The Shallow Seas

by Dawn Farnham

  Grief tightened its fingers around Tigran’s chest, and he took a deep breath of windy, salty air. Takouhi had been sure that a return to the cool hills of Java, the jamu and the magic of the dukun would cure her child, but they had not. Meda had died only a few months ago. It was a blow so shattering that no one had yet recovered. George, crushed, had resigned his government position as Superintendent of Public Works and disappeared to Europe. No word had been heard from him since.

  Takouhi and Charlotte had become close friends in Singapore. When George left, Charlotte had written to Takouhi, and Takhoui dispatched Tigran to fetch her friend and bring her to Batavia. This Tigran did gladly, for he had, the very night he had met Charlotte, and to his own vast surprise, floated like a powerless moth inexorably and dangerously into her flame. Love had taken possession of him, and try though he had for a brief moment to reason her from his heart, he had realised, with a strange and joyful acceptance, that he would not be able to forget this woman. She was like an exquisite melody, a haunting tune which inhabited his mind.

  Now he could hardly believe his good fortune in having her here. He frowned. There was a man—Takouhi had mentioned a man in Singapore. A love affair. It would cause a great scandal, for Charlotte’s brother, Robert, was the Chief of Police of Singapore, and such a storm would have doubtless meant the end of his position. That was all Tigran had known when he set out on this voyage.

  But he knew more now. Charlotte’s reaction to this departure told him of the violence of her feelings. Love is the devil’s weapon, he thought, for it forces reason and all the natural instincts of self-care from the mind, like a damnable battering ram. His own feelings for Charlotte were of an intensity he had not believed possible at his age. Tigran was forty years old, toughened and shielded by experience—so he had believed—from life’s jolts. His looks belied his years, for his eyes were full of a restless energy, and his body retained its youthful vigour. Dark-eyed, he wore his long black hair pirate fashion, half-braided and beaded. Although the Manouks were Armenian Christians, brother and sister had been raised by native women, and many of Java’s ancient customs clung to them.

  Tigran reflected on his desire for Charlotte, so vulnerable now, so beautiful though that every moment he was with her he wanted to bury his face and hands in her hair, kiss her lips until she could hardly breathe. He subdued the effect these thoughts invariably brought upon his body, gripped the shroud rigging and stared into the moiling waves.

  He had intended to ask Charlotte to marry him on his last visit to Singapore, but Meda’s illness had forced his rapid return to Batavia. Now he was angry at himself for not coming back immediately, though it had been impossible whilst Meda was so deathly sick. That was forgotten now in his ardour, and he cursed and punched the wood of the rail hard, wincing as his skin broke from the blow. He would have taken her to Java, and this damn mess with the other man would not have happened.

  He watched the blood well from his skinned knuckles and hung his hand over the rail, gazing as a stream of scarlet coursed down his fingers, feeling the sting of the salt spray. Regret, regret! Well, he would not regret again. He was determined to have her promise before they landed. This enforced departure of hers would be his good fortune. Time would heal her, she would forget the other man, and he would make her the happiest woman in the world.

  He ordered the wind sail to be rigged to send fresh air to the cabins under deck and went below.

  1

  Charlotte’s first impression of Batavia was of a ghost town. It was not just the oppressive thoughts in her mind at leaving Singapore, Zhen and Robert. Nothing could have stood in starker contrast to the harbour at Singapore, with its low red-roofed buildings, its wide and busy harbour of sapphire blue, the gentleness of its island sands and the low green hills beyond. The Queen of the South had threaded its way through the thousand islands which lay before the port of Batavia and dropped anchor near the mouth of the Haven Kanaal, the stone-walled channel which projected far out into the shallow sea like a long grey tongue. The sky, overcast and hazy, turned the water of the roadstead to slate.

  It had been two hundred years since ships had sailed up this canal to the shipyards and docks beyond, Tigran explained. A combination of bigger ships, the narrowness of the channel and the constant sand banks which built up at the mouth meant that ships must anchor far from shore and await the arrival of the slow, flat-bottomed lighters. If the waters were choppy, this could be treacherous. The weather that day was calm, however, and while she waited for the boat, Charlotte took a long look at this place which was to be her home.

  The approach was deceptively pretty: islets scattered amongst the diamond glints of the blue sea like jewels from a broken necklace; a hundred white-rimmed emeralds, distant amethysts, hued agate, rugged grey quartz and far-flung, filmy amber. But as the ship drew closer to the mainland, the illusion dropped away. As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but a low, muddy morass dotted with palms. The high mountains beyond the city, of which she had been told, were invisible, veiled in dense cloud. Of the city itself, she could see nothing but a chalky white lighthouse on the end of the canal wall, a few grey stone houses and a small, low fort. Charlotte’s heart sank. It was as if all colour had been sucked out of this joyless day. The night of her arrival in Singapore flooded her memory. The moonlight, the forest of masts, the swaying lanterns on the ships like dancing fireflies, the Chinese junk and the man who had called to her. Her heart swelled, and an unbidden tear slid down her cheek.

  Tigran stood by her side, wishing to pull her close into him, not daring. He wanted her happiness more than he could express. For two days she had been ill, sick to her soul, caught in a web of misery. Then, on the third day, exhausted, with the wind beating her face, staring at the white-tipped waves swirling remorselessly beneath the hull, she had found a certain calm and made a decision.

  She had not deceived Tigran. When he confessed his feelings to her, she told him of her love for another man and the baby to come. Tigran had blinked slowly but thought for no more than a second. He realised that he did not care. Nothing about Charlotte’s past mattered. To lose her was unthinkable, to be her protector his highest thought.

  He had sunk to his knees, put her hands against his forehead and asked her to marry him. Now he was grateful beyond words that she had agreed, had let him kiss her cheek, even that fleeting touch inflaming. He had dreamed of touching her for too long. He knew it was dangerous, this rapture he felt. He smiled at the word. His English tutor would have chided him for such a grandiloquent term, but he could think of no other which described his condition. Old man’s folly is what his friends called it. How often had he seen it in others and laughed? Never mind. Did not even the great Erasmus write that “folly seasons man’s life with pleasure”? Something like that, he felt sure.

  Now he wanted to divert her from thoughts he saw crowding her mind. He pointed to the rowboat approaching the ship. The equippagemeester came up to Tigran. He had sailed over from Onrust Island, where he supervised the extensive ship repair docks and warehouses. Part of his duties was to board ships to inspect the list of passengers and crew, as well as any cargo, and to check for sickness. Satisfied, he saluted Charlotte with a lingering look. He had not seen a fair-skinned European woman in the ten years he had lived in Batavia. Certainly not one as lovely as this: long, jet- black hair and violet eyes, full, pink lips, her figure slender as the Indische-Chinese women he liked to visit in Glodok, the Chinese quarter. His wife, a daughter of a former councillor, had assured his lucrative position but was regrettably short and dumpy, and six children had not improved her figure.

  As the rowboat pulled up to the channel there was a sudden jolt, and Tigran threw out his arm to prevent Charlotte from falling from the seat. Despite its shallow draft, the boat had run aground. The canal, Tigran explained—attempting to keep his temper—was constructed to narrow the current so that it had sufficient force to keep the channel clear of silt. Tigran would rat
her have used his own cutter, but the Dutch authorities had sold the three-year licence for this transport to the Kapitan Cina, the leader of the Chinese in Batavia. With volleys of shouts and wild gesticulations, the crew pushed the craft off the sandbank, several boatmen floundering as it shifted suddenly to the deep channel. The crew burst into laughter, joshing and pulling the bedraggled men back onboard. Charlotte could not help but share in the good-natured amusement, and Tigran, relieved that she was unhurt, joined in.

  As they entered between the channel piers, three of the crew jumped quickly up to the side with a rope fixed to the boat, and began to track it upriver. The other boatmen rowed, but the current was too great to permit an ascent by oars alone. Charlotte could see the men straining as the boat moved slowly along. Their boat passed another, laden with sick-looking European men heading, Tigran told her, to the hospital ship lying offshore. Convicts in leg chains squatted sullenly on a lighter anchored to one side of the canal wall, covered from head to toe in brown sticky mud. Their task was to clear the silt from the river, and Charlotte could hardly begin to imagine the exhaustion of such dispiriting, endless labours. Here and there lamp-eyed crocodiles floated along devouring garbage, unmoved and unafraid of the boats which passed around them and ignoring the men who laboured in the river and even the small children playing around the boats. They are tame and fat, Tigran told her, because they are protected from injury by the authorities. They fulfill the useful purpose of eating the refuse of the slaughter-houses. Charlotte wrinkled her nose.

  The grim aspect of the canal was redeemed by the crowds of brightly painted double-masted pinisi and the single-masted prahu, the elegant small craft of the islands, moored to one side. When the prahu was under sail, the low shiny hull all but disappeared under the white sail flung back like a bird’s wing. Men squatted lazily on the decks watching the extraordinary sight of this hantu, ghost woman, with such white skin. Cooking smells and human stenches floated faintly on the breezes of the salty air. The craft moving on the canal were rowed by Javanese “sea dogs”, Tigran told her, so named by the Malays for the shrill and incoherent songs with which they beat time with their oars, each verse ending with a lengthy, loud and vigorous howl. Thus, accompanied by curdling wails and pungent odours, they arrived finally at the pier at Kleine Boom.

  Tigran was anxious to be away from the lower town well before dusk and the onset of the night winds. Its reputation for miasma and death had not diminished since the time of the VOC, when it killed scores of men a day and was known as the Graveyard of the Dutch. Europeans might be obliged to work in the port’s godowns and offices alongside the sluggish and infested waters, but, by three o’clock, they left rapidly for the healthier southern reaches of the city.

  Sensing Tigran’s urgency, she recalled, with a small shiver, the words of John Crawfurd in his Dictionary of the Indian Islands, which she had read in the Institution library at Singapore. “The Dutch, unmindful of a difference of some 45 degrees of latitude, determined on having a town after the model of those in the Netherlands, within six degrees of the equator and on the level of the sea. The river spread over the town in many handsome canals, lost its current, deposited its copious sediment and generated pestilential malaria, which was transported by the land-wind even to the roads.”

  Helping Charlotte from the boat, Tigran accompanied her to the small whitewashed inn near the landing stage. The journey to their house in Weltevreden would be quite long, he told her, for the city was sprawling. The entry formalities were slow, the niggardly mestizo clerk fussing over Charlotte’s British papers, for the English were suspect in Dutch water—even this young girl it seemed. Tigran concealed his annoyance. This was the only power this little despot possessed and he would not be hurried. But it was done with finally, and the luggage arranged to follow, and, relieved, he settled Charlotte into his town coach and the four horses pulled away from the port, along Kanaal Weg and over the bridge. Tigran did not tell her that this bridge, owing to the state of the river, was commonly known as Schijtbrug. They moved onto Kasteelplein Weg and through the Amsterdam Gate, formerly the southern entrance of the original fort of Batavia.

  From Prinsenstraat, Tigran pointed out the old Town Hall in the distance; then the carriage turned towards the Kali Besar, as this part of the Ciliwung River was known. They crossed Middelpunt Brug, with its backdrop of lofty sails. This bridge was the furthest south on the Kali Besar that sailing boats could go, and they massed together like flocks of white-winged birds peering at the rowboats beyond. Tigran showed Charlotte the long two-storey building which housed the offices of Manouk & Co., its open godowns bordering the bank, before going back over the river and onto Binnen Nieuwpoort Straat.

  Charlotte was astounded at the decayed appearance of the city. It seemed almost deserted, the canals dilapidated and the buildings broken-down. Barefoot native soldiers kept a slouching watch at the portals of red-tiled, low merchant houses. The occasional European man they passed seemed pale and emaciated. The atmosphere of degeneration was relieved only barely by the large-leafed plantains and the tall stems of coconut and betel nut trees spreading their feathery leaves far into the sky. The horses’ hooves sent up fingers of ash-white dust which touched eerily against the glass of the coach windows. A fetid, cloacal stench rose from the canal. The humidity was a damp cloak, dense and oppressive. She did not know whether to laugh or cry at this introduction to Java, a land she had heard of as the fabled home of Ptolemy’s Golden Chersonese, of Solomon’s Ophir, of gold, perfume and spices.

  Within a few minutes, the architecture changed and Charlotte saw houses like those in Singapore: white two-storied buildings with curved red-tiled roofs. Long-tail-haired Chinese sat crouched in the street or were busy sculling kajang-roofed boats on the river. Only twenty minutes more and they would be home. As he said this, Tigran glanced at Charlotte, unsure of her feelings. Batavia, he felt sure, was a confusing and disconcerting city for a European woman.

  Charlotte said nothing, the sight of the Chinese men with their tailed hair arresting her, wrenching her thoughts away from these streets, back to Singapore. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see any more, and rested her head against the back of the seat.

  The Chinese town faded in the dust behind them, and the carriage entered a broad, perfectly straight avenue running alongside a wide canal. The air felt cooler here. Tigran lowered the glass to let in the breeze. “Molenvliet,” Tigran said. Mill Way, the road linking the old city to the new. The canal was over a hundred years old, built by the Kapitan Cina to bring wood from the forests to the old walled city for ships and houses and to carry sugar from his mills to the port. The wealthy of every race built their houses out here. It was healthier than the low-lying coast. The road was firm, and in the late-afternoon light Charlotte saw large, elegant mansions of both Chinese and European appearance, with ornate wrought-iron fences and gates. Pretty bridges spanned the canal to a similar avenue on other side, lined with the dusky shapes of tall trees. Birds kept up an incessant high-pitched twittering among the leaves; every now and again a fragrance of invisible flowers came floating on the windless air. Lights appeared, and Tigran pointed out a large hotel and, just beyond it, elaborate gates which stood open between lantern-topped columns. Flames flickered, and a waft of coconut oil drifted over the carriage.

  “We are here,” said Tigran and took Charlotte’s hand in his.

  The carriage passed the columns and began to describe an arc around the dense mass of trees beyond. The path was firm and mossy, and the dust died away. Firebrands on either side stretched into the distance. Despite her previous forebodings, she felt a flurry of tingling excitement at the prospect of seeing this house which Takouhi had described to her in Singapore.

  “Brieswijk is Tigran’s estate. Was built by VOC man long time ago, and our father buy this place. Is very nice place, very big house, maybe best house in Batavia. I grow up there.”

  Charlotte suddenly remembered. Takouhi would be waiting for her
. She squeezed Tigran’s hand lightly for, no matter what else she felt for him, she trusted him absolutely. He felt a constricting emotion for this woman rise in his chest. Learn to love me, please, he thought. Let me love you.

  Between the trees, Charlotte saw lights flickering. Tantalised, she almost held her breath, listening to the horses’ hooves beat dully on the earth, watching the shadows of their bodies dance past the firebrands. Then the carriage rounded the last tree, and light flooded the ground, so bright after darkness that she threw up a hand before her eyes. A great mansion came into view in a blaze of light. High windows occupied the floors of the facade, and long lower extensions stood to either side, with French doors of intricate wrought iron and glass from ceiling to floor. The panes cast glints of fire on the ground. Marble steps and columns marked the main entrance to the house, illuminated by a hundred dark-skinned, white-saronged servants holding swaying lanterns. As the dusk stole rapidly across the sky, the impression of aerial flame and brilliance was overwhelming.

  “Oh,” she said and looked at Tigran, lost for words. He had sent a servant on a fast horse ahead to create this moment for her.

  “It’s yours, ours,” he said and kissed her hand. “Welcome home.”

  2

  In the next days Charlotte barely had time to brood. There was so much to discover.

  The banns had been posted and the wedding day set for four weeks hence. It would take this long to settle the legal affairs of the marriage settlement and inheritance. By the laws of the government of the Dutch East Indies, a widow was entitled to at least half of her husband’s estate. Legalised minor children, by any woman the man recognised, were left strictly defined percentages of the estate. If there were no legitimised minor children, the totality of the husband’s estate would pass to the widow. The liberality of this law took Charlotte’s breath away.