The Detective and the Devil (23 page)

So it was that three weeks after the terrible night in Lower Gun Alley, Horton and Abigail made their way over to the Commercial Dock. Horton’s old friend Peach rowed them across, his face
as warm as the inside of Mr Burroughs’s icehouse. As they left the stairs by the Police Office, Horton looked up, and there, standing at his window looking over the river, he could spy the
figure of John Harriott. He raised a hand, and the old figure in the window raised one in return. As they rowed across the river, the sun caught the glass of Harriott’s window in a blaze of
fire, and the old man disappeared.

On the Surrey shore, they left Peach in his wherry, and turned to watch him make his way back over the river.

‘Farewell, Charon,’ said Abigail, and Horton did not ask her to explain the reference.

They made their way round the riverbank to the Commercial Dock, and from there onto the
Martha
. Horton avoided the eyes of the crewmen preparing the ship as he walked his wife on board,
and then into the cabin. ‘So small, husband, so small!’ exclaimed Abigail, and despite his urgings she refused to remain inside, whatever the captain might have said.

‘This is my first voyage, husband. I will not spend it in a box.’

The
Martha
was ready for an immediate departure. Within two hours, they were being towed out of the Dock by a pilot. A pile of letters and newspapers was left by a bumboat, and Horton
picked up a copy of the
Times
as Abigail stared out to the river as it glided past.

Putnam had still not been found. And Napoleon had just entered the United Netherlands.

The dead whale’s empty eyes reflected the clambering limbs of the cabin boy who was being lifted up to the hole that had been cut in its head.

‘My God, no. It cannot be,’ said Abigail.

The hairy steward laughed.

‘Aye, it be true enough,’ he said. ‘Precious stuff left in there.’

The cabin boy was crying in terror, and some of the sailors shouted at him, shoving various blood-stained implements at his arse to force him upwards. There was blood and gore everywhere. The
air stank of viscera.

The boy found himself standing on top of the decapitated whale’s head, his feet slipping on the slick wet surface, and a bucket was passed up to him.

‘In you go,’ shouted the captain.

The boy was sobbing, but he nodded and looked once at the heavens as if seeking divine protection. And then he climbed into the whale’s head.

Around the head were buckets and barrels containing the special oil –
spermaceti
, they called it – which had already been removed. Some of it was beginning to solidify in
the outside air. Hanging off the larboard side of the
Martha
was the eviscerated carcass of the whale, now missing its head and most of its blubber.

Abigail had watched, awe-struck, as they stripped the blubber away. Two mates had cut a hole in the whale’s side, into which they had placed a huge, ugly metal hook. Half a dozen seamen
had begun turning the windlass, pulling the ropes through winches and the hook up and away from the whale. A strip of blubber was ripped from the side of the animal. Round and round the windlass
went the sailors, and the strip became longer and longer, until twenty feet of thick blubber dripping with blood was hanging over the side of the ship.

The flesh was lowered into the blubber room below deck – spraying blood onto the deck as it went – and another hole was torn in the whale’s skin. The same hook went in. The
ugly process began again.

Finally, men had climbed onto the awful eviscerated thing carrying saws and knives, and severed the head.

Now the cabin boy was inside the head, while two seamen were poking a lance around inside the intestines of the skinned whale that still hung from the ship’s side.

‘Looking for ambergris,’ said the steward.

Abigail had known where ambergris came from, but now, watching two ignorant men manipulating an iron lance inside the guts of a dead giant, she wondered at the women of London spraying scent
onto their smooth, pampered skins, the noses of gentlemen twitching with delight at the smell which came from this obscenity.

The cabin boy’s head reappeared, to her relief. The seamen barely noticed him as he clambered down with his bucket full of oil. Her heart went to him, as it did every time she saw him. He
was only a little older than Rat had been.

Every day, when they woke into this lurching terror of water and whales, and Charles left the tiny cabin to fetch food to break their fast, she punched herself hard in the upper arm. There was a
bruise there, a blue-black thing about the size of an oyster. Rat had put it there. She’d called out to him from the bedroom of the Lower Gun Alley apartment, and he’d come running in
around the doorframe just as she’d been walking out, and his forehead had hit her square in the arm with the force of a swung cricket bat. The bruise had appeared the next day. Every day she
punched it to make sure it did not go away. What would Dr Drysdale have made of that, she wondered?

This ship, the
Martha
, was profoundly ugly. It was festooned with elements which had no place on a ship. The steward’s cookhouse, for one, and the large iron pots held in
brickwork for another – the things looked impossibly heavy and bizarre against the wooden-and-cloth world of the ship.

The resentment towards her was oppressive. Superstitions about women bringing bad luck were as old as navigation, but she saw their wellspring in the hours after they had left Gravesend behind.
A different peace had descended, a male comfort which was interrupted by only one thing: herself. She had found this both fascinating and pathetic.

From Gravesend they sailed to Plymouth, then south-west into a veil of fog and rain which belied the growing summer. Two weeks of fresh winds and occasionally astonishing squalls filled with
such danger that she had thought she would run mad with the horror of it, and they were passing Portugal on the lee bow, another week and they were sailing between the island of Madeira on their
starboard and the islands of Porto Santo and Desertos on their larboard, then Palma (one of the Canaries) appeared off in the distant south-west. Yet another week, and there were the islands of
Bravo and Fogo, where slavers lay at anchor.

She had felt the fresh salt air, and despite the fear and the nausea she had imagined her spirits lifting as the fog and rain lifted and the sun beat down upon them and in the water around them
the impossible sight of flying fish accompanied their progress. Yet every morning she punched her arm, remembered Rat, and thought of her sessions with Dr Drysdale, as if the bruise on her arm and
the bruise in her head were joined.

The female mind is a delicate instrument, yet one of remarkable power
, he had once said in his attractive Yorkshire accent. At the time, she had wondered what he had meant by that, but
then that awful final revelation: that he thought
she
had this power of
moral projection
, as he had termed it, that
she
had therefore been the wellspring of the events
inside Brooke House the previous year, events of which she had only a blurred recollection. She watched the poor cabin boy climbing out of the whale’s head, and the comparison was obvious and
disgusting, her head becoming the whale’s, the cabin boy the doctor poking around within.

She remembered the feeling of a lamp in her hand, a lamp she had used with which to read, a lamp she had placed on the little table by the window in Lower Gun Alley. She had read countless books
at that table, with that lamp: books on natural philosophy, on history, novels and poetry, geography and astronomy, her learning growing under the light of the lamp, her understanding illuminated
by print and the lamp. Illuminated by whale oil.

Men were lighting fires beneath the big iron pots on the deck. Blubber was brought up from below and put into the pots. Oil began to run out of the pots into copper coolers which stood at their
side. As night fell, the lights of the fires beneath the tryworks grew bright and fierce, and Abigail imagined them a devil-boat, a destroyer of lives, crewed by demons with knives and saws,
glowing with hell-fire as they pulled south.

She wondered how many other whalers were currently slipping through the waves, how many other whaleboats were chasing how many other schools, and she thought of that lamp and that light and
those books, and finally she went back to her little cabin and failed to sleep at all, the bruise on her arm pumping with her own blood in the oil-stenched dark.

When any two of these three have been noted, what kind of third is to be sought can, accordingly, be known. The anatomies of these three – peculiar to them separately
– are in the other two, but in a different way, celestial, terrestrial, or microcosmic. For example, I suggest to you the sun, gold, and man’s hearts as objects to be considered by
means of the laws of Anatomical Magic.

John Dee,
Propaedeumata Aphoristica

Mina didn’t like the man from the Company. Taylor, her father called him, always with a splash of venom in his voice. She thought her father didn’t like Taylor
either. She wondered if he’d seen the way Taylor’s greedy face darkened whenever he saw her, like he wished to do her damage of some kind.

When Taylor was in the house, she usually made herself scarce; she’d plead with Fernando to take her down to the bay, or to accompany her down to James Town, where she’d sit in the
square and watch the people go by while Fernando hid in the hills, as was his way. She enjoyed it when the children of James Town approached her with their insidious intent, and she told them she
knew the Cannibal of whom they often spoke, and they ran away shouting.

Sometimes a boy (never a girl) would stay behind, fearlessly saying he didn’t believe her, and then she’d take the boy up into the hills above James Town, and Fernando would rise
from the rocks and the boy would scream and run away, and she’d watch him while she laughed and held on to Fernando’s only hand. She never told her mother or father about this sort of
thing, and Fernando kept it to himself.

Childish games, these were. She wondered if tonight those childish games had come to an end. Taylor sat in her mother’s chair, and that was enough to anger her, but she didn’t say
anything. Her father had told her often enough that she was to be polite to the man from the Company.

It had been ten minutes since her mother last screamed.

‘How is the King?’ she asked, as sweetly as she could manage. Her question seemed to shake the Company man from whatever thoughts he was thinking. He seemed very distracted, this
evening. He frowned at her.

‘The King? Which King do you mean, child?’

Now it was her turn to frown. Surely England only had one King? Even a lonely little girl on St Helena knew that!

‘Why, King George, sir. Is there another King?’

‘King George is dead, child. His grandson has replaced him.’

‘Oh. How sad.’ And it
was
sad. She hated to think of men dying. ‘And what is the new King’s name, sir?’

‘King George.’

‘They could not think of a new name for him, then?’

Taylor didn’t answer that, and she decided that this meant he wanted to hear no further questions. She considered asking some anyway, just to annoy him.

There was still no sound from her mother’s room.

Taylor stood up, and began looking along the bookshelves. He often did this when he visited, and she wondered what book he looked for. Once, he had exclaimed joyfully at finding something, only
for his face to fall when he took it down and opened it. When she went to look at the book later on, the only words she saw were in Greek. She could read a little Greek and Latin – her father
had been teaching her – but it was not sufficient to decipher what Taylor had found.

There was a movement at the library entrance, then. Her father appeared there. She looked into his face, and saw nothing but emptiness. Taylor stepped towards him, and the two of them went away,
leaving her alone with the books and the yawning silence.

Eventually, she decided to go to bed. Sometimes she wasn’t sure when the best time to go might be – she usually just waited until exhaustion pushed her bedwards, or her mother
insisted. She could pretend it was whatever time she wanted it to be, if she didn’t go outside. But now her bed felt like a refuge, a comforting soft shelter from the strange emptiness of
feeling she felt in the air. As if something had departed.

She climbed into her bed without bothering to undress, her clothes smelling of the sand and salt of the bay where she had spent most of the day, gazing up at the endless blue sky and imagining
flying up into it, away and over the endless ocean to those far parts of the world that she saw only in books and in the stories of her mother. She often dreamed of flying. It seemed the only way
she would ever get off this island. Her family had been here for almost two hundred years, her father had told her, and he’d made her memorise all her forebears, even the ones named
Aakster
who spoke Dutch and had names that seemed to her to come from the Bible.

She tried to sleep, but couldn’t, and waited for her mother to come to her, to kiss her cheek and read to her and sit beside her until tiredness seized her and dragged her away.

But her mother did not come. It was her father who came and sat on her bed. He didn’t touch her as her mother did – didn’t stroke her head or her face – and she thought
about taking his hand and putting it on her head but something about the way her father sat beside her stopped her doing it. He looked at the corner of the room, and she wondered if he could see
anything there.

‘Your mother is dead,’ he said, eventually. ‘Your brother, too.’

Her brother, whom she had never met, who had only been a promise inside the blossoming girth of her mother’s belly. She felt cheated by his non-arrival, even while she tried to wrestle her
understanding into some grip on the words ‘your mother is dead’.