Not Yet Drown'd Page 20

  In the morning, Sharada came as usual after breakfast to help Catherine dress. Grace had already gone. The day was gray and overcast, and a steady wind blew that made the ship lean. There were big steel-coloured swells, too, and every few moments the ship’s bow would meet one of them at just such an angle that the impact made the entire ship shudder, then hesitate a moment before plunging down into the trough beyond. It was just such a suspended moment, thought Catherine, as the best Highland dancers could achieve at their most whisky-inspired.

  Sharada was unusually silent.

  “It’s cold,” said Catherine. “I’ll have a shawl. The light Indian one will be enough, I think. There; that’s better.” Sharada arranged the shawl around Catherine’s shoulders, and Catherine toyed with the fringe as Sharada attended to her hair.

  “This shawl, you know, was in that parcel you brought me at my brother’s house in East Thistle Street,” said Catherine casually.

  “Was it indeed, ma’am? Also, I am guessing, perhaps the ivory tea caddy and the written-down music, which I have seen among your clothings? Yes; it is Lucknow work, that ivory box; and this is a very handsome Kashmiri shawl, in the newer style.”

  “What newer style is that?”

  “In the old days, ma’am, the design of these goat-hair shawls was woven; but nowadays they are embroidered. This one, you see, is embroidered. The design is stitched onto its surface; it is not the weaving of the cloth itself. These shawls are gifts of great honour in my country, and it is usual to be giving them in pairs.”

  “Alas, I was given only the one,” said Catherine lightly. “But that parcel, now—I have been meaning to ask you: just how did the parcel come into your hands, into your charge?”

  “It was my late mistress, poor Mrs Guthrie, who was carrying it home to Scotland—carrying home several parcels as a favor for her feringee friends in India. But she died of fever off Madagascar, and next the little baby, too. In Edinburgh then I carried her belongings to her people. Nothing more could I do, save taking charge of those parcels and seeing them safely delivered—a last service to perform, to honour the deceased.” Was there a catch in Sharada’s voice? Had she been so very attached to this poor Mrs Guthrie?

  “Had you served Mrs Guthrie for a long time?” asked Catherine.

  “Not long, no. I came to serve her only when she was leaving Ghazipur, for her previous ayah would not go with her, not over the black sea.”

  “I see,” said Catherine. Who had she been, that unfortunate Mrs Guthrie, who was now beyond all questioning and explaining? Had Sandy known her well? Or hardly at all? People often did carry home letters and parcels from abroad as a favour. It was just a thing one did if going home: offer to carry things, sometimes bringing quite large or valuable consignments—even from people one knew only slightly—to people one knew not at all.

  Presently Catherine remarked, “And now here am I, straightaway carrying it back to India again. How curious…”

  “It is so very curious indeed. The twists and turns of fate are most marvelous,” agreed Sharada fervently. She folded Catherine’s nightdress and put it away, then said, “I am troubled in my mind, however, ma’am. Tea and shawls may easily be replaced; but if the written-down music is lost, it might never again be recovered. I am troubled, seeing those papers undergo again the risk of an ocean voyage. What a pity they are not lying safe ashore in Scotland!”

  “So they would be, if only my plans had come aright.”

  “But if I may be suggesting…You—or I, if you are permitting it, ma’am—might copy that written-down music and send back the copy by any Scotland-bound ships we are meeting, at any opportunity, so that a copy, at least, might lie safe in Scotland.”

  “Oh, but that is a great deal of trouble for a manuscript which cannot be of any great value or antiquity. Indeed, I recognise the handwriting as my brother’s. My late brother’s. I have not looked much at it, but I daresay he has just written down some of the old marches that pipers play. In any case, I fear my supply of paper would be insufficient for such an undertaking.”

  “Oh, but fortunately, ma’am, I got in a large quantity of paper while we were in Antwerp, and pens, and ink as well.”

  “Did you indeed?” said Catherine, and searched out Sharada’s face, above and behind her in the little looking glass. But Sharada had turned away just then to plump the bed pillows and make up the sofa beds for daytime.

  “MR TODD DID buy me a hat, the smartest broad-brimmed hat I ever saw,” Mrs Todd was saying at dinner, “and a selection of most delicious ground pigments. And some exquisite brushes made of sable, Cossack sable; I dread the prospect of spoiling them by dipping them into paints. But just fancy! Mr Sinclair tells me I have forgotten the most important colours of all: black and white! And I have already used up nearly all my paper on copies. But that is not the worst of it; for somehow I was so absentminded as to forget to buy any canvas!”

  As his spouse prettily recited her follies, Mr Todd drained his glass and nodded for the boy behind his chair to refill it.

  “Oh, as for canvas, Mrs Todd, there can be not the slightest difficulty,” said Captain Mainwaring. “If there is one commodity which this ship carries in abundance, it is canvas. Six thousand yards, more or less, just in the aft hold. I shall be happy to furnish you with as much canvas as you can possibly cover with a brush!”

  “Oh, sir! I had never thought…but would ship’s canvas be suitable, I wonder, Mr Sinclair?”

  “It will do, certainly. Artist’s canvas is of a finer weave than ship’s canvas, and is usually of linen, so that properly speaking we ought not to call it canvas at all. True canvas is hemp, properly speaking; it is called canvas from its Latin name, Cannabis. But ship’s canvas will do very well. And as for the black and the white pigment, there is no need for despair there either. Indeed, if you were going to forget a colour or two, these two are certainly the best to have forgotten, for we can make them ourselves. Now, if you had forgotten your ochre or your sienna, your lapis or your terre verte, we would have been sadly at a loss, for these are earth pigments, simply not to be had at sea! But as it happens, both black and white are well within our means, even aboard ship. No doubt we can lay our hands upon a piece of ivory; and a lump of lead.”

  “White from ivory, I suppose; and black from lead?” said Mr Todd.

  “A reasonable assumption, but in fact it is quite the other way about,” said Mr Sinclair. “We char the ivory to produce ivory black, and fume the lead over vinegar to produce flake white. You, Mr MacDonald, might like to see how it is done—the flake white in particular. I shall be happy to undertake the making of black and white for you, Mrs Todd, when the time comes. You will not need them soon, however.”

  “No? How discouraging! And I had supposed I was making such excellent progress!” she pouted prettily.

  “You are doing very well. Your drawings have improved amazingly. But you have a great deal of copying ahead of you, before we begin the spoiling of Captain Mainwaring’s canvas.”

  “Am I to be set to copying forever? I warn you, I have used up nearly all my paper during these last three weeks, both sides of it. Now I am scribbling in the margins and the corners.”

  “I can furnish you with paper, Mrs Todd,” offered Catherine. “As it happens, my maid laid by an ample store of paper in Antwerp. We shall copy side by side; for I have myself just begun a tedious job of copying out a manuscript of old bagpipe music.”

  “WELL, HOW DO you and Ramayana get along, Mrs MacDonald?” Mr Fleming asked Catherine one evening after dinner. “Perhaps if the adventures of King Rama and Queen Sita are not to your taste, you would like to trade it for some other book.”

  “I like King Rama and Queen Sita very well,” said Catherine. “But it is not easy reading, and I wonder if it may be partly a case of faulty translation.”

  “Nothing could be more likely,” said Mr Fleming. “I expect the halls of Hades are teeming with translators. But if you will kindly come and dri
nk some tea with me, I will try to shed any light I may possess. I am no great scholar of Sanskrit, but greatness is not always required.”

  Catherine agreed to come and drink his tea with him. The windows of his cabin were open, and a fresh light breeze washed through. Once again, the steward set out the tea things. Catherine took a seat, with Ramayana on her lap, and sighed comfortably. This cabin did not feel crowded, though it was smaller than her own. There seemed to be a place for everything. On Mr Fleming’s worktable lay half a dozen of the ribbon-tied Chinese scrolls she had noticed before. One of them now was unrolled across the table and weighted with an inkstand and a small box to hold it flat. One edge of it, she noticed, was water stained, but most of the rectangular Chinese characters were still legible. Nearby lay sheets of paper, closely written over in a handwriting that Catherine took to be his own.

  “Is the Chinese language among your accomplishments?” she asked him.

  “Hardly,” said Mr Fleming. “I have somehow managed to scrape a bare acquaintance with merchants’ Cantonese. But that is quite inadequate, I am afraid, for translating this venerable old classic. Nevertheless, that is the task I have set myself for this voyage, and a very intractable one it is proving. Here, we are ready to pour, I think. This is a nice delicate Yun Wu, which I have been saving for a special occasion such as this.” He said this without looking at her, and filled her cup.

  Was this a special occasion? Catherine chose to take no notice of this remark. But she observed his long tapered fingers, deft and knowing, handling the smooth porcelain. Then she looked away and said, “But this exquisite scroll—what is it?”

  “It is a part of Cha Ching, which means Tea Classic. It is the book of knowledge about tea, and it is very old, the work of a scholar named Lu Yu, who lived in the eighth century.”

  “What does it say?” she asked, glancing at his closely written manuscript. Mr Fleming’s handwriting was like himself, like his eyebrows: sinuous, neat, definite, black. His translation was much lined out, amended, interlined with corrections and additions.

  “This particular scroll tells us how simple it is to manufacture tea: the leaves need only be picked, steamed, pounded, shaped, dried, then sealed!”

  Catherine laughed. “So simple as that! Anyone could do it!”

  “But then, it seems, the venerable Lu Yu drifts off into poetry—or deliberate obscurity perhaps—with remarks about the boots of Mongols, all shrunken and wrinkled, and windblown mushrooms, and—if I am not mistaken—something about the jowls of wild oxen. I rather think I must be mistaken. I hope so; for if my translation is correct, it does not get us any further in our study of how to manufacture tea.”

  “Is that your purpose?”

  “In part. Several of my friends have urged me to try my hand at it; and it is the sort of text that is of interest to the Asiatick Society.”

  “And who, or what, is the Asiatick Society?” asked Catherine. The Yun Wu tea seemed to open doorways in her mind—doorways into spacious vaulted halls, well lit and quiet. It was a deeply pleasant sensation.

  “Oh, just an assembly of odd fellows in Calcutta, all of us afflicted by a common inquisitiveness about any number of things—oriental sciences, horticulture, literature, medicine, and all that. We get together and read one another papers about things, and sponsor expeditions to collect curiosities and specimens, and publish translations, and so forth. The society have published a number of these old oriental papers. If you like, I will take you to meet these people when we get to Calcutta, for they are my friends: Dr Wallich and Dr Carey and others.”

  “This Dr Carey?” asked Catherine, touching the Ramayana in her lap.

  “That Dr Carey indeed. But you had a fault to find with his translation, had you not? What is it?”

  “I had; but now that I know him to be a friend of yours, I will moderate my tone. Here I have marked the passage—where it says that ‘the Danuvas and the Yukshas have born all.’ Does this mean that they have given birth to all, or that they have tolerated all?”

  “Let us refer to the original Sanskrit, here on the opposite page. So good of Dr Carey to have printed it, for this Devanagari script is most troublesome to set up in type. Hmm…yes,” said Mr Fleming, following along the line of upside-down-looking letters with his finger. “Ah! of course it is ‘tolerated.’ ‘The Danuvas and the Yukshas have tolerated all.’ No, no, they certainly have not given birth to all! I might have translated it a little differently myself—perhaps ‘suffered all.’”

  “Is it quite literal, this translation of Dr Carey’s?” asked Catherine.

  “Very nearly so.”

  “That is best, I daresay, and simplest.”

  “Ah! I am not sure it is best, and a literal translation is not so simple as one might suppose.” He refilled their cups; after sipping at his own, he said, “How, for example, would you translate this simple word: ‘taste’?”

  “Oh, taste! Well. It is…what is the context? Are we speaking of the sensation on the tongue, or of a connoisseur’s nice discrimination and appreciation?”

  “Of some implied process of judgment, of selection, overlying an assumption that some sensations are superior to others? Even an implied consensus about what constitutes the most refined judgment, the superior sensibility?”

  “Just so,” said Catherine, laughing at him.

  Perhaps he liked her to laugh at him, for with a leap of his sardonic eyebrows, he went on: “And from what language are we translating, and into what language? From English to French, our task is simple, for goût in French contains both the meanings you have identified for ‘taste’ in English. But suppose we are translating, as the good Dr Carey has done, from Sanskrit. There is in Sanskrit an important word: rasa. And it means—oh, a constellation of meanings! But its most basic meaning might be translated as ‘taste’ or perhaps ‘flavour,’ even ‘juice.’ But it suggests a great many other meanings as well. It means the experience which the well-prepared observer derives from contemplating a work of art—hearing music, seeing a play, gazing upon a painting or a sculpture. It is aesthetic emotion. And this aesthetic emotion—the learned Sanskrit commentators tell us—occurs in nine flavours, nine tastes, nine rasas which are sufficiently noble to inspire art. Now, how is all that to be translated? In a word, if you please?”

  “Ahem,” said Catherine, laughing again, “I find I do not want a literal translation after all. Will you allow me to wish for a sensible and intelligent paraphrase?”

  “Alas, your wish must be much qualified. First of all, what would you have your conscientious translator do about meter and rhyme?”

  “Ah. I suppose he must not be allowed, as Dr Carey has done, to ignore them?”

  “Oh, fie, Mrs MacDonald! And do you still expect poetry to result? Would you have him ignore the exquisitely complex meter that characterises Prakrit poetry, for example? You might as well omit the leaves from the pot of tea and serve up mere hot water instead. You might as well pour gin and call it whisky.”

  “That would never do,” said Catherine. “It would never retain Captain Mainwaring’s ‘true contraband goût,’ would it?”

  “Ah, the exquisite flavour of the forbidden! No, it would not. And then there are the broader questions of tone and style. Let us suppose instead that you wished to refresh your acquaintance with Homer, comfortably, in English. Would you have Pope’s elegant but quaint paraphrase? Or would you prefer James Macpherson’s misty and Ossianic Iliad?”

  “James Macpherson’s Iliad? Did ‘Ossian’ Macpherson translate Homer, too?”

  “Yes, I am afraid so, about ten or fifteen years after his Ossian. People laughed at it. It was very like his Ossian, all ‘shades of heroes untimely slain’ and so on. But I don’t think it had his full attention. He was much engrossed just then in the writing of pamphlets against the Americans for Lord North’s government. That really was his strength, I think—pamphlet writing. Then he got a seat in Parliament, where he represented—whom do you think? Not
his constituency in Wales—no, no!—but the interests of the Nawab of Arcot! So much more profitable! And fathered five natural children in his spare time—I beg your pardon for mentioning it—and by two or three different mothers too. But he was a generous patron to many a young kinsman, let us not forget. Including our Dr Macpherson.”

  “Our Dr Macpherson, aboard this ship?”

  “Himself. He has told me that his studies of medicine at Edinburgh were funded by a bequest from ‘Ossian’ Macpherson, who had been his uncle or great-uncle, I am not certain—perhaps a cousin at some remove.”

  Catherine returned to her cabin at last quite refreshed, even exhilarated. She supposed it was an effect of Mr Fleming’s tea; and perhaps also of his unaccustomed energetic style of talk, his wide-ranging knowledge and information, great spiraling arcs of connection and analogy. Her maid undressed her and put her to bed, and there she lay, perfectly calm but profoundly awake, for hours, while Grace slept.

  Catherine thought about turtle soup; and the map of the world; and of Mary, in Edinburgh with her children. Then after a while she found herself at the threshold of James, her poor lost James. Don’t think of that, she usually admonished herself. Too painful, that wound; too raw, that loss. But on this long calm alert night, she could venture even across that threshold. She whispered his name in the darkness of the cabin, with the soft Gaelic lisp and lift: Seumas. Seumas, dearest. Just as she had used to whisper it behind the curtains of their bed.

  CATHERINE LEANED BACK in her chair and stretched to ease her cramped shoulders, for the chair pulled up to the big table in the main cabin where she sat at her copying was not quite a convenient height for the work. The light was fading now too; but Mrs Todd had left her drawing things scattered about in the best place close under the window; and the folio of engravings from which she had been copying was set up on a high easel, where it obscured much of the scant remaining light.

  “Hector!” said Catherine as her brother came down the passageway. “You are just the person who can help me. What a vile hand Sandy always had. I can hardly make it out. Does this say ‘Cruinneachadh Chlann IcIllEathain’?”