The Holder of the World (7 page)

12

HANNAH’S ALTERNATE
prospects of life as a widowed Cambridge governess or as the wife of a placid introvert like Hubert were overthrown just after dawn in late April 1694 by the casual, almost languid, appearance of Gabriel Legge crossing the stone bridge in front of the cottage gate.

He had taken pains over his appearance. Hardly the sailor on leave, he appeared, in his silks and breeches, the gold-crowned walking stick, the powdered wig and the trademark silk eye patch, every inch the imperial magistrate.

“We’ll sell the Stepney cottage, of course.” It was never suitable for a man of his height. The beams cut across the parlor at eye level. “I presume you’ll be ready in a fortnight. We sail for Fort St. Sebastian on the
Fortune
.”

“The
Fortune?
The
Fortune!
Whatever happened to the mad Portugee?” She took her cue from Gabriel Legge, for surely had he crawled across the stone bridge begging for forgiveness, seeking accommodation, apologizing for having left her alone and dishonored (which eventually would have been the case), she would have nursed him back to health, forgiven him the hint of deceit in the tale he had told. But he’d rather chosen an approach that admitted nothing, withheld the facts of his past eighteen months and the motives for his cruelty.

“Swallowed by a whale off Grand Comoro and deposited on the Portugee shore. A full desert and jungle year I spent, tearing flesh from the hands of baboons, outwitting the jungle cats, outsmarting the forest savages, joining slavers up the African coast …”

The same old Gabriel Legge. He told her that now he had gone down to Leadenhall Street and joined the Honourable East India Company, convinced that his last adventure had exhausted his store of good fortune. His sailing days were over. He’d earned his stake; now was time to think of a career.

“Husband,” said Hannah Legge, “the story that was told to me a winter last was most convincing.”

“Poor mate.”

“You’ve not just this minute disembarked.”

“These trifles? I show you respect by not befouling this cottage.”

“I wept for you.”

With a smile both amused and sympathetic, Gabriel Legge let her self-pity pass. “You have taken to tobacco in my absence.”

“That is unkind.”

He sniffed the brocaded cushions, whacking them loudly with the flat of his hand. Dust motes sparkled in the morning light.

“A lingering odor. Madeira soaked. Much affected by squinty-eyed Cambridge swine.”

And even as they conducted their interview, the widow and her resurrected groom, Hubert lay in the gutter a few yards below the stone bridge, his fine Dutch glasses twisted from his astonished face, his fleshy ears freshly notched as a slave might be identified by his master, or a common thief punished for a first offense, and a Fornicator’s bold
F
branded to the center of his widening forehead. Their morning’s work done, Gabriel Legge’s mates, including the drunken young man who’d brought the baleful news of Gabriel’s demise and then had stationed himself in a nearby public house close enough to watch the mistress’s comings and goings, crossed the bridge with the first mate’s ornate sea trunks, and one empty locker for the mistress to pack her gear.

THIS IS
the best I can do, pulling it together from a hundred sources. I think of Venn, stitching together an October of four years ago, and realize that the most obscure person on the planet today is, comparatively, like a god: observed, adored, commented upon, celebrated. Hannah, whose 1745
Memoirs
forms the basis of much of the early life, and only a bit of the middle, the warrant, if you wish, for the linkages in my earlier investigations, still eludes my net. Time has made her free from me, just as an ocean passage made her free of the watchful God who punished every venal sin with droughts, drownings, cripplings. Free from the brutal justice of pious expatriates with confused errands. Out of earshot of the whippings and weepings of Original Sinners.

What made Hannah abdicate sovereign rule of her fenced, peaceable suburban kingdom and sail with Gabriel on the
Fortune
, a four-hundred-ton East Indiaman, in May 1694?

Fear, perhaps, for she knew there was (there always is) a dark side to her husband’s rascality. Or simple practicality—she was, after all, a Puritan orphan, strictly raised. She appreciated the value of money. Her widow’s subsistence, and with it her freedom, vanished on Gabriel’s reappearance.

But there are traits even a modern woman can relate to: her curiosity, the awakening of her mind and her own sense of self and purpose. And I think of Gabriel as well, deceiver, liar, thief and pirate—a gentleman cutthroat with a feared gang to do his bidding—why didn’t he kill her, as he had others who displeased or deceived him? Why did he test her, for surely that was his ploy, and why were her indiscretions with doctors, researchers, patients, accusers, not punished?

Venn says he wanted to know if she was prized. If anyone would make a move on her, even more than wanting to test her faithfulness. Gabriel had been in the East; he would know these things.

THE
FORTUNE
was in a convoy of East Indiamen headed for the Coromandel Coast of India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Hannah’s name appears in
Madras Records
, the Fort St. George consultation books, as having disembarked in that English settlement in early 1695. There were three other women on board the
Fortune
on that trip, all three from the same village in Lancashire, and all three single. Their reasons for leaving home were sensible, lucid. The Company paid each of them a monthly maintenance allowance of about fifteen shillings in local currency to provide its bachelor English staff of lonely factors, clerks and soldiers companionship leading, it was hoped, to marriage. Like the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Honourable Company needed but feared the wilderness, and abhorred miscegenation. Hannah got to know the Lancashire women because, like them, she and Gabriel ate at the third mate’s table and grumbled about having to share the decks with livestock that were mainly there as the Captain’s and the richer passengers’ future provision. A schoolmaster sent out by the Company on the same ship mentions Hannah as being of the four women the only one with comeliness and delicacy. In a letter to his brother started on the
Fortune
and finished in the port town of Masulipatnam, he worried that Mistress Legge will not find any “towne of Moors, fackeers and Hindoos cleane after the manner in England,” for “hogs, filth, dirt and swine” clog the streets.

WHAT INTERESTS
me about this letter is that the outbound schoolteacher clings to class-conscious perspectives and absorbs Hannah, the flower of the New World Zion, into the Old World hierarchy.

If status had mattered to Hannah, she would have stayed in Stepney. Her curiosity was robust. She wanted to earn, not inherit, dignity. She moved on. Without regrets.

Venn inputs data more boldly, more mischievously than I do. I watch my convoy of East Indiamen voyage across his computer screen, freed of space and time. He compresses by supercomputer Hannah, Gabriel, the schoolmaster, the maiden ladies from Lancashire, caulkers and coopers, soldiers and sail-makers, gunners, cabin boys, two two-headed freak dogs, horses, goats, hogs, sheep, geese, chickens, ducks, plum puddings, vats of pea soup, mutton pies, pork pies, chops, cutlets, potatoes, lemons, rum, beer, dysentery, scurvy, into a one-second-long video model.

Attaining Nirvana, for Venn, is attaining perfect design.

Together and separately we remember what happened to Hannah Easton Fitch Legge aka the Bibi from Salem so that we may predict what will happen to us within our lifetime.

Before you build another city on the hill, first fill in the potholes at your feet.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on …

JOHN KEATS
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

P
ART
T
WO

1

THE GUIDE
, an Indian Christian named Mr. Abraham—I don’t know if it’s a first name or not—takes me on a tour of the Fort St. Sebastian ruins. Fort St. George, Fort St. Sebastian and all their related remnants of English and Portuguese colonialism are now located in the northern outskirts of the modern city of Madras. This is the place, south of the sluggish Penner River on the Coromandel Coast of the Bay of Bengal, where on a fetid January morning in 1695, from its anchorage on a sand reef half a mile off the shore of Fort St. George, the
Fortune
began its dangerous and laborious unloading of cargo and disembarked Gabriel and Hannah Legge.

The ruins hold no fascination for Mr. Abraham. He is a very thin, up-to-date young man, assiduously elegant in a leisure suit of pale-blue teri-cot, and recently the recipient of a master’s degree in commerce from the University of Madras. He listens to test-match cricket from New Zealand on a transistor radio. Free-lancing as a guide for English-speaking tourists is a stopgap. His deportment has in it a protective haughtiness; his dainty, solicitous way of holding a huge, threadbare black umbrella over my melanoma-prone pinkness reveals a man who has greater expectations from life than recycling the faded glories of his subcontinent. He doesn’t know it, but his casual graciousness has, in fact, profound historical antecedents. He lets me linger where I want, answers my questions with a shrugged yes and “so they say.” Rubble is rubble to him. He lives for development, a South Indian Silicon Valley. He belongs to the future.

I have with me a book of engravings of the original Sonapatnam, and from the fragments of a wall, the rubbled foundation of the customhouse, I can orient myself in time as well as space. I can imagine the customs master, Mir Ali, one of Haider Beg’s appointees, spyglass in hand, noting the names and descriptions of all the ships and cargo that sailed into and out of the Bay of Bengal. A loyal man, Mir Ali, without him, Haider Beg would have bankrupted himself a hundred times over. A fifty-yard-long ancient wall of wafer-thin bricks that look, at a distance, like a sheaf of ill-stacked ledger papers once defined the boundary of White Town. Along this wall Hannah Legge would stroll, looking down to the sea and toward forbidden India. And here, still close to the wall, but now crushed for a roadbed, are heaps of white stones from houses that made up the White Town of Fort St. Sebastian. I take up a piece of crushed stone and drop it in my tote bag; it could have been from a wall of Gabriel and Hannah Legge’s house. A church and a cemetery overcrowded with sinking headstones still stand, and near the cemetery, a stubby rain-blackened victory tower. Where Mr. Abraham sees collapse, or perhaps even the groundwork for a development scheme, I see the spiderweb of permanence.

A satellite town has grown around, and on, the remains of old Fort St. Sebastian. Settlements here have a parasitic, not homicidal, relationship with nature. Inside the crumbled perimeter of the customhouse, shopkeepers have set up tin-roofed stalls. The whitewashed annex of the municipal school building has usurped a corner of the graveyard. Schoolchildren in sweaty uniforms eat tiffin in the serrated shade of the broken wall. Monkeys leap down from shade trees to snatch food out of their hands. At the foot of the victory tower, a vendor hawks peanuts in newspaper cones.

Whose victory? What led to battle?

But Mr. Abraham forecloses on questions. “These people used to build them all the time only.”

These people?

Meaning Muslims and Hindus. Meaning heathens. Mr. Abraham, Christian child of a different intrusion, draws me with a new alacrity toward the cemetery crammed with sunken tombstones. The few stone nubbins still standing are worn clean of inscriptions: each marker carries a typed notice behind a plastic shield. The leaning and fallen stones remind me of conventioneers with name tags clustered by the cash bar. No fence encloses the three-hundred-year-old cemetery. Bony cows graze on untended greenery; pariah dogs doze on sun-warmed headstones.

ISAAC SUCKLING
Death discover’d him
Ere he discover’d Life
.

MARY BROWNE
Belov’d wyffe of Col. Josiah Browne
But for whom Vain would be my Toyle
Under this Skye
.

On some stones only the name survives.
Clarence Clitherow. Hester Hedges. Henry Hedges. Richard Littleton. Samuel Higginbottham. John Ruxton. James Ord. Count Attila Csycsyry. Michel Joachim Bourguien. François La Touche. Klaus Engelhardt. Antonio de Melho. Francisco da Silva. Ludovico Antonio Apiani. João Muliner. Isabela de Taides. Niccolo Manucci. Hans Van den Brinck. Catchick Sookian. Slaughter Harris
.

One headstone bears no name, only a three-masted pirate vessel and the legend: “Gone off on the account.”

Three hundred years ago, Europe converged in a cove on the Bay of Bengal. Today, one person in seven—from Sumatra up to Bangladesh, then back down the Indian coast to Sri Lanka—lives in countries bordering the Bay of Bengal.

IT IS
a curiosity that Europeans, who’d built the most brilliantly situated cities in the world, should have founded their Indian outposts like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay in the most inhospitable, inconvenient and uninhabitable reaches of swamp and disease on the subcontinent. It is almost as though the Portuguese, French and British, in the same spirit that motivates sweltering vacationers to strip off their clothes and plunge into a surf or mountain lake even before unpacking their bags—or, to extend the metaphor, the heedless sensual expectancy that causes fit young men to dive into an empty pool—decided to dump their cargo at the first available landfall no matter what the draw of its harbor, its hygiene, heat and drainage.

Arriving ships would lose as much cargo in that half-mile water portage across the roadstead as they had in the previous six months and fifteen thousand miles at sea. A graveyard of silverware and clavichords and bobbing wooden trunks full of party silks and fancy linens, bed canopies, spreads, tablecloths, and pallets of heavy formal furniture were slowly filling in the channel between the surf and landing piers of Fort St. George. Every now and then, local women would be spotted in the fort, wearing jewelry crafted of sterling-silver soup ladles and barrettes for their glossy hair fashioned from ivory-handled deboning knives. Storms would toss scroll-top writing desks onto the beach, with deadly sea snakes neatly nested inside each letter compartment.

The Company factors and their wives imported all the impractical trappings of English society, knowing full well that everyday cotton clothes and plain, serviceable furniture were locally and cheaply available. For after all, appearances in the tropics were the first line of demarcation that separated an Englishman from a heathen, and to appear unclean or even unpresentable before one’s inferiors merely encouraged the little monkeys, who were, after all, clever and imitative, to strut and mince like popinjays and in general puff up their prices to match their newfound arrogance.

To be accused of dirtiness would be to stand guilty as a buffoon and an amateur. One separated oneself from Them primarily by staying clean and upright: starched, dignified, sober, righteous and faithful. The alternatives were acknowledged to exist, especially among young men outside the ennobling sight of English (or, failing that, French or Portuguese) women, but the occasional misstep was not to be confused with the gleeful wallow of the Hindus and, only slightly above them, the Muslims. It was proven that the most profitable factories—trading posts—were those that enforced the rules of order and cleanliness. And Mr. Cephus Prynne’s St. Sebastian factory was the most profitable on the Coromandel Coast.

Perhaps, beguiled by the fecundity, the can’t-miss promise of preexistent riches like gold and jewels, the British in India felt no compulsion to search long and hard, as they had in the New World, for ideal harbors and salubrious settings. They had not come to India in order to breed and colonize, or even to convert. They were here to plunder, to enrich themselves (under the guise of a Royal Charter) and pay their fees to the ruling nawabs.

Competing European empires set up their chain of waterfront forts within hailing distance of one another. In Hannah’s New England world, French forts even five hundred miles away had been considered too threatening. This commercial competition was something new, a kind of proto-Common Market. In India, the future didn’t matter. If they stayed too long they’d be dead and planted in this septic soil; if they devoted themselves single-mindedly to making money, they’d be rich and retired with a safe Tory seat in the Home Counties.

The locals were fisherfolk and boatmen, mostly Hindu with Muslim overlords. Everyone on the Coromandel, Gabriel had tried to explain to Hannah on those endless dark nights at sea, belonged to a caste if he was Hindu, a right-hand or left-hand caste, and everyone was either Shia or Sunni if he was Muslim. They all spoke different languages, they owed fidelity to different masters, they worshiped different gods, and their ancesters had come from different countries.

It had been inconceivable to a Puritan soul like Hannah’s. Not just pagans and Muhammadans, but different gods and different ways of worshiping the same gods. Even putting a plural ending on the sacred word God: it became her secret blasphemy.
Gods
. It all went back to her earliest years in the forests.