‘You know you can’t make sweeping statements just on the strength of being exotic and foreign.’
He nearly laughed. ‘Of course you’ll go. You must. People are like bees. They’re all workers who could be queens, with the right stuff, but once a queen-making has begun, it can’t be reversed. A bee that’s halfway a queen can’t turn back into a worker. She’d starve. She must keep growing and then she must leave.’
‘Someone’s cryptic this morning. And I’m not a bee.’
‘I know. Sorry. I’m not much good at all this. Look, the point is, I’m going home. I’ve already been away too long. I know you’ve never asked, but I do have a family. Lots of brothers. They’ll be worried. This is my address.’
He gave me a sheet of Japanese, the flyleaf of a Bible. The picture signs were almost the same as Chinese and I could understand, though I couldn’t have said them aloud. Clover Castle, in a place called Longshire.
‘You needn’t write, but there it is, if there’s an emergency. Or . . . well. The post isn’t very reliable anyway.’
‘I see,’ I said.
He looked hard at a point on the floor as if he were suddenly dizzy.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I will have forgotten in the morning,’ he said.
I shook my head slightly. Will have forgotten; there were English children who couldn’t have said that.
He lifted his eyes again. They were full of tears. ‘I had better go or I’ll miss the ship. I’m glad to have met you, Mr Tremayne.’ He gazed around the room once more as though he were leaving it after years, not hours. I saw him catch himself and put on a smile. What he would look like in his thirties was clear, just briefly. He would be a late-bloomer, odd until middle age, but then he would come into himself properly and he would be lovely. I could feel them, all the lost years I’d never see.
‘Keita, wait—’
‘No,’ he said, but he stopped. He was struggling with something. In the end it made him thump the doorframe. ‘I don’t like doing this, but I don’t want you to have to live thinking there was no reason.’ He was looking at my leg where it was set straight with a cage under the blanket. ‘You don’t know what this means yet, but listen anyway. When Mr Markham crosses the salt at Bedlam, you must not. But it’s no good saying must not to anyone, so I’ve made it cannot. I’m so sorry, but if you were well, you would go with him and I want you alive at the end of it all. This was the only way I could think of to make sure of it.’
Everything had warped into the feeling of an opium dream and even knowing I was awake, I couldn’t tell if I was hearing something real. ‘What? How do you know Clem?’
‘I don’t. Get some sleep. Good luck.’
I could have made him stay. He was a little boy; if I’d told him not to talk such nonsense and to sit down, he would have. But I was opium-fogged and I felt like I was drowning, and I couldn’t gather together the presence of mind to do it.
TWENTY-ONE
Peru, 1860
The church was echoing without anyone else in it. The dark pushed up against the windows and so did the cold. I kept the fire going and the pipes running, but although I’d plenty of things to do – half-finished sketches and Spanish to learn – I couldn’t settle to any of it and ended up by the window instead, with its diagonal view of the border and the streams of light where animals paced beyond the salt line. I saw a bear, but never anything tall enough to be a person. All I could think was that the border was a clever idea. It might as well have been Hadrian’s Wall, but they had taken the idea and distilled it down to all that was actually required of a wall in a perfectly policed world: a line on the ground. I wondered if it was perfectly policed.
Eventually the lamps’ clockwork ran down and I had to wind them up again. Moving about brought me back to myself and I was thinking about cooking something when the bell in the nave jingled.
I leaned to the window. There was nothing in the pollen, although I wouldn’t have seen anything from here unless they came at an angle. After a second, the bell rang again, then again, for longer, then silence. I put my coat on, and my shoulder to the door. It was frosted shut and I had to push hard. The idea of carrying a baby across the icy bridges made my ribs tighten.
There was only one candle lit on the altar, but it was enough to show that there was no baby. It was the body of a man, half-laid-out, half-dropped, and the candlelight made his hair brilliantly red.
I leaned against the edge of the altar and felt the rough places in the stone digging into my palms. It took me a long time to push past the feeling that I shouldn’t touch him. When I did, he was as cold as the altar. I had to cross my arms. He didn’t seem like himself, because he was never so expressionless, even asleep. Although I waited to feel sad or angry or something decent, all that arrived was fear, not of the woods or God but of Minna. I’d have to explain what had happened and I didn’t think I’d be able to lie, but I couldn’t decide what the truth was. When I tried to run through the memory I couldn’t tell if I’d let him go because it was right or because he had hurt me.
It was Raphael’s voice that I heard at the back of my mind, asking what the hell I’d been doing. Since we had left the Navy, Clem had meandered about on archaeology expeditions while I’d been forged into a machine on the anvil of the East India Company. I was the stronger of us by far but I’d forgotten, because I was too used to feeling broken. Then I’d lashed out, and it was so much worse than anything he could ever have done to me. And I’d done it in the church of a man who was orders of magnitude stronger than the people around him but spent his life doing their laundry. I’d never felt shame like it. It burned, silent but concentrated like a welding torch until something in me vitrified. I had to burn myself on the altar candle to shock myself out of the certainty that I’d go mad with it. It helped, and I started to think more clearly.
There were marks around his neck, deep and dark. Shaped like fingers. I measured my hand against them without touching him. They belonged to someone with a bigger reach than mine. I lifted up his hand. His fingertips were grazed. He had scratched at something hard. I tipped my lamp to his nails, some of which were broken, but if there was anything under them I couldn’t see it. Certainly no blood. Whoever had caught him, they had been wearing something substantial. I glanced out into the trees, where there was no light, though there should have been if someone had run back after ringing the bell. There were only the markayuq. No one and nothing had moved.