The East Indiaman Read online

  ‘Stop!’ shrieked Sarah but Rose backed away, her lustrous dark eyes shining with a silent exhortation for them to do nothing.

  ‘Who told you that I should be dead?’ she gasped. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘The chief factor… The Company’s president…’ Kite said, his heart beating with the emotion of the moment.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Rose asked, her breasts heaving with emotion. ‘You promise me friendship like he did and then you cast me off…’

  ‘No Rose! No-one here is casting you off. All that I wish to know is why did Mr Cranbrooke say..’

  ‘Cranbrooke? Ah, so, I recall him at Calcutta…’

  ‘He knew all about Josiah…’

  ‘He knows nothing about Josiah,’ Rose said vehemently.

  ‘He spoke of Josiah’s reputation among the merchants,’ Kite pressed patiently, ‘and I need to know more about you for fear that what I do not know compromises me in my attempt to… to…’ Kite was lost for words, but Rose was not listening to any self-motivated explanation.

  ‘You see,’ she cried, ‘you need to know more about me and when you know it, you will not protect me.’

  ‘Rose,’ Sarah broke in, her voice quiet and reasonable. ‘Put down that knife, please, my dear.’ Sarah paused and was rewarded by Rose slowly lowering her hand. Beside her Kite expelled his breath as Sarah resumed her coaxing. ‘All William wishes to know is whether or not to pursue a voyage of gain upon the Malabar coast or to abandon everything here and return to England. We are all lost if he makes the wrong decision, for there is great risk in returning without any profit and, in having acceded to your husband’s wishes you, as his widow, are under some obligation to us.’

  Rose’s eyes closed for a moment and then, when she looked at them again they were bright with tears. ‘Mr Cranbrooke is right: I should be dead. It is a matter of shame that I am not, but Josiah bore me off before I could be burned with my husband.’ She paused, but neither Kite nor Sarah understood the allusion nor thought to ask for any explanation. Sensing this, Rose went on, ‘it is expected of a Hindu wife to accompany her dead husband into the after-life. I was to be a satí, a true and perfect wife, bound to my husband in death as I had been in life but Josiah had conceived a passion for me. It is true, I was not in love with my husband for he was older than myself and it was an arrangement of my parents. Nevertheless, I should not have listened to Josiah and his honeyed words…’

  ‘He took you from your funeral pyre?’ Sarah’s tone was incredulous.

  Rose nodded. ‘And in doing so burned himself so that I was bound to him too.’ Rose hung her head again and her body was wracked by sobs. ‘I lost caste and gained… a new husband…’

  Kite was appalled, for it was clear that if Rose had not wished to marry the man contracted as husband by her parents, she had little liking for the gross and obese Englishman either. For her part, Sarah was contemplating the barbarity of the Hindu rite of suttee with equal disgust.

  ‘Poor Rose…’

  ‘No! Please, that was his name for me,’ she protested and Kite sensed Josiah’s romantic but predictable imagery. ‘It is not my own name!’ the distraught Rose continued, ‘while I was bound to him I endured it: but no longer!’ Again she raised the knife, but Kite took two strides towards her, grabbed her wrist and twisted it. The knife dropped to the deck and he stamped his foot upon it. She fell into his arms and he supported her as she fainted. Her voluptuous body was supple and he caught the scent of her as, in obedience to Sarah, he laid her down upon the palliasse in a sussuration of silk and the faint jangling of her many bracelets. Rising, he looked down at Rose with a sharply unexpected pang of exquisite and adulterous desire as Sarah knelt and slapped Rose’s cheeks to bring her round. Guiltily he knelt beside his wife and, as Rose’s eyes fluttered open, asked in his kindest tone, ‘what is your name, my dear?’

  ‘Yes, tell us,’ said Sarah almost as moved as Kite himself at the strange, pervasive intimacy of this moment.

  For a moment Rose looked from one to another of them and then she held up her hands and, with a complementary spontaneous impulse both Sarah and Kite each clasped one. ‘If you are my true friends, you may call me Nisha.’

  ‘Nisha.’ They both breathed the word and agreed it suited her far, far better than Rose. Slowly Kite relinquished Nisha’s hand and got to his feet. ‘If you are so far fallen from grace, Nisha, could I tempt you with the smallest glass of wine, that we might put this ugly moment behind us all?’

  Slowly Nisha nodded. ‘But only a small one…’

  ‘Of course.’ As Kite withdrew into the adjacent cabin Sarah helped Nisha into a sitting position. As she did so the Indian woman reached up, put her arm round Sarah’s neck and drew her face down to her own. ‘I was not a perfect wife, Sarah, but I shall be a perfect friend,’ and with that she kissed Sarah upon her lips so that as Kite returned with the tray of glasses, his wife was flushed with embarrassment and pleasure as she still held onto Nisha’s hand.

  They drank the wine and under its mellowing they all acknowledged a change in their relationship. Nisha slowly discarded the guilt she had felt instead of grief at Hooker’s murder and which had mixed inextricably with apprehension over her future. Under the unaccustomed influence of the wine she melted in the warmth of her benefactors’ friendship.

  ‘It is a great blasphemy to say so,’ she said, ‘but we three must be together much like the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity. There is you Sarah, who is like Vishnu the Preserver, and you William, you are like Shiva the Destroyer from whom all regeneration must come and to whom we look for our new life…’

  ‘And you Nisha, to whom do you liken yourself?’ Sarah asked, fascinated by this exhibition of a strange religion.

  Nisha shook her head, as though regretting what she suddenly now considered a monstrous, wine-induced blasphemy. ‘No it is too much of a presumption for I have lost caste and must not mention such things.’

  ‘Then you may tell us what is the third deity in your Trinity, surely?’ said Kite, smiling and warming to the shift of mood within the woman and acknowledging the seed of attraction planted in himself.

  ‘Well,’ said Nisha, lowering her eyes, ‘in addition to Vishnu and Shiva, there is Brahma, the Creator…’

  ‘Ahhh, I see…’ grinned Kite, ‘and you could help us, could you not Nisha?’ he asked, adopting her real name with as much ease as had Sarah.

  ‘Of course. I can tell you whether the Topass wishes to cheat you with his interpreting,’ she said with a laugh.

  ‘Ah, that is true,’ said Sarah.

  ‘And I may also be of assistance when you decide what to do, William.’ Nisha added, meeting Kite’s smile with a new happiness in her expression that seemed to add a strange beauty to her features so that the transformation from Rose to Nisha was given an especial significance.

  Inconsequentially insinuating its way into his mind came a disturbing thought as he wondered whether his own first wife had ever resented the Latin name he had given her. For a moment the thought troubled him. He sighed; he was too old to linger over the regrets his life sometimes seemed to consist of. He finished his wine and stood up, smiling.

  ‘I must resume my watch. There is much to be considered and I shall speak of it later. Let us dine together when we anchor on our return to Bombay, and mark our new partnership.’

  And with that Kite left the two women alone together.

  * * *

  On deck he was confronted by McClusky who still stood betwixt the helmsman and the binnacle. ‘Well Mr McClusky, is all well?’

  ‘Yes, Captain Kite, except for this fellow here,’ McClusky nodded. Turning forward Kite saw the pallid face of Muckbul Ali Rahman, the Topass who rolled his head miserably and made shy gestures of supplication.

  ‘Captain Sahib, are we returning to Bombay? I have a wife…’

  ‘Ah, I apologise, I had forgotten you are not a seaman…’

  ‘But that is not true sir!’ Rahman proteste
d. ‘It is only that I have not been to sea on so small a ship as this one and I am wondering that you must be a man of greatness to come so far as from England in this schooner.’

  Kite ignored the compliment. ‘Then what sort of ships have you been to sea on, Topass Rahman? Surely the native boats…’

  ‘No native boat, Sahib! No, no! I have been Number One sea-cunny to Captain Bury in the Shah Jehangir, a great ship, Kite Sahib. A man is not so sick on a big ship.’ Rahman pulled a face but Kite was frowning, hardly daring to believe that he might have just stumbled on some good luck.

  ‘You were quartermaster in an Indiaman?’

  Rahman shook his head. ‘Oh, no, Sahib, not an East Indiaman, but a Country-Wallah. A ship of nine hundred tons, Sahib, as big as an Indiaman, but owned by Banajee and Buchanan Company of Bombay.’

  The name Buchanan rang a bell in Kite’s mind. ‘And what can you tell me of this company, Topass?’

  ‘He is very much changed Sahib, Buchanan Sahib is dead and Bomanjee Pestonjee Banajee is grown old. He has no sons and is sad. Now he has only three ships.’

  ‘And Captain Grindley commands one of them, does he not?’ said Kite recalling his conversation with Hooker and recollecting the news of Buchanan’s death and the reason for the needed capital.

  ‘Captain Grindley is not the best master on the Malabar coast, Captain Kite, and Pestonjee Banajee is too much old man now.’

  ‘Did you know that Mr Hooker was intending to go into business with this Mr Banajee?’

  ‘Oh yes. Hooker Sahib told me so himself.’

  ‘And what else did Mr Hooker tell you?’

  Rahman shrugged. ‘Only that I was to assist you with your schooner, Sahib.’

  ‘And nothing more?’

  ‘No Sahib, not before he was dead.’

  ‘And you are a good sea-cunny, are you, Topass?’

  ‘The best, Sahib.’

  ‘And now that Mr Hooker is dead, what shall you do?’

  Rahman looked shocked and he clapped his hand to his breast. ‘Sahib, I am bound to you until you have no requirement for my services as a Topass.’

  ‘What about your services as a sea-cunny?’

  ‘Is that what the Sahib wishes?’

  ‘Perhaps. And suppose the Sahib also wished his Topass to speak Chinese?’

  Rahman cocked his head on one side and then smiled. ‘It can be done, Sahib.’

  ‘Very well. We shall talk of this some more.’

  Rahman bowed. ‘As the Sahib wishes,’ he said, withdrawing forward and a few minutes later hunkering down under the shadow of the starboard boat on its chocks amidships.

  And at last, relieving McClusky, Kite fell to pacing the weather rail, his brain racing.

  Chapter Twelve

  The Interloper

  ‘Captain Kite, may I introduce Captain Grindley of the Carnatic, Country ship.’ President Cranbrooke said as Kite was shown into his office and two men rose to meet him.

  Kite shook hands with a short, yet powerful man with a disagreeably petulant face caused by too protruberant a lower lip which jutted out and hung over a small, pointed chin. This lower lip, Kite observed with some distaste, was kept perpetually moist, even in the heat, by a frequent and nervous application of Grindley’s tongue. The compulsive habit made Kite think of a lizard.

  ‘Your servant, Captain Grindley,’ he said, adding, ‘if I intrude, gentlemen, please do not hesitate to tell me. I am content to wait.’ Kite had no wish to be rushed in his interview with Cranbrooke and most certainly did not wish to discuss his proposition with a third party present.

  ‘Please take a seat.’ Reluctantly Kite took up the offer and the other two men subsided in the chairs they had vacated as he had entered. ‘You are not intruding at all, Kite,’ Cranbrooke ran on. ‘As a matter-of-fact your late partner was the subject of our discussion.’

  ‘He was not my partner, sir,’ Kite dissembled gently, ‘rather my employer, since I undertook the commission of bringing him hither in my own vessel.’

  ‘Then he paid you?’ Grindley said, speaking for the first time. Kite noticed his voice seemed cracked, as though he suffered some defect in the throat. Curiously, it added to the impression of Grindley being reptilian.

  ‘He was to have paid me.’

  ‘He was to have paid me too,’ grumbled Grindley.

  ‘He was to have invested in your voyage, surely Captain Grindley. That is not quite the same.’

  ‘Well, that may be so,’ broke in Cranbrooke, ‘but it seems our Mr Hooker has, not uncharacteristically, disappointed both of your expectations. Captain Grindley, having suffered the death of his principal, Mr Buchanan, must now risk his voyage under-capitalised, while you, Captain Kite, if you will excuse my presumption, would seem to be cast on an unfamiliar shore with a similar lack of funds.’

  Kite nodded. ‘That is so, sir,’ he said warily, wondering where the conversation was leading to, for there was little doubt Cranbrooke was a man speaking with a purpose. Instead, Kite sought to turn the conversation away from himself and, recollecting the Topass Rahman’s allusion to a Mr Buchanan, saw one means by which he might do this and, at the same time, provoke Grindley into leaving.

  ‘But as I understand it, and this may be a presumption on my part, Captain Grindley’s vessel is co-owned by a certain Pestonjee Banajee.’

  ‘How the devil d’you know that?’ croaked Grindley.

  ‘I am learning the ways of the East, sir,’ Kite said with what he hoped was a disarming smile, ‘from a topass whom Hooker engaged to assist me in the management of my schooner whilst we are in Bombay.’

  ‘Muckbul Ali Rahman,’ Cranbrooke said with a meaningful look at Grindley.

  ‘Do you have anything against this man, sir?’ Kite asked sharply. ‘If so, I should be obliged if you would let me know.’

  ‘No, not at all. It argues Hooker’s shrewdness. Ali Rahman is one of the best interpreters in Bombay and is a man of proven intelligence and integrity. I believe he was formerly a first-rate sea-cunny, was he not Grindley?’

  Grindley nodded. ‘Yes, he was acknowledged to be so among the Country commanders, certainly. He left sea-going employment some three or so years ago after contracting a marriage and has eked out a precarious existence as a topass ever since.’

  ‘Well, let us come to the matter-in-hand, gentlemen,’ Cranbrooke said, turning to Kite who realised his allusion to the Indian part-owner of the Carnatic had been neatly side-stepped. ‘As it happens, Captain Kite, and in view of your circumstances, Captain Grindley has made a suggestion that might appeal to you and kill two birds with a single sling-shot.’

  ‘He has?’ Kite showed his surprise.

  ‘Your schooner, Captain,’ Grindley broke in, ‘looks a fine, fast craft. What was she built as? A privateer-cum-slaver? Ah, I thought so. Well, she would find a ready market and realise you some capital… No, please hear what I have to say before you comment. Now, having solved the problem of your immediate fiscal needs, I am in addition to being under capitalised, in need of one officer. It is not difficult to find a suitable man, but if you were to accept the post as chief officer and were to invest in our voyage, I will ensure that you undertake few of the duties of the rank since I shall continue to rely upon the officer presently in that post for our day-to-day routine. The benefits which will accrue to us both would be considerable if our voyage is a success and I see no reason why it should not be if we sail without delay. There are rumours of reinforcements to the French squadron at Île de France, but there is little risk if we take the current favourable monsoon across the Bay of Bengal so, what do you say, Captain Kite?’

  After his initial protest at the notion of selling Spitfire and investing the surplus profit in the Carnatic’s voyage, Kite had held his peace, curious to hear what Grindley, and by implication Cranbrooke, had to propose. Now he was able to non-plus them both.

  ‘It seems hardly fair to the officer presently incumbent,’ he remarked casually. ‘Besides,
what provision have you made in this plan for my wife, Captain Grindley?’

  ‘Your wife, sir? You have your wife on board?’

  ‘Aye, and my wife’s companion?’

  ‘Good Lord,’ Cranbrooke murmured.

  ‘You have two women aboard that schooner of yours?’ Grindley was astonished.

  Kite inclined his head, an amused smile playing round the corner of his mouth as he rose to his feet. ‘Thank you for your kind offer, gentlemen, but I was not intending to sell the Spitfire. You are right to remark upon her speed, however, and I was therefore mindful of loading a cargo of my own. Indeed sir,’ and Kite turned towards the President, ‘I was hoping to solicit your advice in the matter.’

  ‘Please remain a moment, Captain,’ Cranbrooke insisted and Kite sat down again.

  ‘And what were you intending to load, Captain Kite?’ Grindley asked in a tone of low apprehension.

  ‘Well opium, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ breathed Grindley, his face setting in a mask of suppressed fury.

  ‘I see,’ said Cranbrooke. ‘Well, of course, there is little we can do to prevent you, Captain.’

  ‘Prevent me? Why should you wish to prevent me?’ Kite asked, genuinely surprised.’

  ‘A surplus of such a delicate commodity depresses the market, Captain,’ Grindley said as though teaching a child.

  ‘Surplus? I thought the market inexhaustible. Ah, but I should arrive before yourself, is that it?’

  ‘It is entirely possible, if you do not wreck yourself in the China Seas.’

  ‘But surely the capacity of my schooner poses no threat to a ship the size of the Carnatic. She must measure all of nine hundred tons…’

  ‘She exceeds one thousand, but that is not the point, the point is we should consider you an interloper.’

  ‘And what precisely is an interloper?’ Kite asked, affecting total ignorance.

  Grindley sighed. ‘You see, Captain Kite, you know nothing of our ways on this coast.’

  ‘An interloper, Captain Kite,’ Cranbrooke explained, breaking in on Grindley’s patronising, ‘is a trader who breaks the monopoly. As you know the Honourable Company has the chartered right to trade between Great Britain and India. Here, in India, it licenses what we refer to as “the Country trade” carried out in locally built ships like Captain Grindley’s Carnatic which are free to carry goods between India, Pegu, Sumatra, the Malay ports and China, but must perforce tranship any bound for Europe into the Company’s Indiamen. There are those who, under the device of a flag other than their own, circumvent these regulations and, reprehensibly enough many of these adventurers are Englishmen and Scotchmen…’