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.
She reached the remains of Halley’s little observatory, and once again stood watching the blue horizon for a while. No ogres presented themselves. She had been collecting for a good while, so decided to walk east to see if she might catch a glimpse of this abandoned fort. Who knew, she might even see her husband and Seale down in the sea in that untrustworthy boat. She walked quickly. And then there was a moment when she realised that she was probably being followed.
The moment did not consist of any great revelation – she didn’t spy a head disappearing behind a rock, didn’t hear a careful footstep on the hill behind her – but slowly a dozen or more little signals coalesced into this new realisation: that someone was trailing her, and being very careful about it.
Immediately she imagined the ugly creature of the previous day. Did it wish her ill after all?
A definitive crack of a twig. Her follower had made a mistake. Whoever it was, they were fifty feet or so behind her, to the south west. She turned around a rocky outcrop – much as she had done the day before – and immediately ducked down and waited. Seconds later, a figure worked his way around the corner, silently and carefully.
It was Ken, the island boy who they’d encountered on their first evening on St Helena. He was alone. No Hippo accompanied him.
‘Can I help you?’ asked Abigail from her place in the shadow of the rock. The boy yelped, and seemed about to run, but then thought better of it.
‘Why, Mrs Horton! What a surprise!’
He smiled his big white-toothed smile, and his charm turned on like an oil lamp.
‘You were following me, Ken.’
‘Following you? Why no, madam, ’tis a madness to think so!’
‘You were. Why?’
‘Mrs Horton, you’re a suspicious lady, so you are!’
‘Ken, I’m warning you . . .’
‘Please, Mrs Horton,’ said another voice, and a tall man with a shock of red hair emerged from behind the rock. ‘It was not Ken who was following you. It was me.’
Seale’s boat was an ancient but sturdy thing. Horton imagined it being passed down from Seale to Seale, constantly patched up and added to until the original boat was little more than the idea of a boat, not a single original piece surviving. It might have been as old as the island, this boatish concept. He claimed to have built it himself, but Horton thought there was rather more to it than that.
The ancient thing took some time to prepare. After Abigail left, they were at it for another two hours, though Horton did not begrudge the time. Preparation for sailing allowed him to occupy his hands and the front of his mind in matters of knots and sheets which were as ingrained in his muscles and bones as the memory of the deep orange sand on the beach at Margate. And meanwhile the case churned in the deepest parts of his self, the place from where connections and narratives emerged into the light.
Eventually they were ready, and by now the sea was calm. Seale gave thanks for that. ‘The rollers beyond the quay can be murderous,’ he said. Horton remembered their arrival, and Abigail’s difficulty in getting out of the boat. He remembered the eyes of the men in the boat and the way they rested on his wife.
He wondered if Abigail was safe, and where Edgar Burroughs the assistant treasurer might be. Perhaps he should, after all, have fetched her, brought her with them – but was she safer on this old boat, or on that lonely land? Where was she most at risk? How did he protect his wife from a world which seemed inclined to do her injury? What was the calculus of danger? The unending, unanswerable question.
But now it was too late, they were leaving the wharf, and James Town and its hilltop forts slowly pulled away from them. They bounced and fell through the rollers, and then they were in the calmer and deeper waters beyond. They turned east out of the little bay, the shore on their starboard side, a single sail hoisted by Seale catching the wind with more efficiency than Horton would have ever credited.
‘What is that?’
They were approaching Prosperous Bay. Horton pointed at a fissure in the cliff face, a gap through into the island interior, a dry valley which reached its end perhaps a hundred feet into the air. Below it was a huge cave.
‘That is Halley’s Cave,’ says Seale. ‘Or so I will call it when I build my model. It is where he explored in the underwater suit he had constructed.’
He pointed to a single peak in the interior, visible along the fissure in the rock above them.
‘That is Halley’s Mount,’ he said.
Horton looked at the mountain. From up there, Halley had not just been able to see the stars; he’d been able to see down this fissure, and thence out to sea. And he’d decided, it seemed, to explore this particular cave, using this so-called ‘underwater suit’ of his own devising. Why had Halley come all the way down here?
He pictured it: a ship, anchored off the shore. A boat, let down into the rolling sea and rowed to the beach at Prosperous Bay. A cargo, carried away by that same boat and onto that same ship. An astronomer, high up in the mountains in the dark, watching lights appear off the shoreline rather than gazing at the stars. The stench of illicit activity hung over Prosperous Bay like the nosegay of a Covent Garden beau hunting down a whore.
The bay was now to their larboard; Seale was heaving to before the fissure in the rock, and the cave below it, turning his bow through the south-easterly wind and adjusting his sail so the opposing pressures of sail and wind held them in place. He did this efficiently and well, and Horton could only admire his seamanship. He imagined the mountain dropping away beneath them, down into the depths. Take the sea away, he thought, and this might be a gentle slope leading up to the face of an escarpment, in which there was a gigantic cave below a waterfall. There were, in fact, features just like this in the island’s interior.
‘We can go no further in?’ Horton asked.
Seale looked at him. He had asked few questions about why a botanist needed to see the island from the sea. He seemed to want to ask some questions now, but Horton also saw the man’s own interest in their adventure. He wanted to sail in, if only for the thrill of it.
‘We can try.’ So in they went.
‘It is true then, Mrs Horton. You are a botanist. Among a good many other things.’
His words were chilling, even in the warm breeze that came in from the south, over the island at their back. She stood ten feet from him, and even at that distance she could feel how closed off he was, how self-contained. His thick red hair was churned by the wind, but his face and, more to the point, his eyes were dead still.
‘You have been watching me?’ she asked.
‘Of course I have been watching you. I make it my business to watch people like you. And people like your husband. I have been watching both of you for a good long while.’
He had no weapon – no pistol, no knife – that she could see. But then she looked around her, saw the rocks and the steep slopes, and observed that a well-timed shove would be as effective as a knife to the throat. The landscape was the only weapon he needed.
And yet why did she immediately think of murder? What was it about this man that bespoke fierce and immediate danger?
‘Sir, you have me at a disadvantage.’
He smiled.
‘I do, do I not? Perhaps a good deal more than you might imagine.’
He didn’t give his name. His dark suit was impossibly clean, his hands and nails impossibly well groomed. It was as if he’d stepped off Jermyn Street and onto a hillside in the South Atlantic.
‘Have you found anything interesting, Mrs Horton?’
He said her name as if he were stabbing her.
‘There is much to see of interest on St Helena,’ she replied, carefully.
‘Isn’t there? Of course, a great many of our plants are not indigenous. St Helena has been planted with the seeds of the whole globe, Mrs Horton. We are as it were a microcosm. I believe that is the correct word. From the Greek, yes? Mikros meaning small, and kosmos, meaning world.’
‘You are learned in Greek, sir. But not in manners. You have not seen fit to introduce yourself.’
‘No indeed. Let me remedy that. My name is Edgar Burroughs, madam. I am the recently appointed assistant treasurer on St Helena.’
The name, though suspected, still had the capacity to chill.
‘You have recently been in London, sir, have you not?’
Why she said this, she did not know. She was scared of what he might do, but she was also angry. The man’s impertinence was vicious, and if he had done the things her husband suspected him of doing, he was also the very Devil. Abigail felt a clear pulse of hatred towards this man, an immediate and visceral emotional dislike. It was as if he’d stolen her home from her; which, she supposed, he had.
‘You are not in London, now, Mrs Horton,’ was all he said. ‘And thus you may not benefit from London’s protections.’
He looked over to the east of the island.
‘Where is your husband, Mrs Horton?’
‘I know not.’
‘A lie, I am sure. A lying woman. The most common of the species.’
‘Sir, you . . .’
‘I wish to make your husband an offer,’ he said. ‘Work for me, live on the island, build a new life. There are worse offers. A house in the sun. Better botanising than is available in Wapping.’
It was a finely calibrated turn in the conversation, and she lost her social balance for a second. He smiled at her – the smile of a torturer picking up a new implement. He had said Wapping with the precise care of a surgeon interrogating a cadaver’s nervous system.
‘This is a kind of Paradise, Mrs Horton. Open to the sky and immaculate in its isolation. So much more pleasing than two rooms near the London Dock.’
God, he knew a frightening amount about them.
‘And how would your husband reply?’
‘I know not.’
‘And I believe you. He is a close one, Charles, is he not?’
‘And who are you, to make such offers?’
‘Oh, a mere functionary. A guardian of fiduciary matters.’
‘You speak for the Governor?’
He smiled, looking at her. His eyes were black buttons, his face long and pinched, his feet cloven inside those beautiful boots.
‘No. The Governor speaks for me, my dear.’
‘Charles is a good man. The best man I know.’
‘And I am a good man too, after my fashion. I preserve the island’s secrets, you see. Even when those secrets emerge thousands of miles away.’
‘At any cost?’
‘At any cost.’
‘Including the lives of innocents?’
‘No one is innocent, Mrs Horton. Least of all the wife of a Wapping constable who knows more than he lets on, and is privy to secrets he should not be.’
She saw something, then, down in the depths of his face. Something dark and old. It was as if a demon really did exist within those eyes. She wondered if his mother had ever seen it there.
He stepped forward, and for a moment she imagined shoving him, hard, so that his tall black body tumbled, sharp face over cloven hooves, down into the gully below. All it would take would be a step or two.
‘Abigail, my dear,’ he said, smiling his well-groomed but empty smile. ‘We should be friends, not enemies. I am delighted to make your acquaintance, at last.’
‘Now, you make somewhat free with my Christian name, sir. It is not welcome.’
‘But it is such a good name for you,’ he said. ‘Pretty, but sturdy. Appropriate, for the wife of a Wapping river constable, would you not say?’
She almost ran, but what would have been the point? He would be upon her in seconds.
‘I would like to take a small walk with you,’ he said.
‘I fear that would not be in my best interests,’ she replied.
‘On the contrary. I would like to discuss my proposal with you. There will be no harm.’
‘Do I have a choice?’
‘No, my dear. You do not.’
He walked over to her, and with an impossible smile held out his arm. With a sense of leaping over a precipice, she took it, and together they walked towards the east, away from James Town and towards that eastern point Charles and Seale had become excited by the previous evening.
She wondered if once again she was to be little more than a bargaining chip in a game between men. The bruise on her arm screamed in dull alarm, echoing the shrieks in her head.
The sea was astonishingly clear. He could see the mass of the island declining away beneath them, down into depths he could not possibly fathom.
Something gigantic swam past them in the water, bigger than a man, fat and slow and incurious. It was a sea-cow slowly making its way away from Seale’s boat, like a baronet disturbed at his club by a member of the lower classes. The sight of it calmed him.
He turned his head back to the rocky cliff. For a moment he could not see the opening to the cave; the tide had swept them along a little, shifting the angle such that he could no longer work out where the cave was. They had been pushed southwards, clockwise around the island. The boat was now in front of Prosperous Bay, and he saw the other boat pulled up onto the beach there. ‘We need to go back against the current,’ he said, and Seale moved the tiller.
Two heads broke the surface and watched them, and he almost cried out in alarm. They had heads and whiskers like dogs, though no ears that he could see, their snouts as slick as oil on the surface of stone. Sea-lions, come to watch the strange sight of humans struggling in their realm. He remembered seeing these creatures when he was on board the Phoebus.
The island’s rocky sea-face enclosed them as they came close to the cave, passing over a line between light and dark, under the shoulder of the island itself. The mast of the little boat would soon scrape the rock itself, which was turning over the top of them. The current suddenly changed, as if the island was sucking the boat into itself, and Seale hurriedly threw out the anchor behind them.
The rock’s surface was ribbed with little seams of strange phosphorescence. This was interesting, but it did not help them move away.
‘So deep behind us,’ said Seale. ‘The anchor is not . . . Ah, there it is.’
The cable stiffened as the anchor gripped onto whatever lay below them, and Seale began to haul them out. Looking up into the mouth of the cave, Horton imagined an opening below them. They may have been suspended above a gigantic opening in the side of the island, the top of it just visible above the water’s surface as a cave. He looked down at the water, expecting to see nothing but utter, desolate darkness, but instead he saw a bottom, where he least expected there to be one. It looked loose, not compacted like a sea bed or hard like rock, like a rockfall beneath the water, and it fell away steeply into the depths where Seale had nearly lost his anchor.
The idea of the boat hanging above that opening was vivid and terrifying. Where did those sea-lions come from? Were there colonies of creatures down there, waiting for a visitor, hungry and aware and somehow capable of sight in the pitch-blackness?
The current was strong, and Seale made little headway at first, so they remained suspended over that odd rockfall. Is this where Halley had descended in his underwater suit, a stargazer in Neptune’s realm? The idea seemed preposterous.
The sea-cow returned, anxious to see its visitors.
Abigail and the devil stood on the windswept point, watching the little boat below bob in the waves. She could see the heads of two creatures swimming in the sea around Seale’s boat – perhaps they were seals, too. The boat had emerged from beneath them as if exiting the island itself.
‘The brave constable puts himself about, does he not?’ said Burroughs, beside her. He turned away from the cliff, pulling her arm gently but with nonetheless indecent force. ‘Shall we take some tea at my residence?’
They walked away from the cliff top. The abandoned Dutch fort was above them and to their right. They walked away from it, down a hill and up another, until they came to what looked like a farm on the point opposite the fort. But there were no animals to be seen and nothing was being grown, as far as Abigail could make out. The house itself was well tended, and behind it stood a barn which looked just as cared-for.
Burroughs walked them past the buildings, and after another five minutes’ walking they came to another simple dwelling, on its own, in a sort of garden enclosed by a stone wall. Several huge green plants dominated this space, and the smell of them and their morphology led Abigail directly to identification.
‘Cannabis sativa, Mr Burroughs?’ she asked. ‘Have you been intoxicating yourself?’
‘I am impressed, Abigail,’ he replied, opening the front door of the little house as he spoke. There seemed to be about a dozen different locks and keys. ‘Yes, those are indeed cannabis plants. The stuff grows like weeds here. My father told me about it. He also introduced me to a delicious way of consuming it. The Indians call it bhang – one adds it to milk. It is quite intense.’
The door opened at last.
‘Now, if you please.’
She hesitated at the entrance. She felt as if she were going into a mouth. His smile was fixed and devoid of anything. She went inside.
She was very scared, but had, she thought, a clear view of the situation. Burroughs wanted something from her husband. That odd remark about Charles ‘discovering secrets’ had stayed with her. She was, she supposed, a kind of hostage, but she was only worth anything to Burroughs unharmed. She was in danger, certainly, but perhaps not of an immediate nature.
The house was of a similar size to Seale’s – a simple parlour with a kitchen off it, stairs leading up to an upper floor. There was some decoration, most of it appearing to come from India. There were also a great many books.
‘What now?’ she asked.
He sat down in a chair, crossed his legs and watched her.
‘Now, I would like to talk,’ he said.
‘Perhaps I could make us some tea?’ she said, and she saw that he was surprised and pleased. ‘The tea here on the island is quite magnificent.’
‘Ah yes,’ said Burroughs. ‘I’m sure Major Seale has an excellent supply. He keeps the stores, after all.’
Again, he had disturbed her. He knew so much about their movements and about their home. He seemed determined that she realise it.
‘Your tea is in the kitchen?’ she asked.
‘Yes. In a jar with a Hindoo motif. I can see it from here.’ He pointed into the kitchen, and smiled.
‘And the kettle?’
‘In the sink. I shall light a fire.’
While he lit the fire, she heard him whistling something tuneless and mildly irritating. Her botanising satchel was still over her shoulder, such that she could reach into it easily enough. She put some leaves into Seale’s little kettle, added water, and took it through to the parlour. The fire was already blazing.
‘Thank you, Abigail,’ he said. He placed the kettle on the fire.
‘Do you add milk?’ she asked.
‘Milk?’ he replied. ‘In tea? Hmm. I do keep milk, but usually for bhang. Well, Abigail, I believe in experiencing new things. I will fetch some milk, and some cups.’
He went into the kitchen, and returned with two cups and a jug of milk, which he set down on a table by the fire.
‘Now. Do sit.’
He pointed to a chair, and she sat down. She looked at the kettle, and wondered how long it would take to boil, and whether there would be an odour.
‘What will happen now?’ she asked.
‘What will happen? Nothing will happen. We will wait for your husband.’
‘How will he know where to come?’
‘He is an investigator, is he not? Think of this as a little test for him. The latest of many such tests.’
She did not know what he meant by that.
‘May I read a book?’ she asked.
‘By all means,’ he said, waving at the bookshelves in his hand. ‘I know how much Abigail Horton relies on her books.’
She shivered as she stood and walked over to the bookcase. The man’s knowledge of her was obscene. Her mind raced with anxiety as she pretended to look at the books, their spines blurring into one leather-bound miasma, until a few came into focus.
The selection of books seemed odd. It featured ancient philosophers and mathematicians – Aristotle, Plato, Euclid – but also more esoteric stuff she had not seen before: Roger Bacon, Trimethius, Ramon Gull, Pico della Mirandola – these names tugged at her mind and her memory. And there, another name: Cornelius Agrippa, the man whose name John Dee had evoked.
The kettle boiled, and Burroughs stood up to pour two cups, while she froze with her hands outstretched, frantically sniffing the air for any odd odour. She thought she could smell something. But could he? She heard the sound of liquid going into cups – first the tea, then the milk. Then, the sound of him sitting back down and sipping, carefully, from the hot drink.
On the next shelf, she found a set of works by John Dee: the Propaedeumata Aphoristica; the Monas Hieroglyphica; the Mathematicall Preface. And the rarest of all, the one she had never seen – the Libri Mysteriorum.
‘This milk idea is excellent,’ he said from behind her. ‘The goat’s milk of the island works wondrously well in bhang, too. Will you not sit and drink?’
‘I am just perusing your books.’
‘Ah, yes. Interesting, are they not?’
‘You have some marvellous editions of John Dee’s works.’
‘Dee! Ha! Yes, indeed.’
She did not understand this strange exclamation. She took a book from the shelf – the Libri Mysteriorum – and affected to read it with her back to him, her heart so loud in her chest that she was sure he must be able to hear her tell-tale anxiety. But he said nothing. After a few minutes, he made a small grunting noise, and then there was a crash as he fell sideways onto a table.
She put down the book, and stood and walked over to him. She picked up her satchel from beside the sink and looked at the leaves inside, the remains of the ones she had added to the devil’s tea.
‘Hmm. Cherry laurel, after all.’
She went to find some rope.
He’d expected to find a cave, an entrance into the island’s innards. He’d expected to find a way up inside the hill, a passage which ended, perhaps, at a bolted door inside an abandoned Dutch fort. That was the picture he had constructed in his mind; an internal construction, a repository of secrets and perhaps something more.
He remembered the sight of that loose rock and stone beneath the surface. It had not been the sea bed; it had consisted of larger rocks piled up unknowingly high. A place for sea-lions to scamper in, a place for Royal Society astronomers to lose their footing.
He helped Seale prepare the boat for their return, and they lifted the anchor and stowed it in the stern. Seale turned the bow away from the wind, and raised the sail, and they ran before the south-easterly back around the island. The old abandoned fort slipped away behind one of the island’s steep headlands.
He needed to think of another way. That old locked door within the fort had taken on a symbolic weight. Behind it, he had begun to think, was the essential secret of this whole mystery: the reason for the deaths of the Johnsons, and before them the deaths of St Helena’s assistant treasurers. It was the motivation he had been unable to uncover. He had sailed halfway around the world, only to stand before a door he could not open.
It seemed to take no time at all to sail back to James Town, and as he helped Seale tie up his boat Horton looked up into the island, up the valley to the peaks beyond. Somewhere in there lurked the new assistant treasurer, the elusive Edgar Burroughs. What was he about? Why did the island have need of this secretive post of assistant treasurer? And why did the holders of the post have to die?
Because they held a secret, he thought. A secret that Emma Johnson discovered. A secret valuable enough to blackmail Captain Suttle with. A secret deep enough to kill her for.
Their rope work finished, they walked back to Seale’s house, nodding to the guards at the drawbridge like old friends. He had not been stopped in his investigations by the Governor or any of his militia. For now, his story of investigating the island’s flora seemed to be holding. It might hold for some weeks, or a ship from London could arrive this very day with letters from the Company which proved his tale false. He had an unknown schedule to unlock an unseen mystery.
Abigail was not at the Castle when they arrived, and this brought the inevitable stab of fear. Where was she? The afternoon was drawing on, and the shadows of whatever trees Abigail walked within must be lengthening on the ground. Why would she not stay in one place?
Seale made them tea, adding the delicious goat’s milk. Horton stood staring at Seale’s map, calculating vectors of visibility and distances between dwellings, trying not to think of Abigail.
She appeared after an hour of this, coming through the door in a hurry, her bonnet dishevelled and her face reddened. Wherever she had walked from she had done so at an incredible clip.
‘Husband,’ she said. ‘I have met your assistant treasurer.’
‘What . . .’
‘Wait, I must rest.’ She sat down in one of Seale’s chairs, and Seale went to fetch her water. She sipped it and sat back with her eyes closed for a few moments, steadying herself. Horton saw no injury or sign of struggle. He went to sit next to her, taking her hand.
‘I met him up by Halley’s Mount,’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘He took me to a house near the fort, quite a small place near a larger farmhouse.’
‘Did he force you to go with him?’ asked Horton, his voice tight.
‘He did, husband, yes. Oh, he never as much as touched me. But the threat of it was in everything he said.’
He’d known, of course, that this was possible. But now, facing it, he felt a dull helpless anger, and imagined another knife in his hand and Edgar Burroughs laid out on a table before him.
‘What did he tell you?’
‘He knows all about us, Charles. Where we live. What your work is. He said he had a job for you.’
‘A job?’
‘Yes. He said he wanted you to work for him. For us to make our future here.’
It was puzzling, this, extremely so. Unexpected and, in its own way, interesting.
‘But he let you go?’
She smiled, at that.
‘Ah, not quite. I drugged him with cherry laurel leaves, and tied him up.’
Horton turned to Seale, who was standing with a thunderous face in the door to the kitchen.
‘You are quite the oddest couple I have ever encountered,’ Seale said. ‘And I find myself wondering why a botanist needs to poison our assistant treasurer.’