The Hills of Singapore by Dawn Farnham Page A

marriages, counted against them. Isabel was now engaged, at her mother’s urging, to the son of a Spanish merchant and his native wife from Manila. She did not care a fig for this man, she had told Charlotte, and despaired of her life with him. She envied her sister Isobel, who had caught an Englishman, a merchant from Prince of Wales Island.
    Perhaps, mused Charlotte, I am sensitive to these changes because of my own life: a child born of the love of a Scottish man and a Creole woman, I love a Chinese man and am the widow of an Armenian Dutchman whose mother was the child of a Dutch–Indian marriage. She shook her head. It all seemed so pointless. Her own children were half this and that. All this blood nonsense gave her a headache and she disliked these insidious attitudes which she felt creeping like a shadow over the town.
    Doubtless if Butterworth had the slightest inkling of any of this, he would have ripped up the invitation in a trice. This thought gave her a small moment of pleasure, and she stopped her musings and returned to the tasks of the next few days, one of which was enrolling her beloved little half-Chinese boy in the best school in Singapore.
    Charlotte picked up her parasol and set out through her gardens. It was early and the air held a comparative coolness that only the dawn and the dusk can bring in a tropical climate. She was going to the blessing of the Church of the Good Shepherd.
    Charlotte greeted Evangeline and sat amidst the considerable congregation, both European and Chinese, gathered for the event. The activity and vitality of this Catholic community stood in stark contrast to the benign indifference of the Protestants.
    She had been to St. Andrews many times over the years and always remarked on the general absence of the population, the sleepy and indifferent attitudes of the few who were there. One rainy Sunday, long ago, when Tigran was alive, she, Robert and John Thomson, the Surveyor of the Straits Settlements, had gone to a morning service.
    â€œIf the English be the true church, it is evident the East India Company do not think so,” John Thomson had murmured.
    St. Andrew’s seated perhaps four hundred people, but around them there had been but twenty worshippers. Three emaciated young ladies had occupied one pew, an old man with his dark wife behind them. A corpulent bald gentleman fanned himself, a pretty blonde sat with her old mother. Men from the garrison had occupied other pews. Above them the punkahs waved like the wings of birds in flight.
    In the dusty silence, suddenly the organ had pealed forth. The Reverend White and his clerk entered. The service was read, the responses made by the clerk flippant and indifferent. The congregation played no part. Psalms were given out, the organ boomed, a pagan native boy exerting himself mightily pumping air, but neither the clerk nor the worshippers had sung. The sermon had been tedious platitudes. No charity was asked, and the congregation roused itself and departed.
    As they had walked through the extensive gardens which commanded the finest sea view in Singapore, Charlotte was moved to ask John his opinion on this.
    â€œIt is a mystery,” he had said. “The Company pays its chaplains magnificently but what for, it is difficult to discern. The curate does not visit his people, good heavens no, he plants nutmegs. For the Company forbids him, under the heaviest penalties, to be an apostle to the heathen, and John Company is more powerful here than his heavenly Master. He is the burra padre , you know, the great man’s priest, not the coolie padre , ministering to the poor.”
    â€œSo why build such churches John? Look at this place, magnificent, on the finest piece of land in the whole town.”
    John had shrugged. “Not for religion certainly. Perhaps some abstruse point of East India Company policy lost to reason. The Europeans do not attend church and the natives are all pagans or Mohammedans.