‘Thank goodness you’re on the mend,’ said Charles, with characterstic understatement, at exactly the same time as Laure said, ‘You look absolutely terrible.’
Katharine emitted a short, effortful laugh. It was all too ridiculous. How could anyone survive this purgatory? What were any of them doing here?
Laure sent the men away. Gently, she lowered Katharine to a sitting position on the makeshift plank bed. Katharine felt her bones creak with the unaccustomed movement. She ran her hands down her sides; she could feel her ribs and her hip bones.
‘Katharine,’ murmured Laure, quietly. ‘You’re pregnant, aren’t you?’
The swell of her belly had been accentuated by the drastic weight loss brought about by the illness.
Miserably, Katharine nodded. ‘I was,’ she whispered. She gazed imploringly at Laure. ‘But the baby won’t have survived this, will it?’
Laure’s face blanched momentarily and then was immediately restored to its habitual equanimity.
‘It looks all right to me,’ she replied, her eyes on Katharine’s stomach. She reached out her hand and patted the bump. ‘We could get the feiticeiro to come,’ she said, ‘some of them make effective potions from the forest plants. Others are nothing more than witch doctors. However,’ she continued, after a pause, ‘I think that all will be well. We just need to feed you up and get plenty of fluids into you.’
Katharine said nothing. She could hardly believe the baby could have made it through the wrenching nausea and diarrhoea. But on the other hand, she herself had, so maybe it was possible.
Laure, meanwhile, was now staring intently at her feet. Katharine had the urge to laugh again. Maybe her toes had fallen off. Nothing would surprise her any more. She wiggled them to try them out and they seemed to still be there, but then again amputees thought they still had their limbs, didn’t they? She had read that in a magazine article about the American Civil War.
Laure leant forward, carefully lifted Katharine’s skirts and picked up her right ankle.
‘Excuse me,’ she said. She raised it a little higher towards her eyes. ‘I need to check something.’
‘What?’ Katharine was half alarmed and half resigned. She wasn’t sure she could be bothered to get worked up about any more ailments. ‘What are you looking for?’
‘Chigger mites,’ responded Laure, drily. ‘They are rampant – and ravenous. But it looks like you’ve escaped their attentions – for now at any rate. The only way to be sure to prevent them is to cover yourself up. It’s why I wear these.’
With a flourish of her hands, she lifted her skirts to show Katharine the ankle-length bloomers she sported underneath, with tightly tied bows to secure the bottoms. ‘This way the mites cannot get a hold on me. You might want to make something similar. And remember to regularly check under your toe nails, as that is where they lay their eggs. If you find any, you have to dig the sac out with scissors and tweezers.’
Katharine shuddered in disgust.
‘Or get someone else to do it. It’s fairly painful,’ added Laure.
Of course it was, thought Katharine, wryly. Why wouldn’t it be? This was the Amazon.
Laure bent forward for one last look at Katharine’s feet. ‘You’re fine,’ she pronounced.
Katharine sighed with relief. She had been spared one torment at least.
‘Now drink this,’ Laure said, proffering a gourd of fresh water, ‘and then sleep. You need all the rest you can get, you and the baby.’
When next Katharine woke she felt almost human. It was daylight and she could hear the bustle of people and footsteps and voices drifting towards her. She sat up, and this time didn’t fall straight back down again. She stood, and was not overcome with dizziness.
Slowly, she moved towards the daylight, not entirely sure where she was or what to expect. She stepped out from under the shelter of the rickety house and looked around her, and the recollection of that first view of Norwood came back to her, as if from some long ago past, some almost forgotten history.
It dawned on her anew how much work there was going to be in making it a home fit for herself, a European woman used to a house built of brick with solid walls and floors and windows and doors – and for an infant. Her heart slowed in her chest. She couldn’t face it. Rebuilding the everything, establishing the rubber business, caring for a newborn, simply finding enough for them all to eat when the arrival of supplies would inevitably be erratic – it was overwhelming.
Discombobulated, she wandered round to the front of the house and towards the river. Jonathan and Santiago were there, deep in conversation about something. They stopped as soon as they saw her, came rushing over, implored her to tell them how she was, to accept their suggestions of herbal teas and nourishing soups and other healing potions and potages. Katharine thanked them over and again.
When they left her side, anxious to set Rosabel, an Indian woman they had assigned as cook, to the task of preparing lunch for her, she sat down on a tree stump to think. Jonathan and Santiago and all the Indians had toiled so loyally and bravely, using all their practical skills and cunning to get them here safely. They were relying on her for employment, to pay them, to provide for them and supply them with things only money could buy. She couldn’t crumble on them now. She just couldn’t. Here she was, at Norwood, and the only way forward was to keep going. Though the constant effort required to battle against the jungle was utterly wearying, it had to be done.
Hauling herself upright, trying to shake off the weakness and lethargy, she went to survey their meagre supplies, the canned food and farinha, flour made from cassava root, that they’d brought with them from Manaus. Someone had piled it up in an open-sided hut where it was protected from the rain. It wasn’t much.
‘We will go hunting, Mother,’ Santiago assured her, appearing beside her again. ‘We will bring parrot, tapir, monkey, wild pig. I have already found turtle eggs and we have peach palm fruits, berries and bananas, jungle pears and plums. We will plant yuca. It will be fine.’
Katharine smiled gratefully at him. He and Jonathan were always so positive. Nothing dismayed them, nothing dampened their spirits. They were like the trees in the forest, always there, always ready to give of themselves for human need. Most Europeans seemed to think that the Indians should make themselves more like them. But Katharine increasingly thought she should try to be more like the Indians. Indomitable. Unfazed by triumph or disaster. Stable and strong through anything and everything, resilient to whatever life or nature threw at her.
Later that evening, feeling somewhat revived after Rosabel’s delicious offerings, Katharine took a walk around the compound. She needed to build up her energy again. As she strolled, she felt a little scratch inside her belly, and then a tiny punch, like a fist or foot reaching out to explore its cramped environment. She paused and waited, unwilling to allow herself to believe it was true. It came again, unmistakably. And again. Almost sobbing with joy, she went back to the fire and the remains of the dinner, where Charles and Laure were still sitting. Calling Laure to her, she whispered in her ear. ‘The baby. My baby. It’s alive.’
Laure laughed and smiled and told Katharine it was all the more reason to take good care of herself.
Dazed with unexpected happiness, Katharine went back to her bedroom where she took three of her dresses from her trunk, leaving the best in case of visitors. She had work to do, which began with some adjustments to her attire, and a renewed sense of purpose with which to do it. The dress she had been wearing on the journey and while she was ill could not be salvaged and was good for nothing but burning; it stank and was full of holes and irredeemable stains. Not even Bernadette McNamara’s redoubtable Portuguese washerwomen would have been able to fix it, Katharine thought to herself with a wry smile. But the others were in fine condition. Katharine had invested in the best needlework kit she could afford before leaving London and fortunately the needles rolled in asbestos and the high quality scissors had just about survived the rust
and remained usable.
By the flickering light of a smoky candle, she ripped and tore and seamed and sewed, roughly and with much admonishment of her own clumsiness (sadly, she lacked her mother’s skill at needlework) until she had constructed three sets of long trousers, with ribbons at the cuffs to tighten against any marauding insect.
‘That’ll show you, chigger mites and all the rest,’ she said out loud, and then laughed at herself; wasn’t it the first sign of madness to talk to yourself? But there was Po-Po, peeping his elegant head around the threshold, his darting eyes seeking her out as if eager to respond to her.
‘I was speaking to you, wasn’t I?’ she said to the bird, and then, ‘thank goodness you’re here, Po-Po. We need to stick together. With enemies like the jungle holds, a girl needs all the friends she can get.’
Throwing the idiosyncratic garments over the rickety veranda rail, she gave a last satisfied glance of approval before getting into her hammock which, now she was well, she preferred to the hard, mattressless wooden bed.
Katharine Ferrandis fights back, she murmured to herself, and heard Po-Po’s soft whistle of approval before she fell asleep and slept soundly until morning.
Chapter Thirteen
There was no time to settle in, no time to explore the area or to make the dilapidated house more homely. Katharine had to get to work. Jonathan constructed a makeshift desk for Charles, fashioned from the lid of a packing case and two giant upended ironwood logs that the Indians had felled with their machetes. The first thing that Katharine had to brave was revealing to Charles the extent of Anselmo’s debts, just how much it had cost him to set up as a rubber baron – even before he’d paid the ultimate price of his life.
‘The most important thing is to recruit workers,’ Charles advised, ‘only then can we begin to make the money to repay all these debts. And we need to do it now, so that we’re ready for the main tapping season after the worst of the rains are over. You cannot collect the latex during the rainy season as it is all washed away by the downpours, so you have to allow for months of non-production as well as the times when it flows freely.’
Katharine sat down on a tree stump chair. ‘Some time ago, you spoke of rounding the Indians up. What exactly did you mean?’
‘Exactly that.’ Charles laid down his fountain pen as if he expected to have to give a long explanation. ‘We go out in recruitment parties and gather forest Indians. A kind of human harvest, I suppose you could say.’ He paused, as if expecting Katharine to laugh at his joke.
She didn’t.
‘The fit and strong ones we take and the others we flog so that, when we let them go, they run as far and as fast as they can into the forest and don’t bother us again,’ he continued, his voice as passionless as usual.
Katharine stared at him open-mouthed. ‘Are you serious?’
‘Of course. How did you think it was done?’ Now Charles’ voice had a hint of sharpness to it, as if he was already preparing to defend the iniquitous practice he had described.
Katharine opened her mouth to speak and then quickly shut it again. She didn’t have an adequate reply. From the very first time Charles had said the words ‘round up’ she’d had recurring moments of worry and anxiety – when she had had time to think at all in between all of the other worries and anxieties. It seemed she had been right to be fearful.
‘But,’ she remonstrated feebly, ‘there are so few of us – just you, Jonathan and Santiago and the other dozen or so who came with us. How could we hope to recruit all the workers we need this way?’
It wasn’t what she had intended to say, didn’t even come close to asking the questions she wanted to ask – but these were the words that came out. Perhaps she was looking for an excuse not to follow Charles’ method, hoping he would say, ‘oh yes, I hadn’t thought of that, you’re absolutely right, we’ll have to come up with another idea.’
He didn’t.
‘We have guns,’ he stated simply. ‘We have whips. We use them.’
And suddenly Katharine saw it. The reason Charles was a clerk and had never become anything else was because he had no imagination. He could not conceive of doing anything differently to how it had been done before, how it had always been done. And while the white Europeans of the Amazon were so quick to criticise the Indians of being without emotion, in fact Charles was the most dispassionate person she had ever met. And Laure, too – Katharine liked her but found her to be self-contained to the utmost degree, never opening up to Katharine. After all these days travelling with her, living in such close and intimate quarters, Katharine felt that she knew her no better than when they had started.
At that moment she felt the want of a companion even more than she had done at any point on this journey. She yearned for one so badly it hurt, the longing tearing at her heart. She pined for Elsie, to whom she could say anything, or Mabel who, though so young, understood without words. She ached for Anselmo who had been so cruelly wrested from her before their life together had really begun. She had no one to compare her own moral compass to, no one who shared her values to discuss things with. It was all down to her, and though the burden felt insupportable, she had to bear it.
Through the fug of her isolation, she made up her mind.
‘No. We will not do that here.’
Katharine stood and walked to the battered and pock-marked door, which hung lopsidedly on rusty hinges. ‘There will be no forced labour. And absolutely no corporal punishment of any kind.’ This was what she had committed herself to when she’d decided to continue and she would not bend from that commitment. Slavery was a word she could hardly bear to utter; she had always believed it to be an abhorrent practice and was not about to be part of it. She wanted to work with the Indians, not against them, and had noticed how highly they valued items they lacked the materials to make for themselves – dyed cloth, steel tools, iron pots.
‘In addition to their wages, we will put the word about that there’s fabric, metal items of their choosing and tinned food for every man who signs up,’ she said. ‘Plus a year’s supply of farinha for every tribe that sends us more than twenty men.’
‘You won’t make any money that way.’ Charles’ response was lightning fast.
Katharine paused for a moment to gather her thoughts.
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she replied, speaking in as measured a tone as she could muster when her heart was beating wildly in her chest. ‘I think it must be possible to be a good employer at the same time as being an astute businesswoman.’
In truth, Katharine wasn’t sure about this at all. How could she be? She had no experience of being either. And she did need the money for her father so very badly.
Charles raised his eyebrows before speaking, very slowly, a strained edge to his voice. ‘All right. I’ll rephrase myself. You won’t make as much money as you could.’
‘Money isn’t everything.’ This was true; there were limits, boundaries she was not prepared to cross. But in the Amazon, the only thing that mattered was money, it was the holy grail that everyone was there to seek, what enabled rubber barons in Manaus not only to bathe in champagne but also to wash their horses and their carriages with it.
Charles shut his eyes and opened them again very slowly, as if expecting Katharine to have disappeared, her bizarre ideas with her.
Only when he realised she hadn’t did he reply.
‘They won’t believe you. About the farinha and all the other – gifts.’
Katharine felt her habitual – and unhelpful – impatience well up within her.
‘Then bring them here so that I can show them,’ she snapped. And then, immediately contrite about her bad manners, continued in a more moderate tone, ‘I’d like the opportunity to explain to them in person.’
With that, she went upstairs to her apology for a bedroom. She had no idea whether her gamble would pay off, or whether she would be forced to eat humble pie. But over the next days and weeks, Indians began to arrive, in pai
rs and groups, some with their wives and children. They accepted the conditions of employment, understood that they would get their goods as soon as the supply boats arrived, and melted away into the jungle, to the estradas that Charles assigned to them.
Katharine could hardly believe it. Her plan had worked. She had stuck to her guns and it had paid off. Briefly, she allowed herself to indulge in some self-congratulation. Maybe she would be able to pull this whole thing off, after all.
Weeks turned to months. Time lost all meaning, here where there were no clocks. Almost unbelievably, despite the sweltering heat that was only occasionally moderated by a cool breeze blowing down from the mountains, Katharine suddenly remembered that Christmas was on its way. It was hard to fathom that such a festival could exist without chill winter winds, without the hoar frost lying thickly on iron railings, without the smog produced by a thousand coal fires all battling to keep out the cold. But, she supposed, the 25th December was the 25th December, wherever in the world you were.
In a rare idle moment, lying in her hammock, Katharine rubbed her belly, now grown huge, the skin stretched taut across it, and fantasised about Christmas dinner. Roast turkey, potatoes – delicious, fluffy and crispy, not green, hard and tasteless as they were here – parsnips, carrots, bread sauce, and to follow a pudding, rich with fruit and brandy, set alight to the delight of all the little children in the family. She was permanently hungry, sickened by the lack of variety in the diet, the pungent, gamey bush meat, the farinha that had grown sludgy and unappetising in the damp.
Along the Endless River Page 9