The Holder of the World (11 page)

Sarah the realist’s lesson was dour. Her lesson had to do with the unpleasant inescapability of death in the tropics. No one could say if he or she would be alive next week. India was a permanent plague, and the possibility of death sharpened everyone’s drives.

“And did the late Mr. Hedges have a bibi?” Hannah asked in all innocence.

Martha Ruxton bowed her head. “Mr. Hedges’ acumen was doubted on—”

Sarah Higginbotham objected. “His reputation was impeccable.”

“But in the matter of furniture? In the matter of finery? In such matters was his acumen not—”

“I heard it said that Mr. Hedges had been a voluptuary,” Sarah conceded.

“But not in the carnal sense,” Martha added.

Hannah asked, “What other sense is there?”

“When you have been here longer, you will not have to ask. There are as many occasions for sin as there are birds in the trees. Or trees in the jungle. Or monkeys—”

“A voluptuary,” said Sarah, “according to my husband, is a man distracted from the Company’s business by the lure of personal pleasure.”

“Look about you.” Martha laughed. “Is this dwelling not popish?”

“Mr. Higginbottham likens this dwelling to the Sun King’s summer palace.” Then Sarah grew suddenly serious, reaching out to clasp Hannah’s hand. “I should not wish to live here, not if Mr. Higginbottham were away as much as Mr. Legge appears to be.”

Martha dropped her voice. “This house is said to have hauntings. Tell me, do you hear a gentleman’s feet on the roof? He is not an Englishman. Many have seen a gentleman in Mughal robes smoke his
huqqa
and pace in the moonlight.”

Hannah felt called on to defend her mastery of the premises. “There are no ghosts on my roof, I assure you.” But she knew that hauntings were for blistered, sunlit tropics as well as for dark woods near Salem. That’s why she had Bhagmati sleep on a pallet in the middle of the balcony, just outside her bedroom door.

The sinister talk of the roof, however, reminded her of her first day’s unpleasantness, the touch of madness that she had experienced and that she dared not share, not even with Gabriel lest Gabriel challenge the Chief Factor to a duel. “And what of Mr. Prynne? How do you judge his acumen?”

Martha stiffened. “Mr. Prynne is the very model of a Company man. He dedicates himself entirely to profit.”

“But he is selfless,” Sarah protested. “If he dedicates himself to turning a desert into a garden of riches, it is for our welfare and not his.”

At that very moment, the tinkle of Bhagmati’s bangles alerted Hannah to one of her servant’s silent communications. She seemed to understand English, but did not speak it, nor did Hannah speak more than a word or two of the local languages. But through her eyes, and her body, Bhagmati communicated. Some guest was downstairs. That guest was Indian and male, therefore not to be shown upstairs unless specifically invited.

“Who could it be?” Hannah turned to her guests. “An Indian visitor?”

Martha Ruxton rolled off the cushions to her feet. Again, for an instant, the freckles flared. “I thought you might profit from acquainting yourself with the trader Pedda Timanna.” She led the way out of the overdecorated room.

The Englishwomen were now in a group walking to the archway that opened on the balcony. It was a radiantly bright, Mughal evening, the moon lighting the sky like a blue-gray curtain. The trees and outlines and vague shapes of Englishmen stood out in black profile against the late twilight.

“A horrible man,” Sarah Higginbottham cautioned.

Martha laughed. “But he too turns deserts into gardens of riches.”

The visitor was the small-headed trader who had recovered the Legges’ missing trunk on the day that the Legges had disembarked at Fort St. Sebastian. On that first, confused morning, Hannah had read arrogance and insubordination in his halting the contact of Gabriel’s fist with the umbrella bearer’s face. Now, two years into her Indian years, she felt a certain admiration for the wizened man who sat in his palanquin outside her door, still borne on the shoulders of two old men shorter than himself.

Pedda Timanna brought his hands together and bowed his head to each of the ladies. And to Hannah’s surprise, Martha Ruxton reached into a small purse and extracted five heavy pagodas, as much money as Hannah had seen at one time. And Pedda Timanna slid open a small drawer built into the footrest of his palanquin and dropped, one by one, a diamond, two rubies and an emerald into the pink, soft waiting hand of the fort doctor’s wife.

Martha turned toward Hannah, suddenly an older, worldly-wise expatriate. Even her voice was deeper, and resonantly resolute. “My advice to all English wives in this cursed land, Mistress Legge, is this. Let your husband provide you all necessities. You provide yourself the amenities. Acquaint yourself with a trader.” She held the diamond up to the moon. “Jewels travel with ease.”

It was not a simple matter of profit for Martha Ruxton. Hannah guessed Martha was a voluptuary.

NO, I DO NOT
think the diamond that passed from the richest trader to the sharpest buyer was the Emperor’s Tear. This was a provincial gem, a Coromandel beauty, a Burton-to-Taylor bauble. There is no evidence that the Emperor’s Tear was ever out of Emperor Aurangzeb’s clutches, and he was waging border wars against Raja Jadav Singh a few miles to the north and west. But the fate that brought Hannah Easton to India and, finally, briefly, put her in contact with India’s most perfect diamond, so improbable in its Brookfield origins, had already consumed 99.9 percent of the distance between them, and she was only twenty-seven years old.

I am thirty-two years old, and I have devoted eleven years of my life, off and on, to the reconstruction not just of a time and a place, but also of a person. She and I, New England and India, Venn and—no, that’s not fair. I will not reveal her life before she leads it; that feels like a violation of the respect I feel and the methods I have chosen. It feels, frankly, too much like the methods and wishes of Bugs Kilken.

Venn, I know, is amazed. I may not have the National Weather Service and satellite-tracking data to feed into my little model of Fort St. Sebastian, but I do have the daily meteorologic observations of Mir Ali, the customs official who logged the contents of every ship. I have the sales receipts of every licensed store in the fort, and a record of official exports.

“Venn,” I plead, “tell me when I have enough. Make your next program X-29-1695.” He’s supportive; he’s impressed. Maybe, he says, studying the original engravings of “White Town, Fort Sebastian,” and the layouts of both Black and White Towns, and the punishment records, with every house demarcated as to owner and function, he could begin to create a very bare stage, a kind of Beckettian rendering of seventeenth-century South India. It would have the specificity I require, and a diamond might still be lost, but in the fullness of time, he says, computer-assisted time reconstruction will be possible. It will be, literally, the mother of all data bases. It will be time on a scale of 1:1, with a new concept of real time. He won’t call it time-travel. Neither we, nor time, will have traveled an inch, or a millisecond.

6

THE COMPANY’S
regulations required Chief Factor Prynne to keep an official diary and consultation books of meetings with his subordinates and with visiting members of the Council at Fort St. George. But Gabriel Legge, too, maintained a diary, which for a man as restless as he was seems surprising. Perhaps Gabriel distrusted Prynne to provide for Leadenhall Street truthful summaries of daily business conducted in St. Sebastian, its small, dingy subordinate factory. Or perhaps he was contemptuous of the young apprentices and writers, like Thomas Tringham, who had wept like a woman over his hound’s carcass in full view of local mobs on the beach.

Gabriel Legge’s
Diary
is useful in that it unintentionally discloses how often he deserted Hannah in Henry Hedges’ eerie house, with no company other than the maid Bhagmati.

At least in the first year and a half of his tenure of the Company’s junior factorship in St. Sebastian, he seemed to have enjoyed good relations with the difficult Cephus Prynne. Here are some of his
Diary
entries:

February 11, 1695: Obtained orders from Chief Factor Prynne to vissit the factories south of the Penner River and conduct inspections concerning improprieties. Sett saile on the small English Pinck, called the
Little Teresa.

February 20: Very foule weather
.

February 25: A Dutch Fly-boate wee found rideing, its foretopmast crackt. We invited its Commander, Senr. Hartsinck, on board the
Little Teresa,
whereupon the Commander informed us that in its passage the Fly-boate lost a man overboard. We demanded as gift from Senr. Hartsinck refreshment of fruite, Hoggs And water, which gift the Dutch Commander was happy to relinquish
.

February 28: Wee came on shoare at Sadraspatam, the Agent receiving us with respect
.

June 30: Wee are informed that our factorye at St. Andrews is frequently home to Romish Priests. Our Affaires here are in foolish Posture. Wee have little confidence in the ability of Mr. Richard Ruckle, who was re-entertained as Chief at a sallary of 100
LI
per annum
.

August 26: Wee advise you to see to the sending home of Mr. Richard Ruckle, and to appoint a more fitt and faithfull person as Chief at St. Andrews
.

October 18: Wee are informed of complaints concerning Our Cloath which merchants here in St. Catherine describe as being full of Mothes. Wee have also been in receipt of complaints concerning white Ants in some of Our Cloath
.

November 29: Wee noate that the Counsell at Fort St. George recommends me to remaine at our factorye in St. Catherine and to use my utmost endeavors to discover whether the fault is in the Maker of Our Cloath or in the Warehouse
.

January 18, 1696: Wee have the Nombers of the bayles and peeces of Our goods in which wee have ascertained defects. We shall advise you of such goods. We inquire Liberty for the Selling of such goods cheape
.

March 20: On retorne to our factorye at St. Andrew, wee are sorry to find that Mr. Ruckle continues to proceed in irregular actions
.
If he stay longer, he may doe the Honourable Companye mischiefe
.

June 6: Wee do hope you will permit us to present the requested
Pesh-Kash
to the Nawab’s uncle that wee may obtain greater accommodation in Our Trade from the said Nawab
.

July 24: As to the matter of Mr. Richard Ruckle, wee have proofe that he behaves in scandalous fashion on Sabbath dates
.

August 1: Wee are very glad that you have inquired yourself into the unfitt conduct of Mr. Richard Ruckle and have graunted us our desire to send Mr. Ruckle home
.

There were two Gabriel Legges, the wild and expansive Gabriel Legge who’d shown up in Salem with’ his tales of mountains and camels, deserts and lakes; Gabriel Legge the jealous lover and husband; the democratic Gabriel Legge who, alone among Company factors, seemed to enjoy the hardship postings, the company of rough and low-born privateers, local traders and artisans. And then there was the cautious Gabriel Legge, who worked grudgingly under Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham, men of small compass and meager imagination, whose grasp of profit was dictated by turnover and not investment.

Hannah watched her husband retire early behind his bedroom doors, ledger books open, cursing the failed opportunities and drinking until spilling the ink pot or losing the thread of commercial narrative. His eye patch was no longer dashing and touchingly vain—it was the curse of the record keeper. The logbooks of the factors are models of scrupulous entries and veiled discontents; I have pored over Gabriel’s accounts for mention of Hannah, “my goode wyffe,” and found only paltry recognition of the woman sewing just a few feet away. He would be gone, weeks on end, into the jungles and up the coast as far as Hughli, now Calcutta, and down to Lanka.

“My goode wyffe tonight entertained women in my absence. My goode wyffe bade accompany me to the
mittah
, but was dissuaded. Incommodious facilities for whytte women of gentel byrthe,” writes Gabriel Legge in defense of his decision; the interior, or the smaller stations up and down the coast, untouched by European influence, must have been brutal tests of stamina and resistance. Factors came out of those encounters with village India reeling with fevers, distempers, malaria, fatigue. Malaria carried off half the factors and probably left the survivors victims of fevers the rest of their lives. Many didn’t make it back to the fort at all, dying within hours from generic “tropical plagues,” which must have encompassed the full range of viral disease from rabid-bat and -dog bites to polio, the full rainbow of waterborne dysenteries (they had as many euphemisms for diarrhea as Eskimos have for snow). The head aches constantly, cuts suppurate, the bowels—well, the bowels come in for obsessive chronicling, which would indicate the commonness of defecatory commentary, like sports chat around the watercooler. Even the happy or melancholy outcome of other factors’ daily bout with the thunder mug are jealously or gloatingly recorded in Gabriel’s logs.

To his credit, whatever we may say of Gabriel Legge, he was a man capable of great loyalty, but he placed his faith more in ideals than institutions. The ideal of England in India moved him. The idea of spreading enlightenment, science, sanitation and, as he understood it, Christian tolerance, and of absorbing the best in the culture around him, was a continual delight. His practical nature was not at war with his lust for maximum profit, and both dictated the keeping of an open mind. But the idea of the “glorious enterprise” being the exclusive reservation of the Company and of posturing little potentates like Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham reduced him to rage and, finally, treachery.

I mean, of course, a treachery even greater than the relatively straightforward murder of the Chief Factor. Greater than the marital infidelities, the parallel families he had fathered and for whom, honorably enough, he provided. Internecine homicide among East India factors, which could easily be blamed on tropical passion, drink, brigands or the depredations of local highwaymen, were not uncommon. “Fevers” is a blanket term, and who is to say, three hundred years later, that murder was not the dark companion of many deaths? These were adventurous men with nothing to lose, driven by mercantile lust, in a time and place that provided cover for base designs. You set aggressive men on a course of unstructured competition, and they soon become desperate men in unscrupulous battle. It’s a wonder they didn’t destroy themselves utterly.

He was a man perched on the edge of some great cataclysmic upheaval, I think now; a man of thirty-five—which was borrowed time in that place and century—though of course still vigorous. A desperate man faced with a gray, careworn future of subservience. Or a man waiting to make a leap.

The marital relations of Hannah and Gabriel are an area of mystery today, because they were areas of discretion three hundred years ago. Abundant evidence exists as to their sexual natures, which were vigorous. It would seem that Gabriel enjoyed the favors a white man felt his due in an Asian culture. Where he traveled, he planted his seed. That Hannah felt herself exempt from the bibi jealousies of a Sarah or Martha also appears self-evident. She was not raised, or trained, in garrison expectations of male infidelity. She had not led the desperate sort of life, like Sarah, that substituted gratitude for tolerance. She was a faithful wife who had attracted her share of suitable beaux and suitors, and who resisted courtings and temptations even when expectations and opportunities presented themselves.

Hannah convinced herself that Cephus Prynne conspired to keep her husband from her, but conceded that Gabriel Legge relished his travels up and down the Coromandel Coast, exercising power over the Company’s agents and chief factors in tiny outposts. If Gabriel missed Hannah’s companionship, he kept all yearnings to himself. He sent her few messages while away, but he regaled her with outrageous stories of impossible adventures when he came home.

The falling out between Gabriel Legge and Chief Factor Prynne didn’t happen until the winter of 1696. It started with a public notice that the Company’s Seal had been misused for private business by a junior factor and that from now on the Seal was to be kept in a box with three locks, the keys to which were to be in the sole possession of the Chief Factor. It escalated when Gabriel ordered repairs on a warehouse that had been damaged by floods. It exploded into a scuffle when the Chief Factor humiliated Gabriel by reprimanding him in front of young Tringham and a freshly arrived apprentice for having bound a cash keeper with the man’s own girdle and delivering fifty crippling blows with a stick to the man’s soles. The cash keeper had died later that evening. Of a heart attack in his hut, according to Gabriel’s report. “In future be frugal in your hate as you are in your love,” Cephus Prynne had mocked, “so we may not have to disburse grand gifts to the Nawab’s minister to halt the police report.”

After the scuffle, Gabriel Legge spent more time drinking with freemen and privateers and less time reforming the conduct of Company employees like Richard Ruckle or reorganizing the subordinate factories’ books. The “
poddar
(cash-keeper) affaire,” in fact, made Gabriel a hero among Europeans who were not in the employment of East India companies owned by rich men in London and Paris and Amsterdam and Copenhagen.