I smiled. ‘I missed you.’
‘I’m glad you see it that way.’ He settled forward on his forearms. ‘Merrick. I would suggest that Backhouse’s main problem was not Indians or quinine suppliers but that he was twenty-one and an idiot. You’re old Company; you know how this sort of thing is done. If you can’t go around, find someone to take you through those woods if you have to. Find some Indians, lie, cheat, bribe, use your father’s name, sleep with the chief, I don’t care. This is smuggling, like everything else we ever did. There’s always a way.’
‘I know.’
‘Feeling all right about it?’ he said, which he had never asked me before. ‘Aside from having been chosen for exactly the wrong reason for what might be suicide.’
‘I wish the papers weren’t full of shipwrecks and frostbitten bits of the Franklin expedition, but you know.’
He smiled, but only enough to show his incisors. I realised suddenly that he must have had not just edges knocked off but whole walls blown through by the dissolution of the Company and its restructuring. It seemed ridiculous now that I hadn’t written to him to ask how he was. ‘You’re not off to find the Northwest Passage on a thousand-mile plain of ice populated by six Esquimaux and an owl. It’s only Peru.’
‘No, I know.’ The Illustrated London News had run an article a few days before, with pictures of things that were recovered. They had found a watch, some zigzag-pattern mittens, a pair of reading glasses, snow goggles, bone tools; ordinary things that people had had in their pockets, things made at home to help, things the natives had given them. Humanity on both sides of the Atlantic had tried to get the Franklin expedition to where it needed to go and the only real difficulty had been the weather. In the far north of Canada, there had been no one trying to shoot them, no animals that could hurt them, not around their guns, no diseases to slow them down. There would be no one trying to help us and the interior of Peru was even less charted than the Arctic. ‘I’ll try.’
He nodded. He would never tell me if someone in the upper management had threatened his job if this were to fail, but it was a pressure behind the quiet.
‘The Great Eastern is launching today, did you see?’ I said.
He tipped his eyes towards the window, more like his old self. ‘Monstrous thing.’
‘Have you been to look at it?’
‘No,’ he said, as if I’d asked him if he had been in a pornography shop.
‘It’s not monstrous. It’s the biggest ship that’s ever sailed, with the most powerful engine that’s ever been on the sea. It could make the run to Australia without stopping to refuel, with four thousand passengers. Honestly, it’s incredible. Come with me and see it off. It’ll be good, there are people all up and down the river now.’
‘I’ll be impressed when the bloody thing sails to Mars. Send me a telegram the day before you go if all’s running to time. I’ll meet you in Ceylon in May.’
I frowned. ‘You’re coming?’
‘This is the India Office. Its employees do occasionally make an appearance in India,’ he said, annoyed to have been caught fretting. He sighed. ‘Get it done, please. And stop waxing lyrical about maritime pedantry before the summer or I’ll feed you to a tiger.’
So I took a cab up to Greenwich by myself, into the crowds there. The ship was impossible to miss. It was ten times bigger than anything else on the water, almost too big for the bends in the river. When the tugs guided it out, the cheer felt like it was coming up through the ground. There were four anchors chained to the prow, each one ten times the height of a person. Each link in each anchor chain was taller than me. Thousands of people stood on deck, waving and laughing. I had a horrible feeling that it was all too big and it would sink, but it didn’t. It sailed gently out of sight, out towards Gravesend and looking wrong because it was so leviathan it didn’t belong with anything else. I followed it in the papers because more and more it mattered that not every stupid endeavour ended frozen to a glacier with the Illustrated London News reporting what it had in its pockets. Off Dover there was a fire aboard, but the ship was so big that not even lightning would have bothered it and news came the following week that it had reached America seamlessly, ahead of schedule.
SIX
I made Clem practise taking cuttings every day until we ran out of apple trees. He still couldn’t do it very well, but he was seasick and I hoped it was the nausea making him unsteady, not his natural clumsiness. He kept to their cabin except at mealtimes and Minna moved into the mess room, where she took over the long table with charts and squashed the crew, who didn’t know what to do with her, down one end.
‘Evening,’ she said when I stopped to sit down and have a rest between the hold and the kitchen on Christmas Eve. The crew had made an effort, which had surprised me, because left to myself I would have forgotten about it; but there were as many candles as the mate would allow, and wreaths on all the narrow doors, full of oranges pincushioned with cloves that made all the passageways smell of the holidays. The cook, who was German and had grown his moustache like Prince Albert’s, had made nearly nothing but mince pies and mulled wine for three days and it was wonderful. I couldn’t remember when I’d last eaten so badly or so happily. ‘Eat my pie for me,’ Minna added. ‘I haven’t wanted it. I’m off everything except tooth powder.’
‘You’ll have to call it Minty. What are you doing?’ We had met some rough water, and above the table copper pots and pans swung on their hooks. Their shadows oscillated over the chart she had been looking at. A few of the candles tipped wax on it but we pretended not to notice. The mate was threatening to put them all out if they proved too hazardous. The pipes under the grille floor rattled as someone turned the heating up. Nearly at once, hot air drifted up round our ankles, pumped round from the engine furnace. Minna dropped her set of compasses when the table tipped and lifted her hands to surrender.
‘I’m planning your route. I was trying to work out what would be quickest. And cheapest. The India Office accounting forms are formidable.’
I twisted my head so I could see it upside down. My spine twanged. I tried to ignore it. ‘How long will it take, do you think? Cuttings are all right for a month but anything after . . .’