She nodded as if she already knew that.
He pushed his hand over his wrist without meaning to. He kept feeling spider webs. But his knuckles had gone red; the water must have been hotter than he’d thought, which meant at least that if there were any leftover spiders, they were cooked. He tried the coffee. It tasted bizarre now that he couldn’t tell at once if it was hot or not, but not bad. It was strong enough to taste, at least.
‘What’s your boy’s name again?’ he asked at last.
‘Aquila. I think he might be concealed in your woodshed. He wants to come in but he’s terrified of being accidentally rude. Have I been accidentally rude?’ she added.
‘No.’ He set the coffee aside. ‘Right. Let’s go out and see what we can do with everyone. But I’ll need Aquila to help me. I don’t know their names.’
He’d always felt impatient when old people waxed lyrical about it, but it was easy to spot people’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and it was unsettling. There were eyes that never changed, deformities, and that was unremarkable, but there were other things that had swept down the lines too. There was a girl who spoke with her hands just like her great-grandmother, despite never having met her and her mother having nothing like the same style. He had gone out expecting strangers and some were, because a good third of them were altar children or the sons and daughters of altar children, but in the main it was a colony of ghosts.
By the time he had met everyone who wanted to be met, it was late. He locked himself in, although he never usually held with locking a church. With his back against the door he looked around at the room. It was all the same: the ladder up to the loft, the kitchen, the stiff side door into the chapel. But it wasn’t the same, either. The roof had been repaired twice and needed it again. There were books on the shelf behind the ladder that weren’t his. They were in English. His heart bumped into his diaphragm to think of Harry coming back to an empty church, but when he opened them, the Ex Libris notes said that they belonged to someone called Charles Backhouse. There must have been expeditions here; Harry had said there would be. It needled that they had been put up in the church, but then, they had left it all as they had found it and it wasn’t as though there was a nice inn and coach house in town.
In the deep silence, the clockwork in the pollen lamps clicked. So did the wood in the stove. The windmill rope creaked around its pulley and under it was the roar of the wind in the forest. The winter must have been long already, because there was almost no pollen in the air.
For a long time he looked down at the letter without touching it. Harry had told him about Heligan. Somewhere in a churchyard on that side of the Atlantic were familiar bones.
Or here they were, in this place. Somewhere was another church – his – where Harry was cutting up pineapples, but it was too far gone. Harry had kept sailing while he had stayed still and there was no tacking ahead to find him again, no catching up, and there would have been no waiting, the current being too strong. He had fallen too far behind.
Not able to sit any more, Raphael went upstairs to fetch the Indian cotton and laid it out on the table. With all the pollen lamps lit, there was enough light to unpick the stitching on his waistcoat. After a few hours it was all undone and he lifted out the worn-out old lining to lay it over the cotton as a pattern. It was complicated, but he had always mended things and it was only a matter, really, of cutting straight, and an obsidian knife was as good as a scalpel. It was light outside before he had finished, but he did finish. Once he had he went straight out, because there were people he had promised to see and, even if there hadn’t been, it seemed best to muck in. It would pass the time.
TWENTY-NINE
The Caravaya whitewood forest
1860
When he stopped talking, I gave him the little flask I’d brought from Bedlam. He frowned until he caught the fumes from it – I’d stolen some of his rum – and then laughed and shared.
‘Thanks.’
I swallowed some too and sat still to let it burn its way down, just as hot and good as the fire. I didn’t know what to say; I felt like more of a stranger than ever and I couldn’t say that. It had been Harry’s ghost keeping me safe. It was nothing to do with me.
‘Better go soon.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed, but then his focus turned inward and he frowned. ‘I’m tired,’ he said, puzzled.
I was too, so much that I was only just upright. It was past eleven now, and hard to think that this morning, we had been on the island with Martel. But I could see what he meant. He was always walking and always working. He wouldn’t have been unusually tired, if it were just the distance and the worry alone.
‘I bet you are.’
‘What? We’ve been sitting here for ages.’
‘Well – not only are you changing, you’re changing into something a lot heavier than you used to be. You’re lifting more weight every time you move,’ I said, and finished quietly, because I heard halfway through that it was what Harry would have said. It could have been a portrait of me, on the stairs at home.
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
I looked out the window again. The light was just as dim as before. Anka was where we’d left her – I could see her pollen shadow. ‘There’s no reason to rush on if she’s not coming in.’
He didn’t say anything. It was like seeing clockwork wind down. He stopped gradually, and then it was that strange, absolute stillness. I watched him for a long time, hoping to God that it wasn’t going to be years. I had a feeling it wasn’t. Both the long spells I knew of had been when he was by himself, well away from people, and I would have bet money that the rest had been too, because otherwise someone would have accidentally buried him. The shorter spells, the ones I’d seen, came when other people would have daydreamt or dozed; he had been tired every time, and sitting still.
I went through our bags for some food. We had grapes and apples, and some phoenix eggs wrapped in a handkerchief. I cooked two over the fire, needlingly aware of the markayuq in the window, but he hadn’t moved at all. It didn’t come to me exactly, or not in the ordinary way of a cork popping to the surface of a pond. I must have known it since Raphael told me what they were, perhaps before, so it was sluggish, more like a cork in treacle. For years I had sat in a greenhouse opposite a breathing stone person who watched my father’s grave. And who came inside when it rained.