The Book of the Heathen (29 page)

PART FOUR

24

I woke to the sound of voices and to someone wiping a cloth across my brow.

‘He's coming round.' It was Cornelius's voice. The wiping continued.

I had some difficulty opening my eyes, but when I finally managed this and was able to focus, I saw that I was in my bed. Cornelius sat beside me. Fletcher stood at the foot of the bed, in conversation with the deformed boy. Upon hearing Cornelius, he looked across at me, gave the boy some final instruction and told him to leave us. My vision remained fractured. My face ran with sweat. I felt beneath my sheets; someone had undressed me. There was an odour of sickness in the room, of medicines and vomit. Cornelius wrung out a cloth into an enamel bowl.

I tried to push myself upright, but was unable to, and my head spun at even that small effort. I started to retch and Cornelius pushed the bowl beneath my chin. Nothing materialized and my throat felt sore from the effort.

‘I collapsed,' I said, my voice a dry whisper.

‘We know. Nash sent for us. We found you in the empty chapel.'

I struggled to remember what had happened, what I had seen.

‘Too much drink,' I said. ‘Last night.'

‘Last night? That was three days ago. You've been delirious and barely conscious for all that time.'

I shook my head. ‘Last night. Klein and Nash at the chapel.'

‘It's painful for you to speak. You were sick. River fever, Fletcher reckons. I agree with him. We've been treating you. We sent to the Belgians for whatever they had. That was the boy's errand.' He indicated the bottles and jars arranged on my bedside table.

‘Three days?' I said. I tried hard to recall if anything of the time remained with me. Nothing came.

‘Nash said you went inside with Klein. He left the two of you together. He saw Klein later, and the man said something to raise Nash's suspicions. He went back to the chapel, and there you were, on the floor in the darkness. You must have gone inside, passed out, fallen and hit your head.'

‘Klein was there,' I whispered.

‘Whatever.'

‘Frere?' I said.

‘Still in the gaol. Nash has finished with him. Now we're just waiting.'

‘For what?'

‘For what we all expected. He's being sent to Stanleyville to stand trial there. The Belgians are relinquishing some of their judicial powers.'

I felt the last of what little strength I still possessed drain from me. Cornelius lowered my head onto my pillow. I turned into it and felt its wetness.

I slept for several hours longer.

When I next woke, it was dark. Fletcher had gone, and Cornelius sat alone at the foot of the bed, asleep, a book face-down in his lap. I watched him, making no sound. I tried to remember everything that had been said earlier and it all came back to me. I felt the remaining tremor of my limbs. I took one of my hands from beneath the sheets and held it to my face. It, too, shook, and the skin was discoloured and gathered. The veins stood out along my inner arm. In the bowl beside my bed lay several phials. The same smell of sickness pervaded the room. I held my palm to my face and smelled it even stronger there.

The motion alerted Cornelius, and he sat upright to look at me.

‘I feel better,' I said.

‘You were ranting and raving for two days,' he said.

‘Is the worst over?' My voice remained dry and cracked.

‘Possibly.' He rubbed a hand over his face.

‘And Frere,' I said. ‘Is it all over?'

‘It seems so.'

‘Has anyone been to see him?'

He looked down at the book still balanced in his lap. ‘Speke's Journal,' he said. ‘“Speke, we must send you there again.”'

It was the distant past. It was an unknown landscape filled with promise, hope and wealth turned to mud and holes, and stripped of all it once possessed worth having.

As before, I tried to raise myself in my bed, but again the effort was too great for me.

‘It's almost two in the morning,' Cornelius said.

I felt a ravenous hunger, but knew I would be unable to eat. A metallic taste filled my mouth; my breath was sour.

‘Go to your bed,' I told him. I watched him rise and go.

For a long while afterwards I lay awake, looking around me in the dull glow of my lantern, trying to make some sense of what had happened, knowing only that the long-gathering storm had finally arrived and blown itself out in our midst and that I had remained oblivious to its final coming and the power spent upon us. The book lay on my bed where Cornelius had left it and I kicked it to the floor.

*   *   *

The next time I woke it was to find Nash sitting beside me. It was daylight and the shutters at my window had been folded back to let in the sun. He held a board across his lap and was writing as I half opened my eyes to look at him. He looked up immediately and waited for me to speak.

I asked him the time.

It was one in the afternoon. He had arrived midmorning to find Cornelius asleep at the foot of the bed.

‘I changed your sheets,' he said. ‘You needed washing. Some of your dressings…'

My limbs and chest were no longer bathed with sweat.

‘My dressings?'

‘Your joints, knees, wrists; there were sores.'

I lifted the sheets to look at the bandages.

‘You saw Klein follow me into the chapel,' I said.

‘I left him. I came only as far as the doorway. He told me to go.'

‘He was with me when I collapsed. He lied about finding me later.'

‘I believe you. I trust the man no more than you do.'

‘Did he tell you what happened, what I found in the chapel?'

He shook his head. ‘Just that the two of you had spoken and that he had left you.'

I said nothing about the two women.

He brought a glass of water to me.

‘I took the liberty of gathering together some of your charts,' he said. He avoided looking at me as he spoke.

‘For the Company or as evidence?'

‘Both, I imagine.' He returned to his seat.

I spilled most of the water over my chin and chest. My hands were still not steady.

‘Cornelius is convinced of your recovery,' he said.

‘Is that why you came?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘To interview me about Frere.'

‘My work with Nicholas Frere is over. I finished two days ago.'

‘Over?'

‘As I knew it would be. He kept nothing from me. You know him for the man he is.' He seemed weary of the task completed. He looked away from me, through the window to the locust trees covered in jasmine, the scent of which was added to the room's other odours.

‘But there are things I could tell you in his favour, things which need to be considered,' I said.

He shook his head at the suggestion. ‘No, there aren't.'

‘You interviewed all the others.'

‘Background. Circumstantial events. Something to gain a flavour of the man.'

‘I know him better than any of them.'

‘I never doubted that.'

‘I shall insist on you taking a deposition.'

‘Insist?' He closed the book in which he had been writing. ‘And what if I were to tell you that one of Frere's own conditions for telling me everything himself was that I was not to question you?'

‘You're lying.'

‘I am many things, Mr Frasier, but never a liar.'

‘He wouldn't do that.' But my voice lacked all conviction. It was precisely the kind of thing Frere would do.

‘Why wouldn't he? He told me all about his attachment to your sister.'

‘Why would he tell you that? It has no bearing on any of this.'

‘I know that. He told me to convince me that I should comply with his wishes. He wanted you to have no involvement whatsoever in what happened following the desertion of his responsibilities here.'

‘And presumably you now know what that was.'

He nodded once. ‘I do.'

‘And?'

‘And I know that you – that you all – remain ignorant of the details, that Frere kept everything from you, that he built his moat well. Surely, you of all people can understand his reasoning in the matter.'

‘Will
you
tell me what happened?'

‘There will be a full report in good time.'

‘Was a child killed?'

He paused, considering. ‘There was.'

‘A girl?'

‘A girl.' He rose and went to the window, standing with his back to me. ‘If it is any consolation to you, I believe Frere was as much a victim of circumstance as he was a protagonist, not wholly willing, shall I say, in his involvement. Please, I can tell you no more at present. Arrangements are still being made. My report, though completed, has yet to be submitted to the authorities.'

‘In London?'

‘In Stanleyville. Please, save your breath and your strength. You all knew what would happen. Be grateful that this awful responsibility fell to another man and not to any of you.'

‘He'll hang,' I said, the words little more than mouthed.

‘It is almost certain that he will be sentenced to death, yes.'

‘For who he is and what he represents, rather than for the crime itself.'

‘Neither you nor I can possibly say that.'

‘No, but only because we continue to deceive ourselves.'

He returned to sit beside me. ‘The humpback wanted to bring a gree-gree man to shake his stick at you. Naturally, we refused him. He holds you in high regard. Would you deny him his birthright?'

‘Meaning what?'

‘Meaning he may one day become a court official, a lawyer, a judge even.'

I stopped myself from laughing at this.

‘See?' Nash said. ‘He brought the gree-gree man and Fletcher kicked them out. The man was an albino, blackened with walnut juice and anointed with powder of cloves. You could smell him a mile away. He was in the room before Fletcher knew what was happening.' He breathed deeply.

‘You could have let him perform,' I said. ‘For the boy's sake if not my own.'

‘But that would have implied belief, Mr Frasier, and whatever else we may be prepared to relinquish here…'

‘Is the boy still in the Station?'

‘He comes and goes.'

‘And when will Frere go?' I said.

‘Ten days. A steamer is on its way.'

I was about to ask him how long ago this had been arranged when, without warning, the door opened and a man appeared in the doorway. It was the albino witch doctor. He was washed clean of all his colouring and did nothing other than stand in the doorway and consider me. Neither Nash nor I spoke to the man. He began to chant in a low murmur, and from the pouch at his waist he took out a small carved figure. He came to the bed and laid this beside me. It was of the crudest kind, and with no indication, other than a piece of cloth tied around it, of what it was intended to represent. I could only assume that the doll was me. He looked at us both with his half-closed eyes and then he went. Nash closed the door behind him. I took the doll and pushed it beneath my pillow.

‘Which of my charts did you take?' I asked him when he came back to me.

‘Those I imagine you might have had some difficulty accounting for under the terms of your employment. No-one will see them.' Another of his deals with Frere in which I faded to nothing.

I struggled for a direction in which I might now turn.

‘And you?' I said eventually.

‘Me?'

‘Will you return to Stanleyville with Frere?'

‘Unfortunately, yes. Believe me, he is no trophy. It had been my original intention to continue upriver, perhaps even to cross to the east. However, all that is now beyond me. Two days ago, news reached us of a revolt at Kayasa. The Station Manager and his clerk were killed over a dispute concerning wages paid in cloth instead of the promised food. There has been considerable unrest elsewhere, too. Gathering Stations are being threatened all along the river, and though no-one has yet suggested as much, I suspect all these supposedly isolated incidents are being orchestrated for the purpose of creating that unrest.'

‘Orchestrated by whom?'

He shrugged.

‘Hammad?' I said.

He smiled. ‘Would it surprise you to learn that Klein is with him now? You'd be surprised how much respectability the construction of a mission or a chapel might stamp upon a host of other, considerably less worthy enterprises.'

‘He left me lying there,' I said.

‘So you say.'

‘My word against his.'

‘There were no other witnesses.' He had seen the two women.

‘No.'

He rose, ready to leave.

‘What did Frere say about her?'

‘Who?'

‘My sister. Caroline.'

He paused before speaking. ‘He said that he loved her, that he had never loved anyone before her, and that the hardest part of what he now had to endure was the knowledge that he had brought shame on her, that he had disgraced himself and that she would now feel only disgust and contempt for him as long as she lived.'

‘She loved him, too,' I said.

‘Hence his conviction. He tried occasionally to pretend otherwise – that she did not love him as he loved her – but he could not.'

‘She would have forgiven him,' I said.

‘Forgive me, but you are as little convinced of that as he was. Perhaps when you are in full possession of the facts…'

‘He asked me to communicate nothing to her until all this was over. I see now that what he really meant was that I was to wait until he was dead.'

‘Knowing him as I now do, I imagine that was his meaning,' he said.

And thus we retreated from the blood and flesh of the matter into the cold and sterile language of its understanding.

He went again to the doorway. He seemed reluctant to leave me, and I saw how long those remaining ten days were now likely to be, for him as well as for Frere. He no longer had any purpose among us and wished to detach himself from us, not to endure what we had yet to endure, not to be drawn into the wasteland of that longer waiting, into that emptiness of the future in which we were all now condemned to wander like blind men in unfamiliar places.