Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [63]
Covetousness was not Gabriel’s sin. He was a stubborn dispenser of unprincipled justice. He was a rash romantic with ungovernable yearnings. Hannah didn’t plead with Gabriel to take her back to England. She was not ready to entomb herself in Morpeth or London. She didn’t feel bereft—of roots, of traditions—as Martha and Sarah professed to feel. Instead she felt unfinished, unformed.
She was, she is, of course, a goddess-in-the-making.
The Coromandel had started something as immense as a cyclone deep inside her body and mind. To let Gabriel go was also to let herself expand.
Two weeks later she waved farewell to her husband as he sailed with the Marquis and Cutlass da Silva on his tyro mission. The goal was modest: harass the wealthy backers in Paris, Amsterdam and London. The prey, too, was modest: an English ketch, Clyde’s Folly, which had been captured by the French at the mouth of the Palk Strait and was being escorted into the French port settlement of Pondicherry with a cargo of fifteen barrels of brandy and ten chests of crude coral. Hannah waved and waved until the Esperance pressed its prow through the gauzy lavender horizon.
HANNAH LOOKED on Cephus Prynne’s murder as emancipation. Being rid of a sexual tormentor was the least cause for her new sense of liberty. In murder she saw the workings of an alien providence. She had no doubt that Gabriel had killed Prynne. Her conscience could not condone acts of murder—the teachings of Robert and Susannah Fitch were deeply embedded—but she was glad that for the present at least her Puritan conscience was aflounder like a Coromandel kuttamaram in a typhoon-churned sea.
If Cephus Prynne had died prematurely and precipitously, but of natural causes, she and Gabriel would still be enmeshed in the corrupt embrace of the Company. Under Prynne, the satellite English in Fort St. Sebastian had begun to think of themselves as patriots planting the flag for King and Country, as missionaries of commerce martyring themselves for holy profit. The truth was, Hannah felt herself no more at home in England than she did in the Coromandel. She was deficient in that genetic impulse toward teary-eyed patriotism.
Piracy, in fact, seemed to her a normal outgrowth of the unnatural conditions of plunder and violence that were otherwise condoned, and even lauded, by the Company and its factors. The outrageous act of murder, conceded by no official but condemned by the Fort St. George Council, simultaneously cast the Legges out of Little England and bound them to it with the fastness of unconfessable guilt.
To Hannah emancipation meant she could stay on in the house that Henry Hedges’ ghost still roamed and ruled. Once upon a time the creaks and moans had terrified her; now the house seemed as vast and as stocked with mysteries and wonder as the woods of Brookfield, as the universe of laws of the New Science that poor Hubert had tried to explain. Like Henry Hedges, she put herself in the hands of an Indian woman. Perhaps the same Indian woman. Ostracism opened up unwalled worlds for her.
She was taken by Bhagmati behind the splintered door where the white sari was kept carefully folded on top of a brocaded man’s silk jama, to a makeshift shrine where an oil lamp burned. Flowers were arranged around a painting done in the court manner, of an Englishman in modified Mughal dress.
“Hedges-sa’ab,” said Bhagmati. And another portrait of a serving girl holding her arms out as a parrot perches on an overhanging branch. The bird cage is open. The girl’s face—Bhagmati’s face, obviously the painters had sat on this terrace under Hedges’ patronage—registers sheer terror, but Bhagmati laughed.
“Bird-come-back,” she said.
WHEN GABRIEL LEGGE was offered a way out of the Company,