River of Smoke - Amitav Ghosh [38]
Fitcher’s way of looking at the world could not have been more different: yet, it seemed to Paulette that in some strange way, he was more a part of the natural order than her father had ever been. Like a gnarled old tree, growing upon a stony slope, Fitcher was unshakeable in his determination to extract a living from the world: this was how he had grown rich, and it was also why his riches meant very little to him; he had no use for luxuries, and his wealth was a source not of comfort, but of anxiety – it was a burden, like the sacks of cabbages that had to be hoarded in the cellar for seasons of scarcity.
When she came to know him better, Paulette understood that Fitcher’s ideas and attitudes were outgrowths of his upbringing. The son of a Cornish greengrocer, he had been born into a wind-pierced cottage on the outskirts of Falmouth, within sight of the sea. His father was once a sailor on a ‘fruit-schooner’ – one of those swift, sleek vessels that linked the orchards of the Mediterranean to the markets of Britain – but an accident, and a crippled right arm, had forced him to alter his mode of livelihood: he had taken to hawking fruits and vegetables, some of which he obtained from his former shipmates. There were five Penrose children and the family’s circumstances being what they were, they could only intermittently attend school: when the boys were not helping their father, they were expected to earn a few pennies by working in nearby farms and gardens. It was thus that young Fitcher came to the attention of the parish doctor, who happened to be, in his spare time, a keen amateur naturalist: noticing that the boy had a way with plants, he introduced him to botanizing and lent him books. Thus was inculcated an appetite for self-improvement that served the boy well when he, in turn, was hired as a crewman by the captain of a fruit-schooner. He quickly acquired a knack for tending to the schooner’s delicate Mediterranean cargoes – oranges, plums, persimmons, apricots, lemons and figs. As with most other merchant ships, fruit-schooners permitted each seaman to carry a certain amount of cargo on his personal account, to trade for his own profit. When the weather was suitable, Fitcher would make use of his quota to ship saplings, fruit trees and garden plants, some of which fetched good prices when the schooner visited London.
The habits of that time had stayed with Fitcher and had been crucial to the building of his fortune. It had taken him many years of patient application to build the Penrose nurseries into a major force in the world of British horticulture and to remove himself from the helm, even if temporarily, had not been easy. But as a purveyor of exotic flora, Fitcher was all too well aware that the business of gardening, even more than most, demanded ceaseless innovation – partly because the time it took for a new flower to go from sublime rarity to vulgar weed was growing steadily shorter; and partly because the market was crowded with increasingly aggressive competitors. Among Penrose & Sons’ many rivals, perhaps the most formidable was the Veitch nursery, in nearby Devon: tireless in seeking out new wares, the Veitches would often help to fund exploratory voyages and expeditions. Fitcher too had helped to finance the travels of several would-be collectors, but never with satisfactory results: some of these wanderers had vanished with his money; some had lost their minds or died frightful deaths; and of those who returned, few had brought back anything of value. One such, a promising young Cornishman, had kept his best finds for himself, but only to sell them to the Veitches later – a betrayal that was all the more painful to Fitcher because his Devonshire rivals were not even true West Country people but transplanted Scotsmen.
These experiences had