The Shallow Seas

by Dawn Farnham

  3

  Charlotte began to discover the immense beauty of Brieswijk.

  The house had been built over seventy years before by a Cornelius van Riejmsdijk, a senior merchant in the VOC. His initials and coat of arms adorned several of the inner doors. Over the main portal stood the great open fanlight, with the carved initials of the VOC, the V huge, overlapping the smaller O and C. On either side were fanlights depicting Asia and Europe, surrounded by garlands and fruits. Tigran had explained a little about the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie which had established the town of Batavia over two centuries ago.

  From its trading origins, the United East India Company had grown to be a mighty force, controlling the agriculture and all trade between these Spice Islands and Holland. Establishing the tiny fort at Batavia, the VOC had not sought territory. With territory came responsibility, and responsibility was expensive. Java was merely a great storehouse waiting to be sacked, to the profit of their investors. Gradually, though, the Company had acquired territory, and the armies of the VOC were called on to wage battle for and against the ever-feuding local kings and princes, ceding rights and land to the Company each time. Slowly and inexorably, the royal families gave away all of Java to the VOC, whether the Company wanted it or not. For two hundred years, to belong to the Company was to be part of the greatest enterprise on earth.

  Since the 1760s, though, the Company had been in financial difficulties due in part to abuses, corruption and smuggling by its senior servants, including the Governor-General himself. The initials became known everywhere as Vergaan Onder Corruptie, “ruined by corruption”. When war between Holland and England broke out in 1780 over support for the American Revolution, it sounded the death knell of “Jan Company”, as it was commonly known. The English blockaded the Channel, bringing VOC ships to Amsterdam, destroyed the Dutch fleet and ruled the seas. By 1790, the Company had debts amounting to 85 million florins. The VOC colonies in Guinea and Bengal, Ceylon, the Coramandel coast, Malacca and the Cape were lost to English domination. The Dutch state was obliged to step in to prevent the total collapse of the VOC and the loss of the India trade. Finally, the Company was disbanded in 1800, but not before Holland itself had fallen to the French emperor Napoleon, through the army of Marshal Herman Daendels, amongst others. When Louis Napoleon was made king of Holland by his mighty brother, Daendels was named Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, and the French flag flew over Batavia.

  Tigran showed Charlotte a pair of golden candelabra which stood on a long sideboard to one side of the formal dining room. Winged victories, in Greek dress, held aloft a long floral wreath, from which ten candle sockets sprang, decorated with fluting, acanthus leaves and spirals.

  “My father bought these from the effects of Marshal Daendels after he left. They are said to have been a gift from Napoleon himself, although no one knows for sure. He paid a hefty price for them, so I am certain he believed it to be so. In those days, like him or loathe him, anything touched by the great Frenchman was like gold.”

  Tigran smiled wryly. He was taking her on a tour of the house. It was a veritable repository of the recent history of the Dutch East Indies and Batavia. Tigran had begun the tour in the downstairs study, where a portrait of Riejmsdijk and his family hung on one of the walls. The grand merchant stood, thin and rather humourless, in his embroidered velvet coat, ruffled shirt and buckled shoes.

  Next to him was a small woman also dressed, Charlotte presumed, in the Dutch style of the 1760s, covered in pearls. She was Javanese, Charlotte supposed, but, just as the thought came into her head, Tigran said, “Riejmsdijk’s wife was Japanese. He brought her and his children when he left Deshima, the VOC’s trading station in Japan. Smuggled them out, actually. All Japan trade is still Dutch and still comes through Batavia. Two vessels per year go for copper, and we sometimes trade in lacquer wares and fine porcelain.”

  Charlotte examined the portrait more carefully. She was not sure where Japan was, had had no idea that the Dutch traded there. Now she could see, emerging from its darkened paint, the figures of a boy and two little girls.

  “When we ride down to the river you will see a bridge over the Kali Krukut which leads to the villages on the other side. It is a Japanese-style bridge. It, and some of the trees around the bank, are all that remains of a Japanese garden he built for his wife. I understand she and the children all died before him.”

  When Riejmsdijk himself had died suddenly, Tigran told her, the estate was put up for auction by the Orphan’s Chamber to find funds to support his vast number of illegitimate children. Riejmsdijk had kept over fifty concubines. Charlotte marvelled at this Eastern profligacy. The Dutch in Holland were Calvinist. Something happened to the men, she thought, when they arrived on Asia’s shores. They forgot their upbringing and in short measure fell into Asia’s sensual and tempting arms and became sometimes more immoderate than even the Asian princes and potentates who surrounded them. There was, thought Charlotte, a bizarre contradiction between the almost prudish seemliness of the selected or legitimised wife and the base attitude to other native women, who could be abandoned at will; the white man’s own progeny by them callously sold and forgotten.

  Charlotte looked at Reijmsdijk. He must have loved his wife and children, for he had risked smuggling them out of Japan. He had built her a garden that she might feel, in some measure, less homesick. He must have suffered at their loss. Yet he had been able to abuse and discard other women in equal measure. Charlotte shook her head.

  Tigran was explaining something about the Orphan Chamber, and Charlotte abandoned her musings. The Orphan Chamber had been set up long ago to address the problem of the vast number of children born out of wedlock to native women and abandoned to their kampong lives when the men either died or returned to Holland. The VOC had early on decided to bring these light-skinned kampong children into the church, baptise them and support them. Thus, the girls could serve in the houses of Dutch men, and become acceptable half-white wives or companions. Dutch women had been forbidden to come to Batavia since 1659, for they rarely flourished in the climate and simply caused rank discontent among the men. Even the wife of the present Governor-General, Tigran explained, had her origins in this manner. She was a legitimised daughter of a Balinese slave girl. The boys were groomed to be soldiers for the VOC’s ever-needful army or minor clerks in the government. Where the girls might, through judicious marriages to white men, rise to the highest rungs of this closed society, the boys of low-ranking officers and officials were forever locked into low status and poorly paid jobs. For boys to succeed, they had to be raised and sent to school in Holland. Only the wealthiest men in the land could afford it.

  Tigran looked at Charlotte. He knew Takouhi had mentioned his family with Mia and was not sure how she felt about it.

  “I, too, was supposed to go to Amsterdam. I did not go, my father told me, for when I was of the age the seas were terribly dangerous for Dutch ships. England was at war with Napoleon, you know, and Holland had been annexed and become simply a French province. Batavia flew the French flag, and invasion was inevitable—the more so as the exiled Dutch prince placed the colonies under English protection. I had Dutch tutors and, after Raffles came, an English one. For my sons, a Dutch education was no longer useful. Everything had changed. When Napoleon was defeated and the English returned Java to the Dutch, the new Netherlands government appointed only men born in Holland, loyal to Holland, who brought their Dutch wives. People like my sons are mestizo, like me: not white, not Dutch. High office is out of their reach. They must make their lives in commerce and on the plantations.”

  Charlotte was listening to him and looking out of the window. Impulsively she asked,

  “Did you love your nyai, Tigran?”

  Tigran was nonplussed. He had not expected this question. He frowned. Charlotte turned to face him, waiting somewhat nervously. There was a silence. Had she gone too far? Did she really want to talk about love to Tigran?

  “Love
her? I cared—care—for her. She was the first woman I ever had, for a long time the only woman. She was sent to change me from a boy to a man. That was her role. Possibly I thought I loved her when I was very young.”

  He took Charlotte’s hands in his and looked directly into her eyes.

  “We always love in some measure the woman, or man, who awakens powerful feelings. Don’t we? Is that real love? I don’t know.”

  As he said this, he felt again a deep regret at not having been Charlotte’s first man—truthfully, her only man. Now he would always stand in comparison to this other who had awakened such feelings in her. But never mind, he thought, time will pass. She will forget, as those feelings have faded for me. I will make her forget. I will seduce her as this man did, but I will give her everything he could not.

  He gripped her wrists and pulled her towards him, putting her hands under his coat, against his chest, holding them there. She could feel his heart beating. It was the second time today she had found herself so close to him.

  “Do you want to talk about love, Charlotte, and passion? I know you know these things. I too. Do you want me to tell you how I feel about you, or shall I show you?”

  Charlotte could not hold his gaze. She wished she had not asked him this question. She looked down. Tigran smiled and released her hands, glad he had made her heart beat faster, glad to see the confusion on her face.

  After a moment he said, “Come and let me show you treasures.”

  He walked over to a large carved wood cabinet and unlocked the doors.

  “Reijmsdijk brought many things from Japan.”

  Charlotte was grateful for the change of subject and peered inside. On one shelf lay four boxes. Tigran took one out. It was a double-layered box of black lacquer, with gold images of clouds and mountains. In between pictures of trees and elegant halls were little figures carrying boxes on their backs and staves in their hands. It was delightful. Tigran saw the look of pleasure on Charlotte’s face and brought all the boxes down from the shelf. He himself had never really looked at these things; they had simply been left for years in this cupboard. Charlotte tried to analyse their appeal; perhaps it was their perfect detail, their orderliness. A chaotic world made simple through art.

  As she ran her finger over their shiny and intricate designs, Charlotte remembered other oriental things: Zhen’s wedding clothes with dragons, phoenixes and peonies. She closed her eyes. Tigran, not sensing her mood, went to another shelf where a quantity of cloth of exquisite colours lay folded neatly along the shelves. Eager to please her, he took out a bundle of the clothes and put them on a table. On top lay a folded fan. Charlotte shook herself from her thoughts and picked it up. It felt as fragile as gossamer in her hand. She opened it carefully, and there lay before her eyes a scene in gold and blue: a crooked bridge over a river and along the bridge, ladies and children looking down over the rail into the water. On the water floated fans exactly like the one she was holding; it was a fan race. Charlotte was transported to the place, so far from her own imaginings, and felt the peculiar pull of this exquisite art. Then Tigran opened the top cloth and laid it out. It was a large coat, a kimono, he said, from the Japanese court. It was exactly the garment the ladies on the fan were wearing.

  The silk was pale gold and covered with many-coloured pictures of little children frolicking amongst willow trees and cherry blossom, small dogs running at their feet. Others were playing hide-and-seek around flowing skirts. The whole was a picture so charming that Charlotte looked up at Tigran and laughed with pleasure. Tigran lifted the coat to turn it, but then it suddenly seemed to melt before their eyes. Rents appeared like rivulets of black in this paysage of colour. Charlotte watched, horrified, as the entire garment disintegrated, destroyed by insects and humidity.

  “Oh,” said Tigran, looking at Charlotte, worried that she might be upset. Charlotte ran her fingers over the now shattered garment, its gold turned to silken shards and slivers.

  She met Tigran’s eyes.

  “Golden lads and girls all must,

  As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.”

  As she said this, she laid a hand on her waist.

  Tigran’s father had bought Brieswijk at great advantage to himself, for it included a vast estate in the surrounding countryside. The central house was two storeys, with a large, Dutch-style ornate gable adorning the roof. Here was the huge hallway, a dining room and the sitting rooms of the family, a library, a study, one huge bathroom with low porcelain bathtubs and several commode closets. The ten bedrooms, sitting rooms and four other bathrooms were all on the second floor overlooking the lawn and down to the river or out over the entrance and its screen of jungle trees and plants. The side additions were set back, the ballroom to one side and the formal dining room on the other. Kitchens and storerooms adjoined them. Down paths on either side of the house, screened by great bamboo groves, were stables for the horses and for Tigran’s carriages. Servants’ quarters lay beyond.

  Charlotte’s bedroom occupied a corner of the main house, with four tall windows at the side and a sweep of French doors towards the river. A wide terrace with a wrought-iron balustrade ran the full length of the house at the back, looking down over the shingled roof of the verandah and beyond to the park. It was a beautiful room. Takouhi had brought her here the night she had arrived, after supper on the terrace below. The lamps had cast a low warm glow; a breeze rilled and billowed the muslin curtains at the open windows. The polished wooden floor gleamed in the lamplight, and the bed stood near the window, veiled in gauze netting. A faint odour of sandalwood from the burning oils along the balcony wafted on the air. She was so tired that after the maid left, she climbed into bed and fell immediately into a deep sleep.

  In the morning, though, she had examined the room. The carved teakwood four-poster bed was covered in fine, soft Indian cotton sheets and a pale green satin bedspread. When she looked closely, she saw, to her astonishment, that the initials CM had been embroidered in the middle, in the exact same shade as the coverlet. This must mean Tigran had intended her to come, to visit perhaps. Or had he always held out hope of marrying her? Charlotte was not sure. Now, though, the initials would not need to be changed. She would pass from Charlotte Macleod to Charlotte Manouk. If she had ever doubted, it told her much about his feelings for her.

  A maid had brought her coffee that morning, shyly, curious at this white-skinned woman, placing the tray on the table before the French windows that were open to the lawn. A bowl of white jasmine flowers lay on the tray, with a small note. It was from Tigran.

  “Good morning, Charlotte. I hope you slept well. Saya cintamu.”

  Charlotte knew what the last phrase meant. It said “I love you” in Malay. She frowned a little. How could he love her? He did not know her. Then she remembered how quickly she had fallen under Zhen’s spell, and suddenly, achingly, missed him.

  Do not dwell, she thought, hold fast, the devize of the Macleod clan. She looked up and took in the view from the balcony, down over the vast grounds to the silver line of the Kali Krukut, which flowed through the estate down to Chinatown. She found a shawl on the back of a chair, casually thrown—a shawl of exquisite gold and brown batik with a long, silky fringe. She knew he had left it for her and touched its watery softness, putting it over her nightdress and looking in the mirror, admiring the loveliness of the garment and the way her hair looked lying on it. If I’m not careful, she thought, he will turn me into a vain peacock! But she smiled at the thought. She went out onto the terrace and looked into the distance, contemplating the extraordinary events of the last few days which meant that she would now be mistress of this beautiful estate.

  She turned her head as she heard a door opening, and Tigran came out onto the terrace. She had not realised that his room was next to hers, and she blushed slightly—all the more since Tigran was naked to the waist, his lower body wrapped in a black sarong. He turned, unembarrassed apparently, and came towards her. Charlotte’s heart gave a small thump.
He was strong, not big like Zhen, but muscled and lean, the sarong falling loosely around his hips. As he came to her side, Charlotte was acutely aware that she was naked under the thin cotton nightdress and pulled the shawl around her. Tigran stood, silent, looking at her in this gift he had made her, ridiculously glad she was wearing it. He could see her body outlined against the cloth. Slowly he put out his hand, laying it on her waist, gently pulling her against him.

  Charlotte was unable to react, her breath shortened. She had not expected this. Tigran looked down at her and turned her face to his, holding his hand on her cheek. The feel of her body against his was exquisite. He brought his face down to hers, his lips close but not quite touching, the dark plaits of his hair brushing against her face. He looked into her eyes, then closed his own, felt her breath on his lips. It took every ounce of his willpower to go no further. But he would go no further. To have her loving and willing, he must tempt her. And he wanted her to be his wife first, his wife before man and God.

  “Saya cintamu,” he whispered. He released her and took her hand, kissing it.

  “After breakfast, we will see the house and go to the kampong, visit the estate.” He smiled, then turned and went back into the house.

  Charlotte regained her breath. She had expected his kiss and had gone back into her room embarrassed at these feelings and his professions of love.

  Now, though, she had recovered her poise.

  Tigran opened the sideboard and took out a blue and white dinner plate from the large service which lay inside. She recognised again the arms of the VOC adorning, in blue, the centre of the plate.

  “These were Reijmsdijk’s also. Father bought the estate and everything in it, including Reijmsdijk’s portrait. I have never bothered to change anything in the house. Since my mother, no woman has really lived here as mistress. Should you wish to do anything, make it over to your taste, change everything, you have only to say, and all will be as you wish.”