The Holder of the World (2 page)

“Really. It’s getting very late.” He begins to turn the miniatures over and folds the ancient carpet over them.

“Where will you be selling them?” I ask, but he shrugs.

“That’s up to the owner, isn’t it?”

In a maritime trade museum in Massachusetts, I am witnessing the Old World’s first vision of the New, of its natives, of its ferocious, improbable shapes, of its monstrous women, that only the Salem Bibi could have described or posed for. Her hips are thrust forward, muscles readied to wade into deeper, indigo water. But her arms are clasped high above her head, her chest is taut with audacious yearnings. Her neck, sinewy as a crane’s, strains skyward. And across that sky, which is marigold yellow with a summer afternoon’s light, her restlessness shapes itself into a rose-legged, scarlet-crested crane and takes flight.

The bird woos with hoarse-throated screeches, then passes out of sight. The painting could be covered by the palm of my hand.

I lift the final one. I want to memorize every stroke.

In the largest of the series—its catalog name is
The Apocalypse
, but I call it
The Unravish’d Bride
—beautiful Salem Bibi stands on the cannon-breached rampart of a Hindu fort. Under a sky on fire, villages smolder on purple hillocks. Banners of green crescent moons flutter from a thousand tents beyond the forest, where tethered horses graze among the bloated carcasses of fallen mounts. Leopards and tigers prowl the outer ring of high grass; the scene is rich in crow-and-buzzard, hyena-and-jackal, in every way the opposite of fertile Marblehead. In a forest of blackened tree stumps just inside the fort’s broken walls, hyenas lope off with severed human limbs; jackals chew through caparisoned carcasses of horses; a buzzard hops on a child’s headless corpse.

Salem Bibi’s lover, once a sprightly guerrilla warrior, now slumps against a charred tree trunk. He grasps a nephrite jade dagger hilt carved in the shape of a ram’s head and, with his last blood-clotted breath, pledges revenge. His tiny, tensed knuckles glint and wink, like fireflies, against the darkness of his singed flesh. The poisoned tip of an arrow protrudes through the quilted thinness of his battle vest. An eye, gouged loose by an enemy dagger, pendulums against his famine-hollowed cheek, a glistening pink brushstroke of a sinew still connecting it to the socket through which the smoky orange sky shows itself. The lover’s one stationary eye fixes its opaque, worshipful gaze on the likeness of the Salem Bibi painted on the lover’s right thumbnail.

Near Salem Bibi’s dying lover, under a multirooted banyan tree smeared with oils and ashes holy to Hindus, the upper body of a lotus-seated yogi slain in midmeditation holds itself serenely erect. An infant, chubby and naked, crawls from blood-splattered shield to shield inventing happy games. A thief crouches behind a pretty purple boulder and eyes the necklets of pearls, rubies, diamonds, on courtier-warriors’ stilled chests. Broods of long-haired monkeys with black, judgmental faces ring the heaps of dead and dying.

In the clean, green distance beyond the conflagration’s range, on a wide road that twists away from ruined forts and smoking villages, a gloomy, insomniac conqueror on a sober-eyed elephant leads his procession of triumph-aroused horsemen, foot soldiers, archers, gunners, lance bearers, spies, scouts, mullahs, clowns, poets, painters, bookkeepers, booty haulers, eunuchs, courtesans, singers, dancers, jugglers, wrestlers, cooks, palanquin bearers, tent pitchers, storytellers, to the next gory and glorious field of slaughter. Their eyes form a perfect, glitter-pointed triangle: Salem Bibi’s, her Hindu lover’s, the Mughal conqueror’s.

On the low-parapeted roof of the fort, Salem Bibi chants stubborn and curative myths to survive by. Her braceleted hands hold aloft a huge, heavy orb of unalloyed gold and a clear, multifaceted diamond through which a refracted lion and a lamb frolic in a grove of gold grass as supple as silk. At her henna-decorated, high-arched feet, a bird cage lies on its side, its microscopic door recently ripped off its hinges. The newly exposed hinge glows against the cage’s duller metal, a speck of gold-leaf paint.

“Thank you, Mr. Satterfield.”

It is a feast of the eyes, and I must steady myself, take a breath, palms outstretched on the museum’s floor. You can study it for a lifetime and find something new each time you look. It’s like an Indian dessert, things fried that shouldn’t be, hot that should be cold, sweet that should be tart. And an art that knows no limit, no perspective and vanishing point, no limit to extravagance, or to detail, that temperamentally cannot exclude, a miniature art forever expanding.

Go
, Salem Bibi whispers, her kohl-limned sapphire eyes cleaving a low-hanging sky.
Fly as long and as hard as you can, my co-dreamer! Scout a fresh site on another hill. Found with me a city where lions lie with lambs, where pity quickens knowledge, where desire dissipates despair!

THERE ARE
no accidents. My Yale thesis on the Puritans did lead to graduate school, but it also took me here. My life with Venn Iyer, father of fractals and designer of inner space, is no accident.

I drove out to this museum to track down for a client what he claims is the most perfect diamond in the world. The diamond has a name: the Emperor’s Tear. For eleven years, I have been tracking the Salem Bibi, a woman from Salem who ended up in the Emperor’s court. I know her as well as any scholar has known her subject; I know her like a doctor and a lawyer, like a mother and a daughter. With every new thing I’ve learned, I’ve come imperceptibly closer to the Emperor’s Tear. In that final Götterdämmerung painting, she is holding it: I have seen the Emperor’s Tear atop its golden orb. Three hundred years ago, it existed in her hands; I know where she came from and where she went. I couldn’t care less about the Emperor’s Tear, by now. I care only about the Salem Bibi.

I should have let the keyboard do the tracking, but, like shamans and psychics, I’ve learned to go with hunches as well as data bases. The easiest way for a white-collar felon to make a stone vanish for a while is to loan it to a small, grateful museum under a plausible alias. And if the museum, finding itself too cluttered already, and out of its curatorial depths, were to sell it in some obscure auction in Europe or Canada, and the owner just happened to show up and buy it, he’d have title, free and clear, wouldn’t he?

What I hadn’t figured on was the secret life of a Puritan woman whom an emperor honored as Precious-as-Pearl, the Healer of the World.

3

SHE WAS
Hannah Easton, only surviving child of Edward and Rebecca Easton, née Rebecca Walker of Brookfield, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Brookfield, today, lies about midway between Worcester and Springfield in the foothills of central Massachusetts, east of the gentle floodplain of the Connecticut River. In Hannah’s time it was Indian country: smack in the middle of Nipmuc land with Mohican and Narragansett to the south, Pennacook and Abnaki on the north all the way to New France.

The dates are not important. I’ll summarize them later.

All of Massachusetts must have been an extended family. A cousin shipped out, an in-law followed, an uncle got news of free land, a chance for rebeginning … like villages in Poland and Italy and Ireland emptying for America two centuries later.

Case in point: my family.

Rebecca Easton née Walker’s grandmother was a cousin of Charles Jonathan Samuel Muster’s father; her family had been legitimate passengers on the
Gabriel
(two years later to sink off Pemaquid, Maine) that Charles had stowed away on. Vaguely, then, I’m part of this story, the Salem Bibi is part of the tissue of my life. Walkers appear on the ship’s records, but Charles Muster never did. They’d probably settled in Boston, or even Rhode Island. Perhaps primogeniture did him out of land or inheritance, but by 1653 Elias Walker, his wife and infant daughter, Rebecca, arrived in Brookfield and leased, from their distant relatives the Masters (the three sons of Charles Jonathan Samuel Muster), three hundred acres of prime Quabaug River bluff and bottomland. By all accounts, Elias Walker was a frugal farmer and stockman; by 1665, he had purchased his land outright. My direct Masters ancestors pocketed the cash and further dissipated their father’s wealth.

At that time, Brookfield was a hesitant hilltop Puritan outpost deep inside Nipmuc country. Elias Walker held the usual attitudes of his time, and ours, toward the Indians: they are children; they are trusting; they are proud and generous. Even capable of nobility. But at heart they are savages: bestial, unspeakably cruel. He counseled, and cultivated, the path of mutual avoidance. Eight years later, the Walkers gained a neighbor, a sickly looking but resourceful recent arrival by the name of Edward Easton, who purchased with his English savings a brown ribbon of a field, a rickety shed, a cabin with privy and two barns.

The stage was set: older bachelor farmer with education and some money. The robust farmer’s daughter next door was only eight years old when first glimpsed, but no one was going anywhere. By the time she was fifteen, in 1668, Rebecca Walker was married to Edward Easton.

By seventeen, she’d had two pregnancies. The second, a daughter named Hannah, survived. In the remotest of ways, Hannah Easton is a relative of mine. Hannah Easton would walk the parapets of a Mughal fort, would hold the world’s most perfect diamond in her hands.

This was country for those raw and strong enough to hack prosperity out of wild, volatile land. And this was country for the middle-aged and bitter, discontented city dwellers and immigrants to start over in the wilderness, where the Prince of the Air was said to reign. Edward Easton was forty-three (already living on borrowed time, statistically speaking) the year that Hannah was born.

Of Edward Easton’s life before the winter of 1661, when he showed up in Boston, little is known. He sailed out of the Downs soon after Charles II, the Stuart restored to the English throne, had Oliver Cromwell’s embalmed body dug from its secret grave and decapitated, and the head stuck on a pole in Westminster Hall. They sent potent messages in those days; Edward, a Roundhead sympathizer, must have caught the first packet boat to the colonies.

In the Old World, Edward Easton had been an East India Company man with a sedentary occupation, a doughy-skinned, soft-bellied, fact-fevered scribe hunched over ledgerbooks, letters and memoranda in the Company’s Leadenhall Street offices in London. Back in my junior year abroad, in London, I checked the Company’s books and papers stored in the India Office in Whitehall. Edward Easton’s entries stand out because of the singular primness and angularity of his handwriting.

I knew my own family’s names and fragments of rumored history, of course. When I got to England, I went straight to the shipping records, the baptismal records, the recordings of deeds. Seeing the names of relatives, reading of their deaths and births and marriages all placed me within a context that I found somehow thrilling, as though nothing in the universe is ever lost, no gesture is futile. I’ve since then doubted the significance of many of those innocent discoveries, but seeing those “Salem Bibi’s Stuffs” boxes on the floor of the maritime museum, those Mughal paintings, brought the importance of those feelings back.

A twenty-year-old girl, really, contemplating her place in the universe and the ways of the world had appropriated an ancestor, a man who had gone before her, and though he was writing of strangers, she cherished his observations like an intimate letter from home:

A petty ruler on the Coromandel Coast of India is given the gifts of armour, a wool coat and a spying glass
.

A ship on its way to Masulipatnam is stocked with 1420 hogs and 250 oxen
.

The mother of a factor who died on board a Company vessel sailing home from Fort St. George is denied the diamonds she claims he was bringing back for her
.

A cabin-boy is whipped and his lacerations brined for having stolen a vial of musk
.

Did the cabin boy live to be a sea captain? Did the petty ruler wear his bribe to his next battle and did the armor save his skin? Was Edward Easton’s mind so demented with details that he fled to the wilderness? Or did he merely look up and out the grimy window, see the forest of mastheads and yard-arms on the river and the white Crosses of St. George fluttering like birds on the Company’s pennants and finally walk away from his old self? As his wife and his daughter would do, again and again.

Edward Easton arrived in Boston with sufficient skills and savings to make him desirable as a son-in-law to any Boston patriarch with too many daughters, but within weeks he bought himself a horse and cantered westward. Was it disgust with the old life, or was he enticed by a new, wholly imagined one that drove him away from safe and stable port towns like Boston and Salem? Did the Puritans, with their gloomy quest for godliness, hold for him more terror—as, later, they would for Hannah—than the presumed Satan who reigned over Pennacook, Abnaki and Nipmuc?

What is known is that he headed for the outer rings of settlements, stopping over first in Billerica, then in Chelmsford, then in Lancaster—where he was invited to sup at the home of John White, the wealthy landholder, and offered a modest bookkeeping job by White’s son-in-law, the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, Lancaster’s first minister—then in Worcester, and finally either running out of energy or finding in Brookfield the dreamscape for starting over.

For this accidental frontiersman, the 1660s was a decade of self-transformation. Like an alchemist who turns dross into gold, he hardened his slack and bookish body into the wiriness of a tiller, transformed the forest into farmland, and disenchantment into desire. And when desire grew carnal and kept him awake all the summer nights of 1668, he married, after perfunctory courtship, the Walkers’ bonny lass, strong and handsome, even comely, he wrote in that angular hand, with domestic skills and teachable aptitudes worthy of a freeborn woman of this new land.

He felt he might give her twenty years of husbandly service, begetting upon her a brood of worthy offspring. Already, he was cultivating a second career as village selectman.

I gasped the moment I opened Brookfield town registries and saw the same angular hand I’d known from Leadenhall. I thought then, with all the melodrama of undergraduate training, of Keats’s odes, or of his “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” for here I was, perhaps the only scholar in the world who had traced the work of an obscure clerk from London to Massachusetts. I could sense all the movements in his life, his determination to remake his life before it was too late, to go west to the colony instead of east, where surely his East India clerkship could have led him. I felt the same psychic bond with Edward Easton that Keats did with the revelers on the Grecian urn. He became a footnote in my thesis, but an assurance to me that my research in that era was somehow blessed. Of all the billions of births, the fires and floodings that separate me and my time from Easton and his, that the mundane work of this lone man should be preserved struck me as nothing less than miraculous and conferred on me a kind of wonderstruck confidence.

For most English colonists and certainly for Indian sachems, however, the 1660s was a win-or-die decade. So while Edward Easton was cutting trees down to stumps, raking his field, sowing his wife’s fertile womb, prizing rocks from the ground and hauling them to build a wall, burying his firstborn, trading wool stockings and blankets for herbs with the Nipmuc, the Wampanoag chief, Metacomet (whom the colonists renamed Philip), was suing and skirmishing to oust alien usurpers, and the French
habitants
were selling flintlocks to Ninigret, sachem of the Narragansett, in hopes of stirring up anti-English riots.

In 1671, on September 29, the day that Hannah turned a year old and first toddled far enough away by herself to have to be brought back by a solicitous Nipmuc, and the day that, in a cold drafty hall in distant Plymouth, the colonial government curtailed the sovereign powers of the Wampanoag and humiliated the proud King Philip by imposing a fine of one hundred pounds for violating their laws, Edward Easton, while in his outdoor privy savoring the poetic paradox in an imported, treasured copy of
Paradise Lost
and the physical paradox of constipation’s painful pleasures, died of a bee sting.

OF HER MOTHER
, the twenty-two-year-old widow whom Hannah lost when the Nipmuc laid siege to Brookfield in the scorched month of August 1675, she had one long, disturbing memory.

Rebecca Easton loved to sing. She sang psalms by the light of a fish-oil lamp, always to the same five or six tunes. And though she could neither read the words to the psalms nor the notes to the tunes that Edward, perhaps in a rare desperately nostalgic moment, had scribbled on the back cover of the Psalter, she taught the child to sing antiphonally with her.

Hannah’s memory is of one such psalm-singing night, their last one. Rebecca by the window, her neck long and arched, her throat throbbing with song. A voice so strong and sweet that it softens the sternest spiritual phrases into voluptuous pleas. The greasy, pale light of the lamp; the acute smell of the lamp oil. Rebecca singing each line by herself first, then nodding to encourage Hannah; Hannah repeating the line in a quavery, unformed voice. But, Hannah remembers, and this can never be separated from the angelic choir pouring from her mother’s breast, there are faces at the window.

Of course, the memory coalesces several frames into a single emblematic moment. The child sees; the mother does not. The strangers are listening, tomahawks held high, about to smash the window and door, but they are stilled in midflight. The Indians know these songs, especially the women who sit in the rear of the church, walking in and out during the sermons but rising with the congregation to sing. Her memory is a window, letting in the fecundity of an unfenced world.

She has also what she calls sightings, rather than memories, of that early childhood on the farm. Rebecca and some Indian helpers must farm alone; Rebecca is a widow. A Nipmuc woman teaching her to clean and dress deerskin. A boy-child promising to grow for her the plumpest squashes and pumpkins, the crispest beans, the brightest corn. A Nipmuc man hunting wild turkeys and pigeons, and she bouncing along behind Rebecca. A season of drought. The same Nipmuc man, Rebecca and Hannah—a frontier family—scraping the last ladlefuls of stewed-together berries and bird eggs and ground nuts from a huge, carbon-encrusted pot. Her mother smiling as the Nipmuc presses a steaming gourd of coarse, spicy potage to Hannah’s lips. She remembers her face against the soft deerskin of his jerkin.

King Philip changed Hannah’s life as completely and as forcefully as King Charles II of England had changed her father’s.

All through June and July of 1675, paranoia traveled up and down the Bay Path. Philip was arming his warriors for an all-out war! Wampanoag were breaking into and entering colonists’ houses in Swansea and raiding farms abandoned on the thin, frayed neck of peninsular land. Isolated farmers were gathered up and garrisoned, losing their crops and cattle to the marauders. Messengers from Governor Winslow of Plymouth fanned their frenzy. Philip’s men were looting and burning Middleborough, Dartmouth, Plymouth. The heathens were axing, scalping, abducting the decent Christian men and women and children of Mendon.

Hannah dreamed of Philip pressing his war-roused face at the window. Why not? Stray troopers coming through spoke of Philip as though he were an omnipresent phantom. One moment he was staking out pease fields, next moment he was fortifying snake-crowded swamps. And the next, he was impaling scalped heads and slashing the bulging sacs of milch cows.

Then, on the night of the second of August, Philip’s War came to the Easton hearth in the person of Rebecca’s Nipmuc lover. If he had intended the marking as disguise, it didn’t work. Hannah knew him as her inadmissible father, the only man she’d ever seen her mother with. The child raised her hand. The mother stopped singing, and slowly turned around.