Heart of the Tiger

by Lynn Kerstan

  Platters and dishes began to disappear, to be replaced with saucers of nuts and candied fruits and honeyed cakes. Syr’s brandy remained, of course, and from the corners of her eyes she watched his large hand on the glass, remembering the Mehndi painting, imagining his hands elsewhere on her body. Knowing that if he tried to put them there, she would draw out her dagger—now sheathed at her waist—and use it.

  She wanted, and she could not accept. That’s how it was for her, how it always would be.

  To her left, Birindar stood and raised his hands. Immediately all voices stilled. He spoke a few words of welcome in his own language, repeated them in English for her sake, and asked Hari Singh to lead the company in a toast to the bride and groom.

  “Here it comes,” muttered Syr, reaching for his glass. “Another bloody Buddha sermon.”

  And it was, but she found it beautiful as Hari, in his deep, resonant voice, recounted the tale of a wedding to which the Lord Buddha was invited. As the guest of honor, he asked the family to go into the streets and welcome anyone who wished to join the celebration. There wasn’t food and drink enough for all who came, yet everyone ate and drank to the full, and always there was more.

  Hari had moved to the center of the room and stood facing her and the man beside her, who had put down his glass to listen respectfully. “And to the bride and the groom,” Hari said, “the Lord Buddha gave his blessing and these words:

  “‘A mortal man can imagine no greater happiness than the bond of marriage that ties together two loving hearts. Be you married unto the truth.’”

  “‘For the husband who loves his wife and desires an everlasting union must be faithful to her, and be to her like truth itself, so that she may rely on him and revere him and minister to him.’”

  “‘And the wife who loves her husband and desires a union that shall be everlasting must be faithful to him so as to be like truth itself, so that he may place his trust in her, and for all his life, he will provide for her.’

  “So said the Lord Buddha.” Putting his hands together beneath his bearded chin, Hari bowed, and the other men stood and bowed as well. The silence that followed, though brief, carried prayers and blessings.

  Then Birindar called on Syr, who uncoiled himself, offered a hand to raise up his bride, and spoke a few sentences in what she presumed to be Punjabi. Laughter followed. He spoke again, and the room rang with laughter and cheering.

  “What did you say to them?” she demanded as he helped her resettle on the cushions.

  “That your beauty was matched only by your obstinacy, and your intelligence far outmatched by your reluctance to obey me. But that you would be tamed, in the way a man tames his woman in the bedchamber, and that I expected you to become before very long a humble and dutiful wife.”

  “Rubbish!” She gave a short laugh, stopped, and looked over at him. “You didn’t really say that. Did you?”

  He grinned. “Pay attention now. The children are about to sing.”

  And they were, a chorus of about fifteen boys and girls, with the younger ones tending to totter off in the direction of whatever got their attention. A little boy broke loose to chase after one of the dogs, and another stood crying for no perceptible reason. But they sang so beautifully that Mira wanted to cry as well, even though she’d no idea what their songs meant. When they finished, to loud applause and little parcels of sweets tied up with ribbons, the smallest of them were led off by their mothers.

  Next the women danced, elegant and fierce as they moved to the beat of a drum, and the rhythm of their sandals on the bare floor, and the clapping of their hands.

  “The gidda,” Syr told her. It was easy to think of him as the Tiger tonight. Impossible to think of him as anything else. “When the women dance, they tell a story in pantomime. This one is about a put-upon wife who teaches her loutish husband how to behave.”

  Then came a dance between two men carrying staves, which they tapped together in what looked like a ritual joust. “The dankara,” he said, “always part of a wedding celebration. I’ve never been sure why. Are you enjoying yourself?”

  She was. The excitement carried her back to a time when she had been fearless and exuberant, when new experiences made every day an adventure. It was the life she had wanted to lead, filled with challenges and discoveries and passion. But she’d been diverted, and after that, her adventures were confined to the practical. Her body existed to work. She lived only in her mind, and in the echo of her dreams.

  Until this man, and this night. Nothing awful could happen while she sat quietly and pretended to be a part of this. No one would know how much it meant to her, or detect the moment when she sealed it away in the corner of herself where she kept her few happy memories. She would revisit this night many, many times in the years ahead.

  The men were on their feet now, and the energy mounted with every beat of the dhol drum. The other musicians played from their platform, but the drummer with his two sticks and the dhol suspended over his shoulders with a leather harness had moved to the center of the floor. The men, about twenty of them, young and old, danced in a circle around him.

  “Bhangra.” Syr was smiling, vibrating with the drum. “It’s going to get wild now.”

  At first, it didn’t seem so. The tempo was slow, the men graceful and precise, beating the rhythm with their feet. But almost imperceptibly, the tempo began to gather speed. Their arms went up, bent at the elbows, and their hands were lifted, fingers splayed. Always the circle moved, but now the men began revolving individually, and jumping, and landing in the position of a man on horseback.

  Tongs and flutes and hands beating on earthenware pots. Women clapping, their bangles clicking and jingling. “Haripa!” the men shouted. “Balle! Balle!”

  “What does that mean?” she asked, not expecting to be heard.

  He turned immediately to her. “Something like ‘hurrah.’ Or did you mean the bhangra? It used to be a harvest dance. Now it’s—uh, oh.”

  She looked up to see what had caught his attention. Four men had broken from the circle and, calling to him in Punjabi, appeared to be summoning him to the dance.

  “I’m expected to show off for you,” he said, removing his garland as he rose and dropping it onto her lap. “Try not to laugh.”

  He sprang over the table, landing in front of the men, and they led him into the circle. All the men were displaying for their ladies, bending and straightening, hopping on one leg as they whirled, sometimes dropping into a crouch and extending one leg after the other so that it seemed to her no part of their bodies touched the ground.

  She was breathing heavily, her blood pounding with the dhol, its rhythm a frenzy now. Men were leaping onto other men’s shoulders, keeping a precarious balance as the fellows beneath them jumped and revolved and pretended to try to dislodge their burdens.

  But she could scarcely pay them any mind, her gaze fixed on the man whose body flowed with athletic control through the exuberant dance. A stallion among stallions, virile and confident, he was laughing as the circle whirled with him and around him like a galaxy of stars.

  “Balle, Syr!” they called. “Balle, Syr!”

  Everyone was standing now. She was standing too, and clapping her hands, and hadn’t even known it. She could feel the climax approaching, the great shout of the drum and the clamor of the instruments rushing to their jubilant peak.

  The circle broke at one side. Two men, crouching, joined hands as if to vault someone onto a horse. Then Syr came at them in a run, one foot finding its target, and the men threw him into the air. He spun, two backward flips that had to be impossible, and landed the other side of the room. His knees bent to take the jolt. His arms went up in good-humored triumph.

  The women made a high-pitched noise in the backs of their throats. The men, sweating and panting, clustered around him, pumping his hand.
He said something that made them all laugh. They followed him as he moved from table to table, greeting the ladies, pausing to speak to each one. Bidding them farewell, she knew. It was nearly time for the wedding.

  Mira, dazed, went to her father’s side. His eyes smiled at her. “It was wonderful, wasn’t it?” she said. His finger made a “yes.”

  Shortly after, Hari came up to her. She realized he had not been in the dance, or even in the room since she could remember. Nageena Kaur was gone as well.

  “The reverend’s vehicle is approaching, memsahib. Will you come to change clothing now?”

  “Of course.” She found Syr, his back to her as he hunkered down in a ring of children, and understood that she would not see him again until they stood together and made their vows.

  And then he took a small girl up into his arms, and Mira’s eyes burned with sadness for him.

  No children for you, Michael Keynes. Not if you marry me.

  Mira, wearing a dark blue woolen dress, gloves, and her half boots for traveling, arrived with her father at the parlor door just as her bridegroom was coming down the passageway from the opposite direction. He’d changed into the garments made for him that day by a local tailor, black and simply cut and not a very good fit. He had washed his hair, which lay sleek and glossy on his head, the drying ends beginning to fluff out at his collar. She thought it rather endearing, almost boyish, until he came close enough for her to see his eyes.

  Nothing boyish there, nothing endearing. She saw only determination, and possessiveness, and a touch of triumph. Or perhaps she only fancied seeing them, because there was never anything to be read in the eyes of a Keynes, not for certain.

  To her surprise, he went immediately to the foot of her father’s chair and dropped onto one knee, putting the two men at eye level. “Sir, I owe you an apology. In a short time I shall wed your daughter, and I have never thought to ask your permission to do so. Nothing will change, I’m afraid, if you deny it. But I should like to know if you can accept this arrangement, and me as your son-in-law.”

  Mira already knew the answer. Her father was over the moon at seeing her married at all, and he’d become fond—fond!—of this predatory male. “He’s not losing a daughter,” she said. “He’s gaining a chess opponent. Shall we get on with it, Your Grace?”

  “Is she always like this?” he asked her father.

  The finger waved a treasonous “yes.”

  So they went into the parlor, which was the same one in which she’d negotiated this marriage of his convenience less than twenty-four hours earlier. It was ablaze with light from what must have been hundreds of candles, and perfumed with vases overflowing with flowers. The hothouse must be empty of blossoms now.

  Clumped around a table in front of the fireplace were four men and two women, all with glasses of wine in their hands and nervous expressions on their faces.

  Michael Keynes, direct as always, went up to them and addressed a pigeon-shaped man with a neck that overflowed his starched collar like a pink ruff. “Thank you,” he said, the tone of a duke like steel beneath his words, “for coming out on this cold night so that my bride’s father could witness her marriage. Mr. Holcombe, may I present the Reverend Filbert? I shall leave it to him to introduce his companions.”

  The vicar had brought along his rail-thin wife, the parish clerk, the church organist, and two members of the choir, all of them warily eying Hari Singh, who had just entered the room and taken a position by the door. Heathen, their expressions said. Extremely large heathen.

  “William,” said the wife. “You have something to say to the duke.”

  “Er, yes. That is, Your Grace, my Marigold has brought to my attention the impropriety . . . That is, I ought not to have implied—not that I meant it, you understand—that an offering to the church would be appropriate due to the, er, unusual circumstances of this marriage. Of me conducting it, that is.”

  “What he means,” put in Marigold Filbert, “is that extortion is not the province of a man of God. He will be pleased to marry you and your lady, and there’s an end to it.”

  “But I’ve no objection, madam, to our agreement.”

  “You are missing the point,” Mira said. “There is no prior agreement.”

  “Ah. But afterward, he might do me the honor of accepting a tenor bell for the steeple, repairs to the roof, and new carpets for the rectory. Do I have it right?”

  “And curtains,” Mira said.

  “I forgot the curtains. Perhaps, Reverend Filbert, we should rely on the ladies to work this out between them. In the meantime, shall we proceed with the marriage?”

  They moved to a stand of floor candelabra and took their places in front of the vicar, whose hands trembled as he opened his prayer book. Then, her bridegroom tall and solemn to her right and her father’s chair drawn up to her left, she prepared herself to give her life away.

  She had heard the words before, when neighbors were married in the little church near her home. They were beautiful words, most of them, and until now, they had never caused her pain.

  But when the reverend began to enumerate the purposes for which God had ordained marriage, she was overwhelmed with guilt. How could she be standing here, prepared to take vows she did not mean to keep?

  “First, it was ordained for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy name.”

  Must she try, then? Whatever the cost, despite their agreement, was she obligated by divine ordinance to accept her husband’s seed? Michael Keynes had permitted her to set boundaries, although he’d warned her he would likely try to cross them. But there was no negotiating with God, not when taking a solemn vow.

  “It was ordained for a remedy against sin, and to avoid fornication; that such persons as have not the gift of continency might marry, and keep themselves undefiled members of Christ’s body.”

  She strongly suspected that Michael Keynes lacked the gift of continency. To an extreme. And if she did not accept him into her body, he would go elsewhere and . . . and fornicate. Just thinking of it set her neck and her cheeks on fire.

  She had not, until this moment, realized how much of the marriage ceremony was devoted to carnal matters.

  There were more words from the vicar, which she scarcely heeded until he seemed to be looking directly into her deceitful eyes.

  “I require and charge you both, as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed, that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not be lawfully joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it. For be ye well assured, that so many as are coupled together otherwise than God’s word doth allow are not joined together by God, neither is their matrimony lawful.”

  She ought to speak. She knew of impediments. She was an impediment. This marriage was not according to God’s word, which meant it could not be lawful. She stared back at the vicar, ice clogging her throat, and said nothing.

  More words floated past her on a cloud of guilt and shame.

  Then the vicar’s gaze shifted to the groom, and she drew her first breath in a considerable time.

  She heard a firm “I will” from the duke, and wondered what he had just promised. Her knees shook. She felt light-headed and wished he had not let go of her arm.

  “. . . to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live?” He was looking at her again, a little impatiently.

  “I w-will,” she murmured.

  More words, the vicar’s and her bridegroom’s and her own. “Better or worse.” “To love and to cherish.” “To obey.” “And thereto I plight thee my troth.” She stumbled alo
ng as best she could, expecting lightning to strike her down for the hypocrisy of it all.

  Michael Keynes was holding her hand. She hadn’t even noticed when he took it, her right hand into his. Not until he let it go and placed something on the closed prayer book. Her eyes were swimming with tears of remorse. Against the black leather, a glimmer of gold.

  Dear God, a ring. And she without a ring finger to put it on.

  Then her left hand was lifted, and she gazed up helplessly into his transparent eyes.

  “I wasn’t sure which you’d prefer,” he said quietly, “so I brought two. They’ll not fit well over your gloves, but take them now and decide later. Perhaps you’ll want them both.”

  And as he spoke, echoing the vicar’s words with one correction, he slipped bands of gold over her little finger and over her forefinger. “With these rings I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

  After that, she felt as if someone else inhabited her flesh. Another person wandered through the last part of the ceremony, made polite remarks to the guests who paid her compliments and conveyed their good wishes. She tasted wine. Her husband—her husband!—was a granite pillar at her side. She clung to him without touching him, requiring his support and feeling it like invisible girders holding her erect. Keeping her moving where she was supposed to move.

  At some point, she promised Marigold Filbert a stained-glass window for the church. She spoke to her father, and kissed his cheek, and bade him farewell. There was a cloak around her shoulders, a fur-lined hood over her head. She was outside, surrounded by people, and saying her thanks to Birindar Singh and Nageena Kaur. A carriage had pulled into the courtyard. Music. Drums. Singing. Someone held out a bowl. A voice spoke into her ear.

  “Take rice in both hands,” her husband said, “and toss it over your shoulders. It is meant to bring prosperity to those you are leaving behind, and to the new family you will create.”