The Colony (32 page)

‘One, Napier keeps trying to re-establish radio contact with the mainland,’ Lassiter said. ‘Two, As soon as daylight returns and the storm dies down enough, in tandem with Napier’s team, I will co-ordinate a thorough search for James Carrick.’

There was a silence, a series of collective nods.

‘Is there anything else?’

Alice cleared her throat. She said, ‘In the morning, as soon as the weather calms, I intend to go to the cottage built and occupied by David Shanks. This is my idea and I do it voluntarily. But I’d like someone to come with me, if anyone’s prepared to.’

‘I’ll come,’ Lucy said. Then Jane said, ‘I’ll come too.’

Degrelle left the room. After he’d closed the door behind him, Lassiter 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 nobody 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 ship master had once owned. McIntyre should have set much more store by what Lassiter had discovered. Lassiter 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 nobler motives than some of her companions. He cared too about the fate of Lassiter 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 Lassiter. 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 shimmered 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 fishing 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 assumed 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 Lassiter’s account of his unnerving visit on his museum trip afterwards to a Liverpool pub. And he remembered the description Lassiter 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 passage. 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 passing 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 seamanship and navigation skills at the naval college in Pompey. The rest, he says, comes from a gluttonous appetite for books allied to a prodigious memory. He says curiosity is the key to the accumulation 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 constitute 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 Gods. 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 worship of a Deity thrives on ignorance and that it amounts to no more than superstition dressed up in robes and rituals to appeal to gullible men.

He does not dismiss the possibility of a God. 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 God capable of creating the universe would not wish to be worshipped 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 gratitude?

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 God 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 hell 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 ship absolutely.

We parted at the end of our dinner as friends. There is a hierarchy aboard a ship 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.