western and central India to Bombay. Now his couriers and emissaries fanned out to Gwalior, Indore, Bhopal, Dewas, Baroda, Jaipur, Jodhpur and Kota, spreading the word that there was only one seth in Bombay who was offering a fair price for opium this year. In the meanwhile, in order to raise the money for these purchases, Bahram liquidated his savings and drew upon every source of credit that was available to him. When these measures proved inadequate, he mortgaged – in the teeth of his wife’s opposition – their jointly owned lands and sold off their gold, silver and jewellery.
But even after all this, he would not have succeeded in putting together a shipment that was equal to his ambitions: that he was able to do so was the result of an unforeseen development. By the end of the monsoons, when the bulk of the trading fleet usually left for Canton, the rumours of impending trouble in China had grown so insistent as to send commodity prices spiralling downwards. When everyone stopped buying, Bahram stepped in.
That was how he succeeded in assembling the shipment that ran amuck in the storm of September 1838. Its total value, if the price was what Bahram expected it to be, would be well over a million Chinese taels of silver – equivalent to about forty English tons of the precious metal.
How much of this was lost in the storm? As he lay in his bed, in the Owners’ Cabin, dazed by the after-effects of the opium, Bahram was tormented with anxiety. Every time Vico made an appearance he would ask: How much, Vico? Kitna? How much is gone?
Still counting, patrao; don’t know yet.
When at last Vico was ready with his final count it proved to be both better and worse than expected: his estimate was that they had lost about three hundred chests – about ten per cent of their cargo.
To lose the equivalent of five tons of silver was a devastating blow, undoubtedly, but Bahram knew it could have been much worse. With the insurance factored in, he still had enough left to pay off his investors and earn a handsome profit.
It was only a question now of how he played his cards; they were in his hand and the table was ready.
*
To watch a girl cry was very difficult, almost unbearable for Fitcher. After tugging mightily at his beard, and clearing his throat many times, he said, suddenly: ‘Ee may be surprised to hear this, Miss Paulette, but I was acquainted with eer father. Ee features him mightily, I might say.’
Paulette looked up and dried her eyes.
‘But that is incroyable, sir: where could you have met my father?’
‘Here. In Pimple-mouse. In this very garden…’
It had happened over thirty years ago, when Fitcher was on his way back to England after his first voyage to China. The journey had been a difficult one: his old-fashioned ‘plant-cabin’ had been damaged in a hailstorm; the plants had been spattered with seawater and battered by winds. Having already lost half his collection, he had made the journey to Pamplemousses in a state of despair. But there, in one of the storage sheds near the garden’s entrance, he had made the acquaintance of Pierre Lambert: the botanist was young, freshly arrived from France, and on the way over he had begun to experiment with a new kind of carrying case for plants: he’d removed a few panels from the casing of an old wooden trunk and replaced them with panes of thick glass. He gave Fitcher two of these cases and would accept no payment.
‘I always wanted to thank eer father, but I never saw him again. Right sorry I am to know that he’s gone.’
At this Paulette’s composure dissolved and her story came pouring out: she told Fitcher that her father’s death, in Calcutta, had left her destitute; she had decided to travel to Mauritius, where her family had once had connections and had succeeded in smuggling herself on to a coolie ship, the Ibis; the journey had been calamitous in many ways but because of the kindness of a few crew-members she had been able to make her way safely ashore; the vessel’s second mate, Zachary Reid, had lent her the clothes she was wearing, but he was now under arrest and soon to be shipped off to Calcutta to stand trial for mutiny; finding herself penniless, she had walked to the Botanical Gardens, where her father had once worked – but only to find it abandoned; having nowhere else to go she had taken shelter in the abandoned cottage and had spent the last few days there, foraging for food.
‘So what will ee do now? D’ee know?’
‘No. Not yet. But I have managed well enough so far, and I do not see why I should not get by for a while longer.’
Fitcher coughed, cleared his throat and turned around to face her. ‘And what if – what if I were to offer ee something better, Miss Paulette? A job? Would ee think of it at all?’
‘A job, sir?’ she said warily. ‘Of what kind, may I ask?
‘A gardening job – except that it’d be on a ship. Ee’d have eer own cabin, all fitted out for a young lady. Ee’d have a bosun’s pay, and nothing charged for the victuals neither.’ He paused. ‘I owe it to eer father.’
Paulette smiled and shook her head. ‘You are very kind, sir, but I am not a lost kitten. My father would not have wanted me to take advantage of your generosity. And for myself too, sir, I must confess that I have grown weary of living on charity.’
‘Charity?’
Fitcher was suddenly aware of a strange bedoling in certain parts of his body: it was as though he were being assailed by an unfamiliar illness, with symptoms that he could not remember having experienced before – a strangled feeling in the gullet, a palsied shaking of the hands, a fierce itching of the eyes. Sinking into the chair he raised his fingers to his throat and was bewildered to find drops of moisture dripping off the end of his beard. He looked at the wet ends of his fingers as though they had metamorphosed into something inexplicable – like tendrils sprouting on the ends of thorns.
Fitcher was not the kind of man who wept easily: even as a boy he had been able to endure dry-eyed any number of blows, cuffs and kicks. But now it was as if a lifetime of anguish was pouring out of him, streaming down his face.
Paulette went to kneel beside him and looked worriedly into his face. ‘But sir, what is it? If I gave offence, believe me it was not my intention.’
‘Ee don’t understand,’ said Fitcher, through his sobs. ‘It’s not out of charity that I offered ee the job, Miss Paulette. Truth is, I had a daughter too. Her name was Ellen and she was travelling with me. Since she were little she always wanted to go to China, to collect, as I had done. Month ago, she took ill and there were nothing we could do. She’s gone now, and without her I don’t know if I have it in my heart to go on.’
He removed his hands from his face and looked up at her: ‘Truth is, Miss Paulette, it’s ee who’d be doing a kindness for an old man. For me.’
Three
For many years Bahram had regarded the fledgling township of Singapore as a junglee joke.
In the old days, when sailing through the Straits, Bahram had made a point of stopping not at Singapore but at Malacca, which was one of his favourite cities: he liked the location, the severe Dutch buildings, the Chinese temples, the whitewashed Portuguese church, the Arab souq, and the galis where the long-settled Gujarati families lived – and food-lover that he was, he had also developed a great partiality for the banquets that were served in the houses of the city’s Peranakan merchants.
In those days Singapore was just one of many forested islands, clogging the tip of the straits. On its southern side, at the mouth of the river, there was a small Malay kampung: ships would sometimes drop anchor nearby and send their longboats over for fresh water and provisions. But the island’s jungles were notorious for their tigers, crocodiles, and venomous snakes; no one lingered any longer than was necessary.
When the British chose that unpromising location for a new township, Bahram, like many others, had assumed that the settlement would soon be reclaimed by the forest: why would anyone choose to stop here when Malacca was just a day’s sail away? Yet, as the years went by, despite his personal preference for Malacca, Bahram had been forced to yield, with increasing frequency, to his ship’s officers, who claimed that the port facilities were better in Singapore – Mr Tivendale’s conveniently situated boatyard was especially to their liking: they frequently cited it as the best in the region.
