Mr Peacock's Possessions Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for Mr Peacock’s Possessions

  Also by Lydia Syson

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Historical Note

  Acknowledgements

  For your Reading Group

  Discussion points for your Reading Group

  Reading list for your Reading Group

  Copyright

  Praise for

  ‘A thrilling story of love and courage, brutality and hope all told with equal measures of deep humanity, imagination and élan. Lydia Syson has an amazing gift of bringing history alive through richness of language, dramatic pace and fabulous visual imagery. This is better than watching a film!’

  Anne Sebba, author of Les Parisiennes

  ‘Mr Peacock’s Possessions is a wonderful book, full of drama, courage and aspirations. The language is rich and the characters so humanely drawn’

  Carol Drinkwater, author of The Lost Girl

  ‘With its chorus of vivid voices, Lydia Syson’s novel reminds us why we consumed The Poisonwood Bible and The Underground Railroad so avidly, but it has a (literally) breathtaking bravura and an intensity all of its own’

  Michelle Lovric, author of The Book of Human Skin

  ‘This tense, evocative, richly-imagined novel conjures the voices of a strange time and place, and makes them universal’

  Emma Darwin, author of A Secret Alchemy

  ‘Lydia Syson writes very well about the natural world … [and] the dark tensions in family life that overwhelm the Peacocks’

  Miranda Miller, author of Loving Mephistopheles

  ‘One of those rare novels which keeps you up much later than you’d planned … you can’t put it down until you discover the truth. Swallows and Amazons for grown-ups’

  Alex Monroe, author of Two Turtle Doves

  ‘As compelling, mysterious and haunting as the troubled tropical paradise it portrays … Syson doesn’t just write about the past, she transports us there. A tour de force’

  Piers Torday, author of The Death of an Owl

  ‘The Swiss Family Robinson meets Lord of the Flies in Lydia Syson’s superb and engrossing book. This scintillating story evokes an island paradise which descends into a nightmarish hell as Mr Peacock’s Possessions builds towards a shocking revelation and a thrilling climax’

  Wendy Moore, author of The Mesmerist

  ‘What a powerful, rich and fascinating book. Dark historical events are interwoven with the mystery of a missing child on a remote Pacific island in 1879. Highly compelling’

  Anna Mazzola, author of The Unseeing

  ‘A gripping yarn with unexpected outcomes … Syson writes engagingly and evocatively’

  Morning Star

  Also by Lydia Syson

  Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed

  A World Between Us

  That Burning Summer

  Liberty’s Fire

  About the Author

  Lydia Syson is the author of three critically acclaimed historical novels for young adults – each drawing on the radical backgrounds of earlier generations of her family – as well as a biography of the notorious eighteenth-century ‘Electric Doctor’, James Graham. For Mr Peacock’s Possessions, her adult fiction debut, she took inspiration from the family history of her partner, who was born in New Zealand. Lydia is a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

  Follow Lydia on Twitter: @LydiaSyson

  To Rufus & Solomon

  ‘This unit of land which fits within the retina of the approaching eye is a token of desire.’

  James Hamilton-Paterson,

  Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds

  1

  TO BE SURE I AM A DOUBTING THOMAS. TOO MUCH curiosity, too little faith, and that from early days and always. Off-duty, I stand on deck, wave-watching, awash with qualms. I let drift my mind and vex myself alone, afraid to fright my fellows, whispering only to wind and water. All is wind and water here.

  I did not choose this path – the path of doubting, that is to say, doubting both myself and higher matters. And now the ocean path we follow here, a path so freely taken, stretches before me unclear, unknown, unproven, and I worry and wonder still if it was wise to take it. What if we find no island, or if there is no master living? Where then will the captain take us? And what if this Yankee has lied to us despite our minister? We have no papers. Proof of nothing. We leapt so fast. Nine days at sea, and we see nothing of our landing place.

  My setting-forth desire was like an itch that I must scratch. It made me restless. I could not walk in circles all my days while others winged away. We hear how the world turns, and we want to see its turning with our own eyes. Its riches too. This is natural, says Mr Reverend. We whose fathers have been plucked from us, perhaps we feel most strong the call to venture. But there are calls and callings. I am no Gospel Ploughman, and do not share my brother’s thirst for pioneering in that blessed field.

  I search again for my voyage-spirit, so strong on parting, so soon sped away. Way beyond our reef, the winds that blew within now skim my words away, quick as quickness, or blow ’em down my throat again, back into hiding. I tell myself it was timely to go, to seek a living beyond the skyline, to better all my family. I tell myself we can never know what is to come. I try to hide my fears – of failing, falling, flailing – but cannot shield all from all.

  Because Solomona – holding the rail beside me, knuckle-soft – Solomona sees everything. Older (a little), taller (a little), steadier (always), my brother shake his head. Maybe he sees even into my cauldron-bubbling-mind. All-seeing, all-knowing, you know how it is. Like Him above, or would like to be, I sometimes reckon, before I dam my thinking. When the trader-captain came to our island, asking for men, quick quick – good jobs for good kanakas, working for an Englishman, no big plantation, no guano-gathering – it was not for his strength that Mr Reverend recommend Solomona but for his faith. And other reasons. All psalms, no qualms is my brother, even when grief is greatest. When I think it over more, very possibly, yes, indeed, most probably (I can have no doubt now), Solomona say what he say, despite all things, because he say what he always say, whatever he sees or fails to. Same as ever. Yes, same as ever.

  God will provide.

  God will provide.

  Maybe so. Maybe no. But, I say – to myself alone, you understand
, only inside my own head’s thinking – faith in the Lord is one matter, faith in men another. Right now, we are here at sea, a handful of Rock fellows ready to work, and days passing bell to bell on this vast vessel. Tar and copra, rope and strangers in our noses, many lands’ voices in our ears. Talk I must learn harder to track. Some men call themselves God’s Englishmen, but their speech is nothing like the Reverend’s. Pig-tailed Celestials (as Yankees call the yellow men), a night-dark fellow whose name is Baltimore, some other Islanders who work with us in the ship’s waist: all their words come strange and fast and loud and snaking, and I skip after them, catching two or three and losing four, so I cannot be sure always that I grasp what they may signify. My own words pitch and roll. My English tongue tangles as home twists in me, and a longing for land I had no need to know before.

  High and dry we stand on deck on the big palagi ship called Esperanza, Auckland-bound, and the two-blooded deckboy from Samoa tell me as he passes, without a smile, that Esperanza is a word that signifies hope, in the language of the silver mines. Then on flies my mind, wayfinding without a body, all over and everywhere, wandering, wondering. How long will we voyage, in this ever-cooling air, and see no other island? I must try harder to keep faith with Mr Reverend, and Solomona too. These people are good, they tell me. This is no man-stealing ship. No chains. Look how we stand on deck, bound only to God. We will work, and our island master will pay as promised, and we will return with all our bounty, and our families will be raised in all eyes and we will make them proud. I will know a little more of the world and its wisdom. And Solomona’s splintered heart will come back whole and healed.

  Sunday comes again. Far ahead, clouds gather at the meeting of sea and sky. A brief line, darkening at its base. When I see the moving of another, darker cloud – a cloud of birds – and know that soon I will hear their clacketting calls, this is how I know that Monday Island will also soon be here, and then, like the birds, I will be wide awake indeed.

  2

  LIZZIE STICKS A KNIFE INTO THE BREAST OF THE nearest mutton-bird: a vicious hiss as a stream of hot oil hits the smouldering log below. It flares up, too high, and she jumps back, shielding her face. It’s time to turn the rack, to keep things even, and ward off her mother’s chiding. Where’s Ada got to, or Billy, come to that? Out of sight and out of hearing. The smokery is built a little distance from the dwelling huts and outhouse, to save them from its powerful odours, and the vegetable gardens, where Ada and Ma were weeding earlier, lie on the other side again, on the flats above the beach. Strong as she is, Lizzie can’t shift the weight of sixty spitted chicks on her own, and they will catch if she doesn’t. She will have to move the fire instead. So she leans into the heat to spread and shift the embers with the stripped green stick she’s using as a poker.

  Then Billy’s cry puts everything out of mind.

  ‘A sail! A sail! Have you seen?’

  She turns instantly, looking out to sea, seeing nothing yet. Billy appears but doesn’t stop – and she knows just where he’s going. Abandoning fire and birds without a second thought, Lizzie scrambles down the tree-filled gully after him and up the other side to the higher bluff beyond, the lookout cliff. She moves quickly in her loose tunic, but not as fast as her younger brother, and not as fast as she’d like. At the top first, Billy squints at the ocean, and windmills his arms at her.

  ‘Look!’ he shouts. ‘Right over there.’

  ‘Where?’ A sail is too easy to imagine, never more than when the sky and sea are bright. The sun catches the flat side of a wave at the wrong angle. A crest of foam. A whale’s fluke. From far away anything can look like a billow of canvas if you want it hard enough. ‘If you’re wrong …’

  ‘I’m not. Look harder. Look over there.’

  Lizzie’s brother lines her up behind his back as soon as she reaches him. He’ll be catching her up in height before she knows it. His warm brown hair, darkened with fresh sweat, is already at her nostrils. But though his chest is broadening too, a little, she can match him for strength still, and let him know this when she needs to. Which isn’t now. Billy pulls Lizzie’s arms down around his own shoulders so that her eyes can follow his, and together they trace the line of his arm and pointing finger.

  ‘You must be able to see her now.’

  She can.

  At last.

  Billy pulls away, leaps and prances, as if his energy will speed the ship, but Lizzie resists the urge to join him in his dance. The vessel is a long way off. It’s hard to tell its course. This unknown ship could be sailing away from them already, could go on sailing, straight-waked, and never come close, never see them.

  ‘Does Pa know?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s not back yet. Nor Albert.’

  Lizzie’s eyes widen at the thought of Albert, and his joy at this. A vessel on the horizon would please nobody more. Away from Ma and Pa, well away and out of earshot, Albert talks of little else, on and on, relentless speculations, till only Ada can stand to hear him. Billy nods.

  ‘I know. Maybe he’ll shut up. If it really comes.’

  ‘What do you think she is?’ Lizzie asks, still looking, hope tacking. ‘Can you tell?’

  ‘Not yet. Three … no, four masts. I think. A windjammer?’

  ‘Never mind. We’re wasting time. Quick. Kindling.’

  Like a cork from a bottle, Billy’s off, sprinting up towards the forest while Lizzie shouts after him: ‘Green wood too, remember, and plenty of it!’

  The trickles of smoke already rising from the small cluster of huts on the flats and from the nearby smokery are too quickly dispersed, too missable. They need a proper fire, a huge one, a bonfire to darken the clouded autumn sky and roar, a fire that can’t be mistaken for anything but a signal. They always keep some heavy fuel here on the bluff, ready and waiting, just in case. If a ship’s sighted, they must act quickly, Pa used to warn the children, day after day. But he’s said nothing about the fire for months, and the lighter branches are all blown away. There’s nothing left here to catch a flame. Once or twice Lizzie’s heard Pa remind Ma, quietly, how long it can take for word to spread when a place as remote as this is settled. The whaler that came last year, before they moved this side of the island, the mate who talked of work gangs … his ship could have wrecked itself a week later, and their message gone down with all hands. As for the Good Intent, which brought the Peacock family here, it’s been two years since they waved her off. No hope nor desire of seeing her again.

  ‘I’ll run and tell Ma, and Ada!’ shouts Lizzie. Her voice trails off, because Billy’s out of earshot, and she’s talking to herself. Is it too soon, too cruel to raise Ma’s fragile hopes? Part of Lizzie wants to hang back, until they are certain this ship will really come, until she’s checked with Pa, but she can’t risk any delay. An ignorant ship might try to put ashore by chance, if it had to, a ship short of water or meat, a nosy ship, an adventuring ship, but even on this side of the island, landing took skill. Why come close if you could keep yourself well clear of all the rocky islets on this side? Who’d ever guess a family might be here and longing?

  Then Lizzie remembers the unturned birds and groans, anticipating ruin – half-charred carcasses; black on one side, bloody on the other – and Ma’s silent disappointment, so hard to bear. A scramble back down and up again, as it always goes on this island, into the trees and out the other side. And she finds her mother standing by the smokery, one hand in the small of her back, the other skewering. The birds are perfect.

  ‘Oh, Lizzie,’ she says. ‘How could you? Running off like that, and telling no one. Lucky for you I noticed.’

  ‘But Billy’s seen a ship! He really has! I’ve seen it too.’

  The skewer falls and Mrs Peacock’s hands move swiftly to her ever-thickening waist, just for a moment, as if to pass a message to the child inside. Then she’s back with the one she birthed fifteen years earlier. ‘Then what are you waiting for?’ Her voice is sharp and urgent. ‘Back up there at once and get
the bonfire going. Queenie can help me take these birds off. Ada will go with you – look, here she comes. Where’s Billy?’

  ‘Gone for kindling and more wood. But I don’t know if Pa and Albert have seen it. They need to know.’

  Ma scans the trees that rise at the back of the buildings and climb towards a broken peak, mist-shrouded as many days as not. ‘They’ll soon see the smoke, with luck, if they’ve not seen the sail. Depends where they went hunting. Can’t wait for ’em though.’

  Ada arrives panting.

  ‘What’s all the fuss?’

  Lizzie stays long enough to have the satisfaction of giving her older sister the news.

  ‘A ship.’

  She offers the words like a present, with a faint pop of her lips. Ada closes her eyes for a moment and swallows, swaying slightly. The first visitors since the whalers last winter. The second they’ve ever had.

  ‘At last.’

  Lizzie grabs Ada’s upper arms, to hold her still and calm, and then to shake her into action. Unspeakable expectation skips through both pairs of eyes.

  ‘Hurry up girls! And take this to light the fire.’ Ma bends, with difficulty, to pull out the thick branch which Lizzie had been slowly feeding into the heart of the smoking fire. ‘Tell Billy to bring up the logs Albert cut for seasoning yesterday. For speed. They’re good and green.’

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ said Lizzie.

  ‘We mustn’t count our chickens though.’ Cheeks flushed, Mrs Peacock turns back to the mutton-bird racks, but only for a second, and then she’s looking again from daughter to daughter. ‘We can’t imagine … It would be foolish. No. Could it really …? Oh, but quickly now, Lizzie! Don’t let those embers die. Get back up there right away. I want to see that bonfire blazing. Blazing, do you hear?’

  Lizzie steps back from her mother’s heat.

  ‘Ada, you run and get wood too now.’ Ma’s arms flap her away. ‘And send Queenie here. With Gus of course. Quickly now. Go!’

  The sisters charge off in opposite directions. Lizzie holds her torch awkwardly away from her, determined not to stumble. Pa and Albert must have seen, she tells herself, what with being higher, and they’ll surely be on their way. If they’ve not seen the sails, they’ll soon see the bonfire. She longs to see Pa’s face, just at that moment. She aches for this ship to be the one they’re all hoping for.