Free The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee Page A

thrilled to his seafaring yarns. He had jumped pirate ship in Madagascar. He had slept in the Garden of Eden, inside an Asian mountain guarded by angels. Children enchanted the deadly cobra with a mere piped melody, the same snake that lurched from its basket and killed an Englishman’s servant dead on the spot. He had traveled to Samarkand on camel-back, and he had been to the court of the Great Mughal, whose ostentatious display of gold and jewels made him ashamed of England’s shabby pretension. The soil of Hindustan was ground-up sapphire, emerald and ruby; the building bricks were pure ingots of gold. Their food simmered in its own spices, quite independent of the application of cooking fire. The women wrapped themselves in silken winding-sheets, and because of their soft, compliant souls, they yielded their lives to flame upon their husband’s death.
    She did not believe him, but she, too, longed for escape. And what had become of his suit with Hester Manning, Hannah was bold enough to ask, had he been fearful enough of her broad-backed father not to press his case?
    He paid her memory the proper respect. Like many a man before him, he had been led on by her smile, her cheekiness, her apparent boldness. But when the talk had turned to his travels and his dreams, he’d seen her face set in a frown.
    “The lass would fair tie me down to England and English ways,” Gabriel Legge said. Her passion was more to leave that place, Salem, and the boys around the forge, and her father, than to settle in another place with him. Especially a place of harrowing discomfort, unfamiliar and uncongenial to her narrow sensibilities. She would go only halfway round the world with him, the tiresome, well-trod half, to England. He had not guessed the depths of her fancy, if not for him, then for some of the stories he told.
    “My stories all have a grain, a fair grain, of truth to them, Mistress Fitch,” he confessed, “and none are spun from whole cloth—”
    “You are known for your rampant embroidery, Gabriel Legge. I feared only that you had begun to believe them yourself. I may be a simple girl who has seen none of the earth and its truths, and what you say of the oceans and the mountains may well be true. But, Mr. Legge, I know the heart of womenkind, and none do willingly yield their lives.”
    “Perhaps this you would believe, Hannah Easton,” he said, and with that he took from the watch pocket of his silken vest a small sachet of gemstones, including a ruby more perfect than any she had ever imagined.
    “This is yours. This and a thousand more like it are waiting for us.”
    She closed her fist upon it. A cool fire burned her hand. He wanted an Empress of his own, fit for the Emperor of Dreams.
    In the negotiations with Robert Fitch he remained the sober businessman, the shipowner’s son. He did not expect a dowry; a healthy, strong, God-fearing woman was all a man could claim a right to, although furniture was always welcome, and the Swallow in the harbor was still loading freight. For a cherry-and-maple highboy and dining table of solid cherry, the dowry was set. By the time of the Swallow ’s sailing, Hannah and Gabriel were married. It would be ten years before she saw Salem again.
    WHY WOULD a self-possessed, intelligent, desirable woman like Hannah Easton suddenly marry a man she recognized as inappropriate and untrustworthy? Why would she accept Hester Manning’s castoff, or betrayer? Guilt, perhaps, a need to punish herself for the secret she was forced to carry? Unconscious imitation of her mother, a way of joining her by running off with a treacherous alien? Gabriel Legge with his tales of exotic adventure was as close to the Nipmuc lover as any man in Salem; she sought to neutralize her shame by emulating her mother’s behavior.
    Venn, who listens and is about to get more interested in the tale as it moves away from New England, has his own interpretation. Gabriel was obviously on a wife-hunting