Page 11 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘You’re staring into space as though the ether is telling you things,’ Minna said.

I’d been waiting for her and Clem with my back against three copper heating pipes, and a sapling apple tree in front of me. Because they had been force-grown, they were blossoming in the heat of the hold. When I opened the little door in the case, the blossom blew out in the warm draught and brought the smell of spring with it.

‘Just vacancy – sorry. Have a pipe.’

She sat down next to me. ‘Markham’s on his way. How’s your leg, is it painful?’

‘The heating helps,’ I said. I watched her for a second. ‘You’ve gone green, are you seasick?’

‘A bit. It’s, um . . . it seems only to be in the mornings, though.’ She didn’t look pleased, only worried.

‘Well, go gently, whatever happens,’ I said, thinking of all the things it was possible to fall off or slip on: the ladders, the deck, which was slick with brine; the boxes stowed far short of Navy-fashion in the mess room.

‘I’ll lose it even if I sit perfectly still suspended in mid-air. I always lose them. Don’t tell Markham. Horrible to get him excited and hopeful for nothing.’

‘I won’t.’

‘Thank you. You don’t – disapprove?’

‘No. Christ, Minna, it’s yours until it makes an appearance in the world. It’s yours in the same way your liver is; you wouldn’t catch me telling you what to do or not do about that. I’d suggest not drinking heavily or taking a lot of opium, but you know.’

She laughed. ‘This is assuming I don’t become hysterical soon and give the game away.’

‘I can’t imagine you hysterical.’

‘Watch,’ she said darkly.

‘Morning all,’ Clem said, sliding down the ladder with a happy spring that made both of us look at him a bit hard. He didn’t notice. ‘Right! Shall we get going with this cutting lark? Gosh, it’s lovely down here,’ he added. ‘Hardly know it was a ship.’

I gave them both some barking knives. ‘Right. The idea is, if you both learn to do this, there’ll be three of us who can, whatever happens.’

I took them through how to take a scion cutting from one of the established branches, and then how to pack them properly. We used moss and one of Clem’s map cases, because those were what we would have with us in Peru.

‘God, it’s fiddly,’ Clem murmured. ‘Can’t we just take seeds?’

‘No.’ I paused while I checked his last cutting. It was jagged. ‘Calisaya cinchona seeds sport. Like apples and tulips. The daughter plant from a seed won’t necessarily be the same type as the parent. It has to be cuttings.’

‘Oh good. What a time to be a total arts and crafts duffer,’ Clem said.

‘You’ll be all right. That’s why I’ve got thirty apple trees. Plenty of practice – stop holding that knife like a hammer.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s try again. You were called to Leadenhall Street a few days ago, weren’t you?’ he said suddenly, which was his version of subtly.

My ribs caught, but I was too good at lying now to let it into my voice. After years with the East India Company I was an expert. ‘I was. Just Mr Sing. He used to be my manager. It was a chat and a cup of tea, or he would have called you too. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t addicted to opium or anything.’

‘Oh, of course,’ he said, soothed. He hesitated. ‘Only it – hasn’t escaped me that it’s odd for the India Office to have asked me.’ Minna looked up too. ‘I mean if the idea is to fetch out these trees, a geographer is a funny sort of choice.’

‘A geographer who speaks Quechua and has lived in Peru on and off for years. There aren’t many of those. You can’t do this stuff without an interpreter.’

‘I suppose,’ he said.

‘Let’s try a new tree,’ I said.

The telegram had arrived at the Spanish Embassy. I hadn’t told anyone but Clem and Minna I was there and so I knew it was from Sing, though he didn’t sign it.

The old East India Company had become the India Office, but really only in name. There were grand plans in Whitehall, said the papers, but for now it was even in the same building as it always had been. East India House was on Leadenhall Street, a vast place with a colonnaded front and a statue of a mounted Britannia on the roof. There was a confectionery shop next door and like always, the man at the main desk had a sugar mouse sitting in the middle of his ledger.

Nationalisation wasn’t something any of us had thought would happen, but it had, last year. The East India Company, a private venture with the means and power of a country, a nation state of traders, had been taken almost overnight by the British Government and turned into a branch of the civil service. It had happened in the wake of the war in China; one war too many started by the Company and ended by the Navy. Parliament said they had made a de facto relationship law; Sing and the old traders called it the greatest robbery of the millennium. I kept quiet about it, because I was glad. It gave me a funny unfashionable confidence in Mr Palmerston and his government. Anyone clever enough to steal the EIC from a whole board and company of flick-razor bastards like Sing was certainly qualified to run an empire, just as much as anyone whose name had ended with Caesar.