Her father was angry with her, but here at the foot of Halley’s Mount she could forget that and feel the warm grass on her bare back, the sunlight on her blushing face and the hot, hot skin of the man who had just made love to her.
The sky was so blue and so endless. Once again she imagined floating up into that sky, up and away from St Helena, this beautiful island prison in which she was trapped by obligation and custom. It had been the cause of her latest disagreement with her father. She wanted to leave the island – not forever, just to see England, to spend some of the money which she knew was hers by right. But her father had said she was too young for such a trip – that she was needed here, in any case.
Perhaps she could escape with this man beside her, into the cold North. Or would he take her up into the sky, in one of those balloons she had read about and had even thought of building? The two of them floating to England on the incessant bloody wind.
His name was John Burroughs, and he was a captain in the island militia. His body was as thick and squat as one of the giant tortoises that lived on the island, his hair was as red as Company wine, his hands as hard as ship wood and as gentle as the silk which was her only hobby.
‘That was nice,’ she said, looking round at him lying naked on the ground.
‘Nice?’ John said, and running her eyes down his body she noticed that he was already thinking about taking her again. ‘That was more than nice, Mina. I don’t know what you’ve been reading, but whatever it is you should read some more of it.’
She reached for him with her hand, and he moaned delightfully, and although the sun was still high and the grass was still warm, she was no longer thinking about those things.
It was falling dark by the time she walked back to the old Dutch fort, leaving John to walk alone down to James Town. He knew nothing of the fort or what lay beneath it, nor would he ever learn. She may have been indulging herself in physical transports, but she would never transport herself enough to reveal her father’s secrets to one outside the family.
Her grandfather’s secrets. Her grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather’s secrets. Not her secrets, of course. They had never been hers. And yet this baleful inheritance was all she had. Stuck on this island she had never left. Her mother had told her when she was a child that she might leave one day, and she had painted word-pictures of the London she had herself been born in for her mesmerised daughter, a mighty place of dukes and duchesses, palaces and pleasure-houses, where everyone dressed in Paris fineries and there were dances every night. Her predecessors on the island had come and gone as they pleased. But not her father. He remained, stubbornly and desperately since the death of his wife, his daughter chained to him by unrelenting obligation.
Somewhere between Halley’s Mount and the fort, Fernando appeared. He was never far from her, she found, even though he was supposedly busy working in the mine. But her father was ill, she reminded herself. There was probably less work for Fernando when that was the case.
His broken face glared at her, the face which so terrified the children of the island but which she had been seeing since the day she was born. It bore no fears for her, although she found she resented it more and more.
‘What? What is wrong with you? Stupid bloody Cannibal.’
He hated her calling him that. It was the name the island children had given to him, years ago. She used to wonder whether he watched them playing their games in the square of James Town, one of them pretending to be him, hiding one hand up a sleeve and making awful slobbering noises as he (it was always a boy) lumbered around trying to catch his playmates.
‘Were you watching us?’ she said to him now. ‘Were you? You disgusting fiend. You were, weren’t you?’
Fernando was no longer glaring. He now looked crestfallen, like the dog she had never been allowed to have. He walked in front of her.
‘I see you watching me. I see it. You’re disgusting. I hate you!’
She was screaming by now, her previous calm happiness punctured. As they climbed to the fort, she actually found herself sobbing. Fernando made strange noises, perhaps words in his own tongue, perhaps sobs of his own. She pulled the heavy magnet from her bag, the thing she had to carry around with her wherever she went, and opened the door to the fort.
It was so quiet inside. So still. None of the noises she’d come to associate with the fort; the noise of rock falling onto rock, of rock falling into the sea at the bottom of the fissure, the noise of her father shouting at Fernando, the harsh chemical smell from the processing chamber.
The fort felt like it had died while she had been out in the sun enjoying John.
She found herself unable to sob any more. A panic gripped her as she descended, passing through the big central chamber with the fissure cut through it, over the old wooden bridge and into the chambers beyond. Fernando scurried along beside her, very dog-like now, as if he too had detected the strange stillness in the place.
There was a glow coming from the processing chamber, as if the life of the room were not yet extinguished. But when she entered and saw him lying there on his back, on the ground, she saw that the light had lied. There was no life in this room. Only the memory of it, and the bitter stench of almonds.
With a shriek, she rushed to her father’s side and took one lifeless hand in hers. Her other hand she laid across his cold brow, recoiling from it as if it had been ice – though she had never seen ice, she had only read about it in the books. And then she laid her own brow on the bed, the top of her head against the still infinite immensity of her father’s side, and she wept for the life she had never had and the life that now, at last, was to come.
She would never leave the island, now.
She was watched by the Cannibal, whose eyes spoke only of love and loss.