‘Well – I’m not fit enough to walk through the Amazon, no one’s saying I am. Clem wanted me to supervise, that’s all. But if you’d rather send someone else—’
‘I don’t care if you’re preserved in a jar of turpentine if he can get you there,’ Sing said. He paused. ‘We’re on the edge of quinine riots in India. The cost is madness now. We’re having to sell it at a loss just to keep the tea plantations open. The monsoons last year – did you see in the papers?’
‘No.’
‘Vast. Malaria everywhere.’ He shook his head once and then, in a way that sounded involuntary, ‘I had it too. It’s ridiculous. Half the plantation labourers have fled, the harvests are abysmal. Tea left on the plants because there’s no one to bring it in. Do you know how much of the trade revenue of the British Empire comes from tea?’
‘A lot.’
‘A lot,’ he said, tundra-arid and mostly to the file in front of him. He was quiet then and I saw him trying to decide whether or not to tell me anything else. Five years ago he wouldn’t have, but he looked tired now. ‘I think you’ll do it. But nobody else involved has any such confidence. The new managers here have . . . no concept of the correlation of risk and gain. They’re civil servants, not traders.’ When he said trader, it had a weight; he meant it in the way other people would say statesman. ‘What they know is what will fit into a morning briefing and that is as follows. The calisaya cinchona woods are remote in the extreme. The last expedition was Dutch; three men vanished in the rainforest and the survivor had to hide for so long that most of his trees died . . . only two made it to Java intact—’
‘Two would have been enough if he had just taken care of the damn things properly.’ Hasskarl was the worst gardener I’d met since one of my uncles had insisted ferns grew best in salt.
‘Oh, you know that, I know that, but the new managers think we live in the pinnacle of human accomplishment and if it hasn’t been done yet then it can’t be. What they do know is that Charles Backhouse’s whole expedition was lost before that, in ’fifty-one, along with fifty soldiers, to hostile Indians. Worse, they know we have no maps. Hasskarl didn’t get any – he didn’t go to the forest himself, and the men he sent in are dead. A guide brought him the trees. Said guide was then hunted by informers for the quinine suppliers and killed. Backhouse didn’t send anything either. The Peruvians must have maps, of course, but they’re hardly eager to provide us with nice charts to the only high-yield quinine forest in the world. So in their lofty and infinite W,’ he finished, with the worrying fluency he sank into sometimes when he was talking to or about his colleagues, something he did to prove they weren’t ever going to overshoot his understanding with slang or Latin, ‘the India Office has written the idea off.’
I frowned. ‘Then . . . how was this expedition ever approved?’
‘Markham was chosen because he’s a respected and capable member of the Royal Geographical Society, and he makes exceptionally good maps.’ He watched me for a long moment. ‘And you . . .’ He flicked his eyes to my cane. ‘On paper you’re going because your whole career with us has been difficult smuggling runs with difficult plants and because you have links to the area. But no one will be surprised if a crippled gardener can’t get it done, and you’ve no proper family and no connections, so it doesn’t cost us anything if you die out there. You’re a way for this office to save face.’
I would have been quicker two years ago. I might even have seen it the moment Clem came to Heligan. ‘This expedition isn’t really about the trees at all, is it? It’s about getting a decent map, for if – when – the army has to go.’
‘Yes.’ He wasn’t the kind of man who would report his unsuccessful efforts, but hanging heavy in the air around him were meetings and meetings where he had argued against the appointment of an anthropologically inclined geographer. I knew the sort he would have wanted to lead the thing. It would have been one of the old expeditionaries from the Company, someone fast who could shoot well, ex-cavalry – a bodyguard for the gardeners. ‘If you cannot reach the cinchona woods for whatever reason, then make a spark. There must be a political reason to send troops, however thin. You know how it is. Something small but inflammatory.’
‘Get myself shot somewhere public?’
‘No, get Markham shot somewhere public. A promising young knight of the realm with a pretty widow will make the front page. You wouldn’t even be in the obituaries at the back.’
‘He’s my friend, you know. We were in the Navy together.’
‘I know. I believe you met because he had you flogged.’
‘You once had me kidnapped and traded for a racing camel, but I still wouldn’t chuck you to a load of angry Indians.’
He sighed. I’d known him for years before he admitted that it hadn’t been an accident and he did indeed have a policy about not promoting expeditionaries who couldn’t get themselves back to Cairo from a Tuareg slave train in the desert. ‘Just fetch the trees,’ he said. ‘That would be far simpler. On that note.’ He opened the file he had in front of him. ‘What do you know about New Bethlehem? Did your father and grandfather keep notes?’
‘They didn’t really. I know it’s . . . a mission colony, or it was originally. It’s high up, a good few thousand feet, and it’s on the edge of an alpine section of the forest. There’s a river, but I don’t know the name of it. The cinchona trees nearer the Andes were killed off because traders barked them so badly, but if this place is as remote as I think, not many people will ever have reached it to look for more. It will be a decent starting place for an expedition further into the rainforest, anyway. And I know they’ll know my name. My father was born there. But that’s all.’
He had listened carefully. ‘Did they ever have any problems with Indians? I mean forest tribes, not the villagers. Were they ever attacked?’
‘Dad never mentioned anything like that. But I was eight when he died. I didn’t get a very objective account. Honestly, though, if there are territorial tribes there, then tough,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to cope. New Bethlehem is the only place we can ask for without being obviously there for quinine. It might just about fly that I want to find some coffee and visit people my father knew, but if we try to go anywhere else, no.’
He was quiet while he thought about it. ‘Look, I know it sounds steep when we stack it up like this, but if you want to be paid, you need to bring back something. Whether it’s the trees or the army’s reason to go. I notice that Heligan is in danger of falling to ruin. Do this and I will see to it that you have work afterwards.’
‘Sing,’ I said, ‘did you wait to do this so I’d be good and desperate when you asked me?’
‘Yes,’ he said.