Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [34]
“Husband,” said Hannah Legge, “the story that was told to me a winter last was most convincing.”
“Poor mate.”
“You’ve not just this minute disembarked.”
“These trifles? I show you respect by not befouling this cottage.”
“I wept for you.”
With a smile both amused and sympathetic, Gabriel Legge let her self-pity pass. “You have taken to tobacco in my absence.”
“That is unkind.”
He sniffed the brocaded cushions, whacking them loudly with the flat of his hand. Dust motes sparkled in the morning light.
“A lingering odor. Madeira soaked. Much affected by squinty-eyed Cambridge swine.”
And even as they conducted their interview, the widow and her resurrected groom, Hubert lay in the gutter a few yards below the stone bridge, his fine Dutch glasses twisted from his astonished face, his fleshy ears freshly notched as a slave might be identified by his master, or a common thief punished for a first offense, and a Fornicator’s bold F branded to the center of his widening forehead. Their morning’s work done, Gabriel Legge’s mates, including the drunken young man who’d brought the baleful news of Gabriel’s demise and then had stationed himself in a nearby public house close enough to watch the mistress’s comings and goings, crossed the bridge with the first mate’s ornate sea trunks, and one empty locker for the mistress to pack her gear.
THIS IS the best I can do, pulling it together from a hundred sources. I think of Venn, stitching together an October of four years ago, and realize that the most obscure person on the planet today is, comparatively, like a god: observed, adored, commented upon, celebrated. Hannah, whose 1745 Memoirs forms the basis of much of the early life, and only a bit of the middle, the warrant, if you wish, for the linkages in my earlier investigations, still eludes my net. Time has made her free from me, just as an ocean passage made her free of the watchful God who punished every venal sin with droughts, drownings, cripplings. Free from the brutal justice of pious expatriates with confused errands. Out of earshot of the whippings and weepings of Original Sinners.
What made Hannah abdicate sovereign rule of her fenced, peaceable suburban kingdom and sail with Gabriel on the Fortune, a four-hundred-ton East Indiaman, in May 1694?
Fear, perhaps, for she knew there was (there always is) a dark side to her husband’s rascality. Or simple practicality—she was, after all, a Puritan orphan, strictly raised. She appreciated the value of money. Her widow’s subsistence, and with it her freedom, vanished on Gabriel’s reappearance.
But there are traits even a modern woman can relate to: her curiosity, the awakening of her mind and her own sense of self and purpose. And I think of Gabriel as well, deceiver, liar, thief and pirate—a gentleman cutthroat with a feared gang to do his bidding—why didn’t he kill her, as he had others who displeased or deceived him? Why did he test her, for surely that was his ploy, and why were her indiscretions with doctors, researchers, patients, accusers, not punished?
Venn says he wanted to know if she was prized. If anyone would make a move on her, even more than wanting to test her faithfulness. Gabriel had been in the East; he would know these things.
THE FORTUNE was in a convoy of East Indiamen headed for the Coromandel Coast of India by way of the Cape of Good Hope. Hannah’s name appears in Madras Records, the Fort St. George consultation books, as having disembarked in that English settlement in early 1695. There were three other women on board the Fortune on that trip, all three from the same village in Lancashire, and all three single. Their reasons for leaving home were sensible, lucid. The Company paid each of them a monthly maintenance allowance of about fifteen shillings in local currency to provide its bachelor English staff of lonely factors, clerks and soldiers companionship leading,