Not Yet Drown'd

by Peg Kingman

  “We are not obliged to buy their tea, I suppose,” said Catherine.

  “It is theirs or none, however, for tea grows nowhere else in the world. And tea has become as necessary to Europeans—and the duties on it as necessary to our national exchequers—as though it were opium itself.” And he filled their cups for the third time.

  “Could not tea plantations be established elsewhere?” asked Catherine, lifting her cup and inhaling its steam, which no longer seemed so fragrant. Was her nose becoming jaded, or was the enchanting perfume dissipated by now? She felt remarkably alert, yet deeply calm. Her mind had time, space, clarity, as though she could see a great distance across purple mountains while also perceiving in uncommon detail the very spores speckling the bracken at her feet. The tea, quite strong and more astringent than before, now left a markedly sweeter taste on her tongue after she swallowed.

  “As was done in the case of nutmeg, you mean?” said Mr Fleming. Catherine was flattered, for of course that is what she would have meant if she had known anything about it. “It was a favorite ambition of Sir Warren Hastings, back in the ’seventies,” he said, “and there has been enthusiasm for the project from time to time among the botanists of the Asiatick Society. Seeds and seedlings have been smuggled out of China, but no one has succeeded in growing them. No, we remain in thrall to the Chinese for tea; and they remain in thrall to us for opium.” He filled their cups once more.

  “Are the Chinese unable to grow their own opium?”

  “Oh, yes, the peasants grow a poor grade of it, and always have. A great deal of the Turkish stuff ends up in China too. But for purity, potency and profit, there is nothing like Patna opium. And no other commodity can induce the Chinese to part with their silver.”

  “I see.” And for a moment, she did understand it all.

  “Now, Mrs MacDonald, I have answered your questions without reserve or self-justification, so as to make some amends for my evasiveness this morning when you asked about the cargo you saw taken off so early. This is my apology; and I hope you will accept it.”

  “With all my heart,” said Catherine, and meant it.

  “I think my teapot has given its utmost,” said Mr Fleming, removing the little lid and peering inside. “A fifth infusion would only disappoint us both. It is best to stop at the fourth with this Dahongpao.” By now, his obsession no longer seemed an absurd affectation; clearly he was quite in earnest about it.

  He reached inside the pot, drew out a single leaf, limp and bright green with mahogany red edges, and ate it. Then he offered the pot to Catherine, his mobile black brows arched in invitation. To eat tea leaves! It had never occurred to Catherine; but she tasted one. It was succulent and faintly bitter, and left a sweet aftertaste. Mr Fleming smiled. “In ancient times, the Chinese ate tea as a health-giving vegetable.”

  “With salt and pepper and a knob of sweet butter on a hot bannock or a potato, it would be a Highlander’s treat,” said Catherine. “I wonder that no one has thought of it. It is tastier than sea-tangle. Have you eaten sea-tangle gathered off a Hebridean shore? No? Tea leaves are certainly superior, pleasantly free of any sand to grit between the teeth.”

  She looked around the neat little cabin. Every bit of bulkhead not given over to stores of tea and water was lined with books, the neat rows of octavo editions held fast by mahogany bars across their spines, and the bars secured at each end by bright brass fastenings. There were the usual volumes of Virgil, Homer, Milton, Dryden, Shakespeare, Molière, Pope and Johnson. But there were also many unfamiliar titles: Hitopadesa, Sakuntala, Rig-Veda, Ramayana, Bhagvat-Geta, Mahabharata; as well as a Sanskrit grammar and a large handsome atlas. One cabinet held rolls of creamy thick paper, tied up in silk ribbons. “What are those rolls?” asked Catherine.

  “Ah, my Chinese scrolls,” said Mr Fleming. “If you are not careful, I will make you admire them the next time you come and drink tea with me.”

  “It must be very pleasant to have your books with you,” she said. “I brought only two, not expecting to stay away from Scotland for long, and I fear I cannot get any more in this city in any language I can read.”

  “You must make use of mine. But of course you must; I am quite in earnest. Choose something to take away with you. I know them all by heart, or nearly so; they are all my old shipboard companions. There’s not one that I’ve read fewer than a dozen times, so you may choose anything you like without depriving me in the slightest.”

  He succeeded at last in making her borrow a translation of Ramayana. “As you are bound for India after all,” he said, “you might as well begin to steep yourself in the particular flavour of the place, the rasa of the place. I will be most interested to know what you make of it.”

  When Catherine had thanked him and returned to her own cabin, she examined the book. The embossed morocco binding smelled not only of leather but of Mr Fleming’s cabin; of sandalwood and varnished mahogany and tea. The text was printed in two languages, two scripts. On the left page was the original Sanskrit text, she supposed, in a script so strangely unintelligible; it looked like laundry hung from a line to dry. Facing it, on the right page, was the English translation in the familiar alphabet. The paper was thin and translucent so that each script showed faintly through the other in reverse.

  Kind of him to lend it. Catherine still felt invigorated and alert, still felt the soft, wide, far-seeing stimulus of the tea. She had enjoyed that. She would not mind drinking tea with him again.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Catherine went looking for Anibaddh and found her in her accustomed spot on the main deck. She was hemming a pillow slip in the watery sunshine, and Grace sat in her lee as usual, sewing a long seam on her lap.

  Catherine still could not bring herself to say Annie Bad. “Annie,” she said, “it is time, you know, to determine where you will go and what you will do. Increase will remain in Antwerp for only a few days, and if you would return to Britain, or to America—Boston or Canada or some safe place—it must be from here. Captain Mainwaring will find you a return passage if you are determined to go back. And remember you are to have the sum from me, which is yours to invest or to use as you please. Or perhaps you might prefer to remain in service for a time at least. In that case, Mrs Todd has asked whether you would wait on her and continue with her to India.”

  Anibaddh set her sewing on her lap and looked away from Catherine. After a moment she said, “I never decided anything important before.”

  “Oh, but you have, Annie. When you rescued Grace. When you ran away from that woman.”

  “Mmm, I guess I did, then. Well, Mrs MacDonald, ma’am, I’ve been thinking about Africa. And I’ve been wondering, is this ship going to pass near by it?”

  How could this poor, uprooted, ignorant tall child be turned out to fend for herself in the wide world? But Catherine said only, “Let us go and consult an atlas.”

  Anibaddh folded her sewing and stood up. Grace made to do the same, but she found that her length of calico would not come free of her lap. She tried again to lift the doubled wrong-side-out length of calico, but her skirt lifted too. Understanding dawned; she had sewn her skirt into her long straight seam. Jumping to her feet, she danced a few steps, brandishing the absurd tangle of cloth and skirt, and laughed, a long, free peal of laughter, her transparent skin suffused by warm delight.

  Catherine laughed too, but then tears came instead and she had to turn away. Not since that accident had Grace laughed aloud.

  Anibaddh took up scissors; “Hold still, now, child!” she said. “Look at you, hopping about like a kid goat!” And after a moment she succeeded in cutting Grace’s skirt free.

  At Catherine’s request, Mr Fleming opened his atlas on one end of the big table in the cuddy cabin and leafed through its heavy broad pages to a map of the world. He smoothed the pages flat.

  “Oh!” said Anibaddh, awed, and Grace craned to see.

  “Here is where you began,” said Catherine, pointing to the eastern coast of the North Amer
ican continent. “Virginia.”

  “That’s where I was born, right there,” said Anibaddh, touching the spot with her fingertip, for she did indeed know how to read.

  “And you sailed with your mistress from…what port, do you know?”

  “Alexandria, there! And all across the Atlantic Ocean, I know that, too—aha! to Scotland, way on up north, in the cold!”

  “Here, you see, is Greenock,” said Mr Fleming, “just outside Glasgow, where your ship must have come to port. Was the cargo tobacco, do you know?”

  “Tobacco and wheat.”

  “Then you would have come into Greenock, I am sure,” said Mr Fleming.

  Catherine said, “And then you and your mistress came by land to Edinburgh—just here, you see, across this narrow neck of land. And here is where we all got aboard Increase and sailed out the Firth of Forth, and southeast across the North Sea, coming up the Westerschelde, up to Antwerp, here.”

  “We’re at Antwerp now?”

  “Aye. There, far to the east of us, is India. And this great continent, around which we must pass to get there, is Africa.”

  “All that is Africa? It’s mighty big. Will this ship stop there?”

  “Yes, as it happens, we will,” said Mr Fleming. “There, at the Cape of Good Hope, at the southern tip of Africa. We are to take on a particular cargo here in Antwerp, a consignment of Flemish mares to be carried to Cape Town, destined for the stud of Lord Charles Somerset, who is the governor of the British settlements there.”

  “So if there’s lords and gentlemen at Cape Town, then I guess maybe there’s ladies too?” said Anibaddh. “And I guess maybe those ladies needs maids to do their heads and look after their clothes?”

  “I suppose they do,” said Mr Fleming.

  Anibaddh studied the map again in silence. Then she said, “I just want to get to Africa somehow or other,” she said. “I’ll wait on Mrs Todd, I guess, far as Cape Town.”

  “YOU SHALL HAVE your astronomy lesson this evening, Mrs Todd, if you and Mr Todd will come to the quarterdeck at sunset,” promised Captain Mainwaring at dinner. “Anyone who likes to come is welcome; the full moon of August is always splendid, and it is well worth seeing its rising through a good glass, if you have never done so before.”

  Having nothing else in particular to do, most of the company, excepting Hector and Mr Fleming, did assemble there. A few clouds still hung in the east, for it had rained earlier in the day.

  “Now, Mrs Todd,” said Captain Mainwaring, “you must not look directly at the sun, not even now as it sets. It is too bright and will harm your eyes. Oh, yes, it is quite capable of doing permanent harm. The moon is another matter; there you may gaze as long as you like in perfect safety, for its benign light is only reflected. Those clouds will clear away soon, I think. We cannot expect to see moonrise just yet, but do watch. It will rise just beyond those masts there—the masts of those yachts.”

  Mr Sinclair, elbows on the rail next to Catherine, said, “So you will sail with us to India after all, Mrs MacDonald. I was glad to hear of it.”

  “To India after all,” said Catherine lightly. “Mostly so as to suit the convenience of my Hindu maid, who wants to return there.”

  “Ha ha! Your maid is the one who sings under her breath all the time, I think?” asked Mr Sinclair.

  “You have heard her?” said Catherine. “Let me apologise for her, but I do not think she is even aware of doing it.”

  “What does she sing?”

  “Anything, everything. It is not just Indian songs but Scottish tunes too, even those she has heard only once or twice. She is amazingly quick to pick up a tune. At first, when I heard her strange Indian melodies, I thought that she was simply an unskillful singer, that her pitch was not true, for she would sing such strange notes! But when she sings Scottish tunes, her pitch is exact—quite exquisitely just. So perhaps it is only that oriental music uses different notes, new notes.”

  “New notes! Hmmm; more likely they are the old notes,” said Mr Sinclair thoughtfully. “All the unused notes that fall between the keys of the pianoforte, lost to us now.”

  “How odd to think of losing notes, of discarding them!” said Catherine. “Like losing colours. Are there lost colours somewhere, to be recovered, do you think?” She nodded at the sky, an improbable aubergine, darkening as the moments passed.

  “Ah! I should so like to astonish the world by rediscovering some lost colours! India will be the place to look for them,” said Mr Sinclair. “If they are to be found anywhere, it is there.”

  “There! There it is!” cried Dr Macpherson loudly, taking his pipe from his mouth and gesturing with it at the thicket of masts to eastward. “Lo, the moon appeareth!”

  “‘Lo, the moon appeareth’?” repeated Mr Todd in a quiet sneering tone, aside to Mr Sinclair.

  “‘Shew thy face from a cloud, O moon; light his white sails on the wave of the night!’” declaimed Dr Macpherson, his unpleasing pedantic voice at its most irritating pitch. “Oh, there is no one so sublime as Ossian for a moonlit maritime scene. Here’s another: ‘Rise, moon, thou daughter of the sky! Look from between thy clouds, that I may behold the gleam of his steel, on the field of his promise.’ And there’s a great deal more, you know, a great deal.”

  “Ossian, is it?” said Mr Todd a little more loudly. “Ossian Macpherson, The Great Sham? Rise, Member for Camelford and Arcot, from thy oft-filled shells, and shed thy great beams and motes in the eyes of the credulous.”

  Mrs Todd laughed, then quickly covered her mouth, but Dr Macpherson affected not to hear this sally.

  “Don’t, sir. It’s a shame,” said Mr Sinclair quietly to Mr Todd, and tried to turn him away by the elbow. But Mr Todd, somewhat elated by his after-dinner wine, would not be hushed. “There’s a great deal more of that too, I assure you,” he said. “Here’s another: Hide thy broad beaming self, oh moon, for thy kilt is blown awry by the whistling blast that issueth from thy shadowed darknesses!” And here Mr Todd succeeded in emitting on cue a loud fart.

  Seizing Mr Todd’s arm in an undeniable grip, Mr Sinclair instantly led him away. As they passed, Catherine heard Mr Sinclair saying, low but vehement, “For shame, man, you might forbear; do you forget he is a Macpherson himself, near kin to the very man, and educated by his generosity?”

  After a moment’s embarrassment, Mrs Todd made Captain Mainwaring a little curtsy and followed her husband to their cabin below.

  Captain Mainwaring remarked calmly to no one in particular that persons who had indulged rather too freely in the joys of the shell were best ignored. He tried to put his telescoping glass into the doctor’s hand, begging that he would feel free to make use of it.

  Dr Macpherson had been slow to take offense, slow to recognise the insult and ridicule directed at him; but as conviction dawned, he had ruffled and swelled up glaring like an angry cock turkey. He had not had an opportunity to retort, but he complained now to the captain: That was a low churlish fellow! It was a trial to be thrown into such company! And who was the fellow after all, with such a name as Todd! Certainly incapable of appreciating the beauties of an Ossian! Beneath the notice of his betters!

  “Quite, Dr Macpherson, quite,” said Captain Mainwaring. “Now, pray look through my glass, Doctor, for I have got the instrument focused to the most exquisite degree. You will notice in particular what cannot be so easily seen with the unaided eye—the great, shadowed craters between the Mare Tranquillitatis and the Mare Fecunditatis, in the southeast quadrant, there. It is a very fine instrument; I had it of a most frighteningly learned man in Prague some years ago.”

  The sensation of the heavy polished wood and glass instrument in his hand returned Dr Macpherson to the present. “A fine instrument indeed,” said he, putting it to his eye—and losing its exquisite focus by tapping it.

  HECTOR, RETURNING TO Increase early the next morning, disapproved of Catherine’s decision. “Oh, Catherine, no. No, no, I will not hear of it. Of course you must remain
for a little time here in Antwerp, and then you will go back to Edinburgh and stay with Mary. It has been all settled. I have seen the house here, the house and warehouse belonging to Crawford and Fleming; you and Grace will be perfectly comfortable there.”

  “No doubt we would be comfortable, Hector. But it is not a question of comfort.”

  “What, then? You have not given me any rational explanation for this absurd change of plan.”

  “But I have explained to you as well as I can,” she said. It was noon; they were on the main deck of Increase, which was tied up at one of the two modern gigantic French-built docks in the commodious port of Antwerp, so that the half-dozen Flemish mares destined for Cape Town could be easily brought aboard. The big stolid mares walked aboard placidly, quite unimpressed by their surroundings. “I have thought about it a great deal,” Catherine said, “and I feel quite certain that it is right for Grace and me to go out to India.”

  “Quite certain! Based upon what? You have not given me anything resembling a cogent reason, Catherine. Come, what are your reasons?”

  “Shall I tell you my reasons so that you can argue them with me?”