The Holder of the World (9 page)

Men with officious faces and ledger books in the service of Emperor Aurangzeb’s representative Nawab Haider Beg, Governor of Roopconda, the large
suba
, or state, in which the English, French, Dutch and Portuguese had gained their small trading concessions, stood watch over the unloaders. Hannah had never seen such display of color: rich silks, brocades, cottons, in colors and combinations of colors that only a garden in high blossom could rival. Despite an inner voice that tried to summon up ancient fears of Turks and Ottomans and infidels, she couldn’t quite credit those Christian terrors. In their scarlet uniforms and tightly wound turbans the locals seemed like comedians on stage. They seemed physically weak, no match for the sturdy Europeans, even those, like Gabriel, still groggy from their transit. She had not seen so many people crowded together, ever. The dock in Salem seemed empty, bleached, muffled, in comparison.

“Hannah. Tell this fool—” Gabriel shouted.

She eased the dog’s head back to the hot sands. She verified his count of their trunks. It was the green one missing, she remembered, with the brass locks and hinges.

Cephus Prynne spoke sharply to Higginbottham. “It is the duty of all persons in the Honourable Company’s employment to acquaint Moors and Gentoos with the Honourable Company’s will and power. That is all I desire of you. Less than that I expect not.”

Higginbottham reluctantly approached the porters. He put himself through a clumsy emulation of Cephus Prynne’s deportment. He threatened whippings and bastinadoes if the thief and the missing chest were not instantaneously restored to Factor Legge. Higginbottham’s promise of vicious chastisement, however, intimidated no porter or boatman. The crowd had sized him up. This Englishman was weak. Men tittered; children closed in for better views of the entertainment.

Hannah’s journal entry of what happened next is reticent.
“Gabriel acquitted himself fitt to be in the Companyes imployment.”
She must have been appalled when Gabriel swatted aside peons and porters, jerked Higginbottham out of his way, then seized Kashi Chetty’s umbrella bearer by the hair. Gabriel’s hand smashed into the umbrella bearer’s face.

“… fitt to be in the Companyes imployment …,” Venn reads aloud.

I detect Hannah’s irony, but I, too, had hoped to find censure. I cannot defend Hannah to Venn.

All the same I invent secretive excuses. Maybe Hannah was still unready, unformed. Still afraid to discover herself disloyal. Gabriel was being judged, she must have decided. Gabriel was afraid of losing the respect of the Chief Factor. He did not ever wish to become the laughingstock that Higginbottham clearly was. It wasn’t the cursed land that released in him that crude, brute petulance. Prynne and Tringham were wrong about the Coromandel. The land, any land, is no more than catalyst. In England, Gabriel had often shocked her with his violence or enticed her with his unpredictabilities. The Gabriel she knew was at his most angry when he manifested an outer calm, as on his return from the dead. As in his patient questioning about men, every man, who had visited her while he was reportedly dead, killed by the Portuguese. But there was a new deliberateness to this assault on the merchant Chetty’s umbrella bearer.

Gabriel raised his hand to strike again. The caved-in face was a randomly chosen target. The victim had been on the periphery of the titterers. His “crime” was that he had been too intent a spectator. Other men in the crowd had smiled at the second factor more insolently, had advertised their innocence more sneeringly.

Hannah shrieked, though she didn’t know she had until she heard the shriek herself. This is an incident chronicled in the
Memoirs
. The hand reraised. The face twisted tight in anticipation of pain. The woman’s tormented shriek. She is witnessing an unnatural vanishing of justice, an unspeakable new face of violence. She remembers concentrating on the sweat and soil of the ruffled sleeve so she would not have to see nor hear the crash of flesh on flesh. And then suddenly, the tableau explodes into noise and movement. Pedda Timanna, the rich trader with the small head, leans down from his sedan chair, gives the man a quick shove with his umbrella and knocks him out of the hand’s range.

“The error is yours,” he informs Gabriel, smiling serenely from on high. “The object is not missing. Merely misplaced.”

He points his umbrella at the Legges’ trunk, which four of his attendants place before Cephus Prynne. To the Chief Factor, he adds, “Please inspect nothing is missing.”

Cephus Prynne’s blue eyes blanch bleaker. “Mr. Higginbottham, limit your future endeavors to acquainting the unmarried servants of the Company with their living arrangements and with rules of rank and precedence, of sitting at public table, and such sundry matters.”

Pedda Timanna’s head bows in bitter triumph.

Samuel Higginbottham’s shoulders stoop with self-hate.

Only Gabriel misses the merchant’s irony and its humiliating consequences. He squats on the gritty wharf and greedily pries open the lid of the gouged, rusty-hinged chest.

HANNAH DID NOT
take to Cephus Prynne, but she conceded that he was an efficient procurer of house and servants for his subordinates. The grieving young Yorkshireman and the other two new writers were hustled away to their bachelor billets by Samuel Higginbottham. The Legges were attended to by Cephus Prynne himself. In a procession of palanquins, horses, ox carts and porters who balanced trunks and bundles on their flatly turbaned heads, the Chief Factor escorted the Legges over sandy roadways to the house they were to occupy in White Town, the Europeans-only walled enclave. St. Sebastian, he explained, being a “subordinate factory,” did not yet have a Company residence for its married employees. He had plans to buy land from the Armenian merchant, but in the meanwhile the married factors were obliged to live in their separate homes, as did English freemen and European privateers.

The lodging that he had chosen for the Legges, Prynne said, had last belonged to a factor named Henry Hedges, who had died while negotiating an abatement of 8 percent on longcloth in a weavers’ village controlled by the trader Pedda Timanna. Hannah sensed there was a story to the last occupant’s death. Some hint of fiscal impropriety or at least of behavior inappropriate in an Englishman of rank.

The late Henry Hedges’ house was two stories, but in appearance and feel like no home that Hannah had ever imagined. It was a white, miniature palace, modestly plain to the street, but embracing a courtyard with servants’ quarters in the rear, a wall, a profusion of flowers and fruit trees, all humming with bloated insects—At last, she thought, the royal bugs worthy of a golden swatter—the branches alive with lizards and gaudy songbirds. Everywhere she looked, reptiles hissed at birds, birds swooped on lizards, and insects formed a gray dome, like a veil, around the head of every worker.

“You will find your
malis
most accomplished, madam,” said Cephus Prynne. “I suggest you release them immediately.” There were more gardeners and gardeners’ children and other unspecified staff underfoot than would make up a small American village.

“But I will need their help—” Hannah was an accomplished small-plot gardener from her spell in England. This garden, she realized the moment she saw it, would be her sanity.

“Dear lady, it is a question of their loyalty. They were recruited by your predecessor. They are like dogs. They know only one master, you see.”

“Chief Factor, pardon my ignorance if I find that a most curious way to reward their accomplishments,” said Hannah. “I think they might prove their disloyalty first.”

“They require but one opportunity. Thereafter, it is quite too late.” He bowed and offered up his grotesque little smile. “A friendly warning only, madam.”

“My wife is a tenderhearted woman,” said Gabriel Legge.

“The Company is not in want of tenderheartedness,” said the Chief Factor. “An iron will and a heart of flint, that’s what survives on the Coromandel.”

Hannah noticed a young woman on the upper balcony, busying herself with brass water pots now that her presence had been detected. She was wrapped in what appeared to be a mustard-colored winding-sheet. Her hair was gathered in one long, thick braid that nearly brushed the floor.

In Brookfield, in Stepney and Salem, a house was a barricade to stop encroachment. Outdoors was the prowling ground for Satan and his companions; indoors was furnished, tamed and therefore safe. But the house that she was to live in, like all houses in Fort St. Sebastian, was built to entice crystal-bright tropical starlight, spume-scented breeze, bugs, birds and butterflies through its huge barred windows. There were terraces shiny as marble, balconies made of hardy woods, a flat roof for evening walks—ground level at night being considered unsafe—and turreted parapets. Behind the main house were the gardens, kitchen sheds, servants’ sheds and stables.

Hannah, the new tenant, shuddered. European employers died on duty, or they sailed back home to savor what they had looted. The houses and the servants endured, unless pruned back by prudent management, accommodating to the newest occupants and enlarging their knowledge of human folly and wickedness. She had to admit there was a certain crude wisdom in starting with a clean slate of servants.

Hedges’ residence came with a dozen servants, among them the cook, the maid, the groom and valet and the two peons who had served him half a decade. His furniture was scattered through every room; elaborate pieces, some of which had been brought over from England on East Indiamen, others copied in local woods by adventurous Coromandel cabinetmakers.

Cephus Prynne led Hannah on an inspection tour of the premises while Gabriel supervised the unloading of their baggage. She felt the Chief Factor’s hand, a little too familiarly, on her arm, guiding her up the dark stairwell. Prynne’s voice and bearing suggested he was handing over Henry Hedges’ kingdom and subjects to reign over rather than a rented home to maintain. She concentrated on Hedges’ furniture so she would not worry about the impression she was making on the servant women with their heavy-lidded, judgmental eyes.

The young serving girl with the long braid, whom Prynne indicated was new to the premises, hence untainted by too long a service to Hedges, was named Bhagmati. “Means ‘Gift of God’ or some such,” he muttered. “Hindu. Understands some English. Attends Scripture class. Probably honest, so far as she understands the concept.”

“You are saying I may retain her, then, Chief Factor?”

“Please, dear lady. Cephus.” He laid a cold, reassuring hand over hers. “My intentions are the noblest. If I have experience to share, you may believe those experiences were paid for in hard and bitter currency.”

There were carved rectangular center tables veneered with maple wood and parcel gilt, their tops inlaid with silver strap-work, and gilt-framed mirrors carved with putti, acanthus leaves and floral sprays; pairs of matching cabinets veneered in oyster laburnum and mounted on spiral supports; black japanned chairs and white japanned chests; scriptores veneered with arabesque marquetry and folding tops; walnut armchairs and daybeds with carved rails and cane seats and embossed silver scones and footed silver candlesticks.

“The unfortunate Hedges,” Cephus Prynne began. “He did not know where to stop.”

“In what manner, Chief Factor?”

“Men too long separated from their home country, from, shall I say, the delicate ministrations of a woman … allow their sentiments … to spoil.”

It seemed a heartfelt observation, but she had no idea of its origin, or of its general applicability. He seemed to be drawing his evidence from the rich collection of furnishings. “They become unmanned. Sentiment, luxury … they all gain ascendancy.”

It would require a retinue merely to keep salt spray from pitting the brass and silver, the mildew from attacking the fabrics. Unless the shutters were permanently shut, birds and scorpions and every manner of loathsome creature from outdoors were free to enter.

“A man is judged by the fight that’s in him. He yields, or he resists. Your man, Mr. Gabriel Legge, is battle tested, I presume.”

“He has ofttimes been to sea, Chief Factor.” She followed his lead down the outer, half-covered balcony that Bhagmati had been standing on a few minutes earlier.

“Come, my dear.” The exposed side of the balcony, that part lined with brass pots of flowers, ran past rows of bedrooms, all decently furnished in the local style. At the end of the balcony a crude ladder of ship’s timbers and lashed-together rope thongs lay propped against the inner wall.

Cephus began climbing to the flat roof. Hannah followed. Bhagmati, the serving girl, stood silently at the far end of the balcony.

Indeed, Hannah had climbed to the top of the world. Not only did White Town command the highest land in the region, but Hedges’ house occupied the very pinnacle of the nob. The ocean, broad to its curvature with at least a dozen East Indiamen under full sail, filled the horizon, with the near perspective speckled by fishermen’s boats and one-sail dhows. The warm breeze sought out the last pockets of chill and damp from Hannah’s bones; it was a glorious moment of January sun and offshore breeze, loud jackdaws circling the rooftops. Potted trees even struggled to give off some shade. She closed her eyes, feeling at last that her travels were over.

He moved so silently, so quickly, his arms were around hers before she could catch her balance. His open mouth was trying to kiss her, to close over hers before she could scream, and she could hear his low, guttural threats and promises. “Saucy wench,” she heard, “knowing what’s best for a factor,” and “He’ll be gone, he’ll have his bibis, and your nights—” She struggled free now and pushed him away, and Cephus Prynne reestablished his guise of shabby, inoffensive officiousness, casually looking behind him, before she could scream.

“That gardener! Did I not instruct you to dismiss them all? I’ll have his hide, I saw him!” Cephus Prynne ran to the roof edge and shouted down, “Stop him, stop him, I say.” And he was over the side, down the rope ladder and running down the balcony to the main stairwell before Hannah could catch her breath.