I realise now that when Arthur and I had rooms on the same staircase as Edgar at Oxford we did not really know him. In truth it would be more accurate to say that we were simply two among many people who were in awe of him. His not being an intellectual did not matter because he was the kind of man who made other men wonder whether being an intellectual was perhaps a little shameful. I can vividly recall the five framed Punch cartoons of his uncle, all of them featuring a globe, spinning on the man’s finger, crushed beneath his foot, served to him on a plate or subjugated in some other symbolic manner. Edgar talked repeatedly of his intention to surpass his uncle in some way and none of us doubted that he would succeed. He was almost comically handsome. He had a scar down the side of his face which he had acquired falling downstairs when he was four years old but he carried himself with such martial dignity that everyone thought of it as a duelling wound, even those of us who were party to the secret. He had been awarded Blues in both rugby and fives and was, in short, one of those men who take it for granted that they are liked and admired, that wealth and opportunity will flow naturally to them and that this is simply the nature of the world. Consequently they never learn how to make a compromise or earn respect, they never need to imagine how the world might appear from the point of view of another person, they never truly love and they are never truly loved.
I did not understand these things until two weeks ago.
The following morning, after a night of shallow and restless sleep, while Edgar was relieving himself and Arthur was shaving, Bill asked if he might discuss something with me. Bill was the only non-university man among us and we rarely shared small talk so I feared bad news.
He sat close enough that Arthur might not overhear. “I fear that Mr. Soames has lost his mind and we’re here only so long as we’re useful to him.”
I was shocked to hear him talking about Edgar in this manner.
“I no longer think we can trust him.”
I reminded Bill that whether he trusted Edgar was neither here nor there. He was, ultimately, an employee. I softened my rebuke a little by adding, “The drop was two hundred feet. The rope was two hundred and twenty. There was insufficient slack to form a belay and a cradle.”
“Did he know that?” asked Bill.
I said, “You would both have died. You may dislike him but you owe him your life.”
Bill, I realised, was testing the ground in case he fell foul of Edgar. Might I be an accomplice, a co-conspirator? I found his presumption distasteful. I asked him what he would have done in Edgar’s shoes.
“I would have discussed the matter at least,” said Bill, “before putting a bullet through a man’s head as if he were no more than a racehorse with a broken leg.”
I said that democracy was not necessarily the best model for governing an expedition of this kind.
“So we submit to a tyrant?” said Bill.
“When your name is on the front page of The Times I suspect that you will not care greatly about what kind of dispensation we were briefly living under.”
Bill got to his feet. “I have spoken out of turn. Forgive me. I did not mean to place you in a difficult position.” He turned and walked away.
A few days after Nicholas’s death our compass readings began to go awry. Divining true north by means of the stars, however, a process which involved Arthur ascending tall trees, monkey-like, at night to broach the canopy, we were able by degrees to make our way towards the epicentre of the magnetic disturbances.
Shortly after breakfast one morning Edgar called for us to come and look at a boot which he had found lodged at head height in a mass of creepers and vines choking a rubber tree. He took it down and turned it over in his hand, wiping away with his hat some of the feathery lime-green mould which had gathered on the putrid leather.
Edgar spread his outstretched hand along the sole to gauge the size. “It must have belonged to the boy.” He put the boot back into the crevice between the vines as if he were a shop assistant and a customer had decided not to make a purchase. “Let us press on. If our luck holds we may find the cave by nightfall.”
Later during the morning, as the two of us were walking together, Arthur said, “There is a possibility, of course, that they killed one another.”
I said that after all this time, in this heat and this humidity, even if we were to find the bodies their manner of death would be exceedingly difficult to ascertain.
“You would be surprised,” said Bill who was walking behind us. “I’ve seen many corpses in my time. They are more eloquent than you might expect.”
I cast my mind back to the asylum, to Nat Semperson sitting in the director’s library, November rain lashing the casement and the panes rattling in their leads. His morning dose of laudanum had been postponed in the hope that this might sharpen his mind, the director explained; even so he very much doubted that we would be told a comprehensible story. Semperson rarely spoke, he continued, and remained as feeble-minded as he had been when the HMS Cadogan deposited him at Falmouth. He often cried out in his sleep and seldom slept a whole night without waking.
Edgar asked what had happened to Lord Carlysle and the rest of the men. What point had they reached on their journey through the jungle? Were they still alive when he last saw them? If not, how had they met their end? Semperson watched the rain and seemed blind to Edgar’s presence and deaf to his questions.
“He sometimes talks about a terrifying creature,” said the director. He had the air of a ringmaster, I thought, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat, a voice slightly too big for the room. I wondered how much of the story was concocted for our benefit in the hope of a second monetary donation. “He claims sometimes to have seen it approaching across the fields. Sometimes he is certain that it has broken through the doors and that we must arm ourselves.”
Edgar pulled up a chair and sat in front of Semperson so that he was able to look directly into the man’s eyes. He explained that we were planning to travel to Jamanxim in search of Carlysle and the rest of his party. “The family will not rest easy until they know the whereabouts of their son. We will spend sixteen weeks in the jungle. If there are predictable dangers I would like to be forewarned. I do not wish our party to come to a similar end.”
“To my knowledge,” said the director, “he has never spoken of what happened to his companions.”
After a long pause Edgar got to his feet and replaced his chair. “This is a great disappointment.”
Only I knew how great. Carlysle’s family would fund an expedition only if there were dependable evidence. Semperson was our last hope. We would now be forced to return to London and, within the month, Edgar would reluctantly take up the job at his great-uncle’s bank which he no longer had a justifiable reason for postponing.
Struck by a sudden inspiration I asked the director if I might borrow a sheet of paper and a fountain pen. I removed the tea set, placed them on the tray and placed the tray in Semperson’s lap. He looked at them with his head cocked to one side the way a dog does when it is listening to a faint and distant noise.
“Children learn to talk before they learn to write,” said the director. “I strongly suspect that we lose those faculties in the reverse order.”
But Semperson had taken up the pen in the shaking fingers of his right hand.
“Go on,” I said gently.