1822
Three days into the New Year, at four o’clock in the afternoon, Raffles was sitting at his desk in his office at the Hill of Mists. He was contemplating a letter he had recently received from Farquhar, which had brought both good news and bad. Farquhar reported that the trade of the settlement continued to expand rapidly, but that most of the Europeans and Chinese had already built their houses and godowns along the east bank of the river, because they considered the east beach and the west bank of the river unsuitable.
‘Damn him!’ Raffles said to himself aloud. ‘I told him I wanted that area reserved for government buildings!’
He heard someone enter the open door behind him, although they did not speak. He turned around to see Sophia standing red-eyed in the doorway, holding baby Marsden in her arms. With his head slung back as if in sleep and his brown curls hanging down, he looked like a sleeping angel. But he was no sleeping angel, only another dead child. Marsden, his beloved boy, his Marco Polo, gone forever! Raffles went to Sophia and tried to speak, but he could not. His heart felt like it was bursting and his throat was so tight that he could scarcely breathe. They knelt down on the bare wooden floor and held each other and their child between them. The hours passed and the light faded and the evening gloom descended, but they did not move and no one disturbed them. One by one the Malay servants slipped in and sat praying in a silent circle around them.
Eventually Dr Jack came and gently persuaded them to give up the poor dead boy, so he could be prepared for burial.
When they returned from Marsden’s funeral they were forced to call in Dr Jack again, when Charlotte succumbed to an attack of enteritis. She lingered on for twelve more days, then slipped away one early morning as Raffles and Sophia sat by her bedside.
Sophia was devastated. ‘We must leave,’ she informed Raffles, in a tone that would brook no argument, ‘or we shall all die in this charnel house.’
Raffles had a strong sense of duty, and knew how much remained to be done in Bencoolen. But he did not contradict her, so empty was his soul of meaning and purpose. When they returned heart-broken from Charlotte’s funeral, he wrote to the Court of Directors advising them of his intention to resign his position due to family tragedy and ill health. He informed them that he planned to visit Singapore in September and remain there until June the following year, after which he would return to Bencoolen and prepare for his departure the following January. He arranged for their remaining daughter, Ella, to return to England with her nurse Mrs Grimes on the first available ship.
‘My heart is sick and broken,’ he told Sophia, ‘but we must save Ella and ourselves.’
He was not able to say goodbye to Ella. Two days before she left in late February, Raffles became dangerously ill with a high fever. Dr Jack confined him to his room for three weeks, and bled him frequently with leeches. Raffles was stricken with violent headaches that burned to the very core of his brain, and which drove him to suicidal despair and the darkest depression he had ever known. He had always suffered from headaches, especially at times of great stress, but these were the worst he had ever known. Dr Jack warned him that he might have a brain tumour, and that he should return to England with Sophia immediately. Raffles considered his advice carefully, but then told him he wanted to see Singapore, his ‘other child’, one last time before he died.
Before they left for Singapore in September, Raffles and Sophia visited the European graveyard where their children were buried. Raffles was a broken man, and little more than a skeleton. He had grown dangerously thin and his skin was yellow. He walked like an old man, supported by Sophia, who seemed to have grown in strength to support her husband in their desperate hour of need.
‘We shall never forget them,’ he said in a near whisper. ‘We must thank God for having them, for even so short a time. Who ever had such wonderful children?’
‘Try not to dwell on it, dear heart,’ she said, as she led him away from the graves. ‘It is too hard.’
They said goodbye to Dr Jack as they boarded the ship for Singapore, and thanked him for the loving care that he had given to their poor children. Dr Jack said that he only wished he could have saved them, and wished them safe passage. One month later Dr Jack woke with searing stomach cramps, and died later in the day from cholera.