Secret of the Sands

by Sara Sheridan

  This is not going the way Murray had expected. For no reason, he had thought the matter of real interest might simply arise. Now he forces the point before Mr Wellsted can leave the room.

  ‘I wonder, sir,’ Murray cuts in, ‘you have such an unusual name. I wonder if you might . . . No, it is foolish.’

  He decided when he summoned the tradesman that he would not tell the man he knows exactly his connection to his point of genuine interest. He had intended this as a game, for Murray is a gaming man. But now he is here it is proving a difficult business with the fellow is not in the least conversational.

  James Wellsted Snr turns. ‘From Kent, sir,’ he says, to oblige the gentleman. Not all Wellsted’s customers want to chat, but he is equal to the task if it is required. ‘I’m from Kent. Not an uncommon name in those parts, Wellsted, you see. Though my family have resided in London for some years now.’

  He stares at the piles of papers stacked all over Murray’s desk. He came as soon as he was summoned on account of the address of his new client, rather than the man’s name. Being illiterate, he is not aware that the fellow with whom he is talking is the nation’s greatest publisher and he wonders if the gentleman is so untidy in all his business as he appears to be with his written matter. He has clearly been scribbling rather a lot if the heaped up mounds of papers are anything to judge by.

  ‘Ah, Kent. But that is not what I mean. I’m afraid . . .’ Murray smiles. ‘Thing is,’ he comes clean, ‘I wondered if you might be related to a Lieutenant Wellsted. James Wellsted. Of the Indian Navy?’

  Wellsted Snr looks perplexed. James has been gone from London since he was a nipper – he has never come up in conversation since, or at least not outside the family.

  ‘That gentleman is my son,’ he says. ‘Do you know of him, sir? We have had no news for several months now.’

  ‘I do,’ Murray beams. ‘I do know of him, Mr Wellsted. Please, please won’t you sit with me? You are cold, are you not? I can have someone bring tea perhaps or better still some scalded brandy. Would you like some brandy, Mr Wellsted? Or whisky, perhaps? It is a weakness of mine. I have a Scottish grandfather and my dear, late father considered himself Scottish, despite the fact that he was born here in this house, a great many miles too far to the south to justify his claims. A toddy, sir?’

  The upholsterer nods his greying head. He sits warily on a chair next to the fire while Murray rings the bell and makes arrangements. It feels eerily as if he is being received in a house on Albemarle Street. The sensation is extraordinary.

  ‘The thing is,’ Murray says, ‘that your son has sent me a rather interesting account of his travels. I intend to publish it.’

  ‘Publish?’ Wellsted mouths.

  ‘Why yes,’ Murray continues. ‘Fascinating account, you see. Of Socotra – a small island in the Indian Ocean.’

  ‘In a book?’

  Murray ignores the question. ‘He is very talented your son, Mr Wellsted. Oh, I did hope there was a connection. And you see, when we can find your boy – well, I understand he is to be recalled for a while – the Geographical Society want him and there have been some enquiries from Members of the House that ministers are hoping he can help settle.’

  ‘The house?’ Wellsted repeats.

  ‘Yes, sir. His Majesty’s Parliament. The Palace of Westminster.’

  The butler enters with a tray and places a fragrant toddy at Mr Wellsted’s side and then serves one to Murray. He is accustomed to Mr Murray entertaining unusual visitors from time to time, but the master has never taken sustenance with a tradesman before. He wryly wonders if he will shortly be serving dinner to Ned Spencer who delivers the household fish twice a week or perhaps ordering a carriage for Molly Rankin, the wife of the chimney sweep. Mr Wellsted, however, is far too shocked to notice the man’s offhand manner and for Murray, well, it only adds to his amusement.

  ‘James is coming home – and to all that?’

  ‘I hope so, sir. You have a very fine boy there.’

  Wellsted’s hands are shaking so violently that he does not want to attempt to lift his glass, however, he is sorely in need of a drink.

  ‘Well I never,’ he says, staring longingly at the toddy, which is letting off a small cloud of steam. He breathes deeply. ‘Well I never. The boy did it! He did it! Think of that!’

  ‘Did what, sir?’ Murray enquires.

  Wellsted steels himself. He is not sure what to say, but he’ll be damned now if James isn’t eligible for at least a lord’s daughter if not something slightly grander. There need be no tenuous connections for a man who will give evidence in Parliament and speak at the Geographical Society. He can surely take his pick of almost anyone.

  ‘He did his duty,’ the upholsterer grins. ‘The boy did his duty!’

  Murray continues, ‘Well, certainly he did. They are having difficulty finding him, of course. These men of action – common problem. The high command in Bombay say he’s gone into the interior. The desert. He has been given permission by the sultan – the first of our men ever to get it. It’s quite an honour. I do hope he is notating everything. The admiralty will put him up when he comes home, of course. I believe there is a senior officer who has a house on the Edgware Road. You’ll be glad to see the boy, I expect.’

  Wellsted nods. Yes, the house on Molyneux Street is nowhere near grand enough now. James must stay elsewhere and build his reputation when he returns to London. The old man finally manages to lift the toddy to his lips.

  ‘Cheers, sir,’ he says, taking a satisfying gulp. ‘This is wonderful news. Wonderful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Murray agrees. ‘Well, I want to hear more about your son, Mr Wellsted. I want to know all about him. He is, you see, a veritable rising star.’

  Wellsted smacks his lips. ‘Always had promise. I have to say. The boy always had promise.’

  It’s the first time in his life, he realises, that he feels simply, utterly proud. This news is beyond all expectation. Old Thomas was right about the child. Fancy that. Wellsted can hardly stop smiling. It’s been his life’s work, but finally they are there. The younger children will ride on the coattails of this success and everyone will go up a step or two. It is a wonderful feeling. The boy has done it!

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ he mouths. ‘Thank you for this welcome news.’

  Murray can’t help but feel a glow seeing the old man so delighted. ‘Well now,’ he says, ‘I expect it has been a while since you have seen your son, so I am glad you mentioned that he does write from time to time. You see, I am very much looking forward to meeting James for myself, but until then, will you brief me?’

  Mr Wellsted nods. ‘Anything, sir. Anything you’d like to know.’

  Later, back at his desk, Murray clears a space. It has been a most entertaining afternoon. He pens a quick note to George, addressing it to the Geographical Society and also one to William Thornton Astell, who has taken up the matter in the Commons now that Townsend is dead. If Mr Wellsted Snr is anything to judge by, the family will not embarrass anyone. He rather liked the fellow, in fact. He seemed to have a sense of what was fitting. By all accounts, the boy has been dutiful in writing home. There has been no blinding flash of insight into the lieutenant’s character but nothing shocking that will put paid to their plans for him either. Murray rings for service and dispatches the letters to be delivered.

  ‘Send a boy,’ he instructs, for he does not trust the postal service in this weather.

  Then, lastly, he picks up his quill once more and draws a fresh sheet of paper.

  Dear Lieutenant Wellsted,

  I am writing once more in the hope this finds you well and that your excursions into the interior of Araby have proved fruitful. In anticipation that this has been the case, and given that we will be publishing your account of Socotra shortly, I hope you might have further tales to tell, in the same vein, about your most recent travels. There is a great appetite for travelogues as you know, particularly those that contain the kind of detail tha
t an officer such as yourself, with surveying experience can provide. As you will no doubt be aware by the time you receive this missive, you are to be recalled to London to testify before the House of Commons committee. I understand also that the Geographical Society has been in touch with you about taking part in its activities. I hope, sir, that the voyage homewards might provide an opportunity for you to write up the notes of your most recent travels, which I understand have taken you into the interior of the Arabian desert with native guides. Our readers, I am sure, will find this fascinating and the sooner you can provide me with something for them, the better. I am considering the title Journey to the City of the Caliphs.

  Yours, etc.,

  John Murray III

  Murray folds and seals the paper carefully. He very much enjoyed the balance in Wellsted’s Socotra piece between the scientific and geographical detail and his interest in local customs. The boy clearly keeps his eyes open and does not judge the natives too harshly. It’s a common problem with Murray’s correspondents – that they make all kinds of horrid assumptions about the indigenous population that later prove unfounded. Often though there is nothing else to go on but the account he is sent. This Wellsted fellow has a knack and Murray feels inspired by his visit to Socotra. What the fellow will make of the desert, well, he can only hope. Murray wonders what they eat in the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. Goat, he decides. Not terribly appetising, but then the reading public loves that kind of thing – the more grisly the feast the better. Eyeballs and testicles, deep-fried. Tonight, as he understands it, his wife has organised some kind of game for dinner. A brace of partridge that were sent as a present from the estate of the Earl of Salisbury. The earl, it transpires, has written a book, which he will no doubt be asked to read and subsequently publish. Still, partridge is one of Murray’s favourite dishes, and he hopes Cook has had the foresight to make a Madeira gravy. He dusts the folded envelope and rings the bell.

  ‘This one,’ he says, ‘can go tomorrow morning. To the Bombay Marine.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the butler says, grateful that the master appears to have ceased his eccentric behaviour for the time being. ‘There is a fellow downstairs to pick up the chaise. Shall I send him up?’

  Murray looks down into the street. There is a cart and horse parked at the doorway. The light is fading and the street lamps are being lit.

  ‘The chaise?’ Murray repeats absentmindedly. ‘Oh no. Send him away. It was ruse, nothing more. The thing doesn’t need doing at all.’

  Chapter Forty-Three

  As soon as they take to the water, the balance of everything changes. While Ibn Mohammed and Kasim are born to the desert, both men have always employed crews for their ships and know little about how to navigate on the water. Ibn Mohammed normally sleeps the entire journey, dozing off in one port and rising only for meals until he reaches another. So it is Wellsted and even Jessop, with his meagre frame, who come into their own when the imam finally agrees an extortionate price on the dhangi, the only ship, it seems, he is at liberty to sell them. Kasim congratulates himself that when they fled the emir’s camp he prevented Ibn Mohammed from killing the only able-bodied man on board who knows how to get them back to Muscat inside of a week.

  At the dock, skilfully divested of the camels and most of their money, they start their journey with the tide. Nervous of the reefs around the shoreline, for which the area is notorious, Wellsted and Jessop decide to head further out to sea than is normal in a native vessel and navigate not by the coastline but by the stars. A course south is easy enough to follow, and at a steady pace and with good winds they reckon the journey will take a mere five days.

  Jessop sits at the prow, like a figurehead, and breathes in the sea air.

  ‘I am holding you to the goose and the pudding,’ he tells Wellsted. ‘If we have to scour Muscat, I insist upon it.’

  ‘I could manage a goose,’ Wellsted replies.

  The imam’s hospitality over a day and a night has stretched only as far as a broiled fish and a little rice. On board they have some baked biscuits, salted whitebait, a few fresh oranges and three unappetising barrels of souring water. Still, they are on their way.

  The first to succumb is Tariq, one of the servants. On the morning of the second day at sea, his legs give way under him and with a cry of agony, as if he has been stabbed, he keels over, knocking the brewing coffee from its stand and spreading the grounds across the thick boards of the deck. When the doctor pulls back the man’s jubbah to examine him, the first scattering of pustules are evident and a wail goes up among the others, an incitement for help from Allah. In a blind panic, Hamza jumps off the side of the dhangi and has to be fished out of the water. As he cowers, soaking, on the deck, Kasim strikes him hard.

  ‘We are too far from shore to swim back,’ he sneers. ‘Be a man.’

  The distance from shore, both naval men know, is ir relevant now. Even if they can get there, no port will take them with a contagion on board.

  ‘We will all die,’ Hamza wails.

  And, as if to prove himself right, it is he and Jasouf who are next to succumb. A fierce delirium takes them during the course of the afternoon and they are quickly soaked in sweat and a mixture of other bodily fluids upon which Wellsted does not care to dwell.

  ‘It’s the fever that will kill them. A body cannot stand this heat,’ Jessop says in a matter-of-fact voice as he helps to sluice the vomit and piss from the deck. ‘It will be quick at least, unless the fever breaks.’

  He swabs the men with sea water and tries to calm the frantic calls as they twitch and spasm. Smallpox can be agonising and, though the men are seldom conscious, their cries of pain are terrible to listen to. In his fever, Hamza recites long portions of the Quran but Tariq shouts, begging for death in his more lucid moments when, between the pains, he slips in and out of delirium. At length he sets up a haunting whine that prevents the other men from sleeping when darkness falls.

  Jessop finds he is acutely aware now of how difficult it is for a man’s dying to take a long time. He has always been kind to the sick and it is his custom to treat a cabin boy and an admiral exactly alike. However, in the past when the sick begged to die, he considered it a weakness in their character. Now he has suffered himself he has developed a sensitivity – a progression in his understanding. It isn’t weakness to give up. It can happen to anyone, he realises, for it is impossible to fight all the time and pain, sickness and degradation can be overwhelming for even the bravest of men.

  The devout one, Hamza, is the first to die. As the sun rises and the healthy roll out their prayer mats, they tip his body overboard. While the servants who still can, prostrate themselves in sincere mortification, Kasim appears at the doctor’s side and motions him to the prow. Ibn Mohammed, who at first Kasim thought was simply sleeping, has in fact been sick half the night.

  ‘I brought him coffee,’ Kasim says, ‘and then I saw. You must tell me what to do.’

  After a brief inspection, the doctor directs a swab of cold sea water, the same as the others. Jessop does not believe in bleeding a sick man. It is, he always says, like taking ammunition from the arsenal when the war is in full swing. His views are revolutionary, but they are based on his observations. He only bleeds for prevention, not cure.

  ‘There is no more we can do but try to break the fever,’ he insists.

  Kasim’s face hardens. ‘How many men will survive this?’ he whispers.

  Jessop shrugs. ‘Half will die. At least. Contained as we are at sea, there may be more.’

  ‘He is strong,’ Kasim points out.

  The doctor lays his hand on Kasim’s shoulder. ‘That will help,’ he nods.

  Jasouf dies after midday, a trickle of blood from his nose staining the top of his jubbah as he expires without uttering a cry the entire illness. As they heave him over the side, Wellsted speaks to the doctor in English so the Arabs cannot understand.

  ‘They will all get it, won’t they?’

  Jesso
p nods curtly. ‘Most likely. Or almost all.’

  ‘And we?’

  ‘Are immunised. There is still a slight risk, but it is a small one.’

  There is a moment’s silence. Wellsted cannot bring himself to form the question, but in the event he does not need to. The doctor understands.

  ‘I must apply, for the benefit of the sick, all measures that are required, old man,’ Jessop says cheerfully, quoting his hypocratic oath. ‘I cannot fly and leave these men in need of medical help.’

  ‘I only wondered,’ Wellsted says. ‘We have come this far to save you, and to put yourself at risk now . . .’

  ‘I am at less risk than any of them. They’d have killed us, wouldn’t they? If it were the other way round.’

  Wellsted looks at Kasim bent over Ibn Mohammed at the prow.

  ‘Possibly,’ he says. ‘But they have saved my life a hundred times. They stood by me on the sands, whatever else. I’d be dead without them.’

  ‘Of course,’ Jessop understands.

  The third day of the sickness is grim. The men who have not succumbed pray almost constantly, their mats rolled out on deck. Allah Akhbar. Allah Akhbar. All the while, Jessop and Wellsted continue to swab and move the sick to keep them in the shade of the huge sail. At the prow Kasim will not let anyone tend Ibn Mohammed but himself. He whispers in his patient’s ear, though the slaver is comatose. Wellsted cannot hear what Kasim is saying, but by nightfall Ibn Mohammed is the only sick man left alive and Tariq’s body has been consigned to the deep. The doctor examines him once more. The pustules are everywhere and his body dotted with yellow boils as he twists in pain and fever.

  ‘We were boys together,’ Kasim whispers to Wellsted.

  ‘In Muscat?’

  ‘Yes. We learnt to ride together. We learnt to hunt. When my father died, his father took me in.’

  Long after midnight, Wellsted wakes, propped up against the mast. He thinks, momentarily, of Zena and hopes that she is safe. Perhaps it would be best if she did not go eastwards after all. He checks on Jessop who is asleep beside him. Then the lieutenant rises and goes to the barrel for some water. He takes a sip – for he must take as little as he can to conserve the supply, restocking will be tricky now. As he turns he sees Kasim bent low over Ibn Mohammed’s body. In the dark shadow, the slaver heaves a sob. The men are talking.