While the notes of a Chopin sonata drifted through the garden, he waited and imagined, and behind him, the gossip ensued.
"Cursed?" asked a brassy female voice.
"She's going to be the death of us all," came the reply in a low, ominous whisper such as children affect to tell ghost stories by candlelight.
The woman laughed and asked skeptically, "Her?"
"I know, I know. She seems an unlikely instrument of doom, but so it is. It happened at her christening. The old bitch -- the emerald miner's widow, you've heard about her? -- stood over her frilled bassinet and said the lass would slay us all ... not with knives, mind you, or with poison in our rum or asps in our beds, not by mutiny or pistol or any other means you might conjure for killing, but with a very queer murder weapon indeed. You see, that little lady will slay us with ..." -- he paused for effect -- "... her voice"
This was not news to James, who had read the girl's diary, but he heard a derisive snort of laughter from the woman. "Her voice? Whatever do you mean?" she asked.
Slowly, careful to keep the piano out of his line of sight, James turned to the gossipmongers. The lecher was a white-bearded fellow and the woman had a horsey, well-bred face. They were craning their necks to see across the garden, and there was a leer in the man's eyes as he darted out his pink tongue to wet his lips. With great restraint, James did not follow his lewd gaze to the piano.
"Simply this," the lecher explained to the woman. "The old bitch pronounced that when the girl speaks, all within earshot shall drop down dead."
"Ha-ha! You lot are still living, I see. It must have been a good joke when she spoke her first words -- bit of a flinch all around?"
"Yes, well, I suppose there will be. You see, she has never yet uttered a single sound."
"What? Ever? Not even as a baby?"
"Not after the christening. Not a peep. Damnedest thing."
An ominous silence was left to hang there. The heat felt carnivorous. The lecher drained his drink and looked for more. The ice was running low. There was never enough ice. British hands looked swollen clutching their cocktails. There was in the air always the subtle stench of overripe fruit. For years after these British had returned to their dainty island, when they smelled this soft decay, they would think of fevers and legless beggars, and sad elephants wandering down lanes.
"And has she really never made a sound?" the horsey woman murmured.
"Nary a sigh nor a snort of indignation," said the girl's own mother, joining them and watching her daughter as if she were a monkey brought to entertain them. "She believes the curse. I think the servants convinced her of it. Always whispering. Indians and their nonsense!"
"A bit eerie though, isn't it?" the woman said uneasily. She was new to India, and she was finding that here in this wild land, strange twinges of belief had a way of intruding into one's cultured disbelief like trick cards in a deck to be drawn at random. In India, sometimes, one could accidentally believe the oddest things. "Perhaps she's just mute," she suggested hopefully.
"Perhaps," allowed the mother, her eyes twinkling with merry mischief as she said in a baleful voice, "Who knows, though. Perhaps it's all true. If you'd like to find out, I'll encourage her to sing us an aria. Her sisters have been practicing 'Una voce poca fa' and she must surely have the words by heart."
"Damn me," said her husband, the one-armed Agent of Jaipur himself. "I'm sure even the servants and the mynah birds have the words by heart. The girls never stop wailing that bloody thing."
"Wailing! Gerald, hush!" She batted at him with her hand and the others laughed. "The girls must have their culture!"
"Culture!" the Agent hooted. Catching sight of James, he said with a conspiratorial wink, "Girl's got the right idea in my book. Nothing wrong with a silent woman, eh?"
James forced himself to smile. He doubted his smile could conceal his loathing of these people, but they didn't seem to notice it. After a moment he drifted away from them and wandered at the edge of the garden. He knew by the music -- Liszt now -- that the girl was still at the piano, and he wanted to cleanse the gossip from his mind before he finally let himself see her. He breathed the scent of a strange lily and fingered some broad waxen leaves. He watched a beetle's progress across a flagstone, and when he could stand it no longer, he turned on his heel and looked to the piano.
And there she was.
Her composure marked her out at once from the women around her, who laughed too loudly with their heads thrown back. Her back was straight, her neck white. Her hair, upswept, was the color of dark chocolate. She was turned away from him so James began to move through the crowd, ignoring the coy murmurs of other girls as he went.
He wended his way round to the foot of the grand piano and the girl was revealed to him. Her face, as he had known it would be, was perfect. It was heart-shaped and delicate and flushed with the exertions of her passionate playing. Her eyes were downcast, their color still a mystery. James was strangely moved to see that she did indeed have freckles, as he had imagined. They were as fine as a sift of cinnamon, and he found himself wanting to count them, to lie with her in a sunny patch of garden and touch them one by one, tracing the contours of her cheek, letting his finger drift down to her lips.... He saw she was biting her lip.
Drinking in his first close sight of her, James already knew her better than any of these others did. He knew from her diary that if she was biting her lip, it meant she was having one of her bad days.
He had imagined himself, fancifully, to be half in love with the writer of the mysterious diary, but now, seeing her, that vague fancy was swept away by the exhilaration of actually falling in love with her, not by halves, but fully and profoundly. His heartbeat pulsed in his hands with the desire to reach out and touch her.
She looked up suddenly and saw him. She saw the na**d look in his eyes and her fingers faltered on the keys. The jarring of the music turned all heads and everyone at the party witnessed that first fused stare. James couldn't look away from her. Her eyes were pale gray and they were lonely, and haunted, and hungry. She slowly released her lower lip from between her teeth as she stared back at him.
She was feeling, under the vivid gaze of this soldier, that she had stepped out of a fog and been seen clearly for the first time.
FIVE The Caged Bird
In her diary she had written:
Most days I believe in the curse with all my heart. I believe that 1 might kill with no more effort than it takes others to sing or pray. Those days are easy. My voice sleeps and I have no terrible impulses to speak. But some days I wake with doubts and worse, spite, and every moment speech trembles on my lips so that I have to bite them. I look at the faces all around me, my parents, that horrid old chaplain, all the others with that tippling flush in their cheeks too early in the day, and I think I will burst into song just to see the flash of terror in their eyes before we know, all of us and at last, if it is true or not. If I can kill them all with a word. Those are the bad days.