The Poisoned Island (39 page)

In recent years, the news from Otaheite had become more and more alarming. The natives were constantly at war with each other, such that the security of the island itself and Britain’s presence upon it was called into question. Even the missionaries had left, or almost all of them. The last remaining was Henry Nott, with whom Banks had maintained a regular decadelong correspondence, at least as regular as the patterns of shipping on the far side of the world would allow. Nott had become, almost by default, the Banksian representative on the island, an ambassador of natural philosophy, despite his
austere religion. Nott had known more of the island rituals than any man alive, and he’d told Banks about the stories of a strange tree and the leaf which came from it; how it was said that this leaf had magical properties, and could restore clarity of thought and sense, as well as supplying an immensity of pleasure.

And so Banks had crafted a plan within a plan. He had been plotting a final botanizing expedition to Otaheite for years now, as the news of the brutal tribal wars grew worse and worse, and as the rumors swirled of France’s interest in securing the island for her own possession. So now he took his opportunity: send a ship to the far side of the world, bring back the botany of the island, and also bring back a cutting from that very tree, and see whether it would grow. And, by God, how it had grown!

Banks had kept the true purpose of the voyage secret from everyone, even the ship’s captain. He’d told one of the gardeners where the tree was and what to do to take a cutting from it. The gardener had done as he was told, and had thought nothing of it, for Banks had told him to collect dozens of other specimens, as he’d told each gardener, so the secret of the tree was kept.

Brown quivered just like that ominous tree in the Stove quivered, though not with growth but with a raging disappointment. He had been the test case for the leaf, the one who would check its safety, and Brown shouted then, shouted for the first time in the odd, pitted relationship he shared with his mentor. Banks said nothing, as if giving permission for Brown’s loss of control, but then his librarian said, “You do not know what you have done.” At that Banks too lost his temper, asking Brown if he was or was not a Briton, was he not prepared to put all aside for the sake of the
King
, to save
his country from the gargantuan appetites of the King’s son, who is a man, said Banks, with a mouth, a wardrobe, and no morals whatsoever. Brown, helpless to argue with Sir Joseph’s fierce patriotism, gave way before it.

Banks had used him before, when he’d put him on the
Investigator
and sent him around the world. That is what Banks did. He used lives—his own included—for the furtherance of two ideals which orbited each other like twin planets: man’s knowledge of the natural world; and Britain’s domination of it.

But the
King
, he said to Banks, you cannot surely know enough about the leaf to give it to the
King
. Banks looked at him and asked how much Brown knew about the King’s illness, and Brown said he knew very little, and Banks said
exactly
, because
very little
is what the army of doctors who surrounded His Majesty knew. Modern British medicine had exhausted itself on the steep hills of King George’s mysterious illness. Everything had been tried, and still the man who had once debated planets with Herschel was an idiot, a vegetable, barely even a human, and at what point did the King’s friends have to decide that
any
solution was worth the candle, despite its danger? That moment had passed years before, Banks claimed. If the leaf was dangerous, well, then it was dangerous. It could not make the situation any worse.

Brown tried one more argument. The deaths of the crewmen, he said. The dead men had taken something before their death, something unexplained which had seemingly transported them. The constable investigating those deaths had asked Brown directly whether the men could have brought something back from Otaheite. The question was a sharp one. It suggested the constable was close to uncovering truths about the voyage. Was it not possible that the men
had consumed the leaf, or something similar to it, something which had put down roots in southern soil but which had delivered its effects to the other side of the world?

Banks paused at that. The news surprised him. He pondered it for a few moments, and his stubborn old face turned to Brown’s.

“Did what they consumed kill them?”

“No, Sir Joseph, they were . . .”

“Well then. No more of it. Some of the crew found the leaf, and now they are dead.”

“But killed by whom?”

“It is of no concern to me, Brown. Some ignorant men dabbled in matters beyond their comprehension. They are now dead. The King’s health is still the matter of paramount concern.”

“And what of the Wapping constable?”

“He is Harriott’s officer?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can address the problem. It will soon go away.”

Brown said no more. As midnight approached he left the old man. Silence had descended between them, and neither could bring themselves to look at, let alone speak to, the other. He took a carriage home. And now here he is, quivering with fear and with hunger and with thirst, his head squeezed in pain and the longing in his chest swamping all other remembrance.

His carriage passes, at last, over Westminster Bridge. The dark hulks of Westminster Hall and the abbey float above and beyond the river, dark polygons against the sky which grow in size and definition as the carriage reaches the other side of the bridge, and then turns right into Parliament Street and makes its way up towards Whitehall. Eventually, the Admiralty
passes on the left, and Brown looks up at it and, even in his despairing thirst, wonders how much is known in
that
building of the schemes of Sir Joseph Banks.

The streets are almost deserted. As they pass round the Charing Cross and into Cockspur Street, two dark figures run in front of the carriage. Street children, headed back to St. Giles after a night of begging and picking pockets. Brown scarcely notices them, as the minutes stretch out into infinities. Why is the coach going so damned slowly?

But eventually they reach Gerrard Street and Brown shoves some coins into the driver’s hands, not checking them carefully at all, his habitual parsimony a victim of this pungent addiction. He lets himself in and up to his room, and then must go through the agony of lighting a fire (the servants have not done so, as the June evenings have been particularly clement) and waiting for it to catch, then putting the kettle on the fire and waiting for it to boil and then, finally then, he can put hot water in the same cup he’d used the day before (there is still a residue from the leaf in the bottom of the cup, but Brown does not care) and add leaf from the jar, more than before, much more, but his need is so great, the leaf’s aroma stinging his eyes and sharpening his need—
come on, come on, come on
. Then he is drinking the tea, the water scalding his lips and mouth and throat, but no matter, because now . . .

Light explodes. His hands fall to his side, spilling boiling water onto his thigh where it will burn the skin as a memento of tonight for tomorrow’s consideration, and he falls backwards in his chair to the ground, his head slamming into the rug, but by now he is already under, deep under, in a long, dark well . . .

His father is shouting from the staircase. There are people in every room of the house, whispering and praying. One
of them is his mother, he knows, but she will spare him no attention while his father shouts from above.

“There is no authority but the Lord!”

He hides beneath the stairs, directly beneath his father, and in his hand he holds a plant, its roots still full of soil, its leaves bright and alive.

“There is no law but the Book!”

The green leaves of the plant are the only color in the hallway, which is dark: dark wood, dark floor, dark walls, dark dark dark. He wonders where he can hide this plant, because he knows his parents will not allow it in the house, for reasons he cannot be clear about. He just knows. His father takes a step down the stairs, moved by the force of his own assertion, and so Brown pushes even further back into his hiding place, in case his father is on the way down, but then the wall behind him gives way and he is falling away and down.

He lands beside a waterfall in a green place, the air hot and humid, the ground soft and warm, as if great fires had been lit beneath it. He is still holding the plant, but now he can see, as it were in miniature, a tiny breadfruit in among its leaves. He is examining this carefully when he hears a girl’s laugh. He looks into the trees that surround him, and the laugh seems to be coming from all of them, from behind and beneath and within every tree. He stands and steps into the forest.

The leaves caress his face, and branches stroke his arms, the roots tickle at his feet as he walks through the enchanted forest. Everywhere, there is laughter, as if a troop of princesses were accompanying him through the forest. Soon, he comes into a clearing.

At one side of the clearing there is a stone platform with an altar upon it. He realizes he is at the top of a hill, and all around he can see the ocean, a deep blue ocean as still as glass.
But the clearing is empty, apart from the altar, as if a great fire had burst through here and claimed all the flora. There is only a scrubby grass covering the land. The laughing has stopped, and he steps forward into the center of the clearing.

He stops, and looks around himself, but then he feels the plant in his hands begin to shake. He looks down upon it and realizes that the plant has begun to grow before his eyes. Its stem extends, its branches multiply, strange flowers burst from buds and fruits appear by the second, growing from peas to grapes to oranges to grapefruits to pineapples in size, until the plant becomes too heavy to hold and he drops it on the ground. Still it grows, the branches twirling around his legs and up his body and beginning to squeeze, until one of them reaches his shoulders and then his face and plunges down his mouth, while others enter his ears, his nose, his eyes, and he hears that girlish laughter again but now it is within him and filled with an unquenchable sadness and anger, for it is full of poison, a poison that would eat the world.

The most active poisons which are known do not so quickly destroy the life of an animal as the want of air, or the breathing of it when it is rendered highly noxious. It will appear in this work, that those very plants, which, influenced by the light of the sun, repair the injury done to this fluid by the breathing of animals and by many other causes, may, in different circumstances, poison so much this very element, as to render it absolutely unfit for respiration, and, instead of keeping up life, to extinguish it in a moment.

John Ingen-Housz,
Experiments Upon Vegetables
, 1779

The storehouse on New Gravel Lane has been used for a great many things in its time, but in the main it has always been gravel that is kept there. It is brought down from the higher land above Wapping to be taken on as ballast in ships—mainly colliers from the northeast—returning empty to their home harbors. It is this gravel that gave Old and New Gravel Lanes their names. Other stuff might be left in the storehouse—tar, rope, sailcloth, even the odd barrel of rice or tobacco surreptitiously left out of a manifest and redirected here rather than to the new brick-and-glass warehouses of the dock—but gravel is always piled up all around. It is above the piles of gravel that the dead body swings, hanging from a rope which is itself worked by a metal winch and crane which can be turned through 360 degrees to unload onto the street via a shuttered opening high up on the wall. The crane itself is attached to a small platform running along one side of the storehouse, two-thirds of the way up the wall, and accessed by an unsteady-looking ladder.

Standing beneath the swaying body are three men: Edward Markland, and two of his constables. Harriott recognizes these men but cannot recall their names, although he does associate both of them with an unpleasant stench of violence. Markland has the two of them sketching, Harriott is almost amused to note. Charles Horton’s methods are catching. He looks at his constable as they walk towards the little group, but Horton’s face is turned upwards to the swinging body above them.