"Ana ..." he breathed. "You look ... ravishing ..." He was flustered, and couldn't keep his eyes from straying down to her white shoulders. Anamique wanted to dance with him so he would touch her. She wanted him to cup her shoulders with both hands and whisper in her ear, close, his lips touching her so her whole body would shiver like flower petals in a breeze. She wanted him to kiss her. Looking up into his eyes and seeing the radiance in them, seeing the future in them, she was so full of happiness she thought she might burst. She had to bite her lip to keep from singing.
A flicker of anxiety passed through James's eyes when she bit her lip. She laid her hand on his arm and looked up at him, silently asking with her eyes, "What is it?"
Whatever it was, he shook it off. "Look at me, stammering like a fool! You've taken my breath away, Ana, my beautiful girl. I haven't even told you happy birthday yet! Well, happy birthday. Now dance with me!"
He took her hand and led her to the dance floor, and all evening long they danced and danced. Around them the party happened. There were streamers stretched over their heads, and people drank and gossiped, and khitmutgars moved among them with trays of cakes, but Anamique didn't pay attention to any of it. She closed her eyes and felt James's breath stir the fine hairs at her temple and, when he bent to whisper to her, she felt the softness of his lips for an instant on her earlobe. But he said very little, and late in the evening she realized that he hadn't once implored her to speak.
He also hadn't told her that he loved her. She saw the flicker of worry in his eyes now and again, but more often she saw a distance growing in them, like he was far away and getting farther, following some dark trail of thoughts away from the circle of their tangent bodies.
A sick dread began to fill her. Perhaps, she worried, she'd waited too long. Perhaps her eccentricity had lost its charm and become merely inconvenient. Could it be that he was bored? Happiness can turn like a tide for a young girl in love, and Anamique's did. It turned and ebbed and left her leaden and miserable as she danced, and her misery only deepened when James didn't notice right away what she was sure was written on her face plain as words. Indeed, whole moments passed when he seemed entirely to forget her.
What, she wondered, could he be thinking about?
She lifted her hand from his arm and laid her fingertips gently against his cheek, startling him from his reverie. He looked down at her and saw at once the misery in her eyes. His face fell. "Ana, please, don't look so sad," he said. "I'm a fool! I've the world's most beautiful girl in my arms and I let my thoughts get swept away with nonsense! You're all I want to think about."
They were dancing past the verandah door and he swept her toward it and through it, out into the moonlight where they were alone. Truly alone, for the very first time.
James pushed the door closed, muffling the music and laughter within. And though they'd ceased dancing, he didn't drop his arm from her waist, but drew her nearer, her body full against his. He touched her lips with his fingertips, his brow furrowed and his eyes searching her face as if he were looking for the answer to some solemn mystery.
Anamique wanted to cry out, "What's wrong?" but speech wouldn't come so easily. She asked him with her eyes.
In answer, James took something from his pocket. It was a little velvet box, and when he opened it, Anamique saw a small diamond on a thin gold band. She drew in her breath.
"Ana," James whispered, "will you marry me?"
She felt heat moving from her heart out through her limbs, and a flush spread up from the neckline of her gown, all the way over her shoulders and down to her fingertips. Her eyes filled with tears. All traces of misery were chased away by a flood of joy. She had dreamed of this moment so many times, and she had resolved what to do if it came. Reflexively, she bit her lip, but she released it again from between her teeth and hesitantly, wide-eyed and anxious, she opened her mouth to answer.
A look of panic flitted over James's face, and before Anamique could really register it, he leaned down fast and kissed her. He kissed her to stop her lips and in his urgency he wasn't tender about it. His teeth clashed against hers and her head knocked back against the wall. Her answer was lost in the jarring, and though her lips may have shaped the word "yes," she doubted James felt it, so hard was his mouth upon hers.
He drew slowly away and ventured a shame-faced look at her.
She was bewildered and breathless. That kiss, harsh with haste and teeth, it wasn't the kiss she had imagined in her daydreams. She'd never have dreamed James's lips could feel so hard. They may as well have been a hand clamped over her mouth.
She knew why. She looked up at him and spots of color flamed in her cheeks. He was afraid of her. After all of his cajoling and his scoffing at Providence, making her believe she could have a normal life, making her dream and hope, after all that, he was afraid of the curse!
She looked down at his hands. He had not yet slid the ring onto her finger but clutched at it. She took a step back.
"Ana--" James started to say, reaching for her, feebly holding out the ring. "I'm sorry! I don't know what came over me. Please --"
She turned away, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Something was happening to her. Something was building in her, rising. Her breath came faster. Her skin felt feverish. Eighteen years of calm were swept away in a sudden wild rush, like the monsoon floods that ravage mangrove islands and whisk tigers out to sea. She wrenched open the door and ran inside, across the ballroom to the piano where she closed the keyboard so quickly the pianist had to snatch his fingers out. The dancers faltered in their fox-trot and turned to her, bright-eyed, breathless, and smiling. She saw her mother, her sisters. In the doorway, with anguish on his face, was James.
Anamique took a deep breath, parted her lips, and began to sing. It was Isolde that welled forth as her voice at last burst from its cage. It was the "Liebestod," and James's eyes filled with tears. Anamique's voice was wizardry. Honey. The others had just time to register the perfection of it with a kind of stunned euphoria before, as Anamique had really always believed it would, the curse came true.
TEN A Masterpiece
Anamique's powerful voice filled the house and even reached across the garden to the servants' quarters. Not a soul survived her soaring "Liebestod." Crouched in the garden, Vasudev heard the singing and as it entered his ears, he lapsed into a befuddled fugue. But he couldn't die of it -- he hadn't been alive for centuries -- and after the singing ceased, he blinked and shook off his confusion. An incredulous smile unfurled across his face and he gave a great whoop and a caper and he skittered back down to Hell to be there to count the souls as they drifted in.