The Colony Part 20

Degrelle left the room. After he'd closed the door behind him, La.s.siter said, 'anyone else notice how subdued our famously obstreperous cleric has been since our arrival here?'

'I don't think he likes this place very much,' Jane said.

'Amen to that,' Kale said. He emptied the dregs of his beer can down his throat and immediately reached for another.

McIntyre looked out at the view from the boat shed at the Ardanaiseig Hotel on Loch Awe. The loch was tranquil. Its surface was only ruffled occasionally by the odd salmon or trout swimming towards the lure of the evening light. From here he could see the mountains on the far bank rise high above their own tree lines to where the verdant green surrendered to patches of ochre and pale brown. The seaplane that had delivered him there floated on the loch on its pontoons, white and elegant, like a craft from a more serene and stylish time.

A hundred and fifty miles to the north-west, in the Hebrides, he knew that a great storm raged across the Atlantic. It had severed radio communication with his team of experts there. They had the pictures of their arrival on New Hope and the rather good piece penned by James Carrick that afternoon, but they had lost contact since it was sent and n.o.body could tell him when the lines of communication would be re-established.

He was not worried about the following day's edition. Drip-feed was the successful way to build and maintain circulation with a story as compelling as this one was. They had enough material to make an impact in the morning. He was more concerned about his own growing suspicion that his people on New Hope faced dangers he had not really dreamt they ever would.

He knew now that his own presumption and prejudice had blinded him to the facts about the island. Shanks had not conjured the spectre of the little girl that had confronted and then teased and finally terrified him into leaving. And to call it a revenant, as Karl Cooper had, dismissed the threat it represented. Cooper had trivialised the thing Shanks had filmed because it had been in Cooper's interest to do so. Cooper was a glory hunter, blind to any possibility but the one he sought to prove.

But Cooper was wrong about New Hope. McIntyre now believed that something ancient and malevolent had claimed the lives of the vanished community. It had turned on Seamus Ballantyne. It still possessed sufficient power to make mischief in the present day with those possessions the slave s.h.i.+p master had once owned. McIntyre should have set much more store by what La.s.siter had discovered. La.s.siter had integrity. Cooper's glamour had blinded him to a vain man's obvious failings.

Vanity had contaminated the whole project, when he considered it. He thought that Cooper and Jesse Kale and Jane Chambers and Degrelle had all signed up more to raise their already exultant public profiles than as sincere and genuine seekers after an answer to the mystery. There was such a thing as hubris, wasn't there? He wondered what awful price they would be obliged to pay on New Hope for their conceit.

His conscience troubled him. He knew it would trouble him further if anything bad happened to Alice Lang, who had gone on the expedition out of n.o.bler motives than some of her companions. He cared too about the fate of La.s.siter and the security chief, Napier; men of principle who had gone along because they were on his pay role. And he cared about Lucy Church, plucky and talented and far too young and beautiful a woman to lose her life.

Was that a possibility? McIntyre thought that it was. No one had tried to settle on New Hope since Shanks. Shanks had been the beneficiary of a very narrow escape. He had gone on escaping, running all his life. But that life had been a blighted one after his experience on the island and according to Alice Lang, he had brought about its end deliberately. He had escaped. In doing so, he had never really got away.

A recent letter had provoked this train of thought. He had joked about the fate of Richard Blake to La.s.siter. He'd believed at the time that Blake had probably walked deliberately into the sea. But that didn't excuse the callous levity he'd demonstrated sipping tea on his sun terrace, jesting about Blake screaming only because the water was cold when he entered it.

He'd been sent the letter by Blake's widow. There was a child too, only yet a toddler. He had responded with a generous cheque and some gracious words of condolence. But in masterminding the New Hope expedition, it had never occurred to him that he might be jeopardising lives. The certainty he now felt that he was, weighed dreadfully on him. He could not help but wonder what had made Blake utter that scream.

The hotel had always been a rich man's refuge for him. It was in the Highlands and remote and the scenery had an epic grandeur that never failed to raise his spirits. He always stayed in the boat shed rather than the hotel building itself. The boat shed had been cleverly converted into accommodation that was more stylish than luxurious. He enjoyed the privacy and he honestly thought the view through the floor to ceiling windows unparalleled anywhere else in the world.

It was quite something to wake up to on a sunny summer morning when the loch s.h.i.+mmered and the trout leapt and the birds loudly sang.

It was twilight now. Sunset came very late in early June to this part of the world. But it had finally arrived. He was standing looking out over the loch from the boat shed balcony. Beneath him was the stone jetty alongside which they tied up the boats hotel guests would take out on fis.h.i.+ng and sightseeing trips. He could hear the water lapping gently. Mercifully, this close to the water, there were no midges to torment him. He thought, out of the corner of his eye, he could see a tallish figure moving around down there.

This was curious because it was too late to take out a boat. McIntyre walked to his right to lean over the wooden rail and take a proper look. At first he a.s.sumed the figure on the jetty to be a member of the hotel staff. But she was not dressed right. She wore a black tailored coat that seemed heavy for the season and her hair was not tied back, the way the women on the hotel staff wore theirs for reasons of hygiene.

Hers was black and loose and worn in a longish bob. She turned and raised her head and looked at him and he saw that her lips were a vivid red before her frank gaze of appraisal became disconcerting and he backed away and went inside.

He thought about complaining to the manager about this intrusive hotel guest. Short of levering herself up from the ground to look in at him from the edge of the balcony, he didn't think she could have done much more to breach the privacy he'd always enjoyed there.

Her stare had been rude and almost, he thought, hostile. He actually picked up the phone intending to call reception before telling himself that life was too short and a complaint would be petty as well as pointless. She would have wandered off by now.

There had been something familiar about the woman. It bothered him, this vague sense that he had seen her before or knew her from somewhere. He was on the point of sleep in bed an hour later before he remembered La.s.siter's account of his unnerving visit on his museum trip afterwards to a Liverpool pub. And he remembered the description La.s.siter had given of the woman who had spoken to him there and he remembered, of course, who the woman had been.

July 3 1794 Tomorrow we will barter for the able bodies of men using cloth and rum and flintlocks to make the trade. Tonight the captain is in excellent spirits as a consequence. The Atlantic was in serene mood for most of our outward voyage and we made good time in our pa.s.sage. We are high therefore on stored rations and low on the discontent afflicting crews when the sails are listless and the men are become bored in the doldrums.

We are tied up at a port in the Gulf of Guinea. War afflicts the West of Africa so constantly that the supply of slaves is ever bountiful. The winners of these conflicts seek to profit from victory by selling the men taken prisoner in battle. Any commander could see the logic of sending his foes into exile and being paid with guns to do so. Pity never intervenes in this ruthless commerce. The tribes are pure in blood and never intermingle and so the notion of common humanity is alien to the African Negro.

Last night I dined at the captain's table. He is a charismatic man. He possesses a deep and mellifluous voice and is pa.s.sing eloquent on every conceivable subject under the sun. He suggests much formal education in his erudition. But he claims this is contrary to the case.

He learned his seamans.h.i.+p and navigation skills at the naval college in Pompey. The rest, he says, comes from a gluttonous appet.i.te for books allied to a prodigious memory. He says curiosity is the key to the acc.u.mulation of knowledge and he has always been fierce curious to know more about the physical world.

I told him about my own enthusiasm to know more about what lies beyond the coast of Africa. I confessed that I would like to venture into the hinterland within. He laughed uproariously at this and told me any such exploration would const.i.tute a journey fatal for its taker. The tribes are territorial and merciless in their hostility to interlopers. You would be killed.

Capture would signal the same fate because captives are routinely sacrificed to their pagan G.o.ds. The king ruling one country in West Africa will not trade a single slave with the white merchants, Captain Ballantyne told me. All of his war captives become victims of human sacrifice instead. This king is called Simonal. The land he rules is called Albache .

The Portuguese and the British have tried to persuade him. So have the Spanish and the Dutch. He will not be swayed concerning the fate of his prisoners. He believes he gains more from their blood than in barter for the white man's manufactured goods.

The neighbouring kingdom of Dahomey, by contrast, sells almost all its captives as slaves and has grown enormously wealthy on the trade. Yet a European cannot travel in Dahomey either. To do so is forbidden and anyone defying this rule would pay for their disregard for the custom of the country with their life.

The captain has very strong opinions concerning religion. He confided in me on this very subject over our meal together last night. He does not differentiate between the cruelties of the Counter-Reformation in Papist Italy and the current barbarism of the Albacheian king. He says that wors.h.i.+p of a Deity thrives on ignorance and that it amounts to no more than superst.i.tion dressed up in robes and rituals to appeal to gullible men.

He does not dismiss the possibility of a G.o.d. On the contrary, he says that the visible world makes a compelling argument for a creator. It is the conventions of religious belief he rails against. He says that they are arbitrary and a curtailment on the right of thinking men to speculate. He is a believer in science and scientific method and he argues that science would have made greater strides in discovery and progress were it not for such doctrinal concepts as blasphemy and heresy.

A G.o.d capable of creating the universe would not wish to be wors.h.i.+pped by man, says Captain Ballantyne. Vanity is a human failing. Why would an omnipotent being crave our fear or flattery or even be sincerely interested in our grat.i.tude?

It is a good question. It is one to which I have no answer readily to hand. My own experience of medicine has led me on occasion to believe that G.o.d is a capricious and sometimes cruel being. But I have always believed that good as well as bad comes from divine belief. Christianity is a civilizing force. The moral imperative is surely much stronger in the man who believes honestly in h.e.l.l as well as in heaven.

Our dialogue became quite philosophical as the evening wore on and the wine flowed more freely. The captain has a great weakness for the metaphysical poets and for the plays of William Shakespeare. He is an authority on the recent revolution in France and the Terror that has followed it.

He believes that war between Britain and France is inevitable and that the victorious nation will determine the character of the new century. He told me the names of the politicians and the painters and the mercantile figures likely to play the greatest roles in shaping the destiny of Europe. For he believes Britain will eventually prevail in the coming conflict.

I would say this about the captain of the Andromeda. It is an aspect of his character I would cite as his singular weakness. He has an almost overwhelming need to be right about matters. Their subject matter and even their significance in the scheme of things are less important to him than his being proven correct about them. He is dogmatic in the extreme. It is a childlike trait, this, but disturbing in a man of authority. And he possesses authority for he rules our s.h.i.+p absolutely.

We parted at the end of our dinner as friends. There is a hierarchy aboard a s.h.i.+p of course. But in so far as he is able to do so, I think Captain Ballantyne regards me as more close an equal to him than anyone else aboard. I find his company mostly genial and always thought provoking and he is almost by definition an entertaining companion. But I would not wish to cross him and by doing so stimulate the anger that I believe lies deep within his true nature.

It does not rage, this anger. It does not boil within him for he governs his temperament coolly and with deliberate care. But it almost led to the death of a man when Jacob Parr was recently flogged for his second offence of drunkenness aboard.

The lash was used severely. I feared for a time that Parr's flayed back would never properly heal and that he would perish in the brig from septic shock. You do not provoke the captain. You do not do so if you are a sensible and cautious individual.

Lastly, as he extinguished the lamps and corked only through fastidious habit a brandy bottle we had together emptied, I asked him why an indifferent G.o.d would bother to create men, if holding us only in contempt.

'For sport,' the captain said, grinning through the darkness of his cabin.

July 7th 1794 Our living cargo procured, we cast off this morning for the West Indies. I watched them shuffle aboard empty-eyed in their iron manacles. They know nothing of their destination because no slave has ever been freed to return. And some would say that cutting cane on a sugar plantation in Jamaica is a happier fate than being disembowelled in honour of a pagan G.o.d.

But these were once proud warriors and it seems to me that they have lost everything that made life a worthwhile pursuit. Their freedom and dignity is gone. They have been physically wrenched forever from their homes and their families. They have surrendered their status in the world. They are and will always now be slaves.

The sailors who man the vessels plying the triangular trade almost never speak about the experience of having human cattle in the hold. They do not speak about the reek of despair that rises like a miasma or the toll of dead thrown daily overboard or the diseases that rage among the packed sufferers below decks as the vomit cakes them and the flies feast and the chafing from their manacles turns raw and their sores weep and fester.

What good would it honestly do to dwell on all this? There is no seagoing venture so profitable and the stories, if they gained currency, would be coin the abolitionists would happily mint and spend freely in parliament and on the stump and even in the pulpit in their attempt to see this inhuman business outlawed.

I cannot see such an ambition becoming successful in my lifetime because there is too much profit at stake and most of it enjoyed by t.i.tled and influential men. But such stories would make the seafarers involved seem cruel. Not wis.h.i.+ng to be perceived thus, they remain tight-lipped about what they see. And the weak-stomached among them simply retch drily when the need arises and turn a blind eye aboard the s.h.i.+p.

Our miserable cargo comprises Albacheian warriors captured in the latest war by the armies of Dahomey. The prosperity of the latter kingdom means they have flintlocks and so are vastly superior in firepower to their enemy. Thus there was no disgrace in defeat for these men. They are physically splendid specimens; tall and strong and st.u.r.dy, at least when they came aboard, despite their shared demeanour of wretched despair.

One among them claimed my particular attention. This was because he stood in such stark and obvious contrast to his fellows. He was smaller than they were by a head and did not share their common muscularity. He was almost girlish in aspect and I thought might be from a different tribe entirely. But that could not have been the case for the others would have killed him in the common cages they share prior to being haggled over by the slave masters on the sh.o.r.e.

As he pa.s.sed me I studied him and saw that his skin had been elaborately inked in a design I can only describe as exquisitely done. His neck and slender bared shoulders were filigreed with blue and purple and yellow detail. There were characters and geometric shapes of which I have never in my life before seen the like.

He looked me in the eye. They never do this. They are confused and defeated by their awful plight. And yet he looked me in the eye and the look was insolently appraising. And then to my astonishment he grinned at me and I saw that his teeth had been filed into points and coloured too. They are a vivid crimson. And then he was past me, shuffled like the rest of his fellows into the packed and airless hold of this unhappy vessel.

I confess I wondered what nature of man he might be. He does not look like a warrior. He is too slight to hurl the spear or wield the honed hardwood sword with which his fellow tribesmen fight in battle. It occurred to me that he might find more comfort than they will in the hold. But that is a naive speculation. Despite his size, or because of it, his fellow slaves will be pressed hard against him down there in the closed and sweltering darkness.

There is something lizard-like about this man. It is an acc.u.mulation of impressions. It is the slender stillness of him and the pointed teeth and the scales etched onto his shaded skin and something dead and implacable in his stare. He is disconcerting. I am curious about him.

July 15th 1794 I owe my position aboard the Andromeda to my cousin, Rebecca Browning. Though she married Captain Ballantyne five years ago, I still think of her in my mind always by her maiden name. I believe the marriage happy. She possesses a fierce intellect for a woman. They are friends and companions as well as lovers, I think. But she will always be Browning and never Ballantyne to me. That was true before and is truer now that I have seen how coldly ruthless the captain can be in what he believes to be the correct performance of his duties.

There is an infection among the slaves.I have my own theories about the communication of disease. Heat and close proximity engender it and it thrives on human despair and all of these elements are strongly present in our hold.

Six men had died this morning. The six corpses lay manacled and stiff, among perhaps another four or five who were sick, visibly suffering symptoms of the ailment that had killed their fellows. They lay in a row of 20 chained together in their section of the hold towards the bow of the Andromeda.

After a short discussion with the vice-captain and first-mate, Ballantyne armed half a dozen of the crew with flintlocks. Then the entire row of twenty were unchained and brought up onto the main deck and at gunpoint pushed over the gunwale into the sea.

The dead and the ailing and the well went into the sea together. I protested, as discretely as I was able to, to Captain Ballantyne. He looked mildly surprised at the rebuke and then a shadow crossed his features and he told me that it is his obligation to deliver as much of his cargo healthy and intact as he is capable. He was merely isolating the infection. He was doing what a veterinarian would do treating an outbreak of disease among cattle. And he would not brook my interference in the matter and that my comments were not only unwelcome, but insubordinate.

This short dialogue took place as we progressed and the screams of the live and still healthy men drowning in the water faded in our wake. It became clear to me in that moment that the captain does not at all regard the poor creatures in the hold as human beings. Of course he does not, I concluded in that moment. If he did, his task in commanding this vessel would in all conscience be intolerable.

Philip Fortescue had to stop reading. This was not because he was shocked by the detail of Horan's account. He knew about the specifics of the slave trade in its peak years and so he knew that the brutality shown by Ballantyne was nothing out of the ordinary.

He had to stop, because the exertions of an unusual day had left him utterly exhausted. He supposed his ordeal at the Elsinore Pit had cost him energy and adrenaline. He ached and throbbed and could barely keep his eyes open. He thought what he was reading was interesting and intriguing but he knew that he had to sleep. He was struggling just to bring the words on the page into focus.

He was not just reading the journal. He was transcribing Horan's arcane 18th century prose into modern English on his laptop as he went. He thought that it would be easier for Jane Chambers to understand if he did that. And he was making his own observations as he went along with notebook and pen. Some of the stuff he had read already seemed significant and even ominous.

He had to stop because he had reached the point where fatigue prevented proper concentration. Anything he read now, if he forced himself to press on, would be stuff he would have no memory of reading in the morning. He felt almost drunk on tiredness. His day had been remarkable and arduous and now seemed very long.

He closed the journal and yawned and stood and stretched. The gloomy thought occurred to him that the womanising cosmologist Karl Cooper was on New Hope Island with Jane Chambers. He vaguely remembered reading about their on-off romantic involvement. Somewhat pathetically, he had bought an issue of Heat magazine he'd seen at a supermarket checkout because she was pictured on the cover and he had learned about their liaison there. Oh, well, Phil my lad, lap of the G.o.ds.

He would set his alarm for 5am. That was two hours earlier than he usually got up for work. He thought it would give him plenty of time to polish off the rest of Horan's clandestine account. Now, though, he had an urgent need to embody the cliche about being asleep before his head hit the pillow.

Chapter Eleven.

The storm had blown itself out by the time the expedition members gathered early the following morning in the compound galley for breakfast. There was a change in Jesse Kale's demeanour Patrick La.s.siter noticed immediately.

'Reckon you can spare me this morning?'

La.s.siter thought about this. Napier had been up for an hour already having no success trying to establish radio contact with the outside world. His man Walker, who had some wireless experience, would take over in the comms room so that Napier could join the search for Carrick. The logic of this was that Napier knew the ground better than anyone else on the island. There would be seven security men, himself, Cooper and if needed, Degrelle comprising the search party. Its numerical strength was more than sufficient. It was his private belief anyway that they would find no one. At least, they would find no one alive.

'I can spare you, Kale. What do you have in mind?'

'I slept on what the security guy said about keeping busy. When we walked back from the settlement yesterday, I studied the ground.'

La.s.siter nodded. Generally the perimeter and the s.h.i.+ngle was the surest way to cover any distance on the Island. But the storm had created a swell that made the breaking waves huge and potentially too dangerous to risk the sh.o.r.e. They had trekked home by the inland route.

'Most of the topology is thin soil over granite,' Kale said. 'But there is an area of bog we pa.s.sed a mile to the north-west.'

La.s.siter thought he knew what was coming.

'That's where I would bury the victims in the event of a ma.s.s catastrophe,' Kale said. He sipped coffee. 'Most other places on the island, you'd be excavating rock to create a deep enough grave. That's hard work with hand tools.'

'They didn't s.h.i.+rk hard work.'

'I still think the bog is the likeliest bet.'

'It's a peat bog,' La.s.siter said. 'So we're talking about well-preserved cadavers. And Jane Chambers told the Chronicle that if it was plague, the bacillus could still be virulent.'

'I'll take my chances,' Kale said. 'I've got to do something.'

The Chinook devoted to cargo rather than pa.s.sengers had left them a Land Rover and a mechanical digger; a small contraption with a metal scoop and caterpillar tracks that operated by remote control. Kale could get the digger onto the back of the vehicle using a ramp. When he reached the spot he could get it off the same way and excavate using the console. La.s.siter wondered whether he should be going alone.

'I'm a big boy,' Kale said, reading his thoughts. 'Jane could tag along. But she's committed to holding Alice Lang's hand at the crofter's cottage this morning. After what Napier said about that place last night, I don't envy them their a.s.signment. Frankly, I'd rather be digging for plague victims.'

'Take a short-wave,' La.s.siter said.

'They don't work here. Not with any consistency.'

'They work intermittently. It won't do any harm to take one.'

Kale grinned. 'I'm flattered by your concern,' he said.

Some of this was bl.u.s.ter. But La.s.siter was impressed by Kale's nerve and by his decisiveness in seeking to re-establish order and composure by focussing on his personal area of expertise. 'Do you believe in ghosts, Kale?'

The grin vanished. He said, 'I wouldn't dismiss what Sergeant Napier told us out of hand, the way that Cooper did last night. I don't think what happened to you at the museum in Liverpool sounded much like the consequence of a hangover. I was there yesterday in the settlement and the atmosphere was bad, brother. But if there are ghosts, they were once people. Find the bodies and maybe we put the ghosts to rest.'

'Maybe,' La.s.siter said.

Kale got up to go.

'When will you leave for the site?'

'Got to get some s.h.i.+t together, forensic overalls, camera, voice-recorder because I always keep a verbal log. I'll take my bag with my trowel and brushes and temperature and depth gauges. As soon as I've changed and gathered the kit together I'll set off.'

'Take a thermos of something hot and a foil blanket. Keep your eyes open for any sighting of Carrick.'

'I will.'

La.s.siter stood. He shook Kale's hand. Kale turned and exited the galley and he walked across to where Alice and Jane sat talking to Paul Napier. 'Where's Lucy?'

'She's popped outside for a cigarette,' Napier said.

'She smokes too much.'

'We all have our weaknesses,' Alice said.