A Far Horizon (6 page)

Sati began to skip faster. Her head was full of whispers. Durga flamed within her until it felt as if the flesh fell away from her bones. On and on she whirled. The walls of the room disappeared. Durga was rapturous and shrieked with laughter, feeding on her own wildness. With a sudden twist Durga reached down and pulled up from the depths of Sati a further stream of foul words. Words absorbed from her mother’s and grandmother’s bawdy collections slipped from Sati’s mouth like silk pulled through a ring. She chanted them like an invocation, her eyes riveted on her mother. All the words were aimed at Rita like a constant battering of small, sharp stones.
Hate
her.
Hate
her.
Durga’s laughter swelled in her head, like the beat of a drum with which she must keep pace.
Hate
her.
Hate
her.

Unaware of this silent drum, satisfaction grew on Rita’s face as she watched her daughter dance about. The filth that poured from Sati’s lips was as familiar to her as the raw taste of
paan
in her mouth, and lacking in true impact. To Rita things appeared to be going well. She turned and saw at once that she was mistaken in her judgement. In
Mrs Drake’s face the colour was high, and a strange light burned in her eyes.

‘See, she has made the spirits come, just as I told you,’ Rita assured her.

‘This is not how it was the other night. You told her to pretend.’ Emily took hold of herself. The memories of shamans and her own yearnings should not blind her to the facts. She tried not to hear the vulgar words unreeling from the girl.

‘That is not correct. The spirits have hold of her, just like a puppet. How otherwise could a young girl know so many bad words?’ Rita protested loudly.

All Emily wanted now was for this harlot to leave. Rumour had it that half the men in Calcutta had lain between her legs. She only hoped Roger was not amongst them. But anything was possible and she was too tired to care. Life was like a narrow tunnel with the wind behind her, blowing her on.

‘Go, please.’ Emily turned to the window, her eyes on the Hoogly. She must free herself from the inexplicable hold the girl seemed to have on her. She had been drawn into the imaginings of an unstable child.

‘Go? The girl brings your dead sister to you and you ask her to go?’ Rita exploded. Anger gave her the courage to despise the Governor’s wife.

As she spoke there was a crash. Sati had whirled into a Chinese vase perched on a marble base. She sat splayed on the floor, fragments of china about her. Rita ran to her but Sati shook herself free of her mother and dabbed at a cut on her wrist. The anger was hot in her face and her eyes were wild and liquid. Emily watched from a few feet away. She made no attempt to go near the girl. Sati was not the exhausted creature of the other night, drained of normal life. It took all Emily’s strength to battle with the shame of knowing that she had been taken in by impostors. And yet confusion still filled her. A forgotten vein had opened within her. She stared at Sati’s bent head as she sucked at the hurt on her wrist. Even now something
about the girl cut through her anger and left her perplexed. When she looked at Sati she was filled with regret. The mother was another matter: gold-digging Black Town trash. She rang for the servants.

‘See to them, a bandage, refreshments, whatever they need, then escort them out,’ Emily instructed when a bearer entered, hardening herself and turning away.

‘Give some money for her effort. We are coming so far, paying for a palanquin, exhausting ourselves for you. It is taking everything from her to summon up the spiritis. They feed on her, drain her dry.’ Rita’s voice flapped about hysterically.

Emily nodded and left the room, returning with some coins.

*

Even as they departed, Emily’s mind refused to quieten down. She imagined the girl seated in a palanquin, imagined her journey on the road as Fort William grew gradually distant. Now, about her, the room was silent, nothing intuitive beckoned, no powerful residue remained. And yet her eyes still turned over shadows, seeking what lay behind. The girl’s absence seemed only to heighten her presence in some unfathomable way. Why should she follow where the girl led? Why did the wildness of her face during that strange rhythmic dance not fade from her mind? She was filled by a sense of loss.

Yet even as she settled in a chair she saw that whirling, instinctual being, her skirts full, her hair blowing free, her chant a rhythm from the past, disembodied yet immediate. The root of light and the coil of darkness were centred within the girl. Emily knew there was also a place within herself where that same instinctual force resided. She understood her longing now, and her sense of loss.

The sounds of the fort and of the town came distantly to Emily. The lowered tatties dripped from their frequent dousing of water but failed to cool the high-ceilinged room. From her chair Emily stared at the river beyond the bougainvillaea balcony. Upon the water floated barges stacked with hay, rice or animals. A large raft ferried crowds of people back and forth. Great Indiamen were anchored in midstream and pleasure boats floated nearby. Corpses, discarded as
easily as empty cocoons, also made their journey with the river to the distant sea. And there was something indefinable about the
swift-running
Hoogly, chasing towards its death and rebirth beyond a far horizon. There was no piety or profanity that the river did not know, and it treated both equally. It absorbed the ashes of murderers and witnessed birth on its banks. This wisdom it finally spilled into the sea. In heretical moments Emily sometimes thought God could well take the shape of the sea. She drew more strength from the river than from any church sermon, although she admitted this to no one. Beneath the river ran a silence deeper than the ocean that she listened to each day.

She had not always been like this. Once her blood had coursed through her like the river, with the same longing for the wild. Now, in the mirror she hated to acknowledge her face, marked by lines of ennui and a miserable existence. She still saw the nut-coloured skin and bare feet of an earlier creature. Six years of marriage had turned her from a defiant brown woman into an ethereal ghost. At these thoughts a sense of mourning filled her. Not a shadow remained of that earlier woman; it was impossible to know where she hid. It was enough now to know she did not love her husband, that in her mind he still belonged to Jane. She felt a kindness for him, but little more. For days they barely spoke. He relieved his frustrations in the grog houses, which did not help his reputation. She envied the luxury of his easy relief while she remained locked in herself. Duty calcified her.

Emily had grown up near Bombay on a large indigo farm that her father, John Coates, managed for the Company. The English population was negligible in the nearby town and Mr Coates was absent for weeks at a time. This had been a depressive weight upon her mother, who never ventured beyond her own malaise or the shadowy rooms that held her. The proper care of her daughters defeated her. It was the ayah, Parvati, who played the role of mother. It was to her that Emily ran after a fall, it was she who dispelled a fear of the dark even as her tales of gods and monsters sank easily into
Emily’s mind. And Emily had played with Parvati’s own children as if they were her kin. Their mother’s thin pleas had pulled dutiful Jane to her side, but had meant nothing to headstrong Emily. Jane had tended their mother, embroidered, read and played the pianoforte. At her mother’s side she had learned thrift, how to deal with thieving servants and keep an eye on the stores. She was five years older than Emily, from whom no such responsibility was required.

Some learning had been necessary, so their mother had roused herself to teach. Intermittently there had been governesses but nobody stayed for long. Emily had spent much of her childhood running wild in the sun with Parvati’s children, only slightly lighter in hue than they. On the banks of the river she had watched the fishermen bring in their catch, her legs scratched by thorns, her feet bare and callused. She had thrived on the food in the servants’ quarters and spoken the rough lilt of their tongue. On the banks of streams she had made whistles from leaves, climbed trees for mangoes and green almonds, cleaned her teeth chewing a stick of
neem.
Under the trees she had ripped off her skirts and run about in her shift, free to trap fish in her long-fingered hands. The sunset had flamed in her eyes as it lit the river. In those days her soul had run free. It had been easier for her mother to let her go than to find the stick of discipline. During her father’s brief periods at home he had seen Emily for mere moments. All he had complained about was the state of her complexion.

Emily was fifteen when their mother died, Jane a mature twenty. It soon struck Mr Coates that an indigo farm was no place to bring up young women, and that Jane was already beyond marriageable age with no suitable man in sight. She was twenty-two by the time Roger Drake appeared.

He came to assess the farm for the Company. On his arrival Mr Coates began to woo himself a son-in-law. From the point of view of Roger Drake, the financial terms of Jane’s marriage settlement were what he immediately needed. His future bride was plain, but he kept to the bargain. Yet against his will his eyes at times wandered to the
sun-streaked sister, whose body struck restless postures. She held his gaze boldly, unafraid.

After the marriage, Emily had accompanied Jane and her husband back to Bombay. Jane had insisted her sister live with them; there were eligible men on the loose in Bombay that Emily might snare. They knew besides that their father kept the company of an Indian woman, set up in a home of her own with a brood of his half-caste children. He preferred to spend his time there, and was glad responsibility for his daughter now rested with Roger Drake. The sisters had taken Parvati with them, for her family was grown.

From the beginning the marriage was a tepid affair. The convenience of the arrangement was all that held it together. Soon, as if by silent agreement, Roger Drake crept into Emily’s bed, leaving his frigid but dutiful wife. Brown-skinned Emily, her colour now fading beneath a wealth of petticoats, could still burst at a touch into wildness, however coarse that touch might be. She was heedless to anything but her own life force. Now, too late, she knew Roger was but the mirror in which she had seen herself. From the
high-ceilinged
rooms of Fort William Emily stared at the fast-flowing river.

*

Rita Demonteguy hailed a palanquin from a group waiting outside the Governor’s house. The runners heaved themselves up from where they squatted, hawking and spitting red betel nut juice. Rita climbed first into the palanquin, Sati fitting herself as best she could into the remaining space.

‘So clever you are. Because of you, one more time I am insulted in front of White Town people. That Mrs Drake will tell everyone about us,’ Rita grumbled as they left Fort William.

Despite her disappointment, Rita was aware the spirits had deserted her daughter and left her bobbing helplessly like a cork upon the waves. It did not do to play too clever with the supernatural. Rita swallowed in trepidation.

‘I have a headache. I need
paan
,’
she announced as they passed out of Fort William. ‘Find a
paanwallah
,’
she instructed the runners.

They stopped a short distance later along the fort walls where an old man sat with his leaves and condiments. He parcelled ingredients neatly into a leaf and handed the
paan
into the palanquin. Rita ordered the runners to proceed and leaned back in the litter, mulching the
paan
against her cheek, where it made an unsightly bulge. She could not do this when her husband was around. He objected to the aromatic smell and the unsightly manner in which the betel nut stained her mouth. He sulked for hours if he caught her at it and demanded that she unlearn her ways. The tangy fragrance of the
paan
soon filled the palanquin and Rita revived. As her energy returned, the sight of her daughter, bunched up beside her in the swaying litter, irritated her once more. That self-contained
expression
, those critical eyes, connecting to silent thoughts, disturbed her. There was no way of knowing what went on in Sati’s head. And now Rita was uncomfortably aware of her daughter anew. There was no explanation for the strange happenings of the other night, except that a spirit had entered Sati. Demonteguy refused to believe in such things, but Rita knew spirits when she saw them; everyone in Black Town did. In their gleaming White Town the Hatmen were lacking in any deep knowledge, clinging only to their one paltry God. Rita continued to stare at Sati as if seeing her for the first time. She knew so little about her daughter that it was difficult to believe she had produced her. A shadow of fear passed through her as she met Sati’s reproachful eyes.

The palanquin bearers turned to take the narrow road beside the Ditch along which, on the night of the seance, Holwell had made his way to Rita’s house. As they approached the White Town cemetery, they passed an imposing home of balustrades and balconies. It rose up like a tiered wedding cake, thickly iced with
chunam.
A large garden surrounded the house, half formal, half wild, with flowering trees, coarse-fingered palms and beds of canna lilies. To one side the Hoogly
flowed into the Maratha Ditch, beginning its route about White Town. Rita stared at the house with interest, leaning out of the palanquin.

‘That is Mr Holwell’s house,’ she said, nudging Sati with her foot. Rita had never visited the Chief Magistrate’s home; he had always come to her during the days of their relationship. The sudden sight of Holwell’s residence brought disconcerting emotions. The power she had felt as she straddled the Chief Magistrate at the time of their relationship she had rarely experienced again. He had personified more than his money or his meagre, tumescent organ. She had pinned him down and drawn out of his body the life sap of the man. There had been little physical about her satisfaction as she rode him voraciously to a climax. Every time she heard him groan his relief it was as if the town in which he lived splintered about her feet. He could not do without her.