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  Not Yet Drown’d

  Not Yet Drown’d

  A NOVEL

  Peg Kingman

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  NEW YORK LONDON

  Copyright © 2007 by Peg Kingman

  Shama Futehally, #24, “What is my native shore but him…”

  from In the Dark of the Heart, AltaMira Press, 2003.

  Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,

  write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110

  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kingman, Peg.

  Not yet drown'd: a novel / Peg Kingman.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-393-07994-4

  1. Scots—India—Fiction. 2. Voyages and travels—Fiction.

  3. Bagpipe music—Fiction. 4. India—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3611.I62N67 2007

  813'.6—dc22

  2007015574

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

  500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd.

  Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, W1T 3QT

  To DT

  and to the memory of SR

  Contents

  SCOTLAND

  1 Introductions, Graces, Cadencies &c Transitions

  2 a stranger wild & rude

  3 worthy of Attention, as will afterwards appear

  4 In Which there is Some Art & Practise requird

  5 But this is all mistake

  6 the most bungling Excecution

  7 Runnings, Variations, Allegro

  AT SEA

  8 obvious to a Competent Judgement

  9 A very agreeable Vicissitude or Variation

  10 more cultivated Geniuses

  11 the particular excellency of this Grace

  12 an ackward Pitiful, Clownish Fellow

  13 Such a Contemptible Notion

  14 Deviation from the Proper & native Style

  15 quite opposite to the Original Design

  INDIA

  16 something very Peculiar in the Taste

  17 the most fertile Invention & nicest Judgement must be distress’d

  18 Cut with Strength & prodigious Quickness

  19 This is one of the True Species

  20 very obvious to a knowing Ear

  21 the whole Scope is perceivd

  22 the most despicable Idoea

  23 a Sett of Men approaching an Enemy

  24 To play amidst Rocks, Hills, Valleys, & Coves where Ecchoes rebounded

  25 a gracefull Conclusion to the whole

  Author’s Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  I am very grateful to my son, Joseph Turner, who drew the boats and propellers; to M. J. Wilson and Doris Eraldi, who read early and often; to Chris Caswell, who gave me the Great Music and license to play it; and to David Smith, David Christianson, David Brown, Dr. Rajesh Sachdeva, Prof. Udaya Narayana Singh, Imran Ali, Dharmendra Tiwari, Anup Kumar Saha, Ranesh Roy, Harsh Vardhan Rathore, and Alasdair Caimbeul, who so patiently answered questions.

  To the degree that this novel has some authentic feel of Scotland and India in the 1820s, I am profoundly indebted to the people on the spot who recorded what they saw, said, felt, and thought. The eighteenth-and nineteenth-century observers whose writings I have absorbed include Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus, James Nasmyth, Reginald Heber, Fanny Parks, and, of course, Joseph and Patrick MacDonald—among many others. I have gratefully made use of their observations, their anecdotes, and even their very turns of phrase.

  I am indebted also to Andrew Schelling, A. J. Alston, and especially Shama Futehally for their translations of the exquisite devotional songs of the sixteenth-century saint Meera.

  To Gail Hochman, for her unflagging energy, articulate good sense, and kindness, I am deeply grateful; and to my editor, Starling Lawrence, who could drive a four-in-hand with silk thread for reins.

  From the bottom of my heart I thank my husband, David Turner, for his staunch encouragement and support.

  Namaste.

  Not Yet Drown’d

  SCOTLAND.

  1

  Introductions, Graces, Cadencies &c Transitions

  Catherine MacDonald loathed boats; and as usual, she was shivering with cold. Why had she let herself be talked into this pleasure outing? And how many hours of misery stretched ahead before she could hope to get ashore? To get dry and warm?

  “There he is!” cried her brother Hector.

  “Where?” demanded the captain, gripping the gunwale and peering into the nearly opaque curtain of rain blowing across the Firth of Forth in a northwest gale.

  “There. There! Do you see?”

  Catherine ventured out from her seat in the warm lee of the iron boiler to look for herself. The chilly rain pelted her, plastering the dripping ostrich plumes of her bonnet against her pale cheek. Her cloak was drenched and heavy; underneath, the muslin gown must be soaked, for rivulets of icy North Sea raindrops ran new channels down her thin back and her sides as she moved, and into her shoes. “Where?” she said, joining her elder brother and the captain at the rail of the steam launch Dram Shell.

  “Just…just there,” said Hector. “For a moment when the mist thinned, I had a good look. I am sure it was he. Keep watching.”

  Catherine peered into the rain. She might as well have been peering into a bucket of milk.

  As the black stinking plume of smoke from Dram Shell’s coal-fired boiler eddied about them, Catherine could see cinders on Hector’s ruddy face and hair, and a smut on his good linen stock. His nose and cheeks were bright red. Her own nose felt cold, and her hands, gripping the rail for balance, were curiously mottled with blue behind the freckles. All about them on the heaving gray swell rode ferries, wherries, fishing smacks, yachts, barges, and prams, all of them carrying drenched Edinbourgeois dressed in their best, come out to welcome their king on this historic occasion.

  Some considerable distance out, she could make out two more streaming black plumes of coal smoke; these, Catherine knew, must mark the positions of the two steam paddle wheelers James Watt and Comet, which were supposed to have in tow what all had come to see: the king’s yacht, Royal George, carrying King George IV, cruising up to Edinburgh to visit his North British subjects on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday.

  The birthday had been two days ago, on August 12, 1822. But even in August, Scottish weather could be relied upon to thwart the best-laid plans of kings and men.

  For a moment the scrim of rain thinned, and Catherine could clearly see the two steamships plowing heavily upwind like straining cart horses. And there, in their wake, was the royal yacht flying the Royal Standard. The yacht was sleek and elegant, certainly; but Catherine thought that under tow, with her sails furled, she appeared just a little effete.

  “Aha! There, upon the afterdeck!” said Captain Keith, and passed his glass to Catherine.

  She looked through it, but the lens was streaming with raindrops and she could see only a silvery blur. She wiped the lens and tried again, but their little Dram Shell was heaving ponderously on the sickening gray swell, and it was difficult to fix on anything at such a distance. Better to squint into the rain.

  There were at least half a dozen portly and dignified naval officers on deck. But among them stood a particularly large and corpulent figure which drew her eye; exquisitely turned out, she could see, in a splendid admiralty uniform. Could it be himself? Catherine was shivering hard. For a moment her view was blocked w
hen a heavily listing ferryboat crossed in front of them. Then a cheer went up from a bunting-festooned launch which had drawn quite near to the royal yacht; and the heavy figure acknowledged it with a languid but cordial hand to his cocked hat.

  So perhaps it really was His Majesty.

  Or perhaps it was only an admiral.

  Catherine’s dark green ostrich plumes dried rapidly, a little too close to the fire in the nearly-warm drawing room of Hector and Mary’s Edinburgh house. The maid had brought up the tea, but Catherine had not yet poured; she was waiting for Mary, her busy sister-in-law. A vast piece of canvaswork lay across Catherine’s lap, and she was threading her needle yet again (canary yellow this time) when she smelled burning feathers. Throwing down her work, she snatched up the plumes, shook them, and blew on them. Three of them fluffed up satisfactorily, but the tip of the fourth was shriveled and scorched. Catherine tossed it into the fire; it flamed up and instantly turned to writhing ash, filling the room with a horrible smell. She felt as bedraggled as her feathers—drenched, scorched, shaken, blown, and fluffed—and was quite unwilling to venture out again that night. She felt fragile, as though her bones were made of quills.

  “You mustn’t wait tea for me, Catherine, my dear,” said Mary, darting in the doorway for a moment like a little black bird. “Pour for yourself. I must just go upstairs and look in once more before I can sit down with you…. What is that vile stench? Not the tea! That man has cheated me for the last time; he promised me it was best souchong. Oh, no, I see—your poor plumes! Never mind, I will lend you mine for this evening.”

  “Ah, no, Mary,” protested Catherine. “I wish you would go to Mr Clerk’s ball with Hector instead of me. I do not mind in the least staying in with the children, and I am sure Hector would much rather dance with his wife than with his sister.”

  “I cannot go, my dear, for I have given the nursery maid leave to go out tonight to see the bonfires. And my father is coming in to sit with me for an hour or two. But the truth is, you know, I do not feel quite comfortable with Mr Clerk, though he is so amusing, and so clever. I hate to be made to blush, and I believe he does it apurpose. You do not mind him, I know, and you need not dance if you do not like it, for they know that you are only just out of mourning. And I will look after poor Grace for you, as well as I can.”

  Mr Clerk’s ballroom was like the inside of a headache. The fiddlers contorted themselves on a platform at the far end of the room, their elbows pumping like steam pistons; and a fine hectic state of abandonment had been achieved by the flushed and panting dancers. Catherine—having danced with her brother, eaten a slice of ham, drunk a glass of brandy punch, and spoken with her host, Mr Clerk, and his sister, Miss Bessie—now sat near an open window. The rain was blowing away and the misty sky was oddly tarnished by the glow of an epic bonfire on the high round brow of Arthur’s Seat, to the south of the city. The fire appeared to hang in midair. Presently Catherine saw Hector making his way toward her, skirting the dancers. Hope arose; perhaps he was ready to go home? But no: “Come upstairs; Mr Clerk promises to delight us,” Hector shouted into her ear.

  “Have I not had delights enough for one day?” she said, but she followed him out to the hall, where the notable advocate and collector John Clerk awaited them.

  “Did you ever see such a swirrrrling flurrrrry of tarrrrtan, Mrs MacDonald?” drawled their elderly host as he hitched himself up the broad stairs, leaning heavily on his cane. He wore plain evening dress, more seemly on a man with an imperfect leg. “Tell me, you two young Highlanders, how do you like my authentic genuine traditional Highland ball?”

  “Your fiddlers are true musicians, sir,” said Hector. “Their playing has force, spirit, and fine expression, particularly in the quick measures. Do I recognise two of Neil Gow’s sons?”

  “So they claim, and if you vouch for them, I suppose I must believe it. I have been told that you play quite a pretty fiddle yourself. A musician as well as a natural philosopher. And yourself, Mrs MacDonald—well! It was a pleasure to see you dance. What do you make of my Highland ball?”

  “I never saw any genuine Highland assembly so splendidly turned out as this, Mr Clerk,” said Catherine. “But the dancing is nothing to boast of. Such slapdash reels! The sets so slipshod! I daresay that no one in Edinburgh has danced a reel these twenty years. Why do you not give us a nice modern quadrille, familiar to everyone? So much safer for satin slippers, and for the toes inside of them.”

  “That is just what my sister said,” replied Mr Clerk. “‘Reels and flings, John!’ says she, very scornful. ‘How quaint. Can you not keep your curiosities and antiquities out of my dinners and balls?’ But you see, I was quite right to insist. ’Tis the spirit of the moment, after all—flinging and reeling hither and thither. And everyone so well behaved—thus far. I do hope the king actually comes ashore before we all forget our manners. How long before your wild hielandmen pitch into one of their bonny little wars here in Edinburgh? You are all so spendidly armed: knives, swords, precious little jeweled dirks and pistols. I had not realised there were so many ill-set gems in the kingdom.”

  “Yet not so many Highlanders, in truth, under the tartan,” said Hector. “I spoke a few words in the supper room just now, to one of your guests in full Highland dress. I thought he had a look of the Grants, and he wore a badge of pine, you see. So I just asked him—in Gaelic, you know—whether he’d had to venture far to find a fresh sprig of pine in this city. And the oddest look spread over his face, and he said, very loud and clear and with a most appalling accent, ‘Je n’ai pas eu le plaisir de faire votre connaissance, monsieur.’”

  “Ha ha ha! Tall man, dark, quite decorative, and a better crop of hair than any man needs?” asked Mr Clerk. “Ha! That is my Mr Coates, Glasgow-born and -bred, not a word of the Gaelic, to be sure. A coal family, all of them much given to litigation. Very good clients they have been. He is exceedingly vain of his legs, I believe, and delights in any opportunity to don his Highland costume, the better to show them off.”

  “His legs?” asked Hector. “I did not notice anything remarkable about his legs.”

  “No, no, he is only a pretty fraud. I collect them, you know: frauds. Sometimes by mistake, alas. But I am growing wiser in my old age, I hope,” said Mr Clerk, as he unlocked the door of his private museum and stood aside to let them pass. Inside, the high fiddle tones from below were muted, though the deeper rhythm of stamping feet seemed amplified. A dark bronze figure of the many-breasted Ephesian Artemis stood vibrating on a pedestal, tapping in time.

  “The entire house is shaking,” said Catherine.

  “Timber is not what it used to be—nor stonework either—in these new houses,” observed Mr Clerk as he lit a pair of lamps on a large round table in the center of the room, then adjusted their shades. Artlessly he set one lamp on a low stand, where it illuminated from below a set of four small pictures, exquisitely drawn and brilliantly coloured. The second he carried across to a large glass case, and folded back the hinged glass panels enclosing its front and top. Inside were three gleaming brass devices, each trig, tiny, and complete, fit to enchant any natural philosopher of mechanical bent. “My models, Mr MacDonald. They move. Look,” he said.

  Hector looked; Catherine too.

  “Here is a condensing steam engine of the beam and parallel motion construction, all complete but with this side cut away for viewing,” said Mr Clerk. “I move the flywheel ’round by hand, thus. There are the steam valves and air pump. Watch the piston move in the cylinder. And the slide valve. There are the steam passages, you see, all in exact due position and scale and relative movement.”

  “A thing of beauty! Such an elegant execution! Again,” said Hector, transfixed.

  Mr Clerk rotated the flywheel again, slowly.

  “Superb!” cried Hector.

  “Now this one,” said Mr Clerk. “A direct-acting machine, you see—no beam or parallel motion. It operates this tiny lathe and rotary saw blade, and this belt. Look h
ow sharp; the blade cuts through this bit of pasteboard in an instant.”

  “Charming! Such neat castings, and all rendered to the nicest tolerances! May I operate it? As smooth as—as…”

  “I knew you would appreciate them. But I have saved the best, Mr MacDonald, and the newest, for last. See, here is a model of your own marine steam engine. Complete, you see, with the rotary propelling device of your own design at the bow.”

  “Oh, sir! Catriona, do you see! And complete with bearings, and packing—is it felted wool? That has always been one of the difficulties, after I solved the problem of gearing, of course. For this rotating shaft is so long and subject to such stresses that there must necessarily be some degree of flexibility. This, Catherine, my dear, is a perfect model of my steam engine with the rotary oar, the one that is in Dram Shell, you know. We were out with Captain Keith aboard her today, sir, and I may say she performed flawlessly. Now this, you see, is the very pattern which I am to take out to Calcutta for Crawford and Fleming. So much superior to side-wheel and stern-wheel designs. More efficient by far, you understand—and so much narrower overall, unaffected by rolling or wind, yet allowing free use of the sails. And, sir, such a pretty piece of work! The sweet curve of the blade! Who made the model for you?”

  “I am sitting just now for my portrait to a local man—rather gifted, an engineer as well, I believe. In any case, he is an admirer of your design—calls it a ‘spiral oar.’ And he has a talented son with a taste for machines and metals. I commissioned this model from the son.”