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.’