26

The next morning, Cornelius came to me as I washed myself. He took off my dressings and replaced them. The sores on my joints had still not healed, and it was impossible to avoid the stink of the bandages. He suggested that I went no further than my veranda, and that if there was anyone I wished to see, then he would send them to me.

The only person I truly wanted to see was Frere, but I knew that the journey to the garrison was beyond me. I asked Cornelius to tell Nash I would like to see him.

Later, I watched Bone walk out of the trees carrying his rifle and with an animal slung over his shoulder. He saw me and came to me. The creature over his shoulder was a small deer, already gutted and missing its feet and head, the pearly joints of its bones protruding from the skin.

‘Shot it,’ he said, holding up his rifle.

‘Are you going to cook it?’

‘Sell it. They’re buying anything they can.’

‘Who are?’

He motioned in the direction of the sheds and shelters out of sight along the river.

The small carcass can have weighed no more than ten or twelve pounds.

‘Is Frere still in the gaol?’ I said.

‘Been there with nobody near him since Nash finished with him.’

‘Has he asked for me?’

‘You?’

‘I mean, does he know I’ve been ill and unable to visit him?’

He shrugged. ‘I imagine so.’

‘Will you tell him for me? Tell him that but for my illness I would have been to see him.’

He held out his hand for payment. He no longer made any attempt at subterfuge. I gave him what he asked.

‘He’ll have known anyhow,’ he said. ‘Not long now until he’s gone.’

‘Seven days.’

‘If you say so. They had thirty more bodies wash up at Makura, all of them roped together like ours. What do you reckon, boat sink?’

‘I don’t know.’ I knew the figure was likely to be an exaggeration.

‘Or perhaps somebody tried to take what wasn’t rightly theirs, and these poor beggars got caught in the middle.’

‘Your compassion does you justice,’ I said.

‘Not mine. I’m just grateful they washed up further downriver.’ A detail of his men had been sent by Fletcher to bury the bodies washed up the previous day.

I smelled the blood of the small deer. Flies swarmed over the severed neck.

‘What will you get for it?’ I asked him.

He dropped the meat at his feet and prodded it with his boot. ‘Who cares?’ he said.

We were both distracted by the arrival of a small boat, from which Klein and Abbot disembarked together in close conversation.

‘Where have they been?’ I asked Bone.

He shook his head, unconcerned.

I watched as the two men came from the river towards Abbot’s office. Abbot saw me with Bone. He spoke to Klein, who also turned to look at us. The priest paused to consider me, but then resumed his journey.

I looked back to the river, hoping to see either Perpetua or Felicity, but they were not there. I had seen neither woman since the night of my collapse in the chapel. I asked Bone if he had seen them. I tried to make the remark sound casual, its answer not worth paying for, but he shook his head without even considering its worth.

Klein and Abbot continued to Abbot’s office and went inside.

Bone rose and left me. He retrieved the carcass and swung it from side to side in an attempt to rid it of its flies. The insects followed their feast like a waving scarf.

I had intended spending the remainder of the day examining my charts in the hope of discovering precisely what had been taken by Nash and what remained, but seeing Klein and Abbot together had intrigued me, and so instead of returning to my desk, I followed them to Abbot’s office.

The two men stood on either side of his desk. Mounds of his own files and ledgers all around the room indicated where another of Nash’s inventories had been carried out. A single large chart lay unrolled and weighted on the desk.

I entered without knocking, and Abbot, who had been speaking, fell silent at seeing me. He was clearly excited about something, and he looked back and forth between Klein and myself as I approached them.

‘You need a seat,’ Klein said to me. ‘You clearly remain unwell.’ He smoked a cigar and its smoke marbled the warm air of the room. ‘Abbot, get Mr Frasier a seat.’

Abbot remained where he stood.

‘A seat,’ Klein repeated. He stepped to one side, took hold of the ledger-filled chair beside him and tipped its contents to the floor. ‘This one. Here.’ He wiped the chair with his sleeve and offered it to me. I was unable to refuse.

‘Apparently, I’m in your debt for finding me in the chapel,’ I said to him.

‘I left you where you lay for an hour. One hour, that’s all. Did you want to be discovered with those disgusting women?’

‘What?’ Abbot said to Klein. ‘You knew he’d collapsed there and you left him?’

Klein alarmed him further by kicking a pile of ledgers away from where he stood.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said to Abbot.

‘But you almost died.’

‘Is that true?’ Klein said to me, smiling. ‘Did you almost die, Mr Frasier?’

‘He did,’ Abbot insisted, as though he believed Klein’s mocking tone suggested he did not believe me.

‘Perhaps if you had,’ Klein said to me, leaning over so that his face was close to mine, ‘perhaps if you had, then perhaps Nash might have been persuaded to change your clothes for those of our doomed Mr Frere, and your corpse could have been taken to Stanleyville in place of him. Imagine how convenient that might have been for all concerned.’

‘What?’ Abbot said, still unable to grasp the nature of the man’s hostility towards me. ‘What are you saying?’

Klein kept his eyes on me. I waved the tobacco smoke away from my face.

‘But fortunately you recovered,’ he said. ‘You burned and you recovered. Another little hero.’

‘What’s he talking about?’ Abbot said to me. He started to come round the desk towards us, but Klein held a hand to his chest and stopped him.

‘What are you doing?’ Abbot said, affronted by the gesture.

‘Doing? What do you imagine I am doing, Mr Abbot? I am merely suggesting to you that we resume our business here, that we ignore this side-show –’ he pointed to me ‘– and carry on. Did I hurt you? I’m so sorry.’

Abbot brushed at his chest.

‘I apologize. I am a man of the cloth. I meant you no harm. Here, let me.’ He too wiped a hand over Abbot’s chest. Abbot withdrew immediately and returned to the far side of the desk.

Klein waited a moment, ensuring he was once again in control of the situation, and that Abbot and I both understood this, before going on.

‘You join us on a momentous occasion,’ he said to me. ‘These plans and drawings are the blueprint for my new mission. Everything is agreed. Tell him, Mr Abbot.’

Abbot lowered his gaze to the plans, but said nothing.

‘Mr Abbot is too modest,’ Klein said. ‘Without his assistance, I would have been unable to proceed.’

‘I simply—’ Abbot said.

‘Without Mr Abbot and all the assistance he has been able to offer me, my plans might not even have been thought worthy of consideration in the first instance. Perhaps I shall insist on a statue being erected in honour of his endeavours. Imagine that – a statue to a humble clerk.’

‘Labour. I offered…’ Abbot said.

‘A labour-force of a size and at a price a poor man such as myself would never have believed possible.’

‘The men from the quarry,’ I said, wanting to end this painful performance. ‘You sold them to him cheaply?’

‘Oh, not to me personally,’ Klein said. He drew deeply on the cigar and released its smoke in a slow plume between us. ‘To my new benefactors across the river. To those men with a vision of the future in which accommodation is made for the Lord’s work, and in which—’

‘What about the mission at Kirasi?’ I said.

‘You didn’t hear? Of course not, you were ill. There was a fire. Such a pity.’

‘You had it burned, you mean.’

‘A very unfortunate fire, after which the place was overrun by savages. I believe there may have been some fighting, some loss of life even, one never knows with these people, so much screaming and chest-beating.’

‘Does Cornelius know this?’

‘Van Klees? I imagine so. Why? What concern do you imagine it is of his? This is what should concern us now.’ He slapped both palms onto the outline of his church. ‘This, this is where we should turn our gaze.’

I stopped listening to him.

‘He’s right,’ Abbot said.

I saw from a map at the corner of the chart that the new mission stood closer to Hammad’s home than to the river or the Belgian Station.

‘It will employ men for a year,’ Abbot said, as though still hoping to persuade me of something I had so far failed to grasp. ‘All the excavated stone from the quarry. Don’t you see – nothing undertaken there will be wasted. This is a perfect solution.’ He began to point out the features of the plan.

Klein played no part in this; instead, he continued watching me, merely nodding in mocking agreement with everything Abbot said.

When I could stand this no longer, I rose from my seat and said to Klein, ‘Perpetua and Felicity.’

‘What of them?’

‘Where are they?’

‘I’ve scarcely seen them since their act of debased sacrilege on the night you became ill.’

‘They were doing what you had commanded them to do. Why?’

‘Commanded? You were ill, Mr Frasier, delirious. Ask anyone. Ask Abbot here.’

‘What?’ Abbot said, only then distracted from his litany of excuses and self-justification.

‘Are they still here?’ I said to Klein.

‘Who knows? Perhaps their work for the Lord is finished. Perhaps He has looked down on them and told them to rest, that they have done enough for Him. Or perhaps the new mission demands new servants to do His work. Who knows?’ He fell silent after that, waiting for me to leave. I saw the slender cane he carried hanging on the back of Abbot’s door. I wanted to take it and break it into pieces and throw it at his feet.

He saw where I looked, and said, ‘It’s merely a cane, Mr Frasier. Even Jesus had his staff.’ He spat the stub of burning cigar onto the papers at his feet and then watched as they began to smoulder.

*   *   *

Nash eventually came to see me as darkness fell. It had been my intention to talk to him about Frere, but I asked him instead what he knew of the arrangement between Abbot and Klein. He was reluctant to discuss the matter. I saw the figures in Abbot’s ledgers juggled into their face-saving columns on the back-breaking work of others. Nash seemed tired, unwilling to prolong any of the small conflicts which had forever existed between us, conflicts born of conflict, in which the distinction between allegiance and responsibility had long since been lost. He dressed my sores and helped me to my bed. He asked me about my illness, but in a way which did not so much indicate concern for me, as suggest to me that he was a man preparing himself for his own coming suffering.

‘I saw no reason not to sanction the use of the quarry labour-force,’ he said eventually. ‘Abbot will act in some supervisory role while the thing is being constructed.’

‘Is there so little for him to do here?’

Earlier, there had been unverified and scarcely believable reports of what sounded to be an approaching flotilla of traders, and our wharves had been made ready for them. But the vessels had passed us by without any signal to us. Some of our canoes put out to them, but returned empty.

Afterwards, there was no talk of what had happened.

Several hours later, a dozen porters and guides arrived from Lado with a cargo of Egyptian blue glass, gum and amber. And with news of what had happened to Dhanis and his thousands of mutineers ransacking the country.

Fletcher and Cornelius went to inspect the trade goods and told the men who carried them to take them elsewhere. The glass, Fletcher said, was plunder, and the guides carried rifles which, in all likelihood, had come from Dhanis’s insurgents. The traders complained at being treated like this, insisting Cornelius accept the cargo. Fletcher sent for Bone and his men, and following an uncomfortable stand-off lasting most of the day, the traders left us. One man took out a dozen of the precious glass bowls and smashed them at the centre of the compound.

Nash told me he had spent much of the day gathering together and packing his belongings, awaiting his own departure a week hence. I wondered at his caution, and it occurred to me later that he might have lied to us about the steamer coming for Frere and himself, and that the vessel would arrive earlier, under cover of darkness perhaps, and that he and Frere would be gone from us before we knew it.

‘He was asking after you,’ he said upon my mentioning Frere.

‘I want to see him. Before he goes.’

‘He knows that. He asked me to arrange it.’

‘I doubt I can walk that far,’ I said.

‘I can bring him here to you.’

‘He’ll probably offer to be tied and hobbled,’ I said.

‘He did.’

We both fell silent at this, acknowledging our shared responsibilities towards the man, responsibilities now as destructive as they had once been sustaining.

The night around us lay brooding and largely silent, and he remarked on this, saying it was not what he had expected. I remembered my own thwarted expectations. I remembered the game I had played with my sisters of the endlessly beating drums, the roaring beasts and the strangled screams which would forever rent the jungle darkness.

*   *   *

‘Will he tell me what he told you?’ I asked him eventually.

‘I imagine that is the purpose of him wanting to see you before he goes.’

‘He may just wish to say goodbye. Will you stay with him at Stanleyville?’

‘A day or two, perhaps. A week.’

‘But not until the end?’

‘No, not until then.’

‘If you were given the choice would you stay?’

He thought about this. ‘No.’

I had earlier considered asking permission to go with him and Frere and to wait with Frere while he was tried and while I recuperated, but I knew the request would only raise higher his guard against me, and that any other, lesser concessions might also be lost.

‘The Company will most likely appoint someone through one of their agents there,’ he said.

‘To present his case fairly?’

‘To see that all the proprieties are observed; to ensure that everything is done in the correct manner.’

‘Is it true about Hammad?’ I said.

‘That he has his expectations? Yes.’ He looked around at my now empty walls. ‘We don’t know the tiniest part of it, you or I,’ he said. ‘Not the tiniest part.’

It was the first time I had heard him talk with such resignation or uncertainty, and I saw that he too had finally been betrayed by his expectations. His last few days among us were nothing more to him than a void to be crossed, something worthy of endurance only because it was within sight of whatever lay ahead of him.

‘I’ve made a list of all the maps I took from your office,’ he said. ‘I’m obliged to let you see it so that you can confirm what I’ve taken in connection with the trial.’

I had not yet investigated the missing charts; there seemed little point in knowing. All that mattered was that I had plotted Frere’s wanderings and now he possessed that map. What was the map of our shining blue lake against that?

‘I ought to have destroyed them all before you arrived,’ I said.

‘You would have confessed to it.’

‘Or Frere would.’

‘What do you imagine you would have been hiding from me? Burning them would have made no sense. You had no idea.’

I said nothing to disabuse him of this – of everything that had passed through my mind when it became clear to me that Frere had chosen not to include me on his final journey – and he left me soon after.

*   *   *

I woke the following morning and knew that the worst of my fever had passed and that my strength would now slowly return. I felt weary, as though after a long journey or struggle. I woke from a dream in which Frere and I had been together on the Alpha. I knew I had called out, but whether in the dream or in waking, I was uncertain, and the instant I woke I listened intently, as though for some faint echo of this cry. My door and shutters were open. Fires burned in the compound outside and the usual restless figures – as though dreaming men themselves – passed ceaselessly among these.

In my dream I had been standing with Frere at the prow of the Alpha. The vessel had been diverted and we stood becalmed in the roadstead off Badagry. The impassable surf stretched in an unbroken white line a hundred yards from us, and the water rolled and burst on the barely submerged reef there. Canoes came and went from us through the few narrow openings. We were there for five days, and each night we stood on the deck to watch the impressive display of rockets fired from the shore into the night sky. We tried to determine the function of these fireworks, but could not, knowing only that they were not fired in celebration.

While we waited, we heard from an official brave enough to venture out to us that a week earlier a vessel had foundered on the reef, lodged there and been battered to torn planking and lengths of rope over the three days she had taken to break up. With the exception of seven men who abandoned the ship soon after she struck, the remaining crew of twenty had all perished on the reef, which was notorious for its patrolling sharks.

I had seen all this – the sea, the surf, the calmer water and the land beyond, in my dream. And I had seen too the caught ship and the men on its battered deck running back and forth in their useless attempts to save themselves, eventually one by one throwing themselves into the water and the waiting sharks, creatures so voracious in this dreamed assault that they leaped wholly out of the ocean to seize the falling and jumping men before those fish waiting submerged could launch their own attacks. I recalled how Frere had applauded these leaps, standing with his telescope and notebook, in which he wrote and sketched the day’s dramas. He had already tried to photograph the disintegrating ship, but knew that little would be revealed at such a distance. He spoke with rising admiration for the creatures. For him, the doomed crew were nothing more than the vital part of some experiment.

In my dream, the whole of the surrounding ocean turned red with the blood of the savaged men, and the sharks came in even greater numbers, it seemed, merely to indulge themselves in the pleasure of swimming through this blood. I saw creatures here and there carrying torn limbs; I saw men scrambling along the reef to where they believed they might be safe only to have the sharks become birds and seize them where they crawled; I heard the screams of men in the water attacked from below by a dozen of the creatures at once; I saw men themselves thrown clear of the water by sharks twice their length.

And throughout all this, Frere, beside me at the rail, had become more and more excited, almost yelling with joy at the spectacle before us, applauding some particularly dramatic or entertaining effort on the part of the men or the fish. Some of these men, seeing us anchored so close, grasped at the salvation we offered and swam towards us through this bloody feast, and some, I saw, even managed to clear the immediate carnage before they were seized and drawn back into it.

Others among the Alpha’s crew stood alongside us and chorused Frere in his cheering. I was entirely alone in the disgust and revulsion I felt at the spectacle, and I had woken from the nightmare at the sight of a man almost reaching one of the Alpha’s ropes, but who, even as he reached out to grab it, was seized by two of the sharks, shadows beneath him all the way as he came, one for each leg, and slowly drawn beneath the water in their grinning maws, his waving arms and screaming mouth long visible to us as he was taken down and torn to pieces, and as the calm, clear water above him turned red with his blood.

It was then, seeing him finally consumed and his suffering ended, that I woke, pushing away my tangled sheets as though they too were waves from which I needed to escape.

The dream was as vivid to me in its waking aftermath as it had been while I slept, and my wet brow and shaking hands registered the last of its passing tremors.

I sat for several minutes until I grew calmer. I had seen nothing of what I dreamed, and yet it seemed more real to me then, in those first waking moments, than the empty room in which I found myself and the restless figures outside.

I closed my eyes, but nothing of the sunlit ocean remained.

In the distance I heard the chapel harmonium being played, and I remembered then that it was Sunday, still a day of obligation and devotion amid a waste of days where no other beacon was ever now in sight. The instrument suffered in that humidity, and its mournful, discordant melody sounded like nothing more than the breathless crying of a child, lost notes providing the briefest clicks of silence into which all this surrounding melancholy, dreamed and real, now ebbed.