The Holder of the World (10 page)

4

ALL THROUGH
1695 Hannah Legge kept a diary modeled on the diary kept by Gabriel in his capacity as a factor instructed by his superior, Prynne, to reform the bookkeeping irregularities in the factory at St. Sebastian. The initial entries are of events; the descriptions of those events cautiously impersonal.

January 8, 1695: The two ships following arrived, vizt., (1) the
Loyall Heron
Captain Hope-for Johnson, Commander. (2) the
Pride,
Captain John Bendell, Commander. Though there was a
fresh, my dear husband, accompanied by Mr. Higginbottham, came of to Captain Johnson, and received the Agents Packett from the Council at Fort St. George. Agreement was effected by my dear husband in the affaire of the landing of the Honourable Company’s treasure that had come in the two ships
.

January 9: We had fresh winds. Mistress Ruxton entertained me last night as my dear husband was on board the
Loyall Heron.
She is a woman of good humour. Mistress Higginbottham may be of dour disposition
.

January 10: We had fresh winds againe. Nevertheless my dear husband and Captain Hope-for Johnson disembarked wilfully and, praised be god, came on shoare. Captain John Bendell, his wife and three daughters remained on board the ship
Pride.

January 15: Four days wee had bad weather. George Fleetfax, Apprentice, dyed of sicknesse
.

January 17: Mistresses Higginbottham and Ruxton and I welcomed Captain Bendell’s wyfe, Harriet, and daughters, Eliza, Charlotte and Anne. Captain Bendell, falling sick while the ship
Pride
lay in the road, was oblidged to be carried off the country boat and borne by palanquin to the residence of chyrurgeon Ruxton and his kind wyfe
.

January 30: The Captain’s wife and 3 children were entertained for tea by mee. My dear husband returned from Metchlepatam [Masulipatnam], where hee had been dispatched by the Chief Factor for inspection of the Companyes factorye. Hee sent to desire to speak with Mistress Bendell in the event of her requiring assistance in business with the Companye. Mistress Bendell consenting, he offered her, in her behalfe, to accommodate all necessary affaires if she should give him a Sealed Letter of Attorney
.

February 6: Mistress Ruxton confided in me sad news. The chyrurgeon does not live who can restore health to Captain Bendell
.

February 14: The Allmighty culled the goode Captain to His bosom. My dear husband shows great charity to the widowe and her daughters
.

March 20: Chief Factor Prynne holds the Captain’s widow accountable for moneys owed by the dear departed Captain to the Companye. Furthermore, Chief Factor Prynne demands of the widow payment of passages home to be taken by her and her children. The widow sent to for my husband. I offered her comfort while dear Gabriel is in Roopconda conducting inquiries of a
poddar,
which is the Gentue word for cash-keeper, concerning the rich merchant Pedda Timmana’s ways of tradeing upon creditt
.

March 30: Eliza Bendell was married to Mr. John Harker, freeman, by Mr. Colbourn, the Chaplaine of St. Sebastian. Mr. John Harker offers to cleare the Captaine’s debts and make payment in full for passages home taken by his bride’s family
.

April 10: Concerning Mr. John Harker, Mistress Higginbottham informs mee that the said freeman came into wealth on account of a secret marriage to a Moor woman. Mistress Higginbottham is of the opinion that she should acquaint Mistress Harker with the secret. I am of the opinion that such discharge of duty would inflict on the new bride pernicious suffering
.

May 16: This forenoone Mistress Bendell and two daughters embarked the ship
Glorious,
Eliza Harker having met with an accident month last. Her corpes was interred in the burying place by the church. Of the circumstances of this misfortune I have no knowledge. Mr. Higginbottham is of the opinion that John Harker, freeman, has sealed up his residence here and has removed himself to the Dutch settlement at Pollicull [Palakollu]
.

After mid-May, the diary entries become more disorderly, and personal. Here are just three entries from the winter of 1695:

October 18: Henry Hedges haunts me. He moves from room to room reminding me hourly that the house remains his. I am his tenant
.

November 23: Mistresses Ruxton and Higginbottham tease me with talk of black bibis. Their designe is to affright me. They talk of the vanished Mr. Harker. All Englishmen make secret marriages with black girls, they insist. A wealthy Moor or Gentue woman of respected family allowing herself to be a BIBI, that’s the only exception. They remind me that John Harker was not held accountable for poor departed Eliza’s accident by the Chief Factor. No Englishman here accepts any connection between Mr. Harker’s keeping a BIBI and Eliza’s falling off her horse
.

December 24: I know Henry Hedges kept a secret wife here. I feel his bibi’s presence in this house as much as I doe his owne. May God forgive mee for entertaining thoughts of spirits and phantoms
.

5

WERE THERE
no relatives in England to send the heavy furniture to? Hannah wondered. Or had Henry Hedges, a man so strange and tragical—or mild and farcical—to judge from his abandoned projects of sketching and poetry, his notebooks of descriptive accounts of village life and the forests, his long comparative lists of words in Persian, Tamil, Telugu and English, transformed himself so completely from a modest Shropshire lad content with his lowly station in the English hierarchy to such a displaced, self-indulgent nobleman that his collection of native artifacts and furniture would have embarrassed his relatives?

I am aware, as I write this three hundred years later, of the greatness of Henry Hedges. His accounts (in four thick volumes) are the core of nearly any serious study of South India in the early British times—but what it must have felt like, to have been a twenty-five-year-old Salem woman, discovering them for the first time, digging them out of folded silks in the drawers of those hand-carved dressers, along with the folios of the bright, unappreciated court paintings of the Mughal masters?

Henry Hedges was a man of the New Science and of the Old Humanism. How, or why, he chose to ship out to India as a Company man he never explained—perhaps he saw it as the Peace Corps of his day (although his collection of furnishings indicates he was no mendicant-scholar). He was shrewd, curious, brilliant and passionate, a man of that extraordinary time, and slightly unbalanced.

Hannah had never seen such possessions (they are housed today in the Victoria and Albert, and in several Continental museums). Most factors lived frugally, within their Company means, hoarding their Indian wealth for an early retirement. Theirs was a conversion society, calculating every purchase, every expenditure, every sale in local
tars
and pagodas, against “real” money, bullion, in the real home country. In Henry Hedges we have an early appearance of a Sir William Jones or a Sir Richard Burton, a true eccentric English expatriate.

That the acquisitor suffered in Fort St. Sebastian is incontrovertible. While going through Henry Hedges’ ledgers of household accounts, Hannah came across a startling line.
I am sick, I must die
. Hannah doesn’t appear to have recognized this as a line from Thomas Nashe’s “A Litany in Time of Plague.” Nor did she see it as part of Hedges’ indictment of Company society, its studied ignorance of the people it traded with. Hedges was a pedant—he served without extra pay as Company translator merely for the practice it offered him—and he must have been, like Burton, insufferable. His interest in India was too acquisitive; he felt he owned it by dint of his own efforts and suffering, and that partial ownership conferred upon him a benevolent proprietorship. Like certain missionaries who combined selflessness and spiritual arrogance, Hedges found himself dissatisfied with both sides, neither of which manifested the pure essence of their cultural selves. The Indians, especially the “Zentoos,” meaning Hindus, were already losing their integrity. He felt he had known the last generation of noble practitioners of the ancient Vedic rites.

Hannah cited these ruminations as proof of his breakdown, which, in a sense, they were. One more Englishman snared by the Company and destroyed by the tropics.

In the small circle of Englishmen and Englishwomen within which Hannah’s social life was confined, she saw many variations of Henry Hedges’ ailment and many strategies for its management. The most effective cure was to fabricate a fantasy England, in which life had been idyllic and would be again on retirement. Even the young recruits of nineteen and twenty wore their Englishness as indelibly as a criminal in Salem or London had worn the branded letters of his sin:
E
for English, Extraordinary, Ethical.

The fort was Little England. The Fort St. George Council’s penal code encouraged straight and narrow living. Uncleanness, lying, cheating, drunkenness, swearing, missing morning or evening prayers, using seditious words, mutinying, dueling, all were punishable with whippings, mountings of the “wooden horse,” confinement and fines. When caught. When admitted. When they spoke to their servants and mistresses, to shopkeepers and clients, they spoke as though theirs were the bell-toned sweetly patriotic voice of a homogenous sovereign nation. Hannah with her stories of wigwam burnings in Hopewell Swamp discomfited them.

Early signs of the self-pity and contradictions that would result in the twisted logic of the white man’s burden were already evident. The factors knew their lives in India were extraordinary and, by most standards of the day, debauched. The Company code they lived under placed inhuman limits on even routine freedom. At the same time, their personal code was Excess in All Things. And so they recast themselves as capital’s little pilgrims, forgotten victims of England’s indifference to their sacrifice. Self-pity, unaccountability and hypocrisy were recast as virtues and renamed forgiveness, solidarity and tolerance.

The household ran itself—Hannah didn’t think of it as being run by the servant woman and the peons—leaving her time during the day to visit or be visited by the fort doctor’s wife, Martha Ruxton, and the second factor’s wife, Sarah Higginbottham. She kept a journal of events, a protection against a jealous husband’s ferocity. Through her embroidery, and much later through her stealthily penned
Memoirs
, she revealed to herself her deepest secrets. She was without Gabriel’s company for weeks at a time while he toured smaller factories, scouted dyers’ villages and indigo plantations for the best dye roots, and
mittahs
, or village markets, for the most skillful artisans. She didn’t trust Martha or Sarah as confidantes. What she wanted from them was their gossip, their history in the place.

Over two years she elicited from Sarah the story of Martha’s courtship and marriage. In 1681, the last year of my ancestor Streynsham Master’s governorship, John Ruxton had arrived in Fort St. George, a thirty-year-old bachelor. Cholera, dysentery, typhus and lash ulcers had preoccupied him through Nathaniel Gyffords’s harsh governorship. Then, midway through Elihu Yale’s term, in June of 1690, as the monsoon broke and the very bowels of the Bay of Bengal were churned as though an elephant had tramped through a paddy field, the
Golden Bliss
, carrying Martha Ord, a comely girl of fourteen, and her mother and five younger sisters had docked. The thirty-nine-year-old bachelor doctor had discovered his need for golden bliss.

The mother and sisters had gone on to Masulipatnam, where Martha’s father, Grimston Ord, was third in charge of the factory. Martha Ord succumbed to the doctor’s fevered courting, insofar as an experienced and out-of-practice expatriate could mount it. In actuality, it had more to do with a strict accounting of his holdings and the assurance that upon his demise—which could happen sooner rather than later, given the precarious age and profession—Martha (and her parents and unmarried sisters) would come into one of Fort St. George’s tidier fortunes.

Immediately after the wedding on a September Sunday in 1690, the doctor, thinking ahead to the marital pitfalls that awaited young brides and old grooms in a fort filled with lonely, lustful soldiers, sailors, factors and clerks, moved to the more remote Company outpost at Fort St. Sebastian. The old physician—for he thought of himself, unfailingly, as elderly, as did his patients and even his postpubescent bride—had stories to tell of sturdy-souled Englishmen in desperate need of healing.

I have studied Dr. Ruxton’s death certificates. He was a great medical metaphysician; the deaths from Despond, Despair, Ingratitude and Melancholia outnumber those from the pox, consumption, syphilis, dysentery or ague.

Martha Ruxton had never lost the chubby contours of childhood. Now in 1697 an old married lady of twenty-one, she had been seven years in White Town and had developed neither the gaunt angularities of the fever-prone nor the cushiony complacency of the Company wife. Nor, apparently, had the tropical sun met her face or arms head-on: she was still pink and blond, easily flushed; daily she applied pastes of milk curd and lemon juice to her pretty face.

Sarah Higginbottham’s story came from Sarah herself. She confided to Hannah that she had arrived on a Company allowance to find a mate. Hannah remembered the Lancashire women on the
Fortune
and wondered about their fates. Sarah had accepted the hesitant Samuel Higginbottham’s offer of marriage at the end of a fifty-one-week stop-and-start courtship. (One more week, and she would have been obliged to return.) She was older than Martha and Hannah, thirty-five at least, and had the resignation of a woman who had tried other lives—dairymaid in Devon, barmaid in Bristol—and hated them profoundly. She, who had known servitude as a girl, now had a retinue at her command.

Martha and Sarah savored their roles as guide and guardian to Hannah. They never let Hannah forget that they were truly Englishwomen, while Hannah was tainted because of her long residence in primitive New England.

“I suppose Mr. Legge has found himself a bibi,” Sarah began, always with a smile.

Hannah knew the word, but did not let on. Bibis—their uses, their place, their importance and the need for tolerance thereof—constituted the opening lecture of old Company wives to Company novices.

Martha’s and Sarah’s smiles exasperated Hannah. Their smiles suggested that there was no choice for white men, not when the heat of India fired the brain. The very thought of an Englishwoman attempting to satisfy a rampant Englishman brought out the freckles in Martha. Every English husband strayed into infidelity. Gabriel, too, would find himself a bibi. The term, as employed by Sarah and Martha, meant a healthy young black girl, a native woman in Black Town, or some servant of the English or a slave of one of the Muslim nawabs, or a girl of low morals still living in some mud hut with a widowed mother who could be counted on to look the other way. To Hannah’s friends a bibi was an annoyance, but not a threat.

“Whatever you do, you will of course never confront your husband’s bibi. You will never acknowledge her,” said Martha.

“She does not exist,” said Sarah.

“But she must exist, surely,” Hannah protested. It seemed to Hannah that bibis, suspected and real, were at the center of most female conversations in White Town. Any servant with a new sari, any cheekiness detected, anything missing, meant a good serving girl had passed over to bibihood. Bibis were simultaneously beneath notice, no more than cute little pets like monkeys or birds (although considerably less trouble), and devious temptresses, priestesses of some ancient, irresistible and overpowering sensuality. Wise husbands did not seek bibis on their own serving staff, but could easily be distracted by some wench hanging the wash on a neighboring balcony. Each White Town wife, therefore, had a vested interest in keeping her neighbors’ servants as old and shrewish as tolerable. Maintaining an appropriately large staff of women servants of insufficient comeliness was a domestic virtue that Company wives appreciated.

“Your maids should be ugly as jackdaws,” advised Martha. “Their voices should rasp like rooks, their skin should hang in black wrinkles …”

“And be poxy,” Sarah added.

“Are the women of the Coromandel Coast otherwise so alluring to Englishmen?” Hannah asked. “If there be choice, surely—”

Hannah was not that innocent of the male entitlements, but she had never learned the code of female accommodation. To accommodate meant to demonstrate an intention to please, even on occasion to yield, but with a view to establishing control. “Why would our husbands? Are the women in this land more beautiful?”

Perhaps she was still thinking of the men she’d witnessed that January morning she had landed on Fort St. Sebastian’s beaches. The men were small and finely made, wrapped in the same half sarong as the women. She reckoned that young women fashioned along the same lines as the men (young women were not easily encountered; fully 90 percent of Indians one saw on the street were male, or shuffling old widows) could well be irresistible to white men.

In fact, whenever Gabriel was away inspecting factories or villages, Hannah spent her days in a dream of sensuality. She walked the streets and even the back lanes of Black Town, just as she had walked in Salem. She heard music from the upper floors of the sheds that passed for their housing and smiled back at the faces of youngsters as they gathered to watch her. Some children followed her, pulling at her clothes as though she were nothing more than one of the wretched cows that wandered everywhere, sometimes garlanded in flowers, their horns painted a garish red and purple and yellow, to be touched on the forehead as they placidly munched refuse in the gutters. Men passed the cows, walking, on carts, or being carried in litter chairs, and touched their own foreheads after touching the cow, as though releasing and preserving some sort of religious essence.

“I do not know of their beauty,” replied Martha Ruxton. Martha boasted that she had never scrutinized a young Indian man’s or woman’s face. Too close an inspection, she felt, might engender uncharitable thoughts.

“Have you never really looked at Bhagmati?” Hannah persisted. “Do you find her beautiful?”

“It was all right for a bachelor like the late Mr. Hedges to hire that maid,” Sarah answered for Martha. “In my household she would be inappropriate.”

Martha Ruxton’s instructions and Sarah Higginbottham’s confessions stunned Hannah. These women, the only women she could call friends here, accepted cups of tea and biscuits from Bhagmati without seeing her. Bhagmati was invisible to the women of White Town. This explained why Martha knew—and refused to know—that her husband, the good doctor, had a sizable family from his bibi, accumulated over the years. Some of his children were ten and twelve, and already married. Little mongrel curs, Gabriel had joked to Hannah, whom the doctor shooed away from his compound with a cane.

Martha’s teaching was indirect. Black bibis know their place, so a wife’s safety lies in assigning them a place that is harmless. Perverse pleasures could be demanded of them and satisfied without harm to anybody. Accommodation was synonymous with expatriate femininity. Mating happened fast on peninsulas at the world’s edge. These bibis had only a few months in them—they didn’t retain their desirability through the years like Englishwomen. The swift deterioration of their charms had to do with the flora and fauna surrounding them, with their spicy diets and gaudy garments, with their summer-scorched, monsoon-drenched climate. India heated up the senses. Every glance and nod smoldered into overtures of carnality. Men and women succumbed to primordial impulses. And when instinct subsided, sober single Englishmen and women tied the knot; adulterous Englishmen and women stalked their prey.