The Poisoned Island (9 page)

“Our plant house, constable. Constructed on this river over a year ago and now full to the brim with plants from Otaheite. Here, let me show you something.”

Hopkins pulls open the door to the plant house, and Horton is instantly assailed with an even more intense aroma and something more physical: a shower of dust which seems to be ejected from the plant house like the exhalation of some botanical dragon. It gets into his eyes and nose and causes him to want to sneeze. His skin, suddenly inflamed, seems to come alive.

“Vivid stuff, this Otaheite plant life,” he says. Then he does sneeze, a loud and wet explosion which causes some of the crew to laugh, though they fall silent when Hopkins glares at them.

“ ’Tis indeed, constable, ’tis indeed. My poor Welsh constitution didn’t know what to make of it at first. I sneezed and scratched my way back around the Cape, I can tell you. Now, see this.”

He closes the door of the plant house and then descends a ladder to the back of the ship, beneath the captain’s and master’s cabins. There is some light here from portholes that run the length of the ship on both sides. Behind them, in the hold,
are the plants and flowers Horton first saw on coming on deck. But here is something even more extraordinary: dozens and dozens of half barrels, each filled with flowers and plants, sit in the back of the ship, held within a false floor into which holes have been sawed to hold them. More barrels are held in holes down the sides of the ship. There is no noise in here, but something almost like a noise: a thick, stirring sense of quivering life, which once again begins to invade Horton’s eyes and nose and causes him to weep, after a fashion.

“We call this the Garden,” says Hopkins, his voice hushed, and there is indeed something churchlike about the space. “Bligh called it something similar on the
Bounty
. Though with less happy results.”

They stand and watch, Horton watching the plants, the captain watching Horton, smiling proudly at his cargo, but also careful. Horton is very aware of being observed, and of Hopkins’s fierce intelligence. He is careful to compose his face in a mask of wonder, and nothing else.

“Now, so, come,” Hopkins says at last, and Horton follows the captain back up the ladder well and into a cabin which is as spruce, plain, and businesslike as his ship. He is at a loss to understand the internal layout of the ship; the great cabin seems to have been removed completely, while the captain’s cabin is small, barely more than a cupboard. He recalls Bligh’s descriptions of his own accommodation on the
Bounty
, and wonders how similar this other captain’s space must be.

Despite the lack of room, there are plenty of little books on the shallow shelves, and Horton looks at them carefully, his eyes clearing from the effusions of the flora below and around. Most of the books are botanical works, some of them in Latin. Horton notes the name Daniel Solander on one of the spines.

“The ship is named after the botanist?” he asks.

Hopkins smiles.

“An enthusiast, constable?” he asks.

“Not at all. My wife, though, is an avid natural philosopher.” He speaks the words drily, and Hopkins laughs for the first time, a deep rich brown-gravy sound which causes even Horton to smile.

“Ah, a wife who is a natural philosopher. Which would make you a specimen for daily investigation, I’ll wager, Constable Horton.”

“Indeed. More often than I care to imagine.”

“But a man of the sea also.”

“Is it so obvious?”

“Always.”

“I have not been on a voyage for some time. I have been on ships . . . but not on the open sea these past five or six years.”

“Were you on a merchant vessel, or a fighting ship?”

It occurs to Horton that it is he, not the captain, who is supposed to be asking questions. Particularly when the questions turn into the awkward byways of Horton’s naval history.

“I was in the Navy. So, Captain. This Ransome. You can confirm he was one of your crew on the most recent voyage?”

The bonhomie departs from Hopkins’s face like mud mopped off a deck, and he sits at the small table in the cabin, gesturing to Horton to sit upon the bed. This strikes the constable as unusual. The captain is clearly of a higher social standing, but the way he talks to Horton, and this invitation to sit, suggests that Hopkins feels no sense of superiority. “Ransome is a lazy unappealing bastard of a crewman, Constable Horton. You’ll have come across his like plenty of times before. Always complaining, always absent when hard work is needed, and always whispering behind his hand like
a bloody old woman. I was glad to see the back of him when we docked. He took his pay and hopped off into Wapping at the first opportunity. I haven’t thought of him once since he left. Got himself into bother, has he?”

“He’s dead.”

The captain raises one thick black eyebrow and rubs his chin. He gazes in that appraising way at Horton.

“Now then. An interesting statement, Constable Horton. Dead when?”

“We believe yesterday evening. He was found dead by a female acquaintance, name of Hannah Crabtree.”

“
Found dead by a female acquaintance
. The kind of epitaph I’d expect for Sam Ransome. How did he die?”

“We believe he was strangled.”

Hopkins frowns and smiles at the same time, his face painted with disbelief.

“Strangled? Are you certain?”

“The appearance of his body suggests such a death. We believe he was killed and then robbed.”

“In his room? Extraordinary.”

Hopkins looks like a man half amused, half annoyed by Horton’s story. He seems oddly unmoved by Ransome’s death. As a former Navy man Horton feels a quick but fierce dismay that a captain should be so negligent of the welfare of his crew. But then, Sam wasn’t part of Hopkins’s crew when he died.

“Your magistrate must have some powerful friends, Constable,” says Hopkins.

Horton blinks at this.

“I do not understand your meaning, Captain.”

“Sending a constable out to investigate the robbery of a poor seaman. I knew the
Solander
was important, but I’m only now beginning to understand how important.”

The captain looks at Horton and waits, leaving the constable to ponder how much to say. He needs this man’s help, and just now the man seems disinclined to give it. He decides to be more direct than he would quite like.

“Some matters about Ransome’s death are mysterious,” he says, after a moment. “It may not be a straightforward robbery.”

“Ah. Now we come to it then.” The captain is smiling now and leans forward, suddenly interested. “What are these mysterious matters?”

“Ransome’s pay was still in his sea chest.”

“Indeed?” The captain ponders this with some care, as if he does not at first understand it. “Would have been a pretty amount, too; he was only paid yesterday.”

“A pretty amount, as you say.”

“So what was stolen?”

“We don’t quite know.”

Again, that disbelieving, amused look transforms the captain’s face. Horton finds he doesn’t like it.

“You don’t know? Then how do you know there was a robbery?”

“The room was disturbed. Ransome’s sea chest, also. Somebody was looking for something, and they killed Ransome to get to it.”

This is far more than Horton had intended to say, and he immediately wishes he could take it back.

“Pretty thin, isn’t it, Constable?”

“The man was killed, Captain. His pay wasn’t taken.”

“So, you need to find what this apparent killer was looking for, otherwise you don’t know why any of this happened.”

“Could it have been something from the island?”

“Well, I’ve no doubt Sam brought something back from
the island, but I’ll wager it was in his breeches, not his sea chest.”

“You mean he carried an infection.”

“Most of the men do.”

“I have read of such matters. So has everyone.”

“Indeed. Many men have grown quite fat on tales of Otaheite.”

“Including the sponsor of this vessel.”

“Sir Joseph? If you like.”

“So you have no reason to think Ransome suffered particularly on the trip?”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt he
suffered
, Horton. Sam would make out he was suffering if he was lying in a hammock drinking fine wine and being stroked by native virgins. But no, this particular journey was nothing short of
blissful
, Horton. I’ve never been on a voyage like it.”

“So you can think of no one who bore a grudge against Ransome?”

“Lots of the men found him annoying. But not annoying enough to be done away with.”

“And you can’t imagine what might have been taken?”

“No, Constable, I can’t. My imagination is a poor, withered thing.”

The captain smiles at that, the Welsh charm transforming the cruel, amused expression.
Enough
, the smile says.
We shall part as friends.
Horton decides to surrender.

“My thanks, Captain,” he says. “And the thanks of my magistrate.”

“My pleasure, Constable. Perhaps you could both leave me alone for a day or two now, hmm?”

The June twilight is quiet and the surface of the river is once again busy with insects and floating organisms which seem to glow with stored sunlight. On an evening like this it is possible to imagine that darkness will never fall on England. Sir Joseph Banks is in stolid, silhouetted stillness. Robert Brown stands behind the wheelchair and watches a pair of swans which are preparing to roost on the opposite side of the river. One twines its neck into the other, and they appear like a young couple preparing for a midsummer’s snooze, bellies filled with wine and cake, hearts filled with possibilities. Then, with a wave and a grunt, Banks indicates that he wishes to be moved.

The President is a heavy burden. Brown pushes the wheelchair back along the path, up the bank and around the polite, austere decorum of the Dutch House, their way occasionally lit with candles glowing from the tidy pathways. Round the corner of the little house they see the enormous
vacancy where the White House once stood, and to the left of that is the Orangery, dark and square in the twilight. They walk past the Orangery, until they see the hundred-foot-long glass-and-wood shape of the Great Stove. From within, dark shapes can be seen fluttering in an impossible breeze.

They walk up to the door of the Stove, the librarian now puffing with the effort. Banks does not notice the man’s exertions. The park is quite silent now; the King is elsewhere, the Prince is back in London, and if there are staff still within the mess of buildings within the park, they make no noise. The botanical riches have been pored over and prepared all day long by a small army of attendants under William Aiton, the Director General of the King’s Gardens, as he has taken to calling himself. For some hours Brown has allowed himself to just wander and remember, thinking back to his own botanizing on the distant shores of New Holland as the alien odors of the South Pacific dressed the bank of the Thames. But now he must attend on Banks again.

Robert Brown has been Joseph Banks’s librarian for just over a year, and the post has brought him two things which are to be highly cherished: a fellowship at the Royal Society, and some measure of financial comfort. He combines his position with that of part-time librarian of the Linnaean Society, and the money is good for a self-taught Scot with an incomplete education. Nonetheless, he has been considering returning to a medical career in recent months. Banks has grown increasingly tiresome, and with each little humiliation Brown has found his mind wandering back to his time as a young Surgeon’s Mate in the Fifeshire Fencibles. He has considered how nice it would be to have the quiet life of a country doctor, away from the frantic whirl of London and the whims of an old and occasionally insufferable old man.

But these are just fantasies, because the itch in his bones will always be there, the same itch Banks sometimes speaks of. It’s there when he catches a whiff of salt water from the river while attending Society lectures at Somerset House. It’s there when he hears a seagull caw-cawing through the air and heading downstream towards the rich pickings of Billingsgate. Even the dry recorded memories of adventures which are the very skeleton of Banks’s own great library are merely an academic simulacrum of something else, which can only be felt when your hands are on the ship’s rail, when swell is splashing into your face, and when an undiscovered land rises before you like smoke from an eternal fire. Discovery stirs Robert Brown the way it once stirred Joseph Banks, and if that discovery must occur within the confines of a library rather than on the endless flats of an open sea, well, then so be it.

It is over six years since he returned from his own great voyage of discovery aboard the
Investigator
, a journey which lasted five years. Before he’d left England, he was often ill, and had frequently been away on sick leave from the Fencibles. He’d struggled with his own sense of himself when these illnesses struck, for they often seemed to be illnesses of the mind—great torpid clouds of melancholy which he characterized as indolence and struggled to put down, his father’s rigid Protestant work ethic loud in his ears as if it were shouted from the top of a staircase. Banks at the time was often bedridden in Spring Grove, the gout galloping through his body, but he’d detected something in what he’d heard of young Robert Brown—the same botanical spark that had lit him up, decades before, and which had taken him around the world on the
Endeavour
.