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Kirinda had to reach high on tiptoe to lather his neck and shoulders, then she held up her palm with the cake of soap upon it. Adam took it, washed his face and hair, then ducked beneath the water to rinse off the suds. She soaped his back, chest, and belly, then again passed him the soap so he could wash his own intimate parts. Their relationship was nonsexual and completely matter of fact. Adam, now totally relaxed, closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He felt as if his very bones might melt.
When he opened his eyes a minute or two later, Kirinda was standing patiently with his towels. The ritual time spent with Lotus Blossom was soothing to a man. She never chattered. She never recoiled from his scars. His blue eyes smiled into hers as he slipped on a robe and went to eat his evening meal.
When he had eaten he went out onto the screened verandah to catch the breeze and enjoy a cheroot rolled from tobacco grown in the dry zone of Jaffra. His thoughts drifted about, lulled by the nocturnal symphony of tree frogs.
It was still pitch-black when he arose and made his way to the sheds beside the smokehouse. Over the years his tappers had become highly skilled, learning the importance of cleanliness in gathering the snow-white liquid. Savage handed out knives, cups, coconut shells, and buckets. Then he began to pour acetic acid into molds, knowing the tappers would quickly start returning with latex. After setting for eighteen hours the sheets would be put through rollers to press on a rough pattern to prevent adhesion, then hung in the smokehouse for several days to dry.
The men who had become proficient in English were promoted to overseers and given an umbrella as a badge of office. The Leopard, as the plantation workers also called him, was a hard taskmaster who ruled with an iron hand. He would put up with nothing that displeased him. Punishment was both swift and harsh. He was never lenient, there were no second chances. Mixed with their fear of him, however, was a healthy dose of respect. There was not one task on the entire plantation that he could not do himself and do it better than any other.
When the Dutch owned the plantation, the workers had all been native Sinhalese. They were an attractive people but extremely cunning and indolent. If they did not wish to work on a particular day, no power on earth could make them. When Adam had been in India he had witnessed how the natives manipulated the English by their own form of blackmail. They would sit on a step and fast to get their own way or threaten to disembowel themselves or even dash out their childrens’ brains.
When Savage took over he dismissed the Sinhalese workers and replaced them with darker-skinned Tamils, who were far more industrious and willing to do labor. Savage allowed them their own customs unless those customs offended him, in which case he forbade them. In the East a woman was barren until she bore a son, then her husband was permitted to take a second wife. Concubinage was normal, so he did not interfere. A female must marry as soon as puberty was reached or she became the prey of all males in her caste.
Kirinda was the only Sinhalese woman on the plantation. She became a twelve-year-old widow during his first week and marked for sati. He saved her from burning on the funeral pyre by taking her as his personal body servant.
The other practice he abolished immediately was the murder of female children at birth. Savage insisted they could be taught to work for paid wages.
At the first blush of dawn he left the rubber trees and walked swiftly to the mustering grounds where all the workers gathered each morning to receive their daily tasks. With the aid of a multilingual banyan the day’s tasks were allotted to the work force of fifteen hundred Tamils.
Each day after the mustering Adam Savage returned to his bungalow for breakfast. Then he saddled up and rode over the entire twenty thousand acres to supervise the various harvests that he exported to Britain. His homeland had developed an insatiable demand for anything and everything the tropics could produce.
As he cut through a coconut grove on his way to the house he heard the pitiful whimperings of a monkey. It lay in his path, its small body at a peculiar angle. He saw immediately that it had broken its back in a fall from the top of a high palm. Its eyes looked up pleadingly from its small orange face. Already there was a trail of red ants swarming toward the helpless creature. He could tell it was in great pain but knew that within minutes its suffering would increase a thousandfold. He took his gun from his leather belt and shot it. It was a far kinder death than being devoured alive by a million red ants. Leopard’s Leap was surrounded by jungle on three sides. In the jungle death was the most common occurrence of the day.
Adam was subdued at breakfast, so John Bull thought he had better remind him of something. “Do not forget about Lady Lamb’s visit. I will have fresh clothes and a bath ready at four of the clock sharp.”
“I’ll be here,” Adam reassured his man, refusing more fruit and coffee. “No time. I have a lot to do before four.” He did not need to check on details of the dinner to be served to his guest; John Bull was a perfectionist.
Savage saddled one of his Arabs and rode toward a hilly region planted with tea bushes. Men and women and older children of both sexes were pluckers. They made an exotic picture in their gaily colored cottons, their bamboo baskets slung on their backs, fastened by a rope around their foreheads. Young runners went up and down the rows carrying sacks so that the pluckers could empty their filled baskets.
Mature tea bushes yielded a crop of flush every two weeks. Flush was the tender closed tea bud and two leaves. The overseers with their umbrellas checked continually to make sure the bushes were cleaned of unproductive stems, but that the coarse leaves did not go into the baskets.
As Savage tallied the pounds of tea that had been picked, he watched the women with pride. They made much better pluckers than men. Their hands were superlative, darting over the bushes with dainty movements, gathering handfuls of flush, then lithely throwing them over their shoulders into the baskets without crushing or bruising the tender buds.
Savage moved on to farther acres that were being pruned. Pruners were paid higher for their services because of their know-how. Tea bushes must be pruned in strict rotation to ensure they produced for eighteen months before needing to be pruned again.
Scores of other laborers were needed for cleaning drains, culverts, and silt pits. The plantation boasted a timber reserve of quick-growing fuel trees where men chopped, split, and hauled wood to the latex smoke houses and the four-level tea factory where five processes were carried out: withering, rolling, fermenting, firing, and grading.
For the thousandth time he thanked Providence that on his nefarious runs to China importing and exporting illicit cargoes, he’d also taken an interest in the licit crops the Chinese produced. Once he learned how much tea could be packed into the hold of a ship, and the ridiculous prices the English were willing to pay for this newly fashionable beverage, he had taken immediate advantage. Then later when he had scraped together enough to buy the plantation in Ceylon, he had bought hundreds of the fragile seedlings, transplanted them with gentle hands, then labored and worried over each as if it were a child of his loins to be cared for with infinite tenderness and love. The care he had lavished upon these first delicate tea bushes in Ceylon had paid off a thousandfold. The following year he’d done the same with rubber plants he brought from Burma.
Any number of afflictions could cause havoc on a plantation. Early in the afternoon as he was examining some groves for root and stem disease, Adam was distracted by the birds. The sight and sound in the treetops played hell with his emotions. The swallows were gathering to return to England and such a wave of nostalgia for his homeland swept over him that he knew he must soon return or go “doolally,” a condition bordering on madness from being in the isolation and heat of the tropics overlong.
Savage thought of the house he was having built. It was a culmination of all his dreams and all his hard work. With the naive hopes of youth he had come to the Indies to acquire wood so that his father’s business would increase. Visions of prosperity danced in his head along with a plan to buy a small house in a respectable neighborhood away from the unhealthy, damp yard where his father’s cabinet-making business was located by the Thames.
His father’s death had snuffed out all his hopes and covered him with guilt. To this day he believed if he’d been there to nurse his father through his chronic bronchitis and do all in his power to fight the insidious conditions of poverty, his father might still be alive.
Savage had emerged from the grief and guilt with an iron determination to acquire wealth. If his resolve was fixed strongly enough, and he let nothing stand in his way, and he swore to do anything to attain his goal, including kill, nothing on this earth could keep him from that goal. And he’d done it. Oh, it hadn’t been easy. His driving ambition had led him down paths of iniquity and he’d paid dearly for every mistake he’d made. But gradually, slowly, a plan had been forged.
It was an ambitious plan, a glorious plan, and most importantly a worthy plan. That was the secret of success, probably. It wasn’t enough to need something and want something. Until you also deserved it, you didn’t begin to get it.
The stately home in England was only part of his plan. It was a means to an end. Without the trappings he could never achieve the worthy goal he’d set himself. A woman such as Evelyn Lamb would be the crowning touch for his English estate. She was even titled. With a gracious hostess like Lady Lamb at his side, his ambitions could be realized in half the time.
He decided to waste no more time. He’d begin his wooing today. It might take a little time. She wouldn’t fall into his bed like some chee-chee girl, he wouldn’t want her to, but he must breach the barriers of class between them that would impede a more intimate relationship.
Savage returned to the bungalow early to bathe and change, so that by the time of the appointed hour of five, he was on the verandah steps when her open carriage arrived, driven by a Company sepoy. She was dressed in black silk, her beautiful blond hair swept into elegant coils and fastened by tortoiseshell combs.
“Good evening, Mr. Savage,” she said formally before the soldier.
“Good evening, Lady Lamb.” His slow smile belied the formality of his tone. He smiled rarely, but when he did, his scarred lip gave him a look that was both dangerous and deadly. “I promised to show you the tea factory. There is still an hour before sunset.”
