The Poisoned Island (20 page)

“None, sir. Of that I am quite certain. I did not check the men, I assumed they were . . . asleep.”

“That they slept through whatever it was that ransacked their room?”

“Yes.”

“And you contend that somehow, between you running into the street and returning with Horton, the men were annihilated.”

“So it would seem.”

“How is that possible?”

No answer.

“Nott, you seem suddenly alarmed.”

“Alarmed, sir?”

“Yes, Nott, alarmed. You appear as someone who expects a dragon to leap over that wall at any second.”

At that, Nott barks out a laugh, a sad and angry thing which startles Harriott.

“A dragon, sir?” says Nott. “Perhaps not. But there are other monsters in the world.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Only this. I did not kill those men, Mr. Harriott. I have never killed any man. But someone did, and that someone must have the heart of a dragon to have done those things.”

“I believe you know the man who did it, if you did not do it yourself.”

“How so, sir? What possible reason can I have given you to have imagined that?”

Harriott cannot answer Nott’s question. His thoughts are stuck in a muddy mess of exasperated disbelief. He looks to Horton for assistance, but his constable is watching the prisoners tending the pathetic little market garden, as if they might have the tools to unpick the strange chaplain and his meandering tales.

Sure Friendship’s there, & Gratitude, & Love,

Such as ne’er reigns in European Blood

In these degen’rate days; tho’ from above

We Precepts have, & know what’s right and good

Peter Heywood, in a letter to his sister, Nessy, 1791

The prince had been dreaming of leaving the island for months when the latest British ship arrived. The young members of the
arioi
cult up on the plateau had been talking of little else while they sipped the tea made from the secret leaf. They complained about their parents and their constant squabbling. They mourned the thousands of deaths and the growing stink of decomposition which hung around the island’s glades, where once had been only the fresh smell of green. They vied with each other to tell stories of the magnificence of Britain, where iron was so plentiful it was in every home, where everyone owned a gun, where you could buy intoxicating liquors on every corner. For people who had long believed that the Islands constituted the world, Britain was a story which only the gods could have dreamed into being. And the prince decided he was going to go there.

He felt like he had willed the latest ship into existence simply with the force of his wanting. He had made his definitive
decision to leave weeks before while lying in the hut beside the same empty space where his elder brother had once lain. He had told no one about it. And yet here was the ship, an ugly dwarfish thing, with none of the brutal magnificence of the whalers or transport ships which had visited before. But it was still bigger, vastly bigger, than anything the islanders could conceive of building. In any case all he needed was something big enough to carry him away.

The prince climbed into one of the canoes which rowed out to meet the ship. These little flotillas had become customary with every new foreign arrival. Most of the canoes were there to trade, piled high with breadfruit, coconuts, and in one case a pair of hogs, which the islanders knew the Britons treasured more than any other commodity. There were a few sightseers, mostly
arioi
like the prince, but their numbers were small, certainly far smaller than would have been the case a few years before, when the British visitors still had an aura of mystery and excitement about them. The prince knew his father would not be among the visitors. He had become violently anti-British since the death of his eldest son, killed, or so he believed, by the bad air from the
Britannia
. Some other islanders had similar prejudices, but they were generally mocked by the majority. How could “bad air” kill someone? The idea was quite ridiculous. People who died did so because of the will of the gods. That was all the explanation needed.

It was not only familiarity that reduced the number of canoes rowing out to the new ship. This was as anxious a period of violence and unrest as anyone could remember on Tahiti. Even the king, Pomare, had fled the island, to nearby Moorea, where he sat and brooded. The remaining chieftains fought among themselves for control of the island.

The missionaries had sent an odd representative to the new ship. The lonely half-breed, adopted son of the missionaries’ leader, rowed out in his own canoe and sat watching the vessel which had arrived, dressed in his strange dark European clothes, ignoring the splashing and shouting of the islanders who surrounded him. He saw the prince and nodded at him, as if the prince’s was the only friendly face in the crowd of canoes out on the water. The prince nodded back, but carefully. No one knew what he and the half-breed had been up to these past weeks, and he did not wish to reveal it.

The pale faces of the Britons looked over the side of their ship at the canoes below. The islanders who were there to trade held up their items from the water, shouting the English words for them as well as the words for the items they would accept in payment: “Nails! Guns! Liquor!” The prince looked at the sallow faces of the Englishmen and saw in most of them the hunger he had seen in previous crews. One canoe contained four young girls whose fathers had rowed them out to the ship to be sold as whores. The prince watched as the eyes of the British sailors fell on the girls, who did as they were told and unwrapped themselves as they stood carefully in the canoe, their eyes empty, their smiles rehearsed. A whoop went up from the sailors. One of them even dived into the water near the canoe containing the girls. One of the other sailors hollered after him and the others cheered. It was a tableau terribly familiar from previous visits of European ships.

The prince wondered what the ship was here to do. Previous visitors had traded, observed, restocked, or performed odd little experiments which bemused and amused the islanders. This one was of the experimental kind. Over the days that followed the ship’s arrival, it became clear that this visitor’s
intentions would be as unfathomable to the locals as some of its predecessors had been. Dozens of men came ashore from the ship, and after they had established their tents at the back of the beaches which ringed the bay (as was customary for the British visitors), they began to collect, of all things, plants.

Gangs of British men plunged into the undergrowth, carrying a motley selection of boxes, barrels, and bags which they filled with cuttings, saplings, seeds, and soil. These they transported back to the beach. After a week, the British tents were ringed by dozens of wooden containers of various shapes and sizes containing every different type of island plant that could be imagined. The prince’s father complained long and hard about the activity, telling all that would listen that the British were stealing the island itself. But he was laughed at by his fellow chieftains and nobles, who pointed out that the island was still well stocked with fruit and vegetables, with more than enough to spare for the strange appetites of the visitors. Did he think the British were going to tow the entire place away?

The prince, meanwhile, watched the sailors and the gardeners. One in particular caught his eye—a gigantic blue-eyed, blond-haired man. This man spent his first week whoring himself to distraction, but then, sometime during the second week, he began to disappear into the forest alone, exploring on his own. The prince followed him, unseen, as the blond giant meandered through the island’s hidden places. The prince decided this was the man who would take him back to Britain, and towards the end of the second week of the ship’s visit, he approached the giant, hoping he was friendly.

The man was inspecting a beached canoe, running his hands along the wood and whistling softly to himself. The prince, not afraid, exactly, but anxious lest he startle the
stranger and ignite violence of some kind, walked along the beach as noisily as he could. The blond man heard him and turned to face him. The prince went up to him feeling as self-conscious as a boy lying with his first woman. He held out his hand in the way the missionary’s son had shown him.

“Hello, British sir,” he said, the strange words angular on his tongue. “How are you?”

The Geordie Robert Craven does not see himself the way others see him. He is a curious soul, no question, but for him the world is a place filled with traps and ambushes, a place where information is the strongest shield against those who would hurt him. Forewarned is forearmed, as his father used to say, before going down in the cold North Sea in a fishing boat he’d bought from a Scottish stranger. Craven senior had liked the line of this boat and had been convinced by the stranger’s patter, which promised greater hauls and enormous distances. In fact the flattering description belied the multitude of short-cuts the ship’s builder had made and which now made the thing a death trap, the kind of vessel which old fishermen on the quay pointed at with the kind of hand signs normally reserved for avoidance of the Devil. Craven senior hadn’t read the signs, hadn’t got the information, was not forewarned, and now his bones lay cold and unburied at the bottom of
the North Sea. The lesson had never been lost on Robert Craven, his son.

So Craven has always sought information: who went where, who said what to whom, who fancies whose job or hammock or woman. It would be wrong to say he sells this information for pecuniary gain, but he does distribute it with the care of a gardener laying out a flower bed, placing a single seed in each hole. Information begets information, he has long realized. With some care, a man who nurtures his crop of facts and gossip will always be forewarned and protected.

So he accepts the sneers, the dislike, the cold shoulder. All these are just the sufferings of a man who sees things clearly. Others cannot perceive a world full of men striving and fighting and maneuvering, always seeking an angle, a way in, an opportunity. Only when a man sees this picture in full detail, from every side, can he hope to thrive and prosper and protect himself and his family.

But Robert Craven has no family. Any woman he has come to know has soon departed, unable to cope with his incessant questions and suspicions, his determined and relentless need to know where she’d been, who she was with and what they had had to say.

This need to know is what has driven him here, to a boardinghouse in a row of eight houses on Rose Lane, a half-finished meandering street just off the brand new thoroughfare of Commercial Road, at the north end of the hamlet of Ratcliffe. Behind the row of houses is a meadow which reaches down to a rope walk, more houses, a timber yard, a tar yard and then the river. It is a half-developed stretch of the riverside, a place to take breath between the crushed hive of Wapping and the new austere docks of the Isle of Dogs.

Inside the house, Craven knows, are Elijah Frost and
Colby Potter, who, along with Attlee, Arnott, and Sam Ransome he has begun to think of as Jeremiah Critchley’s Crew. These were the six men he’d watched gather furtively soon after the
Solander
arrived in London, who’d left together and who’d then dispersed. Three of them are, Craven knows, already dead. Jeremiah Critchley is shacked up in Wapping but had not answered when Craven had visited the night before. Craven had waited in a nearby doorway for two hours before summoning up the courage to go in and knock on Critchley’s door. There had been no reply, but careful listening at the door (an activity for which Craven has developed considerable facility) convinced him there had been
someone
in the room, their steady breathing plain to any careful listener.