The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  ‘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 i
n 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.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Clements R. Markham was a real person, and he really did lead an expedition into the Peruvian interior to steal cinchona trees in 1860. In real life, though, there was no Merrick Tremayne; Markham made it out alive but was unsuccessful. He went on to publish a Quechua dictionary, translations of various Spanish histories of Peru and an account of his own travels, which I relied on heavily when I wrote this book. A man called Charles Ledger got some live plants out eventually.

  Peru is as real as I could make it until the expedition turns off onto the river that leads to Bedlam. After that it’s imaginary. But most of the imaginary things are based on existing myths and fairytales about stone, and sixteenth-century Spanish accounts of the last surviving dregs of the Inca administrative system. Especially brilliant books are Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone, and Narrative Threads, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton.

  The Inca really did write on cords. There are plenty of pictures of court scribes and accountants reading from them in Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva crónica y buen gobierno. The system was killed off with the arrival of the conquistadores, and while a few original examples do still survive, no one can read them any more. Current English scholarship suggests these cords were mainly for numbers or used as memory aids, but the second you speak to anyone Peruvian in Spanish they say yes, it was definitely writing. Although we have no Rosetta Stone for it – or Rosetta String – I’m with the writing camp. The people who built Machu Picchu knew the difference between magnetic and polar north, and they built earthquake-proof temples in the fourteenth century. I’m pretty sure that sending a letter wasn’t beyond them.

  Heligan is a real place and very much open to visitors. As I give it here, the history of the Tremayne family is completely fictional. Henry Tremayne did not (to my knowled
ge) meet a markayuq in Peru, so things turned out differently for him in real life.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  First of all, I’d like to thank the Society of Authors. They funded three months of language school in Lima, accommodation, and all my travel in Peru. I wouldn’t have been able to go without their help, which means about a third of this book would be quite different and much worse.

  Just as important is Peruwayna Language School in Lima. In three months, they took me from ‘hola’ to conservations about possible theories on Inca sun religions, as well as a host of things between. Outside school, Spanish opened up some amazing conversations with Quechua speakers – they really do point forward for the past – as well as a lot of historical sources.

  Thanks also to Gladstone’s Library. As part of their writers in residence programme, they gave me a room for all of February 2016, fed me, kept me brilliantly supplied with copies of The Illustrated London News, and made sure I sometimes saw the inside of a pub rather than just my laptop keyboard. A significant chunk of this book was written in their cafe.

  Finally, there’s my mum and dad, who put me up uncomplainingly for all the time I wasn’t in Wales or Peru, even though I single-handedly quadruple the heating bills. And thanks to my brother, Jake, who is able somehow to sort out all my narrative problems on the phone whilst doing a degree in something completely unrelated.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Natasha Pulley studied English Literature at Oxford University. After stints working at Waterstones as a bookseller, then at Cambridge University Press as a publishing assistant in the astronomy and maths departments, she did the Creative Writing MA at UEA. She later studied in Tokyo, where she lived on a scholarship from the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation, and she is now a visiting lecturer at City University. Her first novel, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, was an international bestseller, a Guardian Summer Read, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and won a Betty Trask Award. The Bedlam Stacks is her second novel. She lives in Bath.