Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

‘Yes?’ she asked.

Now that the moment was upon him, Knox didn’t know quite how to proceed. ‘Is that Emilia’s son?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said warily.

‘So that would make him Pierre’s?’

Therese didn’t say anything at first. She looked instead at his face, as if assessing his state of knowledge, his intent. ‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘Why you ask me this?’

‘I knew Emilia,’ he told her. ‘We became close when she came to England. Very close. Maybe she mentioned me?’

Therese’s eyes watered a little, but happily. She wiped a finger beneath them. ‘I think it must be you,’ she said. ‘When Rebecca tell me this Englishman is here, with scars upon his back…’

‘It’s me.’ He nodded at Michel. ‘So he’s mine?’ he asked.

She seemed to hesitate, as though still bound by some vow of confidentiality; but the situation had gone beyond that, and she must have realised it. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s yours.’ She held him out. Knox took him in both hands and raised him up a little awkwardly, as though he’d just been presented with some undeserved trophy. Therese was talking rapidly; he didn’t take in a word of it, too numbed by those big brown eyes. Michel’s face clenched as though he was about to start bawling; but then he thought better of it, he looked up and away, as though mildly puzzled by some anomaly in the world. Knox saw his sister in him, then, and his father too. And in that moment, accepting Michel as his responsibility, all the dead tissue around his heart was simply excised and thrown away, allowing what remained to breathe freely again. He remembered a simple truth he’d somehow forgotten in the loss of Gaille: that life was only worth living when it was lived for someone else. His vendetta against the Nergadzes was instantly over; they just weren’t worth it. And he realised, too, that his first duty now was to find Emilia, one way or another. Everything else could wait.

He passed Michel back to Therese. ‘I have things to do,’ he told her. ‘Will you look after him a little longer?’

‘Of course,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you for everything.’

She nodded and headed back to the house, carrying Michel against her shoulder. He walked with them and watched them safely back inside. Then he straddled his bike and turned it towards Eden, profoundly aware that his old life was over, and a new one had begun.

Delpha didn’t pick up Mustafa’s agreement. He simply turned it to face him on his desk. His half-moon reading glasses proved inadequate for the small print, so he produced a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and used that instead, sliding it with such agonising clumsiness across the paper that Rebecca longed to do it for him. When he was finally finished, he looked up at her with the most melancholic eyes. ‘You signed this?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘I had no time. It was for a ransom. I was late and I-’

‘A ransom.’ He looked stunned. ‘Your father? Your sister?’

‘I spoke to him,’ she said. ‘He’s alive. They’re both alive.’

Delpha’s eyes glistened. He convulsed once, like a sob, put a hand to his brow. ‘Heaven be praised,’ he murmured.

‘Mustafa’s been after a stake in Eden,’ said Rebecca. ‘My father mentioned it in a letter. He also remarked that Mustafa was pestering the wrong person. What did he mean by that?’

Delpha gave himself a few moments to compose himself, then said: ‘You must remember something about Malagasy law,’ he said. ‘Since Independence, only citizens have been able to own land here. Your father has never become a citizen.’

Rebecca frowned. She’d always taken it for granted that her father owned Eden, yet Delpha was right: her parents had bought Eden after Independence, and her father had never become a Malagasy citizen. Then she realised how it must have worked. ‘My mother owned Eden? But what about when she died?’

‘We set up a trust together, to hold the reserve in trust for you and Emilia when you attained majority. You have dual citizenship, after all, so you’re legally able to own property here.’

‘But why didn’t anyone tell me?’ Again Delpha was silent, allowing her to work it out by herself. ‘My father didn’t trust me, did he?’ she said bleakly. ‘He was worried I’d sell my share just to get back at him.’ She put a hand to her forehead. ‘But what if either Emilia or I should… I mean, what if one of us…?’

‘Then their interest in Eden passes to the other.’

‘Will Mustafa know this?’

‘Mr Habib usually knows everything it is in his interest to know.’

‘What are you saying?’ frowned Rebecca. ‘Is he a crook?’

‘A crook is a person who has been convicted of something. Mr Habib has never been so convicted.’

She gave a dry laugh. Now she found out! ‘So that’s why Andriama’s having him watched. But why does he want Eden this badly? It can’t be worth that much.’

‘There have been rumours,’ said Delpha. ‘I do not know that they are true. But they say a German hotel group wants to build an ecotourism resort upon this coast. Eden has beautiful beaches and bays. It has virgin forest, reefs and plentiful fresh water. Can you imagine a better site?’

‘How much?’

‘Two million euros at minimum. Perhaps as much as four.’

Rebecca stood and went to the window, looked out into the street. After Yvette had died, Eden had become her father’s life. He’d never sell it for development, or forgive anyone who did. She had to find some way to undo this. She was about to ask Delpha his advice when her phone beeped, sending her heart into overdrive, thinking it was the kidnappers; but it was only to warn her that her battery was almost dead. Damn it. Her phone was the most likely way for the kidnappers to get in touch; she needed to sort this out now. She made her excuses to Delpha then grabbed the holdall and hurried off in search of a solution.

Knox arrived back in Eden hoping to find some message from the kidnappers inside the door; but there was nothing. He went through the lodge and all the cabins just in case, then headed down to the boathouse, but again without success. While he was there, however, he decided to take another look at that ceramic, make sure his imagination wasn’t running away with him. And there was something else he wanted to check out too.

The Kirkpatricks were self-evidently an intellectually curious lot. If a subject was of interest to them, they’d acquire books and articles about it. That was no doubt why Adam had the charts on board the Yvette, so that he could study them while out on the water. And it was why they kept those books on the treasure fleet and underwater archaeology in the basement. Knox had been following in the Kirkpatricks’ footsteps so far. Everything he’d discovered about the Chinese wreck, they’d got to first. So maybe they’d figured out other things that he still hadn’t. If so, it was a good bet that they’d have bought reading material on those subjects, and that they’d have stored it in the basement. The shelves, in brief, might be his shortcut to their state of knowledge.

He turned on the generator, slid open the panel, unlocked the door and went down, walked along the shelves. There were textbooks and articles on Zheng He and his treasure fleets, on the Ming Dynasty and Chinese shipbuilding techniques. There were archaeological works on the Chimu, the Incas, the Aztecs and other New World civilisations. There were books on the Renaissance, on the history of mapmaking. Several volumes were ageing badly, missing their spines. He pulled one down, opened it up. It was a biography of Ferdinand Magellan, the man widely credited as being the first to circumnavigate the world. A slight fiction, of course, because he hadn’t completed the circumnavigation himself. He’d died in the Philippines, leading an attack on islanders who’d had the temerity to refuse conversion to Christianity. But eighteen of his men had made it all the way. Eighteen out of two hundred and thirty-seven, sailing the one ship that had survived from the original fleet of five.