The Detective and the Devil

by Lloyd Shepherd

  ‘It is a society appointed by the Crown to pursue natural philosophy and investigation,’ she said, smoothly. ‘For the benefit of King, country and mankind.’

  ‘Indeed? Then I am blessed by the presence of its representatives, am I not?’

  ‘Blessed, sir? I think not. We will have you classified and registered before the sun goes down.’

  The man sat back in his chair smiling and rubbing the stubble on his cheek. Then he stood and went towards the kitchen. Before he got there, he turned to Charles.

  ‘Your wife is handsome and clever. There must be something about you. You may stay in my house.’

  He went into the kitchen. Charles looked suddenly angry.

  ‘His tone is insulting,’ Charles said.

  ‘He meant no disrespect.’

  ‘One does not make so free with remarks about a man’s wife in London.’

  ‘He is not from London. We shall seek to adapt ourselves, as any creatures must when in a new environment.’

  The man came back from the kitchen. ‘My name is Abigail, sir,’ she said. ‘Now, you have our names. Might we have yours?’

  He looked at her while she spoke, and she saw that this man was a consumer of women as well as a charmer of them. His eyes twinkled with the crackle of male energy. She found herself liking him enormously. So refreshing, this lack of manners.

  ‘My name is Seale, ma’am. Robert Francis Seale. I am the assistant storekeeper here, with the rank of Captain.’

  ‘And you are an admirer of Mr Horace Walpole?’ said Abigail.

  ‘Not I, madam.’

  ‘Your house has rather a striking name, Captain Seale.’

  ‘Yes, but it is not mine. My wife must have been an admirer of this Mr Walpole. I confess to not having read his works. I never did understand the reference.’

  ‘Forgive me, but your wife is deceased?’

  ‘Yes. She fell ill, soon after we were wed. Her name was Harriet.’

  It was an odd little echo, the name Harriet. A reminder of Wapping, so many thousands of miles away, where John Harriott might already be dead.

  Stop it, she told herself, dismayed by the way her mind ran along such dark rails.

  ‘You have always lived on the island?’

  ‘My family has been here for some five generations. I was sent to school in England when my father died.’

  ‘To what part of England?’

  ‘Marlow. I chiefly remember the cold and the rain. I came back here eight years ago. I do my work, I drink my drink, and since I lost poor Harriet I make as free as I possibly can. It is a lonely life, but not a terrible one.’

  ‘You know the island well?’

  ‘Better than anyone! I have these past eight years been charting it extensively; I have my own little boat to explore the shores. You won’t find better maps than mine, Horton. I could show you some likely places for growing weeds.’

  They made small idle chatter as the night came down, and grew comfortable with each other. Money was exchanged, and as the evening aged Abigail found herself cooking a meal for the two men, who talked in the parlour. It felt good to her to be cooking again, after so many weeks and months of travelling, of eating poor food prepared by a steward who had cared little for taste. Making something fresh and tasty was a positive pleasure.

  Outside the window, it was night on the island. When she looked into the glass and saw her face reflected, there came a single moment of fear. Might someone be looking in at her, even now? Might she move her face forward and look into the glass and see the eyes of someone looking back at her – the same someone who wanted her dead back in London? The same someone who had smashed in Rat’s poor face with the poker from her own fire?

  Her husband laughed in the Castle’s parlour. Quite suddenly, his laugh was not a happy sound.

  1773: THE YEAR MINA BAXTER’S FATHER DIED

  Her father was angry with her, but here at the foot of Halley’s Mount she could forget that and feel the warm grass on her bare back, the sunlight on her blushing face and the hot, hot skin of the man who had just made love to her.

  The sky was so blue and so endless. Once again she imagined floating up into that sky, up and away from St Helena, this beautiful island prison in which she was trapped by obligation and custom. It had been the cause of her latest disagreement with her father. She wanted to leave the island – not forever, just to see England, to spend some of the money which she knew was hers by right. But her father had said she was too young for such a trip – that she was needed here, in any case.

  Perhaps she could escape with this man beside her, into the cold North. Or would he take her up into the sky, in one of those balloons she had read about and had even thought of building? The two of them floating to England on the incessant bloody wind.

  His name was John Burroughs, and he was a captain in the island militia. His body was as thick and squat as one of the giant tortoises that lived on the island, his hair was as red as Company wine, his hands as hard as ship wood and as gentle as the silk which was her only hobby.

  ‘That was nice,’ she said, looking round at him lying naked on the ground.

  ‘Nice?’ John said, and running her eyes down his body she noticed that he was already thinking about taking her again. ‘That was more than nice, Mina. I don’t know what you’ve been reading, but whatever it is you should read some more of it.’

  She reached for him with her hand, and he moaned delightfully, and although the sun was still high and the grass was still warm, she was no longer thinking about those things.

  It was falling dark by the time she walked back to the old Dutch fort, leaving John to walk alone down to James Town. He knew nothing of the fort or what lay beneath it, nor would he ever learn. She may have been indulging herself in physical transports, but she would never transport herself enough to reveal her father’s secrets to one outside the family.

  Her grandfather’s secrets. Her grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s secrets. Not her secrets, of course. They had never been hers. And yet this baleful inheritance was all she had. Stuck on this island she had never left. Her mother had told her when she was a child that she might leave one day, and she had painted word-pictures of the London she had herself been born in for her mesmerised daughter, a mighty place of dukes and duchesses, palaces and pleasure-houses, where everyone dressed in Paris fineries and there were dances every night. Her predecessors on the island had come and gone as they pleased. But not her father. He remained, stubbornly and desperately since the death of his wife, his daughter chained to him by unrelenting obligation.

  Somewhere between Halley’s Mount and the fort, Fernando appeared. He was never far from her, she found, even though he was supposedly busy working in the mine. But her father was ill, she reminded herself. There was probably less work for Fernando when that was the case.

  His broken face glared at her, the face which so terrified the children of the island but which she had been seeing since the day she was born. It bore no fears for her, although she found she resented it more and more.

  ‘What? What is wrong with you? Stupid bloody Cannibal.’

  He hated her calling him that. It was the name the island children had given to him, years ago. She used to wonder whether he watched them playing their games in the square of James Town, one of them pretending to be him, hiding one hand up a sleeve and making awful slobbering noises as he (it was always a boy) lumbered around trying to catch his playmates.

  ‘Were you watching us?’ she said to him now. ‘Were you? You disgusting fiend. You were, weren’t you?’

  Fernando was no longer glaring. He now looked crestfallen, like the dog she had never been allowed to have. He walked in front of her.

  ‘I see you watching me. I see it. You’re disgusting. I hate you!’

  She was screaming by now, her previous calm happiness punctured. As they climbed to the fort, she actually found herself sobbing. Fernando made strange noises, perhaps words in his o
wn tongue, perhaps sobs of his own. She pulled the heavy magnet from her bag, the thing she had to carry around with her wherever she went, and opened the door to the fort.

  It was so quiet inside. So still. None of the noises she’d come to associate with the fort; the noise of rock falling onto rock, of rock falling into the sea at the bottom of the fissure, the noise of her father shouting at Fernando, the harsh chemical smell from the processing chamber.

  The fort felt like it had died while she had been out in the sun enjoying John.

  She found herself unable to sob any more. A panic gripped her as she descended, passing through the big central chamber with the fissure cut through it, over the old wooden bridge and into the chambers beyond. Fernando scurried along beside her, very dog-like now, as if he too had detected the strange stillness in the place.

  There was a glow coming from the processing chamber, as if the life of the room were not yet extinguished. But when she entered and saw him lying there on his back, on the ground, she saw that the light had lied. There was no life in this room. Only the memory of it, and the bitter stench of almonds.

  With a shriek, she rushed to her father’s side and took one lifeless hand in hers. Her other hand she laid across his cold brow, recoiling from it as if it had been ice – though she had never seen ice, she had only read about it in the books. And then she laid her own brow on the bed, the top of her head against the still infinite immensity of her father’s side, and she wept for the life she had never had and the life that now, at last, was to come.

  She would never leave the island, now.

  She was watched by the Cannibal, whose eyes spoke only of love and loss.

  THE HORTONS GO EXPLORING

  The unpleasantness that broke out with Charles the next morning was of a piece with similar disagreements in London. Seale left early to perform some work at the stores, promising to return later in the day and show them around the island. Charles planned to look around James Town while they waited, and had suggested Abigail wait in Seale’s house while he did so, ‘with a book, perhaps’.

  She clapped her hands, once and sharply, and sat down in a chair in Seale’s parlour. She felt suddenly as drawn-tight as a drum. She had become furious.

  ‘Husband, sit thee down.’ She said thee with an acid tone, precisely as she meant to say it. He looked alarmed, almost as if she had raised a hand to him, but he sat down as she had ordered.

  ‘This will end, now, if you please,’ she said.

  ‘This?’

  ‘Husband: I am not some sensitive plant that must be preserved from wind and rain. I am not a milk-skinned duchess hidden from the farm-hands. I am a nurse, I am intelligent, and I am made of more robust substance than you give credit for. Look.’

  She held out her bare forearms (though not her upper arm, where Rat’s bruise lay beneath her sleeve). He looked confused.

  ‘Do you not see?’ she demanded.

  ‘See?’

  ‘My skin is brown from the sun. My hair is blonder than it has ever been. I have been changed by this voyage, husband.’

  ‘Abigail, I do not understand you.’

  ‘No, husband, you do not and nor do you attempt to. It is part of a woman’s burden to be misunderstood by men. Know this, then: I have sailed halfway around the world with you. Not to escape whatever awaited us in London. I am here because you are here. If either of us is in need of protection, it is not me.’

  She stood at this, and turned her back to him at the house’s front window.

  ‘Here we are on a rock in the Atlantic, thousands of miles away from home. Is this where you will squirrel me away? Hide me from the bad men? Wrap me in muslin and put me in a box so that none may harm me?’

  ‘But of course I wish to protect you from harm.’

  ‘But what am I? Have you considered that? Am I just the woman who cooks you meals and reads her books? Or am I something else? It has not been easy being a woman of my type: too poor to marry well, too educated to sell fish or pick hops or sew dresses or go into service. I became a nurse, but then you came along, and I stopped being a nurse. Or at least I became a wife to a man who needs a nurse.’

  ‘I need a nurse?’

  ‘You need a nurse, you need a confidante, you need a confessor. You are the most frighteningly unhappy man I have ever met, Charles Horton. Only one thing makes you happy, I do believe, and it is myself. So you preserve me from danger, you wrap me in muslin. And this will stop, husband.’

  She turned to face him again, and felt something surge up within her, as if a poison she had ingested long ago was finally being released into the open air.

  ‘Because never forget, husband, not for one instant, who is looking after whom.’

  There.

  She understood a new life was being laid out before them. The whale ship had been a voyage from one life to another, as if that great leviathan had been sacrificed for some new conception of themselves.

  If I ever return to London, I shall not need Dr Drysdale.

  Devils and demons had danced around her head, and now they were silent.

  ‘Well, then, wife,’ Charles said, coming towards her. She had troubled him, she saw. ‘It seems we have some things to talk about. Perhaps a walk in the sun?’

  James Town’s single street possessed only a handful of crossings. It ran up the valley, climbing into the interior of the island which, despite the heat of the morning, was once again shrouded in fog – or, perhaps, the peaks were high enough to pierce the clouds.

  The climate was still astonishingly pleasant, though breezy. The people out on the street seemed friendly enough, and greeted them with open faces and smiles. They seemed used to strangers.

  Abigail wondered as to the island’s population; it must run into the hundreds, perhaps even the low thousands. This was the only town, and it was the size of a good-sized village: a few dozen homes, a few hundred residents. The population must, she thought, be swelled significantly by the number of blacks, whose faces were everywhere, all seemingly occupied in some burdensome activity: carrying, cleaning, pulling, sweeping. Some of the Negro men were shirtless, and many of them had vivid white-and-pink scars whipped into their backs.

  There were groups of Chinese, too: mainly men, but the occasional small knot of women. She could not guess as to their provenance or purpose, and they took no notice of her or of anyone else. They talked among themselves and moved with single purpose.

  Charles said he had little plan other than to find Captain Edgar Burroughs, the new assistant treasurer. He had not asked the Governor for this information – for what would a Royal Society botanist have to do with a new Company bureaucrat?

  ‘But he may know we are here, already,’ said Charles. ‘I have little doubt that the message has reached Captain Burroughs of our arrival. I half expect the man to make himself known to us directly.’

  ‘We have no idea of the fellow’s appearance.’

  ‘No. None at all. He cannot be any more than forty years of age, by my reckoning.’

  ‘He has recently arrived, though. He may still have his London pallor.’

  Charles laughed.

  ‘We have lost ours, wife – as you have this morning demonstrated to me.’

  There was an idiosyncratic simplicity to the place, one at odds with Charles’s stories of unexplained murders, and with the older, murkier story that had been told by Sir Joseph Banks, and which Charles had retold to her in that little cabin on the Martha: of Edmond Halley’s visit to the island, the strange creature he had found there, the secrets which seemed to go back centuries.

  She thought of John Dee’s house in Mortlake. She had had time to give Halley’s strange tale much thought (when she had not been thinking of Rat, or Drysdale, or lingering with self-indulgent misery on herself). She had read something of John Dee and his library, though this reading had only brought confusion. Dee seemed to have a profound understanding and reverence for Euclid’s mathematics; indeed, seemed to find mathematics
almost the language of God. But he also had a parallel set of beliefs which she found mystifying: that the stars and planets were fixed in their orbits around the Earth, that their influences worked upon humankind through their rays, that there were angels and demons and that mankind could ascend to the Godhead through knowledge and, indeed, through mathematics. And that a man once ascended might live forever.

  She looked up at the peaks of St Helena’s interior, and remembered Edmund Kean’s Prospero casting spells on the stage at Drury Lane, back on that night when this strange narrative began. Had Prospero’s island been like this one? Had it had peaks and valleys, streams and rocks, green fields and jagged edges? Did another Ariel ride the winds up there, and was Caliban lurking within the hillside shadows?

  ‘I have been remembering Sir Joseph’s odd tale – of John Dee and this island,’ said Charles, interrupting her reverie.

  ‘And I was thinking of the play,’ she said.

  ‘The play?’

  ‘The Shakespeare we saw. It is a strange coincidence, is it not?’

  ‘Edmond Halley met Caliban, did he?’

  Her husband was smiling.

  ‘He met someone,’ she said. ‘I have read some of Halley’s work. He was not a man given to dramatisation.’

  ‘A mystery. One that needs looking into, does it not?’

  Now it was her turn to smile.

  ‘A mystery for you, and a mystery for me, husband?’

  ‘It would seem the fairest arrangement.’

  ‘Well then. I shall walk in the steps of Mr Halley, and you shall pursue your killer.’

  ‘We know not how Sir Joseph’s story overlaps with the melancholy circumstances of the Johnsons’ deaths. But there are secrets here, wife. I believe they are to do with money. Sir Joseph suspects they may be to do with natural philosophy. Let me follow the money. And you follow the science.’

  They came to a fine house in front of which sat a giant of a black man, watching the street. He scrambled to his feet when Horton asked him where they might eat some food, and so huge was he that this took some seconds.