Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [25]
When the boat was beached, one of the pushers heaved a body out of the gunwales. The smith, Henry Manning, normally a silent, composed man, was screaming words into the wind, words that she couldn’t understand. This was not his part of the town. Nothing but the sheerest tragedy could bring Henry Manning to water, he who despised boats and England and had seen the courtship of Legge and his daughter as an assault upon his dearly held prejudice and authority. And now they were together, for the third man was the mysterious visitor from Ireland, Gabriel Legge, he of the rakish black eye patch, and Hannah knew only one event could bring such enemies together.
She couldn’t see the whole body, only a hand. The hand was rigid and got in the men’s way. Henry Manning was looking older now, frailer, than she had ever seen him. He leaned his full weight on an oar and instructed the younger men. Suddenly she saw it—stuck like a pennant on a hooked pole that Gabriel Legge was sliding under the body for better leverage—a soggy fragment of Hester’s dress. Hannah, keening now with grief, scrabbled down the stony trails.
Hester’s corpse was laid out on grass by the time she got close. The arms stuck way out of the body, stiffened in the posture of a woman who had jumped off the precipice, then tried to slow her fatal descent. The two men of her life weighted Hester’s arms down with rocks as they looked around for rope or cloth to lash them tight to her body. Henry Manning stood by the boat, mopping his angry, red neck.
She must have bobbed for hours in brackish water. Now weeds twined her body like sea snakes. Bruises the blue of violets blossomed on her face.
“Fine things she wanted!” Henry Manning spat in Gabriel Legge’s direction. He heard Hannah’s weeping. Hester’s eyelids were stuck open. Her lips were twisted into a bitter gaping O. Or “No!” It was as though Hester had changed her mind as the water hit her face.
The stranger deflected Henry’s wrath away from Hannah. “Ah, what’s wrong with wanting to cultivate yourself?” Then he and Captain Maverick fell to making a stretcher out of oars and a sail. Hannah slunk away. She could not bear to stay and watch them load Hester up, like slaughtered meat, or a cabinet.
THE DAY AFTER Hester’s funeral, the stranger, dressed in a cassock of showy blue satin with a matching, embroidered blue silk patch, called on Robert Fitch. He did not come to have furniture made. He introduced himself as Gabriel Legge of Danagadee, son of a shipowner in the business of ferrying families from the Old to the New England. He asked for, and received, permission to court Hannah. She thrilled to his seafaring yarns. He had jumped pirate ship in Madagascar. He had slept in the Garden of Eden, inside an Asian mountain guarded by angels. Children enchanted the deadly cobra with a mere piped melody, the same snake that lurched from its basket and killed an Englishman’s servant dead on the spot. He had traveled to Samarkand on camel-back, and he had been to the court of the Great Mughal, whose ostentatious display of gold and jewels made him ashamed of England’s shabby pretension. The soil of Hindustan was ground-up sapphire, emerald and ruby; the building bricks were pure ingots of gold. Their food simmered in its own spices, quite independent of the application of cooking fire. The women wrapped themselves in silken winding-sheets, and because of their soft, compliant souls, they yielded their lives to flame upon their husband’s death.
She did not believe him, but she, too, longed for escape. And what had become of his suit with Hester Manning, Hannah was bold enough to ask, had he been fearful enough of her broad-backed father not to press his case?
He paid her memory the proper respect. Like many a man before him,