The Poisoned Island (21 page)

It had been too late by then to walk to see Frost and Potter, the remaining members of Critchley’s Crew. Frost and Potter had not attended the interrogations at the Narwhal the previous day. Like Attlee and Arnott, Frost and Potter were friends before the secret coming-together of Critchley’s Crew to which Craven had borne witness. Craven has given some thought to the symmetry of Critchley’s furtive little group: two pairs, and two loners (Ransome and Critchley himself). He has found himself wondering how such a grouping came about, since it didn’t exist on the outward trip to Otaheite. Only on the way home did those six huddle together periodically, hissing at Craven whenever he approached, like a cabal of witches hatching an infernal plot. Something happened on the island to bring the six of them together, it is clear. But what? And why those six?

He must know, because there is something important here, something which he has no doubt will be of some personal use to him. He feels no urgency to
warn
Frost and Potter, as he feels sure they will know of the deaths of Attlee and
Arnott. He imagines that if the secret between the men is as big and as powerful as he has begun to imagine it is, then Critchley will already have been out here to talk to them.

He followed Colby Potter back here earlier today, having watched him leave the boarding house early this morning. He had taken up a position on the far side of Rose Walk from the boarding house, behind a pile of unused timber and coal which, in a tiny little economic miracle, had been left there and had not been touched by any greedy or needy hands ever since. The pile was close enough to the house so that any noise from the front door was clearly audible, and with each creak and slam Craven peeked around the edge of his hiding place to see who was coming or going. At about eight a.m., Potter came out of the house and began to walk down the street towards Shadwell.

Craven had not seen him for some days, so was taken aback by the change in his former crewmate. Potter was unshaven and walked with an empty shuffling gait as if obeying some lizard impulse in his brain. He took no notice of his surroundings. He simply pointed himself down the street and began to walk, his feet barely lifting off the ground, his eyes fixed to a point in the road eight or nine feet in front of him. He was thin and pale, a shocking transformation from the muscular, well-fed fellow who’d left the
Solander
a few days before, when his skin was still dark from the southern sun and his belly was full of the ship’s comfortable rations.

Craven had followed Potter into Shadwell itself, and as the crowds thickened it became both easier to remain hidden and harder to keep his quarry in sight, although Potter’s plodding gait made his progress easy to forecast. Craven could lose sight of him for a minute and still be confident of where he’d be when he next saw him. Then he lost Potter completely for
a while, before realizing that the man had stopped at a baker’s to buy bread. Craven watched him through the window, mechanically counting out coins in the empty, desperate way of someone who knows they’re the last coins he has. Then Potter came out of the shop, turned back towards the Ratcliffe house, and began plodding again.

The two of them had returned to the boardinghouse after perhaps a half hour in total. Potter had gone in, Craven had returned to his spot behind the pile. Then he’d continued his vigil, watching people leave the boardinghouse one by one, none of them Frost or Potter.

Another hour has now passed. Craven is bored and frustrated and realizes that he must at least try to talk to his two shipmates. No one has left the little boardinghouse in the last hour, and the place has an empty watchfulness about it, as if it were waiting for its charges to return from their days. There may still be people inside, of course, but he will simply go in and, if it comes to it, ask for Potter and Frost and be shown to their rooms. God willing.

The door to the house is tidily painted and maintained, Craven notices, and it is unlocked. He steps into the hallway inside. Various doors lead off the hallway, and a staircase goes up to the first floor. It is well lit and open, not at all like the dark warren in which Craven himself resides in an older district of Wapping. There is not a sound: no cheery landlady doing the laundry, no snoring men in their rooms, nothing at all. The house feels completely empty, even though Craven is sure that in one of these rooms he will find two crewmen from the
Solander
.

Craven is neither a brave nor a cowardly man. He is simply one who follows a sequence of steps in life towards the goal of his own self-preservation and, with luck, his own advancement.
So he feels no compunction in stepping into the house, closing the door behind him, and trying the doors one by one.

They are all locked. He knocks on each one, and tries its handle. The landlady or landlord must leave their front door unlocked during the day, and each boarder has his own key to his own door. The rooms at the back of the place must belong to the house’s owner, and they too are locked. So, the residents and the owners are all out, or have locked themselves in. The ones on the ground floor, at least.

It is the same on the first floor. Craven tries all five doors and can get into none of them. Listening carefully at each one, he does not hear the front door of the house quietly open and close at the bottom of the stairs. He discovers another flight of stairs, small and cramped, leading up to, presumably, another set of rooms on another floor. He walks up these stairs, which are noisy, their squeaks masking another set of sounds which accompany someone walking up the stairs from below.

At the top of the house there is one door, and it is unlocked. He almost jumps when he turns the handle and the door begins to open, and he pulls it shut without thinking, slamming it shockingly loudly and then standing still, the handle still in his hand, listening for any whisperings from the house. There is no noise, only a watchful silence as if somewhere there is an audience waiting to see what is going to happen. Feeling stupid and somehow embarrassed, he knocks on the door.

“Potter? It is I, Robert Craven, your old shipmate. Are you in there?”

There is no reply, but from within the room he thinks he hears something like a quiet growl, which scares him badly and nearly sends him back down the stairs. But then he tells himself not to be stupid and that this is more interesting than
he might have anticipated. Potter came into this house and hasn’t come out, so he’s in here somewhere, and this is the last room. With a little swallow, he opens the door and goes in.

Given his growing fear, the scene of tranquility inside the room is a shock. Frost and Potter are both asleep on their beds. The little growl he’d heard was actually Frost snoring. They are dressed and lying on top of the bedclothes. On a table beneath the room’s one window lie the remains of the loaf Potter had bought this morning; there is no butter or cheese or ham. The two men had eaten the bread, unadorned and unimproved.

But there is a stench in the room, an unwashed and untended reek which comes from the men on the bed and the clothing which lies strewn around the room. The men’s sea chests lie opened by their beds, unpacked and untidy. It is as if the two of them had returned from the
Solander
days before and had lain down on the beds and gone to sleep, without washing or putting away their things or doing any of the little things which traveling men do to their rooms to make them feel like a home, however transitory.

He walks towards Potter, and is struck again by how ill the man looks. His arm is hanging over the bed, a wooden cup still in his hand, the other arm placed across his chest. The man’s cadaverous features are formed into an awful frowning grimace, as if Potter were face-to-face with a creature consumed with terrible hunger. His cheekbones are impossibly gaunt, his beard patchy, his shoulders and chest a sad pastiche of the vital strength that had coursed through the man only days before. He smells terribly, and looking down his body Craven notes the worst thing of all: his old shipmate has repeatedly soiled himself. Whatever it is that holds Potter in its grip will not even let him leave to relieve himself. In
a sickening counterpoint, from a neighboring room Craven hears a girl laughing.

The two men’s beds are placed either side of a fireplace, and on the hearth Craven sees an old black kettle. The fire is still warm but was obviously lit some hours ago. He walks over to Frost and sees much the same thing as he saw with Potter: the same unwashed, unshaven face, the same horrific fearful grimace, the same hand trailing on the floor with a cup falling from it. But where Potter’s other hand was placed across his chest, Frost’s is by his side, and Craven can see that he is grasping, even in this unconscious state, a small leather pouch. He reaches out to take the pouch, but then he feels something tight and warm go around his neck and an enormous pressure is placed upon his windpipe. His feet scrabble backwards as an unseen assailant yanks on the cord around his neck, rupturing something inside his throat, until there is no air going in, and his fingers scrabble at the cord which is destroying him. He cannot get a purchase, the other is pulling too tightly, he is strong, so strong, and like his father before him Craven sinks into a purple-and-black doom, as surprised as it is possible to be.

Robert Brown knows of only one way to smother botanical anxieties—through systematic, remorseless observation. His life has been many things, but throughout he has been conducting a long conversation with the plant kingdom. As a child he had fled into the countryside to escape the hectoring echoes of his father, James Brown, a rebel suspected of being a Jacobite, forbidden from preaching to more than four people in a room. Reverend Brown had got round this limitation in typically direct style by placing his congregation in groups of four in each room of the Browns’ cross-shaped house, and then preaching from the stairs, his voice shouting so it could be heard in every room, and every room containing huddles of the dark-clothed devout with pale faces and fire in their eyes.

Brown’s father had interrupted whatever educational progress his son was making in Montrose in 1789 by moving the family to Edinburgh, where he was consecrated Bishop
Brown in a secret and very illegal ceremony. He was still raging against the heretics and harlots when he died two years later of apoplexy. His son Robert could not have imagined a more appropriate death.

In Edinburgh the younger Brown attended some medical courses and, officially, was well on the way to becoming a doctor. But his passion was botany. The year his father died Brown produced his first
hortus siccus
, drying the best of his plants and displaying them, as if to prevent their own little deaths in the face of the big death of his father. Young Mr. Brown had found his passion, a passion that was seeded in his midteens and now filled almost every waking thought. He worked when he could and often went hungry. If he could have eaten the plants he studied, all would have been well; but man cannot live on botanizing alone. So he was forced to sign up to the new Fifeshire Fencibles, and pursue his botanical obsessions while mending the broken limbs of Scotsmen who were putting down Irishmen on behalf of Englishmen.

Brown’s entry into the botanical world was timely. At the end of the last century, many centuries-old questions were being answered: how plants procreated, how they nourished themselves, even how they should be classified. Theories tumbled over questions in a great rush as the old century ended. The great Linnaean system of a half-century’s standing was beginning to give way to new ways of classifying based on natural affinities between species, led by the pioneering French, with their state-funded Jardin and their bureaucrat natural philosophers. Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu’s groundbreaking
Genera Plantarum
made its way into the Brown book box sometime in 1795, six years after it was published, and Brown spent many damp Irish nights absorbing the unity and elegance of de Jussieu, botanizing when he could
in the peat and on the heath. Ireland was wet and depressing. He frequently drank himself into a state of acceptance, and gambled away a fair proportion of his pay. The blissful botanizing days above Edinburgh receded into the distance. But then Joseph Banks came calling, and everything changed.

His consciousness of his debt to Banks is the single constant in their relationship, and it is why he finds himself acutely anxious about the recent behavior of his mentor. Not least, he is concerned by the reappearance of Otaheite into the biography of Sir Joseph Banks. Brown is more familiar than he would wish to be with the stories of Sir Joseph’s activities on the island. These stories caused immense scandal forty years ago and they still, even today, are capable of drawing flushed gasps from ladies at London dinner tables. Banks had gone to the island as a young man who already had a reputation as a womanizer. Scandalous tales of “fishing trips” accompanied by expensive London courtesans opened the door for caricaturists to draw a direct, exaggerated line between Banks and his aging mentor Lord Sandwich, a decaying rake and former member of the discredited old Hell-Fire Club. When the young baronet returned from the South Seas trailing tales of glamorous and willing savage princesses there was a gleeful explosion of ink.