Page 63 of The Bedlam Stacks

‘No, I’m up to my eyes in opium.’

‘I’ve got to catch a ship in an hour.’

‘What?’

‘They don’t need me here,’ he explained.

‘You mean you were here with me and they don’t need me any more. You can come with me to England. I’m not having you go where you don’t want to.’

I saw something go from him; it was hard to say what, but when he spoke, it was more slowly than he usually did, and although his voice was still small, the measure of it was grown up. There wasn’t any little boy left in him.

‘There are things you wouldn’t do, if you had a motherless child waiting at home. Or with you. Places where you would turn back.’

‘What are you talking about? I won’t be going anywhere. Probably never again.’

‘You will.’

‘You know you can’t make sweeping statements just on the strength of being exotic and foreign.’

He nearly laughed. ‘Of course you’ll go. You must. People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.’

‘Someone’s cryptic this morning. And I’m not a bee.’

‘I know. Sorry. I’m not much good at all this. Look, the point is, I’m going home. I’ve already been away too long. I know you’ve never asked, but I do have a family. Lots of brothers. They’ll be worried. This is my address.’

He gave me a sheet of Japanese, the flyleaf of a Bible. The picture signs were almost the same as Chinese and I could understand, though I couldn’t have said them aloud. Clover Castle, in a place called Longshire.

‘You needn’t write, but there it is, if there’s an emergency. Or . . . well. The post isn’t very reliable anyway.’

‘I see,’ I said.

He looked hard at a point on the floor as if he were suddenly dizzy.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I will have forgotten in the morning,’ he said.

I shook my head slightly. Will have forgotten; there were English children who couldn’t have said that.

He lifted his eyes again. They were full of tears. ‘I had better go or I’ll miss the ship. I’m glad to have met you, Mr Tremayne.’ He gazed around the room once more as though he were leaving it after years, not hours. I saw him catch himself and put on a smile. What he would look like in his thirties was clear, just briefly. He would be a late-bloomer, odd until middle age, but then he would come into himself properly and he would be lovely. I could feel them, all the lost years I’d never see.

‘Keita, wait—’

‘No,’ he said, but he stopped. He was struggling with something. In the end it made him thump the doorframe. ‘I don’t like doing this, but I don’t want you to have to live thinking there was no reason.’ He was looking at my leg where it was set straight with a cage under the blanket. ‘You don’t know what this means yet, but listen anyway. When Mr Markham crosses the salt at Bedlam, you must not. But it’s no good saying must not to anyone, so I’ve made it cannot. I’m so sorry, but if you were well, you would go with him and I want you alive at the end of it all. This was the only way I could think of to make sure of it.’

Everything had warped into the feeling of an opium dream and even knowing I was awake, I couldn’t tell if I was hearing something real. ‘What? How do you know Clem?’

‘I don’t. Get some sleep. Good luck.’

I could have made him stay. He was a little boy; if I’d told him not to talk such nonsense and to sit down, he would have. But I was opium-fogged and I felt like I was drowning, and I couldn’t gather together the presence of mind to do it.

TWENTY-ONE

Peru, 1860

The church was echoing without anyone else in it. The dark pushed up against the windows and so did the cold. I kept the fire going and the pipes running, but although I’d plenty of things to do – half-finished sketches and Spanish to learn – I couldn’t settle to any of it and ended up by the window instead, with its diagonal view of the border and the streams of light where animals paced beyond the salt line. I saw a bear, but never anything tall enough to be a person. All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian’s Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground. I wondered if it was perfectly policed.

Eventually the lamps’ clockwork ran down and I had to wind them up again. Moving about brought me back to myself and I was thinking about cooking something when the bell in the nave jingled.