“I do, sir.”
“And where the guano is fresh, you can fall through. We will not rescue you.”
“I will be careful and expect no rescue.”
“There is something of a path beyond the compound here.” Koster waved vaguely. “Those so inclined do occasionally walk there to observe nature. There is a surveying team working up there that may have advice about birds and whatnot.”
“Thank you, Mr. Koster,” Aiden said.
“What are you on about?” Christopher said the moment they left the office. “Since when do you go observing nature?”
“I want to see more of the place.”
“God—why?”
“We have to know what we’ve become part of.”
“No, we don’t,” Christopher said. He stood at the top of the stairs with his back to the digging, his arms folded resolutely. “I know you. I know what you’re thinking. We’ve seen something harsh—”
“Harsh?”
“—and you have a dangerously tender heart,” Christopher went on. “But what is going to change? Whatever you discover?”
“I don’t know, but—”
“Then I’ll tell you. Nothing!” Christopher spat, trying in vain to get the acrid guano dust out of his mouth. “We’re here now. We’ve invested every penny and sailed four thousand miles. It looks a bit rough—”
“A bit?”
“—but we have a contract for guano. We have loans to pay off and a crew to pay. You are a businessman now, not a laborer, not an indentured servant, not a farm boy or a rock digger or—whatever rotten life you once had!”
“These men are slaves.”
“They are not.”
“What do you need overseers with whips for if not for slaves?”
“There is no slavery in Peru. They abolished it before we did! I’m not going to argue out here all day in the sun.” Christopher sighed, pulling out his handkerchief to wipe the dusty sweat from the corners of his eyes. “This is reality. We cannot change it. And this is our fortune. We must take it! Have your walk. I’ll send the launch back for you at noon.”
“No,” Aiden said. His head was spinning. “We can’t ask the men to row out in the noon sun.”
“For God’s sake, Aiden, we own the ship! We can tell the men to do anything we want!”
“There must be other boats coming and going. I’ll try and catch a ride with someone—otherwise, four o’clock.”
“Fine. As you wish.” Christopher hurried down the path. Aiden turned around and started walking up the guano mountain. He had no idea what he really expected to learn. And regardless, Christopher was right—what could they do about it? Haul up the anchor and sail home empty?
The path wound along the back side of the island, so after only about a hundred yards, Aiden could no longer see into the open pit. Once he was away from the digging, where the guano was undisturbed, it really did not smell bad at all. It was like a sourish kind of ordinary dirt. The taint of ammonia was definitely still there, but it did not burn. The fresh breeze blowing in from the ocean also helped. The path was little more than a slight trail of packed footsteps. The guano on either side of it, fresh and not yet trodden on, was surprisingly light and spongy, though also sticky, a bit like fresh soap. It was honeycombed all over with little holes, and sometimes, even on the path, his foot plunged through up to his knee. Lizards popped in and out of the holes, skittered across the surface and stopped to twist a curious eye at him. There were also immense flocks of a type of blue-gray bird, like a pigeon. It had a bright red beak and jaunty little yellow feathers on each side of its head. The birds sat so thick in places that Aiden couldn’t see the ground beneath them. Then he noticed that they had actually made burrows in the guano. Little heads popped in and out like nosy cottage wives peeping out on a village. They did not seem to be bothered by his presence, or even to notice him, but sometimes a group of them would rise all at once and wheel about in a swoosh of wings so strong it was like a wind against his face.
Millions of seabirds filled the sky like a blizzard. Some he had learned on the voyage—cormorants and terns and boobies, pelicans, frigate birds with their great black wings thin and sharp on the sky—but others were completely new. Their cries were wild and ghostly. He had never seen so many live things crowded into any one place. The rocks down below along the shoreline looked like they were made of brown velvet from all the sea lions lying there, and there were easily just as many splashing in the surf. Aiden wondered if they shared the rocks in shifts, for there could not possibly be room for all at once.
He walked for about twenty minutes, covering no great distance, partly because there wasn’t much distance to cover on such a small island, but mostly because the soft guano made for slow walking. Concentrating as he was on his steps, and with his hat pulled low to protect from the sun (and anything dropping from above), Aiden came upon the surveyors almost without warning.
The trio looked as out of place as hummingbirds on a glacier. One man stood bent over a theodolite, while the other two played cards on a colorful woven blanket beneath a small canopy. The cardplayers were in their mid-twenties, Aiden guessed. One sat on a small canvas camp stool and held his cards in a tight fan. He had a gentleman’s smooth hands and thick chestnut hair curling over his shoulders. It was clearly too hot to have such a loose blanket of hair, Aiden thought, which marked it as a vanity. The other man reclined on his side, propped up on one elbow. He was very fair, with short reddish-blond hair. His shirtsleeves were extra-long to cover his pale hands, and a broad-brimmed straw hat lay at the ready beside him. The two men looked up, startled, as Aiden approached.
Then the man at the instrument turned, and Aiden was surprised to see that it was not a man. She wore trousers and a waistcoat like a man, and rough boots dusted white with the dust of the place, but she was clearly a woman. Her face was framed with a straw hat but still browner than any proper woman would allow.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Aiden said. “I was just exploring. I wanted to see the birds and nature.” Aiden snatched off his hat, the thing to do upon meeting a lady, and felt the sun immediately burn his scalp. “I’m sorry. I interrupted you.”
“Not at all.” Her glance darted quickly to the men on the blanket, like a child caught playing in a forbidden parlor. “We just aren’t used to visitors up here.”
“I’m Aiden Madison, of the Raven from San Francisco.”
“I am Alice Brock,” she said. “This is Mr. Nicholas Brock.” The chestnut-haired man got up and ducked out from under the little canopy. He shook Aiden’s hand.
“And this is my assistant, Gilbert Windemare,” Nicholas said. The fair-haired man gave a little wave from the blanket. “We’re surveying the island.” Nicholas had to speak loudly to be heard over the birds and barking seals.
“We’re pleased to meet you.” Alice took off her hat, and a brown braid dropped out and swung over her shoulder. She wiped her sweaty forehead on her sleeve. Aiden noticed that her nails were chipped and her hands were rougher than her husband’s.
“Nicholas lets me play about with his surveying instruments,” Alice quickly explained, as if reading his mind. “There is so little else to do here that I grow bored.”
Alice was not beautiful, and nothing would ever make her so, though Aiden had learned a little about what powders and styling and luxurious clothing could do for a plain woman. The mousy hair could be burned into curls, the hands covered with gloves and the thin lips colored crimson, but her face was a bit too long, her features a bit too strong and her shape too straight to ever be a beauty, no matter the assistance. But she did have startling green eyes, a lovely voice and a graceful way of moving. A woman could be attractive, he had learned, without being a beauty. She was around twenty-five, he guessed, though it was hard to tell. She had clearly spent more time outdoors without a parasol than most women, but unlike poor women, who could look fifty at twenty, she had the good health to stave off the worst effects. Her cheeks were natura
lly pink, her face unlined.
“Will you rest awhile in our shade?” She waved a weathered hand toward the tent.
“Thank you, but I won’t impose.”
“We would be glad of the company and eager to hear about San Francisco,” Nicholas said. “It is one of the places we are thinking about visiting after this. Please.”
Gilbert sat up cross-legged to make room, and Nicholas opened up the other two little camp stools. By their accents, Aiden knew they were English, and despite the ordinary clothing and peculiar occupation, he sensed an air of aristocracy.
“And how are you finding our little dung heap so far?” Gilbert asked, tucking the cards away in a box.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Aiden replied. “Or even imagined.”
“Why would you?” Gilbert said. “It’s the last place on earth anyone would ever imagine. In fact, it was really rather cruel of God to think it up in the first place.”
“The birds seem to like it,” Aiden said diplomatically.
“Oh yes. You’re on a nature walk,” Gilbert said. Aiden wasn’t sure if he was teasing. There was a sketchbook with some excellent pictures of a cormorant and a sea lion open on the blanket beside him, so the man had to like something of nature.
“I wanted to see something more of the island,” Aiden said. “And stretch my legs. We only just arrived and I’m tired of being aboard ship. Does this path go all the way across the island?”
“Not really,” Alice said. “People from the ships come up this far sometimes, to enjoy the view and the birds, but there is no real reason to go on much further. We have made a path with our own walking, but there is nothing different to see beyond here. Will you have some water?” she offered, taking a bottle out of a canvas knapsack.
“Thank you, but I’m quite all right.” He was in fact very thirsty, but it was his own fault and he wasn’t about to take their water.
“We always bring too much and would rather not have to carry it back,” Alice said as she poured some in a tin cup. Aiden smelled oranges. “We won’t be working much longer—it gets far too hot by afternoon.”
“Thank you.” Aiden took a grateful sip. “It’s delicious!”
“Just a bit of orange oil twisted from the peels,” Alice said. “Ship’s water is always so stale.”
“What ship are you with?” Aiden asked.
“The Lady May,” Nicholas said. “Of the Brockleton Line. We arrived a week ago.”
“Are you surveying for them?” Aiden asked.
The three exchanged glances.
“There are many parties with an interest in the future of guano,” Nicholas said simply.
“With millions of dollars at stake, I’d say so,” Gilbert added, less diplomatically.
Even after his months with the Worthingtons, Aiden didn’t really know what a million dollars was. In Kansas, his family’s one good crop had brought in three hundred eighty-nine dollars, and they had felt rich. Mr. Worthington had recently bought a chandelier from Europe, the size of a shed, for two thousand four hundred ninety-one dollars, including shipping. One year ago, Aiden would have sold the whole farm for one dollar’s worth of cornmeal and a bit of stringy meat.
He changed the subject. “How exactly do you measure guano? Is it like surveying land?”
“Basically,” Nicholas said. “The North Island has already been stripped bare, and there are plenty of shipping records to get a good estimate of the total tonnage mined there over the years. So once we figure out the area of this island and the average depth of the guano, we can calculate the volume. It’s pretty simple math.”
Aiden had never found math all that simple, but he did know how to estimate the amount of wheat a field could produce, or how many tons of coal could be chipped from a seam.
“The topography of all these islands is similar,” Alice added. “And I don’t imagine the birds have been favoring one island over another in deciding where to leave their gifts.”
Nicholas went on explaining the basics of surveying, which involved a lot of angles and triangulation. Alice said nothing during the lecture, but Aiden noticed that there was a notebook sticking out of her pocket, not Nicholas’s, and a pencil poked through her plain hair, not his glossy mane.
“Oh, enough,” Gilbert finally said, putting an end to Nicholas’s windy explanation. “We’re helping rich men understand the depth of their riches. That is really all of it.”
“Shut up, Gilly,” Nicholas chastised. He looked back at Aiden and gave a little shrug. “He’s right, but crass. Tell us about San Francisco.”
“Yes. Have you felt an earthquake?” Alice asked excitedly.
“There have been four since I arrived there in January,” Aiden said. “But little ones. The plates on the table shook, but the ones in the cupboards didn’t fall out. There were nineteen last year.”
“Nineteen earthquakes?” Alice’s green eyes shone, and he thought she might clap with delight, like one of the ducklings upon finding an exceptional beetle.
“People take it as ordinary,” Aiden said. “Like blizzards if you live in the north.”
“Nicholas,” she said, clutching her husband’s hand. “That is surely where we must go next!”
Nicholas laughed. “Besides the geological thrills, what is the city itself like? The talk in London is that it’s become very cosmopolitan and worth a visit. They call it the Paris of the West!”
Aiden wasn’t sure what “cosmopolitan” meant, but he had certainly heard of Paris.
“It is a grand city. I like it very much.”
“Then stay and tell us all about it,” Gilbert said. “We’re always desperate for smart new people to talk with. Come, join us for lunch.”
Aiden hardly thought of himself as smart, but he was equally happy for the new company.
“Please do,” Alice said. “It’s just some bread and cheese. It’s too hot to do any work in the afternoon, but we always spend the whole day here,” she explained. “Even with the heat, it’s much nicer up here with the ocean breeze than on the ship. Do you have a launch waiting for you?”
“I hoped to catch a ride back with one of the supply boats. Otherwise, they will come for me at four.”
“Perfect,” Alice said as she opened a basket and unfolded the cloth inside. “Our launch returns for us at three and can take you back to your ship as well.”
The morning that had started with a scene from Dante’s Inferno now turned into an afternoon of blithe picnicking. They sat in the shade and ate soft bread, crumbly white cheese, a sort of pickled vegetable relish and some dried figs. The conversation was bright and easy. He told them all about the city that he now considered home, describing the elaborate houses and society of the fashionable neighborhoods, the crowded lanes of downtown boardinghouses, the opulent hotels and the busy docks. He told them about Blind Sally and the Barbary Coast. Nicholas and Gilbert were very keen on operas, theater and music halls; Aiden felt he was letting them down by not having gone to a performance every night of the week.
They told him about Rome and London and Venice. They had even been to Egypt. Aiden was fascinated by these exotic people. They had such a different way of thinking and talking, and such different things to talk about: science and philosophy and art and all the new ideas of Europe and England. Sometimes they bickered, sounding more like annoyed siblings than scientists.
When it finally came time to fold up the stools and take down the canopy, it was a shock to step back into the reality of the place. The sun had baked the top layer of guano into a crispy stink. Two sailors from the Lady May came up the path to help carry the equipment down. The day was frantically hot by now, and the blizzard of birds was starting to feel oppressive—like a swarm of locusts. When they passed Koster’s office compound, there was no one in sight and all the louvered shutters were closed against the dust. Yet in the mine below, the work was still going on as vigorously as it had been that morning. The ant men working their ant labors. Watery
shimmers of heat rippled above the guano, and the sun reflected brightly, causing Aiden’s eyes to burn.
“No good to think about it,” Nicholas said, pausing beside him. “It will just depress you.”
“Why are they all Chinese?” Aiden asked.
“Because China’s a bigger dung heap than here,” Gilbert said. “The poor buggers are glad for any chance to escape.”
“Gilly!” Alice chastised him.
Gilbert shrugged. “It’s true. Sad but true.”
“It’s complicated,” Nicholas said. “Peru ended slavery ten, twelve years ago. But the Negroes, after they were freed, mostly stayed. They had nowhere else to go. So they had first pick of the jobs.”
“Of the horrible jobs,” Alice added pointedly.
“Yes, well,” Nicholas went on. “The Negroes preferred the plantations. But someone has to work the guano. Guano finances the entire nation of Peru—it would collapse without it. They tried shipping in convicts, but there’s only so much you can make a convict do. Even the Irish won’t do this work! But China is teeming with people, half of them starving, all of them desperate. It’s harsh, to be sure, but they sign up for it. Civilized men just aren’t suited to this kind of work.”
“From what I’ve read, China does actually have some civilization,” Aiden said.
“Oh, of course,” Nicholas said. “But you know what I mean.”
Aiden did know, and it angered him, this casual racism. Gilbert started back down the path, clearly tired of hearing this discussion. Aiden thought it best to drop the subject for now.
The Lady May’s launch was a sleek, light boat, freshly painted red with gold trim. It was twice the size of the Raven’s, but much faster, though rowed by only six men. The launch stopped first at the Lady May to let off the surveyors and their equipment; the men then rowed Aiden over to his own ship. It was nearly four and the Raven was quiet. The sailors had rigged canopies all over the deck, beneath which they now dozed, except for the one man on watch. Fish was sitting in a canvas chair on the quarterdeck, reading a British magazine called Punch. There was a stack on the chair beside him, the top one dated only five months ago, and Aiden felt a sharp thrill of anticipation to have something new to read.
Son of Fortune Page 13