The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I told you about my grandfather. He stayed at New Bethlehem and he brought back all kinds of things – orchids, white pines – and among them was a kind of coffee that showed some resistance to frost. The samples were lost, and there’s been interest now from Kew and the India Office, so we were hoping for new ones. I’ve never heard of it anywhere else, so we came . . .’

  Martel swivelled in his chair to Raphael, a theatric precise ninety degrees. ‘Well? How are you for frosty coffee?’

  ‘Well off,’ he said.

  ‘It exists?’

  ‘I’ve got a garden full of it. You’ve had some. It tastes like chocolate.’ The other Indians we had met, including the boys, spoke Spanish mixed with Quechua, but his was glassy. He was quiet too. It was elegant.

  ‘Oh, that. God, I didn’t realise it was coffee; I thought you just didn’t know the Spanish for whatever it was.’

  Raphael gave his wine glass a blank look and didn’t say anything.

  ‘Don’t look like that. You didn’t know the Spanish word for the cathedral, remember, the other day?’

  ‘No,’ he said, without looking up from the glass, ‘you didn’t know. It’s the Qorikancha in Spanish too.’

  ‘It’s Cuzco Cathedral.’

  ‘And what do you call the much older place it’s built over?’ Over anything more than a sentence, he had a strange voice. It sounded like he was dragging it up through a shale quarry.

  ‘The foundations,’ Martel said firmly.

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  I looked between them, prickling and sure that Martel had run on with that to keep me waiting for his verdict about my coffee story. Raphael lifted his eyes just enough to catch mine while Martel was still laughing. There was something bleak in them. He hadn’t smiled once. My heart was going fast again. I couldn’t tell if he didn’t believe me or if he only would have preferred to be elsewhere.

  Martel smiled at me. ‘I frightened you, I’m sorry.’ He put his glass down and leaned forward against the table, his forearms flat to the cloth. When they closed over mine, his hands were warm. I made an effort not to shy. ‘I believe you, but I have to be careful, you understand? If you were here for quinine I’d have to turn you back or risk your life. And – as you can imagine, there would be trouble for me too, if the northern suppliers found out I’d let you through.’

  ‘Yes, I’m . . . starting to see that.’

  ‘Good.’ He must have felt how cold I was, because he chafed my knuckles. I wanted to take my hands back, but I’d already offended people by not letting them kiss me. ‘So, you see you must travel safely, with a proper guide. That’s why Raphael is here now. I brought him so that he could take you over the mountains. He’s from New Bethlehem, in fact.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘There are only a few towns up that way,’ Martel said. ‘New Bethlehem is by far the biggest. I’m sorry to spring it on you, but it would be dangerous for you to ask around cold.’

  I shook my head. ‘Pardon my asking, but why are you helping us? If you’ll be in trouble if I’m lying, you should be turning us away whether you believe me or not.’

  He lifted his eyebrows. ‘I don’t think you realise how often this happens. It’s at least once a year. I am very tired of sitting down to dinner one evening with a man, then hearing of his death a week later, whether he was here for quinine or pepper. Very tired. I’m damned if I’ll live in fear of them over nothing but coffee.’

  Raphael sat forward. It made the bones and muscles in his shoulders show. I leaned back without meaning to. It was like sitting across from a big animal. There was a right-angled nick in his eyebrow, not old. Someone had smacked him over the head with the butt of a gun. It was a scar I recognised, common in the Navy, common in all the expeditionary arms of the East India Company. I realised he had moved to get a little further away from Martel. He didn’t want to be sent out with us.

  ‘Would I be right in thinking Raphael is also there to keep an eye on us and make sure we don’t try and dive off into any cinchona woods?’ I said.

  ‘You would,’ Martel admitted. ‘But – you do understand? Unless you go with him, I can’t let you go at all. It wouldn’t be safe. For any of us.’

  ‘Of course I do. It’s kind of you to have thought of it all. I’m afraid we must look very haphazard to you.’

  He smiled, not all the way. ‘You can’t be expected to know what’s going on here if all you were given is vague orders about coffee. Brave of you to come at all, in your condition.’

  I touched my cane without meaning to. The fact was, and chivalrously he hadn’t pointed it out, that he would have no trouble stopping a cripple and a man crippled by altitude sickness if we tried to make a run for it alone. We were stuck with Raphael now. Even if we did run off successfully, he lived in the place we were going to. How to get round him would have to be a problem we saved for New Bethlehem. I didn’t mind. I was too tired to have all our problems stacked up here and now, and hopefully, New Bethlehem was a bit lower down and I might be able to think more like a human being there than a clever sheep.

  ‘And you’re happy to take us?’ I said.

  Raphael was staring into his wine, but his eyes came up when he realised I was talking to him. They were black, real black like I hadn’t seen even in Asia. He set his glass down softly. The cross on the rosary around his wrist chimed against the crystal. ‘Yes.’

  ‘R . . . ight,’ I said, not full of confidence. ‘You don’t sound very happy.’

  He glanced at Martel. ‘He’ll burn my village down if I don’t keep you safe.’

  ‘Only way,’ Martel said cheerfully. ‘Firm hand. Negotiation not a Chuncho strong point.’

  Raphael gave him a look full of threadbare hate. Resignation showed through the worn-out places. Martel saw it too and clapped the back of his neck, only gently. Raphael turned his head away but not fast. It looked like token resistance to me. Nearly like a joke between them.

  ‘Are you allowed to do that?’ I said to Martel.

  ‘It’s my land. It’s all my land, out that way. The villagers all work for me. It’s their only livelihood. I wouldn’t like to burn it down, it’s a charming place. Unless Raphael does something especially Indian to change my mind.’

  ‘I’ll show you especially Indian one day,’ Raphael murmured, with no force.

  Martel snorted. ‘You get used to him.’ He watched Raphael for a second or two, looking quietly pleased. Then he leaned across to share the last of the wine out between us all. ‘Cheers. To coffee.’

  I lifted my glass but didn’t drink. Sitting down with nothing urgent happening, I was feeling the pressure inside my skull more and the wine looked like nothing but a thumping headache in a glass.

  ‘Listen, what would be appropriate to pay you, for being our guide?’ I said to Raphael.

  ‘I don’t need paying,’ he said, as if the idea were halfway to alarming. ‘Mr Martel looks after me.’

  ‘There must be something,’ I pressed. However glad I was to be able to do it, it felt grimy to lie to them, and the urge to be fair in my dealing, at least, was strong. ‘Not money if that isn’t right, but . . .?’

  He waited for something from Martel, who nodded.

  ‘A clock,’ Raphael said. ‘There’s an antiques shop round the corner. Doesn’t matter if it’s working or not. Whichever one doesn’t seem like robbery to you.’

  I frowned. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Two clocks if you feel generous.’

  Martel had been holding Raphael’s shoulder, which I’d seen men in charge doing to men not in charge all the way across Peru, and now he leaned on it more. ‘Are you making bombs, my dear?’

  Raphael inclined his head away. ‘Leaving them in your wardrobe.’

  ‘Clocks then,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He was losing his voice, even though he had hardly spoken. It must have happened often, because he didn’t seem surprised. I wasn’t either.
Even at the start of the conversation it had sounded maltreated.

  ‘Didn’t you go to the antiques shop on Monday?’ Martel asked, shooting me a little sideways look to say, watch this. I shifted, not wanting to see it, whatever it was.

  ‘No, I said I’d go next Monday on the way home,’ Raphael said. He moved his hand back, towards his shoulder, like he was pointing at something behind him. He hadn’t spoken with his hands much before, but with his voice fading it must have felt the natural thing to do. ‘And I asked you last Monday. You said no.’ This time he brought his hand down in front of him, not too close. I was confused until Martel slapped his hand. Forward was the past, behind was the future.

  ‘Don’t talk about time in Spanish and think in Quechua, dear. It doesn’t match and it gives me a headache.’

  Raphael turned his head slowly to look at him properly. ‘Can your superior Spanish brain not recognise ordinary things when they’re backwards? You must be a menace around reversing horses.’

  Martel laughed. ‘Interesting, isn’t it?’ he said to me.

  ‘Y . . . es,’ I said, wishing I could think of an inoffensive way to say that as a rule Englishmen found bull-fighting awkward more than interesting.

  ‘Anyway, I’m sure Quispe can go for the clock. You can’t be expected to brave it across in sleet and ice.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ I said. There wasn’t much I wanted to do less, but I needed a few minutes not speaking Spanish, and not trying to understand the strange way they were with each other. ‘Is there a particular make? Of clock, I mean.’

  ‘No – but decent mainsprings,’ Raphael said. ‘Do you know what a mainspring is?’

  I nodded once. I knew them quite well, after a year with a clockwork-making interpreter in China. I tried not to think about Keita too much. ‘Steel or gold mainsprings. Back in a minute.’

  The shop was diagonally opposite and it didn’t stock antiques, exactly, but viceroyalty tat that must have been increasing in value now that there was no supply of new things coming from Spain. There were cases and cases of Spanish books with gilt spines, and lots of dark furniture with lions’ feet – the pointless sort, tiny tables that would only hold a wine glass or footstools so miniature that a decent heel would take your feet just as far off the floor. But next to the dust and the doorless shacks, it was good to see the bronze studs in the upholstery and the scrollworked mahogany. I paused at a table hung with well-made leather bags and a stack of books in Dutch, novels and monographs all jumbled. There was a beautiful microscope too, and a whole roll of archaeological excavation tools with a trademark that said Amsterdam on it. They were much newer than everything else, brightly out of place.

  ‘You’re not from here,’ an old lady’s voice said from the back of the shop.

  ‘No. I’m looking for a clock.’ I was breathless even from having crossed the street. ‘It doesn’t matter if it’s working.’

  ‘Lots of clocks,’ she said. She passed me a couple over the counter.

  ‘Mind if I see inside?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Springs. Is that a screwdriver – thank you.’ I opened up the casing, pleased to have remembered the word for screwdriver. ‘All right, good. Is there another?’

  ‘That’s five reales, just for that,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, though I hadn’t been handling Peruvian money long enough to know if it was fine or ridiculous.

  ‘Unless you’re trading anything? Probably work out cheaper if you do.’

  ‘No, just the money – do people normally trade?’

  She nodded to the table of Dutch things. ‘Last man to buy clocks brought all that.’

  Something walked over the back of my neck. I had been admiring it all brainlessly without understanding that it was everything the missing Dutch expeditionaries had left behind last time. Raphael had been with them too.

  ‘Just the money,’ I said again. We found another clock, smaller. When she gave them to me wrapped in old newspaper, the clocks were heavy.

  ‘Careful in the snow,’ she said as I eased the door open with my elbow, my cane in one hand and the clocks under my other arm. Outside, little flurries spun thinly, just enough to sting. Quispe must have been watching for me, because he opened Martel’s front door before I was even close to it. Martel and Raphael were where I’d left them at the table. I handed over the clocks.

  ‘These are nice,’ Martel murmured as they unwrapped them. Raphael lifted the second one away from him and put it out of his reach at the far end of the table. He had taken a small screwdriver from somewhere and now he was opening up the first one. His eyes flicked up when he found the steel mainspring.

  ‘The other one’s gold-plated,’ I said. ‘I hope it’s not too soft, but everything else was rusty even on the outside.’

  He looked sceptically pleased. I was on the verge of pointing out that the service he was about to do us was worth a hundred thousand steel mainsprings, but Clem stirred on the couch then and swore as he tried to sit up. I got up to go round to him, holding the edge of the table to keep myself steady, and Hernandez hurried away to the kitchen. When he came back, it was with a small cup of powerful black coffee, burned-smelling.

  ‘Yes, off you go,’ Martel murmured to Raphael, who ghosted away back up the stairs, chaperoned by Quispe again. There was only one tiny lamp at the top. Raphael faded into the gloom at first and then sharpened again as he climbed up into the shallow light. There was one silver bead in his rosary and it gleamed.

  ‘I thought you’d died,’ I said to Clem. I helped him prop himself up. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Apart from having the constitution of an invalid lady. Where are we?’

  ‘Azangaro. This is Mr Martel, it’s his house.’

  Martel waved from the table. ‘Coca’s working. You might feel zingy for a while.’

  Clem bumped back on to the cushions. ‘Don’t suppose I could have a bit more?’

  At the top of the stairs, Quispe opened a door just off the landing, put Raphael inside, and locked it. He came down still fastening the keys back on to his belt.

  The room upstairs had its own stove, which had no flue and which Quispe warned us to keep completely closed until the embers were dead, not just glowing. I promised I knew how not to poison myself. I meant it as a joke, but he seemed worried and backed out. Clem had dropped sideways across the bed.

  ‘He’s set us up with a guide,’ I said. ‘I think we’re going out with him tomorrow morning, if you’re all right.’

  ‘A guide? You didn’t tell him about—’

  ‘No. I said coffee. The man’s from New Bethlehem.’ I paused. ‘At some point we’ll have to tell him what we want. There won’t be cinchona trees just lying around up there.’

  ‘You utter pigeon, Em,’ he said sleepily. ‘Of course we won’t. We’ll just go for a walk one morning. You do like to fuss.’

  I tucked a blanket round him and then inched down on the foot of the bed, in the waving heat from the stove. The hook of my cane fitted nicely over the handle of one of the closed window shutters. Curious, I opened it a little way. There was glass in the frame. It was old and it rattled, and the cold seeped through its seals. We must have been at the side of the house, because the front faced the church and the back the way we had come over the plain. Outside now was the little tumble of the town and then, about thirty miles away, beyond more hills, the mountains. They were jagged and white, stretching in both directions until they were lost in the haze of bad weather. There was nothing inviting about them and no clear way through, although there must have been, if we were crossing them tomorrow. I pushed the shutter closed again and the glass stopped juddering now it was braced, but the wind hummed and howled in the roof. Something in the rafters made a kind of clucking rattle, and then there was a scuffle and a squeak.

  ‘What is that?’

  Clem was asleep, or not worried enough by it to open his eyes.

  ‘Guinea pigs,’ said a voi
ce, in English. It came from beyond the wall against which the headboard of the bed rested, from the next room, and it was so to the left of anything I’d expected that almost as soon as I’d heard it, I convinced myself I couldn’t have and there was a long silence while I tried to chase down the memory of the sound. If it had been real, it was so close to me that the man must have had his forehead against the wall.

  I cracked. ‘Did you say guinea pigs?’

  ‘Listen. You need to go home. Or to another part of the country.’

  I went to the wall. The house twisted and turned and I couldn’t put together a map of it well enough to know whose room it might be, even if I’d known who was where. ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s a waste of time,’ he said softly. ‘There is no way you’ll ever get out of the cinchona woods alive and with live specimens.’

  ‘We’re here for coffee.’

  ‘I just heard you talking, don’t be stupid. You need to leave.’

  I laughed, my temple against the plasterwork. It was new and white. My shadow put its fingertips up to meet mine. ‘If I go home without having done this, I’ll never work again. I’d rather be shot by a quinine supplier, if it’s all the same to you.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you going to tell Mr Martel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Who is this? How come you speak English?’

  There was silence after that. I waited, then jumped when there was a sharp thump that I recognised, right at a level with my head. It was the sound of someone throwing a cricket ball against the wall. I didn’t hold many intermural conversations, but I thought that it probably meant go away.

  Clem tugged the back of my shirt. ‘Move, you’re blocking the heat,’ he mumbled.

  I shifted to one side. ‘Sorry. All right now?’

  He pulled the blanket over his head. ‘Sorry doesn’t make you any less of a pain, you know. If all this fails and we get shot because you gave us away, you can explain it to the India Office. Were you talking to me just now?’

  ‘No, there’s a man in the next room,’ I said. Clem was at an awkward angle, so I folded his pillow double and eased the new half under his head. The room was warming up, but slowly.