Sarah stayed on a few more weeks, which turned into a few more months. Ronnie took her out to St. John’s Island, to the Island of the Back and Beyond of Death, so-called he said because two pirates had died in a duel after stabbing each other in the back with their krisses; and to Pulau Ubin,[1] a beautiful island off the east coast of Singapore, which was inhabited by only a few woodcutters and their families.
They went to fancy dinner parties at Captain Flint’s house and bought fried pork belly and rice from Chinese roadside hawkers. Ronnie took Sarah to the Lombong waterfalls at Kota Tinggi on the Malayan Peninsula, about twenty-five miles north east of Singapore, where a native guide led them through the jungle. He took her to the Mulu caves in Sarawak, and on the journey back to Singapore Sarah had her first taste of real pirates, when their course was suddenly blocked by a Balanini war-fleet. They were the worst of the lot, Ronnie told her afterwards, for they did not take any prisoners, not even women or children, who would fetch a good price in the slave markets. But luckily they turned around and rowed away when two American men-of-war bound for Manila came into view.
Back in Singapore, they rode out one early morning to Bukit Timah,[2] the highest hill on the interior of the island. Pausing to rest their horses, they enjoyed the cool shade of a bamboo grove set off from the dirt road, and they lay down on the dark leaves and made love on the jungle floor, as if it was the most natural thing to do––as in their hearts they knew it was.
They announced their engagement in October at a party Colonel Farquhar threw for them at the residency, and were married in Singapore at the Mission Church on New Year’s Day by the Christian calendar. The wedding reception was held in the home of Chua Chong Long, the Peranakan merchant who had come down from Malacca, who wanted to show off the new house and godown that he had built between High Street and the river.
* * *
Captain Pearl marched up the hill to where Chia Lin Sien lived in a small house of bamboo and attap. He carried a bag of silver over his shoulder. Chia was walking back from his gambier plantation, and beckoned the captain into his home. There was a table and set of chairs in the front; his bed was in the back. Chia hailed a boy who brought them a pot of tea and some English biscuits, to which Mr Chia was partial. The two men haggled for nearly an hour over the price of Mr Chia’s gambier plantation. In the end Pearl had to throw in a case of brandy along with the silver to clinch the deal, but with Mr Chia’s agreement, he was now the proud owner of four of the gambier plantations on the hill.
But these Chinese were hard bargainers, and he knew that the few who remained would probably drive an even harder bargain than Mr Chia. They had him over a barrel, even though their own days on the hill were numbered––for the gambier plants quickly exhausted the soil, and they would eventually have to move further inland to plant new vines. But it did not matter, for they knew that Captain Pearl was desperate to have his hill, and would pay good money for it as soon as he earned it.
* * *
One day in July, while young Leopold was playing ball with his sister Charlotte in the garden at the Hill of Mists, he suddenly vomited all over her dress. When Sophia ran to him she found him curled up and clutching his stomach in pain. He had diarrhoea and a high fever. He cried for hours while she tried to comfort him, as the servants stood hushed outside his bedroom. Leopold died the following morning, in the grey ghostly hour before the dawn. They supposed that he had died of cholera, but Dr Jack said that he had died of enteritis, which was just as deadly.
Sophia screamed and screamed and screamed. ‘Not my baby! No, no, no, God! Please no, not my baby!’ She clasped little Leopold to her breast, and it was only with great difficulty that Mrs Grimes and two Malay servant girls managed to persuade her to part with the limp little body for burial.
‘It is too hard, my love,’ said Raffles later, as he tried hopelessly to comfort her, wounded by his own tearing grief.
‘You were right, Stamford,’ she replied in a leaden voice. ‘We were too happy.’
Yet her tragedy was not over. Three days later her brother-in-law Harry Auber died of cholera.
Sophia became hysterical. She retreated to her room, with the shutters drawn, and refused to eat or drink. She sobbed uncontrollably for days, and Raffles and Dr Jack feared for her sanity. She refused to see either of them, or any of her other children. When Mrs Grimes came and offered comfort Sophia chased her out exclaiming ‘Let me die rather than my babies!’ Raffles felt helpless. His own heart was broken, and his brain was pounding with a skull-spitting headache that drove him to distraction.
Early on the morning of the fifth day an old Malay woman, a poor widow who was employed as a house sweeper, entered Sophia’s room, as the morning light crept through the shutters and picked out the shadow of the figure who lay on the couch by the far wall.
‘Go away, I don’t need you!’ Sophia sobbed, as she turned to face the intruder. But the old woman stood her ground, and gave Sophia such a searching look that she was hushed like a small child.
‘I have come,’ the woman began, in her quietly lilting voice, and speaking in Malay, ‘because you have been here many days shut up in a dark room and no one dares come near you.’
She paused for a moment to brush her grey hair away from her face, while she kept her eyes sharply focused on Sophia.
‘Are you not ashamed to grieve in this manner,’ she remonstrated, ‘when you ought to be thanking God for having given you the most beautiful child that was ever seen? Were you not the envy of everybody? Did anyone ever see him, or speak of him, without admiring him?’
Sophia did not reply, for they both knew the answer.
‘Instead of letting this child continue in the world till he should be worn out with trouble and sorrow, has not God taken him to heaven in all his beauty? For shame, mother, leave off your weeping and let me open a window.’
With that the old Malay sweeper walked over and raised Sophia from the couch. She opened the shutters to let in the early morning sunlight, and then quietly padded out of the room on her bare feet without another word.
‘I am ashamed,’ Sophia whispered to herself. ‘I was blessed to have him and now he is blessed to be with the Lord.’ Then she left her room to rejoin her family once again.
But she and Raffles needed all their strength. Three months later all three of their remaining children fell sick, first Marsden, then Ellen, and then Charlotte.
‘How much suffering must we bear,’ she asked Raffles, as they held each other in desperate closeness the night after Charlotte succumbed to the fever. ‘Is it to be death heaped upon death?’
Mercifully, Marsden and Ellen soon recovered. Charlotte lay gravely ill for three weeks, but then she also recovered. By this time Raffles was suffering almost daily headaches, which forced him to lie down for hours on end in a darkened room, and Sophia was a nervous wreck in fear for their children.
Yet they all survived, and were grateful for the cheerful if subdued Christmas they spent together as a family. On New Year’s Eve Raffles offered a toast to his friends and family, remembering William, Harry and dear Leopold, and thanking God for preserving their remaining children.