The Detective and the Devil (28 page)

Charles and Seale poured themselves drinks, and gazed over an elaborate map that Seale had made of the island: the template, he said, for a planned model he wished to construct.

Once again, she looked out into the dark from the kitchen, though this time she felt no watching presence out there. Or, to be more accurate, her mind did not seem to invent one.

Charles had visited Sir William’s house, Mount Pleasant, while Abigail had been exploring, finding mulberries, and losing her specimen bag. He had described Mount Pleasant’s
situation as ‘Cornish, in its way, though sharper, higher and altogether wilder than Cornwall’, and the house as having ‘a chimney breast which would nestle comfortably in Suffolk
or the Cotswolds.’ He had a way with description.

Sir William had been at home, and had greeted Charles kindly enough. Charles had given Sir William a flavour of the same story he had told Seale: how he worked for the Royal Society as a
botanist. But he had added a new element – that he was a cousin of one Captain Burroughs who, he understood, had recently taken on a new role as assistant treasurer. Assistant, presumably, to
Sir William.

Edgar Burroughs had arrived on the island, Sir William told Charles, two weeks before their own arrival. He did not live in James Town, but in a house on the eastern edge of the island, above a
place called Prosperous Bay. He had only visited Sir William once, two days after his arrival. Sir William had stated this was not unusual; the assistant treasurer, he told Charles, ‘is not
responsible to me, but to East India House. I have no dealings with him or his predecessors, and never have had.’

Charles said the old fellow had seemed aggrieved by this, and suspected there had been bad blood between him and London about it. Indeed, such was his resentment that he seemed to positively
welcome any suggestion of impropriety that might attach itself to the assistant treasurer.

‘Did Sir William believe your story?’ asked Abigail.

‘I think he did. I flattered him terribly, called him the most prominent man on St Helena, after the Governor, by virtue of his long years of service to the Company and the island. I fancy
he is not used to such talk so far from England.’

‘You are turning into a politician, husband,’ she had said.

‘I do not welcome the development, wife,’ he had replied.

So it was that Prosperous Bay was the object under discussion with Seale – though Charles covered his interest beneath the disguise of botanical interest.

‘Prosperous Bay?’ said Seale, looking down at his map. ‘An odd place to site any kind of botanical garden, Horton. No one even lives up there, as far as I know. Other than the
Baxters, of course.’

‘The Baxters?’

‘An old island family. Been here as long as anyone. They live out that way, too. There.’

The two men leaned over the map, and Abigail returned to her cooking. She listened to them murmuring, and tasted the fish stew bubbling over the little fire in the kitchen. It needed a good deal
more cooking, so she left it to bubble and returned to the parlour. She stood behind the two men, and looked at the map over their shoulders.

‘The abandoned Dutch fort is here,’ Seale was saying, pointing to a scribble on the edge of the island. His map was richly detailed and, to Abigail’s surprise, magnificently
drawn.

‘And these?’ said Charles, pointing to the map.

‘Two batteries: Gregory’s and Cox’s. They guard the east side of the island, which is where the bulk of shipping appears off the island. You will have gone round Barn Point
here, to the north-east of the batteries and the fort, when you arrived. The winds dictate this passage.’

‘What else is over there?’

‘It is not at all populated; the landscape is the most unwelcoming on the island. Very little grows there. There is a quarry a little inland, and there are two small bays: Turk’s
Cap, which is virtually impossible to land at, and Prosperous Bay just to the south.’

‘Why is it called Prosperous Bay?’

‘It was the first place an English ship landed when retaking the island from the Dutch.’

‘And the Baxters – which is their house?’

Abigail saw Seale look at her husband. There was clear suspicion in his eyes.

‘Here.’ Seale pointed to a significantly sized square shape on the map, between Turk’s Cap Bay and Prosperous Bay. ‘Baxter’s Gut, it’s called. That’s
how long they’ve been there.’

‘An impressive house?’

‘No, I would not say that. I confess to only having seen it twice, both times from the sea. One could almost assume it abandoned. It must be terribly exposed to the winds.’

‘And yet it sees ships arriving. Indeed, is it not the best dwelling on the island for such a purpose?’

Seale frowned at the map.

‘Yes. I believe it may be. It is why the Dutch built a fort there.’

Charles leaned into the map again.

‘And this?’

Seale looked at where Charles’s finger touched the map. It was a point just south of Turk’s Cap Bay, about Baxter’s Gut.

‘Halley’s Point? It’s said he fell in there and had to be rescued.’

‘Who fell in? Edmond Halley?’

‘That is what is said.’

‘He explored by water, too?’

‘Well, that is what is said.’

Charles frowned.

‘A lonely point below an abandoned fort,’ said Abigail, to no one in particular. ‘An odd place to find a stargazer.’

He came for their son amidst thunder and rain.

The knock sounded on the door of the house soon after dark. Edgar was in bed and, for once, sleeping soundly. Her breasts were sore. He was getting too big to be fed by the breast, though island
women often did so well past the age of two.

Did she know, during those first two years, that this night would come?

She opened the door, and there was John. He had come alone. The rain had drenched his hair and face, water dripped down his nose and his oilcloth coat let water fall down onto the floor.

‘It’s time, Mina.’

He stepped over her threshold, she was pushed back, and it was the first act of violence between them, despite all the arguments of the last two years. When she had fallen pregnant, he had
assumed she would come back to England with him, that they would marry and raise the child. Even when she had told him that her future was on the island, he had not raised a hand to her. He had not
even raised his voice. He had simply frozen over, like a tray of water in an icehouse. She remembered the warmth of him in her hand. It was like a memory from childhood: warm, unclear, impossibly
distant.

He walked through the parlour, dripping water as he went, towards Edgar’s room. She went with him, and began to pull back on his arms.

But even then, even while she pulled, she held back. She had known this moment would come. She knew her choices. Go with him. Kill him, or die trying. Or let him take her son.

Even now, those words ‘her son’ felt misaligned. Not wrong, precisely, but not quite right, as if the wrong planet had appeared in the wrong constellation. Her breasts still ached
with the violence of the child’s feeding, and there was a bruise on her upper arm where his little hand squeezed her skin tight as he fed, his eyes on hers, determined and hungry. She had
looked into those eyes countless times, and on the lonely nights when she and Edgar sat together in this distant house on the eastern tip of the island, the abandoned fort looking over them, on
those nights she had tried to find it in herself to love this oddly intense little creature. And, as often as not, she had failed.

What was wrong with her?

She pulled back on John’s arms, and casually he stopped, turned, and smashed her away with the back of his hand. A hard, calculated, fierce blow to her face, it knocked her down both with
its force, and with its meaning.

Keep away, bitch. You could have been my wife. Instead you have ruined me.

She stayed down on the floor while he went into Edgar’s bedroom. She watched the dark square of the opened door, heard his tender words to the child and the child’s sleepy wordless
responses. Drawers opened and the wardrobe banged, and then John reappeared with Edgar wrapped in a blanket and held within his oilskin coat.

She stood then, propelled by what remained of the maternal instinct in her ravaged breast. The sight of the child looking out at her with its father’s eyes was almost too much to bear.

‘John,
please
.’

‘Come with me, then, Mina. It is not too late. Come with me, tonight, and be my wife. We’ll have more like him. We can live with my brother in Seal. We can prosper and be
happy.’

His flat, unsmiling face told the lie of his words. He was speaking things he did not feel. A final speech, for form’s sake.

Except he was not the only one acting out a role. She was as dishonest as he. She knew, she had always known, that her place was here. Her obligation to her father was too strong, her sense of
her family too unyielding, the burden of their history too, too heavy.

And this man and this . . . boy. They were not her family.

How could that be?

She looked at the child’s face. It looked back, a slight frown on its chubby brow. Its father’s red hair stood untidily from its scalp, threatening to thicken and lengthen as
John’s had done.

It seemed to smile. Heavens protect her, it seemed to smile.

She looked down at the floor and though no words were spoken, her meaning would haunt the rest of her existence. She heard a curse, the slam of the door, and they were gone.

Seale had to report for work the next day in the Company stores, but Charles and Abigail had their own plans. They had discussed them in bed the previous evening, their voices
low and urgent while the incessant wind blew outside the window.

Charles had decided he would explore the land over by Prosperous Bay, but it had sounded a bleak place in Seale’s telling. Abigail said she would walk up to Halley’s Point to find
the remains of the astronomer’s observatory. She saw Charles’s relief that she was not coming with him, which suggested he anticipated some danger from the assistant treasurer, if he
was at home. She imagined a table of potential risks in his head, against which he plotted her movements and her exposure to danger. She wondered if he realised quite how transparent he was to
her.

They left early, walking into the island together. They separated on a path around a steep defile called the Devil’s Punch Bowl on Seale’s elaborate map.

‘Take care, wife,’ he said, and he hugged her to him, an unusual gesture.

‘And you, husband,’ she replied, and walked away from him, up the path that climbed the hill called Halley’s Mount. She looked back once and saw him watching her, standing some
twenty yards below, his dark hair blown off his face by the wind. He lifted his hand, turned and walked towards the east. She, in her turn, watched him for a minute or two.
So like our
marriage
, she thought.
He watches me and I watch him
.

The mist was low, astonishingly so, such that she walked into it as if climbing up into a cloud. After only a few minutes, the visibility became appalling; she could barely see six feet in front
of her. The air was moist on her skin, and her hair began to feel like a damp cloth wrapped around her head. She walked slowly, taking tiny and careful steps, acutely aware of the steep rocky
slopes which must fall away to her side, could she but see them.

How was she ever going to find the 150-year-old remains of an observatory in this fog? But the concern was misplaced. Whoever had built this path meant for it to lead directly to Halley’s
observation point. Perhaps Halley himself had laid it out. After ten minutes of careful going, she saw a low wall at the side of the path, overrun with what she took to be wild pepper. She climbed
over the wall, feeling the ground on the other side with her foot as she went.

Inside the wall, the ground was flat, artificially so, and she spied the shapes of half a dozen rocks and manmade stone platforms. It might have been a house, of course, one which had fallen
into disrepair. Or it might have been the haunt of an astronomer.

She sat down on one of the rocks, and looked around her into the grey wall of the mist. What an ironic disappointment it was, to sit so, perhaps in the same position as a man who had been
charting the stars. Halley gazed across the universe. She could barely see her own feet.

The only sound that penetrated the mist was the wind: constant, almost (but not quite) maddening in its persistence. But then she thought she heard something else, under the wind. The sound of
something moving beyond the wall of the observatory, carefully exploring the landscape she could not see.

A goat, perhaps? Or something else?

She held her breath, because the sound she could hear had a purpose to it, and there was a clear moment of terror when she realised this was the case. Had she been followed? Was there someone
out there in the mist seeking her out, unable to spy her in the mist just as she was unable to spy him? She swallowed, and the sound of it in her ears was like the rumbling of a reawakened
volcano.

The noise continued for a minute that felt like a century. Then it subsided, and all that was left was the sound of the wind, and she was forced to ask if her imagination was once again playing
vicious games with her.

Perhaps I shall be revisiting Dr Drysdale after all.

The mist began to loosen. Was it rising, or just dissipating? She wondered about the relativity of observation. How would it look from another peak? She was being revealed to the world. Or was
the world being revealed to her? The sun began to pick out the colours of the wall, the rocks, the ground.

After a few minutes, the vista opened out to her, and if there had been any doubt before, it lifted with the sun. This was indeed where Halley had placed his observatory. The mist dissolved like
salt in heated water, and she was up above the world. The blue Atlantic Ocean stretched all around, and above it the stupendous vault of the heavens. She felt a single, pure moment of ecstatic awe
in the face of Creation, and then she saw her leather satchel.