The Holder of the World (13 page)

“Of course, my husband.”

“Have you entertained yourself in my absence?”

“Only with my sewing.”

“Your sewing! You hear that, monsieur le Marquis? Every night more sewing, more embroidery.”

“A most fortunate man, M’sieur Legge.”

“A black man named Pedda Timanna did not visit?”

She knew the uselessness of lying. But she had nothing to hide. “He had business with Mrs. Ruxton. I believe he sells her diamonds.”

“In my house?”

“He is not permitted in Dr. Ruxton’s house. I believe they must arrange their meetings thusly.”

She answered in a clear, forthright voice. Gabriel Legge knew from the example of the unfortunate Hubert and of doctors in Stepney that men were attracted to his wife, and, furthermore, her power of attraction was no matter of shame or embarrassment to her. In the mood of the time, which is barely changed,
she bore watching
. And Gabriel was possessed of more than a jealous streak; unfaithfulness he might have accepted before deception. His wife had presented him with the occasion of the former—though never acted—but never a hint of the latter.

“And Mr. Cephus Prynne—has he visited as well?”

“Never after the first day. And I do believe he regards himself as unwelcome here.”

And with that, Hannah had returned to her bed, leaving the door open should Gabriel, even in his drunken state, choose to visit. Bhagmati stood at the far end of the terrace, waiting either to scurry to distant quarters, should Gabriel claim the marriage bed, or to again unroll her mat as a sentry outside her mistress’s door.

SHE AWAKES
with the first streak of dawn, the twittering of the first birds. The house seems full of noises, but not of voices or movement. The echoes, it seems, of great events. Bhagmati’s mat is still unrolled, but the girl is gone. Gabriel’s boots are lined up on the terrace at the top of the stairs. Gabriel is asleep, loudly and drunkenly, in his room, still dressed but for his shoes and belt. He has fallen across the width of the bed, the very picture of exhaustion. Hannah knows from the snoring he will sleep the Sabbath away, another small demerit that will be administered by the Company Council.

At the edge of the fort, in the still-dark west, jackals howl and hyenas chuckle like cardplayers in a room next door. Buzzards circle. The noise is coming from overhead, and the sky is turning pink over the ocean; dawn will come quickly.

The rope ladder to the roof has been moved into climbing position. She doesn’t know whether to climb or to watch, but soon the indecision is taken away, for the ladder is adjusted ever so slightly by invisible hands and slowly a regal form descends in a white shimmering material and gold ceinture, her ankles and wrists jangling softly with gold. Hannah ducks behind her door. It is that two-dimensional time of the dawn, or of history, the light not yet able to endow shape with form or meaning. The woman’s long black hair looks at a distance, in the pale light and against the white silk, like a giant fissure cut across her back. The white-wrapped arms seem to move separately, severed from each other by the hair, and she dashes down the far end of the terrace, entering a room behind a splintered door that had always been locked. It must be, she knows, Bhagmati, but a servant transformed. Hannah watches, and watches, but no one emerges from the storage room, and now the sky is morning bright though the sun has not yet risen above the ocean’s far curve. By this time, Chief Factor Prynne is usually pacing his terrace, offering his profile to the sun, but not this morning.

She will try to sleep an hour or two and rise in time for services. No reason for both of them to be fined. Maybe she’ll screw up her courage to beg the Chief Factor’s forgiveness for her husband’s indisposition.

But she finds she cannot sleep. She has lost control of her house, as though its complicated history, its artwork, the convolutions of its predecessor’s fancies and obsessions, were all coming out this morning to claim their inheritance. The simple servant girl returned in her familiar sleeping-and-waking clothes, rolled up her mat and began the light whisking of the terrace with her stick-bundle broom, leaving no trace of the queenly vision that had descended.

“Bhagmati,” Hannah called.

The girl presented herself at the opened door. The morning light behind her was blinding white, and she merely a slim black cutout against it.

“I saw you. You were on the roof terrace. You were dressed in white silks and gold. You went behind that door.”

The girl said nothing.

“Bhagmati, what are you?”

No, she did not believe in ghosts and witches. Those were the primitive beliefs of the world she had come from. But she did believe in evil, and in possession, in falsity and magic. She could not hold with poor Hubert that the world was explicable by formula and experiment. That was the faith of an Englishman who had never seen America, and never seen India. And having seen India, and America, Hannah knew she could never be content in England. The girl continued sweeping the terrace, opening the bird cage and feeding the parrot, singing softly to herself.

She knows that men have died for her. She knows that the world that seems so calm and peaceful this Sabbath morning is full of furious meaning, but refuses to reveal itself.

AT THE INQUIRY
later, all attested to the fact that Cephus Prynne had left alone. None were seen to have followed him. The walk up the hill from Sonapatnam wall to White Town was considered an evening’s constitutional stroll, indulged in safely by one and all, except of course the women. It was not unknown that jackals prowled the trash pits and hyenas inspected the burial grounds; both those areas were, by mutual agreement, far outside the perimeters of civil protection.

Of course, on the field where the body of Cephus Prynne was found, three days later, in the most deplorable condition of tropical decomposition, bandits and brigands of every persuasion had often wielded uncontested power. Very little flesh remained, but for the tight skin of the forehead, upon which the letter
H
in a Roman script had been slashed. And on parts of the body the pariah dogs and buzzards and hyenas had not carried away, other letters were faintly discernible—an
A
, a
C
, an
E
—as though the Hindus or Muslims had thought by a promiscuous imitation of the English alphabet they were pointing the finger of guilt away from them, instead of directly at their hearts.

8

IT HAD RAINED
steadily for three days from a high, bright sky the day that Two-Headed Ravanna and his three sons were impaled for the murder of Chief Factor Cephus Prynne. Ravanna, a well-known local cutthroat who had never before attacked a white man, earned his name for the goiter that extruded from his neck and lay on his shoulder like a second head (which in jest he often emblazoned with eyes and a mouth). He went to his agonized death slowly lowered upon the sharpened
shul
, surviving to hear loud cheering as the gory spike burst from his bowels and out the very eye socket of his phantom head, and lasting with sufficient strength to curse the Mughal Governor, Haider Beg; the Company Governor, John Goldsborough; and the motley assortment of traders and factors who had sworn to his presence outside the gates near Attila Csycsyry’s distillery the night of Cephus Prynne’s disappearance.

All
firangi
men and women participated in the credible lie that Chief Factor Prynne had been slain by highway bandits. These are times of famine and skirmish! Bolt your portals against Zentoos and Moors! The jungle is no place to turn the other cheek!

Fearing a correlation between plunging morale and plunging profits, the Fort St. George Council met in extraordinary session and unanimously promoted Samuel Higginbottham to chief factor.

There were some rumors that weeks before his death, Prynne had accused Higginbottham of deceit or theft and had asked for insulting clarifications on several entries of prices of goods and costs of sorting, weighing and packing them for shipping home. To counteract these malicious rumors, Sarah spread rumors of her own: Pedda Timanna’s hired assassins were behind the incident. John Ruxton told the young writers that he had seen enough curious deaths on the Coromandel Coast to know for sure that fools expired of cholera, lunacy and flux, and knaves were killed by daggers, garrotes and poisons. Martha Ruxton convinced herself that the mutilated corpse recovered near the distillery was not Cephus Prynne’s at all.

Nawab Haider Beg was not disconcerted by Prynne’s precipitous removal.
Firangi
factors were expendable. The institution of bribes-for-influence would endure. The weaker the English Company, the stronger the competition from privateers. The more cutthroat the rivalry, the richer the coffers of the Mughals. He arranged the magistrates’ ruling: the Englishman got drunk as Englishman were wont to do and was set upon by idol-worshiping robbers who owed their political allegiance to the Hindu Raja, Jadav Singh, who lived in the sandstone hill-fort beyond the jungle.

The evening after the body was recovered and buried ceremoniously with gun salutes, Gabriel took Hannah for a ride along the surf-scalloped shore. Beyond the sand reef a two-masted Dutch hooker flying the Marquis’s flag of scarlet crossed cannons on an onyx field was unloading its cargo into
kuttamarams
. On the beach fishermen were spreading torn nets across the dunes; children were teasing sand crabs out of their holes; gulls, crows and pariah dogs were picking through entrails of discarded fish.

Twilight is so fragile in the tropics! Nightfall so sudden and unequivocal! I can see Hannah, taut spined on horseback, and Gabriel eager, impatient, riding ahead to meet the piratical Marquis. In every lungful of velvety night vapors, Hannah tastes the warmth and wetness of the Coromandel Coast’s peculiar fecund mortality.

We know that Hannah and Gabriel Legge were on the beach on a June night in 1697. We know that Hannah suddenly let go of her reins, that she twisted impulsively, violently, in her saddle, and kissed Gabriel. We know this because recent scholarship about the Company’s trade is finally retrieving the communal and individual memorial of the “Hindoos and the Coromandel Moors.” All the stories are there, scattered in a thousand libraries and a million scraps of information. Put them together, as Hannah’s life does, and a consistent story emerges. In the consultation books of the Company’s factories and forts, the story of the Coromandel Coast is the story of Europe, of white nations battling each other in outposts paved with gold. It is the story of North America turned inside out.

A fisherman’s child, crouched behind a sand dune, witnessed Hannah Legge’s kiss. Reared in an overcrowded shack where sexuality was furtive, a fierce, efficient grab and shudder and nothing more, he watched, mesmerized, the beautiful white woman seize her man right there on the beach,
his
beach, and vent on him without coyness and without shame her wild
firangi
passions and selfish wants, and as he watched the woman greedily, shamelessly, he saw a vision of himself on another shore by another ocean, an adventurer without family, without caste, without country, cantering into worlds without rules.

An asset hunter knows when to continue digging long after economists and historians have stopped.

That fisherman’s boy found his way to William Ill’s court in London. There he chanced upon John Dryden’s
Aureng-Zebe
and was incensed by its Eurocentric falsity. That fisherman’s boy composed his own heroic play,
The World-Taker
, in rhyming couplets as a corrective. In the extant fragment, the anonymous fisherman-poet claimed that when he first came upon Dryden’s confession that “true passion is too fierce to be in fetters bound,” he was wracked by the vision that had befallen him years before on a sandy strip in neglected Fort St. Sebastian.

FOR HANNAH
, too, that night served as a diving board into the Unknown. For there on the night-kohled rim of a seductive ocean, as the beach children hooted and giggled and threw fistfuls of sand, Gabriel announced to her he was joining the Marquis as a pirate.

The Marquis, in his honorable youth, had been a gunnery mate for the British in battles with the Spanish. Then he set himself up,
à la pige
, free-lance, for anyone who paid. There was no dishonor in being a mercenary or of working for the natives. A fractious subcontinent had made all of them rich, traders and militarists alike. Hindu against Muslim, Muslim against Sikh: it was a paradise on earth.

The dishonor that had banished the Marquis from Compagnie Royale service, and from respectable fraternity in all but Fort St. Sebastian, had been over a woman. As a rising young officer in the French outpost, then known in his Alsatian guise as Klaus Engelhardt, he had presented himself one morning half an hour late for dress parade. It was known he had been with his bibi. The young lieutenant had been offered a gentleman’s choice, which he failed: ride the spindle-backed, blood-encrusted wooden horse for an hour with legs weighted down with iron for maximum penetration and possible permanent damage, or watch his bibi ride it before his eyes, and those of his mates, until her certain death.

A factor finds his true self by becoming a freebooter. There’s no stopping voyages of self-discovery. Ditto for voyages of self-destruction.

Hannah, a foster child twice over, could inherit full knowledge of the world’s wickedness, but she couldn’t bequeath it to Gabriel. Gabriel was impulsive, charming, jealous, violent and generous. He had a democratic spirit; he worked well with blacks—better, in fact, than with whites. He truly did not understand the bargain of the world: the principle that Hubert had tried to teach. The equal-and-opposite reaction. So she let Gabriel sail on the
Esperance
, the Marquis’s sloop. She did not ask him whose vessel he planned to plunder nor for what treasure he longed to risk his soul. He was not a pirate of simple rapacity as was the Marquis’s second mate, Cutlass da Silva. And he was not like Captains John Avery and William Kidd, who relished harassing haj-bound pilgrims in order to enrage the Grand Mughal. Gabriel wouldn’t, he couldn’t, do what Pirate Avery had done in the winter of 1695, seize the proud, pious Emperor Aurangzeb’s most prized vessel, the
Ganj-i-Sawai
, torture its passengerload of devout Muslims, violate veiled women from the imperial family and harem, then gloat off to Madagascar or the Mascarene with a booty of beauteous Turki slave girls and five million rupees in bullion.

Covetousness was not Gabriel’s sin. He was a stubborn dispenser of unprincipled justice. He was a rash romantic with ungovernable yearnings. Hannah didn’t plead with Gabriel to take her back to England. She was not ready to entomb herself in Morpeth or London. She didn’t feel bereft—of roots, of traditions—as Martha and Sarah professed to feel. Instead she felt unfinished, unformed.

She was, she is, of course, a goddess-in-the-making.

The Coromandel had started something as immense as a cyclone deep inside her body and mind. To let Gabriel go was also to let herself expand.

Two weeks later she waved farewell to her husband as he sailed with the Marquis and Cutlass da Silva on his tyro mission. The goal was modest: harass the wealthy backers in Paris, Amsterdam and London. The prey, too, was modest: an English ketch,
Clyde’s Folly
, which had been captured by the French at the mouth of the Palk Strait and was being escorted into the French port settlement of Pondicherry with a cargo of fifteen barrels of brandy and ten chests of crude coral. Hannah waved and waved until the
Esperance
pressed its prow through the gauzy lavender horizon.

HANNAH LOOKED
on Cephus Prynne’s murder as emancipation. Being rid of a sexual tormentor was the least cause for her new sense of liberty. In murder she saw the workings of an alien providence. She had no doubt that Gabriel had killed Prynne. Her conscience could not condone acts of murder—the teachings of Robert and Susannah Fitch were deeply embedded—but she was glad that for the present at least her Puritan conscience was aflounder like a Coromandel
kuttamaram
in a typhoon-churned sea.

If Cephus Prynne had died prematurely and precipitously, but of natural causes, she and Gabriel would still be enmeshed in the corrupt embrace of the Company. Under Prynne, the satellite English in Fort St. Sebastian had begun to think of themselves as patriots planting the flag for King and Country, as missionaries of commerce martyring themselves for holy profit. The truth was, Hannah felt herself no more at home in England than she did in the Coromandel. She was deficient in that genetic impulse toward teary-eyed patriotism.

Piracy, in fact, seemed to her a normal outgrowth of the unnatural conditions of plunder and violence that were otherwise condoned, and even lauded, by the Company and its factors. The outrageous act of murder, conceded by no official but condemned by the Fort St. George Council, simultaneously cast the Legges out of Little England and bound them to it with the fastness of unconfessable guilt.

To Hannah emancipation meant she could stay on in the house that Henry Hedges’ ghost still roamed and ruled. Once upon a time the creaks and moans had terrified her; now the house seemed as vast and as stocked with mysteries and wonder as the woods of Brookfield, as the universe of laws of the New Science that poor Hubert had tried to explain. Like Henry Hedges, she put herself in the hands of an Indian woman. Perhaps the same Indian woman. Ostracism opened up unwalled worlds for her.

She was taken by Bhagmati behind the splintered door where the white sari was kept carefully folded on top of a brocaded man’s silk jama, to a makeshift shrine where an oil lamp burned. Flowers were arranged around a painting done in the court manner, of an Englishman in modified Mughal dress.

“Hedges-sa’ab,” said Bhagmati. And another portrait of a serving girl holding her arms out as a parrot perches on an overhanging branch. The bird cage is open. The girl’s face—Bhagmati’s face, obviously the painters had sat on this terrace under Hedges’ patronage—registers sheer terror, but Bhagmati laughed.

“Bird-come-back,” she said.

WHEN GABRIEL LEGGE
was offered a way out of the Company, he took it. Emancipation from the Company meant signing on with the dead Chief Factor’s most hated competitor, the Marquis, and organizing the coast’s stateless
firangis
, cynics and rebels into a joint-stock association with a huge common fund for outfitting piracy against the Indiamen of all European-chartered trading companies and against the fancy fleet of the Grand Mughal. Rich men like Count Attila Csycsyry subscribed in shares; brawny men like YellowBeard Huyghen, Cutlass da Silva and ThroatCut de Azvedo contributed some dormant image of themselves, for they were not born to plunder, nor were they born with the names they adopted. Perhaps piracy on the Coromandel Coast—going to sea, raising a flag of one’s own, being the boss and dividing the loot, scuttling the sobersided sons of sea cooks who stood in the way—was the seed of the frontier dream, the circus dream, the immigrant dream of two centuries later. Gabriel invested all his hoarded capital, but was treasured more for his imagination, his genial leadership, his quick intelligence.

Soon the Marquis enlisted the embittered Pedda Timanna’s support to buy, in exchange for tin, musical automatons, French wines and cheeses, two Coromandel-built three-masted vessels. For reasons of sentimentality and superstition, the
Esperance
remained the flagship, but Gabriel took over as its captain from ThroatCut de Azvedo. Through Pedda Timanna’s influence with the Grand Mughal’s representative, Nawab Haider Beg, Gabriel was able to acquire for the new joint-stock company of privateers an imperial
farman
to raise revenue and administer justice in a square mile of rough coastal land within Fort St. Sebastian’s shadow.

This square mile he rechristened New Salem as a tribute to his wife.

GABRIEL CAPTAINED
the
Esperance
on seventeen expeditions, each of them an adventure that put his earlier tall tales to shame. Legend credits Gabriel with having sacked the
Humility
, a Mughal pilgrim ship more richly laden than the
Ganj-i-Sawai
and the
Queddah Merchant
. He shipped his booty—the ingots, the pieces of eight, the Arab gold and Christian gold, the Moorish and the Burmese stones—to accomplices in New York, where, again, legend obscures its eventual disbursement. Some say the old friends could not resist the temptation; others say his loot lies just within the continental shelf where a corsair went down. He survived shipwrecks, cyclones, duels, whippings, at least one mutiny and two heartbreaks. There are handsome clans of Legges in Madagascar, Mauritius and Réunion. I’ve received a letter from a Vyankoji Legge of Bombay inquiring if his “sinister blood bondage to the aforesaid Gabrielji” qualified him for citizenry in the U.S. or the U.K., or a share of any recovered treasure.