The East Indiaman Read online

  ‘That is sad. Were they sons or daughters?’

  ‘Both sons.’

  ‘And you have had no children with Memsahib?’

  ‘A daughter; she too died.’

  ‘You are like Captain Glasscock.’

  ‘But you,’ Kite said, eager to divert the conversation from its lugubrious channel, ‘you have many children and are a happy man who does not have to go to sea again…’

  ‘Except to escape my children and my wife’s mother,’ Rahman said with a chuckle.

  ‘Ah yes, I had forgot.’

  The two men laughed companionably and Kite returned his attention to the chart. ‘Well, now do you explain once more the procedures for bribing the local, what do you call them? Man….?’

  ‘Mandarins. Those who act as the imperial shaw-bunders, the customs-officers of the emperor who may be bought for payments of cum-shaw in cash.’

  ‘Cash being money?’

  Rahman nodded. ‘Yes, and Kite Sahib, please trust Muckbul Ali Rahman to negotiate for you. You are inexperienced and these men will keep you dangling like a fish on a line so that, knowing the English fan-kwei are impatient if they do not get their own way, force up the price of the cum-shaw until you will pay much more than you need in order to sell your cargo. As you know the import of opium is prohibited, so we can deposit our cargo on account in the Company’s hulks moored for the purpose of acting as floating warehouses. In due season, when your cargo is sold, you will be paid and it is customary to deposit the sum in the Company’s treasury in Canton in exchange for bills to be drawn on London. In this way the Company raises capital to fund its own homeward cargoes, for the Chinese want little from England and in truth buy only cotton and opium, both of which are coming from India.

  ‘For most English and Scotch merchants, and the masters and officers trading on their own account in the ships of the Company or the Bombay or Calcutta Country vessels, the bills of exchange provide a safe way of remitting their profits to London, thus avoiding any trouble with the monopoly of the Company…’

  ‘But you have just said the Company needs the capital in Canton,’ Kite said, confused.

  Rahman grinned. ‘It is what I think I have heard English officers call “a matter of expedience.’

  ‘I see,’ Kite acknowledged, smiling back. ‘Well, well.’

  As the Spitfire sailed north Kite had good reason to be pleased with his circumstances. The discovery of Rahman as a man of many facets was as gratifying as the fact that Kite liked the Indian; they worked well together and Kite had asked him aft, to dine at the cabin table, along with Harper. The invitation had made it socially necessary to include McClusky too, and although one of the officers was always absent on deck, the company grew convivial, with Sarah and Nisha holding a dignifying sway over their proceedings. Oddly, although the Spitfire proceeded as a barely legitimate Country trader, largely protected by Kite’s letter of marque and reprisal from prosecution as an interloper, it was only now, long after Hooker’s death, that their mood seemed to reflect the Spitfire’s original purpose on leaving Liverpool, that of a yacht.

  Of course, they were all warmed by the prospect of a successful voyage, a prospect which seemed assured by the quantity of opium in their small hold, but there were other influences too. Nisha, who had been rescued from the self-immolation of suttee on the death of her first husband by the man who subsequently became her second, was now rescued from grief by a man who had become her third in all but law.

  Harper’s huge frame was matched by a sexual appetite and while he could not indulge this in full during their passage, there were moments when passion overcame both propriety and prudence. Although Kite had had the temporary bulkhead that had been installed to provide private accommodation for Hooker and his wife removed, Nisha had a corner of the cabin which could be curtained off. Moreover Sarah and she had become intimate friends, sharing more than Maggie as a maid, so that Sarah was disposed to absent herself upon occasions when Kite was occupied on deck, allowing the two lovers intense, if brief moments alone.

  Only McClusky seemed left out of things. He had avoided indulgence in Bombay, Kite having drawn upon the former clerk’s familiarity with a ship’s business to assign the more tedious formalities of the Spitfire to him. It had therefore been McClusky who attended the shaw-bunder at the Custom House, and McClusky who had kept the books in the transaction that, through the mediation of Muckbul Ali Rahman, had secured them the cargo of opium. Although this had in reality amounted to very little in the way of labour, it had taken a deal of time, time which McClusky had spent in reflection. He possessed the appetites usual to a vigorous young man and had long ago conceived a desire for the older but elegant Mrs Kite. On a long voyage, plain women become beautiful and beautiful women younger. During his sojourn in Bombay, less demanding than being at sea, McClusky had the leisure to begin to cast her husband in a new light, not that of benefactor, but of obstacle. Captain Kite seemed to be manipulating McClusky, taking advantage of the clerk’s skills. McClusky, inexperienced in the sea-life had subconsciously succumbed to a shifting of his personal perceptions occasioned by these changed circumstances.

  Since leaving Bombay, however, he had had yet again to reinterpret his situation. In the first place it was clear that Captain Kite desired him to take a greater part in the running of the ship and that, instead of McClusky occupying a rather undistinguished role as captain’s clerk and occasional under-officer trusted with such sedentary duties as anchor-watches, he found himself honoured with a deck-watch at sea. Mclusky’s lack of charity soon ascribed this to Kite’s wanton desire to spend more time with his wife, reprehensible to McClusky who, in the frustration of his own desire, cast Kite in the role of sybarite, seeing him in his mind’s eye lolling on the breasts of two women in that after cabin, though Zach Harper was too besotted a fool to notice!

  But McClusky’s logic was confused by two other influences. In the first place it was clear that he, McClusky, could indeed rise socially on the shoulders of Kite’s bounty. This conflicted with his strong want of Sarah, but the repression men of McClusky’s middling class were subjected too, though painfully miserable, was supportable. Nor was he the only person to perceive an opportunity for social advancement. The ladies’ maid Maggie had in turn her own designs on McClusky. In the first weeks of the voyage when she had been laid low by sea-sickness, Maggie had almost forgotten her flirtation with Jack Bow. Since sailing he had been sent forward to learn the business of a seaman and, odd to say on such a small vessel, she had scarcely seen him to speak to for weeks. When they had met he had seemed like a stranger, no longer the cheeky lad but a laughing young man whom Maggie now saw as dangerous, particularly after she had again escaped pregnancy by him, following a moment of weakness.

  Once or twice since Bow had been sent aft on an errand and had cornered her in the pantry. Fondling her breasts he had tried to lift her skirt and petticoat but she no longer felt the same about him. Suddenly there loomed the great fear of pregnancy born of the uncertainty of being tossed about on the vast ocean. What happened to a girl out here if she fell for a baby? After her narrow escape and the horrors of her miscarriage, the thought terrified Maggie with a disproportionate and phobic persistence. Rejected, Bow cast her aside. His new friends told him there were women aplenty in the world and his natural optimistic adaptability made light of this. Jack had found the prediction of his ship-mates all too true in Bombay and, as the Spitfire headed north for the coast of China, undeterred by the venereal miseries of some of his former advisers, he contemplated with relish the differences he had heard claimed for the ladies of the far distant orient.

  Maggie, in the meantime, had adopted a far more serious cast of mind. For her, the experience of miscarrying, the death of Harper and the conversations of the two ladies upon whom she waited, had awakened desires of another sort. The purposes of matrimony, it now occurred to her, were greater than she had at first thought. As an intelligent person, Maggie realised that t
he hermetic world of the schooner offered her a unique opportunity. It was true her choice was limited. Harper, whom at first had fascinated her by his physique and energy, had taken rather more than a mere fancy to the Widow Hooker. Maggie’s reaction to this liaison was ambivalent for, while she recognised the Indian lady’s claim to indisputable gentility, she was discomfited by the thought of Harper’s splendid body in close proximity to the darker skin of Nisha. It was at this point that she overheard Captain Kite discussing McClusky’s potential as an officer, albeit under the watchful eye of the bosun who could make up in forehandedness what McClusky lacked in experience. McClusky’s star, it appeared, was rising and she had always had a distant liking for the young clerk’s appearance. Socially, of course, he was already above her, but Maggie was not slow to see that his choice of women was far more strictly limited than her own of men. Herein she scented the advantage of a proximity which might lead to concupiscent propinquity.

  To these Machiavellian thoughts must be added the workings of nature. Close association with Sarah and Nisha had induced in Maggie a graceful mimickry that was devoid of pretension. In assuming some of the mannerisms of her twin mistresses along with some of their cast-off clothes, Maggie’s own appearance had been transformed. While Jack dismissed her as ‘stuck-up’ there were men in their hammocks forward who thought of Maggie in disreputable poses as they drifted between waking and sleep. Undivided by any differences in rank, McClusky increasingly noticed the young woman. Contemplating her attending Sarah and Nisha one morning, the wisdom of the old proverb struck him with amusing aptitude: a bird in the hand was unquestionably better than two in the bush!

  Thus it was that, as the schooner raced north through the South China Sea, staring the flying fishes and the dolphins from the blue waters, the days seemed for many to be idyllic.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Paracels

  ‘In three days at the most, my darling, we shall be in sight of the coast of China.’

  Kite looked up from the table upon which he had unrolled the chart as Sarah, pushing her hair back over her head, rose from the bed roll on the deck which they had found more comfortable than their cot in the warmer latitudes. She wore only one of her men’s shirts and Kite held out his arms and embraced her. They kissed and then Sarah turned to look down at the chart. She saw the group of soundings about which she had heard her husband and Rahman speak, and to the west the shoal-strewn archipelago of the Paracels.

  ‘Three days,’ she mused, still clouded by sleep.

  ‘Four at the most. We shall be sounding for the bank this very forenoon.’

  ‘Ahh…’ They were kissing again, Kite feeling a thrusting tumescence as Sarah pressed herself against his lean body, when the rasp of curtain rings ended their intimacy.

  ‘Oh, I am sorry…’

  ‘It is all right Nisha,’ Sarah said quickly, throwing a quick smile at her friend. ‘William has to take soundings this morning.’ And then, knowing Nisha did not understand the nautical allusion, she stared into her husband’s eyes and in a low voice jerked herself against him and murmured, ‘but he is not dropping his lead into this sea.’

  She hissed the word as a single, suggestive consonant and Kite grinned at the pun. ‘Witch!’ he countered as she pulled herself away and, short-tails flapping, danced away across the cabin. Kite caught Nisha’s look as he turned away to adjust himself. Beyond the stern windows the wake drew out astern and he was aware of a low swell rolling in from the east. He had not noticed it an hour earlier, when he had been on deck at dawn. Since removing himself from the watch-keeping roster, it had become his invariable habit to be on deck at dusk and dawn, to observe any changed circumstances which might threaten the Spitfire during the coming hours. There lurked in his mind a fear that daylight would, one day, reveal the presence of the Alcmene. Bold and successful though his escape from the French frigate had been, Kite was too experienced a seaman, not to know that his stratagem had been blessed by providence. A man did not enjoy such luck twice in a month.

  He turned back to the cabin. The light reflected from the sea astern danced upon the deckhead and, behind her own half-drawn curtain, the top of Sarah’s head was obscured by her hands as they drew off the shirt. He made to roll up the chart when Nisha caught his eye. She had not retired behind her own curtain and lay back on her pillow, watching Sarah. It occurred to Kite that, from where she lay, Nisha could see Sarah’s entire body and the expression she wore was one of intense, almost ecstatic concentration.

  For a moment Kite felt a shock, not of surprise, but of acknowledgement of his own stupidity, as though the obvious had only just been made clear to him. Sarah had pulled the curtain sufficiently to maintain a degree of propriety in respect of her husband, but surely she was not insensible of the fact that she was visible to Nisha?

  He must have started, for he lifted one of the weights holding the chart and it rolled up. Startled from her reverie by the sudden movement, Nisha lost her wrapt concentration on Sarah, and became aware of Kite’s gaze upon her. In a gesture of extreme longing, Nisha stretched out a bangled arm and said in a low and intense whisper, ‘she is so lovely, William.’

  Kite felt as if the breath was being held in his throat by some extraordinary force. A strong compulsion filled his body so that it seemed to expand, as though the trapped air was raised to some high and motivating temperature. Kite felt himself trembling, his lust suddenly re-aroused. He was rigid with desire. Sarah must have caught something of this atmospheric tension, for she pulled aside the remains of the curtain and stared from one to another of them. Slowly her face broke into a wide smile and she exposed herself shamelessly before them both. Kite felt the blood flush his face but Nisha was the first to move. She drew her legs from her sheets and, slipping out of the light sarong she wore about herself at night until she too was naked, she crawled across the cabin deck towards Sarah.

  Kite began to move round the table as Sarah knelt to receive the approaching Nisha. He was suffused with the thunder of his racing blood and tearing at his breeches, he released himself. For a moment he thought of Harper and the mate’s prior claim on the brown and trembling rump before him, but then Sarah, making a small whimpering sound, beckoned him. her smile had gone and she wore an expression that Kite had never before seen on a woman’s face.

  Enticed beyond reason, Kite moved forward.

  But he stumbled as the Spitfire rolled and he tottered ridiculously, one hand fumbling at his member. Then there was a thunderous knock at the cabin door and a voice called, ‘Kite Sahib, Kite Sahib, come on deck! Please come on deck!’

  There was a moment’s hiatus, a dawning and rapid descent on Kite’s part to the thrusting intrusion of a terrible reality. Hurriedly readjusting his breeches and sparing only a glance at the two startled women as they knelt in each others’ arms, surprised and now embarrassed, he made for the door. Instinctively he reached for his telescope on the rack beside it. Appalled, almost frightened by what had happened, he felt an over-whelming relief that Rahman had not thrown the door open as Harper or McClusky would undoubtedly have done on raising such an alarm.

  Outside the adjacent pantry he knocked Maggie aside as Spitfire gave another heavy roll. Her tray with its coffee pot and cups hit the deck with a clatter and the crash of breaking china. Briefly the thought crossed his mind that she too, in going about her morning routine, had been about to interrupt the weird tryst in the cabin. They must have been mad!

  Grasping the rails at the foot of the companionway he felt the deck heel again, and then stay at a sharpen inclination to larboard. Pounding up the companionway he emerged into the sunshine on deck. Spitfire was driving along at a spanking pace, water spurted in below the lower rims of the gun ports and washed about the lee waterways. Bracing himself Kite stared about him.

  ‘Where away?’ he called, bringing up his glass and staring round the horizon.

  ‘What Sahib?’

  ‘Where’s the enemy sail?’ Kite roared, spinni
ng on his heel and seeking Rahman.

  ‘There is no sail, Kite Sahib…’ Rahman looked surprised as he stood on the weather rail abreast the mainmast, holding a shroud as Kite sought to master himself. Confused and guilty, Kite’s brain was in a whirl. He stood almost stupidly casting ineffectually about himself, his shirt tails untucked, a man clearly called from the privy for all the world to see the haste and discomfiture of his summons.

  ‘Then why did you call me…?’ he began, but Rahman realised the cause of Kite’s confusion.

  ‘It is that, Kite Sahib, see there…’ Rahman gestured at the horizon and added, ‘and this swell, it is getting bigger and bigger all the time. And the wind, it is freshening.’

  It was then that it dawned upon Kite that it was something more than the sudden change in the wind that had alarmed Rahman. Boiling along the rim of the world to the east was a huge mass of cloud that seemed to rise with a menacing foreboding, an inexorable approach that caused poor Kite’s heart to thunder again. But now there was no sensuous overwhelming of the rational, no ineluctable submission to deep and primitive pleasures. Instead he felt another primeval impulse, the only instinct stronger than the ravening desire to copulate: fear.

  There was a charge in the very air they breathed and, in an instant of self-exculpation Kite attributed their strange behaviour in the cabin below to this atmospheric electricity. The next moment he fought aside this fancy and forced his brain into a logical channel. The strange, numbing energy came with a thin veil of cloud, through which the sun shone encircled by a halo. This was but a precursor of the massive disturbance boiling up over the horizon to the east.

  ‘Hurricane!’ he called, giving voice to his comprehension. At the same minute Rahman spoke of the phenomenon called by the Chinese taifun: the great wind. Kite had endured one before, in the very same schooner, and the poor Spitfire had been severely battered. It was not an experience that he wished to repeat, but there was no time to repine. Instead he looked quickly about the deck and then shouted out, ‘all hands on deck! Mister Rahman, we must secure the ship. Have your watch lay aloft and get the square topsails off her and then we will bring her up into the wind and heave-to.’