The Shallow Seas (3 page)

Tigran stood by her side, wishing to pull her close into him, not daring. He wanted her happiness more than he could express. For two days she had been ill, sick to her soul, caught in a web of misery. Then, on the third day, exhausted, with the wind beating her face, staring at the white-tipped waves swirling remorselessly beneath the hull, she had found a certain calm and made a decision.

She had not deceived Tigran. When he confessed his feelings to her, she told him of her love for another man and the baby to come. Tigran had blinked slowly but thought for no more than a second. He realised that he did not care. Nothing about Charlotte's past mattered. To lose her was unthinkable, to be her protector his highest thought.

He had sunk to his knees, put her hands against his forehead and asked her to marry him. Now he was grateful beyond words that she had agreed, had let him kiss her cheek, even that fleeting touch inflaming. He had dreamed of touching her for too long. He knew it was dangerous, this rapture he felt. He smiled at the word. His English tutor would have chided him for such a grandiloquent term, but he could think of no other which described his condition. Old man's folly is what his friends called it. How often had he seen it in others and laughed? Never mind. Did not even the great Erasmus write that “folly seasons man's life with pleasure”? Something like that, he felt sure.

Now he wanted to divert her from thoughts he saw crowding her mind. He pointed to the rowboat approaching the ship. The
equippagemeester
came up to Tigran. He had sailed over from Onrust Island, where he supervised the extensive ship repair docks and warehouses. Part of his duties was to board ships to inspect the list of passengers and crew, as well as any cargo, and to check for sickness. Satisfied, he saluted Charlotte with a lingering look. He had not seen a fair-skinned European woman in the ten years he had lived in Batavia. Certainly not one as lovely as this: long, jet- black hair and violet eyes, full, pink lips, her figure slender as the Indische-Chinese women he liked to visit in Glodok, the Chinese quarter. His wife, a daughter of a former councillor, had assured his lucrative position but was regrettably short and dumpy, and six children had not improved her figure.

As the rowboat pulled up to the channel there was a sudden jolt, and Tigran threw out his arm to prevent Charlotte from falling from the seat. Despite its shallow draft, the boat had run aground. The canal, Tigran explained—attempting to keep his temper—was constructed to narrow the current so that it had sufficient force to keep the channel clear of silt. Tigran would rather have used his own cutter, but the Dutch authorities had sold the three-year licence for this transport to the Kapitan Cina, the leader of the Chinese in Batavia. With volleys of shouts and wild gesticulations, the crew pushed the craft off the sandbank, several boatmen floundering as it shifted suddenly to the deep channel. The crew burst into laughter, joshing and pulling the bedraggled men back onboard. Charlotte could not help but share in the good-natured amusement, and Tigran, relieved that she was unhurt, joined in.

As they entered between the channel piers, three of the crew jumped quickly up to the side with a rope fixed to the boat, and began to track it upriver. The other boatmen rowed, but the current was too great to permit an ascent by oars alone. Charlotte could see the men straining as the boat moved slowly along. Their boat passed another, laden with sick-looking European men heading, Tigran told her, to the hospital ship lying offshore. Convicts in leg chains squatted sullenly on a lighter anchored to one side of the canal wall, covered from head to toe in brown sticky mud. Their task was to clear the silt from the river, and Charlotte could hardly begin to imagine the exhaustion of such dispiriting, endless labours. Here and there lamp-eyed crocodiles floated along devouring garbage, unmoved and unafraid of the boats which passed around them and ignoring the men who laboured in the river and even the small children playing around the boats. They are tame and fat, Tigran told her, because they are protected from injury by the authorities. They fulfill the useful purpose of eating the refuse of the slaughter-houses. Charlotte wrinkled her nose.

The grim aspect of the canal was redeemed by the crowds of brightly painted double-masted
pinisi
and the single-masted
prahu
, the elegant small craft of the islands, moored to one side. When the
prahu
was under sail, the low shiny hull all but disappeared under the white sail flung back like a bird's wing. Men squatted lazily on the decks watching the extraordinary sight of this
hantu
, ghost woman, with such white skin. Cooking smells and human stenches floated faintly on the breezes of the salty air. The craft moving on the canal were rowed by Javanese “sea dogs”, Tigran told her, so named by the Malays for the shrill and incoherent songs with which they beat time with their oars, each verse ending with a lengthy, loud and vigorous howl. Thus, accompanied by curdling wails and pungent odours, they arrived finally at the pier at Kleine Boom.

Tigran was anxious to be away from the lower town well before dusk and the onset of the night winds. Its reputation for miasma and death had not diminished since the time of the VOC, when it killed scores of men a day and was known as the Graveyard of the Dutch. Europeans might be obliged to work in the port's godowns and offices alongside the sluggish and infested waters, but, by three o'clock, they left rapidly for the healthier southern reaches of the city.

Sensing Tigran's urgency, she recalled, with a small shiver, the words of John Crawfurd in his
Dictionary of the Indian Islands
, which she had read in the Institution library at Singapore. “The Dutch, unmindful of a difference of some 45 degrees of latitude, determined on having a town after the model of those in the Netherlands, within six degrees of the equator and on the level of the sea. The river spread over the town in many handsome canals, lost its current, deposited its copious sediment and generated pestilential malaria, which was transported by the land-wind even to the roads.”

Helping Charlotte from the boat, Tigran accompanied her to the small whitewashed inn near the landing stage. The journey to their house in Weltevreden would be quite long, he told her, for the city was sprawling. The entry formalities were slow, the niggardly
mestizo
clerk fussing over Charlotte's British papers, for the English were suspect in Dutch water—even this young girl it seemed. Tigran concealed his annoyance. This was the only power this little despot possessed and he would not be hurried. But it was done with finally, and the luggage arranged to follow, and, relieved, he settled Charlotte into his town coach and the four horses pulled away from the port, along Kanaal Weg and over the bridge. Tigran did not tell her that this bridge, owing to the state of the river, was commonly known as Schijtbrug. They moved onto Kasteelplein Weg and through the Amsterdam Gate, formerly the southern entrance of the original fort of Batavia.

From Prinsenstraat, Tigran pointed out the old Town Hall in the distance; then the carriage turned towards the Kali Besar, as this part of the Ciliwung River was known. They crossed Middelpunt Brug, with its backdrop of lofty sails. This bridge was the furthest south on the Kali Besar that sailing boats could go, and they massed together like flocks of white-winged birds peering at the rowboats beyond. Tigran showed Charlotte the long two-storey building which housed the offices of Manouk & Co., its open godowns bordering the bank, before going back over the river and onto Binnen Nieuwpoort Straat.

Charlotte was astounded at the decayed appearance of the city. It seemed almost deserted, the canals dilapidated and the buildings broken-down. Barefoot native soldiers kept a slouching watch at the portals of red-tiled, low merchant houses. The occasional European man they passed seemed pale and emaciated. The atmosphere of degeneration was relieved only barely by the large-leafed plantains and the tall stems of coconut and betel nut trees spreading their feathery leaves far into the sky. The horses' hooves sent up fingers of ash-white dust which touched eerily against the glass of the coach windows. A fetid, cloacal stench rose from the canal. The humidity was a damp cloak, dense and oppressive. She did not know whether to laugh or cry at this introduction to Java, a land she had heard of as the fabled home of Ptolemy's Golden Chersonese, of Solomon's Ophir, of gold, perfume and spices.

Within a few minutes, the architecture changed and Charlotte saw houses like those in Singapore: white two-storied buildings with curved red-tiled roofs. Long-tail-haired Chinese sat crouched in the street or were busy sculling
kajang
-roofed boats on the river. Only twenty minutes more and they would be home. As he said this, Tigran glanced at Charlotte, unsure of her feelings. Batavia, he felt sure, was a confusing and disconcerting city for a European woman.

Charlotte said nothing, the sight of the Chinese men with their tailed hair arresting her, wrenching her thoughts away from these streets, back to Singapore. She closed her eyes, not wanting to see any more, and rested her head against the back of the seat.

The Chinese town faded in the dust behind them, and the carriage entered a broad, perfectly straight avenue running alongside a wide canal. The air felt cooler here. Tigran lowered the glass to let in the breeze. “Molenvliet,” Tigran said. Mill Way, the road linking the old city to the new. The canal was over a hundred years old, built by the Kapitan Cina to bring wood from the forests to the old walled city for ships and houses and to carry sugar from his mills to the port. The wealthy of every race built their houses out here. It was healthier than the low-lying coast. The road was firm, and in the late-afternoon light Charlotte saw large, elegant mansions of both Chinese and European appearance, with ornate wrought-iron fences and gates. Pretty bridges spanned the canal to a similar avenue on other side, lined with the dusky shapes of tall trees. Birds kept up an incessant high-pitched twittering among the leaves; every now and again a fragrance of invisible flowers came floating on the windless air. Lights appeared, and Tigran pointed out a large hotel and, just beyond it, elaborate gates which stood open between lantern-topped columns. Flames flickered, and a waft of coconut oil drifted over the carriage.

“We are here,” said Tigran and took Charlotte's hand in his.

The carriage passed the columns and began to describe an arc around the dense mass of trees beyond. The path was firm and mossy, and the dust died away. Firebrands on either side stretched into the distance. Despite her previous forebodings, she felt a flurry of tingling excitement at the prospect of seeing this house which Takouhi had described to her in Singapore.

“Brieswijk is Tigran's estate. Was built by VOC man long time ago, and our father buy this place. Is very nice place, very big house, maybe best house in Batavia. I grow up there.”

Charlotte suddenly remembered. Takouhi would be waiting for her. She squeezed Tigran's hand lightly for, no matter what else she felt for him, she trusted him absolutely. He felt a constricting emotion for this woman rise in his chest.
Learn to love me, please
, he thought.
Let me love you
.

Between the trees, Charlotte saw lights flickering. Tantalised, she almost held her breath, listening to the horses' hooves beat dully on the earth, watching the shadows of their bodies dance past the firebrands. Then the carriage rounded the last tree, and light flooded the ground, so bright after darkness that she threw up a hand before her eyes. A great mansion came into view in a blaze of light. High windows occupied the floors of the facade, and long lower extensions stood to either side, with French doors of intricate wrought iron and glass from ceiling to floor. The panes cast glints of fire on the ground. Marble steps and columns marked the main entrance to the house, illuminated by a hundred dark-skinned, white-saronged servants holding swaying lanterns. As the dusk stole rapidly across the sky, the impression of aerial flame and brilliance was overwhelming.

“Oh,” she said and looked at Tigran, lost for words. He had sent a servant on a fast horse ahead to create this moment for her.

“It's yours, ours,” he said and kissed her hand. “Welcome home.”

2

In the next days Charlotte barely had time to brood. There was so much to discover.

The banns had been posted and the wedding day set for four weeks hence. It would take this long to settle the legal affairs of the marriage settlement and inheritance. By the laws of the government of the Dutch East Indies, a widow was entitled to at least half of her husband's estate. Legalised minor children, by any woman the man recognised, were left strictly defined percentages of the estate. If there were no legitimised minor children, the totality of the husband's estate would pass to the widow. The liberality of this law took Charlotte's breath away.

In English law, a wife had no rights at all. Upon marriage, she ceased, legally, to exist. She and all her goods became the property of her husband to dispose of as he wished, and, after he died, his wealth would automatically pass to his eldest son or away to the first male in line. Unless a husband had made specific provisions for his wife, an English widow, no matter how wealthy she might have been before her marriage, could find herself destitute and thrown on the charity of her family or the church.

Charlotte and Takouhi sat on the balcony overlooking the great lawn. Off to the right, at the edge of a grove of waringan trees covered in a blaze of red berries, construction was underway on the big square
pendopo
hall which would be used for a wedding reception. Lines of small, dark workmen passed to and fro, lifting, sorting, sawing and planting the squat, thick beams into the carved stone plinths. To the feast would come special guests, including the Governor-General, the Resident of Batavia and the Kapitan Cina, friends of the Manouk family and all the village people from the estate. There would be
ronggeng
dancing and a
wayang
play. After the wedding at the chapel, a reception for the European town would take place at the Harmonie Club. Takouhi was explaining this to Charlotte.