‘How do you mean?’
‘I can set off through the forest now, say I’m looking for Raphael if anyone tries to stop me. And I assume I won’t find him – what a shame – but we’ll have our specimens.’
‘Christ, Clem. If there are suppliers camped . . .’
‘Then I shall see them a mile away in the pollen, shan’t I?’
‘And they’ll see you.’
‘Are your tools in your bag? You know, the knife to take the cuttings, string, all that?’ He was already on his way down the ladder.
I tagged down after him just as he emptied out the last of my pack on to the windowsill in the chapel. Inti, who had been talking to her brother by the fire, plainly hadn’t guessed what we were saying. ‘They’re in that roll. But Clem – they’re going to see you.’
‘From a distance a person looks like an animal in that pollen, I’m certain, and I’ll see a big group of men long before they see me. I’ll manage.’
‘I don’t think you will. People have disappeared; half an army battalion disappeared in these woods.’
He came past me into the kitchen to take some food, which he did calmly and vaguely and must have looked, to Inti, as if he were only foraging for some dinner. ‘Yes, exactly. Whole expeditions, battalions, clunking about and setting off the pollen and the markayuq. Of course they were caught. One man is quite a different story. Stop fretting.’
‘We don’t even know how far it is. There’s no scale on that map, if it’s to scale at all—’
‘I’ll manage,’ he said again, with too much emphasis, like he was talking to a child. He came back with enough fruit and bread for a couple of days if he was careful.
‘No – Clem. Even if it’s near, you never managed to take a decent cutting on the ship. It will be wasted effort.’
‘Well, if I don’t try, no one will, will they,’ he snapped. ‘You can’t go and you frightened Minna off. There’s no one else to do it.’
‘I didn’t frighten her—’
‘For God’s sake, of course you did.’ He rounded on me much faster than he usually moved and pulled the chapel door closed behind him so that Inti and her brother wouldn’t hear that we were arguing. ‘You’ve been worse than useless since the start. First Minna, and then you had one thing to do, one: convince anyone we ran into we were here for coffee. And you told Raphael we were here for quinine the second he asked. Then I said to keep an eye on him and what did you do? You upset him so much he’s barely spoken to you for days. Of course he’s gone to tell the quinine men that we’re here. You can’t pretend you’ve been anything less than a catastrophic influence on this expedition. Much as I love you, get out of my way, calm down, and see if you can’t think of something to say to anyone who asks where I am, if they notice. Can you manage that?’
‘Clem, wait. What if you’re wrong? What if there’s something to these stories—’
He smacked me with the roll of tools he was holding. It snapped my head sideways and made me see stars.
‘You’re hysterical,’ he said. ‘Local priests are not spirited away by elves or fairies or whatever, and for God’s sake, Occam’s razor. What’s the simplest explanation for this border? An Inca-related culture so advanced they built clockwork statues in the whateverteenth century and still police a hundred-mile stretch of border watching over their rejected and less holy children, or some men guarding the quinine woods and feeding some old origin story from years ago, with the sense to order in a few Spanish church marvels and tell everyone they’re local miracles?’
‘I’m not saying elves,’ I said, slowly, because it was shocking how much it hurt to be hit in the face without having expected it, and on top of the old bruise. ‘I’m saying, what if there’s someone there? Organised people, not necessarily advanced, but organised. We saw those terraces in Sandia; there’s nothing like that even in Rome and I wouldn’t want to take on Romans. If this is their place, if they do watch the border – they’ll find you a hell of a lot faster than a few quinine men.’
‘Look, I know you had an impoverished education, but I’m telling you, categorically, the border is a piece of staged rubbish by people who know the locals are superstitious.’
‘I didn’t have an impoverished education.’
‘Yes, I expect the Bristol naval academy was very thorough—’
‘Hold on a minute. You didn’t go to university either. Wasn’t it some grammar school in the middle of—’
‘I was surrounded by people who did, always! I’ve published books, Merrick, papers. I don’t even know how many scholarly societies I belong to – look, I don’t want to go through listing everything. Just – perhaps, for once, defer to someone who might actually know what he’s talking about. I have to be honest with you, you’re bloody jumped up.’
‘Above my station, you mean.’
‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, but it’s true. You have a good name, and don’t get me wrong, Tremayne is a very respectable name indeed, but a name makes not a gentleman. You don’t know enough. You need to stop pretending you’re anything more than an able seaman converted into an India Office smuggler. Things will go a lot less wrong.’
‘You brought me because I’m qualified.’
‘I brought you because you can keep plants alive anywhere in the world. Of course you’re qualified for that, more than. Just let me fetch them, all right? I’m in charge of this expedition, so let me worry about the decisions. You concentrate on getting the wretched cuttings to India.’
I stayed quiet and saw the two ways ahead as clearly as memory. Down one, I turned around to Inti and her brother and told them what he meant to do. Inti’s brother was big and between us we would be able to lock Clem in the chapel, and he would be safe until Martel arrived, although by then, if there were quinine men in the woods, the path around by the river would almost certainly have been blocked or blown up and we would go home. I’d never work again. Sing would be sent to file things in a cellar somewhere. Bedlam would stay as it was for perhaps five years, and then someone somewhere would find a reason to shell Lima until the Peruvian government agreed to let British troops into Caravaya. If there were Indians, those troops would not wait about wringing their hands. They would burn the forest.