The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘You wouldn’t have to if you’d find yourself some proper work.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand up six months ago. I can barely get out here. Four hundred yards from the front door. I’m not going to get any better.’

  ‘If you’d just pull yourself together—’

  ‘I can’t,’ I said, gently, because he wasn’t being vicious. Until two years ago, he had always been ill and I’d always been strong. That he had no one at all to lean on now had gone even harder with him than nearly losing the leg had with me. I was used to getting on with things by myself. He never had been. Somewhere deep and murky, I disliked him for having let himself get that way and for expecting help all the time when there was none, but I shouldn’t have. Knowing that he had was what stopped me from making the same slide. ‘If you run into a naval bombardment, that’s the last running you’re going to do. And you have to run, to do what I did. People don’t always like East India Company expeditionaries stealing all the good tea and smuggling opium.’

  ‘Parsonage or asylum, Merrick, choose, because I shan’t have you here any longer,’ he said, more angrily, because he knew he had been wrong.

  ‘Can I not have a few weeks’ grace in which not to go mad? You’re going to need to hire someone or reshuffle Sarah’s terms if I go, and you can’t do that overnight.’

  ‘What do you mean, hire someone? Who’s Sarah?’

  ‘The . . . kitchen girl,’ I said. ‘She leaves at five. Who do you think cooks dinner? It’s only me here at that time.’

  He looked honestly taken aback. ‘Three weeks,’ he said. ‘And then I’m calling in a doctor.’

  ‘I’m not mad now and I won’t be mad then,’ I said. ‘Someone moved the statue.’

  ‘Anyway, I’ll be getting on,’ he sighed. He didn’t believe me.

  I gave him his canes. ‘I’m going to town later. Is there anything you want?’ I said, to try and make peace before he went.

  If he had been a hedgehog his spikes would have risen. ‘You’re doing much better if you can walk to Mevagissey.’

  ‘No, I borrow one of the farm horses. Mr Tobin lets me take one when I need it as long as I saddle it myself.’

  His focus passed straight through me. ‘He’s a tenant, Merrick. You can’t borrow a horse from a sheep farmer, it—’

  ‘Well, no dinner then,’ I said, starting to laugh. ‘You’re a snob but there’s no need to be a hungry snob.’

  He stared at me and I stared back, and I think we both saw then what should have been obvious for years: that we belonged to different classes. He was a gentleman, and I never had been. His eyes filled with tears and then I looked away at the hopping crows so I could pretend not to have noticed.

  ‘You’ve no pride, have you,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing left for you to be proud of.’

  ‘Well, hold on. We’re neither of us down a tin mine. Own orchard. Large house. Or half of one. That’s . . . pretty good.’

  ‘I’m selling the orchard.’

  Our grandfather had mortgaged a lot of the land for reasons we had never discovered. It hadn’t been a catastrophic move in itself. It would have been nothing but a quirk in the family’s financial history if our father had been canny with money, but he’d had no idea. He had come into the estate too young and made naive investments in the dying tin mines, and instead of paying off the original mortgage he’d had to increase it, to cover the house too. I hadn’t known about any of the money problems for years – growing up, if a place is shabby it just is and I’d never thought twice – but after having left for a while and come back, it had been obvious and then I’d extracted it from Charles one Christmas. The only things we owned here were the plants. But I hadn’t known he was struggling this much.

  ‘This isn’t really to do with me or the statue, is it? You have to sell the house.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he snapped, but I didn’t push. Although he was tempestuous it was only ever brief, and after his small storms he would freeze over; but the ice was never strong. I came away from the urge to break it and show him I could have and that I was usually quiet from tolerance, not meekness. His eyes were still glittering and he wouldn’t talk to me again this year if he thought I’d noticed. He pushed his hand over his mouth. ‘Although – I am trying to find new positions for some of the gardeners. There’s a new fellow at Trebah. Do you know anywhere else that . . .’

  ‘There’s another house next to that, big valley garden. Glendurgan.’

  ‘They’ve a full staff. So does Trelissick.’

  ‘I’ll write to Kew, they know us. And some of the colleges at Oxford would take people, I imagine.’

  He nodded and made an abrupt study of the floor, and I regretted having mentioned Oxford. He had gone to Christ Church College to read classics for three years in a beautiful set of rooms that overlooked the grounds and the almost-tame deer herds there. I’d gone to a naval academy in Bristol.

  ‘This parsonage,’ I said. ‘Spare room?’

  ‘I don’t know, I hardly made specific enquiries.’

  ‘Yours when you want if there is. No interior slugs, no sprouting doors, it’ll be lovely. I might buy some chickens. Parsons do things like chicken competitions, don’t they? You can’t be a parson without prize bantams.’

  ‘You sound like an Irishman,’ he said, but he didn’t say no. ‘I’ll see you at seven.’ He hesitated in the doorway. ‘No one’s moved that statue, Merrick.’

  I sat down, not wanting to loom, but I watched him go. He had an uneven walk because the polio had damaged his left leg more than his right, and there was something unsteady about it; there were always fractional moments where his weight swung just too far to the left and he looked like he should be falling.

  After a while, I went out to the statue.

  It had used to hold a candle when I was small and, having lit it, you had to make a wish. I took a candle from inside one of the greenhouse lamps and balanced it in the statue’s open palm. I hoped more than wished not to go mad, and not to be seeing things, and that it had been the gardeners after all, or even Charles doing his best to convince me to get me out of the house and save his pride before he had to fold and say we couldn’t afford to stay.

  The statue closed its hand around the candle. It didn’t otherwise move and I stood still for a long time, trying to tell if the motion was something I’d imagined after the fact, or if I had seen it. I shut my eyes and opened them again. But the statue was the same. I tried to move its fingers, but there was no give to them whatever and no sign that they had ever been intended to move. I leaned back in to take the India Office letter from its pot. I brought it with me when I went to town. The ride did me good. Being exhausted wasn’t the same as being mad, and I was exhausted, had been for months. The loss of work, of the use of one leg, and the old independence from home and all its mould-ering difficulties – none of that had done my mind any good. I was at two-thirds capacity, at best. It was amazing I hadn’t started seeing things before.

  I got a tight feeling in my chest whenever I went to the greenhouse after that, but the statue stayed where I’d left it.

  FOUR

  It was a few weeks later that I found the door to the greenhouse already propped open one morning and the vapour from the sprinklers curling out into the cold. The lamps were on too, though hazy, because the glass walls had been made nearly opaque by condensation. The sun didn’t reach over the trees until midday and it was still murky otherwise. I stopped shy of it.

  Crockery chinked inside. Gulliver lifted her head and trotted through, nudging the door further open. It bumped into the frame again behind her. I heard a voice say something to her, a man’s voice, but too quietly for me to make out the words or whether I knew the owner.

  It was much warmer inside than out. The air was heavy with the smell of damp ferns. I’d put in a clockwork misting system last year, but I’d almost forgotten about it; it took time to set it going and at some point I’d given up. It kept a fine spray
in the air near the door for about ten minutes every hour. Someone had turned it on. The stove, further inside, was lit and strong; the light was coming towards me, through the ferns, which cast piano-key shadows in the vapour as it spun.

  ‘Come and sit down, the coffee’s ready.’

  I pushed aside one of the ferns with the knuckle of my middle finger. The smell of coffee met me over the woodsmoke. At the wobbly workbench, Clem grinned and burst to his feet to hug me. It was like being folded into a rainbow. He had bright red hair, so he had never suited dark colours, and instead all his waistcoats were purple or green, with peacock lining or tartan, and his ties were always done in fantastic paisley embroidery, and his handkerchief never matched. He smelled of smoke and green. Where I’d lost it, he had put on weight; solid, broad, middle-aged weight. He was nearly twice my size. I had a sudden, weird realigning of perspective. Near Charles, who was so frail, I was big and clunky, but I felt fragile now, for all Clem was shorter. It must have shown too, because his gold eyebrows went right up. At any distance they were invisible and he always looked good-naturedly surprised.

  ‘Merrick, old man, you look absolutely awful. Charles hasn’t been withholding food, has he?’

  ‘No – no,’ I said, then laughed when I realised his wife was here too. She was almost his opposite and together they were like a pair of pheasants, the cock all bright and showy and the hen modest and brown. There were blonde streaks in her hair and she was tanned. ‘Minna, it’s lovely to . . . I’m sorry there aren’t better chairs . . .’

  ‘I’m happy to perch,’ she said cheerfully. ‘In fact I could sit on Gulliver, couldn’t I? She’s quite spacious.’

  Gulliver snuffled at her, tail wagging interestedly. Her fur had puffed up almost at once in the humidity and she was nearly spherical now.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. I nearly said that I’d thought the statue had invited itself in and made some coffee.

  ‘Fishing you out, old man. Consider yourself fished. And, er, playing with your clockwork. Sorry,’ he added as a new puff of mist came from the nozzle next to me.

  Clem and I had met in the Navy and bonded over a mutual interest in Peru, but we had lost touch after I went to the East India Company and he went off to be an expeditionary for the Royal Geographical Society. I hadn’t thought of him or expected to see him again. He was Sir Clements Markham, in fact, and I had never been wholly convinced that we might really be friends. But when I came back from China in such a mess, he had arrived a few days later. I don’t know how he heard I’d been injured, or how he even knew I was in England, but he’d burst into the house and announced he would be looking after me until I was upright again. And he had, cut short only when he was called off on an archeological expedition to some Incan ruins a month later.

  He pulled the last stool out from under the bench, moved the old flowerpots, and put me on it. Sitting took me into the heat of the open stove. It was lovely. Minna smiled to say hello. Her eyes were dark and so she tended to sparkle even when she wasn’t meaning to. Clem kissed the top of my head. ‘You’ll like this, it’s proper coffee.’

  ‘Do you take sugar, Em?’ said Minna.

  I tried to remember. I hadn’t had coffee for years. It was expensive. ‘No, I don’t think so. When did you get in?’

  ‘Oh, only about twenty minutes ago,’ Clem said. ‘Couldn’t face going up to the house and talking to Charles, though. One of the gardeners said you’d be down here. Got lost twice,’ he added. He was a geographer and losing his way was a novelty. ‘And the house looked pretty chilly, what with the . . . enormous holes in the roof and the wall?’

  ‘Yes. We had some accidents. The wood from the big tree near the house explodes.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ he laughed. He knew Heligan well enough to expect pointless bizarre things in the neglected corners.

  Minna was arranging the coffee-making things across the bench, which she’d neatened up. I’d left a sprawl of seed trays and packets out and now they were all in a strict row along the side. A small hessian bag sat open, still mostly full of coffee beans that gleamed. A mortar and pestle I normally used for seeds still had some ground coffee in it – it looked much cleaner than it did usually – and by her elbow a percolator that wasn’t mine stood fastened, steaming. It was bright bronze and it showed us all in colours warmer than we really were. They had brought their own cups too. She set one under the percolator and pushed a lever gently. The black coffee was silky and slow. She poured in the milk while she waited for it, so that it plumed brown, then gave the cup to me, still with rainbow coffee bubbles around the outside where the furling milk hadn’t quite yet reached.

  It was wonderful when I tried it. When I lifted my head, they were both watching me in the same concerned way.

  ‘I don’t look that bad,’ I said, but not with much confidence. Next to the two of them, I could have been a tramp. My clothes were clean, more or less, but they had been washed in a sink, not boiled, and nothing had been ironed for a long time. Because I always had my sleeves rolled back, the cotton was a fresher, clearer white about halfway down my arms when they were rolled down.

  ‘Well,’ said Minna.

  ‘Listen, we’re not actually here for a jaunt,’ Clem said. ‘There’s another wave of malaria in India. Price of quinine through the roof. The India Office are tired of buying it in from Peru and they want their own supply once and for all. They want us to try for the cinchona woods.’

  ‘So you came via Cornwall?’

  ‘When I say us I mean you too. They said you refused by letter a few weeks ago and I said they must have misunderstood.’

  ‘No. I can’t go on an expedition, Clem, I can’t walk.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Boat, horse, tent, easy. I’ll show you the route.’

  ‘I can barely make it down here from the house—’

  ‘Of course you can’t, you’re living in the middle of nowhere with Vile Charles. Now do shut up and listen to me.’

  I sat quietly. Minna kicked my ankle and nodded a little. I couldn’t meet her eyes for long. I loved both of them, but they did tend towards over-optimism, having always had a lot of money and a lot of friends.

  Clem lifted his bag into his lap to take out a folded map. When he unfolded it, it was a beautiful chart of southern Peru, covering much more territory than mine did. Lima was too far north for it, but near the coast was Arequipa, marked quite big, and then the great ragged shape of Lake Titicaca. He had already inked on the route around. It looped past the lake, north, to a pair of towns close together called Juliaca and Puno, then north again to Azangaro, where there was a drawing of what might have been a cathedral. After that, the Andes. Beyond them, there was nothing. None of the forest there was charted. The cartographer had put on intricate little etchings of tropical trees and the suggestion of mountains for the sake of not having white space, but that was all. Clem pinned the edges down with our cups when they tried to curl upward.

  ‘Right. Now, I don’t know what the situation was when you last looked into it, but according to the latest reports, the whole Sandia Valley – that’s this bit here on the interior side of the Andes – and everything nearer the mountains has been completely stripped of cinchona. There’s nothing left within easy reach, which sounds unpromising but in fact it’s good. It means there’s no quinine industry in the region. The supply regions are in the north, and the suppliers up there harvest lower-yield trees. But there are high-yield woods in the rainforest beyond Sandia, much harder to access. Technically, though, trying to get at them would be a violation of the monopoly, so we’ll have to be—’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ I said. ‘There’s an official monopoly now?’

  ‘Ooh, yes,’ he said. ‘The government run the supply as far as I can tell. Or rather, a group of violent criminals runs the supply, and the government enforces their monopoly for a cut of the very considerable profits. The point is to keep foreigners from taking anything.’

  ‘What hap
pens if they catch us?’

  ‘Prison or shot.’

  ‘Right. And – how do you know there are more trees further in?’

  ‘Because the Dutch got out with a few. You remember, don’t you?’ he added, sounding a little shocked that I’d forgotten about it. ‘The expedition who were killed by mad Indians last year. One of them survived, got out with some trees, remember?’

  ‘But only a couple of the specimens survived the passage to the Java plantation,’ I said slowly. The information came back as if I’d dreamed it rather than read it in the papers and argued to and fro by letter with India House about it. Finding the recollection again felt like having turned aside a stone to get at the thready roots of a few weeds only to find the ruins of a whole town. Something spidery walked down my back when I saw the extent of what I hadn’t known I’d forgotten. I glanced around the greenhouse as if there might have been more crumbled half-memories clustered around it. ‘And then the trees died once they were planted. The last British expedition were all killed too.’

  ‘That’s it. Are you all right?’ Clem said.

  ‘I’m . . . sorry. I do know. Too much time by myself not talking.’

  ‘Happens to me whenever I visit my mother, I can quite imagine it’s dreadful after months rather than days,’ Minna said. She poured me some more coffee. ‘I come back a veritable mute.’

  I didn’t say I thought it was something more serious than that. It was a miniature realisation, that I’d forgotten about the Dutch expedition, but it had lit a little miner’s lamp somewhere in those lost places in the pit of my mind. The light echoed weirdly and I had a horrible feeling there were caverns there when I’d thought there were only a few caved-in corridors. Seams and forgotten seams.

  Clem rubbed my shoulder. Some of it must have showed on my face.

  ‘So – to be clear,’ I said at last, because they had both been waiting for me to speak in a loaded silence that sounded a lot like they wanted to make sure I definitely could speak still. ‘We are . . . being sent to steal a plant whose exact location nobody knows, in territory now defended by quinine barons under the protection of the government, and inhabited by tribal Indians who also hate foreigners and have killed everyone who’s got close in the last ten years. Who was the British man?’