The Hills of Singapore Read online

  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.

  Charlotte had been advised to bring her own supplies of tea, cheese and preserves, but by the time they dropped anchor at the Cape, whatever she had left was wormy and decayed. Rain water was only for drinking. Washing was in salt water, and she never felt clean, despite the quantities of soap she had brought. Without rain, after a week, the drinking water smelled and tasted foul and stale. When it rained she used her chamber pot and washing bowl to gather water to wash her hair so that for a brief period she might not feel covered in salt. She had a store of tobacco and brandy and bars of soap to bribe the sailors to get rain water for her and, in their leisure moments, to do odd repairs on the cabin. These came in handy also to encourage the steward—who had the service of thirty passengers—to supply hot water, bring tea, arrange laundry services or perform other duties above and beyond those he was engaged for, which were unspecified and negotiable.

  Once or twice Charlotte was asked to attend at Captain Wentworth’s table, especially after forming a flirtatious attachment to First Lieutenant Mallory, whom she was, however, careful to keep at arm’s length. For this formal occasion everyone dressed in the most elegant clothes and was seated according to their social rank. Charlotte’s own rank being rather humble, she was, naturally, not often asked to attend. She liked the old captain very much though, and he too, when he could, spent time with her, chatting about nautical matters and the Malay language which Charlotte spent much of her time, buried in Marsden’s grammar and dictionary, endeavouring to learn.

  The meal at the captain’s table was well worth the eating and of quite a different order to her usual fare. The first time she sat down for lunch precisely at two o’clock, there were sixteen people, and the meal included pea soup, roast leg of mutton, hogs’ puddings, two fowls, two hams, two ducks, corned round of beef, mutton pies, pork pies, mutton chops, stewed cabbages and potatoes. This was followed by an enormous
plum pudding and washed down with porter, spruce beer, sherry, gin and rum.

  After the meal the ladies withdrew, leaving the men to enjoy a glass of port. How the captain and the officers resumed their duties after this gargantuan meal rather baffled her, but this they did.

  She had received the most pressing attentions from almost every unattached and many attached males aboard the ship. Charlotte’s experience with men was limited to a few rather tepid fumblings with a friend of her cousin Duncan and a more lively exchange with Will, the good-looking son of a farmer, who had however, been whipped away into the navy before anything of consequence occurred. But she was not naive. Her life growing up on the island had been educational, her mother happy to explain the sexual nature of human beings, which she considered natural and which was on open display all around her. In Scotland, of course, the subject had been taboo, and she was glad she had acquired this knowledge and a certain down-to-earth attitude to it before arriving on those chilly shores.

  There were few women on board. Of her roundhouse companions, three were travelling with their husbands and six were married women with children joining their men in India. The four who were single received almost overwhelming attention, even the devout and plain Miss Devenish, going out to India to save the young girls of Calcutta. Charlotte who was, by far, the most beautiful amongst them, was besieged with offers and attentions and often had to be rescued by Mrs Fortescue, the doyenne of the female passengers, who had set herself up as the chaperone of the young women on board. Charlotte had many occasions to be grateful to her despite her constant prattle, for the men’s eyes, when walking on deck, at meals or at the musical evenings, stalked her.

  The Madras might be designated female as tradition decreed, but men swarmed all over her, possessed her. There was a constant, palpable male potency everywhere on board, a seething current of barely repressed desires and dangers, from sailors and from passengers, whenever a woman appeared. All the women felt it and she knew for some it was irresistible. Far from the strictures of land society, on the swelling ocean, where danger, sickness, and watery death lurked at every squally, howling wind and darkening of clouds, they were pulled into a vortex of male passions. When she felt it whirl, particularly in the evening when liquor flowed, she kept to her cabin.

  Lieutenant Mallory became her devoted guardian angel, his gentlemanly code unflinching, his courage unflagging under all dangers and other men avoided confronting him. When his duties kept him from his role as her protector, he did not object to her walking with one or two of the gentlemen, but it was understood that should Charlotte be in any way bothered, they would answer to him. Only when the ship was approaching Calcutta had she realised that, for him, the matter was a serious one. He had proposed marriage then, and she had been obliged to refuse him. For the first time in her life she had caused excruciating pain to another human being, and she did not like to think of it.

  That these protections and her own good sense had been invaluable she had discovered well before Calcutta. Three women had what was commonly known as the “French disease”, the dreaded pox, and two of the single girls and four of the married women were pregnant including, unfortunately, Miss Devenish. Luckily, and apparently happily, Miss Devenish was agreeable to marriage to the father-to-be, a rather bemused young soldier travelling steerage, and relinquished a life of spinsterly devotion to the heathen rather easily.

  What the married women were to tell their husbands she did not know, and nor did they. She spent hours in whispered and tearful discussions with them, a sisterhood of the sea, as they all made frantic calculations and exchanges of addresses of abortionists and pox doctors in Calcutta, before rushing off again to the arms of their lovers. There were no secrets and very little privacy aboard a ship, and Charlotte had often to turn away from the muffled groans in some dark corner or close her ears to noisy couplings a few cabins away. If this was going on continually on the upper decks, she could not imagine what was happening in the Stygian gloom of steerage.

  It took eleven weeks to reach the Cape of Good Hope and ten days had been nothing but storms. Of their convoy of fourteen ships, two had foundered with all aboard perished and one was in a very poor state. Pirate attack from the African coast was a nagging undertone on all the sailors’ lips, especially if the convoy got separated in a storm. The relief at arriving at the Cape had been overwhelming, and all the women and many men had cried with joy.

  The land had a strange compactness under her feet. She kept being surprised when the wind blew, at not having to hang on like grim death to some spar or gangway, for their ship had never been still, and on the big waves had tossed them all like ants on a cork.

  She had gone to a fleet-fingered Indian tailor for a dress, the cheapness and quality of which astounded her, and bound it carefully for her arrival in Singapore to preserve it from harm. She knew that every other garment she possessed would be a smelly rag by the time they arrived.

  After the Cape, the ship called in for fresh water and supplies at Mauritius, then sailed for months without sight of land, across the vastness of the Indian Ocean. Sickness and death were daily companions. Scarlet fever ravaged the children in steerage. For a while they were called to sea burials every other day, until they all became callous and blasé. A sense of doom floated like a will-o’-the-wisp around the ship.

  The soaring optimism of sighting Point de Galle in Ceylon and the fresh provisions carried out to them on a hundred little boats had buoyed their spirits. The mail was off-loaded and a quantity of fresh water allowed for washing. For two days there was merrymaking and a shipboard feast. They departed this little port with mixed emotions, glad to be gone, nearer to journey’s end, but sorry to leave sight again of land. They were soon back to listlessness, everyone on board simply tired out.

  No one, Charlotte thought, no one who has not spent more than half a year aboard a floating cattle barge with on every side and in immediate view the physical and spiritual degradation of humans thrown together for better or worse, besieged by urges, illness, fear and death—no one who has not heard and seen and smelled this can imagine the relief of its end.

  Notwithstanding her feelings of hurting Lieutenant Mallory, she had quit the ship without a backward look. In Calcutta she spent a week in a boarding house, glad for a bath and fresh food—her first taste of Indian curry and its attendant inconveniences—selling her cabin furniture, waiting for the sleek schooner which would take her to Singapore, for the Madras stopped here. The sights, sounds and smells of Calcutta overwhelmed her, the heat too intense, the press of humanity too claustrophobic, and curiosity soon turned to impatience.

  Captain Wentworth was retiring from the service of the East India Company. Lieutenant Mallory, promoted to captain, would take the Madras back to England. When Charlotte had discovered this fact, she was doubly glad her heart was not engaged, for the prospect of a return voyage or even of life in London or Calcutta awaiting a man who voyaged three quarters of a year was too grim to contemplate.

  This had been Captain Wentworth’s last long voyage. He was getting on, he said, and his family was in Calcutta. Seven-month voyages took their toll. He had rounded the Cape dozens of times, seen seas which made even him quail, been shipwrecked twice and carried the scars. In his youth it had been a life filled with adventure but now he had heeded the wishes of his heart and his family and bought a schooner. Henceforth he was his own master and commander, plying the seas between India and the Straits Settlements.

  He had guaranteed Charlotte a cabin on his ship, and she had been delighted to wait and go on with him. This part of her journey had been light. The ten passengers shared the schooner with her cargo: iron goods, guns, English manufactures and Indian stuffs, bound for the Straits Settlements.

  The months of strain, dread and grinding monotony on the deep ocean were over. As the ship entered the calm waters of the Straits of Malacca, Charlotte breathed the warm fragrance of the night air and felt the caress and promise of the Ea
st.

  2

  The day was grey as Zhen awoke, the rain falling softly. His wife, Noan, was lying, as always, turned into his body. He moved her hand from his chest and she murmured slightly in sleep.

  He did not often sleep with her, but their third child was now one year old and it was time to make another, this time, hopefully, a son, for there were only daughters. So he spent most nights with her, making love to her, letting his essence flow, which normally, he would not. As a Taoist, the highest thought was to give joy to the woman through multiple orgasms which the man could absorb, retaining his own semen, building his strength. This “leaking”, this “surrender”, was alien to him. But when a child was needed, he had to obey Confucius and set his Taoist beliefs aside.

  As he turned, Noan awoke and moved her body against his, silently asking. He had no real desire for her, but he let her caress him.

  Noan was intensely in love with her husband. During her pregnancy he could not touch her; it was forbidden and she suffered his physical absence. After the birth, she was confined, unable to wash for fear of chills, her ears filled with garlic, her forehead plastered with sireh leaves. For almost two months she felt wretched, as custom decreed she must avoid any evil or ill wind entering her body.

  There were only a few months when he gave himself to her willingly, and greedily, she wanted every minute of them. He took her full breasts in his hands, putting his lips to her nipples. Though there was a wet nurse, she continued to breast-feed not wanting her milk to dry up, for she knew it aroused him and she loved it when Zhen suckled her, feeling the motion of his mouth in the depths of her body, her breasts full and streaming, the milk running over his lips. She sighed, running her hands into his queue, grinding her body into his, this desperate longing for him more than she could contain.