I nodded and felt like I was going to cry. I must not have looked well, because the doctor gave me a cup of chocolate, spiced with something warm.
If Clem had been there he would have loved it. The soldiers had their hair shaved back from their temples and gold hoops around their arms that showed, I found out a lot later, their rank. They were the closest to Incan I’d ever seen in real life or in a book, but sitting there with them, I couldn’t summon up any curiosity. They seemed just to belong to the place. I wasn’t surprised to see orders passed along on knot cords; that the short swords they carried were made of obsidian, not steel; that their armour was gold-plated squares that rippled when they turned, or that they spoke that older Quechua which Raphael had taught me for the prayer in the forest. I had a faint, faint sense of being lucky to have seen them. It felt like having been dropped into a place where Rome never fell and there were still Caesars, but broad principles are hard to catch when the thing at hand is to work out how to read latitude on someone else’s map.
They had brought me a Spanish map, but it was old and I struggled to find Arequipa on it. Once I had, I sat back and felt hollowed out. The doctor sent the soldiers away and they went, oddly too respectful. I had a feeling it meant something here, that I’d arrived with a markayuq, but nobody said what it was.
I left a note for Raphael with my address on it, the same one Harry had left, feeling hopeless, because I couldn’t promise that anyone would still live at Heligan by the time he came around. They said it would be, by their best calculation, twenty-one years and six months.
They took me at night. The ship was small, but the sails caught the wind well and once we were above the forest, there was a blackout on board. I sat in the dark in a loop of rigging rope. I’d tied it myself and no one had stopped me. I swung gently, pushing off a little sometimes from the rail. There were lights under the clouds, a big spray of them that might have been Azangaro. I had been sitting straight, but something about seeing a familiar place took the last strength out of the bones in my spine and I let my head bump against the ropes.
Twenty-one years and six months. It was a long way. Looking at the distance made me feel so tired I didn’t even want to begin. Even if it had been less, there was no one to walk with. It ought not have been surprising. I’d never thought there would be anybody and it was spoiled to imagine that I had any right to company. In a few weeks, or months, I wouldn’t be sad any more and back to all my old indifference, which was ordinary enough, but just then it seemed monstrous. I squeezed the cross on Raphael’s rosary until my hand bled.
They left me just outside Arequipa. The ship couldn’t dip below a certain height – the whitewood lift was too much – but they let me down on a rope wound to a silent pulley. To anyone watching from the ground it would have looked like I was being lowered by a considerate cloud, though I don’t think anyone saw. The fields outside the town were deserted. I walked the last of the road up to the house where Minna was staying. The upstairs window was alight. Although I stared at it for a while, I couldn’t go up. I asked a beggar for the next nearest inn, where, because it was the off season for the herders, most of the rooms were empty and as good as free.
PART FIVE
THIRTY-ONE
Ceylon, 1861
When we met Sing in Ceylon, we had fifty-four cinchona cuttings in the Wardian cases, and three whitewood shoots. I planted the latter in the coldest set of shadows I could find, north-facing, and sat staring at them nearly as much as we all stared at the cinchona.
I’d never seen plants dealt with more seriously. The gardeners and I made paper cases to carry the sprouting cinchona cuttings out with their tiny new root systems and the soil around them intact, and planted them with tape measures against their stems to make sure we didn’t bury them too far up. The ground Sing had acquired for us was perfect and they grew quickly. I stayed for almost a year to see them through. In that time, the whitewoods shot up like silver birches. No one else touched them; I didn’t tell anyone what they were, but they were the first thing I went out to every morning.
It was late in the boiling summer when I found Sing sitting at the base of one with a book and the unflustered air of someone who had been born to Asian weather. After the mountains round Bedlam, it was scorching. People hurried inside to get away from the sun like Englishmen avoided thunderstorms. It was easy to spot white people, even from behind; we moved too quickly for the heat and ended up in exhausted heaps before mid-morning.
Sing had managed to acquire a little table and a tea set, with lemons. I died a bit at the thought of drinking anything hot and had to shake my head when he lifted the teapot towards me. Down in the valley below us, the wind ruffled the new cinchona canopy. The cicadas started up a mechanical shriek.
‘So what are these?’ he asked. I’d kept them out of my report. I’d left out everything after I’d followed Raphael to the city. I knew Sing must have seen gaps. My timings added up wrongly; it had only taken me a week to get back across to Peru with the cuttings, and there was no way I should have been able to do that without help from a cavalry regiment. Even then, someone should have stopped me and asked about Martel and his men, though of course I’d completely bypassed Azangaro, three thousand feet up. But Sing hadn’t asked me. I was glad, because I didn’t want to tell anyone. Whenever I thought about it, the idea felt like cutting off an arm.
I sat down beside him. It was awkward, even with the whitewood band, because the muscle was still damaged even if my weight didn’t pull at it any more.
‘I’ll tell you when I know if they’re doing what they should or not.’
He looked to the side. ‘You’ve already taken cuttings from them.’
I had. There were six, much tinier saplings scattered about around them now. It looked all right so far – they had taken root – but the sawdust didn’t float yet. ‘If I’m right about them, they’re going to be valuable. More than quinine. I was wondering if I could shanghai a plantation in the Himalayas.’
‘For a mysterious project of unknown yield,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘All right. Since you’re the India Office’s new golden boy. Speaking of which. I’m happy to hand off the cinchona to more junior gardeners soon if you are.’
I nodded.
‘Good. Where would you like to go next?’ he said, as if it was nothing. ‘There are rubber expeditions going out in Africa now. Some Arctic exploratory stuff, if you wanted a change of scene. And the Foreign Office are mooing for anyone who speaks Chinese to get on the diplomatic service in Japan. It opened to trade while you were away,’ he explained when I started to ask since when had there been a diplomatic service in Japan.
‘Did it?’ I said, surprised.
‘Well, the Americans shelled them until they said yes.’
‘Oh, right. Yes, Japan please.’