Not Yet Drown'd

by Peg Kingman

  Everyone was invited. Anibaddh, Catherine, Sharada, Grace, and Mrs Babcock with her infant were received among the women along one side of the big dance hall, and given a good place to sit, and served delicious food brought to them on enormous leaves used as platters; sweetmeats of rice and honey, tiny smoked fishes, roasted meats. They could see Sandy across the hall among the men.

  In the middle of the room were the dancers. The girls of the town were dressed in their best silken sarongs, and were weighed down by massy necklaces of gold beads and red coral. They danced sedately, demurely, in an inward-facing circle while the young men, in their exquisitely pleated gold turbans, danced exuberantly, showing off behind the backs of the girls, dancing a larger circle outside of them. The musicians, in one corner, played tirelessly: a hornpipe, several double-ended drums, a tambourine, and an instrument like a bamboo mouth harp that sounded like a nest of bees. Sometimes they sang.

  Eventually, when the music stopped, it was time for the presentation of gifts. The Hima Syiem presented the great man of the town with a long canvas-wrapped object. This, when unwrapped, proved to be a British percussion-cap rifle, and it caused a sensation. The great man’s speech upon accepting this gift was energetically delivered, and it went on for some time, warmly acclaimed by all those who could understand it.

  Then the great man of the town presented the Hima Syiem with a splendid tiger-skin shield decorated with tassels of red-dyed goat hair. Catherine noted that the tiger must have been immense, for the shield was nearly six feet high, without head and tail. This present was also much admired, and Prince Teerut delivered the speech of thanks, which, though briefer than their host’s, was certainly as well received. At last the alliance was ratified by the consumption all around of a quantity of rice liquor. This was not the mild, yeasty rice beer that Catherine had tasted before; this was unmistakably a distilled spirit. As the piper took up his hornpipe once again, Catherine could feel her head swimming.

  As the ceremonies concluded, and the music and the dancing resumed, there were still more presents to be exchanged—private exchanges, unofficial presents. Prince Teerut now made his way across the hall to Anibaddh and offered her a small silk-wrapped parcel on a polished tray. She unwrapped it: a tiny box upholstered in silk, exquisitely embroidered and decorated with appliquéd iridescent butterfly wings. “It is a betel nut box, of course,” Sharada whispered in Catherine’s ear. “That is a traditional betrothal present here.” It was a lovely thing, a promise of all the blissful pleasures and treasures to be laid up during a long, fruitful lifetime of marriage.

  What gift could Anibaddh offer in return? Catherine wondered.

  But Anibaddh was prepared for this. From her sash she drew out a little silk-wrapped object. She placed her gift onto the same tray and presented it to Prince Teerut with a graceful bow. Teerut received it and unwrapped it. Catherine saw the gleam of gold, then recognised it: a gold watch, and ticking blithely, it seemed, for Teerut held it to the ear of first one person, then another, causing amazed delight to bloom upon each face in turn. It was the very gold watch which had formerly been Mrs Babcock’s wedding gift to her dear Babcock. Catherine looked across at Mrs Babcock, whose eyes were brimming. But she was smiling through her tears; and on the arm that held the sleeping infant Constantia, she now wore the gold bracelet that had formerly been Anibaddh’s.

  Now, another gift passes from hand to hand.

  A cloth-wrapped packet tied with black silk cord passes from Sharada’s slim brown hand to Sandy’s freckled broad hand. He cuts the cord—using his own sgian dubh, which Catherine gave him on their fifteenth birthday and he has recovered at last from Grace—and proceeds to unwrap it.

  The outer wrapping is of waxed khaki-coloured canvas, quite stiff. Inside is another wrapping of pale silk. It goes around and around, at least a yard of it. Removing it is like unwinding a silkworm’s cocoon. But now, here is the thing itself, the kernel of the nut: a book—a neat, thick volume no more than six inches across and eight inches high. It fits easily in the hand, a pleasure to hold, to turn over and over. It is handsomely bound in the Lucknow taste: in tooled azure leather stamped with lotus blossoms around the border in gold leaf. But the front cover is on the back, for it is bound for reading from right to left—in the Mughal style—not left to right in the European style.

  In Sikander’s freckled hand, the book falls open to a page somewhere in the middle. It is not a printed book; these pages have never been through a printing press. They are the product of some human hand. It is a manuscript of music.

  The paper is foxed and spotted with molds. The ink is faded to brown. One edge of the volume has been wet—quite recently perhaps—and the paper there is buckled and wavy; and some of the ink has run. Is there a great deal of damage? Is the manuscript all run away, dissolved and drown’d?

  No. There is the familiar stave—fourteen rows of five lines filling each small page from top to bottom, left edge to right, front and verso; each with its sketchy treble clef, its two sharps, on C and F, and the nine notes. Who needs more than nine notes? Bagpipe music.

  “‘Rory MacLeod’s Lament,’” Sandy reads out quietly, for that is the title of the venerable old tune written out by hand on this page. “My darling, my beloved, it is a great treasure. An inestimable treasure.”

  Sharada smiled, her face ducked down modestly, pleased by his pleasure. “I knew you were desiring it, from the very moment of first casting your eyes upon it.”

  “What is it?” said Grace, craning her neck to see.

  “A very curious and valuable manuscript,” said Sandy, “formerly belonging to Sharada’s father.” His voice sounded strangely choked as he continued. “He had kept it all his life, saved it as a memento of the feringee friend of his youth, who wrote it out so long ago—back in the ’sixties—before dying of fever, twenty-three years old and far from home.”

  “But what is in it?” said Grace again.

  “Look,” said Sandy, showing it to her. “It is a collection of old Scottish bagpipe tunes—the ceol mhor, the old traditional piobaireachd—written out by the very hand of Joseph MacDonald. It is a vastly valuable thing in itself. And it is doubly valuable to me, for—for—it was over these pages that I fell in love. Each tune I have copied out while my darling sat nearby and talked sweetly to me, or sang beautifully to me, or drew the lines on the page for me. Each tune is in itself a precious artifact, and each tune is also for me a memorial of an evening spent in a garden paradise in the company of my beloved. I remember the evening of this one, Sharada, dearest: ‘The Pride of Barra’—do you remember?” He sang the first phrase of it, and Sharada laughed.

  “I remember most assuredly,” she said.

  “Alas, I had not nearly so much pleasure myself from copying your copies all over again during that long voyage,” said Catherine drily.

  “Copying them all over again!” said Sandy. “How tedious! Each and every one?”

  “Aye. It was a four-month voyage, you know.”

  “My own little tune among them?”

  “Aye, even your tune, with your secret message for me in its title. And sent them back to Mary, in Edinburgh.”

  “But why?”

  “Because Sharada told me I must. She hinted, in the most mysterious way, that they were very important and must not run the risk of loss at sea. I sent some home by Captain Appleton’s Minerva from the Cape Verdes, and some from Cape Town; and the last of them from Calcutta by Captain Robbins’s Alacrity. And I asked Mary to take them all along to Mr Clerk.”

  “That depraved old Edinburgh lawyer?”

  “Aye, the same; he collects these things. He owns Joseph MacDonald’s other manuscript, you see—the manuscript of A Compleat Theory. Oh, aye! He showed it to Hector and me—nearly a year ago, I suppose, having then just acquired it. It looked very much like this. Except for the binding, of course.”

  “Ha ha! But I am utterly charmed, my dear! I wonder if all your copies came safely to Mary. And if
she has taken them to Mr Clerk. How astonishing if my tiresome wee tune should be received among the canon of the authentic old great music by such a chance as that! Even I could not have created such a delightful forgery, such a charming fraud, as that! And to think that you, Catriona, have done it for me!”

  Even Catherine could not help laughing at this. “But do you consider it tiresome—your wee tune?” she asked then.

  “Oh, aye. I never liked it much, or perhaps I have not yet done it justice. But it is the tune that I am charged with, I’m afraid—the little tune that chose to come through me, my own droplet running its course into the Ocean of Music. One would of course prefer to let loose a truly great tune upon the world, but we cannot all produce great tunes. And I daresay the small tunes are of some use, too.”

  “Certainly yours has been of considerable use, to us. And in any case, it is fairly launched in the world now,” said Catherine.

  Sharada shook her head and said, “I do not understand why the feringees so value the writing down of music. Could anyone forget important music? Can memory become so decayed as that? Surely, the greater the treasures entrusted to the memory, the more trustworthy it is becoming. And any music that could be forgotten, and by everyone at once, cannot have been worth the keeping. Paper is not music. It is only paper.”

  In reply, Sandy only sang another little phrase, a piquant little phrase, which Catherine did not recognise. But Sharada flushed; clearly she knew it and was moved by it. And when Sandy reached out, she let him take her hand, though she could not look in his face. Her slim brown hand rested in his broad freckled hand like a bird come to her nest.

  Catherine had to turn away, turn to the dancers and musicians across the room. Her vision blurred; the torches in their sconces on the wall seemed to swim and waver, and the bitterness in her heart rose up to her throat.

  Then there was some disturbance across the hall near the door. The Khasi men rose and crowded toward the door. Then they fell back again. The musicians faltered and stopped. The dancers came to a standstill. Everyone turned to look as half a dozen newcomers entered the hall.

  Feringees.

  How? How? How could he be here?

  Pieter Fleming.

  He looked about the hall in the flickering torchlight.

  Catherine rose, knowing that her face was flaming. She was hardly able to draw breath. He came across the hall, between the dancers in disarray, and stopped before her. He held out his hands. In them was a tangle of little figures. She reached out for one. It was a small carved effigy, a carefully whittled female figure—with a tuft of copper-coloured silk floss for hair. She took another—much the same. He held a dozen of them cradled in his two hands.

  “One left at each camp along your route,” he said hoarsely, “set upon a tall stone next to the ashes of the fire.”

  “Sharada!” cried Catherine, looking about.

  “Not I,” said Sharada at her shoulder. “But I am wishing to have been so clever.”

  There was Grace, blazing Grace. “Of course I did,” she said. “How else was he to find us?”

  Catherine reached forward; and he let all the little carved figures into her hands, cupped beneath his.

  Author’s Afterword

  Some of the characters, events and artifacts in this work of fiction are not fictional. King George IV did indeed visit Edinburgh in August 1822, setting the city awhirl. John Clerk did own the original manuscript of Joseph MacDonald’s A Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe; after Clerk’s death it was sold at auction in 1833 to David Laing. The manuscript now resides at the Edinburgh University Library. All the chapter titles in this novel are derived from that text. Lord Charles Somerset was governor at the Cape of Good Hope from 1814 to 1826; slavery remained legal there until 1834. Dr Nathaniel Wallich, superintendent of the Asiatick Society’s Museum and Botanical Garden at Calcutta, maintained until after 1830 that the plant samples brought down to him out of Assam by various collectors were not true tea. Dr William Carey—missionary, translator, publisher, and horticulturalist—did cultivate a notable garden at Serampore; it was largely destroyed by monsoon floods late in 1823. Sir Charles D’Oyly was appointed the East India Company’s opium agent for Bihar in 1821; he and his second wife, Eliza, residing at Patna, were energetic amateur artists and collectors. And by 1829, Teerut Sing, Rajah of Nungklow, was taking up arms against British adventurers building roads through his realm.

  Rotary marine propellers were first proposed in the second half of the eighteenth century, but practical progress was slow—due largely to misconceptions about flow dynamics—despite the publication (in Latin) of Daniel Bernoulli’s insightful Hydrodynamica in 1738. Even sail theory remained primitive at this time, though sails had been in practical use for millenia.

  The East India Company’s last remaining monopoly—“the exclusive right of trading with the Dominions of the Emperor of China, and of trading in Tea”—was terminated by an 1833 Act of Parliament, and the Company was directed “with all convenient speed, [to] close their Commercial Business.” From 1839 onward, British planters cleared vast tracts of Indian forest and established huge tea plantations in India and Ceylon using Chinese and Assamese plants. In 1839 and again in 1856, Britain waged war upon the emperor of China, asserting the right of British merchants to sell opium in China. By 1900, Indian tea production had surpassed that of China, and India has remained the largest tea producer in the world ever since.

  In 1762, James Macpherson’s Works of Ossian were all the rage. That was also the year of Joseph MacDonald’s death in India, where, he wrote to his father in Scotland, he had been engaged in making a “collection of Highland music and poetry, which I have formed a system of, in my voyage to India, and propose to send soon home…in order that those sweet, noble, and expressive sentiments of nature, may not be allowed to sink and die away; and to shew, that our poor remote corner, even without the advantages of learning and cultivation, abounded in works of taste and genius.” The collection he made never arrived in Scotland. Perhaps it may still exist somewhere in India. If so, it is Not Yet Found.

  P. Kingman

  Potter Valley, California, 2006