Page 12 of The Bedlam Stacks

I wasn’t surprised to find Sing in exactly the same office I’d left him in, although if anyone was going to be shifted about in all the changes, it was him. He was a slight Oriental. In western clothes he should have looked like someone’s butler, but he didn’t have the eastern manner or its over-politeness. He sat like an Englishman, straight, with one forearm across the hem of his ribs and the other elbow resting against that wrist. If there was anything left of his own country, it was buried. He wouldn’t say where he was from. His servant and his accent were Dutch and his first name was Iseul, but that only made me think of Cornish princesses.

‘Tremayne, sit down,’ he said, as if we hadn’t been out of touch for nearly two years.

I sat, carefully, not wanting to look too exhausted from the tiny walk up through the building. But Clem was right; I had been getting better in London, much better. He kept the house warm and he had towed me out to buy new clothes because, he said, the Spanish Embassy didn’t want me slouching about in a wax jacket that had probably seen action at Trafalgar, so now I was neat in black and grey, and a coat he had paid for with a blue cord collar. He had been buying gear for the expedition at the same time and it had been bizarre to see him order six shirts and four jackets all at once. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought anything new and I’d forgotten how thick unworn cotton felt.

Sing studied me. Although he wasn’t an expressive man I saw the dismay go through his eyes. I’d known I must have aged in the time we had been apart, but it was a shock to watch him notice it. He didn’t mention it. ‘So Markham seems like an idiot who signed up to all this in the interest of having a jolly good jaunt and discovering something irrelevant and Incan. Is that a fair summation?’ he asked.

‘He’s a geographer-anthropologist, not an idiot. Of course he’s interested in the Inca.’

‘In the context of expeditions like these, anthropologist and idiot are wholly interchangeable terms.’ His Dutch accent was gone now, except on perhaps one word in ten, where it could have been anything. He let his hands slip down to the file and rested his fingertips on the margins. ‘So, I haven’t invited him. I don’t think I can stand to talk to someone like that at this time of the morning. I’d be in great danger of having him transported to Australia.’ A ghost of a smile lined his eyes when I laughed. ‘Anyway. Cinchona trees; tell me how you mean to do it.’

I sat forward so that I could talk with my hands and trace shapes along the edge of his desk. ‘Seeds will sport, so we’re going to take cuttings. Those cuttings will need to be about two feet long for trees like this. We’ll pack them up in Clem’s map cylinders. The difficulty is getting them back across Peru in time. They need to be planted within a month. We’ll plant them in Wardian cases – those will be waiting for us at the port, in Islay; they’re too delicate to transport inland on dust roads – and then ship them to India that way. Even in cases they won’t survive very long at such low altitude, so the sea route is going to have to be direct.’

He frowned. ‘You won’t get many out in map cylinders.’

‘The point is to bring out viable scion cuttings of high-yield plants. Quality over quantity. If those are successful, more cuttings can be taken from them once they’re established in India. About Malabar? Clem said that’s where we’re going with them.’

‘What about it?’

‘Climate’s wrong. Do we have land in Ceylon?’

‘Yes.’

‘There please. Sheltered ground, nothing rocky, rich soil, lots of ferns, between four and five thousand feet above sea level. They’re very particular trees.’

‘That’s rather a—’

‘I’m telling you the conditions required for their survival. I was at Kew yesterday, and they’ve only confirmed all this. Previous efforts at transplantation have failed because insufficient attention was paid to their natural environment. That’s why the Dutch plantation in Java is such a catastrophe. It’s on a rocky hillside, no shade, wrong elevation – of course they can’t grow anything, even the hardy low-yield stuff. You’d do better trying to grow these things in a jar.’

He smiled a fraction and I realised he had wanted me to gardening-babble, to make sure I still could. ‘So, Ceylon,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll arrange it, then.’ Perhaps it was only that I was older now, but there was a fragility about him that seemed new; or perhaps it was new, and born of holding on to everything as the sand shifted under him. ‘You don’t look well,’ he said.

‘Well – I’m not fit enough to walk through the Amazon, no one’s saying I am. Clem wanted me to supervise, that’s all. But if you’d rather send someone else—’

‘I don’t care if you’re preserved in a jar of turpentine if he can get you there,’ Sing said. He paused. ‘We’re on the edge of quinine riots in India. The cost is madness now. We’re having to sell it at a loss just to keep the tea plantations open. The monsoons last year – did you see in the papers?’

‘No.’

‘Vast. Malaria everywhere.’ He shook his head once and then, in a way that sounded involuntary, ‘I had it too. It’s ridiculous. Half the plantation labourers have fled, the harvests are abysmal. Tea left on the plants because there’s no one to bring it in. Do you know how much of the trade revenue of the British Empire comes from tea?’

‘A lot.’

‘A lot,’ he said, tundra-arid and mostly to the file in front of him. He was quiet then and I saw him trying to decide whether or not to tell me anything else. Five years ago he wouldn’t have, but he looked tired now. ‘I think you’ll do it. But nobody else involved has any such confidence. The new managers here have . . . no concept of the correlation of risk and gain. They’re civil servants, not traders.’ When he said trader, it had a weight; he meant it in the way other people would say statesman. ‘What they know is what will fit into a morning briefing and that is as follows. The calisaya cinchona woods are remote in the extreme. The last expedition was Dutch; three men vanished in the rainforest and the survivor had to hide for so long that most of his trees died . . . only two made it to Java intact—’

‘Two would have been enough if he had just taken care of the damn things properly.’ Hasskarl was the worst gardener I’d met since one of my uncles had insisted ferns grew best in salt.

‘Oh, you know that, I know that, but the new managers think we live in the pinnacle of human accomplishment and if it hasn’t been done yet then it can’t be. What they do know is that Charles Backhouse’s whole expedition was lost before that, in ’fifty-one, along with fifty soldiers, to hostile Indians. Worse, they know we have no maps. Hasskarl didn’t get any – he didn’t go to the forest himself, and the men he sent in are dead. A guide brought him the trees. Said guide was then hunted by informers for the quinine suppliers and killed. Backhouse didn’t send anything either. The Peruvians must have maps, of course, but they’re hardly eager to provide us with nice charts to the only high-yield quinine forest in the world. So in their lofty and infinite W,’ he finished, with the worrying fluency he sank into sometimes when he was talking to or about his colleagues, something he did to prove they weren’t ever going to overshoot his understanding with slang or Latin, ‘the India Office has written the idea off.’

I frowned. ‘Then . . . how was this expedition ever approved?’

‘Markham was chosen because he’s a respected and capable member of the Royal Geographical Society, and he makes exceptionally good maps.’ He watched me for a long moment. ‘And you . . .’ He flicked his eyes to my cane. ‘On paper you’re going because your whole career with us has been difficult smuggling runs with difficult plants and because you have links to the area. But no one will be surprised if a crippled gardener can’t get it done, and you’ve no proper family and no connections, so it doesn’t cost us anything if you die out there. You’re a way for this office to save face.’

I would have been quicker two years ago. I might even have seen it the moment Clem came to Heligan. ‘This expedition isn’t really about the trees at all, is it? It’s about getting a decent map, for if – when – the army has to go.’

‘Yes.’ He wasn’t the kind of man who would report his unsuccessful efforts, but hanging heavy in the air around him were meetings and meetings where he had argued against the appointment of an anthropologically inclined geographer. I knew the sort he would have wanted to lead the thing. It would have been one of the old expeditionaries from the Company, someone fast who could shoot well, ex-cavalry – a bodyguard for the gardeners. ‘If you cannot reach the cinchona woods for whatever reason, then make a spark. There must be a political reason to send troops, however thin. You know how it is. Something small but inflammatory.’