It was wonderful when I tried it. When I lifted my head, they were both watching me in the same concerned way.
‘I don’t look that bad,’ I said, but not with much confidence. Next to the two of them, I could have been a tramp. My clothes were clean, more or less, but they had been washed in a sink, not boiled, and nothing had been ironed for a long time. Because I always had my sleeves rolled back, the cotton was a fresher, clearer white about halfway down my arms when they were rolled down.
‘Well,’ said Minna.
‘Listen, we’re not actually here for a jaunt,’ Clem said. ‘There’s another wave of malaria in India. Price of quinine through the roof. The India Office are tired of buying it in from Peru and they want their own supply once and for all. They want us to try for the cinchona woods.’
‘So you came via Cornwall?’
‘When I say us I mean you too. They said you refused by letter a few weeks ago and I said they must have misunderstood.’
‘No. I can’t go on an expedition, Clem, I can’t walk.’
‘You’ll be fine. Boat, horse, tent, easy. I’ll show you the route.’
‘I can barely make it down here from the house—’
‘Of course you can’t, you’re living in the middle of nowhere with Vile Charles. Now do shut up and listen to me.’
I sat quietly. Minna kicked my ankle and nodded a little. I couldn’t meet her eyes for long. I loved both of them, but they did tend towards over-optimism, having always had a lot of money and a lot of friends.
Clem lifted his bag into his lap to take out a folded map. When he unfolded it, it was a beautiful chart of southern Peru, covering much more territory than mine did. Lima was too far north for it, but near the coast was Arequipa, marked quite big, and then the great ragged shape of Lake Titicaca. He had already inked on the route around. It looped past the lake, north, to a pair of towns close together called Juliaca and Puno, then north again to Azangaro, where there was a drawing of what might have been a cathedral. After that, the Andes. Beyond them, there was nothing. None of the forest there was charted. The cartographer had put on intricate little etchings of tropical trees and the suggestion of mountains for the sake of not having white space, but that was all. Clem pinned the edges down with our cups when they tried to curl upward.
‘Right. Now, I don’t know what the situation was when you last looked into it, but according to the latest reports, the whole Sandia Valley – that’s this bit here on the interior side of the Andes – and everything nearer the mountains has been completely stripped of cinchona. There’s nothing left within easy reach, which sounds unpromising but in fact it’s good. It means there’s no quinine industry in the region. The supply regions are in the north, and the suppliers up there harvest lower-yield trees. But there are high-yield woods in the rainforest beyond Sandia, much harder to access. Technically, though, trying to get at them would be a violation of the monopoly, so we’ll have to be—’
‘Wait, wait,’ I said. ‘There’s an official monopoly now?’
‘Ooh, yes,’ he said. ‘The government run the supply as far as I can tell. Or rather, a group of violent criminals runs the supply, and the government enforces their monopoly for a cut of the very considerable profits. The point is to keep foreigners from taking anything.’
‘What happens if they catch us?’
‘Prison or shot.’
‘Right. And – how do you know there are more trees further in?’
‘Because the Dutch got out with a few. You remember, don’t you?’ he added, sounding a little shocked that I’d forgotten about it. ‘The expedition who were killed by mad Indians last year. One of them survived, got out with some trees, remember?’
‘But only a couple of the specimens survived the passage to the Java plantation,’ I said slowly. The information came back as if I’d dreamed it rather than read it in the papers and argued to and fro by letter with India House about it. Finding the recollection again felt like having turned aside a stone to get at the thready roots of a few weeds only to find the ruins of a whole town. Something spidery walked down my back when I saw the extent of what I hadn’t known I’d forgotten. I glanced around the greenhouse as if there might have been more crumbled half-memories clustered around it. ‘And then the trees died once they were planted. The last British expedition were all killed too.’
‘That’s it. Are you all right?’ Clem said.
‘I’m . . . sorry. I do know. Too much time by myself not talking.’
‘Happens to me whenever I visit my mother, I can quite imagine it’s dreadful after months rather than days,’ Minna said. She poured me some more coffee. ‘I come back a veritable mute.’
I didn’t say I thought it was something more serious than that. It was a miniature realisation, that I’d forgotten about the Dutch expedition, but it had lit a little miner’s lamp somewhere in those lost places in the pit of my mind. The light echoed weirdly and I had a horrible feeling there were caverns there when I’d thought there were only a few caved-in corridors. Seams and forgotten seams.
Clem rubbed my shoulder. Some of it must have showed on my face.
‘So – to be clear,’ I said at last, because they had both been waiting for me to speak in a loaded silence that sounded a lot like they wanted to make sure I definitely could speak still. ‘We are . . . being sent to steal a plant whose exact location nobody knows, in territory now defended by quinine barons under the protection of the government, and inhabited by tribal Indians who also hate foreigners and have killed everyone who’s got close in the last ten years. Who was the British man?’
‘Backhouse,’ Minna said. ‘Half a regiment of Peruvian soliders disappeared in the forest trying to help him.’
‘Oh, did they, good,’ I said. ‘And you two think you’ll get through it all if you go at the pace of someone with only one working leg?’
‘Proper organisation, that’s all that’s required,’ Clem said firmly. ‘You don’t mind a few mad Indians, do you?’
‘It’s more the two of you I’m worried about.’
‘Kind but unnecessary,’ he said, waving his hand. ‘Anyway, you make it sound like we haven’t the foggiest where to look. But we’ve got a pretty good idea of where the things are. It’s round here.’
He was circling a point right on the edge of the map with his knuckle.
When I touched it too, my fingertip, rough from digging and seeds, scratched against the paper. I clenched my hand, then motioned between us. ‘We would stand out, in the interior highlands of Peru. If the monopoly is what you say then they’re watching for white men.’
‘We say we’re mapmakers. And we will be. The India Office has asked for an accurate map of the region as well as the plants. If we have to take any planty-type equipment, we’re also collecting rare types of . . . something that grows in the same conditions at the same altitude?’ he finished hopefully.