Lies That Blind: A Novel of Late 18th Century Penang

East India Company Headquarters, Fort William, Calcutta, India. November 1788.

I always imagined that in a previous life Dalrymple had been an overseer during the construction of the Cheops pyramid. Every day he peered down on us from his elevated perch, his gaze like a lighthouse beacon. Yet it was not the whip we feared from him but something more pernicious. We junior writers under his authority would frequently jolt awake in the small hours, drenched in sweat. Not from fever, although disease was ever-present, but from nightmares of having made the slightest error in our work; then we would know the sting of his opprobrium. After two years longing to be anywhere but here, doing anything but this, I thought I had become inured to the undertow of despair that had shipwrecked my soul. What I had not imagined was what would happen when Father made his biennial visit to check on his Indian investments. Which, as his only son and heir, included me.

I squinted at the pile of papers that continued to menace me: records of opium trades and intelligence extracted from captain’s logs, all of it feeding the voracious maw of my employer, the East India Company. My eyes blurred, not only from being mired in this dust moted monotony, but because of the fledgling tears that bubbled up from a deep well of frustration. The night before he departed for London, Father had made it clear how he intended my life to unfold. When banished here two years ago at the age of seventeen I had believed that with enough administrative experience I would return to England to join the family firm. Now Father had other ideas.

At first, I had half-listened to his usual complaints: I had been such a disappointment to him and Mother, although thank God I had some brains so was not the complete imbecile he had once feared. I only became suspicious as he rambled on about how, after forty years’ service, the company would pay me three-quarters of my salary in retirement and full pay if I completed half a century’s toil. Of course, such pensions represented no great generosity on John Company’s part since over half the people who worked for them in India died long before that many years could be accumulated. If they did not perish from cholera, dysentery, or any number of other fevers common to the region I was convinced boredom swept most clerks like me to an early grave.

When Father mentioned his good friend, Warren Hastings, I thought he merely intended to discuss the man’s impeachment trial taking place in the House of Commons, during which Mr. Edmund Burke had needed four whole days of oration to cover all the charges of corruption and mismanagement being levelled against the former Governor-General.

That would have been the perfect opportunity to voice my concerns about the house of cards I believed would soon teeter due to John Company officials’ misguided policies: the famine that had caused ten million Indians to die from starvation; the subsequent loss of tax revenues; the precipitous fall in the value of stock that had led to uncertainty over whether the exorbitant government loan the company had received would ever be repaid, or if it would go bankrupt. It had been for these and other reasons that the Honourable Company’s ambitions had needed to be reined in and why, when Lord Charles Cornwallis succeeded Warren Hastings as Governor-General, he did so as the representative of His Majesty, subject to Parliamentary discretion, not the East India Company’s Board of Directors in London as had been the case with his predecessor. A state of affairs that sorely aggrieved Father, who had spent considerable sums of money underwriting all those pocket borough seats for his cronies who, as Members of Parliament, had been bought to help him unshackle the restraints the government now imposed upon his golden goose, the EIC.

We never got to talk about any of this, however. Father brought up Hastings only to point out that he had begun his career as a humble clerk in Calcutta. Hence, the Honourable Percival Lloyd—recipient of considerable dividends that relied on the EIC’s unhindered success—wanted to know: How did I, James Lloyd, Esquire, plan to emulate Hastings’ steady rise and one day become Governor-General of India myself?

By the age of 25, Warren Hastings had come to the attention of the infamous Robert Clive. A year later he was made an ambassador of sorts in Bengal’s capital, Murshidabad. Three years after that, he had earned a seat on the Calcutta Council. My father, as much as he loved his friends, never let anything get in the way of his fierce ambition. He wanted to see me achieve an even quicker trajectory, so this dilly-dallying had damned well better stop! I had six months in which to pull myself together and start impressing those who mattered most; Dalrymple would be a good start. Father’s ‘or else’ hung between us like a miscreant dropped from the scaffold but not yet dead.

I snapped back to the present when my right wrist began to cramp. Yet I dared not rest and risk Dalrymple berate me yet again for laziness. I moved my hand by rote so that our cruel overseer would think that I was working, although my mind remained rooted in the past.

A cheeky young kitchen maid had once been employed at our Buckinghamshire manor house around the time that Mother’s German-designed stove had been newly installed. While berating the girl for her indolence in not maintaining the object’s once-gleaming exterior, my mother had suggested she apply more “elbow grease.” To which the foolish servant replied that if elbow grease was going to make her job easier, why didn’t the mistress give her the money to buy some? A good beating later, the girl was dismissed and shown the door. As a child, I had also misunderstood my mother’s meaning, for this was not some miracle substance that could be purchased but what my father now demanded of me until my dying day: hard labour. But with pen and ink rather than a scrubbing brush.

I should have told the old man that I considered my work to be the most soulless, dismal activity outside the trials of Sisyphus. Yet had I done so his already low opinion of me would have sunk ever deeper, and his financial support disappeared as quickly as that kitchen girl’s position. Father’s final words ignited the guilt he more than anyone else knew how to stoke: His health was not good—his damned gout had been playing up again, among his many other ailments—and he wished to be convinced I was not totally worthless before he passed away and left his fortune to me. I knew I would die here before that happened, if not from fever or melancholia then by my own hand.

Dalrymple’s voice disrupted these dark thoughts when he announced the break for lunch, his final words drowned out by a near-deafening scrape of chair legs against the wooden floor. Someone would have needed to shout “Fire!” to have cleared the room as quickly. I followed the throng, casting my eyes about for a companion with whom I might share the outstanding burra-khana that awaited us in the dining hall. Then I saw him in the corridor and my spirits lifted as if hoisted up to the crow’s nest of a ship after months of being imprisoned in the cargo hold. I relished not only this two-hour respite from slavery, but the excellent conversation I might have with a man whose life had always been far more interesting than my own, and from whom I might seek solace.

The illustrious company surgeon and botanist, Dr William Roxburgh, had appeared like a wish-fulfilling genie.

We entered the dining hall bustling with company officials and the white-attired, voluptuously moustached Bengalis who attended to our every need. Even Lord Cornwallis’ reputation as a man determined to root out wastefulness had not put an end to the extravagance of company mealtimes. It would have required the quelling of a small revolution, more successfully than he had managed in the American colonies, for the new Governor-General to achieve such a victory. Not least because the delicacies freely offered were as fine as anything King George might have tasted. Tired of thinking, I told Roxburgh to go ahead and order meals for the both of us.

“We have much tae tittle tattle aboot,” announced Roxburgh after he had selected a platter of lamb, breasts of peacock, and cumin-infused rice, to be followed by Persian delicacies. “But first, young Jim, let’s whet oor whiskers wi’ a glass or two of India’s finest arrack.” Since I had no whiskers to whet—my inability to sprout facial hair being a great embarrassment at the age of nineteen—I thought this a strange expression.

To me, arrack was anything but a fine drink, being liquor fermented from the juice of the coconut palm and too strong a spirit for my constitution. I had often been accused of being a belligerent drunk, using alcohol to fire up the confidence that enables the unsayable to be said. The taste of arrack, which I did not like, made it easy enough to resist any such temptation on this occasion. But given my relief at being in the company of someone as admired across all three company presidencies as Dr William Roxburgh, I agreed to partake of half a glass.

The last I had seen of him, Roxburgh was being sent to Samulcottah, a small garrison town to the north of Madras, to take charge of the company’s botanic gardens. Now he had petitioned his benefactor, Madras’ most well-connected and influential independent trader, Andrew Ross, to help him lease land in Coranda in order to develop an experimental farm on which to grow vegetables and grains. Such production, Roxburgh said, would help to sustain the poor, miserable creatures who were in constant need of food, as well as allow him to conduct further experiments on commercially useful crops. It delighted me to hear that my friend planned to do more than simply make more money for men already wealthy beyond the desires of Croesus.

“And what of yersel’, young Jim?” asked Roxburgh who sat back in his chair with hands resting on a stomach more pronounced that I remembered from last time. “Ye dinnae look sae happy, I have tae say.” My friend snapped his fingers and requested the waiter deliver us another breast of peacock that he insisted I alone devour because, “You’re looking awfy thin tae me.” I smiled at my recollection of our first meeting, when Roxburgh’s strong Ayrshire accent had befuddled me, together with his tendency to pepper speech with Scottish phrases as incomprehensible as Chinese.

William Roxburgh and I had become acquainted not long after my arrival in Calcutta when, in an effort to find something interesting to distract me during an especially dreary week, I had slipped into a talk he had been giving to the factors and learned why this Scottish surgeon concerned himself with seeds and soils rather than torn skin and sutures. Roxburgh’s time at Edinburgh University had led him to discover the many ways in which agricultural production could be increased. Now a botanist of repute, Roxburgh advised the company on how to successfully identify different qualities of cottons, dyes, and spices, so that it might extract the greatest profit from each trade. My friend had soon come to the attention of Andrew Ross, who enthusiastically took Roxburgh under his wing.

While I half-heartedly ate the second peacock breast, I related to Roxburgh most of the conversation—although, more accurately, Father’s monologue—that had arrested me the previous evening. The only part I chose to omit was how my parents expected me to become Governor-General of India one day; the audaciousness of that idea embarrassed me.

“So, climbing up the greasy pole of John Company hierarchy disnae sound as if it suits ye, Jimmy. What fires up yer passion, then?”

As breathless as a besotted suitor I gushed, “I desire to be a journalist, having long admired James Boswell whose The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson has been published to great acclaim. I purchased a copy before leaving London and it is very much the kind of intimate conversation with a subject of great interest that I would like to write.” I glanced shyly at my friend, who had a strange look on his face. “What is it?”

Roxburgh continued to stare at me as if puzzled by my admission.

“Did I say something wrong?” I asked.

My friend lubricated his larynx with more arrack before speaking. “I dinnae know much aboot Boswell’s work—although his private life disnae impress me and he comes across as a very gossipy, indiscreet sort—but I gather many of today’s journalists are dubious fellows.”

“Really? What makes you say that?”

“The last time I was in London a friend of mine invited me tae lunch at The Turks Head Inn in Soho. Those in the literary establishment know it simply as The Club. One of the guests in attendance was a gentleman called Mr. John Nichols.”

“I have heard of him,” I interjected. “He is the editor of the prestigious The Gentleman’s Magazine, a man much admired in literary circles.”

“Aye, well,” began Roxburgh. “Mr. Nichols told this rather amusing story pertaining to the Americans’ General George Washington. He had earlier been at pains tae point out how many blackguard writers loiter around coffee shops and alehouses picking up pieces of tittle-tattle that they present in a credible way to a gullible public. The ease of which is all the greater when tales originate from abroad. That acclaimed editor had, surprisingly, very little good tae say about most men who pursue journalism so ye might not wish tae risk yer reputation by entering such a murky occupation, young Jim.”

My curiosity piqued as to what gossip might have been shared about General Washington, I ignored Roxburgh’s disdain for journalism and asked, “What prompted such a conversation about the Americans’ commander-in-chief?”

My Scottish companion leaned closer. “One young chappie recently presented the editor with a story that Mr. Nichols described as mere propaganda, not journalism, his article being full of half-truths and outright deceptions.”

“What does that mean, ‘propaganda’?” I said.

“Aye, I had not heard that word before myself, but Mr. Nicols explained it as a means of propagating an overly favourable impression of one’s subject without any attempt at balance or truth. He drew oor attention to an essay written some thirty years ago by Dr Johnson entitled Of the Duty of a Journalist, in which the great man pointed oot the importance of establishing facts before—as he put it, “slaughtering armies without battles, and conquering countries without invasions”.”

My friend shook his head and chuckled, then warmed his throat with another swig of arrack. “But let me test you as Mr. Nichols did oor party that day.”

Convinced I could best any challenge, I said confidently, “Go ahead.”

“There appeared an article in the April 1783 issue of the Rambler’s Magazine entitled ‘A remarkable discovery; or, Mrs. General Washington, displayed in proper articles’, the writer claiming that the former commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, George Washington, was really a woman. The accompanying illustration showed Washington attired in a dress,” began Roxburgh. “This assertion was apparently supported by an admission made by General Washington’s late wife, Martha, reported in the Pennsylvania Gazette some months earlier.”

My face must have given away my shock at this revelation, but Roxburgh only smiled and carried on.

“Let us further examine the veracity of that report,” he began. “According to Mr. Nichols, a copy of the Whitehall Evening Post of the 25th January 1783 reported that Mrs. Martha Washington before dying confessed to her chaplain that she had long known of her husband’s true sex but had agreed to the deception because of “motives of the most refined friendship.” The writer mentioned having gathered this information from the Dublin Register which, in turn, received the news from an issue of the aforementioned Pennsylvania Gazette printed on 11th November the previous year.

“What, then, would be your verdict on General Washington’s true nature, young Jim?” my friend asked.

I admitted that as improbable as it seemed there appeared to be considerable proof, since three separate newspapers had reported the story, that the former leader of the Continental Army was indeed a woman in disguise. The written word, so confidently presented, was surely sacrosanct. And how many times had we heard stories of women disguising themselves as men in order to enjoy the freedom of adventure? Women like Hannah Snell who had later made her name and a living on the stage, recounting the years she had pretended to be a soldier then sailing to Mauritius as a marine with Admiral Boscawen’s fleet, never once discovered.

“Then you are convinced?”

With a hesitant nod, suspecting a trick, I mumbled, “Yes.”

“Yet the story about General Washington being a woman is false,” declared Roxburgh, rather too smugly for my liking. “For Mrs. Martha Washington still lives and never made such pronouncements. According to Mr. Nichols, the Pennsylvania Gazette appeared on the 6th and 13th of November that year, not the 11th, and there is no such publication as the Dublin Register.”

I slumped back in my chair, angry at not having asserted my misgivings no matter how many newspapers had repeated this untrue tale.

“Most journalists today appear tae be an unscrupulous lot who would sell their grandmothers for a juicy story and I am surprised you, young Jim, would wish to be counted among them,” said Roxburgh, wiping his mouth and throwing the cotton napkin on the table as if in disgust.