The Detective and the Devil (29 page)

It was sitting on the low wall over which she had climbed. If it had been there when she’d arrived, she may not have seen it.

But why would it have already been there?

She stood up from her rock, walked over to the wall and picked up the bag. She looked around her to see if the island had an explanation for this rematerialisation. It had nothing to say on the
subject.

She opened the bag. She was certain that someone else had rifled through the inside. The specimens from yesterday all seemed to be there, but there was a tidy order to them which she did not
remember imposing. She had just stuffed the leaves and shoots and fruits in, planning to order and perhaps categorise them back in James Town. She had not even looked inside while she botanised,
but she was sure the order that now persisted inside the bag could not have emerged spontaneously.

A crack of a twig, then, and she looked around sharply. Only the path and the hillside and the spectacle of the view.

‘Hello? Is there somebody there?’

Answer came there none. Yet there was a sudden (imagined?) watchfulness to the place, a sense of purpose . . .

‘Nonsense.’ She spoke the word aloud, as if this would convince her. She would
not
allow her mind to indulge in ridiculous fancy. She knew where such indulgence ended.
Madness, visions, fantasies of pursuit.

And yet . . .

She put the satchel over her shoulder. She looked around the remains of the little observatory, seeing only rocks and bricks and flattened ground. She stepped over the wall again, back the way
she had come, heading down the hill, but then, on an impulse, she stepped behind a high lonely rock by the side of the path, which had seemingly rolled down from somewhere further up the hill.

She waited, controlling her breathing, listening to the sounds of the island, which were now audible after the lifting of the mist. The wind in the hills, a noise always there. A goat braying
some distance away, another goat replying. And, almost beyond the range of hearing, a slow, steady creep along the path from further up the hill. Her breathing became a little ragged, and she
forced it to smooth over. She should leave, now. Why this infernal curiosity?

A figure appeared. A man. But when she shrieked and he turned his face towards her, she saw it was not a man at all but some ugly beast: no nose, no ears, and when it raised its arm towards her,
no hand either. Its dark skin and almost bald head were covered in evil scars, and its eyes were as dark as caves. It reached out towards her, both arms (there was a hand on the left arm, but it
had no thumb), and she was on the point of swinging the satchel at the thing’s head to buy herself time to flee when the figure froze, and sniffed the air, and said something which sounded
like an angry curse in an incomprehensible tongue, then turned away and ran down the hill.

Abigail stood still for a while, her eyes straining wide, her heart running at a frenzied gallop. After a few minutes, she felt calm enough to look around the edge of her hiding place.

Whatever the thing had been, it had gone. She followed in the same direction, though she would dearly like to have chosen another, and thought of Caliban. It was only then that she remembered
Edmond Halley’s own encounter with an island ogre – one with no ears, no nose, and a missing hand.

‘Did you feel threatened?’ was the first question Charles asked, somewhat predictably.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Not at all. I was scared, of course, but once the initial shock had passed I felt sorry for it.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Yes. There seemed to be a kind of longing about it. Like it wanted me to approach it – that was why it left my bag behind. And then the way it scurried down the hill . . . I swear,
Charles, it was more scared of me than I was of it. It was like some kind of animal.’

They sat in Seale’s parlour, waiting for him to return home from the stores. Abigail had made some tea, to which they added fresh goat’s milk. The taste of the Company tea with the
island milk, which was still new to both of them, was exquisite.

‘Can it be, Charles? Can it really be true that this is the same creature Edmond Halley encountered?’

‘There may be other explanations.’

‘Such as?’

‘I do not know. A conspiracy, perhaps, to make us think this is the same man. If indeed it is a man.’

‘But why?’

Charles shook his head.

‘I do not know, wife.’

‘And what of your day?’

‘I walked out to the old Dutch fort on the far eastern side of the island.’ He described it to her: a plain stone building built during the short Dutch occupation of St Helena.
Anything of value – weaponry, or iron of any kind – had long since been removed from the place. The only mystery about the place had been a single locked door, with no external
metalwork at all.

‘It looked like a large sheet of ancient wood shoved directly into the doorframe. It was impossible to open.’

He had tried getting through that door – had tried shoulders and kicks, smashing it with rocks, forcing the edges with his pocket knife. But all to no avail. The door had remained
steadfast, in such a way that strongly suggested to Charles that it was bolted from the inside. But given there was no obvious means of ingress, how could that possibly be?

‘You believe someone is hiding something within?’

‘It is possible. I walked around the place several times, but then I looked over the cliff face beside the fort, down to the little bay below – we saw it on Seale’s map.
Prosperous Bay. Is that not a name to conjure with?’

‘How so?’

‘Abigail, I was a Kent lad and, what is more, I was a north Kent lad.’

He described to her the stretch of coast between Margate and Gravesend, the southern border of the stretch of water where the Thames and the Medway gave up their individual identities to become
the North Sea. A coast with numerous beaches and landing places, looked over by little houses, stalked by men carrying torches and lamps, men in oilcloths and hats pushing carts and barrows.
Smugglers, all of them, exploiters of the financial gaps which Whitehall ministers were prone to open and close with their incessant fiddling with duties and taxes. Charles had remembered the
beaches these illicit men used, and they had something of Prosperous Bay about them. Wild and lonely on the surface, but filled with possibility.

‘Did you walk down to it?’

‘I tried. I could not find the way. It seemed very much to me that the one path down had been destroyed; there was a defile down which a path might have led, but it was filled with
rocks.’

‘Then what use can it have as a smuggler’s cove?’

‘I asked myself the same question, but for different reasons.’

‘What were they?’

‘Looking down on the bay from the fort, I saw a boat pulled up onto the beach. I found myself wondering who it belonged to.’

Mina did not immediately recognise the man from the Company. There had been no warning of his arrival; she had received no visit from the Governor to tell her that East India
House was despatching a new man. It had been eighteen months or more since Captain Suttle had taken his wandering eyes and hands back to England. Such a hateful man – even a woman of almost
sixty years had not been able to avoid his disgusting glances and leering smiles. He had talked of the females of the island to her, had boasted of his dalliances with various whores, and had
seemed to expect her to be excited by it.

Mina had despised him. She had enjoyed the peace since he had left. The work under the fort continued with new efficiency, the Chinese labourers of whom she had once complained now so efficient
that output had almost doubled. Suttle had been pleased with the results, but Suttle had also come back, time and time and time again, to the subject of the
Opera
.

She had tried deflecting him or even ignoring him, but Mina was far too intelligent a woman to pretend to herself that the Company would lose interest in the
Opera
. It was all they
cared about. Every missive to her from London mentioned it; Putnam, the new manager of the private trade office who now wrote all this correspondence, begged and cajoled and threatened. She must
reveal the
Opera
to them. She had no offspring. Her family was at an end. The reason for keeping the
Opera
secret no longer applied. When she reached death’s threshold,
there would be no other Baxters to protect and no other Baxters to remember.

But Suttle had failed in his cajoling, and had presumably been recalled. The man had not even said farewell to her. He had simply stopped coming to see her, and after a few weeks of his absence
she walked down the hill from her house to his little dwelling and knocked on the door. There was no answer. She had tried the door, and it had opened, and she’d gone inside. The house had
been empty. Suttle was gone.

The Governor had confirmed Suttle’s departure. She was pleased, but also disconcerted. Previous assistant treasurers had not left until their replacement arrived on the island. Little
handover ceremonies had become the norm: Captain Jenkins to Captain Fox, Captain Fox to Captain Campbell, Captain Campbell to Captain Suttle.

A blissful eighteen months followed, until the day he had arrived, knocking on the door of her house one evening as the sun began to sink over Halley’s Mount. She had opened the door, and
had seen him there, with his new suit and the hat rising from his head and the red hair beneath it being revealed.

No, she had not recognised him, then. But he had stepped into the house without an invitation, she had taken a step back, and she had seen his eyes, and she had known because those eyes had not
left her dreams – not really – in the intervening forty years.

‘Hello, mother,’ Edgar had said.

Back from him, back from him she had stepped, her hand to her mouth and her eyes wide. The baby who had been taken from her, the mouth she had suckled, had turned into a tall, pale man with that
shock of red hair. His father’s hair. He was as tall as her and his face was broad and almost Slavic, the Dutch inheritance of the Aaksters. He looked powerful. One look into his eyes and she
was back, back, back over the years, back to the chair into which she now sank, back looking into his eyes as he fed on her, those eyes which seemed to be full of something old and terrifying.

He closed the door behind himself.

‘Mother, I am the new assistant treasurer,’ he had said. ‘Your family line is, you see, still intact. So we will now begin our lessons. You will teach me the
Opera
, as
your father once taught you.’

Abigail walked with Seale and her husband down to the harbour wall the next morning, and watched the massive rollers in the ocean with horrid trepidation while the two men made
the boat ready. They would be at it for some time, it seemed – Seale admitted that he had not taken the boat out for some time, and it appeared barely seaworthy. Her heart was in her mouth at
the thought of her husband rowing out into those waves in a boat which, from here on James Town’s wharf, seemed about as robust as a muslin curtain.

‘I will leave you to this,’ she said to Charles.

‘As you wish, wife,’ he said, barely glancing at her as he inspected the bottom of Seale’s boat, coiling a length of rope between his elbow and fingers as he did so, a task
which looked as natural to him as breathing.

Men and boats. She would not try to interject.

The soldiers at the drawbridge waved her back into James Town as if she were an old friend. She had begun to feel comfortable in this strange place – almost at home. The bright sky, the
green of the foliage and the brown of the rock, the warm incessant breathing of the wind. She remembered the dark grey skies of Wapping, the smell of shit and piss in the street, the tarry
thickness of the air.

She walked back up the main street, and fetched her little leather satchel from the Castle of Otranto, glancing at the map which was still laid out on the table, the map over which the three of
them had talked the previous night when Seale returned. He had taken some drink, she could see, so she had made coffee and he had sobered up quickly, and had answered her husband’s questions
carefully. The two men had a project now – the bay below the old fort – and like all men it was the only connection they needed.

Once more, she walked up the valley towards the interior. There was no mist today, even at the highest peaks, and this as much as anything else lifted the unease she initially felt at walking
back up towards Halley’s Mount. The creature she had seen was not there.

And, of course, that was the real terror: that she had, indeed, imagined it. That her mind was once again painting pictures of things that did not exist. Charles had made no such suggestion the
previous day – but was he just being careful?

The human mind is uncharted
, Dr Drysdale had told her.
Your experience at Brooke House demonstrates that fact. It may even be possible to put one man’s thoughts into another
man’s head. The mesmerists believe something like this, do they not?

They did believe that – and so, clearly, did Dr Drysdale, though he had imagined that
she
had some ability in this direction. Well, he had been wrong, and she had been abused. She
would think no more of it. Perhaps she could confront her own imagination up there on Halley’s Mount. Is that what Dr Drysdale would suggest?

The path up the mountainside in bright sunlight was a different thing – cosy and rural where yesterday it had been terrible. The dogwood trees cast polite shadows. She picked the
occasional flower or leaf: the strange purple bent grass which seemed indigenous to the island; three or four different species of
Aspidium
which she did not immediately recognise; a thick
rush which she thought was the same as that used on the roofs of the island, and which she took to be
Fimbristylis textilis;
cherry laurel trees, their leaves smelling slightly of the same
almonds Charles had described when he talked of Gay-Lussac’s
hydro-cyanic
acid; large
Lobelias
with astonishing white flowers; a stout shrub which she saw in several places,
with thick branches, which she confessed herself to be stumped by; a tree which she took to be a kind of laburnum, but of a type she had never seen before. She could not help but feel a stab of
excitement at this, even though she knew it was almost impossible that she had come across a new species on an island which the Royal Society had visited so often, albeit looking for myths and not
botanical specimens.