The Detective and the Devil (33 page)

‘Stop!’

A woman’s voice, sudden and loud, echoed around the chamber. A crisp island accent, spoken with real authority. He stopped, unhesitatingly.

‘Do not move, constable. Not another step, if you value your safety.’

A light began to glow, and became deeper and stronger, as if its source were approaching him. It emerged from a cavity beside him, some thirty yards to his right, and as it glowed brighter it
picked out the shape of the space of the room he was in. With every step, the space grew clearer.

It was enormous, as big as a small church. He saw now that he was standing at the edge of a terrible slit in the floor, its bottom invisible in the darkness. This fissure ran across the far edge
of this space. If he had carried on walking he would have fallen straight into the ravine. He took two steps back, an instinctive move of self-preservation. Steadying himself, he looked down into
the fissure, but could see nothing in the gloom; the sound of the sea, though, was huge.

Was he looking down into the sea-cave into which he had almost sailed earlier today? He thought he was.

Alongside this fissure ran a series of works which reminded him of the try-works on the deck of the
Martha
. Huge iron pots, almost a dozen of them, stood in a row, some of them leaning
out over the fissure. Channels of brick and metal ran from beneath these cauldrons or crucibles or whatever they were. Further along the fissure to his left there was the suggestion of more
openings in the walls, leading, perhaps, to other tunnels or cavities beneath the fort. The whole installation looked very old.

A figure had appeared from a space in the wall, carrying an oil lamp. She walked up to him in the gloom: a middle-aged woman, perhaps even old, wearing the clothes of a male worker, trousers and
shirt and waistcoat. Her hair was tied up behind her head. She was as tall as him. Horton could not see her eyes in the flickering light, but when the woman spoke, her strong white teeth flashed in
the shimmer from the oil lamp.

‘I have been waiting for you, constable,’ she said, in that forceful yet odd-sounding island accent, English and yet not.

‘You have? How did you know who I was, may I ask?’

‘Edgar told me all about you.’

‘Edgar Burroughs?’

‘Aye.’

‘And where is Burroughs now? My shoulder would have words with him.’

The woman frowned.

‘I know not where he is, constable. He struggled with Fernando, and escaped.’

‘He did not follow me into the tunnel.’

‘I believe he did not. Fernando removed his key.’

‘I saw no key.’

‘
In the magnet, God has offered to the eyes of mortals for observation qualities which in other objects he has left for discovery to the subtler research of the mind and a greater
investigative industry.
’

‘Is that a quotation?’

‘It is. From a work by John Dee.’

‘Ah. Dr Dee. He seems to have cast a strange shadow over my life, these past months.’

‘John Dee’s shadow is a long one. It has lain over me for decades. Now, will you come with me, constable? It is time for all to be explained.’

‘All?’

‘All.’

The warm breeze moved through the cavern, carrying with it the unmistakable smell of bitter almonds.

She picked up a cup from the counter. It was chipped at one edge, and she passed the end of her index finger across the sharp little white wound, feeling it cut into her own
skin, and watched with only mild interest as a deep-red drop of her own blood stained the powdery surface.

She put the cup into the sink, and poured some water from a jug over it, and looked up, and shrieked. A face was at the window – an ugly, deformed face. It stared in at her, and muttered
some sound from its throat, which she heard as a rasping series of unintelligible noises through the cheap, rippled glass.

It was the ogre from the hillside. Its ugly noseless face stared at her longingly, and then it stepped back and held both arms out in a kind of surrender, a similar gesture to that which it had
greeted her with on the hillside. It was a signal made pathetic by the hand missing on its left arm and the thumb missing on its right hand.

It stepped back, away from the window and almost into the darkness. It gestured again with its thumbless right hand; a waving gesture.
Come with me. Come with me.

She was badly scared. Her heart felt like a rabbit darting about a field surrounded by hounds. But even so, she lifted her hand up and opened the little kitchen window. The creature took another
step back, as if signalling that she should trust it not to attack. And this time it spoke recognisably English words.

‘Will you come with me?’ it said, and its voice was cracked with exhaustion and harsh with an accent she did not recognise.

‘Come where?’

‘To where your husband is.’

‘And where is he?’

‘He was with the Company man. Now he is in the fort.’

She frowned at it.

‘The Company man? Edgar Burroughs?’

‘Yes, yes, the Company man.’

‘He sent you?’

‘No, no. My mistress sent me. The Company man is not a good man.’

‘Who is your mistress?

‘Come, come. To the fort.’

‘How will we get there? It is dark.’

‘You will come on my horse. Come, my mistress said it was time.’

‘Time for what?’

‘Time for stories.’

Horton followed the woman, as she turned down the opening from which she had emerged and walked down another corridor, similar to the one from which he had come. This one,
though, was longer. Taking the fissure and the sound of the sea as his cue, he estimated that they were now walking in parallel to the edge of the island, to the south.

The island had swallowed him up. He walked within it, once more a Jonah – although this time it was St Helena and not East India House that was the leviathan through whose innards he
wandered. He had voyaged here chasing a mystery, one which was obscured beneath conspiracy and privilege back in London. He remembered the poor cabin boy on the
Martha
, being forced to
climb down into the dead vacancy of the eviscerated sperm whale’s head, prodding the cavities of its brain with a sharpened shovel. At least that boy had had a shovel.

The tunnel began to rise, and then the woman’s oil lamp picked out another set of wooden stairs fixed into the rock, rising up to yet another black door with no handle and no lock. She
pulled an iron bar from a pocket within her dress, and moved it across the door’s surface as Burroughs had done, in a series of definite geometric sequences. From within the door he heard
metal moving upon metal. And then the door swung open, the woman stepped through, and he followed her.

He emerged into a cellar: a wide space, suggesting a good-sized house above it. It was cool down here, and there were various meat-shapes hung from hooks and the strong smell of curing. There
were sacks of grain and boxes of fruit and vegetables. A well-ordered food store.

The woman closed the door, passed her metal bar over it another time, and then turned away. She walked across the cellar, up some more steps, and through an unlocked door. Horton followed
her.

‘Please, constable, come and wait in the library,’ she said, still holding her lamp in the darkened house. ‘There is a fire in the kitchen, I shall make us tea.’

She stepped inside. Horton followed her, and entered a room unlike any other he had encountered.

It was finely decorated with dark wooden furniture, which the woman’s lamp picked out as she went around the room lighting other lamps. As these fired into life, more detail emerged. The
furniture was, indeed, very fine, and some of it looked very old. It was the kind of furniture one might find in a well-ordered townhouse. He had seen nothing like it on St Helena, even in the
Governor’s office.

And everywhere, there were books: on shelves, piled on tables by the sides of the chairs, tumbling off a writing desk which took up almost the whole of one wall of the room. A hearth with an
unlit fire occupied another wall. Looking up, he saw the room was perhaps twenty feet high, and every inch of its surface that was not occupied by the desk or the hearth was covered in books.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of books.

He walked over to one of the shelves.

‘May I?’ he said to the woman, who now stood waiting at the door, despite having promised tea.

‘You might perhaps start with that pile of books on my desk,’ the woman said. ‘There are volumes there which I think may be of interest to you.’

He picked up one of the books from the desk. Its leather binding was cracked and dangerously dry, its spine rubbed away so there was no writing legible on it. He opened it to the front page, and
saw immediately why the woman had pointed him to it. The book was in Latin, of which he had none at all, but it said it had been printed in ‘Londini’, which he took to be
‘London’. A date was given beneath this – ‘
MDLXVIII
’ – which he had insufficient tools to decode. The title of the book was
Propaedeumata Aphoristica
, and below it were the words ‘
IOANNIS DEE
,
LONDONINENSIS
’.

John Dee, of London.

But these signals were, to him, after effects. He knew this book was one of John Dee’s, because there at the centre of the frontispiece, on a shield entwined with snakes and what appeared
to be the feathers of quills, was the device that had been inked on the chests of the Johnsons. John Dee’s device – the Monad.

‘These books are all John Dee’s?’ he said, and the woman smiled.

‘It is an interesting question, constable,’ she replied. ‘These books are indeed mostly John Dee’s, though he only wrote a few of them – indeed, the ones in that
pile are the ones he wrote. But the rest are his, too.’

She spoke in a mannered, courtly air, like an actor on the stage. As if she had been trained to it, Horton thought.

‘I do not understand your meaning.’

‘No, I expect you do not.’

She sighed, and it was the sound of someone accepting the end of something.

‘My name is Mina Baxter, constable,’ she said. ‘And this room contains the library of John Dee. My grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather stole it from
him.’

As Abigail rode through the island night with the ogre, St Helena’s angular savagery was even more potent, unsoftened by the green bucolic edges of daytime. Peaks cut
jagged lines in the moonlit sky, and the lamplight landed every now and again on the demonic eyes of a goat watching them pass.

A fragment of John Dee’s words came back to her:
There is such a conjunction of rays from all the fixed stars and planets upon every point of the whole universe at any moment of time
that another conjunction which is in every way like it can exist naturally at no other point and at no other time.

Every moment in time a unique moment, and every point on the map of the cosmos a unique point. Men walked through these conjunctions under an infinity of influence.

And women, of course. Though Dee did not mention women.

They rode east towards the Deadwood plain, and the Moon hung high above them; one of Dee’s fixed stars, of course. He had thought much of the Moon.
The Moon is the most powerful
governess of moist things: it is the arouser and producer of humidity
. The Sun governed fire, the Moon governed water, tugging at the tides and influencing the hysterics of the mad.

And this was madness: to be galloping across a plain in the South Atlantic with only an ogre for company. This Caliban, this fairy-tale ogre, held the horse’s rein in his one good hand,
and placed his handless arm behind him and half around Abigail’s waist, holding her in place with surprising strength. He smelled of oil and fire and sweat, as if he had stepped out of a
furnace. And of almonds. The stench of bitter almonds hung on him like a memory of violence. She had put her trust into him, because he had promised her stories, and was that not always an item of
great promise?

They were almost at Deadwood when a shape appeared from within the rocks and shouted something at their horse. The animal reared backwards, throwing her and the ogre. She fell backwards and
landed on her shoulder, which then screamed in pain at her, a white-hot spearing agony the like of which she had never felt before, and the nurse in her realised that she had dislocated the joint,
and the physician in her knew that the only fix for such an injury would present even more pain.

She tried to stand, but could get no further than her knees before the pain grew too much. Ahead of her she saw two shapes struggling in the moonlight – the ogre, and another. She could
hear the ogre growling and shouting, but the other shape made no sound at all. It was taller and altogether calmer than the frenziedly angry ogre, and she anticipated the ending long before it came
– a rock raised high in the air, brought down with cold belligerence, and the struggle was over.

She breathed, heavily, trying to control her pain and her fear. There was a harsh sound as the figure dropped the rock with which it had dispatched the ogre, and she watched it stand up straight
and rub its face where, presumably, a punch had landed. Then it turned to face her and spoke.

‘That was clever, to poison me like that,’ it said. ‘Some women are too clever for their own good.’

‘What will you do with me?’ she said.

‘Oh, to start with, I might just twist your arm a few times,’ said Burroughs. ‘But before then, I need to find that horse.’

Mina Baxter told Horton a story.

It was a story that had its roots in the long ago and the now very far away. It was a story of Dutchmen on the make: Amsterdam merchants, an unscrupulous mercenary named Jacobus Aakster (and his
wife, Mina Koeman), and the library of the most famous magus in England, John Dee.

Dee’s library, an untidy but extraordinary English Alexandria, was said to contain a great secret, though the man himself had become something of an embarrassment, speaking to angels and
seeking the perfection of man in the achievement of a celestial magic.