoes with a Japanese manufacturer’s mark on the heels. He smiled at me. He was sitting to one side of the piano stool so there would be room.
‘Keita,’ I laughed. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Surprise.’ He finished the carol and let his hands drop into his lap, although he had hooked down the pedal and the sound resounded. ‘I heard about your brother; I’m sorry.’
‘You didn’t come all the way from Tokyo for that?’
‘Well, and it’s Christmas,’ he said awkwardly.
I smiled. I didn’t touch him, though I would have if I’d thought for a second he wouldn’t, Tokyo-ishly, take it as assault.
He was a changeable thing. He was a late bloomer just like I’d thought, and he was coming into himself more and more every time I saw him. He had been fragile as a young man, but he was in his thirties now and glowing. Nothing else about him had changed. He was still exactly the same pensive person he had been in China, and when I’d found him watching a cricket match at his school fifteen years ago.
There were women I didn’t know taking up all the chairs at the other end of the room, so I took a tray of tea things and made it on top of the piano. He closed the lid over the keys so we could use it as a counter. Once the tea was poured and cooling, I saw how he was looking at my wrist, which still had Raphael’s rosary wound around it. I rested the heel of my hand on the edge of the piano lid, the beads imprinting the underside of my arm. He didn’t tell me not to, although it was a nervous habit he must have noticed before.
‘Who are all these people?’ he said instead.
‘Apart from Minna and Cecily, no idea. Their friends.’
‘Why are they inviting people to your house?’
‘They invited themselves and then said it seemed empty. I think I might be Minna’s winter project. She’s worried that I’ll be upset about Charles. And apparently when you say in a moment of good-willed absentmindedness that you’ll be someone’s godfather, it turns out that you’re actually signing away all your worldly goods to her, including your house and any available Christmases. Actually I quite like all the noise,’ I admitted.
He smiled. ‘Me too. Listen, did I imagine that you’re going to Peru in June?’
I hadn’t told anyone, but that was no more a barrier for him now than it had been twenty-five years ago. ‘No, I am. Why?’
Somewhere upstairs, where they had renovated Dad’s study into a new, bigger parlour, Cecily had taken over the music. She played the violin and she had begun the same carol Keita had been playing, but she was pretending not to know all of it and, in the joking way musical people can, bridged the gaps with ‘Ode to Joy’. The fireplaces here and there lined up and I could hear people laughing through the chimney.
‘Could you send me some of the pollen from the forest? Only a vial.’ He paused. ‘I’m making some fireflies.’
I laughed. ‘To Tokyo?’
‘No, Knightsbridge, please.’ He gave me a piece of paper with an address on it. Filigree Street.
‘Holiday?’ I said.
‘No, to live. Not for very long, only a few years.’
‘Lovely,’ I said, and waited to see if he would say anything else, but he didn’t. For his country he was a tall man, and he held himself like one, but every so often there was a fragility around him when he was coming up to something that seemed especially insurmountable. I poured him some more tea and watched the moving steam catch his eye and tug him slowly into the present.
‘Is she playing “Ode to Joy”?’ he asked at last.
‘She is. She’s joking. She means you should go upstairs and say hello.’ They had met before. Minna had come on holiday to Japan once when Cecily was about four. Keita had taught her to read, in about two afternoons, with the efficiency of someone who didn’t like children and wanted a proper human being to talk to.
‘What?’
‘Keita? Joy?’ I said gently. He knew the translation of his own name but he still looked far away.
‘Oh, yes.’ He came back to himself properly. I saw him studying the possible recent future, the one with Cecily in it in full Christmas swing. He looked worried. ‘I’d rather not.’
I laughed. ‘Christmas spirit. It’s why you’re here, on you go. I’ll come up in a bit. I just want the last of the light.’ I motioned at Charles’s old study.
His black eyes caught on the door. I thought he smiled, as if there were an enormous surprise party waiting inside, but he turned away too quickly for me to be sure and when I leaned in round the edge of the door, nobody burst out from behind the ferns.
I’d been excavating for a month. Charles had kept everything, from old, irrelevant account books to octogenarian financial newspapers, but it all had to be gone through. An accountant from Truro had been helping me, because I’d never kept a proper ledger in my life and I had no idea how it worked, and I didn’t understand what bonds or trusts were, or how investment differed from gambling. What money I had, had come here, and what was left had gone to the bank in London, where the account was too little for them to bother asking me much. The India Office paid well, but well in modern terms; to fully restore a vast twelfth-century estate, created and then expanded in times when noblemen had been the equivalent to the millionaires of this century, was long work, and would have been even on the Prime Minister’s salary. I was happy doing it, though.
We had found a lot of things: failed investments from Dad’s time, where he had tried to get some of the mortgage money back by betting on the tin mines, which had promptly run dry, and a few from Charles too. He had never told me about those, too ashamed I suspected, though it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference to me. The mortgage on the house had been astronomical and I’d only paid off the last of it a few years ago. I was trying to keep chipping at the records for an hour or so a day, even during the holidays, so that the idea of it couldn’t grow too monstrous on the fertile soil of absence.
Carefully, because I still couldn’t quite bring myself to trust the strength of the whitewood round my thigh even after twenty years wearing it, I climbed up on a chair to take a random pile of dusty things from the top shelf. I dropped them on to the desk and crumpled down after them. It was much nicer than usual, though, with the music coming through the ceiling, and happy voices, and the candles sparkling all along the stairs. The puppy yipped at me under the table. I lifted her out.
‘I wondered where you’d gone.’ She was barely a dog yet; at first glance she was an enormous ball of fluff with ears. Like a baby would have, she emerged with her paws curled up. I laughed and hugged her. She was called Quixote, because I was working my way through books as well as dogs. She was Gulliver’s great-granddaughter. ‘Come and help me read all this rubbish. What have we got, do you think? Oh. Could it be as exciting as – old receipts for lamp oil? I think it might.’
She fell asleep hanging over my arm. I laid her across my lap so she wouldn’t hurt her back like that and held her to keep my hands warm while I read. I frowned when I realised that the pile was nothing to do with Charles. They were much older accounts in Harry’s writing: ordinary household stuff. I put the first ledger aside. The next thing down was a slim envelope. When I opened it, the documents inside were flowery and official, in Spanish. The seal of the Peruvian government was at the bottom. My Spanish was good enough to scan them and my lungs caught when I first guessed the meaning, but I wasn’t sure. After I’d spent another quarter of an hour with a dictionary, I knew I wasn’t wrong. Not quite able to breathe properly, I went upstairs and looked through rooms full of festively dressed people until I found Sing. He was talking to one of Minna’s friends.
‘Could I borrow him?’ I asked.
‘If I can borrow that dog.’
‘Yes. Trade.’ I gave her the dog. Sing followed me out.
‘Was I just bought for a St Bernard?’
‘Comparable weight of goods. I, um . . .’ We were in the corridor, still surrounded by music, but I couldn’t wait. ‘These are land deeds.’
Sing didn’t speak Spanish, but he understood what he was looking at straightaway. There must have been a standard format for the documents, or else, he recognised how the numbers were laid out. Acres, price, tax. From what I could tell, the land had been bought just after Peru had won independence from Spain. The new government must have been selling off land in the interior to help recharge the treasury.
‘So this is what your grandfather did with the money,’ he said, after looking through a few pages. ‘This must cover thousands of acres. All beyond the Andes.’
‘This one is for all the land around Bedlam.’ I fished out a deed from the middle of the sheaf to show him. Nueva Bet., it was abbreviated to, but it was there. ‘Raphael told me that Martel had a landlord who had stopped asking for money years ago. I mean – that must have been Dad, he must have known about this, but I never thought . . . this is what I think it is, isn’t it?’
‘If you think that your grandfather bought the land to keep it safe in the event that anyone discovered what was there, and died before he could form any kind of legal protection round it – yes, it looks that way to me.’
Sing knew what was there. Late one night, out on the new whitewood plantations in the Himalayas, we had been celebrating. The trees, already the size of oaks, had been growing for perhaps five years, and for the first time that evening, one of the gardeners had pruned some twigs and found that they floated. Sing had known there was something odd about them before that, because they were volatile things to grow and we’d had to have heavy fire regulations right round the mountain, but I’d told him then what they could do if we could only grow them strong enough. It had felt dangerous to say it aloud, even though I had the evidence floating in front of me that we had just rendered any whitewood expedition to the Andes unnecessary. He had laughed, properly, for the first time since I’d known him, and said only that I ought to get some sort of award for shrewdness. None of it had felt shrewd. It had felt like tightrope walking, for years. I’d been ill for a while after that, with relief. There would be a whitewood trade, but not out of Peru. It would be India Office plantations, ours, and nobody would ever have to know about Bedlam, or what was in the sky above it.
I couldn’t frame what it was I wanted to ask. For what had happened to Raphael never to happen again; for it to be impossible for the next Martel to hold anything over Aquila. For no one to march in and build a cathedral or a salt mine over the town. ‘Is there a way to . . .? Can we ringfence it somehow? In . . . a trust, or – I don’t know. Build a bloody great wall around it?’
‘I’ll talk to some lawyers,’ he said. ‘We’ll be able to make it so that no one touches that place even if they find El Dorado out there.’
‘I don’t have much money to throw at something like—’
He laughed, not at me but softly. ‘Merrick. You have what – a thirty per cent share in the Himalayan whitewood plantation? Hang on to it. The heartwood is almost mature. The Navy wants it. You’re going to be very wealthy indeed soon.’
They weren’t surprised to hear from me at Raphael’s monastery in the new year. There was a post office box in Lima that they had told me about and correspondence took a couple of months, but we arranged dates and, like people tend to do in situations of limited communication, they stuck exactly to their word. At the Bedlam border, a salt trader met me and took me along the glass road, considerately with a horse. Anka wasn’t at the graveyard and no one followed. Having been to Bedlam so often, I didn’t have altitude sickness any more in the mountains and there was no delay. A little ship met us beyond the aqueduct and took us into the city. I stood by the rail and watched the clouds go past, and the first buildings, and then the huge docks where ships the size of cathedrals floated at anchor. Those hadn’t been there before.
The monastery was a ghost in the clouds. Where the sun edged through, the walls shone. They were inlaid with gold. It wasn’t that gold was fabulously valuable. They were, said the steward who met me, on the top of a gold mine. It was because in its earliest days, the place had been a sun temple, and gold reflected the light yellow. I’d been too distracted to have paid attention last time, but the halls he took me through were beautiful, and impossibly high, the masonry hauled upward by rafters and vaults of whitewood. In the heights were pollen chandeliers. They spun slowly, making tiny golden galaxies.
I’d come back to Peru often to see Inti. My Quechua was good enough now, although it sounded very modern here, even though I’d made her use only the oldest words, nothing Spanish. There had been a pronunciation shift. Up here it sounded sharp, but when the steward met me on the monastery steps, we understood each other. He seemed pleased, if terse. I wanted to say I hadn’t come with an army, and there was no need to be nervous, but it wasn’t me bothering him, or I didn’t think so.
On the stairway up to the monastery proper, where everyone lived, there was a markayuq on a plinth, holding a human skeleton kept in shape by wires and slim metal rods. The bones were slight, a girl probably. The stone man’s grasp stopped short of the bones, outlining where her body had been.
‘That’s what you have to be careful of,’ the steward said, with a sternness I didn’t deserve. He had stopped to say it and until then I hadn’t noticed that two guardsmen had followed us, towering, grim men with condor designs stamped into their armour.
It was difficult to look at the markayuq and the bones. It was plainly meant to be awful, but its being macabre wasn’t what bothered me; I’d never had any trouble with bones in themselves and these ones were kept very well. It was the same way I couldn’t look at French postcards; a kind of pointless prudishness that came from never having married. Their heads so close that they must have been kissing when the markayuq froze. Whoever the girl had been, she was crippled. One femur was twisted. A Bedlam girl. I wondered if she had died by accident, trapped like that, or if she had done it on purpose.
‘Is he awake yet?’ I asked instead. ‘Your letter said sometime this week.’
‘He’s been stirring for the last few days. The doctor has estimated that it should be some time this afternoon or in the night. Their pulses come back up to normal speed a few days beforehand. It becomes more like sleep than stasis, you see.’ He paused, with a thorny quiet. He was worried about something, or something had gone wrong, but I didn’t push. Before and now, the monastery stewards put me powerfully in mind of the Swiss Guards. It must have been a calling, and no one wanted to say anything difficult about the markayuq. Some boys sitting on the stairs stared at us.
‘Sir, is there any . . .’ They looked from him to me. They were asking about Raphael.
‘Not yet,’ he said. Then to me, abruptly, to get it out at once, ‘Sometimes they never wake properly. Something goes wrong, and . . .’ He lifted his hand towards the markayuq on the stairs but glanced up, to the next floor, and to the room beyond which was that balcony with its view over the city. He was nervous. They all were. One in a generation now; it mattered that Raphael woke and kept his mind at the same time.
‘Is he showing any sign of that?’
‘As far as we can tell, no, but it’s never certain.’ He swallowed. ‘You are of course here at his invitation, but you must be aware of the protocols. Has someone explained?’
I shook my head.
I was allowed to touch a markayuq, but only with my undominant hand. Under no circumstances was I to let one touch me in a way that wasn’t flat-handed; if there was an unexpected lapse, I would be stuck there, and nobody was going to cut through a saint’s fingers just to save mine. Should it seem to be happening, I was to step back and say why. If I used Quechua, I was to use a register appropriate to their station. If I had trouble knotting messages, there were scribes who could help. And I would never be left in a room alone with any of them. The guards, he explained, were there for my safety. Markayuq were strong and didn’t always remember that they were. The guards would help me should an accident happen. If an accident did happen, I was not to retaliate, unless I wanted to be quartered on an altar by tomorrow morning. I wondered how often it happened, if he needed to mention it.
At last, they let me go up to the room. It was just the same. I didn’t go out on to the balcony. He was exactly where I’d left him, perfectly kept, his clothes like new. I felt as if the past twenty years had been nothing but a loop which had brought me back to the same place and the same hour. While the monastery had seemed dreamy when I’d tried to think of it before, it was everything else that seemed that way now. It was hard to believe that I’d lived more than half my adult life in the meantime.
The steward brought me some food and a brazier so that I could make my own coffee. The water boiled so low here that there was no other way to get at it fast enough while it was still hot. I watched the coal inside burn through a glass window in the front until I saw Raphael shift, as if he had just come out of a daydream, then made two cups, one black and one white, and took them out. I sat down on the bench with them rested against my knees. Behind me, near the door, the two guardsmen had stood up too. I hadn’t seen before, but coming close to the stone banister brought me into view of the floating gardens. They had been much expanded, and they were full of people, waiting. Little boats had been tied to the gantries and moorings and there were more people in those. They were too far away to hear, except for a tidal murmur I had thought before was the sound of the streets below.
Raphael looked at me sidelong, starting to smile, then stopped.
He watched me for almost half a minute. It was a brilliant afternoon and the light was hurting my eyes – it felt like the edge of snowblindness – so he must have been able to see how I’d changed. His eyes caught briefly on the rosary. The haze over them, complete now, didn’t look like a cataract. It was more like a second lens, a necessary one, not to frown into the streaming sun. Otherwise he was just the same; his colours all gone but just the same. I gave him his cup.
‘You like it black, don’t you,’ I said.
He laughed.