"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.
So far, I have managed to forbear and doubtless I will go on forbearing. But sometimes when they treat me like an idiot child, talking loud and in short sentences, with that smug sense of their own charity -- how good they are, to speak to the idiot girl!-- I can't help but amuse myself deliberating, if I were to kill them with a word, what should that word be? Hello? Listen? Oops? But I rather think it wouldn't be a word at all, but a song, that they might hear the voice I sacrifice for their sake every single day.
I am always sick with guilt after such wicked thoughts, and the guilt drives the wickedness out.
Her name was Anamique, after a Flemish soprano her mother had heard sing the role of Isolde once at Bayreuth. Anamique had been singing Isolde in her head since she was twelve and her mother had ordered the libretto for her older daughters' singing lessons. Inside herself, where she sang, Anamique's voice was far more beautiful than her sisters' voices, but she was the only one who knew it. She was the only one who would ever know it.
Years of warnings had built up in her. Her ayah believed the curse and so did the rest of the servants, even the stern old Rajput whose job it had been to guide her around the garden on her pony, Mackerel, when she was small. The servants had always implored her to keep silent, and they prevailed. Even while her mother commanded her to speak, her ayah was there whispering in Rajasthani in her other ear, "Hush, my pearl, keep quiet. You must keep your voice in its cage, like a beautiful bird. If you let it out, it will kill us all."
Anamique believed her. One couldn't help believing things whispered in Rajasthani.
To her family, she wrote notes on a small tablet she carried always with her, though her mother often disdained to read them, as it would have required putting on her spectacles, which she took great pains never to do.
For the servants, who were illiterate, Anamique developed an elaborate language of gestures that almost looked like dance when shaped by her graceful hands. And when they spoke to her - bless them -- they didn't raise their voices as if she were deaf, or speak slowly as if she were dim-witted.
Because of her silence, Anamique had not been sent to school in England like her sisters and all the other British children, but had spent her whole life in India, and most of that with the servants. There was more of India in her than of that far green isle she had rarely seen. She played the vina as well as she played the piano, and she knew all the Hindu gods by name. She had ridden a camel in the Thar Desert, scooped rice into a saddhu's bowl, and been lifted by an elephant's trunk to gather figs from the high branches. She had even gone back to her ayah's dusty village for festivals and slept on a string charpoy with the native children, nestled together like spoons. The voice that was full within her not only sang full lyric soprano but could chant the Vedas, and yet she bit her lip and played accompaniment to her sisters' unremarkable singing.