Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [76]
In the first year of the new century, blocked in the expansion of his trade, the destruction of Gabriel Legge became his life’s end. Legge did not have to answer to Leadenhall Street. Legge and the Marquis were thick as thieves—no surprise there—with the suppliers and artisans, with their fellow defectors from the French and Portuguese factories, and even enjoyed a favored status with the Nawab himself. It seemed that a man who played the cards that were dealt him, who met all his quotas and returned decent value, who tried to rein in the rapacious tendencies of his underlings, was not sufficiently treasured by Pitt or London.
And then, in October 1700, his only helpmeet, Sarah, out for a stroll with Martha in the Ruxtons’ garden, one minute was sharing delicious gossip that she had just heard about the notorious traitor, Gabriel Legge, and his bibi, and the next instant was bitten by a rabid flying fox. She died within two weeks, spitting out her pitiful hydrophobic curses those last days and nights, lashed to a string bed in a distant corner of the courtyard.
MAYBE IT WAS Sarah’s sudden death that unhinged him. He saw himself as St. George, the Company’s knight-errant dispatched to destroy the reptilian Legge. Letters were no longer sufficient. He needed to slay the enemy.
On Guy Fawkes Day, he sent Thomas Tringham and the dubash to New Salem with an ox-cart load of fireworks as a conciliatory gift for Gabriel Legge. Tringham was to deliver the fireworks to Legge himself and was not to trust any servants. Only the reliably treacherous dubash was taken into Higginbottham’s confidence: the fireworks were really disguised explosives. The dubash was to deliver the crates of fireworks to Legge’s new warehouse and then, before leaving, ignite one charge, and flee before the reaction sent the waterfront complex higher than the circling buzzards, and Legge and the Marquis with it.
Some men are poor conspirators, others simply unlucky. The dubash was impatient to collect his reward, and Higginbottham was fated to a life forever unfulfilled and unhappy. On the afternoon of the fifth of November, 1700, the distraught widower Samuel Higginbottham had expected Gabriel Legge, the rich entrepreneur, to be working as assiduously in his warehouse by the wharf as the Chief Factor did in the Fort St. Sebastian office of the Company. The fireworks were meant to do grave damage to Legge’s bales of cloth waiting to be shipped. But it so happened that on Guy Fawkes Day, Gabriel was visiting Zeb-un-nissa, his black bibi, in her hovel in the qsba’s most crowded alley. The dubash had heard stories of Legge’s capacity to prolong his pleasures; he set fire to the explosive-packed cart, without waiting for the pirate to bid goodnight to his bibi.
It was she who had put on her fine cream-colored silks—gift of Gabriel on the occasion of their first son’s birth—and visited Gabriel’s home, to test the fortifications of servant defense and white wife against her, and found them laughably weak.
The ox cart blew up half the alley. Shops and huts blazed. Men, women and children sprouted wings of flame. Their screams and curses were heard, soon enough, in every village, every factory, every home in Roopconda state. The Hindu Raja, Jadav Singh, meditating on the roof of Devgad, his hill-fort, heard the cries and pledged revenge. Nawab Haider Beg, distracted in midpleasure with an acrobatic Abyssinian slave, dreamed up deserving new chastisements.
Whole villages of dyers, washers, bleachers, rope makers, sail riggers, boat builders and repairers, fishermen and ferrymen converged on Zeb-un-nissa’s burning alley and rioted. They rioted against the Nawab’s avaricious tax collection, against the poor wages promised and not always paid by firangi traders, against the acceptance of hunger and disenchantment. For three days, the rioters sacked, ravaged, pillaged. They trussed Thomas Tringham with rough ropes of hemp and transported him, kick by kick, to the magistrate’s doorstep. He pleaded his innocence, in