Page 53 of The Bedlam Stacks

His shoulders stiffened as though that was a horrible thing to hear. I had been going to guess at dates, but I stopped, uncomfortable and suddenly not sure if the friends of older relatives here had an importance they didn’t to me. He didn’t explain why he was interested and only sat looking down at the letter for long enough to have read it twice more. Instead of throwing it in the fire, he folded it up again along its old lines and then once more, to make it small enough, and put it into his breast pocket.

‘Is it important?’ I said. ‘I could find out what happened to him exactly, when I get back.’

‘No. None of my business, sorry.’ He flicked open his book again and wound up a pollen lamp to sit on the opposite page, then the new one, the one made from the clocks I’d bought, to hold like a torch. The clockwork was loud in the quiet. His sight must have been bad, because on a white page the two lamps together were almost too strong.

‘I’ll go to bed,’ I concluded, too tired to think in a straight line any more, never mind around intergenerational connections across the Atlantic. There was no need for any more hot water, but he put another log on the fire.

I pulled the chapel door to behind me but not shut, because the latch was rusty. Through the glass pipe that came up just beside the frame, a little translucent salamander glided by on the current, smiling, then disappeared into the dark further along the wall where the pipes were only a gleam. In the kitchen, Raphael was leaning forward, watching the fire with his wrists hanging from his knees. Where I was standing to change into my night things, as close to the pipes as I could get without burning myself, I could still see him, just through the half-inch gap between the door and the wall. He took out the letter again and I thought he would burn it, but he only sat holding it open. Abruptly he held it wide of himself. I didn’t understand until he set it down and pressed his hand over his mouth so that he could cry without making any sound. I tipped the door open, just enough to make it creak. It made him jump. I put my hand out to say I hadn’t meant it to.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Aren’t you going to bed?’

‘Not now, no.’ I went back to sit with him, then put my arm across him when he tried to get up. ‘If you say you’re going out for firewood or something I’ll follow you, so don’t, my leg hurts and I still can’t breathe properly.’

He looked like he might argue, but didn’t. I leaned both hands on the hook of my cane.

‘Have you been to India?’ he asked after a while. The grit and the broken stones in his voice were gone. He sounded much younger. The fire clicked.

‘I have. I used to live there. I was an opium smuggler.’

‘You were a what? I thought you were in the Navy?’

‘I grew up in the Navy. But the family have always been gardeners and I was sharked quite young by the East India Company and their expeditionary arm. But India, yes. For about a year. I used to oversee a poppy plantation and then take the opium to China. It’s nice there. Hot, but nice.’

‘Is it common, then, to . . .’

‘To live in India, very. Part of the Empire. Everyone speaks English, so it’s an easy place to live.’ I hadn’t meant to say any more, but he scanned the cinders for something else to ask, so I tried to sift through some memories of it. ‘Most people go in through Malabar. Which is . . . the army garrison, so every second white man is in a red coat. It’s bloody odd, it feels like being on a battlefield, but there’s no fighting there now. And there are lovely guesthouses and hotels everywhere, for all the East India Company clerks. It’s rich, because everyone from abroad spends their money there. I think it’s the best place I’ve ever lived. The first week, before I moved north, I had to wait for my manager at a hotel, and there was a swimming pool. In the room. And they had a tame tiger in the foyer. It was a sort of joke on new people. Everyone thinks it’s a rug and then it sits up and answers to Gregory.’

He smiled. ‘Is there such a thing as a tame tiger?’

‘Tame or stupid, I don’t know. It liked it when guests gave it wool to play with. And then if it got used to you, you’d open your door in the morning and outside would be a hug from an unexpected tiger.’ I paused, feeling strange, because I’d never told anyone about it. There had been no one to tell. Charles hated that I’d left the Navy and wouldn’t hear a word about the EIC, and Clem and Minna knew it all already, because they had travelled even as children and had no sense of the exotic, only the less worn-out. ‘I’ve forgotten a lot. If you go somewhere . . . very different to home, even for a long time, the memory feels like a dream when you get back. But the general impression is hot and flowers everywhere.’

In the time I’d been talking, his breath had evened out again but there was, like the stacks, a brittleness in him and a glass core. I didn’t ask him again what was wrong. It was none of my business. He twisted his wrist to move the cross on his rosary out of the way, then pushed his abused fingers together, slowly. I didn’t think he was praying.

‘All right?’ I said, even though I knew he wasn’t.

‘Mm. See you in the morning.’

EIGHTEEN

He didn’t see me in the morning. For the next few days, he was already out before I was up, and still out well after I’d gone to bed. The snow stayed. Each morning, the top layer was crackly where it was frozen fresh and the only evidence I was sharing the church with anyone at all was the single line of footprints that went out to the forest and, sometimes, if the wind fell, his pollen wake weaving between the trees on his way to the markayuq. I wanted to ask if he was avoiding me, but it was a stupid question, because he was, and he was straight enough to say yes and keep on doing it.

I was avoiding dark windows but I had to look at myself shaving. There were marks on my neck, bruises like I’d expected, but there were grazes too. Whoever had caught me had been wearing something rough over their hands. The bruises down my ribs were nearly black in places, deep, though the ache was a clean sort and I didn’t think anything was broken. Having spent my twenties perpetually battered and flung about it made me feel more like myself again, but the feeling of being watched kept coming back when I went outside in the mornings. I didn’t go near the border again. Instead I went to see Inti. When I asked her to speak some easy Quechua for me, we were both surprised to find that I understood. I couldn’t have produced it, but in the last few days of hearing it here and there, something in my mind had clicked back into place. Dad had told all his fairytales in Quechua. I’d forgotten that, even if I’d remembered the stories. Hearing it aloud after so many years felt like organ music coming up through the glass deep under my feet.

There was a lot of milking of goats too, not just Inti’s. There weren’t many other people about during the day who were healthy enough to do it. Apart from the fishermen, most of the fitter people worked on Martel’s farm, the produce of which fed the village; all except for the cocoa, which was shipped downriver to Azangaro and sold for five English pounds per stone and a half. Three or four farmers took care to confirm the numbers, as though it was a fortune, which it wasn’t. Sometimes I saw Raphael in gardens, with laundry or broken crockery, or stitching tipped towards the sun in a way that made me sure he was quite near-sighted. And always, in the end, back to the endless waxing of the statues. If I’d been braver I might have gone to find him, but whenever I thought about it, I got one of his thousand-yard stares. It made me very glad of Inti. Without her, those days would have been a bubble of isolated silence. Everyone else was too busy or shy to talk to me and I was too feeble to help with any proper work.

I’d almost convinced myself that Clem wouldn’t come back. When he did, early on the fifth morning and completely without fanfare, having slept the previous night in one of the warm salt caves about a mile upriver, I was so surprised I dropped the cup I was holding. He laughed and hugged me. There was frost on the lining of his hood that crackled when I squeezed him.

‘Em! I was sure he would have murdered you by now.’

‘I was sure you’d have been eaten by a bear. How was it? Are you all right?’

‘Oh, fine, but I do smell. Sorry.’

I put him in a chair and ran a bowl of hot water for him from the stove as he started to peel off his coat, then had to start the long process of easing down onto my knees to pick up the pieces of the cup. I found the biggest and collected the rest up into it. ‘Did you manage to see Martel?’

‘I did. He seemed very surprised to see me; I think he was convinced Raphael would do us in too. Anyway, I wanted to come straight back, but he shouldn’t be far behind me. Two days or so. He’s bringing men.’