The unpleasantness that broke out with Charles the next morning was of a piece with similar disagreements in London. Seale left early to perform some work at the stores, promising to return later in the day and show them around the island. Charles planned to look around James Town while they waited, and had suggested Abigail wait in Seale’s house while he did so, ‘with a book, perhaps’.
She clapped her hands, once and sharply, and sat down in a chair in Seale’s parlour. She felt suddenly as drawn-tight as a drum. She had become furious.
‘Husband, sit thee down.’ She said thee with an acid tone, precisely as she meant to say it. He looked alarmed, almost as if she had raised a hand to him, but he sat down as she had ordered.
‘This will end, now, if you please,’ she said.
‘This?’
‘Husband: I am not some sensitive plant that must be preserved from wind and rain. I am not a milk-skinned duchess hidden from the farm-hands. I am a nurse, I am intelligent, and I am made of more robust substance than you give credit for. Look.’
She held out her bare forearms (though not her upper arm, where Rat’s bruise lay beneath her sleeve). He looked confused.
‘Do you not see?’ she demanded.
‘See?’
‘My skin is brown from the sun. My hair is blonder than it has ever been. I have been changed by this voyage, husband.’
‘Abigail, I do not understand you.’
‘No, husband, you do not and nor do you attempt to. It is part of a woman’s burden to be misunderstood by men. Know this, then: I have sailed halfway around the world with you. Not to escape whatever awaited us in London. I am here because you are here. If either of us is in need of protection, it is not me.’
She stood at this, and turned her back to him at the house’s front window.
‘Here we are on a rock in the Atlantic, thousands of miles away from home. Is this where you will squirrel me away? Hide me from the bad men? Wrap me in muslin and put me in a box so that none may harm me?’
‘But of course I wish to protect you from harm.’
‘But what am I? Have you considered that? Am I just the woman who cooks you meals and reads her books? Or am I something else? It has not been easy being a woman of my type: too poor to marry well, too educated to sell fish or pick hops or sew dresses or go into service. I became a nurse, but then you came along, and I stopped being a nurse. Or at least I became a wife to a man who needs a nurse.’
‘I need a nurse?’
‘You need a nurse, you need a confidante, you need a confessor. You are the most frighteningly unhappy man I have ever met, Charles Horton. Only one thing makes you happy, I do believe, and it is myself. So you preserve me from danger, you wrap me in muslin. And this will stop, husband.’
She turned to face him again, and felt something surge up within her, as if a poison she had ingested long ago was finally being released into the open air.
‘Because never forget, husband, not for one instant, who is looking after whom.’
There.
She understood a new life was being laid out before them. The whale ship had been a voyage from one life to another, as if that great leviathan had been sacrificed for some new conception of themselves.
If I ever return to London, I shall not need Dr Drysdale.
Devils and demons had danced around her head, and now they were silent.
‘Well, then, wife,’ Charles said, coming towards her. She had troubled him, she saw. ‘It seems we have some things to talk about. Perhaps a walk in the sun?’
James Town’s single street possessed only a handful of crossings. It ran up the valley, climbing into the interior of the island which, despite the heat of the morning, was once again shrouded in fog – or, perhaps, the peaks were high enough to pierce the clouds.
The climate was still astonishingly pleasant, though breezy. The people out on the street seemed friendly enough, and greeted them with open faces and smiles. They seemed used to strangers.
Abigail wondered as to the island’s population; it must run into the hundreds, perhaps even the low thousands. This was the only town, and it was the size of a good-sized village: a few dozen homes, a few hundred residents. The population must, she thought, be swelled significantly by the number of blacks, whose faces were everywhere, all seemingly occupied in some burdensome activity: carrying, cleaning, pulling, sweeping. Some of the Negro men were shirtless, and many of them had vivid white-and-pink scars whipped into their backs.
There were groups of Chinese, too: mainly men, but the occasional small knot of women. She could not guess as to their provenance or purpose, and they took no notice of her or of anyone else. They talked among themselves and moved with single purpose.
Charles said he had little plan other than to find Captain Edgar Burroughs, the new assistant treasurer. He had not asked the Governor for this information – for what would a Royal Society botanist have to do with a new Company bureaucrat?
‘But he may know we are here, already,’ said Charles. ‘I have little doubt that the message has reached Captain Burroughs of our arrival. I half expect the man to make himself known to us directly.’
‘We have no idea of the fellow’s appearance.’
‘No. None at all. He cannot be any more than forty years of age, by my reckoning.’
‘He has recently arrived, though. He may still have his London pallor.’
Charles laughed.
‘We have lost ours, wife – as you have this morning demonstrated to me.’
There was an idiosyncratic simplicity to the place, one at odds with Charles’s stories of unexplained murders, and with the older, murkier story that had been told by Sir Joseph Banks, and which Charles had retold to her in that little cabin on the Martha: of Edmond Halley’s visit to the island, the strange creature he had found there, the secrets which seemed to go back centuries.
She thought of John Dee’s house in Mortlake. She had had time to give Halley’s strange tale much thought (when she had not been thinking of Rat, or Drysdale, or lingering with self-indulgent misery on herself). She had read something of John Dee and his library, though this reading had only brought confusion. Dee seemed to have a profound understanding and reverence for Euclid’s mathematics; indeed, seemed to find mathematics almost the language of God. But he also had a parallel set of beliefs which she found mystifying: that the stars and planets were fixed in their orbits around the Earth, that their influences worked upon humankind through their rays, that there were angels and demons and that mankind could ascend to the Godhead through knowledge and, indeed, through mathematics. And that a man once ascended might live forever.
She looked up at the peaks of St Helena’s interior, and remembered Edmund Kean’s Prospero casting spells on the stage at Drury Lane, back on that night when this strange narrative began. Had Prospero’s island been like this one? Had it had peaks and valleys, streams and rocks, green fields and jagged edges? Did another Ariel ride the winds up there, and was Caliban lurking within the hillside shadows?
‘I have been remembering Sir Joseph’s odd tale – of John Dee and this island,’ said Charles, interrupting her reverie.
‘And I was thinking of the play,’ she said.
‘The play?’
‘The Shakespeare we saw. It is a strange coincidence, is it not?’
‘Edmond Halley met Caliban, did he?’
Her husband was smiling.
‘He met someone,’ she said. ‘I have read some of Halley’s work. He was not a man given to dramatisation.’
‘A mystery. One that needs looking into, does it not?’
Now it was her turn to smile.
‘A mystery for you, and a mystery for me, husband?’
‘It would seem the fairest arrangement.’
‘Well then. I shall walk in the steps of Mr Halley, and you shall pursue your killer.’
‘We know not how Sir Joseph’s story overlaps with the melancholy circumstances of the Johnsons’ deaths. But there are secrets here, wife. I believe they are to do with money. Sir Joseph suspects they may be to do with natural philosophy. Let me follow the money. And you follow the science.’
They came to a fine house in front of which sat a giant of a black man, watching the street. He scrambled to his feet when Horton asked him where they might eat some food, and so huge was he that this took some seconds.
‘Please, sir,’ she said. ‘Do not hurry yourself. We do not wish to interrupt you.’
He was confused, and almost scared. He pointed to his mouth and shook his head.
‘You cannot speak?’
No, his head shook. He took a medal out from inside his shirt, which hung on a piece of leather around his neck. He bent down so she could read its face.
On one side of the medal the words HONEST DILIGENT FAITHFUL SOBER had been stamped and on the other was a name – HAMLET – and a year of issue, 1805.
‘Your name is Hamlet?’ she asked, and the giant nodded, almost happy now. She found herself wondering why he didn’t speak, and whether his tongue had been removed, and whether that happened before or after 1805.
‘Well, Hamlet, is there a tavern down this street? Somewhere we may get some food?’
He nodded, and pointed down the street towards the sea.
‘Thank you, Hamlet. Making your acquaintance has been a pleasure.’
And she offered him a curtsy and he looked astonished. She took her husband’s arm and they walked on down James Town’s main street.
How odd, she thought. She had been thinking of Prospero, but then she had met Hamlet.
‘Land or sea?’ said Seale, back at the house in the early afternoon.
‘Land,’ said Charles. ‘We have been at sea enough.’
They turned out of Seale’s front door, and walked up the valley away from the sea. As the town reached an end, they followed a path, climbing further into the interior. The way became steep, and Abigail had the distinct feeling of walking into the island, as if James Town were simply the front entrance to a secret world.
The island was crossed by a central ridge, explained Seale, that ran roughly south-west to north-east. The highest peaks of the island rose from this ridge, and now the morning mist had lifted she could see them clearly, touching the sky. She saw steep brown rock walls plunging vertiginously into green bowls, within which tendrils of fog still stirred like the breath of dragons.
The higher they went, the stronger the wind blew. It was extraordinarily constant, with none of the moist stop-start fecklessness of an English breeze.
‘I think of the island as the peak of a mountain,’ Seale said, ‘for such it must be; a tall mountain which descends down into the depths of the ocean around us. There may be an entire range of mountains beneath us, with this as the tallest peak. But I also imagine a catastrophe here, of a volcanic nature. This may once have been a peak as elegant as any of the famed Alpine mountains, but at some time an explosion tore half of the peak away, and left this behind.’
The conception seemed, to Abigail, a brave but unprovable one. But it had the virtue of explaining the impossible situation of this place, and also the jagged aggression of its topography.
Seale pointed upwards to the south.
‘Those are the main peaks of the island: Diana’s Peak, Cuckold’s Point, Acteon and Halley’s Mount.’ He moved his finger along the vista, as he named the mountains.
‘Halley’s Mount is named for the astronomer?’ asked Abigail.
‘Yes. I believe he visited the island soon after the Company took ownership of it.’
‘He had a telescope or some such up there?’
‘He did. There is only a small ruin now.’
Seale now pointed to the eastern end of the central ridge.
‘On the far side of the ridge there is the flattest part of the island, the nearest it has to a plain. It is called Deadwood. It was once a huge forest, though there are few trees upon it now.’
‘What happened to them?’
Seale began walking down the hill, southwards again.
‘Mankind happened to them,’ he said.
They walked for hours, and for much of the time Abigail was quite exhausted by it, despite the delightful climate, which combined heat and breeze in measures seemingly designed to promote endurance. She and Charles had trouble keeping up with Seale, who bounded from rock to rock like one of the goats which, he said, infested the island despite numerous attempts to kill them off.
‘The Portuguese left them when they first came here, and the first English settlers encouraged them also,’ said Seale. ‘Now they own the island. We are outnumbered by goats, rats and blacks. That at least is the common saying.’
She lost her bearings more than once, and began to use the peaks as a way of regaining them. They came to a glorious confusion of steep mountainsides cascading down to the Atlantic which Seale said was called Sandy Bay. At the edge of some of these peaks Abigail spied impossible pillars of rock, like ancient columns from some uncompleted temple. This, argued Seale, must have been where the calamity happened which blew the top off the island untold aeons ago. ‘Imagine,’ said Seale, his face lost in an ancient unseen narrative, ‘a volcanic explosion so immense as to tear the top of the mountain away and plunge it into the sea. Then came the tides and the wind and the actions of Time, and what must have been a jagged horror was turned into this smooth green landscape.’
Abigail, who thought the landscape was not particularly smooth at all, knew there were blasphemies in Seale’s imagined histories. Did not the church argue that the world was barely four thousand years old? How long would time and tide take to wear down jagged volcanoes? Seale’s tales of aeons appealed to her more strongly than Biblical narratives.
Half a dozen smart little houses dotted the steep Sandy Bay hillsides, and Seale pointed out one of them.
‘That is the residence of Sir William Doveton, the treasurer of the island.’
‘Treasurer?’ said Charles, catching his breath. ‘I should talk to him.’
‘Of plants and gardens?’
‘It would be a courtesy.’
‘And what of those?’ said Abigail, changing the subject. She pointed to two of the tall columns of rock, standing like sentinels on their own peaks.
‘We call those Lot and Lot’s Wife.’
They turned their backs on these columns, as Lot and his wife had so failed to do, and walked eastwards onto a large flat plain.
‘Deadwood,’ said Seale, and Abigail noted how the dreary old English word sounded mournful on his tongue.
‘Have your family been long on St Helena?’ she asked.
‘Since the first settlement. My ancestor Benjamin Seale had an allotment of land down there’ – Seale nodded over his shoulder, to the south, on the other side of the ridge to Deadwood. ‘They call it Seale’s Flat now; it’s at the upper part of Shark’s Valley. We no longer farm it.’
He carried on walking. A house he called Longwood sat in the middle of the Deadwood plain, and there were a few dozen small copses of gum trees, but the overall impression was of undressed land, denuded of forest.
‘This was all once known as the Great Wood,’ said Seale. ‘It was almost gone a hundred years ago. They tried replanting it, putting a wall round it, everything. But it was an easy source of firewood. The islanders treated it as a commons, and such was its tragedy.’
From here, up on the plain, she seemed to be standing on a platform above the world. The wind blew in her face from somewhere over there in the south-east, from impossibly distant seas where whales hid from whalers beneath the white mountainous icebergs.
She caught her breath for a moment, and thought herself to be gliding above the world, a London nurse with a good mind, gazing upon the infinite.