Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

‘Fine,’ he sighed. ‘Sleep well.’ He returned to his bed, lay there listening to her bitten-off cries as she readied herself for bed. It distressed him to hear her pain, to not be allowed to help. He struggled for sleep, turning this way and that on the thin mattress without ever quite finding repose. It grew less dark outside. He tiptoed quietly through the gloom to the washroom, dressed and went out. The sun wasn’t yet up, leaving the morning grey and cool. Down on the beach, he kicked off his shoes. The thin, cold crust of sand crunched satisfyingly beneath his tread, like the dried bark of a rotted tree. He bowed his head as he walked, searching the beach for fragments of pottery.

He stopped, crouched, picked up a white shard; but it was only a piece of eggshell. From the size of it, it had to have belonged to an aepyornis, a one-time Madagascar endemic, and the largest bird ever to have lived, taking advantage of the island’s lack of large predators to become the bully on the block. But then the first settlers had arrived and they’d eventually hunted them to extinction-for their meat, of course, but also for their eggs. The damned things had been the size of rugby balls, so that an aepyornis omelette would feed a family for a week. The birds had become well known in the ancient world. Marco Polo had immortalised them as the rukh or roc, capable of carrying off elephants in their claws and then dropping them like bombs from a great height; though actually the aepyornis had been as flightless as ostriches.

There’d always been a bit of a question mark as to how Marco Polo knew about the birds. He’d never visited the island himself. In fact, he’d actually confused it with Mogadishu, a corruption of which had given Madagascar its name. Most likely he’d heard of them from Arab merchants, who’d certainly been familiar with the place. They’d called it the Island of the Moon, and they’d believed it to be a point of no return for the southern ocean; that he who sailed beyond it was lost. Yet people undoubtedly had sailed beyond it. A Chinese map completed in around 1390 in honour of the first Ming emperor showed the world in traditional fashion, with a swollen China at its heart, shrunken apologies for Africa and Mediterranean Europe to the west. But what was most remarkable about the map was that it got the shape of Africa broadly right, including its southern and western coasts, even though the Chinese had never explored it themselves.

Whatever their sources had been, Zheng He and his admirals would have known it to be perfectly possible to reach and even round the Cape of Good Hope. Sailing along unfamiliar coasts had been a painfully slow business, however. If you stayed in sight of land, you increased exponentially your risk of running aground, so you had to go slow, take constant soundings, find a new safe harbour every afternoon, because sailing at night that close to land was suicide. If a Chinese treasure fleet had crawled in this manner all the way down Africa’s eastern coast, the crew would doubtless have been restless for home and impatient of a slow retracement of their route, so it was entirely plausible that their navigators would have set a course directly for China. Draw a line between the Cape and Beijing, and it would run pretty much straight through these reefs here. Just as easy for the coral to snag two ships as one.

Ahead of him, mangroves were being slowly ducked by the incoming tide, like a village of elders undergoing baptism. Knox turned and headed back along the beach, past the Yvette and Eden and on to Pierre’s cabins and beyond, still searching the shore as he went. The sand became infested with tiny flies; he set off blizzards of them with every step, cascading ahead of him down the beach. He went down to the sea’s edge to avoid them, small waves splashing timidly around his ankles before withdrawing like unctuous servants, his feet leaving shallow imprints that quickly filled with water and then faded into nothing. It was there in the wash that he saw the shard of porcelain. He crouched to pick it up. It was perhaps an inch long, its edges abraded smooth, white with just a trace of blue upon it, the exact same shade he’d seen on the porcelain fragments on the Morombe sea-bed. He tossed it up and caught it, thinking through what it might mean. Then he tucked it away in his pocket and headed back to Eden.

Rebecca’s cuts had healed enough overnight that every small movement was an agony when she woke. She didn’t intend to waste her morning feeling sorry for herself, however, so she gritted her teeth and swung out her legs and used gravity to help herself up, then hobbled through to her father’s office, hoping to guilt Daniel into making coffee and breakfast. He was already up and gone, however, but at least that gave her the opportunity for a more methodical search of her father’s desk than she’d been able to give it when rummaging around for the Yvette’s insurance documentation.

His desk had filing-cabinet-style drawers, with multicoloured hanging folders inside, each tagged with the name of a bank, insurance company, tax authority, stockbroker or friend. One of the tags bore her own name. She pulled a thin sheaf of letters from it, read through them with growing dismay, so obvious was it how absent her heart had been from her words. There were two postcards of London landmarks that she didn’t remember sending. She turned them over and with a jolt recognised Emilia’s handwriting. She must have gone ahead with her forestry training course after all.

– You came anyway? You didn’t tell me?

– You didn’t want me there.

– No! Don’t say that!

– You’d moved beyond me.

– Never! I made one mistake. How could you ‘Is something wrong?’ She looked up to see Daniel at the door. She feared her voice would sound strained if she spoke, so she shook her head instead. He came inside the room. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Better, thanks.’

‘You want me to change your bandages?’

‘It’s okay. Therese is coming by.’

‘How about some breakfast, then?’

‘That would be wonderful.’

He nodded and went out. She returned her letters and her sister’s postcards to the folder, began on Adam’s finances instead. They proved astonishing. She’d known he had money in England, for he’d paid her Oxford allowance from an English bank account. But he’d always been so careful, she’d assumed it had been a constant struggle. He’d built the Yvette himself, for example, and the Jeep was decades old. Yet these folders told a completely different story.

Daniel reappeared with a tray of coffee and fruit salad, toast and jam, set it upon the desk. ‘Is there anything else I can do?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t think of anything.’

‘What about searching the reefs?’

She smiled and showed him her bandages. ‘I can’t exactly go diving, not like this. And I’m hopeless at doing boat things.’

‘Then maybe I could take the Yvette out, see if I can’t find something.’

‘By yourself? Is that safe?’

‘I know what I’m doing.’

‘Then thanks. That’s really kind.’

‘No problem.’ He shouldered one of his bags. ‘See you later, then.’

Rebecca watched him leave, feeling bad about shutting him out like this when he so clearly just wanted to help. But it wasn’t only the kidnappers who’d insisted on her silence; Mustafa had, too. She resumed totting up her father’s assets. Without even taking Eden into account, he had over three-quarters of a million pounds invested in British bank and share accounts, and he still owned a house near Oxford. He had more income than she’d expected too, and not just from rent, dividends and interest. The Landseer Trust ran at least two expeditions a year here, each made up of twelve to twenty volunteers paying through their noses for the privilege of collecting data from the reefs and forest. He’d also written several journal articles, had conducted field trials on a new GPS tracker system, had acted as an agent for local craftspeople, selling their works to dealers in London and Munich. And now that tourists had started visiting this coast in greater numbers, he’d begun taking in paying guests too, offering day-trips on the Yvette, even the occasional deep-sea fishing expedition. Everything was scrupulously documented and declared, kept here in these drawers. And it occurred to her then that anyone with access to the lodge could easily have found out about her father’s wealth; and that would have made him a very tempting target indeed.