Square Wave by Mark de Silva

Author:Mark de Silva
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio

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Stagg closed the laptop and drank deeply from a coffee mug full of flat champagne so cheap that it was hardly worse for having lost its life. He shut his eyes and blotted out the light of afternoon.

Rutland would truly head home, Stagg thought, only many years later, in 1680. But the London he fled to would be two-thirds the size by then, hollowed out by the bubonic plague, and with a king, not Rajasingha II but Charles II, the Stuart, restored. The Lord Protector and master Roundhead Oliver Cromwell had lost the confidence of his people and left them longing for the comforts of monarchy.

Rutland’s father, Harold, a prominent Royalist, had relished the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660, though Stephen himself was always more cavalier than Cavalier. Certainly he was at the time he’d left London, in 1658, after a military training, for a life at sea, ostensibly in the name of the commercial interests of the East India Company but really more for the adventuring. The conflicts he’d been enmeshed in on the island had altered his politics, his sense of justice, though he couldn’t say just how, except to say he could be neither Royalist nor Roundhead now.

Stagg’s own predicament, the inchoate strife that surrounded him, how different was it, finally, from what Rutland had experienced abroad? It must be making his politics mutate too in unknown ways. Officially he stood with Penerin and the ruling order. But if the elections, or else a less peaceful force, were to undo it, there was no saying in advance which of the competing actors might earn his sympathy, or what new attachments he might form. This mercenary instinct seemed to be growing in Stagg, and he had to consider whether, beyond the turmoil all around him, his research too might be a catalyst, just as its object, a long-lost Sri Lanka, had been for Rutland.

A century and a half later, as if to revenge his captivity, the Rutland line would return to the island. Lt. General Andrew Philip Bartley Rutland led the final thrust into Kandy and was a leading signatory, in 1815, to the Kandyan Convention, that British treaty of annexation.

In the Uva rebellion that followed, he brought an end to several leading Sinhalese bloodlines, ones very much like his own back in England. He was always of the view that Bulwer-Lytton would articulate years later, and Disraeli would endorse: an “aristocracy of shopkeepers” was not to be preferred to an oligarchy of nobles. Abroad, of course, these English shopkeepers were out of sight, so A. P. B. Rutland was less dispirited by them than by the killing of nobles here in Ceylon, swiftly, brutally, knowing it could only speed the conquest of the commercial classes, however exactly they chose to dispose of the island.

Later, around 1900, Andrew’s grandnephew Gareth Robbins Rutland would serve as deputy governor of Ceylon. He had been an Apostle at Cambridge, at Peterhouse, in fact, where Stagg had been a doctoral student. Gareth’s ascendancy was swift.

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