The Poisoned Island (10 page)

So when Banks needed a botanist for an expedition to New
Holland—and when his first choice, Mungo Park, said no—it was to Brown he turned. They’d dined together on Christmas Day 1800, haggling like a pair of old bankers before agreeing on a salary of £420 for the voyage. Six months later Brown was sailing south aboard the
Investigator
, and his fortune, for good or bad, was set. Now, he is a librarian, a botanist and, it would seem, a pusher of wheelchairs.

He steps from behind Banks’s wheelchair and opens the door of the Stove, and once again finds himself astonished by the richness of the new odors which spring out from within. The plants which have been placed inside the hothouse have survived thousands of miles of travel, thanks to techniques invented by Banks and perfected by Brown. He may understand those techniques, and yet it still seems a miracle to him that these delicate exotic things have made it this far.

The door squeaks slightly as it opens, and for a moment the squeak sounds like the giggle of a girl, and the librarian pauses, wondering if a child of one of the staff has entered.

“What is it, man?”

The bark from the chair is familiar if unwelcome.

“I thought I heard someone, Sir Joseph.”

“In here? Don’t be ridiculous.”

A pause.

“What did it sound like?”

“Like a girl laughing.”

Banks grunts.

“What would a girl be doing in the Stove, Brown?”

“I have no conception, Sir Joseph. Collecting flowers?”

Banks laughs at that, an intelligent and generous laugh which reminds the librarian once again why he loves this enormous man, with his curiosity and energy and spirit, despite his lapses into gruffness.

“Collecting flowers! We have done little else with our lives, Brown. So are we nothing more than girls ourselves?”

“Perhaps so, Sir Joseph. It might explain our occasional petty quarrels.”

Banks laughs even more at that, the joke from his librarian all the more valued because of its rarity. Brown pushes him into the Stove.

“Leave me for a while, Brown. I wish to renew my acquaintance with some of these treasures.”

So the old President of the Royal Society wheels himself into the hothouse, leaving his librarian by the door. Brown stands and watches him for a while, but Banks has already departed into a botanical world of memory in which no one else exists. He smells the air around him, as if comparing the odors.

“
Barringtonia asiatica.
It keeps its odor well. And
Triumfetta procumbens
. That was one of your triumphs, Sydney. The smell and the picture are as one in my head.”

He continues to move forward, pulling up next to a small pot which is waiting to be planted in the earth. He lifts it up, and holds it in front of his face. Brown thinks it is the same plant Banks had been holding when the Regent made his sudden and unwanted incursion into the Gardens earlier in the day.

“And you? What are you?” says Banks. “Well, we shall see.”

He heaves himself out of the wheelchair, and digs a hole in the virgin earth which has been made ready. With infinite care, Banks plants the little thing into the soil of the Stove, and the librarian turns and makes his leave.

Thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thy eyes have fruit;

But knowest thou that trees and fruit flourish upon the earth

To gratify senses unknown? Trees, beasts and birds unknown:

Unknown, not unperceived, spread in the infinite microscope,

In places yet unvisited by the voyager, and in worlds

Over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown.

William Blake, “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” 1793

The prince’s brother began moaning in his sleep a week after the
Britannia
had departed. The prince was the first to hear his brother’s groans and sighs, as they slept side by side in the hut, but his mother came soon after and asked her eldest son what was wrong.

“My stomach hurts, that is all,” said his brother, embarrassed by the fuss, and affecting manly irritation. “I was asleep. I didn’t know I was making any noise.”

“You sounded
terrible
,” said the little prince, and his brother scowled at him. The prince felt bad, though he didn’t quite know why.

“Drink some water,” said his mother, and something in her eyes scared the younger boy for a moment, because it looked as though she was afraid. But this idea—his mother, afraid—was such an impossibility that the prince forgot it instantly. His brother did what he was told, and they all went back to sleep.

His brother ate little the next day. The following night his
groans were louder, and their mother came immediately, as if she’d never really fallen asleep. His brother claimed he was fine again, but then suddenly he leapt up and ran out of the hut. From outside they heard him throwing up, retching sounds followed by great shocking wet noises which made the prince think, somehow, of a fish eating. His mother followed the prince’s brother out of the hut and they were both gone a long time. Eventually they came back and his mother laid her eldest son back down. The prince lay alongside him, feeling him shiver and hearing him moan the rest of the night.

His brother could not get up the next day, and their father came to see what was wrong. A look passed between their parents which the prince just about caught, but could not decipher. In the afternoon a great smell rose from his brother, and some men came and took him out of the hut and laid him on the ground outside, washing him down with water because he had soiled himself. His brother was shrieking now, even when he was sleeping, and all the little prince could think was
he went on board the
Britannia
and he came back ill
.

And then, after two more days of shrieking and vomiting and that terrible brown stinking excrement, came the end. His brother yelled one more time, a liquid yell of despair, and then he was silent.

The traditional mourning followed. The prince’s mother was joined by other women from the district in a terrible wailing around the body of the elder son. The women beat themselves around the head with shark’s teeth and conch shells, blood dripping down their cheeks from the wounds in their scalps. The men hung drapes made from
tapa
, the bark of the breadfruit tree, around the body, and soon joined the women in their mutilations.

Other men spent this time building an altar for the dead
prince in the family
marae
. This altar was six feet high with a roof to shelter the corpse. On the third day the women stopped wailing and ceased their mutilations, and the prince’s body was taken to the altar so that the public mourning could begin. For the younger boy the sight of his mother’s bloodstained face had been the stuff of nightmares, but this soon gave way to the appearance of a new horror: the
haiva
, an enormous monster with mother-of-pearl eyes, a tiara of red feathers, and a vicious scepter, lined with shark’s teeth. The
haiva
ran through the district accompanied by a gang of young men and boys, smeared with mud, and as he ran he clattered together two mother-of-pearl shells in his hands as a warning of his approach, so that the district resounded with the snapping echoes of a wooden-footed demon trampling among the surrounding rocks.

The young prince buried his head at the sound of the
haiva
’s arrival, and hid himself even after the
haiva
had disrobed himself at the altar of his dead brother, revealing an ordinary man. The chase around the village was a representation of his brother’s spirit, the prince understood, a spirit which was still in the air and the trees and the ground around them and which would not depart that place until it was satisfied with the mourning. Every night he told himself this, and every day which followed he fled into the hut again at the sound of the
haiva
’s approach, so full of terror that his bladder turned to water and his eyes ran.

Every day for a fortnight the
haiva
performed his manic masque, ending each day disrobed and eating calmly with the dead prince’s family. Finally, after seemingly endless days of wailing and chasing, the body of the older brother was wrapped in
tapa
and taken up into the mountains, and the younger boy was given to understand that now, at last, his brother’s spirit could leave the island along with the spirits of all the other dead, and be free.

Charles Horton is prowling Lower Gun Alley, below the windows of the rooms he shares with Abigail.

Up and down. Up and down.

It is Saturday. The coroner’s inquest into Sam Ransome’s death is to be held on Monday. This morning, John Harriott received notice from the Shadwell magistrates that Charles Horton was no longer welcome to pursue the matter, which was formally under their jurisdiction. The Shadwell magistrate Edward Markland had added a postscript insisting on an interview with Captain Hopkins of the
Solander
. Harriott had expressed his surprise at Markland’s aggressive alacrity, and Horton had seen how angry this had made the old man. Persistent battles are being played out, he can see, and he finds himself asking how any of this helps discover who killed Ransome, and why he died with that satanic grin on his face.

So now Horton walks. Up and down. Up and down.

Neither the coroner nor the Shadwell magistrates remarked
on what he had noticed: the bag of money in the sea chest, left untouched. Nor had they yet spoken, as he had, to the boardinghouse woman. This was how magistrates traditionally proceeded. There had been a death. Was there an obvious perpetrator? And was there anyone who wanted the perpetrator prosecuted? If the answer to either question was no, the case was judged unimportant. If the answer was no to both questions, well then. There are other cases to pursue. Niceties such as evidence and even motive are too complex for a busy coroner and a trio of unimaginative magistrates. A poor, uneducated sailor is dead. Hardly unusual, and hardly dramatic. Samuel Ransome had been a seaman (able or otherwise) of no distinction in either his work or his relationships. A fat, lazy, unremarkable human being with few acquaintances and even fewer friends. There is certainly no sense whatever that the murder should be investigated because a wrong has been done. As far as the magistrates can see, the only victim in this case is dead. So on whose behalf would they pursue an investigation?

Up and down. Up and down.

Little dramas play out in his head, imaginings of possibilities. Sam in his room, straight off the ship, boiling a kettle, making tea, falling asleep. Being killed. But why? The killer, hunting through the sea chest, looking for something, ignoring the money. But why?

Start somewhere else, he thinks to himself. Start with a motive for a killing. Why might someone want Sam Ransome dead? The most important fact in this consideration is out in the river: the
Solander
. This has been the thing that defined Sam for the last eighteen months of his life. So, if there is a motive for his death, it either sat and waited in London for Sam’s return. Or it was forged on the ship itself.