by Peg Kingman
A long moment passed while Mr Fleming toyed with a spoon. At last he looked up, drawing breath to speak. Instantly Catherine was pitched violently from her chair and thrown against the table. At the same time, Mr Fleming’s chair overturned, dashing him to the deck. There was a gruesome rending crunching noise like the breaking of bones, and a cry from Grace. Then, from below, many men’s voices, all at once, all in a babel of languages.
“We’ve run aground,” said Mr Fleming as he gained his feet, and helped Catherine up. “Are you hurt?” Only her shoulder and elbow felt bruised; she had somehow not been cut by the broken glass scattered about. Once he realised that she was all right, he disappeared down the ladder to the engine well. Someone shouted to warn the following Pollux to stay well clear.
Grace and Mr Sinclair’s pale frightened faces swam into the dim light. “Fire!” cried Grace, for one of the lamps had been toppled, spilling its oil across the dry boards of the deck. Flames rippled outward. Mr Sinclair tore off his coat and threw it over the fire. But the oil instantly saturated the light cloth, and the flames consumed it. Catherine ran to one of the buckets of sand she had seen holding the little herbal braziers. So heavy, too heavy! It nearly wrenched her arm from her shoulder, but she half dragged it across the deck. It was too heavy to lift and throw onto the fire. She plunged her hands into it and threw double handfuls of sand into the blaze; then Mr Sinclair was at her side, doing the same. The fire guttered, leapt up again, then gave up. They smothered it. Mr Sinclair picked up the nearly empty bucket and dumped the rest of the sand over the charred oily stain.
THE ROTARY OAR at Castor’s bow was mangled, and part of the vane broken off entirely. Hector could not be certain that the main shaft was not bent as well. They had stemmed the leak around the gasket through the hull by stuffing it with oakum and tar, and they deployed two pumps, the men on three-hour shifts.
At first light, Pollux took Castor in tow, making for Monghyr, still thirty miles upriver. The supply boat and firewood boats followed, now under sail. These made slow progress, soon dropping back out of sight, for the wind was scant.
“Why Monghyr?” Catherine asked Hector.
“It is renowned for its foundries,” he said. “For its metalworks of all kinds, or so says Mr Fleming. He assures me that the metallurgists there are the best in all of India. I am dubious. Oh, I knew that the rotary oar was vulnerable, too vulnerable at the bow! If only it had been Pollux run up onto that shoal, we should just have reversed the engines and drawn her off without the slightest damage.”
They limped up to Bhagalpur on the evening of the twelfth day. There they made urgent inquiries of the Company’s agents, but the answer was as Mr Fleming had said: They had best go up to the foundries of Monghyr. The supply boat had not caught up with them, nor the firewood boat. They replenished their onboard supplies of mutton, fowls, yams, eggs and pumpkins; loaded Castor’s deck with coal for Pollux’s boiler; and weighed anchor again at first light on the thirteenth day.
Catherine and Grace took refuge from the heat, insects and glaring sun—and from Hector’s palpable agitation—down in the hold with the ice. The rice-straw matting was now very wet, and it no longer smelled fresh or clean. It smelled moldy.
Once, in an effort to distract himself, Hector took out his violin and bowed the first few phrases of a little melody. The instrument was terribly out of tune, and he struggled with it for some time, adjusting first one string, then another. He tried a different phrase—still an unpleasant noise. He put the instrument away and did not get it out again.
On the fourteenth day they made Sitakund. No one sent for any of the brilliant water for which the place was famous. The river was broad and shallow here, and the current strong. Pollux had struggled all day to tow heavy Castor up against it, straining like a horse dragging logs. It was a relief to anchor at night and rest. Even then, Hector did not allow the workers to let the boiler cool. He said it placed too much stress on the seams and the rivets to alternately fire it, then let it cool. He required the dandees to keep a moderate fire burning even overnight while they lay at anchor. They were in no position to take any chances, he insisted, and fuel was cheap.
Early on the fifteenth day, they anchored off the crowded riverfront of Monghyr at last. Immediately Mr Fleming and Hector climbed into the dinghee and went ashore; immediately the beggars and the vendors in their boats came teeming out from the bazaar all along the bank and assailed the newcomers with offers of pistols, guns, necklaces, baskets, toys, forks, knives, kettles, shoes, and birds in cages. Catherine and Grace and Mr Sinclair took refuge in their cabins behind closed blinds, and with stout bamboo staves the guards fended off the boats of the hawkers, who eventually gave up and drifted away.
Hector came back at midnight to change his clothes and sleep for four hours; then he was off again.
Mr Fleming came back in the morning of the sixteenth day to tell the passengers how matters stood. “We have covered almost four hundred miles—three hundred ninety-eight to be exact—from Calcutta. We have yet eighty-six miles to go to Patna, and five days remaining to us. Castor is to be towed immediately up to the dock at the shipyard above the town, and her damaged oar removed. The new rotary oar is to be cast tonight, using the metal from the damaged oar as well as such additional metal as we have been able to obtain. The molds are nearly ready, and we hope we have secured an adequate supply of fuel for the furnaces. Then we must allow sufficient time for the tempering, and for the wrought-iron portions of the work. Finally the oar must be carted to the dock and installed. Mr Sinclair and I shall have to sleep ashore while Castor is in dock. You, Mrs MacDonald, and Grace are at liberty to remain aboard Pollux, or to share our lodgings ashore, just as you wish. We trust our repairs will be finished by the day after tomorrow. That would give us a chance at getting up to Patna within our allotted time. But if Castor is not ready, then I will take Pollux by herself, and without any passengers. Regrettably, it would be necessary in that case for you to stop here until a later passage, by water or overland, can be arranged.”
Catherine and Grace remained aboard Pollux on the seventeenth day aching for news, but they received no report from Hector, nor from Mr Fleming. A hazy pall of smoke hung over the town. Only Sharada, who had gone ashore by herself, came back with anything to report: The casting of the enormous rotary oar was the talk of the bazaar. The tricky operation had been completed without mishap, but the smiths of the town were amazed by the astonishing quantities of fuel the feringees had insisted upon using to fire the furnaces. They themselves never found it necessary to fire their furnaces so lavishly as that. They grumbled that there remained neither a lump of coal nor a stick of firewood to be had anywhere in the town, reported Sharada; and it was said that even the fires at the cremation ghat had been temporarily checked. Catherine suggested that perhaps no one had died just then, but Sharada said no, she had seen several muslin-wrapped corpses waiting to be burned.
On the eighteenth day, the merchant brig Spur arrived at Monghyr. She remained for only two or three hours, long enough to take on provisions, then set sail again into the lowering sun with an easy breeze behind her. With an impatience that throbbed like an inflamed tooth, Catherine watched the brig disappear up the river.
But at the first light before sunrise on the nineteenth day, Castor and Pollux steamed out of Monghyr at last. Pollux led now. Hector was aboard Castor, monitoring how she went with her new-cast rotary oar. She went as well as ever, he said—still not quite able to keep up with her twin. At noon Hector had himself rowed ahead to Pollux, and went straight to his bed, remaining there for the next ten hours. He did not awaken even when both ships hove to late in the afternoon to help tow Spur off the sandbank where she had run aground in the fog early that morning. All her people had not been able to drag her off, but Castor and Pollux together succeeded in pulling her free and into deep water. Then the two steamships proceeded in tandem up the narrow channel, straight into a brisk headwind that had been gradually g
aining force since noon. Spur, unable to proceed into this wind, could do nothing but drop anchor and lie waiting for the wind to change. Catherine knew just how her people must feel.
The hold where the ice lay was very wet. Cold water sloshed heavily between the ship’s frames. Mr Fleming ordered the pumps manned and the ice-melt pumped out. The men pumped in shifts for hours.
On the twentieth day, Catherine, sitting with her canvaswork on her lap as they passed yet another nameless village without stopping, noticed a cluster of low clay mounds along the riverbank. “Sharada,” she said to the ayah, who was shelling fenugreek nearby, “what are those curious domed structures with spikes on top, there along the bank under that tree? I have seen so many of them all along the river. Are they wee temples?”
“They are suttee monuments, memsahib. Each one honours a widow who has immolated herself with her deceased husband.”
“But there must be at least a dozen at this very spot! And I have seen hundreds more as we have passed up the river!”
“Yes, memsahib. There are very many of them. Very many suttees.” And Sharada gathered up her bowl and, tossing the emptied pods into the river, went down to the galley.
Many widows; many suttees. Catherine threaded her needle yet again. She was using the blue and green silks now; and she was working on the little stream which meandered across the bottom of the stitched scene. She was making that stream much larger, much wider than it had been; she was turning it into a broad river. Perhaps, she considered, she would stitch a steamship on the river.
They got under way before dawn on the twenty-first day, having anchored nearly thirty miles below Patna for the night. All day they steamed at full power up against the broad current, the featureless shore sliding past under a blistering bronze sun.
At sunset, Catherine asked, “Where are we, Hector?”
“Eight miles below Patna. More or less.”
“And are we to continue in the dark?”
“Aye,” he said shortly.
A little later, as the dusk deepened, Grace came with a request: “Catriona, my dear, may I have a sheet of paper? Before it is quite dark, I want to write down the words for a song that Sharada has taught me.”
“Yes, certainly. What is the song?”
“Oh, it is an old boat song, I suppose,” said Grace, and bent to her task.
After a moment, Catherine looked over Grace’s shoulder. She was writing quite easily and deftly in Devanagari script.
“What does it say?” asked Catherine.
Grace sang in her light clear voice, tracing the words with her finger:
“A tasty tune. And what does it mean?”
“Oh, I don’t know every word. But it means, roughly, my leaking boat lies in midstream, no saint or friend comes to save me…hmm, something something, carry me ashore…”
“A fine thing to be singing! Let us try something more auspicious. How about ‘Safely Landed’?” suggested Catherine; and the two of them sang the old Gaelic song together: “Fallain gundith thainig e…Shh, shh; what is that? That boat is hailing us. And music! Who is it?”
Who? It was Sir Charles D’Oyly and Lady D’Oyly in their boat, with his barge following close behind carrying his band of musicians. It was a full escort of honour in fact, all come down to meet them and escort them in their triumph up the last half mile on this evening of the twenty-first day. For ahead in the distance, as they came up at last, rounding one more broad bend in the broad river; there at last! Gleaming in the dusk were the wide well-lit ghats of Patna, and the handsome marble mansions arrayed beyond for miles along the riverbank.
19
This is one of the True Species
Something bumped against the budgerow belonging to Sir Charles and Lady D’Oyly. With an angry oath, a boatman fended it off with a pole. Catherine looked over the rail, then quickly turned away. But she had seen all too clearly in the noonday light: a corpse, only partially burned, the muslin wrappings merely charred over the rib cage. The skull was horribly grinning, the form horribly buoyant, and stinking. It drifted clear, drifted down the current, spinning lazily in their wake in the opaque gray-green holy river.
Death drifted downstream, surrendered to the current. Live beings had to struggle up against the river. Up, up, always fighting up against the current, thought Catherine. She was very tired. She had not slept well, sharing an airless cabin with Grace. It was late April now, and the nights were nearly as hot as the days. She closed her eyes in the shade of the awning and daydreamed in the heat. She daydreamed of icy Highland streams. She thought of the Spey in spate, the tea-coloured, whisky-coloured water transparent as air magnifying its pebbly bed. She was a salmon, battered and worn, still fighting her way upstream, up against the current, up…to what? The spawning grounds, the gravel beds? Up to see for herself a wrecked bungalow near Ghazipur.
“After all there is nothing like being on the spot and seeing for oneself, Sir Charles says,” came the voice of Lady D’Oyly.
“Quite,” said Mr Sinclair. Catherine opened her eyes to see him dash his brush across the top of his wet paper.
“Sir Charles found the entire business in a shambles,” said Lady D’Oyly. She peered narrow-eyed at Catherine, then frowned at the drawing on her lap and applied her pencil. “The most shocking abuses. He has set stringent measures in place for securing the consignments: armed escorts, forms, seals, registers, scales, certificates, assays. When it comes to a thing like opium, one can’t be too painstaking. There is nothing like being on the spot and seeing for oneself.”
“Just so,” said Mr Sinclair, and laid another stroke across the top of his paper.
“I had at first thought it so unlucky that we must run up to Ghazipur just now,” said Lady D’Oyly, “practically the very minute that your party arrived, for it is not very often that we have such congenial visitors. But now is the season when the opium crop comes in; and a business which is to make or break the fortunes of the entire Company cannot very well be left to look after itself. I was so unwilling to go, yet look how fortunately it has all turned out. Ghazipur is quite in your way to Lucknow, Mr Sinclair, and Mrs MacDonald was so obliging as to agree to bear me company. How did you convince your clever brother to manage without you for a few weeks, Mrs MacDonald?”
“Oh, Hector is quite confident of managing everything for himself,” said Catherine. “He supposes that food, clothing and sleep require no management at all. When I return, I expect to find him half starved, rumpled beyond disgrace, and exhausted, but he will not have noticed.”
“I did not quite understand his explanation of the changes he is making to his steamships,” said Lady D’Oyly.
“None of us quite understands, I’m afraid. He has had yet another brainstorm about his rotary oar. It is rather difficult to explain, but he is trying a new placement for it in a slot to be cut in the keel, in the deadwood just before the rudder, you know. Out of harm’s way, he says, where he claims that it will have greater propulsive power and improve the steering, too. He is sleepless with excitement about this new idea.”
“And Mr Fleming?”
“He would have preferred that this brilliant idea—if it is so very brilliant—had occurred to Hector sooner.”
“Oh, but that is the nature of inventions and discoveries, of all philosophical advances,” said Mr Sinclair. “It is all so very obvious in retrospect that one mistakenly supposes it should have been obvious in prospect as well. Alas, it never is.”
“It is the nature of composition, too,” said Lady D’Oyly. “As soon as I have drawn a correct outline, it is perfectly clear that it is correct; how could it be otherwise? But until I have drawn it, I have only a blank sheet of paper. And I have spoiled a great many blank sheets in my time, trying to discover my correct line.” She considered her sketch judiciously at arm’s length, then added weight to a shadow. “Ah! Pray don’t move just yet, Mrs MacDonald. I have very nearly got the folds of your gown.”
“Still,” said Ca
therine as she settled back in her chair once more, “as steamships are rather costlier than sheets of paper, Mr Fleming seems to think that Hector should have had his afterthoughts ahead of time, and is hoping that he will not have any more of them in the future. He would like for Hector to stop inventing and discovering, in short. So Mr Fleming remains in Patna to make sure that any more improvements that may occur to my brother will not be tried out on the boats that will be needed to carry down the precious cakes of opium in just a very few weeks.”
“Do you know, Mrs MacDonald, I should like to draw your ayah one of these days,” said Lady D’Oyly, cocking her head to look critically at her drawing. “She has such an interesting intelligent face and a graceful figure; I should like to add her to our collection. Oh, you have not yet seen our collection; alas, there was not time before we left Patna, but you shall certainly see it when we return. Sir Charles and I have been making such an album of the visages, the costumes, the physiognomies one sees hereabouts, as well as the scenes of native life, and the landscapes, the temples, the ruins. Some of it of course is our own work; but we also have acquired a great many worthy pieces by other artists, even some of the native artists of the district. Some of it is rather primitive, though beautiful in its way; and some of it quite accomplished. Yes, Sir Charles has quite taken some of them under his wing. They are so eager to learn correct modern methods of perspective—and light and shadow, in particular. He talks of forming an art society, open not only to the civilians and the officers but also to the more distinguished natives; but now it will have to wait until after the opium harvest is complete. There! I flatter myself I have got you pretty well, Mrs MacDonald. Ah! And here comes my hardworking husband at last. Have you finished your dispatches and reports, my dear? Come, you are always my severest critic. I cannot get Mr Sinclair to say anything critical at all. Tell me, have I not made a fine job of Mrs MacDonald?”