Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [55]
I mean, of course, a treachery even greater than the relatively straightforward murder of the Chief Factor. Greater than the marital infidelities, the parallel families he had fathered and for whom, honorably enough, he provided. Internecine homicide among East India factors, which could easily be blamed on tropical passion, drink, brigands or the depredations of local highwaymen, were not uncommon. “Fevers” is a blanket term, and who is to say, three hundred years later, that murder was not the dark companion of many deaths? These were adventurous men with nothing to lose, driven by mercantile lust, in a time and place that provided cover for base designs. You set aggressive men on a course of unstructured competition, and they soon become desperate men in unscrupulous battle. It’s a wonder they didn’t destroy themselves utterly.
He was a man perched on the edge of some great cataclysmic upheaval, I think now; a man of thirty-five—which was borrowed time in that place and century—though of course still vigorous. A desperate man faced with a gray, careworn future of subservience. Or a man waiting to make a leap.
The marital relations of Hannah and Gabriel are an area of mystery today, because they were areas of discretion three hundred years ago. Abundant evidence exists as to their sexual natures, which were vigorous. It would seem that Gabriel enjoyed the favors a white man felt his due in an Asian culture. Where he traveled, he planted his seed. That Hannah felt herself exempt from the bibi jealousies of a Sarah or Martha also appears self-evident. She was not raised, or trained, in garrison expectations of male infidelity. She had not led the desperate sort of life, like Sarah, that substituted gratitude for tolerance. She was a faithful wife who had attracted her share of suitable beaux and suitors, and who resisted courtings and temptations even when expectations and opportunities presented themselves.
Hannah convinced herself that Cephus Prynne conspired to keep her husband from her, but conceded that Gabriel Legge relished his travels up and down the Coromandel Coast, exercising power over the Company’s agents and chief factors in tiny outposts. If Gabriel missed Hannah’s companionship, he kept all yearnings to himself. He sent her few messages while away, but he regaled her with outrageous stories of impossible adventures when he came home.
The falling out between Gabriel Legge and Chief Factor Prynne didn’t happen until the winter of 1696. It started with a public notice that the Company’s Seal had been misused for private business by a junior factor and that from now on the Seal was to be kept in a box with three locks, the keys to which were to be in the sole possession of the Chief Factor. It escalated when Gabriel ordered repairs on a warehouse that had been damaged by floods. It exploded into a scuffle when the Chief Factor humiliated Gabriel by reprimanding him in front of young Tringham and a freshly arrived apprentice for having bound a cash keeper with the man’s own girdle and delivering fifty crippling blows with a stick to the man’s soles. The cash keeper had died later that evening. Of a heart attack in his hut, according to Gabriel’s report. “In future be frugal in your hate as you are in your love,” Cephus Prynne had mocked, “so we may not have to disburse grand gifts to the Nawab’s minister to halt the police report.”
After the scuffle, Gabriel Legge spent more time drinking with freemen and privateers and less time reforming the conduct of Company employees like Richard Ruckle or reorganizing the subordinate factories’ books. The “poddar (cash-keeper) affaire,” in fact, made Gabriel a hero among Europeans who were not in the employment of East India companies owned by rich men in London and Paris and Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
7
AT ATTILA CSYCSYRY’S Suchikhana, the stuffy, smoky, infernally hot den of male privilege in Fort St. Sebastian,