Harbor for the Nightingale

by Kathleen Baldwin

  I was right.

  The next day, on Papa’s orders, his secretary, a fusty man with little patience for children, escorted me to my grandmother’s family in the north. My father sent me away from the only world I’d ever known. On that long trip, loneliness and hurt chewed me up. Why would he send me so far away? Was he too sick? Or was his grief too heavy for him to share in mine? Perhaps my black hair and olive skin reminded him too much of my dead mother. Or was it because she was gone that he no longer cared for me?

  Why?

  We traveled for days and days, journeying toward the great mountains, land of the five rivers, and all the way there, sadness gnawed on my soul.

  Few Europeans had ever ventured to the old villages and cities along the rivers. People were wary and distrustful of my white escort. He had difficulty finding a guide, and even when he did, we made several wrong turns. I did not care. Numb with grief, certain my father would die, or that he no longer loved me. I was already a lost child. What did it matter if we wandered forever?

  After several treacherous river crossings, our guide located my family’s village on the Tawi River. The weary attaché deposited me and my trunks in their midst and hurriedly left. I sat in the dirt beside my baggage, completely abandoned. The last ember of hope flickered inside me and blew out.

  Strangers, who I would learn later were my cousins and aunts, gathered in a circle around me, staring, their faces ripe with curiosity and suspicion. Half-English, half-Indian, I was an unwelcome oddity, who belonged nowhere. I sat in the center of their circle, feeling like an oddly painted lizard. Did they judge me poisonous? Or edible?

  A woman’s joyous cry startled me. Astonished, I stood up. In my exhausted state, amidst all the confusion, I briefly mistook her voice for my mother’s. I stared at the old woman running toward me. The voice, although eerily similar, did not belong to my dead mother. It belonged to my grandmother.

  She burst through her gathered kinsman, took one look at me, and opened her arms. Though I learned later she had only visited me once as an infant, she kissed my forehead and hugged me, rocking and murmuring in Hindi. In tears, she declared to all my cousins and aunts that I was her daughter returned home.

  Grandmother, my naanii, did not care about my mixed blood. She had no qualms about teaching her half-caste granddaughter the ways of her people. Others in our village were not so quick to trust me. I was half-English, after all. But out of respect for my grandmother, they kept their opinions to themselves. Naanii taught me how to make bread, how to mix healing herbs, braid hair, sew, and a thousand other things.

  More importantly, Naanii taught me to listen.

  To hear the world around us.

  Over and over, she told me, “All life sings a song if we will but stop and listen.”

  I remember standing on the banks of the river washing clothes. “Close your eyes, little bird,” Naanii said. “Quiet your mind and tell me what you hear?”

  I pointed to her kinswoman standing in the shallows scrubbing her laundry against the stones. “I hear Kanishka humming a contented tune.”

  Grandmother, ever patient, smiled and asked, “And the stones, little one, what do they sing?”

  I laughed and closed my eyes tight, listening for subtler vibrations. “They are old, Naanii. Their voices are quiet and deep. I can hardly hear them. Kanishka sings too loudly, so does the wind in the trees and grass.” I opened my eyes. “And the river is especially loud.”

  “Ahh.” She nodded, wrung out the cloth she’d been laundering, and set it in her basket. “It is true. Water is bold and brash. Very noisy.” She galloped her fingers through the air. “Always rushing to and fro. River thinks she is all-powerful. You must try harder, my child. Listen for the calm voice of the stones.” She laid a smooth pebble in my palm and pointed to one of the large rocks jutting up, splitting the current of the river. “Do you feel it? The mighty waters push and shove with the strength of a hundred horses, yet that boulder is unmoved. Hear how deep it hums, how sure it is of its connection with mother earth.”

  Years later, I would hear the stones sing, but not that day. That day I heard my grandmother, not just her words; I heard the unfathomable vibrations of her soul. It was as if she was as ancient and knowing as the stones of which she spoke.

  I wish I were still standing on the banks of the Tawi River. Instead, I am here in London with too many sounds roaring in my ears—the babble of our many guests, the rumble of the city seeping up through the bones of this house. My father has taken me half a world away from the person who loves me best in all the world. Even though she is thousands of miles away, I close my eyes, hoping to catch my grandmother’s distant pulse. I try to block out all the other noises, searching for those melodic threads that run between us even at this great distance.

  “Maya? Maya! Are you all right?” Lady Jane rests her hand on my shoulder and startles me out of my search. She and Sera stare at me expectantly. “The musicians are tuning up for a quadrille. We are about to return to the dancing. But you seem shaken, what’s wrong?”

  I look at Lady Jane, wondering how to answer. I am not all right, as she phrases it, but what else can I say, here in this jangling place. “Yes, I hear the music,” I say, and try to smile as if it is an important observation, as if the frivolity of dancing lightens my heart.

  “Hmm,” she says skeptically, and takes my hand, pulling me along with her like the mighty river carrying a piece of driftwood. I feel her questions clamoring to be asked, but luckily, I also know Lady Jane will restrain herself. This is not the time or place for that sort of discussion. She glances around the room and spots Alexander Sinclair. Immediately she brightens, and I feel joy pulse through her fingertips.

  “Come.” She leads the way and, arm in arm, we face both the music and crowd together.

  The Disquieting Dangers of Dining

  I drift through the next two hours, closing my ears to everything except the music flowing from the orchestra. Everyone here thinks I am so peaceable and tame. Infinitely calm. They think this because, in the past, I have used my voice to quiet their hearts, just as my grandmother used hers to soothe mine. They have also seen me meditate, but they do not know why I do it.

  No one knows the truth.

  Inside me, races a wild storm. A typhoon thunders against my ribs, rattling my soul, and I fear the day I can no longer hold it back. Shortly before my father took me away to England, Naanii instructed me to let the storm escape a little at a time. How? If I open the door, my fury will roar like a lion and leap out to devour what is left of my tattered world.

  No, I must hold the storm inside.

  I manage to do so, until the supper dance with Lord Kinsworth. He will perform a duet with me later this evening, and so he thought it best if we sat together at dinner. By all outward appearances, Lord Kinsworth is a very pleasant young man. At least, that is what Lady Jersey says of him. Lady de Lieven begs to differ with her friend’s assessment. “Pleasant? Are you mad? He is an absolute Adonis. There isn’t a female in Britain who doesn’t catch her breath at the sight of him.” She made this bold claim and added, with a girlish sigh, “Too bad, he’s so young.”

  I wish someone other than me would notice that regardless of how handsome he is, the man is dangerous. I can’t remember meeting anyone so elusive. Lord Kinsworth is impossible to decipher, and I do not like that. On the other hand, I must admit he does sing quite well. Fearlessly, in fact. His throat opens with a clear rich tone, full of depth and power. He holds nothing back there. His voice is incredible—so warm it would melt the butter on our bread plates.

  I also concede that I hear kindness strumming through his being. I suppose some people find kindness an even more alluring trait than his commanding shoulders or his powerful physique. Not I. And frankly, the fact that he could easily pick me up with one arm is not reassuring either. Yes, kindness can be alluring, but shouldn’t that arouse suspicion? I don’t trust kindness. Not at all. A lion may purr and his mane mi
ght appear soft and inviting, but only a fool dares pet that lovely beast. There are always teeth attached. I am much more comfortable with people like Miss Stranje, whose stern no-nonsense demeanor lets me know exactly where I stand.

  What’s more, I care nothing for Lord Kinsworth’s honey brown hair or his absurdly blue eyes. He must be dangerous, else why would his inner music always be running away, staying just out of my reach, laughing at me, as if we are playing a game of hide-and-seek.

  It bothers me.

  Dancing with Lord Kinsworth epitomizes our questionable friendship. Dance is so much like a chase. I step forward, he steps back, he moves toward me, and I step aside. No one in this merry jig is ever truly captured.

  Afterward, he leads me into the dining room for supper and sits beside me. We silently busy ourselves spooning up creamed asparagus and cheese soup. Footmen remove our bowls and ready our plates for the main course. I glance sidelong, to the far corner of the table, at my father and his wife. They are chatting amiably with their dinner partners. My father does not even glance in my direction.

  “You’re awfully quiet tonight.” Lord Kinsworth leans into me, nudging my shoulder with his. At the same time, he is irreverently twirling his dinner fork. “Not nerves, is it?”

  “Nerves?” I blink out of my trance and struggle to grasp his meaning.

  “Are you apprehensive about our performance after dinner?”

  “Oh, that.” I smile. Our upcoming duet had not even crossed my mind. “No. That is the least of my concerns. Are you? Apprehensive, I mean.”

  “Of course. Can’t you tell?” He gives me an innocent grin, a grin he probably used his entire life to charm nursemaids, his mother, and every girl within a hundred miles. “I’m quaking in my boots.”

  He is not telling the truth. Nor is he wearing boots. I hear laughter beneath his mockingly serious words, and now he begins spinning his fork on one finger. A very un-English thing to do. The woman across the table stares at him with a disapproving frown. He spins it faster. Before the thing should go flying across the table, I gently retrieve his fork and set it beside his plate.

  Hunting for something to say, I come up with a feeble compliment. “It is very generous of you to have agreed to sing with me.”

  “Generous?” His brows lift as if I’ve surprised him. “I assure you, generosity has nothing to do with it.”

  “No?” If not that, then what? I cannot keep the edge out of my tone. “Are you doing it out of pity?”

  “Pity? Hmm. Let me think.” Part of my veil has drifted onto his sleeve, and he toys with the silk embroidery. “Yes. Perhaps.”

  How does he do that? How does he make his face a mask of seriousness, and yet I can almost hear a boy laughing in the wind? Whatever the case, he has ruffled the last of my hard-won calm. I adjust the silver knife beside my plate until it lines up squarely. “Pity?”

  “Naturally. What else could it be?” His brows angle up and, despite his cheerful curls and square jaw, he pulls a long mournful face. “I felt pity for all these poor souls who would otherwise be deprived of our duet.”

  He is jesting. “Oh,” I say, embarrassed because I can never find my footing with him. The moment I think he is about to sing one song, he strikes up a different tune. My hands drop into my lap. “I see.”

  “Why else do you think I would’ve spent all those long hours practicing with you?”

  Were those hours so very torturous?

  I blink at him, aware of the fact that as I struggle to respond my mouth is foolishly opening and shutting. Difficult man. He doesn’t mean for me to answer—I’m sure of it. And yet, he waits expectantly, compelling me to speak. I turn away from him and focus on a vase of roses situated in the center of the table. “I thought you enjoyed singing?”

  To this, he merely hums and lifts his shoulders in a shrug.

  My gaze snaps back to him. “You perform quite well, for someone so indifferent.”

  “You make it easy, Miss Barrington. Singing is like dancing. With the right partner, it is almost effortless. A pleasure.” He turns his attention to the footman, who offers to serve us slices of roast beef.

  Roast beef. I smell rosemary and bay leaf, but also the flesh of some innocent unsuspecting cow. In my country, cattle are a symbol of prosperity and life. It is forbidden to kill them. I cannot bring myself to even look at the platter. Whereas, Lord Kinsworth indicates he would like an additional helping. Of course, he would, wouldn’t he? After all, Lord Kinsworth is an Englishman. An inscrutable beef-eating Englishman.

  I do not belong here with people like him. I do not belong in England. It is a cold and unfeeling place. As soon as I reach my majority, and find some means to support myself, I am going back to India. I am fully aware that they will not fully accept me there either, but at least the people in India are not impossible to understand.

  I wave the beef-bearing footman away and cross my arms, waiting for the roasted parsnips. A few moments later parsnips arrive, bathed in butter and herbs, followed by platters of fresh green beans garnished with almonds, bowls of pickled cauliflower, plover’s eggs in aspic jelly, and a dozen other offerings. Miss Stranje spared no expense. This is a feast worthy of a king, which is fortunate, given the fact that our honored guest, His Highness, Prince George, Regent of England, sits at the head of the table.

  During the dessert course, Prince George rises to offer a toast. “To the brave young ladies of Stranje House. We are dazzled by your loveliness, charmed by your elegance, and eternally grateful you know when to shout.”

  An uncomfortable chuckle goes around the table, followed by pale-cheeked grimaces as the memory whistles through us all like a high-pitched flute. He refers, of course, to the day our shouts warned Prince George and his admirals of a bomb about to explode. The gentlemen who were on the platform that day, men who might have died, admirals and statesmen—they bolster themselves against that dreadful memory and stand to honor us.

  My cheeks grow warm with shyness, and I lower my gaze. Lord Kinsworth stands, too. For once, it does not feel as if he is laughing. He raises his glass when the Prince bellows. “To the young ladies! To their health and long life!”

  A cheer shakes the air, making my heart pound faster. I am uncertain where to look, but I peek sideways, down the table to where my father stands. Curiosity ripples from him. His brows pinch as if he doesn’t understand what the Prince means. How could he? He wasn’t there that terrible day, and yet my father joins in and raises his glass. His head tilts to the side, and our eyes meet.

  Instantly, I turn away. Confusion tumbles through me, two storms colliding, one warm, one cold, forming a cyclone within me, whirling out of control. I hum quietly to calm my jumbled emotions.

  Lord Kinsworth glances at me and leans down so that only I can hear. “Cheer up, Miss Barrington. You needn’t wear the hero laurels long. Any minute now, and you can chuck them aside.”

  I do not know what to say to that odd comment. “I am not a hero.”

  “Quite right. Begging your pardon. What is it they call you?”

  Many things, I’m sure.

  I open my mouth to reprimand him for his rudeness, but he is already rattling on. “A hero-ness? No, that’s not the word. Ah, I have it—a heroine. Yes, that’s it.”

  “No. Neither one. That is to say—” I am at a complete loss, and fully aware of the fact that I am sputtering. Prince George signals for all of us to sit down. Lord Kinsworth ignores my stammering and moves to help me with my chair.

  “My lady,” he says, being absurdly gallant.

  Finally, everyone is seated. I am still struggling to find a suitable comment to put Lord Kinsworth in his place. Except my chance vanishes when the Prince lifts his cup again. “And to peace.”

  “To peace!” We echo this sentiment. Millions have died in battles with Napoleon. This war has bruised us all and wounded dozens of nations. Let us be done with it.

  Our cheer fades, but the Prince continues to hold his cup aloft
. An ominous thrum radiates from many of the men at the table. Admirals, Captains, Lords, they all lean in, apprehensive about something, listening closely, holding their breath. I sit back, and grip the seat of my chair, joining in their dread of what he might say next.

  Miss Stranje straightens. Her features harden as if she, too, is steeling herself for the worst. Lady Jane stares intently at the Prince, her tensed muscles whirring with alarm. Lord Kinsworth falls eerily silent. He slouches, pretending to be relaxed, but I feel the fighter inside him, ready to spring up and swing his fists.

  “Peace.” The Prince Regent begins with a childish tremor, dragging out the word as if by slowly scraping his sword from its scabbard we won’t notice the threat. “We have been at war with Napoleon Bonaparte for eleven long years. Eleven years our men have given their lives. The time has come to end the bloodshed.” He nods sagely, staring into his wine. Then, with a resolute sniff, he lifts his gaze to ours. “To that end, we have agreed to meet with Napoleon in order to negotiate a settlement.”

  We?

  British government?

  Or does he mean he intends to negotiate?

  I am not the only one around the table who tallies up his remarks and sucks in a wary breath. What sort of settlement? He wants peace, but all down the table I hear only war drums pounding in my ears.

  The Prince Regent gauges their reaction and begins bleating at us like an injured goat. Surely, I cannot be the only one who hears the tantrum in his cadence. “P’rhaps you do not grasp what a remarkable turn of events this is. Yes, yes, remarkable. In a few weeks’ time, we may finally achieve the peace England and, indeed, all of Europe has so desperately desired over the last decade.” Prince George makes this claim as if he believes such a thing is possible.

  He is a child wishing upon a star. There can be no peace. Negotiating with Napoleon is tantamount to surrender. Does Prince George plan to surrender England to Napoleon?