My ribs caught, but I was too good at lying now to let it into my voice. After years with the East India Company I was an expert. ‘I was. Just Mr Sing. He used to be my manager. It was a chat and a cup of tea, or he would have called you too. I think he just wanted to make sure I wasn’t addicted to opium or anything.’
‘Oh, of course,’ he said, soothed. He hesitated. ‘Only it – hasn’t escaped me that it’s odd for the India Office to have asked me.’ Minna looked up too. ‘I mean if the idea is to fetch out these trees, a geographer is a funny sort of choice.’
‘A geographer who speaks Quechua and has lived in Peru on and off for years. There aren’t many of those. You can’t do this stuff without an interpreter.’
‘I suppose,’ he said.
‘Let’s try a new tree,’ I said.
The telegram had arrived at the Spanish Embassy. I hadn’t told anyone but Clem and Minna I was there and so I knew it was from Sing, though he didn’t sign it.
The old East India Company had become the India Office, but really only in name. There were grand plans in Whitehall, said the papers, but for now it was even in the same building as it always had been. East India House was on Leadenhall Street, a vast place with a colonnaded front and a statue of a mounted Britannia on the roof. There was a confectionery shop next door and like always, the man at the main desk had a sugar mouse sitting in the middle of his ledger.
Nationalisation wasn’t something any of us had thought would happen, but it had, last year. The East India Company, a private venture with the means and power of a country, a nation state of traders, had been taken almost overnight by the British Government and turned into a branch of the civil service. It had happened in the wake of the war in China; one war too many started by the Company and ended by the Navy. Parliament said they had made a de facto relationship law; Sing and the old traders called it the greatest robbery of the millennium. I kept quiet about it, because I was glad. It gave me a funny unfashionable confidence in Mr Palmerston and his government. Anyone clever enough to steal the EIC from a whole board and company of flick-razor bastards like Sing was certainly qualified to run an empire, just as much as anyone whose name had ended with Caesar.
I wasn’t surprised to find Sing in exactly the same office I’d left him in, although if anyone was going to be shifted about in all the changes, it was him. He was a slight Oriental. In western clothes he should have looked like someone’s butler, but he didn’t have the eastern manner or its over-politeness. He sat like an Englishman, straight, with one forearm across the hem of his ribs and the other elbow resting against that wrist. If there was anything left of his own country, it was buried. He wouldn’t say where he was from. His servant and his accent were Dutch and his first name was Iseul, but that only made me think of Cornish princesses.
‘Tremayne, sit down,’ he said, as if we hadn’t been out of touch for nearly two years.
I sat, carefully, not wanting to look too exhausted from the tiny walk up through the building. But Clem was right; I had been getting better in London, much better. He kept the house warm and he had towed me out to buy new clothes because, he said, the Spanish Embassy didn’t want me slouching about in a wax jacket that had probably seen action at Trafalgar, so now I was neat in black and grey, and a coat he had paid for with a blue cord collar. He had been buying gear for the expedition at the same time and it had been bizarre to see him order six shirts and four jackets all at once. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d bought anything new and I’d forgotten how thick unworn cotton felt.
Sing studied me. Although he wasn’t an expressive man I saw the dismay go through his eyes. I’d known I must have aged in the time we had been apart, but it was a shock to watch him notice it. He didn’t mention it. ‘So Markham seems like an idiot who signed up to all this in the interest of having a jolly good jaunt and discovering something irrelevant and Incan. Is that a fair summation?’ he asked.
‘He’s a geographer-anthropologist, not an idiot. Of course he’s interested in the Inca.’
‘In the context of expeditions like these, anthropologist and idiot are wholly interchangeable terms.’ His Dutch accent was gone now, except on perhaps one word in ten, where it could have been anything. He let his hands slip down to the file and rested his fingertips on the margins. ‘So, I haven’t invited him. I don’t think I can stand to talk to someone like that at this time of the morning. I’d be in great danger of having him transported to Australia.’ A ghost of a smile lined his eyes when I laughed. ‘Anyway. Cinchona trees; tell me how you mean to do it.’
I sat forward so that I could talk with my hands and trace shapes along the edge of his desk. ‘Seeds will sport, so we’re going to take cuttings. Those cuttings will need to be about two feet long for trees like this. We’ll pack them up in Clem’s map cylinders. The difficulty is getting them back across Peru in time. They need to be planted within a month. We’ll plant them in Wardian cases – those will be waiting for us at the port, in Islay; they’re too delicate to transport inland on dust roads – and then ship them to India that way. Even in cases they won’t survive very long at such low altitude, so the sea route is going to have to be direct.’
He frowned. ‘You won’t get many out in map cylinders.’
‘The point is to bring out viable scion cuttings of high-yield plants. Quality over quantity. If those are successful, more cuttings can be taken from them once they’re established in India. About Malabar? Clem said that’s where we’re going with them.’
‘What about it?’
‘Climate’s wrong. Do we have land in Ceylon?’
‘Yes.’
‘There please. Sheltered ground, nothing rocky, rich soil, lots of ferns, between four and five thousand feet above sea level. They’re very particular trees.’
‘That’s rather a—’
‘I’m telling you the conditions required for their survival. I was at Kew yesterday, and they’ve only confirmed all this. Previous efforts at transplantation have failed because insufficient attention was paid to their natural environment. That’s why the Dutch plantation in Java is such a catastrophe. It’s on a rocky hillside, no shade, wrong elevation – of course they can’t grow anything, even the hardy low-yield stuff. You’d do better trying to grow these things in a jar.’
He smiled a fraction and I realised he had wanted me to gardening-babble, to make sure I still could. ‘So, Ceylon,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll arrange it, then.’ Perhaps it was only that I was older now, but there was a fragility about him that seemed new; or perhaps it was new, and born of holding on to everything as the sand shifted under him. ‘You don’t look well,’ he said.