Page 16 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘How?’

‘Feed the pheasants, Merrick.’

I hadn’t opened the old study door for years. Nobody had. It stuck at first. When it juddered open I expected the air to be stale, but it was fresh and cold because there was a hole in the ceiling and a spear of sunlight where some more roof tiles had fallen through. The desk wasn’t locked. It had three top drawers along its width and the first I opened was full of farthing coins and odds and ends Dad must have turned out of his pocket: bits of interestingly knotted string, a few white pebbles. The next was empty except for the letter. Caroline had told me exactly what to look for, although it wasn’t addressed. The envelope was old and much folded, the edges worn. One had torn a little and the creamy paper inside showed through. The only thing to say whose it had been was the seal on the back, from our grandfather’s signet ring. When I picked it up, it exposed the corner of a little book that had been tucked underneath. I lifted the book out slowly. I’d seen it before.

It was a storybook my father had made for me when I was four or five years old. There was no writing inside – he’d told me the story, not read it – only ink pictures, dotted with gold. He drew beautifully and he had used to read it by candlelight, which had brought out all the gold flecks in among the black ink drawings, made when he’d still more or less had the money for gold ink. He had bound it and covered it too, in velvet rather than leather, to make it soft to hold. I opened it, carefully, afraid it would crack.

The story was about a woodcutter who lived on the edge of a great forest, the sort that we didn’t have in England any more. The trees were drawn bleak and Schwarzwald-ish, in grey light. The woodcutter worked on the border and never strayed in, because it was dangerous, but one morning an elf came out and decided he quite liked the woodcutter’s company and stayed for a while. But eventually he heard bells ringing for him inside the forest, and went back. He didn’t forget about the woodcutter, but time being different for elves, he lost track, and when he came back, it was the woodcutter’s grandsons he found working on the edge of the forest, the woodcutter having died years ago.

I could remember Dad turning pages for me. He’d always worn the same coat, which was too big for him because he had inherited it from his father, so he had rolled the sleeves back. The lining was an elderly but beautiful Indian chintz, brilliant complicated birds on a blue background that had faded from wear and sun to nearly white. I could remember those cuffs but not his face.

As I let the book fall closed, a page slipped forward, not attached to the others. It was another panel in the story. I didn’t remember it. I couldn’t make it out at first and I had to raise it towards the light.

It showed a man trapped in a growing tree. The bark and the roots had twisted around him, holding him upright, though he was asleep or dead. They had angled him upward a little, as if they were offering him to the sky. There were vines around the roots and they were flowering. Haloes of uninked spaces around them made them look like they were glowing. The petals were moulting, and in the air where they fell, they had left tiny wakes of light like firework embers, done in hairlines of white ink. There was no sun. The man was facing mostly away, his head resting against a loop of the vine that twined around his arm. It had pulled the collar of his shirt down over his shoulder. Along his collarbone were freckles, marked on in the very faintest sepia, like someone had flicked ink at him and he had scrubbed it off days ago but not all its ghosts.

I couldn’t remember anything about a scene like that. In the story the elf had gone off to be with his friends and the woodcutter had, I supposed, lived happily ever after, since he’d had children and grandchildren. The way it was drawn was different from the other pictures in the storybook; more detailed, less like makebelieve. I touched the ink, suddenly sure he had drawn it – or the man at least – from life. It was too good to be imaginary. Where he had pressed hard the thick paper was still furrowed. I turned it over but there was no note to say when or where he had done it.

I slid the extra drawing back into the book, then put the book into his desk again and closed the drawer. Not sure how else to keep it flat and from any more damage, I tucked the letter into the paper pocket inside the cover of my sketchbook. Easing over the crooked floor and out to Gulliver, who was sprawled at the top of the stairs, I wondered if there was a grimmer version of the story he hadn’t told me: a dead man trapped in a tree somewhere and cradled in those glowing vines, somewhere so cold he was frozen perfect. The portrait had seemed like a memorial.

PART TWO

SEVEN

Peru

January 1860

We crossed Panama on a cart, very slowly to keep from damaging the Wardian cases, then set off on a Pacific and Orient ship which Minna had arranged for along the west coast. When we passed Lima, only its church spires showed above the cliffs, which formed in furrows like kapok roots. That wasn’t even halfway down Peru; we were going much further south. It took three days in the little ship, and at night, incredibly, the aurora australis sang out above the wispy clouds. Clem and I had stared at it for a long time before Minna came out with a compass to show us how it was spinning. Solar storm; we had better not get lost.

There wasn’t much of a port where we landed, just a little fishing town called Islay where the only food you could easily come by was guinea pig on a stick or some variation of ceviche, which was a kind of horrible fish thing marinated in something citrus until it tasted less like fish. Though they said at the inn that I’d be robbed if I wandered about by myself at the market, I risked it for pineapples and proper coffee, which they sold in abundance even though nowhere seemed to serve it as a drink. It was good to sit still in the baking courtyard with the innkeeper’s incurious llama and a mortar and pestle to crush up the beans.

The first bigger place was Arequipa, miles inland. It was high up – the road had climbed all the way – and the sky was a blue I’d never seen in England. Minna found us a pair of Indian boys to help with the mules, then booked herself into an old inn where the foundations were made of the irregular polygonal stones the Incas had built with. Although Clem tried to make her change her mind about not coming with us, she didn’t. She went up on the roof terrace to see us off but, because the houses were dense and the tiny streets so steep, we soon lost sight of her in the jumble of bright shutters and the hanging tapestrywork in the roadside markets.

Clem watched me bleakly sometimes after that. Although he soon got his brightness back, it was thin enough to see through. I would have paid it more attention, but the boys seemed impressed and worried by the idea of going all the way to Caravaya, and it was hard to stop them telling it to complete strangers, as if Caravaya were on Jupiter. They were only twelve and fourteen and I’d promised their mother I’d look after them, and I couldn’t think the chances of that would be better if the whole of Peru knew where we were going. A vicuña hunter rode with us for a while and the boys told him half-earnest and half-worried about how mad we were.

‘I wouldn’t,’ he said to me. Ahead of us, Clem was already flagging from the altitude and in no fit state to talk to anyone. ‘The forest there is haunted.’

‘Is it. Brilliant.’

The journey was easy enough at first. It was all long, straight, beautiful Incan roads. They were dotted with post houses and inns where you could change horses and mules or stay the night for not very much money at all, which was just as well because high summer in the highlands was still hovering around freezing after dark. The boys said it was far colder in winter. It was a bizarre climate. The days were hot and we were all always halfway into or out of jackets, but we soon learned to keep them on, because the sun was ferocious and after fifteen minutes unshaded, even my hands were sunburned. Being so pale, Clem suffered much more. The grass plains were dead, and for a reason I couldn’t understand, the local farmers had burned great tracts of it, so that the hills around us were a strange striped mix of yellow and soot black. But as soon as we came into any shade, at an inn or one of the bare twisted trees, it was hard to imagine being warm again and, being the least fit of everyone, I was shivering in a few minutes. It was fun though, until we reached Lake Titicaca.

By then, twelve thousand feet above the sea, I could feel the altitude too, a nasty pressure inside my ears as if someone were trying to crush the membrane inward. The towns became sorrier and fewer. Stopping was nearly always as miserable as pressing on. Scattered about were the ruins of much better-built places – drystone archways and tumbled pillars that led nowhere now except the water, where people bundled up in furs poled to and fro in boats and rafts made of reeds. Whatever the Incas had done to hurry along the economy was long gone now.

People in Arequipa had been burnished, but nobody looked healthy at the lake. They were all small but the poorest, the people who swept the courtyards of the run-down little inns, were tiny; some of the women barely reached my ribs and even Clem was a relative giant. We shared food at the inns, spread our money around, but I don’t think we helped much. It made me nearly angry with them, because it would have been less effort to get everything together and just walk to somewhere gentler. There must have been something keeping them there, laws or relatives, but the waste of it and the inefficiency were hard to watch. There must have been minds there just like Sing’s, people who could have been flint-hearted trader millionaires, but would never make a difference to anything because they were too occupied weaving the idiotic reed boats. Reeds, when the Amazon rainforest was just over the mountains. But there was no logging trade, or not a visible one. Three decent engineers and a proper businessman could have sorted it all out in a month, but something about the place made me think that they never would.

It took me a while to realise that we were irritable partly because of the altitude. It dragged at everything in a thick, chemical headache, but I could have lived happily enough with that if walking even for a few yards hadn’t felt like sprinting a hundred. I woke up in the nights with my heart pounding like I’d run for my life and Clem was even worse. It meant we were both exhausted always, even before setting off in the mornings, and nothing drags at a journey like being too tired to look at anything. We tried not to push ourselves or the mules. They were industrious and enterprising in pursuit of the main scheme of their lives, which was escaping. It was difficult for Clem and the boys, but since there was about as much chance of my running after mules as skipping back to England, for me it was mostly a matter of finding a comfortable rock and something to read while I watched them rush about. We only managed a few miles each day and I started to worry about getting cuttings back. We’d only have a month on the return journey before they all died.

Although everyone else we saw was Indian, white men must have been common enough because there was no particular curiosity about us. People just smiled and kept on herding their llamas or their geese along the broad road. Before long I had the impression it was unobjectionable but still funny for us to be there, like camels in London.

On the far side of the lake was Azangaro, the last proper town before the Andes. What had been a pretty good dirt road became muddy in the light and frozen in the shade. A lot of people had passed through recently; it was to do with the war in Bolivia, though the boys were too young to know much about it. When the storm arrived, the sleet was cutting. It got down collars and into lamps where it made the flames flicker and hiss. By the time the town came into view, with its cobbled-together church spire that tipped at an angle, Clem had real altitude sickness and rode with his handkerchief clamped over his nose, blooming red every hour or so.

The town was a big cluster of doorless houses and straw roofs. Raggy curtains writhed over the thresholds, sometimes enough to see people inside, wrapped up and hunched round braziers on dirt floors. I sent the boys on ahead to find a post house. I hoped we hadn’t gone too far east for them now. The idea of stopping in a mud hut instead of somewhere with a proper roof was terrible. The wind howled and I had to keep my head turned to one side.

Clem groaned and half-collapsed. I caught up with him just in time to get my arm under his shoulder and keep him more or less upright. We rode like that, awkwardly, until the boys came back with a man. He was Spanish, with a good coat and two Indians. It was just then, just before he met us, that we turned the corner into what must have been the main square. The houses had doors and windows and there was firelight inside most of them. It wasn’t anywhere near dark yet, but the storm had folded everything into a twilight gloom.

‘We’ve been expecting you!’ the man called, and I was too cold and tired to ask who he thought we were. When he was close enough, he lifted Clem down. While they headed away, I started the painful business of getting down from the saddle too. I could do it, but the horse had to be understanding, because I had to dismount at a difficult angle and hold the reins to keep the weight off my bad leg. It hurt more each time.

‘You’d better come in,’ the man shouted back. ‘It’s not much but at least you won’t freeze. It’s just here.’