‘And you? Were you happy to see him?’
Ah Fatt shrugged and said nothing.
‘But what else? Did he tell you what you should do next?’
‘He agree better I go to my sister in Malacca. He say after this season in Canton he give me money for start busy-ness. Just have to wait three-four month.’
Ah Fatt’s attention was clearly drifting away now, and Neel realized that it would be hard to get much more out of him. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Maybe we should sleep now. Better to talk tomorrow.’
But as he was turning to leave Ah Fatt called out: ‘Wait! Some news for you too.’
‘What?’
‘You want work for Father?’
Neel looked into his absent eyes and expressionless face, and decided that he was merely rambling. ‘What are you talking about, Ah Fatt?’
‘Father need munshi – to write letter and read paper. His old munshi dead. I tell him I know someone who can do this job. In jail I see you write letter, no? And you can write English, Hindusthani and alclass="underline" true?’
‘Yes, but…’
Neel clapped his hands to his head and sat down again, beside Ah Fatt. He knew nothing about Bahram Modi except what he had heard from Ah Fatt, and these accounts had given him plenty of cause for misgiving. At times he had been reminded of his own father, the old Zemindar of Raskhali: between the two of them also there had been little communication, for the zemindar had spent much more time with his mistresses than at home. Their meetings, being infrequent, had involved much preparation and a great deal of anxiety: always, when the time came to enter his father’s presence, Neel would find that his tongue was stilled by a peculiar combination of emotions – a mixture of fear, anger and a dull mulish resentment – all of which came flooding back now, at the thought of meeting Bahram.
And yet what a relief it would be to have a job, to stop living like a fugitive.
‘Father want to see you tomorrow,’ said Ah Fatt.
‘Tomorrow!’ said Neel. ‘So soon?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you tell him about me, Ah Fatt?’
‘I tell him I meet you by chance here, in Singapore. All I know is you have done munshi-work before. He say he want see you tomorrow. Talk about job.’
‘But Ah Fatt…’
Neel was for once at a loss for words, but Ah Fatt, in his strangely intuitive way, seemed to know what was going through his mind.
‘You will like Father, Neel. All people love Father. Some say he great man. He see many thing, know many people, tell many story. He not like me you know. And I not like him.’ He smiled. ‘Only one time I am like Father.’
‘When?’
Ah Fatt held up his pipe. ‘You see this? When I have big-smoke, I become like Father. Great man who all people love.’
Five
The coast of China was only a week away when Paulette learnt that apart from a trove of living plants the Redruth was also carrying a ‘painted garden’ – a collection of botanical paintings and illustrations.
The reason why this discovery came so late was because the pictures were not on display: they were neatly bundled in ribbon-tied folders and hidden away in the dingy little storeroom where Fitcher kept his plant presses, seed jars and other equipment. This was no accident: Fitcher was not artistically minded and the aesthetic merits of the pictures meant little to him. He regarded them primarily as tools, but of a special kind – for him they were clues to guide him in the search for new and unknown species of plants.
To use paintings to look for plants struck Paulette as a marvellously inventive yet curious procedure: what could be more unlikely than to search for new species not in Nature, but in the most rarefied realms of human artifice? But this was an old and proven method, Fitcher explained, and he was by no means its inventor: it dated back to the earliest European plant-hunters to work in China – among them a British botanist by the name of James Cuninghame, who had visited China twice in the eighteenth century.
In Cuninghame’s time, travelling in China was a little easier for foreigners than it was later to become: on his first visit he had had the good fortune to spend several months in the port of Amoy. He had discovered there that Chinese painters were exceptionally skilled at the realistic depiction of plants, flowers and trees: this was fortunate for him because in those days no one could hope to bring live specimens from China to Europe by sea; the collector’s aims were rather to amass stocks of seed and to assemble ‘dried gardens’. To these Cuninghame had added another kind of collection, the ‘painted garden’: he had returned to England with over a thousand pictures. These illustrations had elicited much admiration while arousing also a great deal of scepticism – to eyes accustomed to European flora it had seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that flowers of such extravagant beauty could actually exist. There were some who said that these painted flowers were the botanical equivalent of phoenixes, unicorns and other mythical creatures. But of course they were wrong: in time the whole world would see that Cuninghame’s collection had contained pictures of many of the most notable flowers the world would receive from China – hydrangeas, chrysanthemums, flowering plums, tree peonies, the first repeat-flowering roses, crested irises, innumerable new gardenias, primroses, lilies, hostas, wisterias, asters and azaleas.
‘But it’s for the camellia that Cuninghame most deserves to be known.’
Never had he understood, said Fitcher, why Linnaeus had chosen to name the camellia after Dr Kamel, an obscure and unimportant German physician. By rights the genus ought to have been called Cuninghamia, in honour of Cuninghame, for whom camellias had been a passion, a quest: it was he who sent back the first camellia leaf ever to be seen in Britain.
It was not merely because of their flowers that camellias were of special interest to Cuninghame: he believed that next to the food grains this genus was possibly the most valuable botanical species known to man. This was not a far-fetched notion: the camellia family had, after all, given the world the tea bush, Camellia sinensis, which was already then the fount of an extensive and lucrative commerce. Cuninghame’s interest in its sister plants was sparked by a Chinese legend, about a man who fell into a valley that had no exit: he was said to have lived there for a hundred years eating nothing but a single plant. This plant, Cuninghame was told, was of a rich golden colour and yielded an infusion that could turn white hairs into black, restore the suppleness of aged joints, and serve as a cure for ailments of the lungs. Cuninghame named it the ‘Golden Camellia’ and came to believe that it might surpass the tea bush in value if it could be found and propagated.
‘And did he find it, sir?’
‘It’s possible, but no one knows…’
On his way back to England, after his second visit to China, Cuninghame had vanished without trace, off the coast of southern India. His collections had perished with him, and it came to be whispered later that he might have met an untimely end because of certain protected plants that were in his possession. Those rumours were further fuelled when a packet of his papers reached England intact: they had been mailed shortly before he embarked on his last voyage and they included a small picture of an unknown flower.
‘The Golden Camellia?’
‘Ee can see for eerself,’ said Fitcher, in his laconic way. Reaching for a folder he extracted a card-like square of paper and handed it to Paulette.
The card was not large, and the picture inside was only about six inches square: it was painted with a fine brush, on paper that was covered with a faint yellow wash. In the background, lightly etched, was a landscape of mist-covered mountains; in the foreground was a twisted cypress tree, and under it, the seated figure of an old man with a bowl cupped in his hands. Next to him lay a branch with a few brilliantly coloured blossoms. The scale was too small for the precise shape of the petals to be outlined in any detail, but the blossom’s colouring was strikingly vivid: a mauve that turned gradually into a sunburst of gold.