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Zemindar
By Valerie Fitzgerald Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © 1981 Valerie Fitzgerald
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78185-953-7
CHAPTER 1
'Landfall! ... Miss Hewitt! ... At last we have landfall!'
Mr Roberts waved to me jubilantly as I appeared on deck and walked towards him where he leant on the rail gazing intently at the horizon.
Though it was still very early in the morning, scarcely more than dawn by English standards, it was already hot, and a haze born of the heat sapped the colours of sea and sky and effectively obscured my first and long-awaited glimpse of our destination.
'But where?' I shaded my eyes from the glare of the water and peered in the direction to which my companion pointed. 'I can see nothing. Are you sure?'
'Quite sure. You just missed the look-out's shout from the crow's nest — about a quarter of an hour ago — but I think I caught a glimpse of the coast a moment since. It has disappeared again — no — there it is! Look — that small smudge of darker grey low down near the water? Do you see it?'
'I see something, but surely that cannot be land? It looks as insubstantial as the haze itself.'
'Ah, but it's land for all that! I'm sure of it now — and so is the crew. See them crowding the rails! That is India, Miss Hewitt. India on the horizon!'
Quite spontaneously we turned to each other and shook hands, as though we had something to congratulate ourselves upon. And indeed, looking back on the long journey of more than five months' duration, most of it accomplished in bad weather and all in circumstances of discomfort, perhaps we had.
The Indiaman on which we had embarked from the Pool of London the previous April was old and dirty and still stank of the hides and skins that had formed a previous cargo. For weeks, as we bucketed down the western coast of Africa, every board and beam had squeaked and squealed in an agony of protesting age; and then, when we had rounded the Cape of Good Hope and turned northward again, the great winds of the south-west monsoon had bellied our patched sails to bursting, and, though we had made good time, the vessel, ill-balanced and forced beyond its capacity as it was, vented its rage at the elements on its twelve unhappy passengers. Few of us saw much of the sky between Cape Town and Calcutta, and of those few only two can have been said to have enjoyed the voyage — Mr Roberts and myself.
Not that I was entirely immune to mal de mer myself; but I had discovered early on the voyage that I could keep my feet pretty comfortably as long as I was in the fresh air. Thus I had formed the habit of settling my cousin Emily for the day in what scanty comfort her hot and airless cabin could provide, and then taking myself up on deck until the midday meal. Sometimes, indeed, I found it more prudent to miss the meal altogether, but whether because I soon became accustomed to the motion of the ship, or whether because I was constitutionally a better sailor than the others, by the time we were in the foul weather of the Indian Ocean, when all the hatches were battened and the ports shuttered, I was still able to rise, dress and pass the day in the unpleasantly close atmosphere of the saloon rather than in my bed.
Mr Roberts never turned a hair whatever the weather, and so, thrown much together as we were, and over a long period, a forced acquaintance had developed into a genuine friendship.
I dread to think what my state of ennui and frustration would have been had someone other than Mr Roberts kept me company over those long weeks. Of the remainder of the passengers, few would have been as pleasant and none as interesting.
There were only two ladies aboard apart from Emily and myself: Mrs Wilkins and her daughter Elvira, both of whom had suffered continuously and severely from sea-sickness. On embarkation they had had with them a ladies' maid, a pathetic little orphan girl named Jepthah. But at Cape Town Jepthah, having endured the rigours of her own and her employers' ill health for several weeks, was granted leave of absence to see the sights, and with commendable resourcefulness had neglected to return to the ship — which, despite the wails, threats and maledictions of the Wilkinses, sailed away without her.
At the time this happened I could afford to be amused at Jepthah's defection and hoped she would be happy in her new environment. But within days I had occasion to wish the young woman had possessed more staying power, for, being the only female aboard capable of helping them, I could not in common charity neglect to assist Mrs Wilkins and her daughter, who were both by this time unable to do anything for themselves. Though they were not as demanding as my cousin Emily, anyone who has had to nurse a bad sailor on a long voyage will realize that my duties were far from pleasant. Even when the weather improved, they remained so debilitated that they could do nothing but lie on their hard cots and try to regain strength with the aid of gruel prepared in the galley by a kind cook and port wine donated by a kind captain. I sat with them for a brief period each evening, but the better I got to know them, the gladder I was that it was Mr Roberts who was my usual companion.
Mrs Wilkins was an 'old India hand' (as she was fond of describing herself) and with the misplaced assurance of the vulgar, took it upon herself to enlighten me as to the customs and character of that country — volubly, enthusiastically and, as I was to discover, inaccurately. For Mrs Wilkins belonged to that class of female, all too frequent among our countrywomen, who can travel the world and spend a lifetime doing it, then return to Surrey or Kent as totally innocent of any enlarging experience, of even their own character, as when they first left the shores of England. The boundaries they set themselves in Bokhara or Bombay are the selfsame with which they guard their nonentity in Bristol or Brighton — children and servants, social mores and petty scandals — and their minds remain unopened by rational curiosity and imprisoned by mean suspicion of the people they are (generally) well paid to live among.
Of such was Mrs Wilkins, and her daughter Elvira, anaemic and silly, had small chance of making better use of her opportunities.
Our male co-travellers were no more promising than the Wilkins ladies. There were two army men returning to their regiments, and still showing, despite a year's furlough, the ravages of tertiary ague or other tropical fevers; a couple of young clerks going out to commercial concerns in Calcutta (very brash these, with hair as brightly polished as their patent-leather boots); and two elderly brothers who, after a lifetime in India, had retired to Shoreham-on-Sea, but after one winter had decided to return to the more familiar infelicities of the East. They were reputedly very wealthy and obviously seldom sober.
Small wonder I was grateful for the company of Mr Roberts.
Mr Roberts was a middle-aged widower with two daughters safely married in England. By avocation he was an indigo factor, though he had started life as a 'writer' in the service of the East India Company, and his work took him all over the north-eastern regions of India, following the course of the great River Ganges and its tributaries. From his conversation I learned that as well as buying indigo crops, both raw and processed, from established planters, a part of his time was spent in promoting new plantations in untried areas and advising on the cultivation of this plant, which provides the blue dye used to colour the uniforms of our navy and those of most of the navies of the world, including Russia and America.
He was a quiet man with gentle ways, very self-contained, of medium build and neat appearance. When I knew him better, for all his quietness I found he could talk well on the subjects which interested him and discovered also that he was possessed of a wealth of knowledge about India and a depth of sympathy for its people that astonished me. Ignorant as I was of everything pertaining to the sub-continent, innocent — when I left England — of any but the haziest generalizatons of what I would find at the end of the voyage, Mr Roberts took me in hand, and as we huddled in our mackinaws on the gale-swept deck or took our lonely meals in the heaving cabin while the lantern swung violently above our heads, he educated me with tact and humour and that enthusiasm which comes of real affection for one's subject. By the time the morning dawned when land was at last in sight, I had accumulated a fair knowledge of the geography of India, more than a mere inkling of its complex history, and a great desire to learn for myself something of its diverse and gifted people.
There was little to distract me from Mr Roberts's teaching. He was the type of man who carries a small library with him wherever he goes, and when I was not actually talking to him, I was reading one or other of the numerous volumes he was pleased to lend me. Of course, for a time, part of my day was occupied by the Wilkinses and always I had to listen for the tinkle of Emily's little silver bell summoning me to do some service for her, which, with a little more hardihood, she could as well have done for herself. But on the whole I was free to apply myself to my studies of Mr Roberts's books and listen to his conversation, and, because I knew that otherwise I would have spent too much time thinking of Charles, I was grateful for both diversions.
By the time we neared the coast of India, I had become accustomed to the sight of Emily and Charles together. It was no longer necessary for me to avoid his nearness for fear of betraying myself, and if I still hung on the sound of his voice or allowed my eye to linger a little too long on his face, it was but seldom, and I prided myself that no one seeing us together could have guessed the true nature of my feelings for my cousin's husband — least of all Charles himself.
Not that I could delude myself that my love for him had dissipated, let alone disappeared. At night, as I waited for sleep, it was still impossible for me to stifle my memories of the time, not so long ago, when I had known myself to be the magnet that drew him to Mount Bellew. Who knows, perhaps in those early days his interest in me, his apparent regard for me, were genuine? But then Emily came back from the holiday she had been spending with relatives in Bournemouth. Emily was seventeen and beautiful and gay, and so sure of her ability to charm that it was taken for granted that Charles would fall in love with her.
And he had.
I think he was bewitched by her the very first time he saw her, when she was wearing a muslin gown sprigged with small cherries and tied with cherry-coloured ribbons, sitting in a hammock slung between the two great spreading cedars on the Mount Bellew lawn. One small foot in its bronze boot tiptoed the grass and kept the hammock swinging, and on her lap she held a blue bowl of polished red apples. I had recognized Charles's step coming towards us over the grey flags of the terrace, and my heart had leapt, knowing he was searching for me. Instead he had found Emily.
All I had to be grateful for in the weeks that followed was the fact that I had never betrayed my feelings — either to Charles or my relatives. It was a bitter time for me. Within two months Charles and Emily were engaged, and within six had married. My aunt, reluctant to see her adored only daughter leave home, had tried to delay matters. My uncle, however, aware of Emily's 'giddiness', and perhaps knowing that if she remained at home she would become even more spoilt by her mother and brothers, had declared the match a capital one and furthered it by every means.
As it happened, that circumspection for which I had been so grateful, that reluctance to reveal my feelings even to those nearest me, was my undoing.
Charles's mother, the redoubtable Mrs Flood of Dissham Manor, suddenly decreed that the wedding journey should take the happy couple not to Paris, the Rhine or Italy, but to India. There were several reasons for this decision. To begin with, Charles had recently taken up a position in the firm of Hewitt, Flood & Hewitt, Importers and Agents, of which my uncle was a Director, as had been the late Mr Flood, Charles's father. Both families concurred that the young man would benefit from a closer knowledge of the country with which most of the firm's business was conducted. 'A great experience; a necessary experience!' my uncle had declared. 'Why, it will give the lad a head start over every other young feller in the City. If he plays his cards right, he could even end up on the Board of Directors of the Company itself.'
Mrs Flood also had another reason, which I believe was more cogent than her son's career in Hewitt, Flood & Hewitt. She had a son by a previous marriage, a man much older than Charles, who was resident in India. We knew little of this gentleman and, according to Charles, that little was as much as he knew himself, for he had never met his half-brother. It was known, however, that he was a wealthy man, in possession of large estates in Oudh, unmarried and therefore inevitably, in Mrs Flood's mind, in need of an heir. And being Mrs Flood, she did not trouble to disguise the fact that she very much hoped, as in this instance she could not command, that her elder son would see fit to make her younger son that heir. Once thought of, the matter was settled as far as she was concerned, but I had my doubts. After all, the elder son would not be so old that marriage could be entirely precluded, but it was no business of mine, so I said nothing.
My Aunt Hewitt, however, had a great deal to say about the whole enterprise. She was against the idea of Emily even visiting India, but, when she found that her daughter might even have to live in India, her agitation was great.
'Not at all a likely contingency,' my uncle reassured her. 'There was something "off" about that whole business, don't you remember? Never did get to the bottom of it, but some quarrel about the guardianship of the boy and so on when the first husband died, and Maud was never allowed to have the lad at Dissham. French blood somewhere!' he concluded as though this explained all.
Uncomforted, Emily's mother continued to protest. Emily was scarcely eighteen; she had seldom left home and then only for the houses of her relatives; it was unthinkable that she should be required to make a long voyage to a barbarous and unhealthy country on her own. Besides, Emily was impractical, untried. Aunt Hewitt even went so far as to admit that her daughter was headstrong and wilful.
At last, when all other arguments had failed, my uncle suggested a 'companion'. Somewhat soothed, my aunt immediately advertised, and a succession of respectable females was interviewed. A sensible widow, who had spent some years in India, was engaged, and preparations for the wedding went ahead. Then, just three weeks before the young Floods were due to embark, the widow sent her regrets; she would be unable to accompany the couple as her health had suffered a sudden deterioration and her doctors forbade it. My aunt took to her room and had the vapours for an entire afternoon; my uncle fumed; and Emily rejoiced openly at the defection of the lady whom she had already dubbed 'the Gorgon'.
Then they thought of me, Laura Hewitt, and wondered why I had not been considered earlier. At twenty-four years of age I could be counted upon to have some common sense and decorum, I was fond of Emily and knew her ways, and had I not done some travelling myself, coming all the way from Genoa, alone, when I was just Emily's age? Above all, Emily would not object to having me with her.
I had protested with all sincerity against being made part of the wedding journey, but as the true reasons for my reluctance could not be divulged, those that I gave lacked urgency. Moreover, though I foresaw the suffering that constant proximity to Charles could mean for me, though I realized the dissimulation and pretended lack of feeling might prove too much for me, yet beneath and beyond my fears and anxieties I discovered a bittersweet joy in knowing that I would be near him. No wonder my arguments against going were not forceful enough to deflect my relatives from sending me. So, with much haste, I too was fitted out and prepared for a long absence from home.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Zemindar by Valerie Fitzgerald. Copyright © 1981 Valerie Fitzgerald. Excerpted by permission of Head of Zeus Ltd.
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