Disquiet at Albany (5 page)

‘Now, now gentlemen,’ warned Bitten, ‘you must proceed delicately. You, Mr Holmes, are speaking as though “Ratty” here were real, that the species actually exists. This just won’t do. The trained cartographer would regard this caricature with justified scepticism.’ He paused to take a sip of coffee. ‘Map artists in the sixteenth century were notoriously inaccurate and took untold liberties. The rat is probably nothing like depicted here.’

‘In this instance I’m not sure the illustrator did not get it exactly right,’ said Holmes, a worried expression surfacing on his hawk-like features. ‘Now, on to the printed word, Mr Bitten.’

‘Mr Holmes, I have already instructed young Credon to extract from the library shelves a number of suitable volumes – naval documents recording early voyages to the spice islands – copies of course, the originals being way too fragile to handle.’

Credon duly provided us with copies of the aforementioned documentation. One extract from a logbook belonging to a Captain Dreyfuss Malmby R.N., particularly caught our interest. Written in brown, watery ink with a quill pen, each page meticulously recorded an expedition by a group of officers and ratings who first came ashore to the island of Sumatra in a row-boat armed with pistols and muskets, evidently fearing the worst. But those fears proved ungrounded.

Our vessel
Bulldog
safely anchored in the bay. Upon landing on the island named Sumatra I am thus pleased and gratified to report no hostility did we encounter, rather the natives appeared both friendly and industrious, eager to trade for a variety of fish, fruit and much-prized spices, in exchange for tobacco and iron cooking utensils. A peculiarity upon which we all remarked was the fact that on our trip not one old or ailing person did we encounter. Even in the village of palm huts it appeared age and infirmity had been banished for no old people were to be seen, neither sleeping, cooking nor going about their business. Village elders, so much a part of Indonesian culture, the mainstay of a community, were entirely absent. I thus congratulated the chief amongst this tribe of young men and women through a translator, and heartily commended the health and wellbeing thereof. Grinning, he pointed to a cooking pot and flayed animal skins drying out, hung from poles. These rough, hairy hides were evidently precious to them.

Our initial fears that the old and infirm were, at a certain advanced age, led away to a jungle clearing and left to be devoured by predatory beasts as in certain other tropical cultures were mercifully proved unfounded for I was assured that by consuming the flesh of a giant tree-rat who inhabited this island exclusively, youth and vitality were maintained and that the bones of that same animal when ground down to a fine powder could enable a man or woman to live to be three hundred years of age, and that most of the islanders had never known a day’s illness in their lives, the average age being two hundred and fifty years.

The meat, I doth report to my king, be tough and inedible, though sampling a sip of the special potion they talked of, the effects upon the bowels were most agreeable and filled us with a sense of wellbeing and wonder at our situation.

Ratings and officers alike, we rowed back to our sailing barque in good spirits with eight native palm baskets brimful of spices.

Ship’s Doctor’s Report: H.M.S. Bulldog

After a most thorough examination of the returning crew, ratings and gentlemen officers alike, I confess dear brethren I am at a complete loss to explain exactly how the older ratings (indeed our captain himself is nine and fifty years of age) seemed verily sunnier and full of much youthful exuberance. Their physical ailments and grumpy demeanour so evident before their departure in the row-boat are replaced by muscular suppleness, youthful faces and they are so jolly and overbearing as to cause me great displeasure and to become irritable and off-hand with them.

The ratings and officers I examined showed much signs of increased vitality and strength since visiting the island called Sumatra. Am I, a man of science and medicine, to wholly support such unnatural change in a man, else as I suspect some diabolical, un-Christian sorcery may be at work?

‘What are we to make of this, Holmes?’ said I, placing my coffee cup back on the tray in a state of continuing puzzlement.

‘The evidence mounts up, my dear fellow,’ said Holmes with a frown. ‘It is obvious to me Ethby Sands has given himself over to some dastardly medical experiment. His absence from Albany this last fortnight, the time spent in Norfolk holed up at Foxbury Hall bodes ill.’

‘You infer this group of Chinese led by Doctor Wu Xing, the alternative medicine crowd, may have succeeded in producing a viable serum that duplicates in modern terms the effects of the native potion of powdered bone?’

‘I do, Watson, I do old man. Come, we must make haste in a cab to the telegraph office. There is a person who above all others can enlighten us further concerning this peculiar case.’

14

Alfred Russell Wallace

Less than a week later, I recall as if yesterday, a slender, tall gentleman with a nut-brown complexion, sporting a long bushy beard and round wire-rimmed spectacles entered our rooms at Baker Street. He had been guided up the stairs by Mrs Hudson, who I could see was in complete awe of our visitor, and with good reason, for here in our modest bachelor apartment we now played host to the explorer and naturalist, the author of
The Malay Archipelago
, Alfred Russell Wallace; he who had been a close friend of Darwin and at great cost to his own health and personal finances had single-handedly explored some of the remotest islands on earth.

It was a rare privilege indeed to receive his Panama hat and brolly and, once he was comfortably seated before a blazing fire in the grate, offer him a cigar from the coal scuttle, while Holmes poured us each a glass of whisky. My colleague had arranged this interview with the great man at very short notice, Wallace being down in London for the opening night of a new light opera at the Wimborne, Drury Lane, written of course by the lyricist Philip Troy and composer Christopher Chymes.

We had ourselves been invited and were fortunate enough that same evening to attend, sharing a box with Wallace, his wife Annie and their daughter Violet and sons Herbert and William, who had come up from Cornwall specially and were staying for a day or two at the Langham. Once we were all settled, Holmes fastidiously refilled his pipe and, languidly stretching his long legs across the bearskin hearthrug, posed his first question of the evening.

‘I recall noting in your autobiography, Wallace, that you went down with a serious fever some time in 1858. You nearly lost your life due to malnutrition and the onset of a severe strain of malaria. You lay on your cot drifting in and out of consciousness for many days and nights in that time, but you received an unusual visitor, a shaman from the Indonesian island of Sumatra.’

‘To an explorer in the tropics, as I then was Mr Holmes, the unseen dangers of semi-starvation and disease are always present. I was at the time, you will recall, lying on a cot-bed in a palm-thatched house, dangerously ill, hallucinating, my feeble constitution unable to stave off a virulent bout of yellow fever. I must emphasise, gentlemen, that had it not been for the intervention of this native, an accomplished shaman, I believe I should have died and been lost to hoards of black ants, giant centipedes and carnivorous termites who abound in that region of the interior, and would certainly never have made it back to England alive.’

‘A shaman, you say,’ said I, taking notes in my little pocketbook.

‘Indeed, Doctor Watson, I had long known the Albverro of Seram, for instance, were renowned and powerful magicians and spirit guides. But it was a bird trader of all people with whom I had been doing business, who happened to be visiting Sumatra and, using all his influence, persuaded this powerful shaman (for a substantial consignment of rare bird feathers) to travel across the islands on a trading
prahu
and visit me. So there was I, suffering dysentery and a high fever, sweltering in that damn palm hut, when this kindly native shows up. I barely registered his presence at first. I recall a happy, dusky fellow patting me on the shoulder, allowing some sweat from my brow to trickle into a tiny clay pot he kept strung around his neck. My native visitor lost no time in assessing my condition and it was lucky he acted so promptly. From beneath his shawl he drew out a bundle of brittle old bones wrapped in the stiffened, mummified hide of some long dead animal. A horribly squashed head, large furry ears, a compressed snarling snout, the vilest looking, longest and sharpest incisors I ever saw. The acute smell of the matted fur, the leathery skin, repulsed me.

‘“Take it away,” I exclaimed, more dead than alive. “Take the damn thing away and burn it.” The native found my feverish ranting highly amusing and chuckled merrily, once more patting me on the shoulder and emitting a
chuk-chuk-chuk, chuk-chuk-chuk
from between pursed lips, quickly followed by a peculiar keening noise such as a rodent makes, which seemed to soothe away my fevered thoughts and calm my inner being wonderfully. I slept soundly and deeply for the first time in weeks, awaking now and then to find my new friend, my surrogate mother if you will, squatted on his haunches, busily occupied with pestle and mortar, grinding bony fragments from that awful emasculated creature into a fine power which he then placed in a jar and mixed with a quantity of blood drawn by hideous slug-like leeches cleaving to my inner thigh, to form a mash to which he added water.

‘The shaman would occasionally allow me a sip of this potion, else feed me slices of a delicious fruit entirely unknown to me.’

‘This animal – would you classify it as a rat?’

‘Why yes, Mr Holmes, a giant tree-rat native only to Sumatra, a species rare and long extinct, an exotic specimen. I grant you that if I had been in my right senses and able to think straight, and record jottings in my journal of travels properly, or even write a paper on it, I might have regarded the specimen as a valuable link in the evolutionary chain. At the time my dear friend, Charles Darwin, was as you know busy embarking upon his great work
On the Origin of Species
, and perhaps if I had been more my old self I would have drawn his attention to the giant Indonesian tree-rat earlier. As it was, I loathed the sight of the filthy-smelling vermin. However, gentlemen, when it came time for Samu the shaman to leave, and I was fully recovered, he left the skin and bones for me and I had not the heart to throw them out or destroy them. So Samu, that dear, beloved companion of mine for so long, left me the tree-rat remains as a present – a gift to recall our association – and they got placed in a bamboo crate and were all but forgotten, until my eventual return to these shores. It was only when I began to classify and label my finds back in London, and by this time I was a happily married man, that the old bones, wrapped in animal hide, once more came to prominence. I recall my darling wife found the items stuffed behind one of my portmanteaux. She picked up the rolled-up carcass of matted hair and calcified bone, commenting about the awful snout and teeth the creature possessed. She said, “I don’t care if it’s a rare Sumatran tree rat, Alfred, for goodness sake get rid of it. The old skin and bone pongs to high heaven and should be heaped on the bonfire, I don’t want it in the house. I dread to think what dormant mites and ticks it is host to.”

‘Of course I did not even then want to destroy the specimen so we contacted Charles Darwin and his wife and they agreed to take it off my hands.’

‘Now we come to the crux of the matter, Wallace. We know much about your giant tree-rat of Sumatra but next to nothing about the potion. Another whisky?’

‘I will have another, thank you Holmes. All right, the potion – well, I can honestly say hand on heart it worked. If there is such a thing as the elixir of eternal youth, this gets damnably close. Not only did it contain healing properties, but when I next looked in the glass after being confined to my cot with yellow fever, for God knows how long and close to death, I had lost middle age and become young again. I felt cleansed, entirely rejuvenated in both body and mind. Samu the shaman insisted he had lived three hundred years, and amongst his tribe on Sumatra he was but a young man, a mere whippersnapper.’

‘But, scientifically, surely that’s unfeasible – an anti-ageing potion belongs to Greek myth,’ said I, stubbing out the remains of my cigar in the ashtray.

‘Make of it what you will, gentlemen,’ said he at length, sipping from his glass. ‘But I tell you truthfully, it proved effective.’

‘One more thing Wallace.’

‘By all means.’

‘If it were possible, say, to replicate this potion you talk of, to produce a modern serum from the remains of this long-extinct tree-rat, who would you plump for, who should possess the requisite skills and knowledge to carry it through?’

‘The Chinese come to mind. As a race they are so far advanced in alternative medicine. One only has to visit a Chinese herbalist in Limehouse to see the similarities.’

15

Opening Night

The theatre lights dimmed. We took our places in the box. Alfred Wallace, his wife and family filed in and took their seats. We were all of us expectantly passing round a bag of mint humbugs, making sure our opera glasses were close at hand. At last the performance got under way. A rousing overture, both instantly melodic and catchy, set our feet tapping and hands clapping to the infectious rhythm of the orchestra in the pit, being conducted by Sir Penfold Wilkes in white tie and tails. A stirring baton-led march led to the curtains parting on an idyllic tropical island. A gorgeous young lady walked hand in hand beneath the coconut palms with her handsome beau and a love duet ensued.

‘By Jove,’ said I to Alfred Wallace in the next seat. ‘That’s the second catchy tune and we’re barely into the first act.’

‘Agreed,’ said he, nodding his head, his spectacles flashing in the subdued wall lighting. ‘I think they have a hit on their hands, Doctor Watson.’

Entranced, we sat in the box, occasionally moved to tears, as stirring rumbustious marches alternated with tuneful ballads and Bella eventually promised eternal fidelity and marriage to young Archie, a poor rating whose ship would be leaving for England the next day, leaving the pretty young maiden alone to pine for her love. She, the daughter of a cantankerous, possessive widower, a hypochondriac moaner, a gruff old Welsh missionary by the name of Davies, played to perfection by our dear friend Charles Lemon.