Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [42]
It was Cephus Prynne, however, who responded to her desperate wave. Chief Factor Prynne was lither, swifter, than the portly Dr. Ruxton. He was at her side, his bleak stare fastened on Tringham and the dying hound. “Hyenas love nothing more than tender English cur,” he said. He did not hide from Hannah his pale, malicious smile. To Tringham, he said, “Better bury it under a rock.”
Hannah understood Prynne’s words for what they were: an order, not consolatory counsel. Poor Tringham did not.
“Eight months aboard the Fortune, only to die here?” Tringham wept. “Is this land not cursed?”
“Aye, cursed,” agreed Cephus Prynne, and scuffed some sand on the hound’s flank.
Glittery grains of sand came to rest on Hannah’s gloved hands. “Tobias weathered the voyage!” Hannah protested. “So why not the cursed land?”
Prynne’s rejoinder shocked Hannah. He said, looking in the direction of Gabriel and the customs officials, “Mistresses Higginbottham and Ruxton devote themselves to the well-being of their husbands, the keeping of their tables and the education of their children in the Protestant religion.”
Just then Gabriel signaled Cephus over. Gabriel seemed to be losing an argument with the chief customs officer. One of the chests had been overturned. Cheese, rum, gloves, watches, spyglasses—valuables he had brought with him for private trade—littered the beach. Hannah had never seen her husband so angry; with his words muffled by the surf, he seemed to be a comedian miming rage. She smiled, then caught Cephus Prynne’s cynical stare. He was watching her watching Gabriel. She backed away.
“Mind my words,” Prynne said to Tringham before ambling off to Gabriel’s aid. “Three feet deep, under a rock.”
Higginbottham, Ruxton, soldiers, servants, followed the Chief Factor in showy procession.
“He had no warrant to disrespect his suffering,” Tringham moaned. He swiped at the sand with a snap of his hat. Hannah lifted the dog’s head for a final view of the sea and three masts that had brought it to St. Sebastian.
WHEN GABRIEL, Prynne, Higginbottham and Ruxton finally returned to where Hannah was cradling Tobias’s head, Gabriel was still seething, but this time his rage was focused on “thieving infidels.” A porter or boatman, he accused, had stolen one of his chests.
At a deferential distance from the English stood three traders, each with his own retinue. At the edge of the group hovered Kashi Chetty, a small, dark, smiling man in a broad-brimmed, English-style hat. He had dismissed his umbrella bearer, who was left squatting on his haunches near his master’s feet. The other two traders sat high aloft in their litter chairs, obliging their umbrella bearers to stand on ornate wooden stools. The lightest-skinned of the traders, the only one not in Indian garments, was an Armenian by the name of Catchick Sookian. If anything, his linen was starchier, his velvet coat more carefully brushed, than the ship’s captain’s had been at Sabbath dinner table. The third man, Pedda Timanna, was plump, with a plumed and aigretted headgear on his disproportionately small head. He seemed to Hannah to be richer than the others, or perhaps had a stronger sense of his place in a hierarchy she didn’t yet comprehend. He sat on a fancifully carved chair and was carried from spot to spot by four emaciated servants. Another servant stood at the ready with a silver spittoon, yet another waved off flies. The lesser traders made do with fanners but no spittoon bearers, and at the edge of the bizarre congregation stood the three decorated hackeries, the hobbled horses and the idle horsemen who had borne the