So, a mystery.
He held the book tenderly as he stepped off the train and into his new life, and later, in his lodgings, he read it a third time, mining it for clues as to who the girl might be. There was enough to suggest she had lived in Jaipur, though whether she still did was uncertain. The diary had been lost on a train, after all. It occurred to him she might be gone. Absurdly, the thought left him desolate. He chided himself that she was only a stranger.
But she wasn't, really. She was all here, in this book. Not her name, and not her face, but she was here, and absurd or not, he thought he might actually love her.
If she was in Jaipur, he vowed, he would find her.
He didn't have long to wait. It was only his second day in the city when he was invited to a garden party at the Agent's Residence.
The upper echelons of the Indian Civil Service were known as the "heaven-born," and when James saw the legion of white-turbaned servants bearing trays of colored sweets and cocktails among the fantastical banyan trees and the overlush vine flowers, he began to see why. In England, bureaucrats could never have lived like this, like little kings with monkeys on leashes and stables full of fine hunting horses. He smiled at his new colleagues, but behind his smile he was thinking how these men had been tipping back gin while other, better men had been holding in their entrails with both hands. His fingers went automatically to Gaffney's lighter in his pocket.
All of James's childhood friends had died in the War. Every single one. James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once, he might have believed it to be the work of Providence, but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others, flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands, and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.
He was distracted from his grim thoughts when he heard a raspy voice over his left shoulder say, "That one, at the piano, that's the girl the old bitch cursed. Damned good fun!"
His cursed girl! James's first impulse was to turn to look but he stopped himself. He didn't like that raspy voice. It had a lecherous sneer about it, and he didn't want his first glimpse of the girl to come at the end of a lecher's pointing finger. He held himself still, his back to the conversation and the piano. He heard the music, though, and became suddenly alert to it.
He had a good ear, and even in the din of high, thin laughter and meaty guffaws he could tell the pianist was extraordinary. Again, he almost turned, but stopped himself and went on listening, imagining what she looked like, trying to conjure a face from the exquisite notes that flowed from her fingers. Delicate, he guessed, but passionate. He felt certain her hair would be dark, and whimsically he imagined freckles. He smiled. It had been a long time since he had savored anticipation like this. Mostly in the past years the things he'd anticipated had been heart-stopping, vicious things like death-wish dashes from one trench to the next.
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."