Fitcher sank shamefacedly on to the bench. ‘Ee’ve shown me up for a druler, I won’t deny it.’ He reached into his pocket and took out the coin. ‘E’ve won eer wager fair and square.’
Without another word the youth stretched out his hand. When Fitcher dropped the dollar into it, he snatched it back and stood staring at the piece of eight as if he’d never seen one before.
‘Where’d’ee live then?’ said Fitcher.
‘Why sir,’ said the youth. ‘I live right here – in that house.’
‘In the cottage ee mean? But it’s a ruin, innit?’
‘By no means, sir,’ said the gardener. ‘Come, I will show you.’
Now, once again, Fitcher was in for a wild coursey through the chest-high grass, chasing after the gardener as he raced towards the ruins of ‘Mon Plaisir’. He arrived grunting and cabaggled, to find him waiting by the door.
‘One can see for oneself,’ said the youth, gesturing at the interior with proprietary pride, ‘this house is not quite as much the ruin as the outside suggests.’
Fitcher had only to look through the door to see that this was true – for despite the drifts of dust on the floor and the spangled nets of cobwebbing that stretched from wall to wall, it was clear that the cottage had not succumbed to the onslaught of the elements. But of furniture, as of any other accoutrements of habitation, Fitcher could see no sign.
‘But where d’ee sleep?’
‘There is no lack of space, sir. See.’
The youth pushed open a door and Fitcher found himself looking into a room that had been carefully dusted and rearranged: the floor was clean and the air was scented with the pleasing aroma of boy’s-love – clumps of the shrub hung suspended from the mantel and the window frames. At the centre of the room lay a pile of sheets and curtains, heaped up like after-grass to form a pallet. A chair and a table stood in one corner, both wiped free of dust. On the tabletop lay a leather-bound sheaf of papers, parted at a page that immediately drew Fitcher’s eye – prominently featured on it was a brightly coloured illustration of a plant.
Not to take a closer look would have been impossible for Fitcher: he stepped over and peered closely at the page – the illustration was hand-drawn and it featured a long-leafed plant that was unfamiliar to him. The text beneath was in French and Latin and he could make almost nothing of it.
‘Is this eer doing then?’
‘Oh no! I did only the drawings, sir – nothing else.’
‘And the rest?’
‘It is the work of my… my uncle. He was a botanist and he taught me everything I know. Alas he died before he could finish the manuscrit, so he left it to me.’
Fitcher’s eyebrows began to quiver with curiosity now: the community of botanists was so small as to be almost a family; every member had some acquaintance with the others, either in person, or by name and reputation. ‘Who was he then, this uncle of eers? What was his name?’
‘Lambert, sir. Pierre Lambert.’
A half-throttled cry burst from Fitcher’s throat and he sank into the chair. ‘Well… I… Monzoo Lambert!… did’ee say he was eer uncle? What was your relation to him?’
Once again the gardener began to stammer and stutter. ‘Why, sir… he was the brother of my father… so I… I am his nephew, Paul Lambert. His daughter, Paulette, is my cousin.’
‘Is she now?’
Although Fitcher Penrose was, by his own account, something of a misanthrope, he was by no means unobservant: suddenly things began to fall into place – the guilty surprise with which the ‘boy’ had crossed his arms over his chest, the flower-strewn bedroom. He looked again at the illustration on the open page and made out a signature.
‘Whose was the drawing, did ee say?’
‘Why sir, it is mine.’
Fitcher bent low over the page. ‘But the signature, if I’m not wrong, says not “Paul” but “Paulette”.’
*
Apart from Bahram himself, Vico was the only other person who knew that the Anahita was carrying three thousand chests of opium in her after-hold. Bahram and Vico had gone to great lengths to keep this a secret, fudging the bills of lading, rotating the stowage crews, and disguising some of the crates. To let the facts be widely known would have been imprudent on many counts, making insurance more difficult to obtain and increasing the risks of piracy and pilferage – for this shipment was not merely the most expensive cargo that Bahram had ever shipped; it was possibly the single most valuable cargo that had ever been carried out of the Indian subcontinent.
Bahram was one of the very few merchants who had the connections and reputation to assemble such a shipment, being almost without peer in his experience of the China trade: rare was the Indian merchant who could boast of travelling to Canton more than three or four times – but Bahram had made the journey fifteen times in the course of his career. In the process he had built, almost single-handedly, one of the largest and most consistently profitable trading operations in Bombay: the export division of Mistrie Brothers.
Although this firm was one of Bombay’s most prominent establishments, it had by tradition been quite narrowly specialized, with few interests outside shipbuilding and engineering. The export division was Bahram’s personal creation and it was he who had built this small unit into a worthy rival of the famous shipyard. In doing so he had faced no little resistance from within the firm; if he had persevered, it was largely because of his deep and abiding loyalty to his father-in-law, Seth Rustamjee Pestonjee Mistrie – the patriarch who had accepted him into the family, and given him his start in the world.
As with many others whose fortunes are transformed by advantageous unions, no one set greater store by the reputation of the family he had married into than Bahram himself: in his case, his regard for the Mistries was tinged also with a great deal of gratitude, for it was they who had given him an opportunity to rise above the humble circumstances into which he had been born.
There had been a time once when Bahram’s own family had also been prosperous and well-respected, occupying a place of distinction in their hometown of Navsari, in coastal Gujarat; his grandfather had been a well-known textile dealer, with important court connections in princely capitals like Baroda, Indore and Gwalior. But in his waning years, after a lifetime of prudence, he had made a slew of rash investments, incurring an enormous burden of debt. Being a man of steely integrity he had taken it upon himself to pay off every loan, down to the last tinny, coproon and half-anna; as a result, the family had been reduced to utter penury, with no more than a handful of cowries in their khazana – too few, as the saying went, to string together on an arms-length of thread. Forced to sell off their beautiful old haveli, they had moved into a couple of rooms on the edge of town, and this had proved fatal for the old man as well as his son, Bahram’s father, who was a consumptive and had suffered from lifelong ill health; he did not live to see Bahram’s navjote – his ceremonial induction into the Zoroastrian faith.
Fortunately for the boy and his two sisters, their mother had learnt one lucrative skill in her girlhood: she was an exceptionally good needlewoman, and the shawls she embroidered were much prized and admired. When word of the family’s plight spread through the community, orders came pouring in, and by dint of thrift and hard work, she was able not only to feed her children, but also to provide Bahram with the rudiments of an education. In time her renown spread as far as Bombay, fetching her an important commission: she was asked to supply embroidered wedding shawls for the daughter of one of the foremost Parsi businessmen of the city – none other than Seth Rustamjee Pestonjee Mistrie.
The two families were not unknown to each other, for the Mistrie business had also been founded in Navsari – its origins lay in a small furniture workshop which the Modis, in their heyday, had lavishly patronized and supported. Attached to the workshop was a shed for building boats: although small to begin with, this part of the business had quickly outstripped every other branch. After winning a major contract from the East India Company, the Mistries had moved to Bombay where they had opened a shipyard in the dockside district of Mazagon. On taking charge of the firm, Seth Rustamjee had built energetically upon his inheritance, and under his direction the Mistrie shipyard had become one of the most successful enterprises in the Indian subcontinent. Now, his daughter was to marry a scion of one of the richest merchant families in the land, the Dadiseths of Colaba, and the wedding was to be celebrated on a scale never seen before.