The Hills of Singapore (2 page)

She had made herself busy. Not God, not sympathetic utterances, no matter how well meant, could keep her from darkness. Only sensible industry and benevolent endeavour kept the shadows at bay. So she had busied herself, dividing the fortune between his children, learning the legalities and niceties of Dutch justice and the intricacies of liberal economics, putting the plantations in order, ensuring his widowed sisters were cared for—doing what she knew he would have wanted.

Now it was time to go back. Alexander and Adam required an English education, and this was to be found in Singapore.

She took up Tigran's scarf. The last skin it had touched was his, and now she tied it around her neck and looked in the mirror. Whilst she and his children lived, he would not die.

She went out on deck. The sails were flying up the masts; men were calling and clambering in the rigging. There was always a quivering excitement aboard a ship being made ready for sail, the anticipation of a leap into the unknown, for the sea could be a treacherous companion.

The
babus
came up on deck gripping the children, watching, half-terrified, for their feet had never before felt the unsteady movement of the sea, and they too were filled with excitement and trepidation at the strangeness of the ship and the voyage to a far land.

The men's voices raised the capstan chant, their sinewy muscles strained in unison and the ship lurched as the chain was pulled slowly aboard and began to inch forward. Orders flew about the ship from the foredeck to the poop. Aye, captain, aye, aye! The sailors were often tongues, but they all understood the language of the sea and its ports, a fertile and ever fluid blend of Malay, Portuguese, Hindustani, Arabic and English. Men moved in perfect harmony from deck to topmast, tying off, locking down, making fast, flying in the rigging with the litheness of dancers.

The wind suddenly grasped her hair like a hand as the sails began to roar. The flags, fluttering loosely in the breeze, snapped to attention, cracking like gunshot, as the ship, groaning, turned to the north. She moved to the carved rail at the stern and watched as the coastline of Java receded, her hair flying round her face, the check scarf fluttering violently in the wind, waving farewell. She put her hand to her neck and took up the locket. Then she turned and looked towards Singapore.

1

The ship was asleep. At least, those who had no night duties were sleeping. She liked this time, the night filled with stars, the moonshine like a silver trail, the soft splash of water swirling and sliding along the hull.

She looked around the cabin. It was surely the most luxurious accommodation to be found on these southern seas. A large bed with a kapok mattress and sheets of fine Indian cotton and satin stood under the four square ports. It was furnished with teak wood drawers, a table and soft chairs, a writing desk, lamps and books.

As she gazed at this room, her mind slipped to a time, a short time ago really, she thought, only nine years. How altered she had become, how extraordinary and unexpected the direction of her life.

When she had been just eighteen, her brother, Robert, had written to her to join him from Scotland, for though his new position as Singapore's chief of police gave him little remuneration, it came with a large house. Part of his small inheritance had paid her passage.

Charlotte and Robert loved each other as utterly as a sister and brother could. They had been born on the same day exactly one year apart. She knew he had saved her from marriage to some lecherous old squire and had willingly faced any hardship to be with him. They had grown up on Madagascar with the native children, barefoot and carefree. Her father had been a missionary with the London Missionary Society, her mother a beautiful French Creole.

The peace of this existence had been shattered by violence against all the whites, against the church and the orphanage, and she and Robert had been placed in the care of a young missionary and sent to live in Scotland with their grandmother and maiden aunt. Neither parent had ever been heard of again. The miseries of those years in Aberdeen had faded, for her Aunt Jeanne and her cousin Duncan had loved them both. She had grown very gradually to accept the strict tutoring under the steely eye of her grandmother, who made no bones of the fact that these half-breeds needed dragging into civilisation. She had not even minded the solitary existence: reading in the library of her long-dead grandfather, walking on the cliffs and sailing in the bay at Aberdeen with Duncan, waiting for Robert to come back from college.

She lay back on the bed and watched the moonlight roll along the floor with each motion of the ship. The wind blew in the open windows, ruffling her hair. How profoundly different from this, her voyage from England to Singapore.

She had voyaged on an East Indiaman, the
Madras
, a mighty thousand-tonne, three-masted, square-rigged, forty-gun merchant ship of the East India Company, which ran everything in the British East, including India and Singapore. The ship was designed and built for goods, not passengers, and the human cargo must squeeze itself in wherever space could be found.

The agent in London had found her the best place for a single woman travelling alone, at a cost which Charlotte knew took a good portion of Robert's money. This place was at the rear of the ship, beneath the poop deck, in a large space known as the roundhouse. The space was not round but a rectangle. No one could tell her why it was called thus. Because you could stand upright and walk round it, one said; because it cost a very round sum, said another. It was divided into cabins made of temporary partitions of canvas battened to the roof and deck, which could be quickly cleared away if the ship became involved in a battle.

Each cabin had a small window which gave light and fresh air, commodities, Charlotte had been quick to discover, which were beyond price on board a ship which would take upwards of seven months to arrive at its destination. High above the water, the windows, or “ports”, as she was told to call them, seldom needed to be closed, even in rough weather. These cabins, though not spacious, were secluded and convenient. A few steps led from them all to the cuddy. There was no need to go out upon deck, or to go up or downstairs to meals.

“Thus, my dear, you will avoid many of the inconveniences of shipboard life,” the agent explained solicitously.

He had seen that her youth and beauty would likely cause some havoc aboard a ship full of men at sea for months at a time. She was, perhaps, somewhat too slim but with skin like ivory, blue-black hair to her waist and long-lashed, violet eyes. He liked women's hands, his wife had lovely hands, and he saw that Charlotte too had slim fingered, graceful hands, the nails small and oval, perfectly shaped and delicate. He felt, suddenly, as protective of her as of his own daughters. He took out a large handkerchief and wiped his nose.

“I myself care not for such travel. No, assuredly I do not. I therefore have no personal knowledge of such matters, but may I urge your attention to the words of my friend, Mr Wilkins?” The agent took a paper from his drawer and began to read.

“The roundhouse rooms may be somewhat noisy from the boom and the sailors working on the poop deck, but the rolling of the vessel is circumvented by the shortness of the distance required to travel from cabin to table, a not inconsiderable advantage. More importantly, you may avoid, as far as may be possible, all the disagreeables attendant upon encountering persons engaged in the duties of a ship. It may seem fastidious to object to meeting sailors employed in getting up different stores from the hold, or to pass and repass other cabins, or the neighbourhood of the steward's pantry; nevertheless, if ladies have the opportunity of avoiding these things, they will do well to embrace it; for, however trivial they may be in a well-regulated ship, very offensive circumstances may arise from them.”

He had put the letter on the table and looked up at Charlotte.

“You will forgive me for forwardness, my dear young lady, but your brother's letter was most insistent that I act somewhat
in loco parentis
. I feel constrained then to offer some advice.”

Charlotte hid a smile. He was a little long-winded, but she could see he meant well. She had composed her face into a study of attentive and charming womanhood.

Yes, most lovely, the agent thought, and barely eighteen. The men will be sniffing around her from morning to night.

“Well, my dear child, there are several things I must urge you to treat most seriously. The first concerns items of your personal washing. Some women passengers have been known to hang washing out to dry from the roundhouse windows. This,” the agent said, waggling his eyebrows and frowning fiercely, “is entirely unacceptable.”

Charlotte was somewhat mystified but nodded solemnly.

“Nothing is so indelicate, indeed so indecent, as to see hanging from the windows of the ladies' cabins items of a delicate nature likely to inflame the ungentlemanly feelings of the common sailor.”

Charlotte had lowered her eyes decorously, and the agent saw he had struck the mark. She was a good girl.

“Social decorum is of paramount importance, as I am certain you understand, in such a constrained environment. I have taken the liberty of proposing a fellow passenger, a respectable matron, Mrs Fortescue, as your chaperone. You are advised to drink no more than two glasses of wine at dinner and to vigorously decline invitations to play cards or backgammon. When walking on deck you may take the arm of a gentleman to steady yourself against the motion of the ship, naturally, but,” the agent's eyebrows waggled again, “the conversation must be restricted to the weather and general matters.”

The kindly agent had arranged to deliver to her cabin the furnishings she would need, for the price of the berth included nothing more than the space. The most important item was a swinging cot, suspended from the ceiling, allowing her to sleep through the constant rolling of the vessel, rather like a baby in a crib. In the day it was tied fast to the wooden side with hooks. A table and chair, bookcase and washstand were nailed securely to the floor. A small bathtub, her bedding and utensils, candles and candlesticks and the all-important chamber pot completed her belongings.

It had all been intensely exciting, the captain greeting them, a majestic figure, like a king to his court, the bustle and noise of Gravesend, the port seething with activity around this ship towering over her, its guns ranged along its bulwarks, grizzled sailors with gold rings in their ears swarming. Then came the hustle and bustle of setting up the cabin, meeting her companions on this long, long voyage, the departure from London, sailing down the Thames like Queen Elizabeth in this mighty ship, the lurch as they hit the open water of the Channel. The reality had hit very quickly in a storm in the Bay of Biscay.

The constant rolling of the ship, even on calm seas, had been comically ridiculous. Dressing and undressing became acts of supreme hardship: no sooner did one lift a leg or let go of the chair then one was flung to one side, only to slide back into the canvas walls at the next motion of the vessel. For the first two weeks she had been covered in bruises. She learned to dress speedily, either sitting in her swinging bunk or on the floor, one leg looped round the chair.

The noise in the roundhouse was a constant aggravation. The cabins were separated by a mere width of canvas. Every sneeze and yawn was heard, the snores like thunder, the sounds and smells of every bodily function magnified in the cramped environment. After a mere few days at sea however, and upon examination of the other accommodations, Charlotte had been eternally grateful to the agent and to Robert.

Beneath the roundhouse was the great cabin, where the single gentlemen travellers stayed. Because the great cabin was closer to the waves, in rough weather the windows were screened to prevent the sea coming in. These window screens were known as “dead lights” and didn't always fit very well, with the result that passengers, their bedding and other possessions became soaked.

But even this was better than where the less affluent men were accommodated. In this dark, fustian place amidships, reeking of human stenches, slung around the gun placements were quarters the other men shared, all sleeping slung from hammocks twelve inches from the ceiling, rolled into tubes like bats in a cave.

Robert, she knew, had travelled this way, and when she thought of this her heart became raw with love and pity for him, and tears welled and never once, not ever once, during the entire voyage did a complaint pass her lips. But for him she would have travelled in some cave-dark, stifling cabin or worse, in steerage, in the bowels of the ship, amongst the rats and the bilge water, cheek by jowl with the poorest passengers. Compared to the heat, noise and stench of below decks, her cabin had been a palace.

However, human nature decrees that despite our comparative good fortune we are not always happy with our lot, and time hung heavy for all on such a long journey. The ship grew salads and vegetables in boxes of earth on the upper deck, and Charlotte tended these, attempting to save them from the salt air, and occasionally took one or two of the goats on a tour of the deck for some exercise or played with the young steerage children who were permitted on deck for fresh air but corralled like the goats. She fed the poultry in the hencoop. She tried not to get attached to the sheep and lambs which would end up on the plate, but she allowed herself to care for the little goats which supplied milk for the children.

Everyone from the upper deck cabins ate in the cuddy by the cook's galley, under the poop. The food grew progressively worse the further they ventured from land. A breakfast at eight o'clock of boiled oats and sugar, corned beef and biscuit as hard as a stone, sometimes an egg if she felt like paying for it; at two, a hot lunch of chicken stew, cabbage and potatoes. Afternoon tea was at six o'clock, and at nine a cold supper of bread, cheese and whatever was left over. This was the menu from Monday to Sunday. When the vegetables ran out and after all the chickens had been slaughtered, there was nothing left but weevily oats, sugar, salt pork and biscuit.