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The Baldaya Children
Nancy Jeffreys was the daughter of a respectable family of Sussex gentlefolk who had disgraced herself and her family in the year 1800 by running off with a Portuguese gentleman who was only very vaguely known to his Embassy as an extremely minor sprig on the vast and shady Baldaya family tree. The gentleman had been not only Roman Catholic, which was enough to damn him eternally in the eyes of respectable Sussex gentlefolk in the year 1800, but also married, which had immediately put the whole thing beyond the pale. So Nancy’s family had cast her off and refused to mention her name ever again. Luckily for the offspring of the union, the Portuguese lady who had had the misfortune to be the Senhor’s legal wife had very shortly thereafter died, it was said of a broken heart, and he had married Nancy but a few weeks before their daughter was born.
This legitimizing of both the union and its product had not made the affair any more acceptable to the respectable Portuguese gentlefolk amongst whom the gallant Senhor had been used to move, and after several years struggling for some sort of social acceptance on his very minor country estate, he had entrusted the estate to a cousin and gone off to seek his fortune in the East. Complete with wife and children. He had settled on the western coast of India and there gone into trade jointly with two men of around his own age: a merchant of his own race and a cheery Englishman who made no bones about being an uneducated fellow who had come out to the Indies to seek his fortune.
The partnership had prospered and all had gone swimmingly until the day on which the Senhor came home to his white house with its vine-swagged deep verandahs to find his servants in floods of tears and his wife run off with an Indian princeling. Possibly Nancy Jeffreys Baldaya had become bored with life as the wife of a prosperous India merchant: she was prone to boredom, was Nancy. Swearing horribly, the Senhor had girded on his pistols and his sword, and dashed off into the hinterland in pursuit of the pair. He was, not altogether surprisingly, never heard of again.
That left little Nan (for Nancy) and even smaller Dominick, Daphne and Dicky. Nancy had firmly imposed the English diminutive of her eldest little girl’s name, and even more firmly named the boys and the second girl for her own relatives, ignoring her husband’s wishes in the matter—Nancy had been like that. The Senhor had endeavoured to use Portuguese versions of the boys’ names, easy enough in the case of little Dom, but rather more difficult with Dicky, in especial as his mother had encouraged him to refuse to answer to anything but “Dicky,” or at a pinch, “Richard”—Nancy had been like that, too.
Senhor Baldaya’s Portuguese partner immediately wrote home in an effort to contact the children’s relatives. After ten months had elapsed with no reply to any of his several letters, it became fairly evident that there was not going to be one. The Baldayas were a powerful family and if they wished to have nothing to do with these dubious little fruits of the loins of one of their least distinguished representatives, there was, realistically, very little that anyone could do. Neither of the partners could leave the business in order to spend an appreciable period in Portugal sorting out the ownership of the estate which should properly have come to Dom, and there was the additional point that the Peninsula War was now in full swing. After some consultation they decided that the Englishman should take the children. It was true he was unmarried (though not that there was no woman in his house) but then, his Portuguese partner already had a houseful of children of his own, and the four little semi-orphans would be better off with a man who could give them his whole paternal attention and not one sixteenth of it each.
It might have been supposed not only that Senhor Baldaya would never be heard of again, but that Nancy Jeffreys never would, either. And in fact the cheery John Edwards and his partner did not suppose it, and, though she was a woman of a remarkably sanguine temperament, neither did the Portuguese lady from Macao who was the partner’s wife; and so, very sensibly, none of them encouraged the children to hope for news of Nancy.
But one cloudless day, in the year that Nan turned fifteen and Dom fourteen, Nancy was heard of again. There was a terrific rumpus in the street outside Mr Edwards’s house, Nan, Dom, Daphne and Dicky ran to the grilled windows, as did most of the large household of Indian servants, and all stood transfixed.
“An elephant! Coming here!” gasped Dom.
“THREE elephants!” shrieked Dicky.
So it was. Three elephants, one with an extraordinarily elaborate howdah, plus a horde of attendants, several of them on horseback and garbed in plumed turbans. It was immediately evident to the experienced Baldaya children that these were private elephants and not the kind that were hired out for work, for they were, though rather dusty, elaborately and beautifully painted as to their heads and trunks.
“Perhaps it’s the maharajah that Uncle John is hoping to do business with,” said Nan as the entire entourage turned in at the gates of Uncle John’s house.
“Those are not maharajah elephants, Nanni baba!” cried their ayah immediately.
Nor they were. They were a rajah’s elephants, as it turned out, but only a minor rajah’s, and in fact had been sent by the minor rajah with whom the children’s mother had run away. John Edwards would have been prepared to fight for the children if necessary: particularly for Nan and Daphne, for he could not think little European girls would be happy as the inmates of an Indian zenana: but it was not that: the rajah had plenty of children of his own. No: quite the reverse: the rajah had sent the Baldaya children their little sister. …
—From The Portuguese Widow, http://theportuguesewidow.blogspot.com/
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