Did the rajah sense that this man would try to do him harm?

Perhaps not. He only sensed something about him that he mistrusted and disliked, the more so because Leon, apparently bearing the man’s disdainful behaviour towards him without flinching, was behaving like a child in his excitement about the explosions Scaife would bring about.

Sir Ralph warned his lover that the ‘black powder’ was a fiendish substance which often surprised people by doing more damage than was intended, but Leon brushed this ‘feeble talk’ aside and spent his time showing Scaife ‘the mangrove problem’ at the river and putting in front of him designs for cans that the engineer immediately dismissed as useless, telling him that there was no capacity to manufacture cans on the rajah’s estate and that these would have to be shipped to Kuching from China. The Chinese, he said, were the only people in this part of the world who knew how to make airtight containers. But if he expected Leon to be dismayed by this, he was wrong.

‘China! China, Sir Raff!’ said Leon, in a voice choked with excitement. ‘I will cross the South China Sea. I will become Emperor of the Tin Can dynasty!’

‘Hush, Leon,’ said the rajah. ‘I’m tired.’

‘No,’ said Leon. ‘You don’t be. Tired is very bad. I work. You see how hard I work with this engineer? Soon, I will be rich from this cannery – and then I will leave you.’

Sir Ralph made no answer to this. For as long as he could remember, Leon had tortured him with threats of leaving. It was an emotional trick played too often to be convincing. But on this occasion, perhaps because, for some days now, the rajah had indeed been feeling sad and listless, the idea that Leon might one day actually abandon him was suddenly so unbearable that it choked him and he was quite unable to speak. He felt his heart pound in his great barrel chest. Tears started under his closed eyelids and began running down his cheeks.

Instead of gently wiping away the tears, Leon began pinching Sir Ralph’s face, as if to gather the tears up, like tiny fallen leaves, or spilt crumbs in his hand. This pinching felt cruel, and the cruelty excited Leon, but instead of moving, as he usually did, towards some sexual expression of his anger, he left the rajah’s bed and began upon a terrible diatribe of how, whenever white men came to the rajah’s house, they scorned him and belittled him – he, Leon, the man upon whom everything depended. He said he heard the word ‘savage’, unspoken but directed by thought alone against him and all his race. And the rajah – ‘you whose very name is Savage!’ – had never defended him. With the ‘Jesus boy’ he had communed ‘in secret hammocks’ and as for Septimus Scaife, why had this uncouth man not been told that Leon was to be treated with courtesy and respect? Was all this surely not proof that Sir Ralph did not truly love him, did not truly see him as an equal, but only used him as a slave to satisfy his carnal appetites? Let the rajah think upon this. For the time was coming when Leon would have made his own fortune, when he would lie down in his bed, not with any white rajah, but on a mattress stuffed with silver dalers. And then he would buy a prau and sail away.