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And what happened to Gabriel? Knowledge, as Venn would say, comes from purity of design. Data without design is a muddle. The data on Gabriel’s death had been given to me the day I stumbled on Hannah’s things stuffed in a cardboard box in the hallway of the maritime museum in Marblehead. I just didn’t know where the data fit, it was so long ago. Gabriel Legge lived a comparatively long life, dying in 1720, and is buried in the British Cemetery in Calcutta.

THE FOREIGN TRAVELER

from the “Salem Bibi” series

c. 1700

9.5 cm × 11.3 cm

Provenance: The Museum of Maritime Trade

Anonymous Loan

This is the starkest in the series. The artist executes his vision in frugal lines. An emaciated firangi in a Muslim ascetic’s garb stands beside a low white wall. The dense, almost-black forest backdrops the figure. Actually, there are two figures; a seductive, veiled, dark-skinned woman extends a gold-bangled arm toward him. In the woods, we see the eyes of demon forms, tigers, half-human, multiheaded monsters. In the pigmentless area behind the wall, I make out no path or road that a traveler might pursue. The traveler’s eyes are sunken; blue pits in a bony gray oval. He stares straight at the viewer, or at the artist, who might well be sitting in the courtyard of a half-completed palace. A cap of embroidered cloth sits too low, too loose, on a shrunken forehead. Wisps of mustard-yellow hair hang limp over a saggy, wrinkled earlobe. The chest is bare, long, narrow. The ribs bulge through the tent of gray-blue skin. The wrists are opalescent, crisscrossed with lapis capillaries.

There is little doubt the figure is Gabriel, and the painting a concentrated story of how he survived the drownings and butcheries of December 1700. If I had to title the painting I might call it Entry into the Garden. It seems in every way a reversal of the familiar expulsion myths of Adam and Eve from Eden, Adam’s fall, sinning all.

In December 1700, Hannah became, to her satisfaction, husbandless.

History was already rewriting her fate. Her passage to England was nearly complete. Face smudged with lampblack, wrapped in white khadi, shivering in a servant’s hut, Hannah was still retrievable. Poor Tringham, after all, was packed, partially healed, face wrapped in a scarf, waiting at the docks. And Hannah, rather than waking up and fleeing for her freedom, felt a heaviness in her bones, a fatigue, that wouldn’t go away.

Shock, depression, rejection—we have words for it now. The fatigue that doesn’t lift. A moral collapse. Or a vision of the future that the body refuses to endorse.

All she wanted was sleep. She didn’t care who came and went; she slept like a local through heat and light and noise. The packet ship came and loaded, and went. Hannah Legge did not board and was thought to have died in the riots, and her piratical husband to have drowned.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest …

JOHN KEATS

“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

PART THREE

1

IN THE CARNIVAL CROWD that had gathered to witness the cutting off of Thomas Tringham’s nose stood a sturdy mendicant in soiled khadi cotton, with a begging bowl and a long staff to lean on and the holy wanderer’s saffron daub on his forehead. He was deep inside enemy territory, not because of his obvious Hinduism—the vast majority of inhabitants of Muslim lands were Hindu—but because this master of guerrilla strategies and of incognito disguise was Raja Jadav Singh, King of Devgad, a Hindu-ruled disfigurement on the Muslim map of South India, and a deeply embedded thorn in the flesh of Emperor Aurangzeb.

Devgad was an oblong parcel of swamp, jungle and Deccan escarpment that cut a narrow swath a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide, from the arid highlands of south-central India, east and south to the Coromandel Coast. Revenue from the various European factories within its territory, as well as tributes from the dozens of vassals and the thousands of individual villages,