River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [16]
The figurehead too?
Ji, Sethji.
The figurehead was a sculpture of Anahita, the angel who watched over the waters. It was a prized heirloom of his wife’s family, the Mistries, who were the Anahita’s owners. He knew they would consider its loss a portent of bad luck – but he had portents of his own to deal with now, and all he could think of was getting into his cabin and taking off his clothes.
Make sure the munshiji is looked after; let the Captain know …
Ji, Sethji.
*
Neel did not need to have Paulette’s contribution to the shrine pointed out to him: he spotted it himself – it was an outline of a man’s head, drawn in profile, not unlike one of those cartoonish drawings in which human features are fitted into the inner curve of the crescent moon: the nose was a long, pendulous proboscis; the eyebrows jutted out like a ferret’s whiskers, and the chin disappeared into a tapering, upcurved beard.
Do you know who that is? said Deeti.
Yes, of course I do, said Neel. It is Mr Penrose …
Mr Penrose’s face was not easily forgotten: it was gaunt and craggy, with a jutting brow and a chin that curved upwards like the blade of a scythe. Tall and very lean, he walked with a bowed gait, his eyes fixed on the ground, as if he were cataloguing the greenery on which he was about to tread. Notoriously unmindful of his appearance, it was not unusual for him to be seen with straw in his beard and burrs in his stockings; and as for his clothes, he possessed scarcely a garment that was free of patches and stains. When deep in thought (which was often) his tapered beard and bristling eyebrows had a way of twitching and flickering, as if to announce the presence of a man who was not to be spoken to without good reason. This tic was by no means an accretion of age, for even as a child he had had a habit of ‘starin and twitcherin’, in a manner that was so like a polecat’s that it had earned him the nickname ‘Fitcher’.
Yet, despite all his tics and idiosyncrasies there was a gravity in his manner, a penetration in his gaze, that precluded his being taken for a mere crank or eccentric. Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose was in fact a man of unusual accomplishment and considerable wealth: a noted nurseryman and plant-hunter, he had made a great deal of money through the marketing of seeds, saplings, cuttings and horticultural implements – his patented moss-scrapers, barkscalers and garden-scarifiers had a large and devoted following in England. His principal enterprise, a nursery called Penrose & Sons, was based in Falmouth, in Cornwall: it was reputed especially for its Chinese importations, some of which – like certain varieties of plumbago, flowering quince and wintersweet – had gained enormous popularity in the British Isles.
It was the plant-hunter’s avocation that had brought Fitcher eastwards again, in his own vessel, the Redruth, a two-masted brig.
The Redruth sailed into Port Louis two days after the Ibis, after a voyage that had also been beset by misfortune and tragedy. No one on the brig had suffered more than Fitcher himself, and it was at the urging of his own crew that he decided to go ashore for a break: on the first clear day after the Redruth’s arrival two sailors rowed him ashore and hired him a horse so he could pay a visit to the Botanical Gardens at Pamplemousses.
It was largely because of the Botanical Gardens that Port Louis had been included in the Redruth’s itinerary. The Pamplemousses garden was among the earliest of its kind and counted, among its founders and curators, some of the most illustrious names in botany – the great Pierre Poivre, who had identified the true black pepper, had worked there, as also Philibert Commerson, the discoverer of bougainvillea. Had there existed such a thing as a route of pilgrimage for horticulturists the Pamplemousses garden would have been, without a doubt, one of its most hallowed stations.
Pamplemousses was not much more than an hour’s ride from Port Louis. Fitcher had visited the garden once before, on the return leg of his first voyage to China: at that time the island