Part 15 (1/2)

He made the call for two reasons. The first was that he had enjoyed no success at all in trying to track down Thomas Horan in Barnsley. There were a handful of residents there sharing the s.h.i.+p's doctor's surname. But the genealogical records he perused showed no connection among any of them with a physician ancestor who had once served aboard the Andromeda.

Ordinarily he would have persisted on his own for longer than he had. It would have been a matter of professional pride for him. He was good at research and remained convinced that Edith Chambers had been inspired in calling him and asking for his help. But he shared her belief that finding the journal was a matter of urgency. He had a growing intuition that there was not much time left to locate it and heed whatever warning it contained for McIntyre's expedition and its a.s.sorted members.

His second reason for calling La.s.siter was the doc.u.ment he now held between his white-gloved hands. It was a slender booklet, just a few pages hand-sewn at the spine, mottled with age but still legible, its words described in sooty ink in a slightly shaky hand. Given its contents, he thought the tremor perfectly understandable.

He had found it, shortly after reading the newspaper article, on the library shelves of his own museum. He was not absolutely certain of what it was. But if it was what he thought it might well be, it was a doc.u.ment history insisted simply did not exist.

There were believed to be no written accounts anywhere of life among the New Hope Island community. But Fortescue was convinced he had stumbled upon exactly that. He further believed, on the basis of the events it described, it had been written at a time very close to the vanis.h.i.+ng.

A problem shared is a problem halved, he said to himself. And the same is probably equally true of secrets. They had a shared experience, he and La.s.siter, didn't they? They had both undergone the unnerving ordeal of examining the contents of Seamus Ballantyne's sea chest.

There were barely 24 hours left before the expedition team were scheduled to leave for New Hope. La.s.siter was booked to go. And there was some hint in the story written by Lucy Church that the ex-detective had a more than professional involvement with Alice Lang. Fortescue wondered would the account he had uncovered be enough to persuade La.s.siter to stay and help him. He would have to tell him about Edith, wouldn't he? He would have to tell La.s.siter too about Jacob Parr.

The doc.u.ment between his hands was not dated. But he thought it too obscure to be a forgery. Provenance was not really an issue. Neither was authenticity. He looked from the desk he occupied in the library, up to the shelves which had concealed it. He looked at his mobile, placed neatly parallel with the edge of the desk. He had the room to himself. He had the necessary privacy. He was, though, a punctilious man. Before he made the call, he would give what he had discovered one last read.

Each morning the Master ascends to the heights and awaits the arrival of the bird that never comes. Seeking guidance in this manner is a thing that sorely hurts him. We have never been obliged or beholden. It is not our way to beg or beseech. But we are no longer blessed, either, it seems. We must do what needs to be done to lift the Great Affliction and the master as ever leads by example in his humble and desperate compromise.

This morning another two were gone. That is five to feed the hunger in a week. The Morgan girls were taken from us. The loss is terrible. We cannot endure it. Our family will simply perish over a season of anguish and despair if this continues.

It is the devil's work and horrible. It also seems to us all to be unjust. We have lived humbly and austerely. We have traded honestly. We have hurt or offended no one. Our isolation has always been more a condition to endure than to celebrate; the elements harsh and the situation bleak and the comforts sorrowful scant.

Faith has been our consolation. But was ever faith tested in such a manner as this among men and women who love and wors.h.i.+p their G.o.d? In my old life I was a scholar, a studious man and a student of history. I can recall no ordeal I have read of the equal of the Great Affliction for the fear and crus.h.i.+ng hopelessness it provokes.

Each day the Master rises from his sleepless bed and climbs to the heights and awaits the bird that never comes. His patience and fort.i.tude are quite wonderful qualities. Those of us who still survive wonder how he sustains them as he watches his Kingdom of Belief erode and dwindle.

Faith also erodes and with it, authority. There are voices among us speaking openly now in discordant tones. The family is cleaved, no longer one. There are those among us but no longer of us saying that the Master has himself delivered the Great Affliction. It sounds like treachery. Worse, it sounds almost a heresy to make this claim. No man could have expressed his remorse more convincingly. None could have paid a heavier price in repentance than he has for his past sins.

Aye, say the dissenters, but we are all paying the price for his past. And we will go on doing so until the last of us is gone before the debt to G.o.d is finally honoured.

Forgive me for the impertinence of committing such an arrogant claim to the page, but G.o.d does not work in this way. The Master may have jeopardised his own immortal soul. That is a matter between him and the Almighty. It may be that he has been responsible for deeds so dark and outrageous to our Maker that he is indeed d.a.m.ned. But the Great Affliction is not the work of G.o.d. Of this, I am convinced even if recent events have dulled the distinction between that which I can and cannot rationally accept is true and real.

The weather has brightened. The sky is an unsullied blue and the sea azure beneath its colossal canopy and calm. The sun s.h.i.+nes, bathing the land in a warm light that stirs scents from the ground, subtle and sweet. On such mornings it is almost impossible to believe the predicament in which our settlement finds itself. Then you look up and see the Master perched like a statue on the heights, or like some carved figurehead, its wooden gaze unblinking, waiting for the first glimpse through that endless blue vista of the bird that is never going to come.

The Great Affliction claimed three victims last night. The Morgan girls were taken, as I have stated already. Young Barton was found hanged by his belt from the pulley gantry at the harbour when dawn broke. He was already stiff, had resolved to end his life by the look of it the previous night not long after darkness fell. It was pitiful, watching them cut him down. He was only 13 years old.

The grief was evidently too great a burden for his young heart to bear. He was all that was left of his family and could not tolerate their absence from his life. Either that or he could not endure the dread of awaiting his turn to become himself one of the perished at the Great Affliction's whim.

We carry on. Somehow, the dull routine of toil seems to make men and women oblivious in the immediacy of what they do to their general plight. And so we fish and weave baskets and distil the whiskey that will now never be sold and gather wool and sow oats and mend nets and patch clothes and school children in the matters of reading and writing and arithmetic.

And for all I know, as a single man and life-long bachelor, the married among us still couple in the night for comfort or through pa.s.sion in the warmth and intimacy of their beds. Intimacy is an illusion now, of course. But all comforts here are an illusion, truth be told.

The evil come among us makes hope seem a scornful jest and prayer for deliverance a babbled nonsense. There is no hope. There is no prospect of deliverance. Even should the impossible happen and the bird come, nothing will change. Will Barton, wise beyond his tender years, knew that. But self-murder is a mortal sin and so offers no escape for a devout soul.

Fortescue called La.s.siter. He told him about Edith and Parr and Thomas Horan. He told him about his Barnsley cul-de-sac. He told him about the doc.u.ment he had just that morning chanced across. There was silence on the other end of the line until he had finished speaking. Then there was a pause so charged it was almost audible.

La.s.siter said, 'Where did you find it?'

'There are some books here at the museum salvaged from New Hope after the vanis.h.i.+ng was discovered. One of them is an atlas. Some of the really detailed maps are folded flat into envelope arrangements so they can fold out bigger than the dimensions of the book when you study them. I opened out a map and there it was, concealed in the fold, tucked and hidden there.'

'Why were you studying the map?'

'Does it matter?'

'Just answer the question.'

'It was reading that piece Lucy Church wrote about the psychic, Alice Lang. I thought that if I handed something from New Hope from the period of the vanis.h.i.+ng, I might have an intuition, the way that she does.'

'You wouldn't want one of her intuitions.'

'She's very attractive. Either that, or she takes a very good picture.'

'She's the former.'

'You're a lucky man.'

'Read it out to me.'

'Read the whole account?'

'You said it wasn't particularly long. Read it aloud.'

Fortescue did. When he had finished he said, 'What do you think?'

'I think it's genuine and doesn't tell us very much. Except that whatever the Great Affliction was, it panicked Ballantyne into communicating with the outside world.'

'Why do you say that?'

'What do you think the bird is all about? You think old Seamus was a twitcher?'

'I thought it might be symbolic, a metaphor or bit of religious symbolism. Birds feature heavily in religious mythology. Doves are connected to peace and hope. Ravens are harbingers of death, aren't they?'

'The bird he's looking out for is a carrier pigeon. He's waiting for information from someone, which means that he's asked someone somewhere other than New Hope for advice or a.s.sistance.'

'Where?'

'How the b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l would I know?'

'Sorry.'

'Anyway you should be asking who, not where. And a more pertinent question would be, about what? We can now safely rule out ma.s.s suicide. And this Great Affliction doesn't sound much like any epidemic I've ever heard of. The spread of contagion is too slow.'

'Unless you think of AIDS,' Fortescue said.

'That's a fair point, which I'll concede. So none of the major theories are either ruled out or confirmed by what you've found.'

'There's a hint of mutiny. Of mutinous thoughts, there is.'

'There is. But a mutiny would either have been successful or successfully suppressed. Everyone wouldn't have just vanished as a consequence of rebellion. Obviously something nightmarish was occurring on New Hope. But I think this account poses more questions than it answers.'

'Will you help me track down Thomas Horan?'