As the capercaillie wandered away into the pines, leaving Ross with the feeling of being absolutely alone, with nothing else stirring in the field, he was invaded by an intense dismay at his own shortcomings. Jane Adeane, his adored ‘White Angel’, had looked down at him from her great height and found him wanting. He had searched for but could not find the courage to travel vast oceans in the hope of saving his brother’s life. What in the world was to become of such a flawed and cowardly man?

RAJAH

In Borneo, things were no longer quite as Valentine Ross believed them to be. Edmund Ross, recovering slowly from Malaria, was not lying in the kind of ‘fearful hovel’ so vividly imagined by his brother, but had been brought to the grand, high-portalled house of a self-styled Rajah of the South Sadong Territories, Sir Ralph Savage.

Here, the young man rested on clean linen sheets. On Sir Ralph’s orders, Chinese servants brought Edmund sweet water from a garden well, bowls of sticky rice and a potion made of bitter Jesuit’s Bark and molasses, upon which he himself swore as a preventative against death from Malaria.

Edmund slept a fevered sleep. From time to time, Sir Ralph would come into his room and look at him. Pale from his sickness, his long-fingered hands resting on his chest, his dirty hair matted, as though to resemble thorns, Edmund Ross reminded Sir Ralph of nobody so much as Jesus Christ himself, and this strange likeness brought into the rajah’s heart complicated feelings of wonder and yearning. He longed for Edmund to wake up for long enough, not just to sip the bark potion, but to begin to talk to him.

There were many rajahs in Borneo at this time. All had their hearts set to the ticking of the European clock and acted as rulers over the native peoples: Malays, Arabs, Malanaus, Dyaks, Bugis and a small contingent of hard-working Chinese. One of them had even waged a deadly war in 1863 on behalf of one Malay tribe against another, seemingly only to assert his power to command bloodshed and sacrifice, as if that was the one thing he yearned for.

But the rajahs differed wildly in their treatment of those who laboured in their fiefdoms. Most were incompetent, demonstrated an unnecessary cruelty born of fear, and – often to their own surprise – could detect no improvements in the quality of human existence which surrounded them, not understanding that if they had treated their workers with greater consideration, they could have begun to make things better in this singular part of the world.

Sir Ralph Savage, however – despite the terror that seemed to be written in his name – was not quite of this lazy and unthinking kind. He saw that rajahs and sultans could, if they chose, bring happiness and prosperity to those they claimed to rule over, provided they refrained from levying harsh taxes on the Malays and had the imagination to see where that happiness might lie. Sir Ralph was a man who adored being alive, who found beauty in things which others did not necessarily see, and who, despite his overwhelming appetites, believed that Jesus Christ would watch over him and bring him, by some means, to everlasting salvation, if he could only do some good in the world.