Page 13 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘Get myself shot somewhere public?’

‘No, get Markham shot somewhere public. A promising young knight of the realm with a pretty widow will make the front page. You wouldn’t even be in the obituaries at the back.’

‘He’s my friend, you know. We were in the Navy together.’

‘I know. I believe you met because he had you flogged.’

‘You once had me kidnapped and traded for a racing camel, but I still wouldn’t chuck you to a load of angry Indians.’

He sighed. I’d known him for years before he admitted that it hadn’t been an accident and he did indeed have a policy about not promoting expeditionaries who couldn’t get themselves back to Cairo from a Tuareg slave train in the desert. ‘Just fetch the trees,’ he said. ‘That would be far simpler. On that note.’ He opened the file he had in front of him. ‘What do you know about New Bethlehem? Did your father and grandfather keep notes?’

‘They didn’t really. I know it’s . . . a mission colony, or it was originally. It’s high up, a good few thousand feet, and it’s on the edge of an alpine section of the forest. There’s a river, but I don’t know the name of it. The cinchona trees nearer the Andes were killed off because traders barked them so badly, but if this place is as remote as I think, not many people will ever have reached it to look for more. It will be a decent starting place for an expedition further into the rainforest, anyway. And I know they’ll know my name. My father was born there. But that’s all.’

He had listened carefully. ‘Did they ever have any problems with Indians? I mean forest tribes, not the villagers. Were they ever attacked?’

‘Dad never mentioned anything like that. But I was eight when he died. I didn’t get a very objective account. Honestly, though, if there are territorial tribes there, then tough,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to cope. New Bethlehem is the only place we can ask for without being obviously there for quinine. It might just about fly that I want to find some coffee and visit people my father knew, but if we try to go anywhere else, no.’

He was quiet while he thought about it. ‘Look, I know it sounds steep when we stack it up like this, but if you want to be paid, you need to bring back something. Whether it’s the trees or the army’s reason to go. I notice that Heligan is in danger of falling to ruin. Do this and I will see to it that you have work afterwards.’

‘Sing,’ I said, ‘did you wait to do this so I’d be good and desperate when you asked me?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘I missed you.’

‘I’m glad you see it that way.’ He settled forward on his forearms. ‘Merrick. I would suggest that Backhouse’s main problem was not Indians or quinine suppliers but that he was twenty-one and an idiot. You’re old Company; you know how this sort of thing is done. If you can’t go around, find someone to take you through those woods if you have to. Find some Indians, lie, cheat, bribe, use your father’s name, sleep with the chief, I don’t care. This is smuggling, like everything else we ever did. There’s always a way.’

‘I know.’

‘Feeling all right about it?’ he said, which he had never asked me before. ‘Aside from having been chosen for exactly the wrong reason for what might be suicide.’

‘I wish the papers weren’t full of shipwrecks and frostbitten bits of the Franklin expedition, but you know.’

He smiled, but only enough to show his incisors. I realised suddenly that he must have had not just edges knocked off but whole walls blown through by the dissolution of the Company and its restructuring. It seemed ridiculous now that I hadn’t written to him to ask how he was. ‘You’re not off to find the Northwest Passage on a thousand-mile plain of ice populated by six Esquimaux and an owl. It’s only Peru.’

‘No, I know.’ The Illustrated London News had run an article a few days before, with pictures of things that were recovered. They had found a watch, some zigzag-pattern mittens, a pair of reading glasses, snow goggles, bone tools; ordinary things that people had had in their pockets, things made at home to help, things the natives had given them. Humanity on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to get the Franklin expedition to where it needed to go and the only real difficulty had been the weather. In the far north of Canada, there had been no one trying to shoot them, no animals that could hurt them, not around their guns, no diseases to slow them down. There would be no one trying to help us and the interior of Peru was even less charted than the Arctic. ‘I’ll try.’

He nodded. He would never tell me if someone in the upper management had threatened his job if this were to fail, but it was a pressure behind the quiet.

‘The Great Eastern is launching today, did you see?’ I said.

He tipped his eyes towards the window, more like his old self. ‘Monstrous thing.’

‘Have you been to look at it?’

‘No,’ he said, as if I’d asked him if he had been in a pornography shop.

‘It’s not monstrous. It’s the biggest ship that’s ever sailed, with the most powerful engine that’s ever been on the sea. It could make the run to Australia without stopping to refuel, with four thousand passengers. Honestly, it’s incredible. Come with me and see it off. It’ll be good, there are people all up and down the river now.’

‘I’ll be impressed when the bloody thing sails to Mars. Send me a telegram the day before you go if all’s running to time. I’ll meet you in Ceylon in May.’

I frowned. ‘You’re coming?’

‘This is the India Office. Its employees do occasionally make an appearance in India,’ he said, annoyed to have been caught fretting. He sighed. ‘Get it done, please. And stop waxing lyrical about maritime pedantry before the summer or I’ll feed you to a tiger.’

So I took a cab up to Greenwich by myself, into the crowds there. The ship was impossible to miss. It was ten times bigger than anything else on the water, almost too big for the bends in the river. When the tugs guided it out, the cheer felt like it was coming up through the ground. There were four anchors chained to the prow, each one ten times the height of a person. Each link in each anchor chain was taller than me. Thousands of people stood on deck, waving and laughing. I had a horrible feeling that it was all too big and it would sink, but it didn’t. It sailed gently out of sight, out towards Gravesend and looking wrong because it was so leviathan it didn’t belong with anything else. I followed it in the papers because more and more it mattered that not every stupid endeavour ended frozen to a glacier with the Illustrated London News reporting what it had in its pockets. Off Dover there was a fire aboard, but the ship was so big that not even lightning would have bothered it and news came the following week that it had reached America seamlessly, ahead of schedule.

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