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Anna and the King of Siam
By Margaret Landon, Margaret Ayer OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1944 Margaret Mortenson Landon
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3855-3
CHAPTER 1
BANGKOK, 1862
The Siamese steamer Chow Phya, most modern of the ships plying between Singapore and Bangkok, came to anchor outside the bar at the mouth of the River Chow Phya. A troupe of circus performers were hanging over the rails trying to catch the first glimpse of the country whose king had invited them to entertain his extensive family. Their trained dogs were barking and snarling at the two dogs belonging to the captain of the ship, George Orton, but Jip and Trumpet were disdainful and superior.
Somewhat apart from the rough and laughing group an Englishwoman was leaning against the rail. Her dress of lavender mull had a neat high collar and modest wrist-length sleeves. She was slender and graceful as she stood there with a light breeze ruffling her full skirts. Chestnut curls framed a face that was pretty except for the rather prominent nose. Her dark eyes were turned toward the line on the horizon that was land. She stood almost motionless, fingering a curious brooch on her breast, a gold brooch into which were set two tiger claws. Beside her a Newfoundland dog stood as quiet as she.
The circus dogs came close, sniffed and barked, but the Newfoundland did not return their greeting. She was aloof, reposeful, dignified, not to be cajoled into confidences with strange dogs. She kept her eyes fixed on her mistress' face as it looked across the water to the distant shore.
The sun rose higher. Golden rays danced and sparkled on the slow blue swells of the gulf. The laughter and shouting on deck continued. The dogs raced about. But the woman was as remote from the confusion as if she were separated from it by an invisible wall.
A carefully dressed boy of about six came up from below deck, followed by a Hindustani nurse in a richly patterned sari. He had the same look of good bones, the same delicate air of breeding that distinguished the woman at the rail. His brown hair was curly and his brown eyes danced.
"Mama, Mama," he cried, dashing up to the still figure. "Are we there? Are we there?"
She turned to him with a smile. "Yes, Louis. We are there. In a little while we'll be in Bangkok. Shall we not, Captain Orton?" she inquired of the bronzed young man in an immaculate uniform who had stepped up behind her son.
"We'll go over the bar with the tide," the officer answered, "and you'll sleep on shore tonight."
Louis ran shouting with the news to the circus performers, and the Newfoundland gravely padded after him. "Stay with him, Beebe," the woman directed in Malay.
"Beebe and Bessy take good care of you and Louis, don't they?" asked the captain.
"Yes, they're very faithful." She smiled faintly, her eyes on the hurrying back of the ayah. "Beebe and Moonshee have been with me since before I was married, you know. And good old Bessy is a member of the family, too. She'd guard us with her life."
Captain Orton stood silent a moment. A puff of fresh wind blew the woman's curls back. "Mrs. Leonowens, that ought to be a man's job," he said in a low voice to the pink ear that hardly reached his shoulder. "A maid, a dog, and an old Persian professor aren't enough. I don't like your going in there. For some women, yes. For you, no. People go in there and never come out again." Dark color moved under the clear tan. "Forgive me for saying so much, but you can't even imagine what it will be like."
"You forget that I've lived in the Orient ever since I was fifteen."
"Yes, in British colonies with British soldiers to protect you. This is Siam!"
The woman bit her lip, but did not turn her eyes toward him. "I can't go back now. I've given my word."
"You will not go back now?"
"I cannot!"
He paused, hesitating, then forged ahead. "There's always Mr. Cobb. He's a gentleman and rich!"
She flushed deeply. When she did not speak, he went on in a savage voice, but low. "There is also myself, as you know. Perhaps not a gentleman, and certainly not rich!"
She turned to him then, the deep brown eyes full of tears. "Dear Captain Orton, don't belabor yourself so! To me you are a gentleman, a kind gentleman who has made this difficult trip endurable. But — please try to understand, that for me there has only ever been one man — Leon — and now that he's — gone — there will never be anyone else." She looked out across the water, but her eyes were unseeing. A tear ran down her cheek and she dried it hurriedly with a handkerchief. The man leaned on the rail beside her.
"Mrs. Leonowens, you're too young to bury your heart in a grave." There was a note of pleading in his voice. "Believe me, I would not ask much. Just to take care of you, and Avis, and Louis."
She answered slowly, "But I can't give even that little. I don't know why, but I haven't it left to give." She lifted her face toward his and for a long moment he looked deeply into her eyes, then turned away scowling. Halfway down the deck he wheeled and came back. "I'll be in port every month. If ever you need me, the Chow Phya and I are at your service." And he was gone without waiting for a reply.
The sun was hot now. Sighing, but a little reassured, the slight, graceful woman went below.
CHAPTER 2
FROM WALES TO INDIA
She had been born in Carnarvon in Wales on November 5, 1834. No one is left there now who remembers Anna Harriette, the daughter of Thomas Maxwell Crawford and his wife. But half a world away in one of the strangest and loveliest cities of Asia, she is remembered still.
Carnarvon was a good place to begin life, a clean town with narrow regular streets. There was a fresh wind from the sea, and ships coming and going in the blue and spacious bay. On a summer evening it was pleasant to walk out along the terrace at the north end of the city wall and watch the sun go down in a paradise of clouds back of the Anglesey Hills. On the opposite side of the town crouched Mount Snowdon, brooding over it. Storms roared down its rocky defiles in winter, and in the spring a child could pick snowdrops and pale primroses at its foot.
There was much in that countryside to remind one of the heroic past: remains of encampments, lines of circumvallation, fortresses, castles, cromlechs, abbeys. Into this land the ancient Britons had retreated before successive invaders. The Romans had never fully subjugated them, for all the many garrisons they had kept on Welsh soil. One of the most powerful of these military stations was still clearly visible hardly half a mile from town — Segontium, now only a shadow of vanished pomp. From there Suetonius Paulinus had set out with his cohorts to exterminate the Druids at the command of the Emperor Claudius. The Druids were fanatic lovers of their country's freedom and the uncompromising foes of Roman rule. The stern general had fed the bearded priests to their own altar fires, cut down the sacred oaks draped with mistletoe, and destroyed all visible evidence of the faith except the cromlechs — those round altars of sacrifice — and the huge sepultures of the dead called carnedds. But the Romans had not stamped the love of freedom out of Welsh hearts.
Nor could the English do that through the centuries that followed, not even in the thirteenth century when they drove Llewelyn-ap-Gruffyd foot by foot back to the mountain-holds where, deserted by his friends and betrayed by his confederates, he perished alone, last of his race to hold the scepter of Cymri. The city walls which Edward I had built to secure his conquest were little changed in the nineteenth century, although the Castle of Carnarvon, his seal of triumph on defeated Wales, was crumbling into dust.
A hundred years ago in Carnarvon people still talked of these things, and of others. They talked of Din Sylwy where a double circle of stones was believed to be King Arthur's Round Table. They talked also of Pont Aberglaslyn on the Beddgelert Road, which — it was whispered — the Devil had built in return for the soul of the first one to pass over it, and of how the wily villagers had driven a dog across the bridge when it was finished and so kept their bargain and cheated the Dark One.
Reared in this land of elf and Merlin, it was not strange that Anna Harriette Crawford remembered vividly all her life how as a child she had posted letters in trees to fairies and wood spirits and had received the most flattering replies. Nor was it strange that she carried away from it through the years a profound love of freedom, a deep religious faith, a courage and a pride that never deserted her.
She was only six years old when her parents sailed for India. Captain Crawford and his regiment had been ordered to reinforce the troops there in the face of impending war. His little daughter was left with a relative who conducted a school for girls. She was not quite seven when this relative, Mrs. Walpole, called her to the parlor and, taking her gently into plump arms, told her that her father had died a soldier's death in that far-away country where he had gone to serve the Queen.
In the most delightful of all Indian months, the cool month of November, in the year 1849, a steamer came to anchor in the harbor of Bombay, bringing Anna Harriette Crawford among its passengers. She was fifteen, fresh from school, and eager to rejoin her mother, who had married again.
The sun shone through the mists of early dawn as the young girl looked from her cabin window with mingled curiosity and wonder. She was a pretty girl, small-boned and delicate in appearance, with brown eyes and wavy brown hair parted in the middle. In the foreground she saw the stone quays and the great flight of stone steps along the waterfront. Beyond were strange shapes of temples, Hindu, Parsee, Jain, and Mohammedan; the remains of old Maratha forts; and a line of European and native mansions. In the distance was the dim outline of the mighty ghats towering into the clouds.
As the boat docked everything was confusion. Shrieking porters quarreled over luggage. A number of officers, civil and military — some in light-brown coats of China silk and wide-brimmed straw hats, others in frogged blue tunics and military caps — pressed through the crowd and boarded the ship. A young cadet who had been standing near the gangplank rushed into the arms of a handsome officer, very like himself but older by twenty or thirty years. Anna looked anxiously about for her mother, half afraid that she would not recognize her after the long years. But when she found her mother the years did not seem to have mattered. Her mother looked a little older, a little frailer, but that was all. They drove away from the quay happily, Anna almost hanging out of the carriage in her eagerness not to miss any of the new and strange sights. Her mother told her that they would stay with friends at Colaba for a few weeks, and would then go to Poona. Her stepfather held a prominent position in the Public Works Department and was needed in Poona to supervise certain government projects there.
In the meantime they would see as much of Bombay as time permitted. One of their early drives was to the fort, another to the dockyard. It was Anna's first glimpse of the commerce of the world. Her life had been so sheltered that she had hardly bought so much as a ribbon for herself in the shops of Carnarvon. The great square at the dockyard in Bombay was full of merchants, both dark-faced and white, jostling and contending with each other in a dozen languages. There were pompous Englishmen, suave Parsees, Arabs and Hindus, and mixed with them a motley collection of fakirs and beggars hoping for a few pice.
For six hours this mass of humanity bartered, bought and sold, haggled, and fought in a strangely exciting warfare. At four o'clock a long line of carriages drove up to the stone warehouses and dashed away with the white merchants. Almost instantly not a human being was to be seen except a few Indian watchmen and some armed white sentinels. Anna had refused to be dragged away until it was all over. She was intoxicated with the drama of it. So this was commerce! She felt an insatiable curiosity to see and know more.
A day or two later her mother and she drove through the markets and bazaars of the Parsee section. They visited the Bhendi Bazaar, and the Arabian horse-market. They saw the landing of pilgrims from Mecca, a dirty ill-looking set of men. And they watched the arrival of some beautiful slave-women who had been bought for private sale among the rich Indians.
But the experience that made the most profound impression on the young girl newly arrived from the simple life of Carnarvon was a dinner party. It was given by a rich widow whose house was near Parel, a beautiful part of the island. Her husband had been an "uncovenanted officer." In the East of those days so great was the prestige attached to the word "officer" that every white man was an officer of some sort, from brigadier to private. A civilian was an "uncovenanted officer."
The carriage bringing Anna Harriette and her parents to the dinner drove through a long avenue of trees to a pillared building of stone with a spacious flight of steps leading to it. On the steps half a dozen servants were waiting, in flowing white robes, crimson and gold turbans, and blue and gold cummerbunds. Anna Harriette looked at this princely assembly in awe. They salaamed the guests, and then with stately dignity advanced to help them alight from their carriages. Another group of flunkeys, equally magnificent, moved forward to conduct them to a sumptuously furnished apartment where they were to lay off their wraps. A third company then led them to the drawing room in the middle of which sat the widow, like a queen, on a yellow satin ottoman, surrounded by her guests.
Anna Harriette found herself little interested in the guests, although the men were for the most part in handsome uniforms, and the women in low-necked dresses of exquisite Chinese crepe and silk, or Indian gauze and mulmul. It was the regal Indian servants who drew her attention. At dinner they glided about, so quietly that their feet seemed hardly to touch the floor, offering the guests costly foods and wines, setting down plates and removing them without making the faintest sound. The punkahs overhead moved softly to and fro. Light fell from coconut-oil chandeliers on the flowers, the glass, the silver. Everything went forward with ease and perfection. The servants who were not at the moment waiting on the table stood with arms folded across their breasts under the shadow of door or pillars, until their turn came. They were so still that, except for the glitter in their eyes, they might have been statues cast in bronze.
The talk at the table was full of expanding British power. It flowed around the young girl in a sea of words. She listened and said nothing. No one considered it strange that she was quiet, because it was the proper thing. But the thoughts in her head were anything but quiet. She heard the officers, whose faces were red with wine, exulting over the accomplished fact of British supremacy in India, and she wondered a little. They discussed campaigns and victories, and spoke contemptuously of the "natives," whom everyone agreed had to be put in their place periodically. "Their place?" Anna Harriette pondered, strangely troubled. "And what is their place in their own country?" The laughter, the pomp, the arrogant assertion of racial superiority grated on the young Welsh girl unpleasantly. She watched the Indians moving silently about. She had a feeling of leashed power emanating from the mute and motionless figures under the arches and pillars. It came to her for the first time that it was a very solemn affair for Britons to be in India, luxuriating on her land and on her spoils.
Abruptly the delicious dinner, the music of fountains playing through the windows, the movement and color about the table seemed incongruous, almost revolting! What were they thinking, the dark and sinister men waiting in the shadows, watching every turn and expression on the white faces around the table? Did they hate the conquerors of their ancient land? Did they say to themselves with scorn, "A little while, you fools, and our knives will slit your throats!" The ominous illusion became so strong that suddenly Anna Harriette wanted only to escape this impassive scrutiny. If she laughed at a joke made by the young soldier next to her, if she merely leaned closer to hear better, those obsidian eyes seemed to observe her, even when they remained fixed on vacancy. She could hardly restrain the impulse to stand up and run away from the overpowering sense of animosity and resentment that came to her over the chatter of the table. But this would have been a shocking breach of etiquette. She sat still, trying to hush her secret heart.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Anna and the King of Siam by Margaret Landon, Margaret Ayer. Copyright © 1944 Margaret Mortenson Landon. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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