A breeze stirred the trees and the baby smiled again. She looked as if she might coo, and Estella felt suddenly that her own death was perched upon her shoulder like a bird. How easy to die, she thought, and how fitting, if she were to be the first victim of this curse ... the first victim of this child, whom at the behest of a demon she had just turned into a murderer. For, as surely as twenty-two children in Kashmir lived, people in Jaipur would die.
But not yet. Vasudev had his curses, but Estella was not without power of her own. Before the Political Agent's wife could sweep over and scoop up her child, Estella leaned down, pressed her fingertip gently but firmly to the baby's lips and whispered, "You will stay silent, won't you, little thing? Until you are old enough to understand the curse, your voice will be as a bird in a cage." And so it was.
Three Limbo
Year by year the girl grew up. Queen Victoria died. Black rats aboard steamships carried plague from China to India. Millions died. Estella and Vasudev were kept very busy. The Great War began with a shot. The Germans used poison gas first, but the British followed suit. They were so ashamed of themselves they forbade the very soldiers who carried the chlorine canisters from uttering the word "gas." Millions died. In India, Vasudev's curses mostly came to their fruition. Among their victims were a child in Chittagong who went fleetingly invisible every time she sneezed, and a Punjabi princeling who crowed like a cockerel at dawn.
But through some remarkable depth of will, the gray-eyed daughter of the Agent of Jaipur held her own curse in a curious limbo, and after more than seventeen years, the British still had no reason to believe in it.
Vasudev chafed and swore. "It's not fair, you meddling with the servants!" he hissed to Estella, his face flushing in fury so that its two halves nearly matched crimson. "You haven't let things take their natural course!"
"Natural course?" Estella repeated, giving him a flat look. "There are no curses in the 'natural course.' You've had every opportunity to influence the Agent's servants too, Vasudev. You spend enough time spying in the garden there."
The demon gave her a sour look but said nothing. What could he say? That that damned Pranjivan had taken unfair advantage of his broad shoulders and flashing white teeth to sway the girl's servants? That the factotum was too damned handsome, and an ugly little demon hadn't a chance at a game like that? It was true, but he wouldn't say it. Even demons have some dignity. The truth was, Estella had won -- so far. First that trick of whispering the girl silent until she was old enough to understand the curse, and now this. The servants believed Pranjivan, damned handsome beggar, and the girl believed the servants. In that raucous palace of singing sisters, she lived her life butterfly-silent, never giving so much as a laugh out loud. When Vasudev spied on her in the garden, he saw a deep sadness in her, a dreamy wistfulness, but he never saw her test the curse, not even on a beetle or an ant. It was inhuman. The girl wasn't normal!
That one unfulfilled curse was the single blemish on Vasudev's joy when he guessed that the old bitch was dying.
Estella had been old for a long time, and sometimes the demon had feared that she would never die, that he would be hamstrung by her human sensibilities forever. But now she was fading. Growing papery. Pain became plain in every furrow of her face and in the way she moved gingerly down the onyx tunnels to their morning meetings. She was dying at last! Vasudev wanted to gloat, but the curse restrained him. It was unthinkable he shouldn't have the satisfaction of it while the old bitch was still alive to suffer from it!
He sat opposite Estella and drummed his fingers on the table, unable to triumph at her pain and pallor. Furiously he wondered how he might finally tip the balance. How he might make the girl speak at last.
He had no way of knowing, as he scowled and muttered, that at that very moment a soldier on a train from Bombay was discovering a lost diary wedged between the seat and the wall, and not just any lost diary, but the lost diary of the cursed girl herself. And even as that train wended its way toward Jaipur, the soldier was flipping it open to the first page.
Some would assert that Providence was at work, shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Others would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: A lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched memories.
In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.
FOUR The Solders
he soldier's name was James Dorsey, and he had dropped his lighter down between the seat and the wall of the compartment. It was the lighter his friend Gaffney had told
him to take off his corpse if he became a corpse, and then he had. Six hundred thousand men had died at the Somme, but James had not. What remained of his regiment had been torn apart in the Second Marne, and again, somehow, James had survived. He'd joined the Foreign Office after the War and come to India for another try at death -- a more interesting one than mortars and gas, perhaps. Here among the tigers and the dacoits' long knives there were many to choose from, not the least of them the marvelous fevers with names like exotic flowers.
Digging out the dropped lighter, James found the diary wedged down between the seat and the wall and he fished it out too. It was bound in floral linen and filled with girlish script. "The secrets of a blushing maiden," he quipped with a smile that brought his dimples out, and he flipped it right open with no scruple to preserving the maidenly modesty of its writer. Indeed, he expected none. He had endured his sea voyage in the company of the "fishing fleet" -- English ladies hying themselves to India to catch husbands -- and he felt as if he had barely escaped being drugged and dragged to the altar. He thought he knew the character of English girls in India, and surely this diary would be more of the same.
Tucking Gaffney s lighter back into his pocket, James began to read.
His smile wavered. It clung for a time in disbelief and then fell away in stages. The little book did indeed hold the secrets of a blushing maiden, but they weren't the sort of secrets he'd expected, and by the time his train arrived in Jaipur, James had read the diary through twice and found himself -- against all expectation -- to be half in love with its writer.
That was ridiculous, of course. Certainly a man couldn't fall in love with cursive on a page, could he? He scanned the inside covers of the little book for some hint of the girl's identity but found no name.