Not Yet Drown'd

by Peg Kingman

  Anibaddh and Sharada carried in the heavy wooden chest between them. But what of its stout padlock? A search through Lieutenant Babcock’s effects turned up no keys, although carefully wrapped in silk and put away with his uniform saber was a handsome watch, the sight of which reduced poor Mrs Babcock to tears once again, for it had been her wedding present to him. But she bravely composed herself after a few minutes and returned to the matter at hand. “There is nothing for it then but to smash the lock,” she said, still blotting her nose with her wet handkerchief.

  “Oh, no, we mustn’t,” said Catherine.

  “We must, and we shall,” said Mrs Babcock.

  But the padlock proved very robust. Even Anibaddh’s vigorously bashing it with the poker had no effect. “I send for the blacksmith?” Anibaddh said at last, breathless. “Maybe he can cut it off.”

  “I can be removing it, I think,” said Sharada. And turning away modestly for a moment to reach under her petticoat, she brought out an ugly thing: a large pistol, of dull steel.

  “Where in the world did you get that?” demanded Catherine. “Do you mean to say that you carry such a thing about you, upon your person?”

  “I purchased it at Monghyr when we were stopping and waiting for the forging and repairing of the steamship,” said Sharada calmly. “Very good firearms are made at Monghyr. It is the place of all places for buying steels and arms of every kind. A lady is perhaps needing such a thing at some time. But I am not quite knowing how to use it.” She peered doubtfully up its long barrel.

  “Don’t!” cried Catherine, and snatched it away from her.

  “I think you just point it, like that, and then you pull that trigger underneath,” suggested Anibaddh. “It’s loaded?”

  “Yes, I was watching the merchant inserting the powder and the ball,” said Sharada. “He was demonstrating to me just how that is done. But it may have fallen out perhaps?”

  Gingerly, Catherine examined the hammer and the copper percussion cap. “It appears to be loaded, and there is the cap to make it fire,” she said. “But I cannot be certain whether it is properly charged. It may indeed fire, if it has not got too damp in all this time.”

  “But how do you know about guns, Mrs MacDonald?” asked Mrs Babcock.

  “Was it all for nothing, the rising from my warm bed all those frosty autumn mornings to go with my brothers after the red deer and the grouse, and reloading for them, my fingers stiff with cold? But never to this day have I shot anything myself. Stand well back, and put your fingers in your ears. The ball may go through the floor. There is no one downstairs, I trust?”

  “Only a basement, and no one is there,” said Mrs Babcock. “But I do hope it will not wake the baby.”

  Holding the pistol in both hands at arm’s length, Catherine took aim, and wished her arms were longer. The others put their fingers in their ears, and shut their eyes for good measure.

  Slowly, slowly, Catherine squeezed the trigger, more than half expecting that nothing would happen. And then the pistol fired. The detonation was a shock, and Catherine’s hands and arms and chest and eardrums felt the impact.

  Anibaddh was the first to come forward; she fingered the lock on the chest. Alas, the lock itself still hung intact, but then she saw that the plate to which the hasp was fastened was loose, and the wood to which it had been solidly bolted was now shattered. She wrenched it free, and Mrs Babcock came forward and opened the chest.

  They all peered in, and a swarm of white ants came teeming, boiling up from inside. “Oh! Oh!” cried Mrs Babcock. “The horrid, disgusting creatures! What is to be done?” The ants poured over the side like infantry at the charge.

  “The window!” said Catherine, and threw it open. Sharada and Anibaddh lifted the chest by its handles and tumbled it out onto the wet stone pavement below. It spilled its contents across the narrow street and into the running gutter in the middle of the passage: a shredded mass of dirty frass and litter, for the ants during four or five undisturbed weeks had consumed much of the paper, and built a Rome amid the rest.

  Sharada and Anibaddh went down to save what might be saved, and Mrs Babcock went to her baby, who had indeed been wakened by the commotion. Catherine was left alone in Mrs Babcock’s little sitting room overlooking the street.

  The street was only just wide enough to permit the passage of a moderate-size elephant. Catherine was able to determine this because a moderate-size elephant came along and, obedient to the orders of its mahout, came to a stop just outside the window, its pink and gray spotted ears slowly flapping. The man mounted on the elephant’s back—not the barefoot mahout astride its neck but the great man riding in dignity upon the elaborate howdah strapped to the elephant’s back—was higher than the window itself. There were half a dozen attendants, too, following behind on foot.

  Catherine had never looked an elephant in the face before. Its eye looked at her, and blinked. The elephant had long curved eyelashes.

  “What are you doing, you beautiful Unbound One?” said the great man on the howdah, in English.

  Anibaddh drew herself up—very straight, very supple—and said, “Good day, Prince Teerut. I’m looking for maps of those hills of yours. A lady upstairs, she want to go there.”

  “My men shall search, Unbound One,” he said, and his attendants came forward at his gesture.

  “Never mind; ain’t a thing worth saving,” said Anibaddh. “It’s all just dirt. Where are you going on your elephant?”

  “I am going here, to seek you. My uncle’s business in this city is finished. He prepares to return to our braw high lands in the Abode of Clouds and Mist. But my own business, it is not finished. I cannot go with him. I cannot go away from you. I am coming here to beseech you, that you will return with me. That great noble family which has no daughter—which yearns for a daughter—they will adopt you, Unbound One, as their own daughter, and then we can be married, you and I.”

  Anibaddh looked at him for a long time, her hands on her hips. “Well, Prince,” she said at last, “I don’t care to talk about it in a loud voice, out in the street. Please get on down and come out of the rain.”

  Catherine watched as an attendant carrying an ornate ladder hurried forward and planted it against the elephant’s side, and the great man climbed down. Another attendant held a marigold-coloured silk umbrella over the great man’s head. It was hard to judge his age; he might be in his twenties. He was of Anibaddh’s height, with fine skin the colour of milky tea. His features were regular and handsome, though foreign, resembling slightly the Chinese men whom Catherine had seen in Calcutta, and his hair and mustache were of the glossiest black. His body was well formed, with flat belly and broad chest, and his tunic and loose trousers were made of a shimmering pale golden silk. He wore several gold rings set with large gems. Could they really be rubies, diamonds, and emeralds, of such a size?

  There was nothing bashful in Anibaddh. She drew herself up and returned his gaze. She, too, Catherine realised, was beautifully formed, fully as feminine as the indecent stone carvings of goddesses which adorned the native temples in this city. Her only ornament was a thick gold bracelet on her left wrist. They did not touch each other, nor speak. They only looked at each other.

  Finally Anibaddh said, “My lady with the baby, she beg me not to leave her here all alone.”

  “You shall bring them with you. You shall bring as many attendants as you please. You and all your ladies shall ride on elephants.”

  Anibaddh laughed; and the elephant flapped its pink-spotted ears again at the sound.

  “I AM GOING with Anibaddh,” said Sharada later to Catherine when they were back in their own gloomy damp rooms again. Sharada smoothed the cloth over the table and laid out the cutlery for Catherine’s dinner. “First we are traveling upon boats up to Gowahati. That is ninety miles from here, up the Brahmaputra River. Thence we are going overland, on elephants and oxen, southward, up into the Khasiya Hills, into the high lands, up to the lakes and waterfalls and the pi
ney forests of Meghalaya.”

  Catherine maintained her stony silence.

  “You come too, memsahib, you and Miss Grace,” said Sharada, and uncovered a dish of stewed fish cooked with eggplant and some kind of succulent greens. “We all can go. He is of important family, this Prince Teerut, and he offers to be carrying us all.”

  “But how utterly absurd!” Catherine burst out. “It is out of the question that we should do so preposterous a thing as that. Only imagine explaining such a plan to Colonel Hill! It is so foolish, so reckless, so—so exceedingly imprudent. And as for you, have you the slightest reason to expect you will find Sandy there rather than anywhere else in this wilderness, this trackless jungle?”

  “Yes, memsahib, I have reason. I am feeling his presence there.”

  “Oh, feeling his presence!”

  “Certainly, memsahib. When Mr Fleming comes into the same room with you, do you not feel in your flesh that he is there? You feel, I am sure of it. So you know in your own body what I am telling. I can feel Sikander’s nearness in my flesh. I can feel where he is. There is a heat in my flesh on that side of me where he is, like feeling the heat of the sun falling on that side of my body which is turned toward the sun. It is the same thing.”

  Catherine snorted, and Sharada went out of the room, closing the door rather more decidedly than was necessary.

  The dish of fish and eggplant was spicy, but Catherine was becoming accustomed to spiciness. Was there poppy in it? Possibly; but it was delicious, and she was hungry. And what was this strange vegetable? Not so different from sea-tangle.

  Heat in her flesh! What unseemly language! And from a widow! Let glowing coals cool, banked in their own ash.

  If only they would cool.

  Could she indeed feel Mr Fleming’s presence in a room? she asked herself. Aye, in truth she had felt it. She had always been uncomfortably aware of it, like a pressure of air, making it a little more difficult to breathe, to draw a deep and easy breath. She could feel him even now, perhaps, behind her. Far away, back down the river, behind her, between her shoulder blades. She looked up at the window to orient herself: yes, she was indeed facing more or less eastward. And she had left him more or less behind her, to the west. But by now, must he not have passed back down the river again, and have passed already through Calcutta? By now, surely, he and Hector had set out in the twin steamships across the Bay of Bengal, making for Canton with their cargo of opium. Her shoulder blades might be mistaken, must be mistaken. And so Sharada might easily be mistaken, too.

  But Anibaddh’s Khasi prince—speaking remarkably good English, and where had he learned that, pray? and with a dash of Scots in it, for surely he had said “braw highlands”—this Prince Teerut had offered to bring them all, as the attendants of his bride, as her maids and matrons of honour. As Anibaddh’s servants, in fact. To bring them all into Meghalaya, to the Abode of Clouds and Mist.

  Had she any other way to go there? Any prospect but this?

  Was she still utterly determined to go there? Still certain of finding Sandy?

  Catherine wiped up the sauce from her plate with a morsel of flat soft bread dotted with white seeds. There was another thing to be considered, a curious and troubling thing which Sharada did not know. The curious thing was this: Mr Fleming had referred in his letter—that letter, engraved in her memory—to Sandy’s associates in Assam, The Princes of Tea Root. Was that a joke of Sandy’s? Was it only a misunderstanding, a mishearing, on Mr Fleming’s part? Was it merely a coincidence, only another trick of the gods, that this sounded so like Prince Teerut?

  Grace’s chessboard stood at the far end of the table, the pieces left as the battle had ended. The white king stood checkmated by the black queen. That is odd, thought Catherine; both queens had been captured already when she had seen the board earlier. How had this happened? When Grace came in, she asked her.

  “Aye, and so blind of me not to have seen it sooner!” said Grace, helping herself to the last piece of flatbread. “But now I will never forget. I had only to get my pawn to the far edge of the board—a matter of only a few moves, and no way for white to stop me. Once queened, then, my new black queen had the white king in checkmate in a matter of one more move.”

  From black pawn to black queen. Now she is puissant; she can go everywhere. She carries everything before her.

  WELL, HERE AM I, arrived at the far edge of the board, at the very edge of the world, thought Catherine later as she lay in bed beside Grace. And now who will queen me? The rain had stopped, the clouds had blown away; and now moonlight poured across the roofs of the city, quite as heavy and liquid as the rain. Sharada had packed up her own belongings—her two chests of musical instruments, books, and papers—and carried them away to the house behind the Goldsmiths Bazaar, to be ready for the morning departure, and to help Mrs Babcock pack what she and the infant Constantia would need on the journey into Meghalaya.

  “We must go, too, Catriona, you and I,” said Grace’s voice.

  “I didn’t know you were awake,” said Catherine.

  “The moonlight wakened me, glaring in my eyes. But we ought to go. I feel certain of it.”

  “I don’t feel certain of anything. I have never felt so uncertain in my life. The heart has gone out of me. I feel all adrift, in a small boat, in a blind mist.”

  “How else are we to make our way? In any case, I should like so much to ride again upon an elephant. I do like elephants. In chaturanga, you know, Indian chess, the bishops are elephants. Otherwise, what? Shall we just wait here until Mr Fleming comes to fetch us away again?”

  “Certainly not; what are you talking about? Why should Mr Fleming come here?”

  “Sharada says he will come. When I have to choose between two moves at chess—and I cannot see very far ahead, you know, in the game—I have made a compact with myself always to choose the boldest move, or the one I have not tried before. Before, when I was timid, afraid to move, I used to lose.”

  “Chess is only a game. Even if you make a foolish move, you lose only a game.”

  “But Mrs Babcock is going.”

  “Oh, Mrs Babcock, the paragon of good judgment!”

  “What do you suppose we may lose if we go with them?”

  Catherine did not answer, but she thought, we may lose everything. All. Ourselves. Our lives. We may be lost forever.

  “Well?” insisted Grace.

  “Be quiet, you. I am trying to think.”

  Grace turned over again with a deep exasperated sigh, and pulled the sheet over her face to keep the moonlight out of her eyes. Soon she slept.

  But Catherine could not sleep. She was thinking about Mr Fleming. About that feeling in her body about where he was. He was coming here. Sharada said he would come. Perhaps in several months, in October or November, after his voyage to China, he would come.

  What would he find when he arrived here? Would he find herself, timid, paralyzed, unnerved; sitting, waiting, too frightened at last to proceed any further on her quest? And would she then allow herself to be rescued by him from this place, rescued from her dead-end failed search, taken back down to the well-traveled river routes, back down into the populated cities?

  But if he did not find her here? If he arrived here and found only that she eluded him still, retreated before him still, disappeared into the unmapped highlands, the terra incognita of Meghalaya, what then?

  How far would he follow? How long would he seek her? How far would he pursue her beyond this edge of the world?

  What becomes of those who flee their own happiness?

  It was a long time before Catherine slept. But she did at last; and when she awoke again before dawn, it was with music streaming through her head. The music was “Sandy’s Tune,” “Not Yet Drown’d.” She rose from her bed and packed her scant belongings into her trunk once again, for another journey.

  24

  To play amidst Rocks, Hills, Valleys, & Coves where Ecchoes rebounded

  Prince Teerut had
procured a couple of European-style officers’ tents for his bride and her attendants so they would feel comfortable on the journey up into his highlands. He and his important uncle, the Hima Syiem, had obtained a great many other European-style things, too, in Goalpara—things whose long, awkward shapes were well wrapped in canvas and oilcloth, to keep them dry despite the frequent downpours. These precious swaddled objects were unloaded first from the boats after each day’s passage upriver toward Gowahati, and a special guard was set over them each night.

  The infant Constantia was kept well swaddled, too. She seldom cried during the daylight hours; she usually slept while they were traveling. Sharada said it was because she was so constantly rocked by the motion of the boat, bucking upriver against the heavy monsoon current. But Constantia wailed at night, when all was still, until Sharada rigged up a sort of hammock which could be slung from the tent poles and swung by a cord, like a punkah. Vigorous rocking soothed her. “She will be wandering, all her life, this one,” predicted Sharada. “She must always be moving.”

  “Like yourself,” said Catherine.

  “And yourself,” replied Sharada.

  “Alas! Not by choice,” said Catherine.

  “Fate or choice—who can be telling any difference?” said Sharada. She opened the brass-bound chest that contained her belongings and unwrapped a gorgeous native violin—shaped and painted like a peacock—and its stout bow, resembling a shallow hunting bow, strung with a broad band of horsehair. “Music this evening, because it is for once not raining. Mrs Babcock will bring a mat to be spreading on the ground. You, memsahib and Grace, please are bringing cushions for Anibaddh and yourselves? The cushions from the tents.”

  The cushions from the tents were stuffed with sweet dry grass. Catherine and Grace arranged them on a bamboo mat which Mrs Babcock had rolled out like a carpet under a canopy set up for them by Teerut’s servants. They set the best cushion, the one with the silk cover and the silver and gold embroidery, upon a little platform in the middle, for Anibaddh, and they arranged the others around it, lower, for themselves.