Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [70]
“What business takes your husband away?” He glanced away from her.
“I’m not a fool, Mr. Higginbottham. I do not disclose my husband’s affairs. And … my husband is not a knave.”
All at once, in a reproachful monotone, the Chief Factor unburdened himself of the message he had come to deliver to Gabriel. The Company, he informed Hannah, was pledged to protect, on pain of severe chastisement of its personnel, all ships belonging to the Emperor Aurangzeb.
Hannah stopped him. “Gabriel Legge is not adverse to helping the Badshah should he require help.”
But it was as if she had not spoken at all. Samuel Higginbottham continued to recite his message. The Company was pledged also to protect the ships of all Indian merchants, be they Muslim, Hindu, Armenian, Christian, if they had the Emperor as their liege lord. Any piracy of the Emperor’s fleet would therefore have to be considered a hostile act against the Company.
Gabriel was fighting Europe’s war, saving the monkey on a tiny island off the Pamban Channel. But why allay the Chief Factor’s fears just yet? Why allay them at all? He was right to dread the Mughal Emperor’s rage. Martha Ruxton had told her a hundred frightening anecdotes about the Emperor. After Captain Avery, the English pirate, had sacked the Ganj-i-Sawai off the Malabar Coast, the pious Muslim Emperor had put all Englishmen and Englishwomen in Surat in irons. And when men like William Kidd or Cutlass Culliford harassed haj-bound shiploads of the Emperor’s dearest subjects, the Emperor had had Company agents whipped and threatened to cut them out of trade. Where men like Higginbottham and other factors saw damnation in the ebb and flow of profit margins, the aging Badshah talked only of vengeance and sacrilege.
It was unthinkable that a noble Englishman, the fairest of God’s creatures on earth, should be stripped and tied to a post in the middle of a public square and flogged by men under a distant authority, more practiced in carving the entrails of goats than the chastisement of a gentleman’s shoulders. The first condemned Surat factor, white skinned, blue veined, suety from long hours in some local punch house, had died of apoplexy when the flogger raised his arm.
“Day and night our men and women suffer tyrannical insultings at the hands of these slavish heathens.”
“And you seek to alleviate suffering?”
The Chief Factor flinched. Hannah was grateful that it was the uneasy Higginbottham and not the cold, self-possessed Cephus Prynne who had borne the warning for Gabriel. “Commerce is our mission. Conquest the necessary means.”
“You have delivered your message,” Hannah said. “The response will be conveyed by my husband himself, when he sees fit.”
When she regained her shaded post behind a pillar, she commanded visions of the sea and of the now-vacant courtyard where Bhagmati directed boys in the watering of trees. The cheeky interloper was gone, and Higginbottham was but a dusty dot on the southern horizon.
THE NAYAK kept his word on rewarding the Marquis’s mercenaries. Gabriel came back with sea chests filled with riches. He came back, but Hannah didn’t see much of him. He was traveling the hinterland with Pedda Timanna. Count Attila and the Marquis dropped titillating hints of business deals; Gabriel and Pedda Timanna were bribing washermen and bleachers to boycott the Company; they were seeking an audience with the Nawab for trade concessions; they were closing deals that would cut heavily into Catchick Sookian’s, Kashi Chetty’s and the Company’s textile-exporting profits. Especially the Company’s.
When she delivered the Chief Factor’s threat to the Marquis, he gloated