I made Clem practise taking cuttings every day until we ran out of apple trees. He still couldn’t do it very well, but he was seasick and I hoped it was the nausea making him unsteady, not his natural clumsiness. He kept to their cabin except at mealtimes and Minna moved into the mess room, where she took over the long table with charts and squashed the crew, who didn’t know what to do with her, down one end.
‘Evening,’ she said when I stopped to sit down and have a rest between the hold and the kitchen on Christmas Eve. The crew had made an effort, which had surprised me, because left to myself I would have forgotten about it; but there were as many candles as the mate would allow, and wreaths on all the narrow doors, full of oranges pincushioned with cloves that made all the passageways smell of the holidays. The cook, who was German and had grown his moustache like Prince Albert’s, had made nearly nothing but mince pies and mulled wine for three days and it was wonderful. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten so badly or so happily. ‘Eat my pie for me,’ Minna added. ‘I haven’t wanted it. I’m off everything except tooth powder.’
‘You’ll have to call it Minty. What are you doing?’ We had met some rough water, and above the table copper pots and pans swung on their hooks. Their shadows oscillated over the chart she had been looking at. A few of the candles tipped wax on it but we pretended not to notice. The mate was threatening to put them all out if they proved too hazardous. The pipes under the grille floor rattled as someone turned the heating up. Nearly at once, hot air drifted up round our ankles, pumped round from the engine furnace. Minna dropped her set of compasses when the table tipped and lifted her hands to surrender.
‘I’m planning your route. I was trying to work out what would be quickest. And cheapest. The India Office accounting forms are formidable.’
I twisted my head so I could see it upside down. My spine twanged. I tried to ignore it. ‘How long will it take, do you think? Cuttings are all right for a month but anything after . . .’
‘All being well, from the coast to the Andes, it’s about ten days. Through the Andes – it isn’t too far as the crow flies but of course it will be longer. I can’t find any record of how high the pass through the mountains is, so I don’t know the real distance. But I’d say give that a few days as well. Then there’s a river called the Tambopata – you’re close when all the place names go into Quechua – and after that . . . no one knows. New Bethlehem isn’t on any maps. It’s too far into the interior. That’s when you’ll need a guide. So say three weeks there, three weeks back? But that’s an absolute guess.’
‘You keep saying you.’
‘I can’t come like this,’ she said quietly. Her eyes went briefly past me to be sure Clem wasn’t here yet. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to carry it to term anyway but . . . I don’t want to take the chance of falling off a mule or drinking something horrible. I don’t even know what the altitude does. Do you?’
‘Do you think I’ve got a clutch of other female acquaintances in a cupboard somewhere? I haven’t. I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Really? Handsome bachelors tend to know . . . sometimes . . .’
‘No bastard children kicking round China, sorry. I’m not that exciting. What will you tell Clem?’
She looked pained. ‘I’ll make noises about there being no plumbing in Amazonian mission colonies, I suppose.’
‘Say he shouldn’t be worrying about both of us. Worrying about me is enough and I have to be there.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘You haven’t an extensive history of minding about plumbing.’
‘He’s coming,’ she murmured.
Clem dropped down on the bench next to me. ‘This is not all right. I was never seasick in the Navy, was I?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘But those were bigger ships and you were always outside.’
‘Been outside,’ he said. ‘Got wet. Not worth it.’
Minna shifted with a tiny creak of the whalebone in her corset. It was almost exactly like the creak that rigging makes in a breeze and, although it actually represented something wholly unfamiliar, it was homely. ‘Um . . . I’ve worked out your route, more or less.’
He noticed at once. ‘Our route? You’re coming with us.’
‘I’m not. I’d be a distraction if push came to shove.’
‘Oh, what on earth do you mean?’
‘I mean,’ she said, ‘that if you’re arrested, you could fight your way out and take the cuttings. If I’m held hostage, you’ll give up the cuttings in a heartbeat. Honestly, why do you think the East India Company loved unmarried childless men so much?’ She inclined her head at me. ‘What I will do is stay at Arequipa and arrange as fast a passage to Ceylon as our money can buy. I think we might need it.’
‘I swore I’d never leave you behind just because it wasn’t safe. We’d never have done anything together otherwise. You always said—’
‘It’s not about safety, it’s about the integrity of the expedition. If I go, you’re more likely to fail. You’re hostage to the first person who works out that you’ll drop it all if he grabs me, and I’m not big enough to reliably fight anyone off. If I don’t go, you might just bluff it out with your cuttings intact.’ She paused. ‘And if it does all go wrong, you’re going to need someone to come and fetch you out of prison.’
‘Bugger prison. We’ve been everywhere, and you’ve never been kidnapped or thrown off a building or trampled by a llama, or anything—’
‘Markham,’ she laughed. ‘You can’t worry about Merrick and about me at the same time. While you ought not to be worrying about either of us, I know that you will, and this expedition hangs on your mind being on the job, and on someone knowing what it is you need to bring back.’ She tipped her eyelashes at me. ‘The expendable element in this equation is me.’
‘I don’t worry about Merrick! He’s – perfectly capable.’
Although we had agreed for her to say it, it still stung to see what Clem thought. There was only a tiny pause before he rallied properly, but it was still a pause.
‘Honestly, I don’t worry about him. Minna, of course you must come.’
‘I’m frightened,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s . . . people have died there, often, and I don’t think it’s any place for a woman.’
‘Nonsense—’
‘No, I mean any human who’s five foot one and doesn’t know how to shoot. I will slow you down, one way or the other. Listen, I did a bit of laundry earlier and I want to get it dried on the pipes while the wretched heating is still on, so I’d better . . . get to it,’ she said, having to hop gently to get out from the bench, which was bolted into place. ‘Can you bring the charts along with you, Markham?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Clem said. He stared after her. I could see the pressure fractures forming in his gold bubble. From the next room, the cook began to sing ‘Stille Nacht’ in an unexpectedly fine tenor. Some of the other men at the far end of the table hummed along.
The ship swayed again and the copper pans pendulumed above us. I leaned into it. Clem looked queasy. I got on with finishing off a drawing I’d started at Kew. Tucked in the back of my journal, the letter my mother had given me tipped a little. I pushed it back in with the end of my pencil.
I’d gone up to Brislington before leaving for London. It was a picturesque place near Bristol, more hotel than asylum. Nobody there was gibbering. It was for subtle shades of madness: ladies who insisted they could control the weather or told marvellous lies for no reason. I’d never been to the men’s side, but there was only a hedge between the two sections and when I arrived that morning, a badminton match was going on over the top of it, so it seemed unlikely that the policy was radically different there. Our mother was always in the same place, with a stack of books and some feed for the pheasants, which barely shuffled out of the way when I went over to her.
‘I hear your brother’s having to sell up,’ she said. I shouldn’t have been surprised that he had confessed to her and kept it from me. They were close. She didn’t like me any more than he did. I couldn’t remember having done anything particular, but having never known her especially it had never mattered much. Dad had died and she had been sent here within the same six months. I’d gone to school in Bristol after that, where the housemasters, ex-quartermasters all, were solid and kind. I called her Caroline.
‘He’s being cagey about it but I think so.’
‘He writes that you’re going to Caravaya.’
‘If there’s anyone you want me to look up, write a letter and I’ll deliver it.’
She looked at me oddly. ‘You can’t afford to go to Peru. What on earth are you doing?’
‘It’s for the India Office. Quinine.’ One of the pheasants pecked hopefully at my shoelaces.
‘Is that really why, or is it some rubbish your father told you?’
‘It – no. I don’t remember anything he told me. I was eight.’
‘Well, that’s wholly for the best. No, I don’t want anything to do with the wretched place.’
‘All right.’ I sprinkled some grain down for the pheasants, who cooed. She had the grain in a wine glass between us.
‘Merrick,’ she said.
I looked across.
‘You don’t mean to go . . . looking for anyone, do you?’
‘What? Looking for someone, no.’
‘Not out in the forest?’ she said, unconvinced. She was watching me carefully.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Nothing, I’m sure I’m only raving,’ she said.
‘Being mad isn’t an excuse for being vague. Can we at least have specific madness?’
She ignored me. If you didn’t catch it and understand it first time, she wouldn’t go back. I knew why. Nobody had listened to her when she was sent here and so she tended now to wave something interesting under her interlocutor’s nose, then snatch it away since they weren’t listening anyway. Then, like she didn’t want to but found she couldn’t countenance not doing, she said, ‘Your grandfather wrote a letter for the priest, so I suppose you had better take that. Your father never delivered it.’
Some gears in my mind clunked and made a grinding noise. ‘But Harry was there eighty years ago,’ I said, trying not to sound too gentle. There’s something horrible about the way visitors speak to mad relatives. Madness of the Brislington kind was not a loss of reason but reason disorientated and funnelled in the wrong direction. ‘It won’t be the same priest.’
‘Take it anyway. It will be in the top drawer of your father’s desk, if Charles hasn’t chopped it up for firewood.’
‘He hasn’t. And I will take it, but—’
‘Well, you never know, it might help.’
‘How?’
‘Feed the pheasants, Merrick.’
I hadn’t opened the old study door for years. Nobody had. It stuck at first. When it juddered open I expected the air to be stale, but it was fresh and cold because there was a hole in the ceiling and a spear of sunlight where some more roof tiles had fallen through. The desk wasn’t locked. It had three top drawers along its width and the first I opened was full of farthing coins and odds and ends Dad must have turned out of his pocket: bits of interestingly knotted string, a few white pebbles. The next was empty except for the letter. Caroline had told me exactly what to look for, although it wasn’t addressed. The envelope was old and much folded, the edges worn. One had torn a little and the creamy paper inside showed through. The only thing to say whose it had been was the seal on the back, from our grandfather’s signet ring. When I picked it up, it exposed the corner of a little book that had been tucked underneath. I lifted the book out slowly. I’d seen it before.
It was a storybook my father had made for me when I was four or five years old. There was no writing inside – he’d told me the story, not read it – only ink pictures, dotted with gold. He drew beautifully and he had used to read it by candlelight, which had brought out all the gold flecks in among the black ink drawings, made when he’d still more or less had the money for gold ink. He had bound it and covered it too, in velvet rather than leather, to make it soft to hold. I opened it, carefully, afraid it would crack.
The story was about a woodcutter who lived on the edge of a great forest, the sort that we didn’t have in England any more. The trees were drawn bleak and Schwarzwald-ish, in grey light. The woodcutter worked on the border and never strayed in, because it was dangerous, but one morning an elf came out and decided he quite liked the woodcutter’s company and stayed for a while. But eventually he heard bells ringing for him inside the forest, and went back. He didn’t forget about the woodcutter, but time being different for elves, he lost track, and when he came back, it was the woodcutter’s grandsons he found working on the edge of the forest, the woodcutter having died years ago.
I could remember Dad turning pages for me. He’d always worn the same coat, which was too big for him because he had inherited it from his father, so he had rolled the sleeves back. The lining was an elderly but beautiful Indian chintz, brilliant complicated birds on a blue background that had faded from wear and sun to nearly white. I could remember those cuffs but not his face.
As I let the book fall closed, a page slipped forward, not attached to the others. It was another panel in the story. I didn’t remember it. I couldn’t make it out at first and I had to raise it towards the light.
It showed a man trapped in a growing tree. The bark and the roots had twisted around him, holding him upright, though he was asleep or dead. They had angled him upward a little, as if they were offering him to the sky. There were vines around the roots and they were flowering. Haloes of uninked spaces around them made them look like they were glowing. The petals were moulting, and in the air where they fell, they had left tiny wakes of light like firework embers, done in hairlines of white ink. There was no sun. The man was facing mostly away, his head resting against a loop of the vine that twined around his arm. It had pulled the collar of his shirt down over his shoulder. Along his collarbone were freckles, marked on in the very faintest sepia, like someone had flicked ink at him and he had scrubbed it off days ago but not all its ghosts.
I couldn’t remember anything about a scene like that. In the story the elf had gone off to be with his friends and the woodcutter had, I supposed, lived happily ever after, since he’d had children and grandchildren. The way it was drawn was different from the other pictures in the storybook; more detailed, less like makebelieve. I touched the ink, suddenly sure he had drawn it – or the man at least – from life. It was too good to be imaginary. Where he had pressed hard the thick paper was still furrowed. I turned it over but there was no note to say when or where he had done it.
I slid the extra drawing back into the book, then put the book into his desk again and closed the drawer. Not sure how else to keep it flat and from any more damage, I tucked the letter into the paper pocket inside the cover of my sketchbook. Easing over the crooked floor and out to Gulliver, who was sprawled at the top of the stairs, I wondered if there was a grimmer version of the story he hadn’t told me: a dead man trapped in a tree somewhere and cradled in those glowing vines, somewhere so cold he was frozen perfect. The portrait had seemed like a memorial.