Chapter 4
To LABOUR. To roll or pitch heavily in a turbulent sea.—Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine
“Other fellows run around here in a heat these days, Doreé, but you always seem so at ease.” Styles cocked a curious brow. The corridor of the East India Company’s London headquarters bubbled with activity, traders moving from one chamber to another, one deal to another. “Why is that?”
“I suppose I have no desire to draw attention.”
“Then you should not look as confident here as the king ensconced at Carlton House.” The baron laughed.
“I should hurry along as well, do you think?” The East India Company and its desperate attempts to stay afloat beneath the pressure of Parliament’s finicky rule meant little to Ben. His fortune had never depended upon the Company’s successes, nor his principal endeavors. He maintained an active membership for the sake of connections and appearances only.
“Court’s in session, don’t you know, Doreé,” a gentleman announced as they approached the Directors’ Court Room. “G’day, Styles.” He nodded. “Trapper’s hearing. Lost a bundle in that Bengal fiasco. Going in to gawk at the poor sod?”
Ben lowered his lids. “Never.”
The man’s face puckered, his thick brows tilting downward.
Styles laughed. “Doreé rarely minces words, Nathans. You ought to know that by now.”
“Don’t know that you’ve got cause to chortle at me, Styles,” Lord Nathans grumbled. “Didn’t see so clearly with that Nepal venture, did you?”
Ben turned to his friend. “Nepal, Styles? How positively intrepid of you.”
Styles’s blue eyes narrowed. “Not all of us can be universally successful. Some of us occasionally make mistakes.”
Nathans chuckled, a sound halfway between relieved and self-satisfied. “Well, I’m popping in to see Trapper try to salvage the wreckage. P’raps I’ll buy him a bottle after, to cheer up the old fellow.”
“Good of you,” Ben murmured. A few years over forty, George Nathans had the thick carriage of a man a decade older and all the bluff conceit of the worst sort of middle-brow Englishman involved in eastern trade. The king had recently awarded him a peerage, alongside his partner, another prosperous private trader turned Company lackey, for work they’d done smoothing the sea path to Singapore.
Nathans’s business partner was Marcus Crispin.
“By the by, Nathans,” Ben said, “I am having a few friends out to the house next week for some shooting. Care to join us? Just a handful of Company men. You are welcome to bring Lady Nathans along, of course. How a man could bear to be separated from such a beautiful wife I cannot imagine.”
Nathans’s square face reddened, but his eyes looked eager. Cantonese tea had made him rich as Croesus, but his father had been a haberdasher, and his title was spanking new.
“Well, I’m glad for the invitation, Doreé,” Nathans blustered. “Don’t mind if I do.”
“Capital. Friday, then.”
Nathans bowed and went into the hearing.
Styles turned to Ben, brows high. “Thought you didn’t care for entertaining.”
“I must have altered my feelings on the matter.” Ben started toward the exit.
“Don’t I merit an invitation as well?”
“Do you wish one?”
“I haven’t been to Fellsbourne since—well, since the funeral.” He cast Ben a questioning look. “Sometimes I wonder if you ever go there yourself.”
“I have had little occasion to.” Until now. Despite himself. But old habits were difficult to lay aside.
“If you wish to change government policy concerning trade in the East Indies, why don’t you do it in the Lords? You’ve got the seat. You don’t need to knuckle around with nonentities to drum up support. Step into your father’s footsteps.” Styles’s voice prodded.
“I have no interest in politics. You know that.”
“So you insist. But then why this shooting party of Company men? And, for God’s sake, Nathans? His wife is good ton, but the fellow is a horrid Cit.”
“Perhaps. But I am particularly ill suited to throw stones.” Ben’s gaze passed over an oil painting hanging on a nearby wall of a great, shaggy lion subduing a thick-shouldered tiger. The striped animal, longer and larger than its opponent, nevertheless lay prone beneath the king of beasts. “And perhaps I am inspired to know my competition.”
“Competition?” The baron’s eyes seemed to spark.
“Adieu, Styles.”
Ben passed through the front door onto the portico. The Company’s headquarters, built in Greek revival style to disguise its purpose in austere, classical costume, rose like a depressive shadow from the narrow street. Behind the striated Ionic columns and pediment stuffed with symbolic statuary, gold changed hands over kegs of saltpeter and barrels of cotton piece goods, bushels of opium and stacks upon stacks of tea bricks. But no London bypasser would know that from its exterior. It looked like a temple.
Ben moved from the porch, leaving the ponderous weight of India House behind him. The street was clogged with mud after the morning rain, but in front of the building straw was piled in ample supply to facilitate passage. The gentlemen-traders of the East India Company, struggling against the censure of high society, must not be seen to muddy their boots.
He pressed a coin into a stable boy’s hand and rode through the City toward Blackwall Village where the East India Docks spread across acres of planking and water. Before the massive wall that surrounded the quay, warehouses loomed, sentinels of Britain’s mercantile power upon the seas. Beyond, a forest of masts rose above the hubbub of business. Seamen strained at capstan poles, hauling aboard the produce of English manufacturers and mines—woolens, bullion, copper—and from the East, spices, tea, silk, and porcelain to be sold on the Continent and in America. Gulls circled masts and blanketed sails, alighting upon spars and barrels stacked along the boards awaiting transfer onto carts, their strident cries cutting the air.
Ben’s gaze slid over the nearest vessel, a hulking three-masted East Indiaman suited to the rough seas of the Cape of Good Hope. His secretary stood amidships beside a dockworker, gesturing aft to a pile of crates.
Creighton caught Ben’s gaze, dismissed the lumper, and moved toward the rail. Ben climbed the gangplank serrated with shafts of sunlight slanting through the rigging.
“Good day, my lord. This is the Eastern Promise.”
“Show me.”
He followed his secretary down into the belly of the vessel, the air growing close as they descended. Upon the low-slung berth deck, Creighton moved forward to the infirmary. He folded his hands behind his back and his brow furrowed, gaze fixed on the detritus stuffed into the foremost corner of the surgeon’s quarters.
“So you see, my lord.”
“I do.”
Human hair clogged the crevice. Straight, curly, red, brown, blond, some black. In considerable quantity.
“Too long for bilge rats,” Creighton muttered.
Ben tilted his gaze aside to his employee.
“Of all the moments for you to insert a note of levity into your work—and perhaps, Creighton, it may be the first in my memory—this is an odd one.”
“Forgive me, sir. I have nothing else to say. I’m afraid this has left me quite speechless.”