East India

by Colin Falconer

  Chapter 11

  CORNELIA took out her journal and stared at another empty page. When she had embarked on this great adventure she had imagined there would be countless incidents to record. Instead the days had begun to blur, each as monotonous as the one before.

  She lit the oil lamp, which was suspended on a gimbal above her head to prevent the oil spilling as the ship rolled. She put the brass pen with its split nib into the ink and wrote:

  “The undermerchant, Christiaan van Sant, is a most charming man, yet there is something disconcerting about him. Sometimes he has such a look in his eyes that disturbs me. But Commandeur Secor thinks highly of him and he is a great judge of men's character. He is also one of the most engaging men I have ever known.

  “And all his powers are necessary on such a voyage for our ship is composed of many diverse elements all crowded together, it is only through the force of his personality that there is harmony between us all. It seems the sailors treat the passengers with disdain, while the ordinary passengers look upon the VOC employees with a sort of fawning resentment. And the soldiers hold themselves apart from all of us...”

  She put down her pen. Were things really that bad? Her husband said she was prone to fancy and hysteria, the fault of her gender.

  She heard the ship's bell, it was time for dinner.

  ***

  The cabin boys, Strootman and Simon Oddyck, brought in platters of hot, salted pork. The cook had spiced it with cardamom and coriander but all the spices in all of India could not disguise the taint. Biscuits sat in copper bowls, arranged like fruit. Fruit! What she would not give for a juicy pear.

  Welten, the commandeur's butler, hurried around with burgundy; wine was at least something she could still appreciate.

  The talk turned once again to the commandeur's adventures in India. The young clerks were always hankering for stories of the Oriental harems.

  “So is it true,” Salomon, the Jewish clerk, asked him, ‘that even a common man may have more than one wife?”

  “If he can afford it,” Ambroise answered. “Keeping just one may be expense enough for a poor man.”

  They all laughed at that.

  “Why should a man need more than one wife?” Cornelia said.

  She saw the junior clerk, David Krueger, glance at one of his fellows and give him a knowing wink.

  “Indeed, some men would count themselves lucky with just one,” Ambroise murmured. But when his eyes met hers, his cheeks coloured and he looked away.

  “I have heard that the princes have whole palaces filled with their wives,” Christiaan said.

  “I should like to have been born a mogul prince,” Krueger said, and received a look of disapproval from the pastor.

  “I am sure the princes think the arrangement very fine,” Ambroise said. “But as a Dutchman I cannot but feel sympathy for these women. Theirs is not such a happy life. Yes, they have the best food, the finest clothes, and they live in the greatest luxury in their zenanas, which is what they call their palaces. But they are, I am told, desperately lonely.”

  Salomon discovered a nest of maggots in his pork. He pushed the meat delicately aside. “Yet other women, do they not, find life without their husbands so unbearable that they follow them voluntarily to the grave?”

  “Indeed,” Ambroise said. “I have seen it once with my own eyes. They call it sati.”

  “Remarkable,” Christiaan agreed.

  The pastor shook his gloomy head. “This is godless talk! To destroy oneself is a mortal sin before God.”

  “What is this sati?” Cornelia asked.

  Ambroise sipped the burgundy wine, and it left a dark stain on his moustache. “The woman I saw, she was most handsome. She had married her husband when she was just thirteen years old and knew no other man. And he, for his part, had no other wives. When he died, she declared she would become sati, though her relatives and her friends tried to dissuade her, they even enlisted the support of the governor, but it was to no avail. It is custom there, and she saw she was doing herself great honour in the eyes of her savage gods.”

  A contemptuous snort from the pastor.

  “She dressed in her best clothes and jewels, as if it was her wedding day and then went to sit upon his funeral pyre. When his body burned, her living flesh burned with him. She uttered not a sound when she was consumed. It was the most remarkable thing I have ever seen, and the most distressing.”

  “I don't think I could ever love a man so much,” Cornelia said.

  Christiaan looked up. “Is this situation ever reversed, Heer Commandeur? Might a man willingly give up his life for a woman, do you think?”

  Before he could answer, the pastor spoke up. He looked as if he was about to burst. “A man must be prepared to die for God. That is all he should think of.”

  “Easy words,” Ambroise said, ‘but in my experience a man will do anything just to live one more day.”

  “Not if he has God in his heart.”

  “Perhaps no one really knows what is in their heart until they are called upon to act on it,” Cornelia said. There was silence. A woman was not supposed to say such things.

  “Those chosen by God are exalted by His love and redeemed by Him,” the pastor said. “Those who are not chosen to be saved by Him will burn.”

  “Surely,” Salomon said, ‘a man chooses whether he burns.”

  The pastor looked down his nose at him. “Certain persons are elected by God for salvation, the rest are consigned to eternal damnation. Every human action is fore-ordained by God. There is no such thing as free will.”

  “Then what is the point of it all, if God already knows what we shall do and which of us will be sinners?” Salomon muttered, peevishly, unwilling to let it go.

  “I think my husband knows the ways of God better than any man here,” the pastor’s wife said.

  “But if you think about it,” Salomon persisted, ‘we all have known men who have been brought down by their own actions, as men have been exalted by their suffering under trials.”

  “Trials are brought by God to show his displeasure for our sins,” the pastor said.

  She saw that Salomon wanted to go on with it, but he noticed the angry looks he got from his fellows and decided to abandon the debate. Cornelia looked at François, at the head of the table. He had kept silent through this angry exchange, and she wondered what he was thinking. Christiaan had a soft smile playing around his lips, but he, too, had been careful to keep his opinions to himself.

  The pastor now launched into another of his sermons and Krueger glared at Salomon for giving him cause to blast his holy trumpets again. Salted pork and sanctimony. A fine dinner.

  Cornelia longed for Java, exotic fruit and long silent dinners with her husband.

  ***

  It was dusk and most of the passengers were below decks, just the night watch on top. The skipper saw Sara emerge from the companionway, give him the eye. Well this was promising. He supposed her stuck-up mistress was at dinner with the officers. He called her up to join him on the poop, he could be free with her up there, anything he said would be carried away with the wind and the crash of the waves over the bow.

  “Hello, little Sara,” he said, grinning at her. “How's your mistress tonight?”

  “Down there making calf eyes at the fine commandeur,” she said, her eyes knowing.

  “As if I care about that.”

  “Oh, I've seen the way you look at her. The whole ship sees the way you look at her.”

  “She flaunts herself like a whore,” he said.

  “What are you talking, man? She thinks her hole's for pissing out of.”

  He grinned at that.

  “Last night she was up on deck for hours talking to her fancy man. He's all she has eyes for.”

  The skipper spat into the sea.

  “You can't blame him, I suppose. How can any poor girl compete with her?”

  “You're more of a woman than she'll ever be.”

  �
��You don't mean it.”

  “I mean it well enough,” he said, his voice husky now. A long time at sea without a woman, and this Sara wasn't a bad sort of a piece. “If I dressed you in lace and jewels, all the men would be looking at you instead of her.”

  “Now how's a poor captain with a wife at home in Holland going to give a girl lace and jewels?”

  He felt her wriggle against him and he reached out to grab her and she twisted away. So that was how it was going to be, was it? Well, he was sure he could oblige her.

  She let her cloak fall open and gave him a glimpse of fat little boobies tied up tight inside her bodice, screaming to be set free. She grinned at him like the trollop she was. “The commandeur,” she said, ‘now there's a man. I bet he has jewels to give a girl.”

  Why, the little bitch. “I'll be a rich man one day,” he told her. “You think I'm going to pilot these old tubs around the ocean all my life. A man like me? I could do anything.”

  She turned her back on him but he caught her by the wrist and spun her around. He held her against him and kissed her hard on the lips. He thought she might fight him but not a bit of it. Her mouth was as hot and dirty-sweet; he felt her thigh rubbing against his groin. God's breath! He pinched her plump little breasts, his hands all over her.

  She pushed him away, breathless. “What about your wife in Holland?”

  “What man needs a wife when he can have you?”

  “I didn't say you could have me,” she said and darted away down the companionway.

  He thought the little tease was going to leave him like that, but she stopped halfway down and whispered: “Look for me when you finish your watch!’ and then she was gone.

  ***

  Among the Utrecht's other innovations, the shipwrights had roofed in the gallery overlooking the stern, and had built privies there in addition to those in the beak. These were for the exclusive use of the commandeur and the ship's officers. A real luxury compared to some of the other old tubs he'd sailed in.

  When he came off the watch that night, Sara was waiting for him, good as her word. He took her to the gallery, shut the door and lifted her off the floor. Without a word, he lifted up her skirts, and pulled his breeches down to his knees. He wet himself with his fingers and pushed his way inside of her. It hurt her and she bit into his shoulder to stifle a cry of pain.

  “I'm going to make a great lady of you,” he whispered and he fucked her hard and quickly, standing up, right there in the commandeur’s privy.

  Chapter 12

  A GOOD wind, the Utrecht on a course east by south, and a month ahead of schedule by the skipper's reckoning. Seaweed floated on the waves, speckled gulls circled screaming, land not far off now, no more than two days sailing to the Dutch colony at Good Hope.

  Ambroise walked alone on the deck. He had known in his bones that he should not take this voyage. But the Company had made him President of the Fleet, even offered him a chance to become a Commissioner with all its promises of riches and position. It was everything he had worked for these last ten years. How could he refuse?

  Yet he had only these few months returned from his last journey to India where the vapours had drained his health and taken his vigour. When he had asked for time to consider, his brother-in-law, Heindrich Brouwer, one of the High and Mighty Seventeen, had himself pressed him to take this golden opportunity.

  “Turn this down and you may not get another chance, Ambroise.”

  But from the moment he stepped onto the boat he knew he had made a vital mistake; from the moment he saw the skipper again, in fact.

  Or was it from the moment he saw her?

  He had tried to avoid her these last few weeks, for the sake of his mortal soul and his peace of mind, but she was always there at mealtimes, when he and his fellow officers and a few privileged passengers ate together in the Great Cabin. If it was just her loveliness, perhaps he could have stood it. But she was, besides being beautiful, also intelligent and well read. It seemed to him that he saw in her eyes a spark from a kindred fire. When he spoke of the women of India, the clerks would wink and grin, the preacher frown, but she alone seemed to share his anguish for their position. While others asked him about the mogul's toys, she wanted to know of the people.

  Here was a companion and soul mate, but married to another man. If only circumstances had been kinder.

  There were days he could hardly bear to look at her. His appetite vanished, and he felt ill with desire. At dinner he would say something innocuous to Christiaan or Salomon to try and take his mind off this obsession but his eyes always strayed back to her, to the clutch of jewels at her throat where the soft pulse beat against the olive skin.

  That something so exquisite should be possessed by a diamond polisher!

  The world shrunk to the dimensions of their lonely ship. So many nights he lay sleepless, or went up on deck to stare at the moon reflected on the wash from the stern, but even then he saw her face mirrored in the waves.

  What was to be done about this?

  ***

  There was never opportunity to be private on board the Utrecht, she thought; you lived your life under the noses of three hundred others. Cornelia stopped for a moment at the foot of the companionway, looked into the gloom of the gun deck, all those people crammed in there sleeping, or trying to, she didn’t know how they could stand it. She heard a couple coming together in the darkness, making little noises that sounded like a hedgehog at the door as they fumbled under the bedclothes and all just a few feet away behind a curtain.

  She hurried aloft.

  The deck appeared deserted, just the night watch silent at their posts. Cornelia pulled her wrap tighter around her shoulders; it was a still night, just the to'gallant unfurled, and the cold air better than the crowded fug of the holds. She was alone with the creaking of cordage, the gentle swell of the ocean, strange stars swinging above the mast.

  Then she saw him, standing alone at the stern. She was about to turn away and go back to her cabin, but it was too late, he had seen her.

  “Vrouwe Noorstrandt,” he said, formally, to cover his surprise.

  “A beautiful night, Heer Commandeur.”

  “Indeed.” She joined him at the stern. They stared in silence at the ocean; the wash left in their wake silver against a rising moon.

  “So, we are nearly at the Cape. How have you found your first sea voyage?”

  “These five months have been the longest of my life. I have spent them either miserable with seasickness or bored to distraction.”

  “The romance of the sea soon palls for everyone. No doubt you are eager to reach Batavia.”

  Well, perhaps, she thought. There lies boredom and misery of another kind.

  “What will it be like?”

  “They say it is much the same as India. There are trees--slender as flowers--that grow to the height of a gabled house. They are quite different from any tree we have in Holland for all the branches are on top. And the fruit - well, let us say, you would not want the fruit to fall on you. It would not be quite the same as being struck on the head by an apple, for instance. They are the size of cannon balls and almost as hard.”

  “Still, I think I shall miss Holland.”

  “There are compensations. The air smells of spice and there are so many wonders. I am sure you will never be bored by what you see and hear.”

  “Is that why you are returning so soon?”

  “No, I am returning because I am overly vain and overly ambitious.”

  “A man cannot be too ambitious, surely. I am sure Boudewyn should not think so,” she added, and hoped he did not hear the disparagement in her voice.

  “Sometimes a man reaches a point in his life where ambition can be a harsh companion.”

  “Is there no wife waiting for you in Holland?”

  “I have given my life to the Honourable Company. Too late, perhaps, I realise what I have missed. The fault is all mine. The loss, also.”

  “Many men keep lon
g hours and keep wives also,” she said, thinking of her own husband.

  “I am not the kind of man who could...who would marry for the sake of God and for children.”

  “Then why should a man marry, Sinjeur Secor?”

  “For love. Most find me a strange man for saying so, but it is what I believe.”

  “And you have never found it?”

  “Not yet.”

  At table he gave the impression of such self sufficiency, a man of the world who suffered no doubts about himself or harboured any bitterness for the direction of his life. She realized he had just entrusted her with an intimacy about himself that he had shared with very few others, and she was flattered and not a little shaken.

  She thought of her husband. Had he married her for love? Hardly. He had the blood, she had the money. A bit of a come down for a Noorstrandt, she supposed, marrying into trade, even though he and his family were all poor as beggars.

  Ambroise drew closer to her in the darkness. She felt a thrill of alarm.

  “I have a confession,” he said.

  “Perhaps you should speak to the pastor.”

  “I would rather tell it to you.”

  He put his hand on hers. She knew she should snatch it away but she found she could not.

  “You have heard me speak many times of the zenanas where the Indian princes keep the most beautiful women of the kingdom for their own private pleasures. I was allowed a glimpse of them once; I paid one of their eunuchs to take me to a secret window so I could see inside their courtyard and watch them at their leisures. I was not disappointed. They were breath taking in their loveliness all of them.”

  “Is this your confession, Sinjeur Secor?”

  “No, my confession is this: that not one of them was as beautiful as you.”

  She stared at the ocean, unable to think of answer to that. Boudewyn had never spoken to her that way, and that the commandeur should be making love to her was cause for scandal, and yes, for grief. She had so longed for a man to say such words to her, a man as charming and intelligent and yes, worldly. This was just too cruel, to want something so badly, and know that it was impossible ever to have.