Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [72]
The French were a more hated enemy than the Dutch or the Danes. Capitulation to the Compagnie Royale was tantamount to personally handing William Ill’s head on a platter to Louis XIV. Higginbottham’s self-doubt atrophied into a suicidal melancholy. Sarah could not get him to eat or bathe or make love to her. On the seventh day in desperation she visited Hannah in the hope that she could talk Pedda Timanna into accepting the Norwich woolens in spite of the Coromandel’s heat.
She appealed to Hannah. Samuel was fast becoming a broken man, she sobbed. If she, Hannah, had any influence with Pedda Timanna, whom she, Sarah, had never spoken against and always considered a higher sort than other natives … then now was the time. They have had their differences, but after all, they were all English, all working for the Crown. They had that, didn’t they? Thank God, they had that sense of belonging.
Perhaps she looked closely into the eyes of Hannah and saw no blazing insignia of attachment, no Cross of St. George reflected in them, no light from a higher allegiance. She realized she had humiliated herself needlessly, fallen back on her serving girl’s faith in her wheedling good looks and other men’s power.
“Let me see the woolens,” said Hannah. They were fine and high-quality gray woolens, light by New England standards, and for a moment she held them to her face and bare arms. Woolens like this in Salem would belong only to the merchant aristocracy. Sarah misinterpreted nostalgia for commerce.
“You will do it, then?” she asked.
“I will take a dress length off this bolt,” said Hannah. “On personal consignment.”
With a shipload of Norwich bales, and her husband’s future riding on their sale, two yards at a discount price had not been Sarah’s intent. In fact, she took it as an insult and hurled the entire bolt at Hannah.
With that bolt of gray wool, Hannah turned out a somber wardrobeful of Puritan outfits: a coat for Gabriel, tunics for herself, complete with white-lace trim.
Hannah pleaded with Gabriel and later with the Marquis not to let Samuel die of despair. Wasn’t Cephus Prynne’s death enough revenge? There could never be enough revenge; the Marquis laughed. But he was charmed by her concern. He called it her womanly aspect. He promised he would help Samuel out of his difficulty. And then he laughed again. His help would make the vengeance all the sweeter.
He bribed or bullied Kasey Chetty and Catchick Sookian into forming a new joint-stock association and lodging the common fund of a paltry seventy-five thousand pagodas in the Company’s treasure. Zentoos, he joked, don’t like to trust their money to anyone outside the family. This mixed-caste and multiracial association would be catastrophic. They would bicker and squabble over who was to sign contracts, who to keep the books and disburse the money. By helping Higginbottham he was ensuring Higginbottham’s inglorious ruin, brought on not by external agency, not by external assault with its possible recourse to glorious defeat, but by glaring incompetence in the area of his greatest vanity: knowing the locals and how to outsmart them.
The two merchants, one a Telugu of the balija right-hand caste and the other an Armenian Christian, each bought seven shares of one thousand pagodas. Three shares of one hundred pagodas were bought by Thomas Tringham, who appears in their bookkeeping as Tomma Trinamma, perhaps as a protection. (Until Bugs Kilken lured me unwittingly into the pursuit of the Salem Bibi, Tomma Trinamma was thought by scholars to be the mistransliterated name for another Telugu merchant of the same right-hand caste as Kasey Chetty, and who, like Chetty, had moved from the golden kingdom of Roopconda after the Sunni Emperor Aurangzeb had defeated its Shia king. Thank you, Bugs.) The bookkeeper’s phonetic misrendering of Thomas Tringham is no