Page 22 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘A guide? You didn’t tell him about—’

‘No. I said coffee. The man’s from New Bethlehem.’ I paused. ‘At some point we’ll have to tell him what we want. There won’t be cinchona trees just lying around up there.’

‘You utter pigeon, Em,’ he said sleepily. ‘Of course we won’t. We’ll just go for a walk one morning. You do like to fuss.’

I tucked a blanket round him and then inched down on the foot of the bed, in the waving heat from the stove. The hook of my cane fitted nicely over the handle of one of the closed window shutters. Curious, I opened it a little way. There was glass in the frame. It was old and it rattled, and the cold seeped through its seals. We must have been at the side of the house, because the front faced the church and the back the way we had come over the plain. Outside now was the little tumble of the town and then, about thirty miles away, beyond more hills, the mountains. They were jagged and white, stretching in both directions until they were lost in the haze of bad weather. There was nothing inviting about them and no clear way through, although there must have been, if we were crossing them tomorrow. I pushed the shutter closed again and the glass stopped juddering now it was braced, but the wind hummed and howled in the roof. Something in the rafters made a kind of clucking rattle, and then there was a scuffle and a squeak.

‘What is that?’

Clem was asleep, or not worried enough by it to open his eyes.

‘Guinea pigs,’ said a voice, in English. It came from beyond the wall against which the headboard of the bed rested, from the next room, and it was so to the left of anything I’d expected that almost as soon as I’d heard it, I convinced myself I couldn’t have and there was a long silence while I tried to chase down the memory of the sound. If it had been real, it was so close to me that the man must have had his forehead against the wall.

I cracked. ‘Did you say guinea pigs?’

‘Listen. You need to go home. Or to another part of the country.’

I went to the wall. The house twisted and turned and I couldn’t put together a map of it well enough to know whose room it might be, even if I’d known who was where. ‘Why?’

‘It’s a waste of time,’ he said softly. ‘There is no way you’ll ever get out of the cinchona woods alive and with live specimens.’

‘We’re here for coffee.’

‘I just heard you talking, don’t be stupid. You need to leave.’

I laughed, my temple against the plasterwork. It was new and white. My shadow put its fingertips up to meet mine. ‘If I go home without having done this, I’ll never work again. I’d rather be shot by a quinine supplier, if it’s all the same to you.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you going to tell Mr Martel?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t answer.

‘Who is this? How come you speak English?’

There was silence after that. I waited, then jumped when there was a sharp thump that I recognised, right at a level with my head. It was the sound of someone throwing a cricket ball against the wall. I didn’t hold many intermural conversations, but I thought that it probably meant go away.

Clem tugged the back of my shirt. ‘Move, you’re blocking the heat,’ he mumbled.

I shifted to one side. ‘Sorry. All right now?’

He pulled the blanket over his head. ‘Sorry doesn’t make you any less of a pain, you know. If all this fails and we get shot because you gave us away, you can explain it to the India Office. Were you talking to me just now?’

‘No, there’s a man in the next room,’ I said. Clem was at an awkward angle, so I folded his pillow double and eased the new half under his head. The room was warming up, but slowly.

He was asleep. Wanting to let him spread out if he liked, I took the other pillow and the spare blanket and set up on the floor next to the stove.

It took me a long time to go to sleep. Somewhere in the ceiling, the guinea pigs scuffled. I still felt like I was having to push through mist to think. I wanted to believe that we had just stumbled over someone who hated the quinine suppliers enough to help strangers, and perhaps we had. But Martel had said the land at New Bethlehem was his, and he was rich, and Raphael had been with the Dutch, who had died in the forest. Those things spun and spun in my head but I couldn’t make them link up, and it kept me awake because it was maddening. All the doors in my brain had come down and locked. In the end I slept badly, sourcelessly afraid, my heart drumming.

EIGHT

The Indian boys ran away in the night. There was no note and no message to say why. They had taken the mules and the horses too. I strayed out into the frosty street to see if they were still in view, because it was early when I noticed they were missing, but they must have gone hours ago. There weren’t even tracks in the road; it had all been covered over by a new dusting of snow, disturbed only in one line of small footprints where a tiny girl wrapped up in a thick poncho and what must have been her father’s leather hat was going into the church.

‘It doesn’t matter about the mules,’ Raphael said when I told them over breakfast. Quispe looked disapproving that Martel had let him sit at the table with us. ‘You’d never get them over the mountain passes and you don’t want them on a boat.’ He spoke more slowly than Martel did, and far more clearly. I’d been tired even at the idea of sitting at a table with people who only spoke Spanish so early in the morning – except for one mystery English-speaker, though I was starting to think I must have dreamed that – but Raphael was so easy to understand that his Spanish was only a bit more work than Edinburgh English. It was a tiny thing, but it went a small way to soothing the loss of the boys and the animals, and I felt less unsettled. I’d forgotten what a knife-edge my mood sat on in the first few weeks in a new country.

‘I know, but I can’t walk,’ I said. I was opposite him again. They had set another place next to me for Clem, who was awake but hadn’t come down yet. ‘You might have to leave me here until I can find a horse.’

‘There are horses here.’ He glanced at Martel. ‘Quispe can come with us and bring them back.’