The poisoned island, p.19
The Poisoned Island, page 19
The Englishman gazed down into the liquid in the cup. He could see various bits of organic material, fragments of leaf and triangular shapes that looked like the tops of some strange flower. He breathed in the aroma and his head spun, momentarily, in one great circle around itself, like the leaves circling in the hot water. He looked up and saw the prince watching him and was surprised, even shocked, to see the expression on the savage’s face. For the first time the Englishman thought the prince looked like a king, a great king from the far side of the world, skilled with hidden knowledge and enormous wisdom. The Englishman remembered the joke about his own fabricated royalty and felt not so much ashamed as suddenly terrified lest this king should ever be offended.
The wooden cup was in his hand, hot in his palm. He held it up to his nose, and something flashed before his eyes—a beautiful young woman, running away—and then he drank it, and everything changed.
He sipped, then gulped, then swallowed it whole, the leaves and seeds accompanying the water down his throat and into his stomach, and then his head exploded with light and the trees were full of everything and the world was a golden coin which he held in his hand, and he fell backwards onto the earth as the island prince watched, a surprised look on his face, shocked by the strength of the Englishman’s reaction to the leaf.
The tree in the clearing rustled in the breeze, and waited for its newest acolyte to wake up.
SOHO SQUARE
A couple of years after his return from New Holland, Robert Brown became ill. He had fallen ill many times in his life, but this had felt different. He was overcome by a terrible torpor, a sense of nothing being to any purpose. Worse, this dissolute sense of indolence was accompanied by an intermittent but profound deafness. When this came over him the world was smothered in a dull hum which, with a terrible irony, seemed to grow louder during the evening and kept him awake, such that his torpor grew worse due to lack of sleep.
It was a difficult time for other reasons, too. Sir Joseph was proving a mercurial patron. He seemed uninterested in Brown’s plans for a major work on the botany of New Holland, and barely supported the younger man’s prodromus, for which the Scot ended up paying most of the costs of production. As a result only 250 were ever printed. Sir Joseph’s own journey to the far side of the world had bought him enormous fame and bountiful connections. It seemed to Brown, who had made as big a journey, that he had returned to general indifference and penury. He was on the point of returning to Scotland and resuming a medical career when Jonas Dryander died, and Banks offered him the post of librarian.
Today, he is a person of some consequence. His prodromus, he has been told, is viewed with awe by France’s finest botanists. His positions with Sir Joseph and the Linnaean Society bring with them a certain standing in society. Nonetheless that old sense of torpor had been returning, along with those thoughts of returning to medicine.
But everything had changed with the previous day’s examination of the alien tree at Kew. A new kind of energy is now pouring into him. He did not sleep the previous evening for thinking of the impossible tree. A new species of course, but so much more than a species. A potential economic miracle, a breadfruit tree which is alien and astonishing, a plant with such capacity for growth that it throws into question many of the experimental botanical discoveries of the last thirty years.
This morning he stays in Soho Square to research the matter further in the Banks library. He starts at the beginning: with the papers from the original Endeavour voyage, principally Sydney Parkinson’s sketches of breadfruit and the descriptions of them by Sir Joseph. He reexamines the papers from the Bounty and the ship that followed her, the Providence, which successfully took live breadfruit from Otaheite to Jamaica twenty years previously, as the Bounty had been intended to do. There is no record in any of the documents available to him of a tree such as the one he saw yesterday. Nor is there anything in the records of Sir Joseph, Lieutenant Cook, or Parkinson.
He has placed the dried specimens from last night on a shelf above his desk, and now he gets up and examines them again. There seems to be nothing special about them, here in their component parts, no great revelation to be had. He takes down the microscope he keeps here in the library and then thinks better of it. Today is for following a paper trail, not for further hours lost with his eye to a microscope. He opens one of the jars, the one that contains the dried leaves and flowers which looked to him like tea the previous evening, and the odor from within nearly overwhelms him. His head spins for a moment in a great leap around the place, and the odor flies up into the room such that he believes for a moment he can almost see it, this bizarre concoction of smells which causes his nostrils to quiver with life. He feels light-headed and dizzy, and tries to remember if he ate breakfast.
“You’d best sit down, Brown. You look somewhat uncertain.”
Sir Joseph wheels himself into the library, and Brown snaps awake. The first thing he hears is the sound of a girl giggling in the street outside. He goes to shut the window.
“Leave it open, Brown. The air is particularly pungent in here, and I am still recovering from last night. I indulged myself rather more than is good for my health.”
“Indeed, Sir Joseph? And you are not to visit Kew today?”
“Not today, no. I had to be in London for the Royal Philosophers dinner last night, and will attend to matters here. These are the specimens you examined yesterday?”
“They are.”
“May I look?”
Brown feels an unaccountable resistance to showing the material to Sir Joseph, a feeling which he observes with some detached interest, as if another part of him were gazing down into the room through a microscope. There is no earthly reason he should feel possessive towards the specimens. A headache is beginning to form just behind his left eye, in a familiar place, and something like the old lassitude has crept up upon him. The entrance of Banks has brought back unwelcome maladies.
“As you wish, Sir Joseph.”
He says it with some insolence, and Banks notices this with a raised eyebrow followed by a scowl.
“I will take care, Brown, not to damage your specimens.”
He holds each jar up to the light and looks within. After a few minutes of examination, he begins asking questions, and it is these questions, Brown realizes, that he was hoping to avoid.
“The flower is that of a breadfruit tree?”
“It is, Sir Joseph. As far as one can tell from a tree that is still so young yet possessed of such prodigious growth, the flower is of a piece with breadfruit. The female flower, that is.”
“Hmm. And the flower grows as fast as the rest of the plant.”
“Indeed it does.”
Brown watches the economic calculations whirl through the old man’s brain, and feels thinly disgusted.
“How did you dry the material?”
“I did no drying, Sir Joseph.”
“You must have done. The contents of this jar are quite desiccated.”
“Yes. But I did not dry them. They became like that within hours of being cut from the tree. Perhaps even quicker—I did not notice how dry they were until the end of the day.”
“They dried like this inside the shed yesterday? At Kew?”
“Indeed, Sir Joseph.”
And now Banks, like Brown had done, opens the jar with the dried stuff in it. Even from the other side of the desk Brown can smell the extraordinary scent. Banks, for his part, widens his eyes and sits back in his chair, holding the jar away from his face before, after a few seconds, gradually bringing it back in towards him.
“My God. Extraordinary,” says Banks.
“It is.”
“I am reminded of nothing as much as the smell of the hemp plant, Cannabis sativa, which I understand is used in India in some forms of religious ritual. Cannabis, of course, has male and female plants with their own flowers. Unlike the Artocarpus.” Banks replaces the lid on the jar.
“Yes, I can see the resemblance,” says Brown.
“It had already occurred to you?” says Banks.
“In the matter of the flowers, yes. In the matter of odor, no, Sir Joseph. Just now, watching you open the jar, I was reminded of something, but your knowledge is wider than mine.”
“I wonder if it can be consumed.”
“That is perhaps something to be tested.”
“One would need to make it into a form of tea, I would imagine.”
“Perhaps so, Sir Joseph. Though it would be a dangerous effort.”
“But not one without precedent. I remember reading of Robert Hooke’s experiments with an Indian tea made from hemp; bhang, I believe they call it. He wrote about the experience. It is in the Royal Society library somewhere. There may even be a copy in here.”
Sir Joseph closes the jar and puts it back on the table.
“And the male flowers? There continue to be none?”
“None, Sir Joseph.”
“So this cannot be Artocarpus incisa.”
“No, Sir Joseph. The lack of male flowers, the prodigious growth . . .”
“Indeed. But how useful is a breadfruit tree with no fruit?”
“Not useful at all. But no doubt this is just a matter of finding the male plant and bringing them together. As I understand it, no male plant has been found. This seems particularly odd, given how thorough the botanists were in their collecting.”
“You spoke to the botanists about this?”
“I have had some conversations. I need to have more.”
“Perhaps that is something I should do directly. They may feel more obliged to be complete in their report.”
“Is there a suggestion that the botanists are somehow dishonest, Sir Joseph?”
“No, Brown, there is not. But this plant is important. We should do everything in our power to learn as much about it as we can.”
And with that, Sir Joseph leaves.
WAPPING
The day after the Royal Philosophers dinner Harriott has a heavy head. He has not drunk so much beer and wine in a single evening for a long while, and the morning is taken up with a good deal of staring out of the window from his ancient chair, trying to piece together his conversation with Banks and tease out the meanings. He does not relish such quiet introspection at the best of times, but with a headache and a stomach which is murmuring in protest at its mistreatment this is by no means the best of times and he is capable of little else.
Banks had seemed preoccupied during their conversation, certainly, but a man with as many wheels turning as Sir Joseph is bound to be preoccupied. He had been warm and welcoming towards Harriott, and there had been little of the tension Harriott might have expected. This morning he’d received word from Robert Brown that Horton might visit him at Soho Square to arrange interviews with the Solander gardeners and inspect the documentation relating to the voyage to Otaheite. Sir Joseph has been as good as his word already, but however hard he pushes his addled old head Harriott cannot recall a single sentence from the President’s pronouncements the previous evening which might help Horton move the case forward.
There remains an unacceptable void at the heart of the case, a dead space, as if no one with any authority truly cared that three men are dead, two of them in very unusual circumstances. Harriott knows these were ordinary men, by definition unexceptional, and in that sense possibly disposable to men like Sir Joseph Banks. Perhaps he is being unfair, but it seems to John Harriott—who has always valued ordinary men, and rather thinks himself one of them—that he could end this case immediately, turn it into another file in the River Police archives, and it would attract no comment.
These worrying thoughts are interrupted by an unwelcome arrival: Edward Markland, one of the three magistrates from the Shadwell police office and, in Harriott’s eyes, the most intelligent but also the most devious. Despite the proximity of their offices, and the frequent uncomfortable overlaps between their investigations, the two men have never shared a dinner or indeed a conversation other than one pertaining to a particular case. They circle each other within London’s chaotic legal systems like impotent lions fighting over a barren pride.
Markland is shown in to Harriott’s room by the servant and extends his customary smooth greeting.
“My dear Harriott, a pleasure to see you. I take it you are in good health.”
“I am, Markland, thank you. Won’t you take a seat?”
“Thank you, I will. And Mrs. Harriott does well, I trust?”
“She does.”
“I have still never had the pleasure of her acquaintance.”
“Really, Markland? Well. Is this a social visit, or a business one?”
Markland marks Harriott’s impoliteness with a smiling pause and some business with his hands, which brush off invisible fibers from his silk breeches. He looks up with his routine smile and calmly delivers his bombshell.
“I came to tell you we have had reports of a particularly vicious set of deaths in Ratcliffe. Three dead, one strangled, two slashed throats. The circumstances bear some uncanny resemblances to the killings you are yourself investigating in Rotherhithe.”
He stops and waits for a Harriott explosion, but he does not know of Harriott’s thick head, which is only capable of a dull irritation this morning. Last night’s alcohol seems to have leached away any capacity John Harriott might have had for explosion.
“You are well informed as to Rotherhithe,” he says.
“It was in the newspapers this morning, Harriott. It is not a state secret.”
“You believe the same person or persons may be responsible for both slaughters?”
“I do rather think so. Two of the dead men were crewmen on the Solander.”
This second bombshell is accompanied by that same fixed smile. Markland looks like a boy watching a cat in a box into which he has just dropped a mouse.
“You are certain of this?”
“Of course. The woman who owns the boardinghouse where the incident took place told us as much. Now, you are investigating two separate incidents, one in Wapping, one in Rotherhithe. The first should of course be the responsibility of my office, Harriott, and the second—well, the second is a moot point; you are investigating in any case. Now, I hear you have made little or no progress on either of your cases, which of course I do not believe. You have the most effective men here, as you are sure to state. That one clever fellow we had dealings with before. Naughton, was it?”
“Horton.”
“Ah yes, Horton. Well, I am here to suggest we cooperate on these incidents. I suggest that Horton investigates the murders in Ratcliffe, along with those already under investigation. We would take joint ownership of the, well, what should we call it? The operation, perhaps. We can combine our resources, Harriott.”
Hangover or no, Harriott sees immediately what Markland is up to. The fame of the Solander and its sponsors, and the infamy of the existing murders, mean that a successful investigation will bring enormous political capital. But there is no one in the Shadwell office with the detective capacities of Charles Horton. So he is to be co-opted. It is clever and, Harriott supposes, it is a kind of compliment to his River Police Office.
“Are the detailed circumstances of the Ratcliffe murders the same as those which preceded them?” asks Harriott. “Are you sure they are connected?”
“Oh, you can be assured there is every reason to think so. In addition, we have a witness who saw the killer.”
Harriott almost smiles at that, but is not so oppressed by last night’s excesses that he forgets himself. The Shadwell magistrates are always good at trawling for witnesses. Whenever they investigate a serious crime, they approach it the same way: ask if anyone saw anything. As a result, every woman and man with a grudge against any other woman and man comes forward to assert that yes, they saw who did it, it was him or her or them who did it, arrest them now, they’ve had it coming to them for a long time. The Irish and Portuguese in particular are favorite targets for these witnesses. Every murder Shadwell investigates is accompanied with a sudden but temporary incarceration of large sections of both those communities.
That said, there is something unusually certain about Markland this morning. The fact that it is he who has come with this proposal, and not his fellows Story or Capper, says something. Markland is clever. He would only make this move if he thought there was personal gain in it for him. He cannot gain from Harriott making a mistake, for they both know that Harriott has no reputation to speak of in Whitehall and that the new Home Secretary is just waiting for the old man to die or retire before putting someone in the River Office more compliant and willing. Perhaps, Harriott thinks with a start, Markland himself.
The servant knocks on the door, firmly but politely, and Harriott tells him to come in, at which Markland looks momentarily put out before reattaching his unflappable face. The attendant whispers in Harriott’s ear.
“Constable Horton has returned, sir. You asked to be informed of his arrival.”
“Thank you, Upson. Tell him I will be done here in a few minutes.”
The attendant leaves and shuts the door, and Harriott turns back to his adversary.
“Your idea has merit, Markland. It may well be that the murders in Ratcliffe are by the same man, or they may be by someone different entirely. Either way it makes sense for Horton to establish the truth of it and judge the bearing, or otherwise these killings might have on the existing cases at hand.”
“I am glad you see the sense of it as well.”
“I must speak to Horton and it may also be necessary to put more men on the case.”
“I can find men.”
Harriott is sure this is true. But he has seen the caliber of the men Markland employs.
“But Horton must lead the investigation.”
