Free The Poisoned Island by Lloyd Shepherd Page A

ask your business on board my ship, sir.”
    “I take it that you are Captain Hopkins?”
    “I am.”
    “Sir, I am Charles Horton, a constable from the River Police Office.”
    “Indeed? I met with your magistrate only yesterday. I was surprised by his interest in my ship even then. A personal visit surprises me even more, constable.”
    “I am here about one of your crew members. A Samuel Ransome.”
    The captain scowls at the mention of the name.
    “If we’re going to talk about Ransome, we’re not going to do it on deck. Come to my cabin.”
    They walk back to the rear of the ship. The Solander is quietly busy and sprucely clean. About a dozen crewmen are in view, most of them occupied in transporting the remaining flora in the hold onto the deck and preparing it for loading onto two barges which lie alongside. The containers for the flora are mostly half barrels of various sizes. All the men are tanned and healthy looking, and a number of them look towards Horton as he walks with the captain, clocking the interloper and filing the intelligence away. They note Horton’s ease on deck, and take him for a seaman. They also note the suddenness of his arrival, as if he’d popped into existence at the lip of the hold just in time for the captain, and they warn each other that here is a man upon whom a sharp eye needs to be kept.
    An incongruous young man whom Horton takes for a clergyman nods as they pass and then stares, without embarrassment. He is holding a small book he has been reading while walking on the deck. He is dressed like a country vicar from the previous century. His skin is as brown as that of the crew, his nose broad and his hair as dark as his breeches.Horton almost stops, expecting to be introduced to the young man by Hopkins, but the captain does not even look at the clerical stranger, whose eyes follow the two men up to the quarterdeck with an oddly desperate intensity.
    The quarterdeck is dominated by the strange shedlike structure Horton saw from the river. There are glass windows all round its walls, and looking inside Horton sees even more plants within. The shed is a hothouse, and the flora within quiver and sweat with an alien energy. Hopkins sees him looking through the window.
    “Our plant house, constable. Constructed on this river over a year ago and now full to the brim with plants from Otaheite. Here, let me show you something.”
    Hopkins pulls open the door to the plant house, and Horton is instantly assailed with an even more intense aroma and something more physical: a shower of dust which seems to be ejected from the plant house like the exhalation of some botanical dragon. It gets into his eyes and nose and causes him to want to sneeze. His skin, suddenly inflamed, seems to come alive.
    “Vivid stuff, this Otaheite plant life,” he says. Then he does sneeze, a loud and wet explosion which causes some of the crew to laugh, though they fall silent when Hopkins glares at them.
    “ ’Tis indeed, constable, ’tis indeed. My poor Welsh constitution didn’t know what to make of it at first. I sneezed and scratched my way back around the Cape, I can tell you. Now, see this.”
    He closes the door of the plant house and then descends a ladder to the back of the ship, beneath the captain’s and master’s cabins. There is some light here from portholes that run the length of the ship on both sides. Behind them, in the hold,are the plants and flowers Horton first saw on coming on deck. But here is something even more extraordinary: dozens and dozens of half barrels, each filled with flowers and plants, sit in the back of the ship, held within a false floor into which holes have been sawed to hold them. More barrels are held in holes down the sides of the ship. There is no noise in here, but something almost like a noise: a thick, stirring sense of quivering life, which once again begins to invade Horton’s eyes and nose and causes him to weep, after a fashion.
    “We call this the