Not Yet Drown'd

by Peg Kingman

  Then Hector asked Mr Sinclair to spare him a sheet of copper so he could make some experimental models. The two of them disappeared into Hector’s cabin. For two days there was conferring and sketching; cutting, filing, and hammering; and finally a foray down to the ship’s smithy to do some brazing. By their fifth day at sea, Hector and Mr Sinclair were ready to test Hector’s new theory, and Mr Fleming was invited to observe.

  Catherine was curious, too. She was accompanied by Mrs Todd, who at this time did not like to be left alone. In the cuddy cabin, Hector had set up three large glass beakers of seawater, and mounted in each of these was a mechanical device made of copper. Each device differed a little from the others.

  “It is a matter of turbulence, I think,” said Hector, taking up a bottle of grenadine syrup which stood at hand and idly twisting its cork as he spoke. “I had assumed that an oar of two spirals must exert twice as much propelling power as an oar of only one spiral. Then, by mischance—or good luck—the oar on Dram Shell snapped in two, leaving only a single spiral. Yet the oar’s power actually improved! I could not understand why. I have been pondering it for these three months. But when you asked me, Catherine, why our old chimney would not draw after our father built the new wing near it, I realised then I had to understand not just the action of the fluid upon the upstream plane of the oar but also its action behind the plane—the eddies and currents at the top of the chimney, so to speak, and the pressures—or the voids—exerted there. It has been valuable to observe the action of wind upon the sails all this time, for air and water are both fluids, and their action is similar. When I saw the effect of the wind pouring over the cliffs outside Table Bay, I understood at last how to redesign my spiral oar. And so this is what I have been making, you see: three small models for testing. Here is my rotary oar as I originally designed it, with two full spirals. This next one has only one spiral. And this third model is an entirely new design, with four quarter-spirals, all mounted shoulder to shoulder, so to speak.”

  “It does not look like a spiral oar at all,” said Catherine. “More like the vanes of those windmills at Antwerp.”

  “Aye, only rather broader and shorter, as water is a denser fluid than air.”

  “Now, on your steam engines below, in the hold—” said Mr Fleming.

  “Those rotary oars are the original design, with two full turns,” said Hector. “But if trials were to prove one of these newer designs more efficient, it would be a simple matter to forge new ones and mount them to the engines. No modifications would be required to the engines themselves.

  “Now let us begin. I have devised these rawhide loops to act as drive belts upon this spit, borrowed from the galley, of course. Perhaps you, Mr Fleming, will be good enough to turn it—as steady as possible, if you please. There they go, the three of them—a pretty sight! Now, into the water, just in front of each rotor, I inject with this baster a dollop of the grenadine syrup. Ah! Look!”

  The crimson syrup bloomed in the beakers, swirling in ribbons and streams churned by the moving rotors. Within a few seconds, though, the syrup had dissipated throughout the seawater, and the distinctive patterns of turbulence caused by each of the three devices could no longer be discerned.

  “We’ll do them again,” said Hector. “One at a time now.” Pouring out the pink water, then pouring in clear water from a bucket, he started over again. And again, while he intently studied the swirling patterns of turbulence and diffusion, sketching notes and memorising the differing patterns produced by each of his little rotors. Over and over. And over. Eventually Mrs Todd sighed and wandered away, but it wasn’t until the steward came in, seeking to set the table in the cuddy cabin for dinner, that Hector released his assistants and ceased his experiment at last.

  ANIBADDH HAD DYED black Mrs Todd’s shoes and her three muslin gowns, and Catherine had given her two pair of black kid gloves which she had laid by, no longer needing that colour herself. Mrs Todd’s broad-brimmed Antwerp hat—the one which had aroused Mr Todd’s derision—was trimmed now with black silk ribbon and several crape roses, also salvaged from Catherine’s mourning clothes. Mrs Todd would absently twist and roll the ribbon as she sat and talked to Catherine under the canopy rigged over the maindeck in the long afternoons.

  She liked to speak of Mr Todd. She talked of his virtues, and the kind consideration with which he had always treated her. She liked to reminisce about how they had first met, and how he had admired her and courted her, was bowled over by her charm and beauty, from the very moment he had laid eyes on her. Catherine was fairly certain that a great deal of this was made up (indeed, she recognised particular scenes and phrases from certain popular novels), and wondered, as the stream of words flowed past, what purpose could be served by this making of fiction, this energetic falsifying of the past. Mrs Todd never again referred to any irregularity in her connection with Mr Todd; nor did Catherine ever allude to it. Catherine was not certain that Mrs Todd was even aware of having once given away this secret.

  About the first of December, when they had been under way again for a week, Mr Todd’s personal effects were sold by bid as usual, with the second mate acting as auctioneer. The proceeds were given to the widow. It made a little store of ready money, in addition to what Mr Todd had been carrying. Of his belongings she kept only his gold-and-ivory toothpick.

  “I have every confidence that Mr Todd’s dear friends in Calcutta will open their arms to me, for his sake,” Mrs Todd assured Catherine, torturing her black ribbons, “but it is a comfort to have a small sum laid by for contingencies which may arise. Oh, yes, especially one particular and inevitable contingency, which is certain to arise only six months from now! Ah, such a bittersweet memento of himself he has given me!” And she laid a hand just below the sash at her bust, plumper now than ever.

  Out of compassion, Catherine schooled herself to let Mrs Todd talk, though she could not really listen. But as she sat and stitched doggedly at her canvaswork, she found that Mrs Todd’s reminiscences, embellished and imaginative though they must be, triggered a deep remembering in herself. It was a fluent upwelling of long-held memories, and they came upon her in astonishing vividness and detail. While Mrs Todd talked, Catherine remembered everything.

  Every thing. But they were not so very painful now, these memories. Though clear and exquisitely detailed as a miniature portrait on ivory, they seemed small and far away. For she herself was now very far away. Now, here, she could afford to remember.

  James MacDonald, her own darling. Tall and grave, she had thought him. So sad at first, mourning still his wife. Then the evening when he had first sought her own quiet company rather than sprightlier others. The fine man he was! The deepening pleasure of learning the qualities of his character; and of knowing her own qualities esteemed by such a one as he.

  Not just esteemed, then, but loved. Beloved. Oh, the exaltation! the exultation!

  The joy of going to dwell in his house, to be his wife.

  There, her tender care of his griefs (aye, still), and of his silverware. There, fostering his little pale daughter; fostering the spring peas in his garden.

  This vast piece of canvaswork, spread even now across her lap. Stitch, stitch: a golden tulip forming now under her fingers.

  The heather-scented linen sheets of their bed, and the curtains hung ’round it: she could see clearly the sprigged muslin of their lining. Their bed.

  His kindness to her, and his delight in her. His pride, his virtue, his uprightness in his dealings with all men and all women.

  His pride in his horses, and his masterful but tactful way with them. That one wicked mare, so lovely to look upon: a bright chestnut with perfect markings and a gait like the doe on the hill—

  “Will you spare me a length of dark worsted, Catriona, my dear?” said Grace, appearing suddenly at Catherine’s elbow in a most startling way. Bunched in her hand like an old dishcloth was her grubby sampler, a thing she had always loathed. “I beg your pardon, Mrs Todd,” Grace a
dded belatedly, for Mrs Todd had been talking.

  “Aye, I will,” replied Catherine. “But what makes you want it after all this time?”

  “I am going to stitch my name. Look, Sharada has written it for me on this paper: ‘Grace.’ That is how you write Grace in the Devanagari script. Perhaps I will stitch the whole Devanagari alphabet. It is curious that it does not get muddled up in my head like our alphabet does, still.”

  “Perhaps it is because you have never yet dashed this new alphabet to bits by pitching onto your head.”

  “Nor do I intend to. It was most disagreeable. Look: this is ‘ga,’ the first letter of my name.”

  “It is very pretty and graceful. Just like yourself,” said Mrs Todd.

  Grace smiled upon her, truly pleased, then asked Catherine for a new needle, as her old one had rusted.

  In Catherine, memory welled up again…The wicked beautiful mare had been killed, too, bolting over the cliff in harness. Catherine regretted this; she would have liked to shoot that mare herself.

  “DO YOU LIKE Mr Fleming?” Grace asked Catherine suddenly as they lay drowsy in their beds one night.

  Catherine was struck dumb, for a long moment. Of course she liked him; he was well bred and perfectly amiable. But what did Grace mean? And what would her reply mean to Grace? And as she considered the childish question, it broke quite suddenly upon Catherine that she liked him very, very much indeed. “Oh, aye, I do like him,” she said at last.

  “I like him, too,” said Grace. “He lent me a book, a Sanskrit grammar, which was kind of him, though I doubt I shall ever look at it.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “Sharada says that no one knows Sanskrit anymore except the priests and the singers. She says that Hindi and Bengali will be far more useful to me.”

  “I suppose Sanskrit is the language of the cultivated class, of scholars, just as Latin and ancient Greek are for us,” said Catherine.

  “Sharada knows Sanskrit herself, though, because she knows the old songs. This evening she sang some for me so I could hear how it sounds.”

  “Ah, was that it? I thought I heard her singing. But I could not walk away from Mrs Todd while she was talking to me.”

  “She is the loveliest singer, Catriona. Did you know that she was a famous singer, and a musician, before she became an ayah?”

  “Was she?”

  “A musician by profession, she told me. She knows how to play ever so many native instruments whose names I cannot remember. Her father taught her, for he was a very famous musician himself, though he was blind. And she used to play and sing for the great prince and his nobles, she said, at court. At the full moon, everyone would go out in boats upon the river, and she and the other musicians would sing and play for them all night by moonlight on the water.”

  DURING THE NEXT four weeks, Sharada taught Grace the Devanagari alphabet, and some Hindi and Bengali phrases—and Hindustani chess while she was at it, a game called chaturanga.

  Catherine referred to Mr Fleming’s Sanskrit grammar from time to time, for she was still making her deliberate way through Ramayana.

  She had copied two-thirds of Sandy’s manuscript by now, and from Cape Town had sent a second batch of copied pipe music back to Mary in Edinburgh via a homebound ship. She still made a point of devoting to it an hour or two each morning, hoping to finish by the time they arrived at Calcutta. Sometimes Mr Fleming inquired about her progress, and she would report what number she had been copying. She asked him in turn about his translation of the Chinese tea scrolls; they were slow going, apparently—obscure and troublesome.

  In the afternoons, sitting on the deck with her canvaswork across her lap while Mrs Todd talked, Catherine continued remembering everything about her time with James. It no longer hurt, not very much. She had been quite happy in those days, while she was married, before her heart had been so grievously maimed…

  “Mrs MacDonald, are you quite well?” insisted a voice. It was Mr Fleming. How long had he been standing over her? She had been very far away.

  “Perfectly well, sir,” she croaked with great effort, for her tongue felt thick, and as she whisked back a stray corkscrew of hair from her cheek, she dashed away the tear she found there, and mustered a smile to reassure him. Mrs Todd was sound asleep in her chair, a few feet away, her mangled black ribbons still twisted between her fingers in her lap.

  He looked searchingly at Catherine nevertheless. “I am just going to treat myself to the last of my Yunnan,” he said, “and I beg you will do me the honour of drinking it with me. Pray do, Mrs MacDonald. You will be doing me a great kindness. You cannot conceive how tired I am of human endeavor. I do not complain of your brother; only, only…Come, it will do us both good. A change of scene is not to be had, alas, aboard ship, but perhaps you will settle for a change of company. You have had a long, hard watch since we left Cape Town. She can spare you just now,” he added quietly. “We both have earned some respite, some relief from demands.”

  “I daresay we have…. Am I to understand that Hector is being imperious?” she asked as she rose from her chair.

  “Well, not to say imperious, precisely, but alarmingly enthusiastic. He now proposes to cut those rotary oars from those engines stowed below just as soon as we arrive in Calcutta and to replace them with new ones of another design. Another design, which, he assures me, will prove far superior.”

  “But you are just a little skeptical about these new rotary oars of superior design, I think?” asked Catherine.

  “They are entirely unproven. They do not even exist except in your brother’s imagination.”

  “Aye. To him, however, they are quite real. I think it must be very agreeable to be a mechanic, for, unlike ordinary people, they are never abashed by their mistakes. Quite the contrary, they are exhilarated by them, because they learn so much from making them. A practical person such as yourself cannot take the same view of the matter. You, of course, need a design that will assuredly do its job, and you have no time for mistakes, no matter how inspiring. Well, Mr Fleming, I wish you luck in dealing with any brother of mine. We are obstinate and arrogant, we MacDonalds! You will have an interesting time of it.”

  “Are you both like this, then?”

  “Oh, aye,” she said. “We never give up. And then, so often, we turn out to be right.”

  “I daresay it will be interesting then,” he said. “We Flemings are just the same way. I consider myself warned. Still, I would be glad if you will come and drink some tea with me.”

  “I will,” Catherine said. “Only I must go and put away this tiresome needlework first.”

  This she did, stuffing it into the narrow closet in the bulkhead of her cabin. And there, in the back of the dark recess, she saw the little ivory box of tea which Sandy had sent, his last present. She withdrew it and removed the ivory sliver that served as hasp, then opened it and inhaled deeply of the malty scent. The large, twisted brown leaves were dashed with golden tips, and the caddy was still nearly full, for she and Mary had drunk only a little of it. She took it with her across to Mr Fleming’s cabin.

  The steward was already there, tending the kettle. “Sitakund water, this time,” said Mr Fleming, and set a chair for her. “From Queen Sita’s well. Your wee lass startled me this morning. She asked me—in quite passable Hindi—whether I knew how to play chaturanga.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Catherine. “From one extreme to the other. She talks every waking minute now in any language. Well, and what did you say to her? Do you know how to play chaturanga?”

  “I did not admit to it,” he said, setting out his cups and polishing them with a cloth.

  “It is a corrupted form of chess, I gather.”

  “Oh, not corrupted in the least, I beg your pardon, Mrs MacDonald. It is in fact the pure, original form of chess—the game was invented in India. Later the Persians learned it, and the Moors got it from them, and the Europeans from the Moors. But it originated here, in India. Now what tea will you h
ave? I can give you that bohea from Yunnan which I mentioned, or a Lung Ching, now unfortunately a little past its prime.”

  “Neither one, if you please. I have brought you some tea this time,” said Catherine, and presented him with the little ivory box.

  “Handsome,” he said, examining the box before opening it. “It puts me in mind of some of the finer Moghul work.” He peered at the tea inside, and sniffed it. Then he shook a few leaves into the palm of his hand, turning them over lightly, and held them under the window for a close look. He smelled it again; then he tasted one dry leaf. “What is it?” he said. “Where did you get this?” He took a pinch of the leaves, dropped them into his teapot, and poured the steaming Sitakund water over them from quite high up, making a splash. Then he covered the pot with its lid.

  “It was sent to me by my brother—my late brother, Sandy, from India,” said Catherine.

  He suddenly stared at her very oddly, intently. But it was as though he did not quite see her, as though he were looking through her instead, beyond her, to someone or something else. “Sandy MacDonald…Alexander MacDonald?” he said slowly.

  She nodded: yes.

  “You did mention, long ago, I think, that you had another brother. Your brother Alexander was in the Company’s service?”

  “Aye, for nearly four years.”

  “Civilian or army?”

  “Civilian. He took part first in an exploratory expedition to the eastern hills; and afterward the Company posted him to a district called, I believe, Ghazipur, where he superintended some aspect of the Company’s opium production. Until, they tell us, he met with a fatal accident during last year’s monsoon flooding.”

  Mr. Fleming blinked hard several times. His expressive eyebrows rose, and he took both her hands in his, saying, “But my dear Mrs MacDonald, what a blockhead I have been, all this time! I knew your brother!”

  And then the story spilled out: “I met him in Calcutta at an Asiatick Society dinner in the year ’twenty. By merest chance we fell into conversation, and quickly discovered in each other a congenial mind and temper. What a delight it is to meet a new friend! At my invitation, he afterward paid me a visit at Serampore. A genuine friendship soon formed between us, perfectly effortless….” He fell silent for a moment, remembering, and then went on: “This was after his return from that expedition to the Assam Hills, and he told me a little about what he had seen there. He stayed with me for perhaps a fortnight while awaiting his next instructions from his superiors. I was so glad to have his company and his conversation. Dear Mrs MacDonald, I liked your brother so very well! How sorely you must miss him.”