The Temple Dancer (32 page)

"Forgive me, sir."

Victorio snorted. This interrupted the rhythm of his gasps, and his face
grew pale before he found the strength to speak again. "I had planned to
demand seventy thousand hun. I would have taken sixty thousand, but I
had hopes of seventy. But you interfered. Now we will get seven hundred thousand hun for the nautch girl, thanks to you, ten times what I had
hoped." He gasped at the effort of saying this long sentence. "What made
you name such an outrageous figure?"

Da Gama thought about telling him about Slipper, about the secret
headdress, but decided against it. "A man of the Khaswajara's stature coming to your factor, all alone? Something big was up."

"Yes, you're right. Very observant. Very good." Victorio licked his dry
lips, and Mouse patted his face with a white kerchief. "I have decided to
make you a partner." Da Gama looked up in surprise. He thought he had
already been made a partner. Rich men had no honor, he thought with disgust. He wished he were back on a horse with his pistolas tucked into his
belt. "Yes, a partner. And when you bring her here, you'll get your first
commission. What do you say to twenty thousand hun, eh?"

Da Gama lowered his head. In fact it seemed a paltry sum compared to
Victorio's profit; on the other hand, it was ten years' wages. "Whatever you
think best, sir," he answered with as much gratitude as he could muster.
"That will be more gold than I have ever owned."

"Exactly," Victorio said. A little yellow was returning to his cheeks,
and he began to sit up straighter. "That is why I will keep the money safe
for you, in an account that you may draw upon at will."

And that you may turn on or off as you like, Da Gama thought bitterly. "I'll have it now, sir, if you please. And in gold, if you please. Otherwise you can find another man to fetch your nautch girl."

Victorio blanched. Seeing this, Mouse glared at Da Gama. "What have
you said to my master, you lout!"

But before Da Gama could reply, Victorio placed a heavy hand on
Mouse's arm. "Quiet, son, quiet. It is just farang talk. Do not worry." To
Da Gama he said in Portuguese, "You must mind your manners around
him, sir. For love of me he'd put a dagger through your heart while you are
sleeping, whatever I may say. Give him a smile, sir."

But though Da Gama did as he was told, Mouse eyes shone with a murderous gleam. "I still want the gold, sir," Da Gama said with his most polite tone and another glance at Mouse.

"I have no gold to give you."

"Surely ..."

"Listen to me. I've made you a partner; now you must share my secrets. We have no cash. None. Mouse buys my food on credit." Victorio patted the eunuch's withered hand. "I must ask you to fund your own
journey to Belgaum. Bearers, palanquins, horses, and so on. I expect it will
be only seventy or eighty hun, but that is more than I have at the moment."

Da Gama remembered Shahji and the loan he had nearly refused. He
nodded and Victorio continued.

"Also ten or twenty hun for me. I must keep up appearances. The important part's the girl."

"The nautch girl," Da Gama agreed.

Victorio frowned. "Her? She's nothing. Seven lakh hun? I'm speaking
of Lucinda. How much do you think she's worth, eh? The heir to the
Dasana fortune-how many lakhs do you think that's worth, eh? How
many crore of hun? You saw the factor. How much do you think that's
worth, eh? Carlos and I have been busy. And it all belongs to her."

Da Gama let out a low whistle. "Someday, you mean, when she comes
of age. But you're her guardian, so it falls to you ..."

Victorio, now fully animated, raised his hand. "As a partner you must
now share this information, but in confidence."

Now what? thought Da Gama, who realized that he was only a partner
whenever Victorio had bad news to tell.

Victorio glanced at Mouse, and though he and Da Gama spoke in Portuguese, still Victorio whispered his next words: "She came of age a year
and two months ago."

Da Gama looked up, shocked. Vittorio nodded his heavy head. "We
kept this secret from her, Carlos and I, so that we might better order her affairs. Hers is the third greatest fortune in Portugal." Victorio enjoyed seeing the amazement on Da Gama's face.

"I had no idea."

"No one was meant to know. Now bring her here, and swiftly. We cannot afford to lose a moment!"

Da Gama nodded, though he did not understand Victorio's sense of urgency. "What do you mean to do, sir?"

"Do? Why marry her of course!"

Not even Da Gama could hide his amazement. "I thought she was
pledged. . ."

"To that fool Oliveira? I arranged that match. It is easily disposed of."

"But, sir, your health ..."

"You think I'm too old? You're wrong. I'll have an heir in no time, if
she's fertile. It still gets hard, believe me. You can ask Mouse if it doesn't."

Da Gama's brain was swirling. "What if she objects?"

"She's still my ward. She has no choice!"

"You just said she's come of age!"

Victorio shook his head. "She doesn't know that, though, does she?"
He raised his eyebrows until his jet eyes showed, black as a night without
stars. Then his head slumped, and Mouse hurried over to straighten his
knit cap and pat the beads of moisture from his brow.

"You must rest, uncle," he whispered, stealing an angry glance at Da
Gama. "You exert yourself too much."

"But I shall exert myself a great deal more when Lucinda gets here."
His wet laugh became a wheezing cough.

Da Gama tried to be a soldier. Ignore your feelings and just do your
duty, he told himself. But his mind's eye saw that sweet blossom bouncing
beneath this old man's sorry ass. Think, he told himself. There must be a
way out of this.

"You have no choice, soldado," Victorio said as if he read Da Gama's
thoughts. "Not if you want those twenty thousand hun."

Da Gama's cheeks grew hot. "What has that to do with you? It's her
money now. I could just as easy get them from her direct."

Victorio's heavy lips lifted into a sly, cruel grin. "How? I'll be her husband soon, so the fortune comes to me. Also she's a murderess. Also she's
mad, or going mad like her mother. I have friends everywhere, in Bijapur
and Goa, and in Lisbon. You are a nobody. You don't know business or
trade or the law. What chance have you against me?"

Victorio leaned forward in his chair, and patted Da Gama's hand. The
old man's swollen flesh looked rough and raw, cracked and scaling at the
knuckles. "You may try to go against me. Perhaps you have the determination, perhaps even the skill. Perhaps. Or you can be my partner, sir. My
partner, and a rich man. Very rich."

Da Gama weighed his options. "All right," he answered softly. Victorio smiled and held out his hand. Cursing himself, Da Gama reached to
take it. But as he did this, the old man gasped.

"What are you doing, sir?" Victorio demanded.

"I thought ..."

"I want those twenty huns we spoke of. Give."

After digging in his pockets, Da Gama took out a few of Shahji's coins.
The old man's palm was dry as sand.

Vittorio leaned back in his chair, contentment and exhaustion on his
face. Mouse took the coins from Victorio, kissing the old man's fingertips.
Da Gama turned his head.

In the gardens of Belgaum palace, a wide platform swing swayed gently under two enormous mango trees. The platform hung from ropes as thick as a
woman's wrist, and the ropes had been covered with cotton batting and
silks of many colors. The ropes were tied to the corners of the platform, so
it stayed perfectly flat as it swung in the shadows. Cicadas droned outside
the garden walls beneath a lazy sun.

The platform floor was padded, creating a large, gently moving room.
Three women drowsed among the bolsters and cushions of the swing. The
blind woman hummed, first one note, then another, as the swing sawed
back and forth, back and forth. Her dry voice mixed with the creaking of
the ropes and branches. Another woman sat propped against a cushion
reading a long, palm-leaf book.

The last of the three floated with eyes half-closed. Shadows and sunlight danced on those dark lids like silent fireworks. She felt deliciously
adrift, tetherless, suspended; as though she were a baby who had not yet
learned to speak, not yet even learned her name.

As she sailed in the soft garden air, the blind woman said, "Lucinda."
And when she did not answer, the blind woman said again, "Lucinda!"

"Who is Lucinda?" the young woman answered. "I do not know her
anymore." And the other women smiled as though she joked.

She recalled a woman named Lucinda. But that woman now lay scattered in pieces on the banks of a stream, at the bottom of the chasm beneath a treacherous road. Some pieces of her might still be found, the
woman guessed, in the trunk that had tumbled from a bullock cart. But
Lucinda, that poor farang woman, was now lost forever.

Lucinda had been a lifeless thing, like the Colombina puppet in Tio
Victorio's gilded theatre: a doll dressed in corsets and frocks and hose and
drawers; all animated by another's hand. That had been Lucinda's life; a life
of squeezing: squeezing into slippers too small; into corsets too tight; into
roles that had only made her sad. But that Lucinda, that puppet, was scattered in pieces at the bottom of a ravine.

The woman who once had been Lucinda hoped never to see her again.

Lucinda had spoken of this to Lady Chitra who had of course understood at once. "The dew on the leaves before the sun rises," she answered in
her dry voice. "The silence before the cock crows. The eggshell not yet
broken by its chick." So Chitra said, patting her hand. Her black eyes,
sightless as stones, wavered aimlessly. "Not what is, but what might be."

The woman who had once been Lucinda was now wrapped in saris, in
yards of crisp silk. Red saris, green saris, black saris shot with gold. Her
long hair fell in a soft braid. On her hands she had patterns painted with
mehndi.

Now she walked differently. Maybe it was the way her twisted ankle
had healed so quickly; or maybe because her tender feet now were cradled
in sandals and could feel the ground. Without a corset, she could see the
swell of her breasts as she breathed. Air flowed around her bare legs when
she moved; silk teased her nipples. Her pale face flushed sometimes with all
the new sensations, and she'd clasp her arms around her chest and swallow
hard, hoping no one saw.

People still called her Lucinda-she called herself Lucinda-but it was
a stranger's name-repeated two or three times before she rememberedyes, that's me. I am that one, Lucinda.

Here no one knew her past. Aldo alone might guess what she'd been
like, a young Portuguese woman living in Goa. But she and Aldo had barely met before the changes began, and Aldo himself had started wearing
jamas, just like a Hindi.

Maya only knew her as the woman who'd shared her howdah-not a
little girl who had grown up in Goa, but the woman Lucinda had become
since she left her home.

Lady Chitra's young serving girl, Lakshmi, sat on a stool and tugged
the towing rope of the big platform swing. The women glided on it, lost in
silent thought.

Far away, at the bottom of a deep ravine, Lucinda's dresses and corsets
caught the breeze and tumbled over wet rocks. In a tiny pool of gravel, the
stream swirled over her miniature portraits of her mama and her papa, and of
the gray-haired Marques Oliveira, her fiance. Beside them in the clear water
lay her pot of vermilion, and her delicate silver box of arsenico, and the shattered blue glass bottle that had held her belladonna. A mongoose had taken
one of Lucinda's silk slippers to her den and laid her four pink, hairless babies in its toe. But on the swing the woman called Lucinda, now newly born,
opened her eyes and looked around as though waking after a long sleep.

"Come see, come see!" a man's voice called.

"Who is that?" Chitra whispered. "It is that man Geraldo!" She sat up,
turning her sightless eyes toward the sound. "Go out, go out! This is the
women's garden!"