The Detective and the Devil (27 page)

‘We know not how Sir Joseph’s story overlaps with the melancholy circumstances of the Johnsons’ deaths. But there are secrets here, wife. I believe they are to do with money.
Sir Joseph suspects they may be to do with natural philosophy. Let me follow the money. And you follow the science.’

They came to a fine house in front of which sat a giant of a black man, watching the street. He scrambled to his feet when Horton asked him where they might eat some food, and so huge was he
that this took some seconds.

‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘Do not hurry yourself. We do not wish to interrupt you.’

He was confused, and almost scared. He pointed to his mouth and shook his head.

‘You cannot speak?’

No
, his head shook. He took a medal out from inside his shirt, which hung on a piece of leather around his neck. He bent down so she could read its face.

On one side of the medal the words
HONEST DILIGENT FAITHFUL SOBER
had been stamped and on the other was a name –
HAMLET
– and a year
of issue, 1805.

‘Your name is Hamlet?’ she asked, and the giant nodded, almost happy now. She found herself wondering why he didn’t speak, and whether his tongue had been removed, and whether
that happened before or after 1805.

‘Well, Hamlet, is there a tavern down this street? Somewhere we may get some food?’

He nodded, and pointed down the street towards the sea.

‘Thank you, Hamlet. Making your acquaintance has been a pleasure.’

And she offered him a curtsy and he looked astonished. She took her husband’s arm and they walked on down James Town’s main street.

How odd, she thought. She had been thinking of Prospero, but then she had met Hamlet.

‘Land or sea?’ said Seale, back at the house in the early afternoon.

‘Land,’ said Charles. ‘We have been at sea enough.’

They turned out of Seale’s front door, and walked up the valley away from the sea. As the town reached an end, they followed a path, climbing further into the interior. The way became
steep, and Abigail had the distinct feeling of walking
into
the island, as if James Town were simply the front entrance to a secret world.

The island was crossed by a central ridge, explained Seale, that ran roughly south-west to north-east. The highest peaks of the island rose from this ridge, and now the morning mist had lifted
she could see them clearly, touching the sky. She saw steep brown rock walls plunging vertiginously into green bowls, within which tendrils of fog still stirred like the breath of dragons.

The higher they went, the stronger the wind blew. It was extraordinarily constant, with none of the moist stop-start fecklessness of an English breeze.

‘I think of the island as the peak of a mountain,’ Seale said, ‘for such it must be; a tall mountain which descends down into the depths of the ocean around us. There may be an
entire range of mountains beneath us, with this as the tallest peak. But I also imagine a catastrophe here, of a volcanic nature. This may once have been a peak as elegant as any of the famed
Alpine mountains, but at some time an explosion tore half of the peak away, and left this behind.’

The conception seemed, to Abigail, a brave but unprovable one. But it had the virtue of explaining the impossible situation of this place, and also the jagged aggression of its topography.

Seale pointed upwards to the south.

‘Those are the main peaks of the island: Diana’s Peak, Cuckold’s Point, Acteon and Halley’s Mount.’ He moved his finger along the vista, as he named the
mountains.

‘Halley’s Mount is named for the astronomer?’ asked Abigail.

‘Yes. I believe he visited the island soon after the Company took ownership of it.’

‘He had a telescope or some such up there?’

‘He did. There is only a small ruin now.’

Seale now pointed to the eastern end of the central ridge.

‘On the far side of the ridge there is the flattest part of the island, the nearest it has to a plain. It is called Deadwood. It was once a huge forest, though there are few trees upon it
now.’

‘What happened to them?’

Seale began walking down the hill, southwards again.

‘Mankind happened to them,’ he said.

They walked for hours, and for much of the time Abigail was quite exhausted by it, despite the delightful climate, which combined heat and breeze in measures seemingly designed to promote
endurance. She and Charles had trouble keeping up with Seale, who bounded from rock to rock like one of the goats which, he said, infested the island despite numerous attempts to kill them off.

‘The Portuguese left them when they first came here, and the first English settlers encouraged them also,’ said Seale. ‘Now they own the island. We are outnumbered by goats,
rats and blacks. That at least is the common saying.’

She lost her bearings more than once, and began to use the peaks as a way of regaining them. They came to a glorious confusion of steep mountainsides cascading down to the Atlantic which Seale
said was called Sandy Bay. At the edge of some of these peaks Abigail spied impossible pillars of rock, like ancient columns from some uncompleted temple. This, argued Seale, must have been where
the calamity happened which blew the top off the island untold aeons ago. ‘Imagine,’ said Seale, his face lost in an ancient unseen narrative, ‘a volcanic explosion so immense as
to tear the top of the mountain away and plunge it into the sea. Then came the tides and the wind and the actions of Time, and what must have been a jagged horror was turned into this smooth green
landscape.’

Abigail, who thought the landscape was not particularly smooth at all, knew there were blasphemies in Seale’s imagined histories. Did not the church argue that the world was barely four
thousand years old? How long would time and tide take to wear down jagged volcanoes? Seale’s tales of aeons appealed to her more strongly than Biblical narratives.

Half a dozen smart little houses dotted the steep Sandy Bay hillsides, and Seale pointed out one of them.

‘That is the residence of Sir William Doveton, the treasurer of the island.’

‘Treasurer?’ said Charles, catching his breath. ‘I should talk to him.’

‘Of plants and gardens?’

‘It would be a courtesy.’

‘And what of those?’ said Abigail, changing the subject. She pointed to two of the tall columns of rock, standing like sentinels on their own peaks.

‘We call those Lot and Lot’s Wife.’

They turned their backs on these columns, as Lot and his wife had so failed to do, and walked eastwards onto a large flat plain.

‘Deadwood,’ said Seale, and Abigail noted how the dreary old English word sounded mournful on his tongue.

‘Have your family been long on St Helena?’ she asked.

‘Since the first settlement. My ancestor Benjamin Seale had an allotment of land down there’ – Seale nodded over his shoulder, to the south, on the other side of the ridge to
Deadwood. ‘They call it Seale’s Flat now; it’s at the upper part of Shark’s Valley. We no longer farm it.’

He carried on walking. A house he called Longwood sat in the middle of the Deadwood plain, and there were a few dozen small copses of gum trees, but the overall impression was of undressed land,
denuded of forest.

‘This was all once known as the Great Wood,’ said Seale. ‘It was almost gone a hundred years ago. They tried replanting it, putting a wall round it, everything. But it was an
easy source of firewood. The islanders treated it as a commons, and such was its tragedy.’

From here, up on the plain, she seemed to be standing on a platform above the world. The wind blew in her face from somewhere over there in the south-east, from impossibly distant seas where
whales hid from whalers beneath the white mountainous icebergs.

She caught her breath for a moment, and thought herself to be gliding above the world, a London nurse with a good mind, gazing upon the infinite.

The next morning, Charles left early to make his way to see Sir William Doveton, the island treasurer.

Abigail did not mention the prickly feeling she had experienced once again the previous evening, while she washed the dishes and listened to the two men talk in the parlour. She had opened the
window onto Seale’s little garden – she had been thinking of their first evening in St Helena, when she had seen her reflection in the glass and had felt a moment of profound unease,
remembering her sessions with Dr Drysdale.

With the window open she could see into the darkness, and this should have made her more comfortable. Yet that unease persisted. The feeling was vivid that there was someone out there, in the
dark, watching this little house. She thought of the whores down by the sea wall, the slave Hamlet, the boys Ken and Hippo. Were they all watchers? Did they all file reports?

She thought she had heard him, then. Heard him breathing out in the dark. But it must surely have been the wind moving in the hills.

She took her time getting dressed the following morning, allowing Charles to leave early. He asked what her plans would be – and he asked carefully, she was pleased to see, lest his
solicitude affront her. She told him she would investigate the churchyard beside Plantation House, the country residence of the Governor. About an hour after Charles had left, she made her own
departure, walking back up the valley as they had the previous day.

Plantation House was at the end of the valley in which James Town was set. The tidy little churchyard consisted almost entirely of individual graves and headstones. There were perhaps half a
dozen family mausoleums, recording what she supposed to be the oldest families on the island, or at least the ones who had stayed the longest. One of them, she saw, belonged to Seale’s
family.

She hoisted her little leather satchel over her shoulder, and walked east towards Deadwood plain. It was a walk of almost two hours, and on the way she saw perhaps a dozen whites, all of whom
greeted her with the same cheerful lack of embarrassment that had marked their first encounter with Seale. These people expressed a good deal of curiosity as to her presence on St Helena, but it
was not of a suspicious kind. The residents of St Helena were used to strangers, it seemed, despite the extraordinary distance of the island from any other human habitation. She wondered at this,
and imagined the talk over St Helena tables this evening. ‘Saw a woman on her own walking from James Town. Said she was collecting flowers!’

She also saw a number of Chinese as she walked, though these were working away on the ground of the plantations. They looked at her silently as she passed, then chattered to each other, as if
she was the victim of a tremendous shared joke. There were no Negroes, and Abigail wondered if they had been supplanted by these Chinese workers. Were the Orientals slaves, then? Or some kind of
indentured labour?

At Deadwood she spent some time investigating the treeless, scrubby plain, watched only by some curious goats. It was then that she stumbled upon something of a mystery.

There was a little gut in the middle of the Deadwood plain, not quite a valley and with no stream running down it, although something about the ground at the bottom of the gut suggested it did
get particularly wet, presumably at a time of significant rain. She climbed down into the narrow defile in the flat treeless plain, for what she had seen from above was worthy of inspection by a
woman with botanical eye.

She was proved right. The gut was, indeed, filled with mulberry trees. She could not count them but there must have been hundreds, crowding the defile like ladies with parasols at a horse race.
She walked between them, inspecting various trees closely, noting their long leaves with serrated edges, the male and female catkins, the white fruit, which she picked and tasted. It was sweet but
uninteresting. After some thought, she guessed that the tree must be white mulberry, she thought
Morus atropurpurea
, though she was surprised by the colour of the fruit, which was normally
purple in the wild and from which the tree got its Latin name. The white fruit was normally only on cultivated plants.

Many of the trees had silkworms on them, which caused her to wonder whether these trees were perhaps native to St Helena, though she had seen nothing like them anywhere else on the island. Had
the Chinese she had seen planted these trees, or brought silkworms with them? Was such a thing possible?

The island certainly contained a remarkable hybrid of botanical specimens, a symptom presumably of its fecund climate and its status as a stopping-off point for ships from the Indies, first
Portuguese and now British. She snipped a few leaves and fruits from the mulberry trees, and added them to the little bag she used for specimens.

It was pleasantly sheltered in the defile, so she put the specimen bag on the ground and took her other bag, removing from it a flask of water and some bread and cheese acquired in James Town.
She sat on the ground at the edge of the trees and ate some lunch. When she had finished she lay down for a while, and drifted into sleep.

She woke suddenly at the sound, she imagined, of someone walking through the trees, but when she sat up there was nothing, only the sound of wind passing through the mulberry leaves. She picked
up her lunch bag and walked out of the defile, heading back to James Town.

She was at the edge of the plain when she remembered the specimen bag, and shook her head in irritation with herself. That little nap must have discombobulated her. She turned and walked back to
the gut of mulberry trees.

But when she walked down into the trees, she could not find her bag. She spent a half-hour walking around the secluded and dark copse, but every tree looked exactly the same, growing close
together as if for comfort against the bleak plain outside the defile. Astounded at her own stupidity, and mourning the little specimen bag with the literal fruits of the day’s walk, she gave
up and walked back towards James Town.

That evening, Abigail cooked for them again. It had only been three evenings, but already an odd domesticity had descended. Seale’s readiness to welcome them into his
home was in keeping with the openness of the other islanders she had encountered. They had become used, it seemed, to putting up sailors and other visitors from vessels at anchor off James Town.
She thought Seale must be lonely, and filled his life with drink and women and now, perhaps, with the intrigue of a botanical husband and his wife.