Page 60 of The Bedlam Stacks

My cheekbone still throbbed and I stood paralysed for what felt like minutes and minutes. I wished he hadn’t hit me. It was hard to see past that and hard to know if the reasons for letting him go were good ones or just an excuse for revenge.

‘Yes,’ I said finally. Even as I said it, I had a terrible feeling that I’d decided for no better reason than that this was what Sing had told me to do, and the mountain air had stolen any capacity I might have had to imagine not doing it. I looked without meaning to at the jagged black shape outline beyond the town in stars and had a stupid vision of a cave somewhere in those razor crags where the logic of everyone who had tried to take things from this place lay stacked in little glass boxes. ‘You’re right. You’d better go to bed for now. I’ll play cards with Inti. They can’t stay here, there’s nowhere for them to sleep. They’ll have to go eventually.’

He let his breath out. ‘Yes. Yes, good. We’ll try and keep it a secret once I’ve got the cuttings.’

‘What are you two nattering about?’ Inti asked as we came through.

‘Gardening,’ I said. I dropped into the chair next to hers and played cards with them while Clem went to get some sleep. They lasted much longer than I’d hoped, long into the night, but eventually they went home. Before they left, Inti made me swear not to go anywhere, so I swore and then went to wake Clem.

As he disappeared into the dark, I stood in the doorway with both hands on my cane, waiting to see the pollen flare as he went into the woods. Although I was breathing and my heart was beating, my ribs felt hollowed, like there were no organs left there, having all been scooped neatly out and left in canopic jars elsewhere. The pollen flared beyond the markayuq. I went out a little way to see the town. The last week had been like being allowed to visit somewhere imaginary. I’d thought it was imaginary: the grim forest and the glass, the man who disappeared. People sang songs and told stories I knew from being a child, echoes from that gold jumble of half-memories that were all I had from before Dad died. Inti had said, welcome home.

I had no idea if I was helping Bedlam or if I’d just destroyed it.

TWENTY

India and China, 1857

(three years earlier)

The shelves in the Stacking Room at the Patna warehouse went up to twenty-five storeys. From the steps that zigzagged up the wall, there were gangplanks over the huge drop down to the floor. Checking crates fifty feet off the ground brought on a certain sharpness of mind that lasted for a long time afterwards. The crates were small and inside each one, the opium balls looked like rocks tucked in their sawdust, but if you cut one open, they were made of smooth, shiny gel that could be melted and smoked. I was cutting every fiftieth ball in half to check the consistency before we shipped everything down the Ganges to Calcutta, and from there, to China.

Beyond the high windows, fields and fields of poppies made white waves as the wind came in over the mountains. They were just starting to wilt now and the petals were everywhere. Someone was brushing them into piles against the wall where they had blown inside. Keita, my interpreter, who was twelve, was playing with one of the plantation boys and there was a burst of still-baby laughter as they fell over in one of the piles. It echoed up around the warehouse and I smiled. He didn’t usually play at all, which worried me sometimes.

It was a strange job. I had been hired originally for tea. In the forbidden districts in China, there were rare types that the East India Company wanted for its own plantations in India but the Chinese growers wouldn’t sell. When I’d first come, a year before, I’d been based in the Hong Kong office, at the mouth of the Pearl River, and had gone for weeks-long trips into the interior to steal samples. Those samples, though, had to be smuggled out and taken round to the Himalayas. We had struck an agreement with another EIC operation, who were shipping silk out of Canton – which was, if you were coming from inland China, on the way back to Hong Kong anyway. The smuggled tea went in with the silk cargoes. It had all been straightforward enough at first.

I’d never dealt with opium before, but the poppy fields were in the same region as the tea, and Sing had pointed out in his efficient way that I might as well take the opium round to China on my way in for the tea samples. Gradually the tea side of things disappeared and orders from the Company headquarters at Hong Kong hinged around looking after the poppy crops. After six months on the job, I was nine-tenths an opium smuggler. We made a run every month, starting in India, across the South China Sea, past Hong Kong and into the Pearl River, where, after seventy miles on the strange, murky water, we arrived at the Canton wharves and the silk warehouses. By that December, we had made the journey seven times.

The colossal distance soon seemed ordinary and easy enough, but every now and then tiredness caught up with me, which it did on the morning our steamer sighed past Hong Kong and into the massive estuary of the Pearl for the eighth time. I’d found for years that if I moved around enough and if I was tired enough, I stopped remembering how I’d got to be in a place. It felt as if I’d just appeared there. Trying to think of the voyage then, I couldn’t picture it. I felt as though one moment I’d been in the warehouse in India and the next here we were, again, on the ship, in China, three days and hundreds of miles away. It was nearly Christmas, just after the rainy season. The river was swollen and muddy and the water was viscous as it passed through our waterwheel. Despite not being very interested in the soggy scenery, I was sitting outside on the rail. I would have had to even in the pouring rain. Any crew coming in with something illegal needed a blond person to be conspicuously British under the Jack, to keep Customs officials from searching the ship. They weren’t allowed to touch British ships.

I watched Hong Kong go by. I could just see the office on the hill. The tripartite cross flag snapped out on the warm wind and I felt then as though I spent my life going past things and never inside. The East India Company had made me into a sort of gypsy. I didn’t dislike it, but just then, the miles I had to go before I would be able to stop seemed like too many.

My interpreter tapped me and gave me a rice cake with honey on it.

‘You haven’t eaten anything,’ he said.

‘Thanks. Share?’

He climbed up too. I’d found British clothes for him, so that he would obviously belong with me when we were with strangers. He wore them a lot more comfortably than port officials did and he had the knack of being always in a state of slight but not scruffy dishevelment. It implied that he had just come away from doing something useful.

A Customs ship glided by near us and we both watched it. I never felt completely safe, although we had never been stopped. The legal way to pay for silk was silver bullion, but if the EIC kept giving them that, Sing pointed out, it would end up paying more and more in real terms as silver devalued in China and became rarer in England. Opium, though, was an endless resource, and worth a thousand dollars a crate once it was on the Chinese mainland. When I’d mumbled that maybe opium wasn’t the best thing for people to trade, Sing had told me to get it into my stupid flowery head that the effects of goods were not the Company’s business. The point was favourable trade, and not crashing the British economy, and if one in twenty Chinamen had chosen to addict himself to something so idiotic, that, thank you, was his own fault. Availability of goods never forced anyone to buy them, however Gladstone might roar in Parliament. The devil could have roared at Sing and got nothing for his trouble but a newspaper in the face and a summary of the morning stock exchange.

One of the men on the Customs ship looked back at me, a flat look that said he knew exactly what we had in our hold – if it had been legal, there would have been no need to bother with a visible Englishman – but the ship kept going, away from us, towards one of the little jetties on the shore where a Chinese junk was waiting for inspection, one of its red sails stuck half-unfurled where a line had caught.

We came into a deep, cold shadow. I was still looking at the island and the Customs ship, but beside me, Keita leaned back.

‘Christ,’ he said in his adult way, which was all the odder because he was half the size an English boy his age would have been. He was a Japanese runaway who spoke fluent Chinese and English by means he had always managed not to disclose.

It was a British Navy ironclad, towering above our little clipper. It had five masts, the sails furled, and the gigantic waterwheels were stopped, but the engines were thrumming and there were still the last dying wisps of steam from the funnels. It must have just moved into place. I could see they weren’t manned or ready, but I felt nervous as we sailed past the gun ports.

‘They’re not ready to fire yet,’ I said, unnecessarily. ‘We’d better get out quickly, though. I think it will be today or tomorrow. They won’t hang about long.’ While I was talking, a little supply boat steamed up to the hull and started to load person-sized shells up to the waiting winches.

He thought about it. The hems of his mind dragged a long way behind him. It took a while sometimes for him to look at all the briars caught in them and find which were relevant. ‘I think today.’

‘Why?’

‘Just a feeling,’ he said. He had a long history of accurate feelings. He always knew when it would rain. He always knew when Sing was coming, even though Sing was a great believer in arriving unannounced. I’d never asked him straight out if he had some real sense of things to come – it felt too close to an accusation of madness – but it had happened often enough now for me to pay attention. He shifted anxiously as if he didn’t like being near the guns either.

‘Before or after we get through?’ I said.