The Poisoned Island (45 page)

But that terrible smell is as nothing to what is on Hopkins’s face. His head is thrown back on the pillow, as if in some extremity, his back arched and his shoulders pushed down, such that Horton only really sees the man’s face when he reaches the side of the bed. The eyes are wide and sightless, the nostrils flared open, and the mouth is tensed broadly open, the captain’s yellow teeth exposed in a terrible grin.

*  *  *

Horton, naturally, waits for the coroner, allowing the two magistrates to return to London in the carriage. It is already well past midnight. Abigail will have gone to bed long ago, another few hours will make no difference to him. Harriott says he will send word to the Surrey coroner and magistrates and will, if needs be, supply officers from Wapping to take over from him, and Graham makes similar undertakings. Then they are gone, leaving Horton with a dead captain, a widow who is somewhere in the house weeping gently into some embroidery, and the rustling Putney dark.

Hopkins, it is clear, had become reckless with the leaf described in Nott’s letter. He had waited to consume it, but then had indulged in a deadly innovation. He had attempted to smoke it in a pipe rather than just drink it as a tea. What difference this makes to the intensity of the leaf’s effects Horton
can only surmise, but it has clearly led to the captain’s death. The smile on his face is a grim exaggeration of those peaceful smiles on the faces of his dead crewmen. While those had been made terrible by the circumstances—bloodstained throats, empty lungs, livid necks—the captain’s grin has its own essential horror. It is as if Hopkins’s body has been possessed by an external force, a gleeful malignancy which was too much for his human heart to bear. Despite the stillness of the body, Horton cannot escape the feeling that at any moment the hands will rise from the captain’s chest and will seek out his throat, squeezing the air from him as the mad grin widens before his eyes.

After some time, Horton hears a noise from the landing, and then the voice of the captain’s wife speaks through the half-open door.

“Constable Horton?”

He rises, and steps out into the landing. The exhausted woman still holds her embroidery in her hands, and she will not look at the door to the captain’s room. She raises her eyes to Horton’s and they are red-raw and desperate.

“Some tea, Constable?”

Horton, despite himself, struggles with a smile. “No, Mrs. Hopkins, thank you. I will take no tea.”

“I may have some. Is that permissible?”

“Perfectly permissible. The coroner will be here soon.”

“Thank you.”

She turns away from him, and heads down the stairs.

*  *  *

The coroner arrives after another two hours. By this time there are threads of gray in the sky as dawn approaches.
The coroner pronounces Hopkins dead and arranges for the two men who have accompanied him to carry the body out to their carriage. Mrs. Hopkins stays out of the way, hiding somewhere in the house and now silent, her weeping ended. When the two men lift the captain’s body it is stiff, as stiff as a mast, and they are forced to carry it out still holding the pipe, as they can by no means force the fingers open. As the coroner prepares to leave, another carriage appears at the end of the driveway, sent by Harriott to bring Horton home.

He goes to find the widow. She is in a neat, tidy sitting room at the back of this neat, tidy house, gazing out onto the pearl-colored light which is beginning to pick out the individual plants in the neat, tidy garden. Her embroidery sits upon her lap, now forgotten.

“Mrs. Hopkins, I must now take my leave.”

“Of course, dear. Of course.” She continues looking into the garden.

“Is there anything you need?”

“No, dear. It is perfectly all right. My husband has been on many a journey and I have waited many a day and night for him to return. Now he has left on a final journey, it is for him to wait for me, wherever he may be. As he has often said to me, I say to him: I don’t know how long I’ll be, dear. You’ll just have to be patient.”

She smiles a sad human smile, which she turns onto him. It goes a good way to erasing the memory of that awful grin of her husband’s.

“In any case, he has left me a delightful memento.” She looks into the garden, and Horton thinks he can detect the leaves of a tree moving outside the window. “A beautiful tree, from the far side of the world.”

Horton says nothing to that. He wonders if he might need to visit the widow again before long.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Hopkins.”

“Goodbye, my dear.”

*  *  *

London is waking up. He can almost see it coming back to life, street by street, light by light, window by window. His carriage crosses Westminster Bridge, as Robert Brown’s had done, and starts to make its way towards Whitehall. Two figures which would have been familiar to Brown appear from behind the corner of some great Government building, where later today the machinery of Empire will be winding its way towards another day of battle with Napoleon. The figures shout something at Horton’s carriage and then they cackle harshly before disappearing into the shadows once more. Little London organisms, cells of humanity, bouncing randomly in the urban soup.

There is still a long way to go, and for a while Horton sleeps, dreamlessly and fitfully, waking every now and again when the carriage bumps against some London feature in the road. Finally, the carriage starts to make its way down the Ratcliffe Highway, past the tall masts down below in the Dock, like the trees which surround Captain Hopkins’s little Putney cottage. The Highway is already busy with lumpers and traders and craftsmen ready to begin stoking the engines of Trade, and at some point Horton will join them, but for now he needs to sleep, perhaps for the whole day.

Down Old Gravel Lane turns the carriage, down the hill towards the river, in between the shops and workshops and inns and boardinghouses, from which men are streaming into
the morning light. At the end of Old Gravel Lane the carriage turns right, down Wapping Street, then right again into Lower Gun Alley, and he is home.

Harriott has already paid the driver, for which Horton gives silent thanks. As the carriage begins the tricky business of turning round in the narrow alley Horton opens the door of his lodging and climbs up the stairs, trudging with exhaustion but also careful not to make too much noise in case Abigail is asleep. He opens the door to their little flat, goes into the sitting room, and sees the burnt-down fire, the kettle on the side, the pouch. He smells the pungent, acrid smell, weaker than in Putney but the same as all those days before in Sam Ransome’s room. Coming further into the room he sees his wife lying on the floor, a cup in her hand, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling like a little frantic bellows, and a high, doglike whimpering coming from her throat, and he shouts and falls down upon her, his guilt rising up to meet him like that Pacific wave.

Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,

Withdraws into its happiness:

The mind, that ocean where each kind

Does straight its own resemblance find;

Yet it creates, transcending these,

Far other worlds, and other seas;

Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.

Andrew Marvell, “The Garden,” 1651

Last night, she said, she dreamed of today’s burial.

“He was smiling inside his coffin. That terrible smile which you described and which, in some strange way, I’d already seen. The coffin was covered in earth, almost instantly, and then some time seemed to pass, and a tree sprang up above the coffin. I dreamed I could see the roots of the tree twining around the coffin until the wood cracked and splintered, and then the roots went inside and began to twine around
him
. I heard her laughing again. Oh, Charles. She laughs with such joy at the pain he suffers, but when she looks at me she smiles, and then she leaves. The worst of it was, I wanted him to suffer. I wanted those roots to tear him asunder.”

Abigail laid her head on his chest, her fine blond hair brushing his chin like a spider’s web blowing in the breeze. She shivered slightly at the memory of her dream. She had slept and dreamed for much of the time since that terrible early morning when he’d discovered her lying on the floor.
Whenever she woke she asked for more of the tea. She cried and shrieked and slapped his face and tore at him with her nails, but it was no good. The leaf was gone, perhaps thrown into the river by the desperate captain and now somewhere out in the estuary, causing silver-gray fish to dream of walking. He had visited the captain’s widow, too. With an axe.

Abigail screamed with frustration this morning, too, but with less violence. The quality of the dreams she described had changed also. Her dreams were nothing like those which Robert Brown had described to him two days before, when he’d visited the librarian in Soho Square.

It had been an instinct, that visit, but he’d been sure that Brown could tell him something of the leaf and of its effects. Brown had looked shockingly pale and haunted and Horton had been convinced, immediately, that he’d come to the right place. Brown had been appalled at what Hopkins had done, and after some prodding had admitted that he too had taken the tea, and that he had been subject to the same enormous longing and those dreams of a terrible woman pursuing him through a lush landscape.

“How is she terrible?” said Horton as Brown related his experience.

“She wishes me harm. I am convinced of it. Why, I cannot say.”

“And she is pursuing you?”

“Without doubt.”

Horton frowned. “Abigail’s dreams have been disconcerting. But she always describes the woman’s presence as protective.”

Brown had looked amazed.

“The woman does not chase her?”

“No. She has spoken of a woman, but to Abigail she is like
a fierce friend, one who will always protect her but is at the same time disturbing.”

Brown said nothing to that.

Hopkins is buried at St. Mary’s Church, despite the strongest representations from magistrates Harriott and Graham that he should be given an unmarked grave as a vicious murderer. But the leaf stolen from the dead
Solander
crewmen remains unfound, and Peter Nott is still missing. The Surrey magistrate argued (with the connivance, Harriott later discovered, of Edward Markland) that there was no firm evidence to commit Hopkins’s name to an eternal damnation, and until Nott was found that was likely to remain the case. So Hopkins’s widow got what she wanted: a church burial for her beloved captain. There was little either of the two London magistrates could do about it. Horton feels none of the anger that Harriott expresses about this turn of events. The man is dead, after all.

He goes to the burial for no other reason than to see who else will be there. He still wishes to find Nott, and half believes the strange missionary’s son will make an appearance himself, and demand that the Christian burial be ended. He wonders to what extent Hopkins’s death was self-imposed, whether he realized that smoking the leaf would be fatal. Traditionally a man committing suicide to evade justice is buried at a crossroads with a stake through the heart. But Hopkins after all was a sea captain, and captains are not buried like common men.

Horton waits outside the church during the funeral service, pondering on forgiveness and the eternity of sin. The enormous weight of his own guilt—the whole sorry parade of mutinies and betrayals—is such that it feels as if the church tower had fallen on him. He remembers Abigail’s light head
on his chest that morning, and wonders how such a memory can be so redemptive.

Hopkins’s coffin is carried from the church by four old shipmates. No one from the
Solander
is there. Horton rather suspects that Red Angus Carrick has put out the word that the old captain is not to be mourned. As the coffin makes its way to the open grave, followed by the widow and her family (Mrs. Hopkins looks calm and distracted, as if pondering on when she might follow her husband on this final journey), a carriage arrives at the church gates, and Horton sees Robert Brown get out of it. He walks up the path, and greets Horton with a nod, which the constable returns. Then his eye rests on the coffin, and there it stays, as if the casket contained arcane knowledge needing careful interment.