‘We’re here for coffee.’
‘I just heard you talking, don’t be stupid. You need to leave.’
I laughed, my temple against the plasterwork. It was new and white. My shadow put its fingertips up to meet mine. ‘If I go home without having done this, I’ll never work again. I’d rather be shot by a quinine supplier, if it’s all the same to you.’ I hesitated. ‘Are you going to tell Mr Martel?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Who is this? How come you speak English?’
There was silence after that. I waited, then jumped when there was a sharp thump that I recognised, right at a level with my head. It was the sound of someone throwing a cricket ball against the wall. I didn’t hold many intermural conversations, but I thought that it probably meant go away.
Clem tugged the back of my shirt. ‘Move, you’re blocking the heat,’ he mumbled.
I shifted to one side. ‘Sorry. All right now?’
He pulled the blanket over his head. ‘Sorry doesn’t make you any less of a pain, you know. If all this fails and we get shot because you gave us away, you can explain it to the India Office. Were you talking to me just now?’
‘No, there’s a man in the next room,’ I said. Clem was at an awkward angle, so I folded his pillow double and eased the new half under his head. The room was warming up, but slowly.
He was asleep. Wanting to let him spread out if he liked, I took the other pillow and the spare blanket and set up on the floor next to the stove.
It took me a long time to go to sleep. Somewhere in the ceiling, the guinea pigs scuffled. I still felt like I was having to push through mist to think. I wanted to believe that we had just stumbled over someone who hated the quinine suppliers enough to help strangers, and perhaps we had. But Martel had said the land at New Bethlehem was his, and he was rich, and Raphael had been with the Dutch, who had died in the forest. Those things spun and spun in my head but I couldn’t make them link up, and it kept me awake because it was maddening. All the doors in my brain had come down and locked. In the end I slept badly, sourcelessly afraid, my heart drumming.
EIGHT
The Indian boys ran away in the night. There was no note and no message to say why. They had taken the mules and the horses too. I strayed out into the frosty street to see if they were still in view, because it was early when I noticed they were missing, but they must have gone hours ago. There weren’t even tracks in the road; it had all been covered over by a new dusting of snow, disturbed only in one line of small footprints where a tiny girl wrapped up in a thick poncho and what must have been her father’s leather hat was going into the church.
‘It doesn’t matter about the mules,’ Raphael said when I told them over breakfast. Quispe looked disapproving that Martel had let him sit at the table with us. ‘You’d never get them over the mountain passes and you don’t want them on a boat.’ He spoke more slowly than Martel did, and far more clearly. I’d been tired even at the idea of sitting at a table with people who only spoke Spanish so early in the morning – except for one mystery English-speaker, though I was starting to think I must have dreamed that – but Raphael was so easy to understand that his Spanish was only a bit more work than Edinburgh English. It was a tiny thing, but it went a small way to soothing the loss of the boys and the animals, and I felt less unsettled. I’d forgotten what a knife-edge my mood sat on in the first few weeks in a new country.
‘I know, but I can’t walk,’ I said. I was opposite him again. They had set another place next to me for Clem, who was awake but hadn’t come down yet. ‘You might have to leave me here until I can find a horse.’
‘There are horses here.’ He glanced at Martel. ‘Quispe can come with us and bring them back.’
Quispe stared at the floor.
‘Fair enough,’ said Martel, who was making something at a side table where there were steaming kettles and cups. ‘But if any of them come back with a broken ankle, my dear, I’ll break yours.’
‘Yes,’ said Raphael.
Martel stopped by me and gave me a cup of chocolate. I looked down at it and then up at him, surprised.
‘It’s good for you,’ he said gently. He gave a second to Clem, who had just eased in, holding himself tentatively. ‘You need to keep having something sweet at this altitude. Keeps your blood going.’
‘Oh, lovely,’ Clem murmured. I moved my cane, which I’d propped against his chair, over the back of mine instead, and put my hand out to give him something to lean on. He did and smiled, but it was watery.
‘It’s local,’ Martel said. ‘From my cocoa farm, actually.’ He nodded towards Raphael to say he meant the one at New Bethlehem. ‘Marvellous stuff. Grows back very fast if somebody sets it on fire too,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Doesn’t it?’
He was talking to Raphael, who almost smiled. ‘I don’t know. I’ve never set your cocoa on fire.’
‘Look, take care,’ Martel said to him, more seriously. ‘The weather’s mad. It’s going to be madder up on the passes.’
‘I’ll be careful with the horses.’
‘I did mean with yourself too. Here you are. Sugar cake for the way. Make sure you don’t give it all to other people.’
Raphael lost some of his usual stiffness and took it. Martel rubbed his shoulder. In his fine velvet waistcoat, he looked like the most accomplished sort of ringmaster, with a lion that was just getting used to him.
The way after Azangaro was frozen. That night we stayed at a horrible place called Crucero, huddled at the foot of the jagged mountains. When I boiled a cup of water and dunked a thermometer in it, the reading in Clem’s logbook said we were at almost fifteen thousand feet. It had laid him out flat, although it was a variation, at least, on his nosebleeds. I was queasy too, and slow and tired. I couldn’t think properly to read and even working out that I could put a shirtful of snow on my leg to keep it from hurting so much was a long, creaking exercise. I went through my bag to find an old shirt but then gave up when it occurred to me I’d have to go back outside again for snow.
When we arrived, Raphael had lifted me down from the saddle as if that were as ordinary and certain as taking down the bags. He must have been used to doing it for someone else, because he knew not to let it become nothing but a controlled fall. He took my whole weight until I was almost on the ground and then still kept it slightly more on the right while I found my uneven balance again. Usually I was too tall for anyone to help reliably but he didn’t struggle. He seemed like he could have managed someone twice as heavy before it gave him any trouble, though he was a good few inches smaller than me.
‘Thanks,’ I said, surprised. I’d been about to ask Quispe to give me a hand.