The Shallow Seas Read Free Page B

stood by her side, wishing to pull her close into him, not daring. He wanted her happiness more than he could express. For two days she had been ill, sick to her soul, caught in a web of misery. Then, on the third day, exhausted, with the wind beating her face, staring at the white-tipped waves swirling remorselessly beneath the hull, she had found a certain calm and made a decision.
    She had not deceived Tigran. When he confessed his feelings to her, she told him of her love for another man and the baby to come. Tigran had blinked slowly but thought for no more than a second. He realised that he did not care. Nothing about Charlotte’s past mattered. To lose her was unthinkable, to be her protector his highest thought.
    He had sunk to his knees, put her hands against his forehead and asked her to marry him. Now he was grateful beyond words that she had agreed, had let him kiss her cheek, even that fleeting touch inflaming. He had dreamed of touching her for too long. He knew it was dangerous, this rapture he felt. He smiled at the word. His English tutor would have chided him for such a grandiloquent term, but he could think of no other which described his condition. Old man’s folly is what his friends called it. How often had he seen it in others and laughed? Never mind. Did not even the great Erasmus write that “folly seasons man’s life with pleasure”? Something like that, he felt sure.
    Now he wanted to divert her from thoughts he saw crowding her mind. He pointed to the rowboat approaching the ship. The equippagemeester came up to Tigran. He had sailed over from Onrust Island, where he supervised the extensive ship repair docks and warehouses. Part of his duties was to board ships to inspect the list of passengers and crew, as well as any cargo, and to check for sickness. Satisfied, he saluted Charlotte with a lingering look. He had not seen a fair-skinned European woman in the ten years he had lived in Batavia. Certainly not one as lovely as this: long, jet- black hair and violet eyes, full, pink lips, her figure slender as the Indische-Chinese women he liked to visit in Glodok, the Chinese quarter. His wife, a daughter of a former councillor, had assured his lucrative position but was regrettably short and dumpy, and six children had not improved her figure.
    As the rowboat pulled up to the channel there was a sudden jolt, and Tigran threw out his arm to prevent Charlotte from falling from the seat. Despite its shallow draft, the boat had run aground. The canal, Tigran explained—attempting to keep his temper—was constructed to narrow the current so that it had sufficient force to keep the channel clear of silt. Tigran would rather have used his own cutter, but the Dutch authorities had sold the three-year licence for this transport to the Kapitan Cina, the leader of the Chinese in Batavia. With volleys of shouts and wild gesticulations, the crew pushed the craft off the sandbank, several boatmen floundering as it shifted suddenly to the deep channel. The crew burst into laughter, joshing and pulling the bedraggled men back onboard. Charlotte could not help but share in the good-natured amusement, and Tigran, relieved that she was unhurt, joined in.
    As they entered between the channel piers, three of the crew jumped quickly up to the side with a rope fixed to the boat, and began to track it upriver. The other boatmen rowed, but the current was too great to permit an ascent by oars alone. Charlotte could see the men straining as the boat moved slowly along. Their boat passed another, laden with sick-looking European men heading, Tigran told her, to the hospital ship lying offshore. Convicts in leg chains squatted sullenly on a lighter anchored to one side of the canal wall, covered from head to toe in brown sticky mud. Their task was to clear the silt from the river, and Charlotte could hardly begin to imagine the exhaustion of such dispiriting, endless labours. Here and there lamp-eyed