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By Root 975 0

and preened. Hannah understood that the threat had had everything to do with diminishing profits and nothing to do with privateers sacking Muslim pilgrim ships. Would Higginbottham develop the backbone to become another Cephus Prynne? Men like Higginbottham and the Marquis had no home, no loyalties except to themselves. Their homelands were imaginary. For them there was no going back, and no staying on. They were in a perpetual state of suspension, which was not the same as floating free. They were ghosts, trapped in space meant for full-fleshed and warm-blooded humans. She would need to root herself, she was not sure where nor how, before she too became ghostly.

I HAVE CHECKED the consultation books of Fort St. Sebastian for this period. The entries are in the plump, passionate handwriting of Thomas Tringham, the writer whose beloved hound Hannah had helped bury on that first day on the Fort St. Sebastian beach. The handwriting reveals the panic that the frugally worded summaries are intended to conceal.

The summaries are of the Chief Factor’s separate consultations with “Kasey” Chetty and Catchick Sookian about the appointment of a chief merchant with whom the factory would deal exclusively and to whom the Chief Factor would delegate the authority to settle trade disputes among the “natives.” Kasey Chetty is led to believe that if he can influence Nawab Haider Beg to arrange for the English an imperial farman—a land grant decreed by Emperor Aurangzeb himself—he will be favored above other candidates. Catchick Sookian is led to believe that the Company automatically ranks Armenians higher than natives because Armenians are Christian-born and vehement in their faith and perforce more reliable and manly; and that if he can organize a joint-stock association among native merchants who traditionally resist commonly held stock and commonly run trading operations, the position of chief merchant is guaranteed him. The Chief Factor impresses upon Sookian the Company’s paradoxical need both to increase the volume of exported textiles and to decrease its outlay of cash credits.

The negotiations with Pedda Timanna were clearly unfriendly. The entries are mainly lists of debts owed to him by the late Cephus Prynne and Samuel Higginbottham in their official and personal capacities. These debts total 250,000 pagodas, exclusive of the four diamonds and six rubies mortgaged by Martha Ruxton. There is a summary of the debt-settlement proposal made to Pedda Timanna originally by Prynne and later amended by Higginbottham. This proposal requires the creditor to forgive 40 percent of the sum owed and to accept English woolens as payment of the remaining 60 percent.

Higginbottham’s amendment promises Pedda Timanna a permit to buy one residential property in White Town and to enter Fort St. Sebastian in a palanquin. Pedda Timanna’s response, too, is summarized. He thanks the Chief Factor for his “generous application” and “blushes that he must needs decline it.” There is no mention of the fact that he has been entering White Town by palanquin at his will for a considerable period. His circumstances are too humble to permit high discounts and the Coromandel climate too brutish for the resale of woolens. He expects that the Company being “honourable” and its factors “noble” his application will be “well received and will terminate agreeably.” Meanwhile he is considering an offer from the Compagnie Royale de France to remove himself and his family to the French settlement of Pondicherry. There is no specific reaction recorded to Higginbottham’s amendment, whether he considered the invitation to own a house in White Town an insult or merely insufficient.

Higginbottham took to his bed for six days when he heard that Pedda Timanna was moving to Pondicherry. Sarah had to petition the Fort St. George Council for special exemption from the Council rule that required the Chief Factor to be on the premises of his factory every day. She gave out that Samuel was “indisposed by the insupportable heat.” But her husband’s ailment was graver than sunstroke