The Moonlit Garden

by Bomann, Corina

  “What kind of promise?”

  “If you get your violin back, I’d like you to do everything you can to become a famous violinist. Will you promise me that?”

  “Oh yes, I promise!” Helen said enthusiastically.

  “You’ll get it back—I promise you. But now I must go.”

  “Will we see each other again? My mother’s considering whether she should send me to Mrs. Faraday’s school in England.”

  “I don’t know whether we’ll meet again. But think on your promise, won’t you? Play as well as you can.”

  “I will!” the girl replied.

  The lady rose and slowly walked away.

  “Farewell, Helen,” she said, turning once more before she was swallowed by the drifting fog.

  Helen remained on the stone seat for a while, looking at the place where the lady had disappeared. She was amazed at how peaceful their meeting had been. Would she really get her violin back? Before she could stand and look for a way out of the garden, she was enclosed by darkness, and she slept on dreamlessly.

  Three days later, foresters found Imela Hadeland in a remote, impassable place. She was crushed and half buried beneath a horse that had not survived the fall. In her hurry to leave the city, she had chosen a route through the bush that even the native people avoided because of the danger of sliding down a steep slope. The fact that she was on horseback at all surprised people somewhat, since she had never come across as an experienced rider. She always preferred to travel by coach or ship, and if she had done so again this time, she would probably have gotten away. But her fear of being pursued because of the theft had been greater than her common sense.

  Helen’s parents were sure that her motive was greed—Imela Hadeland had clearly been in need of money and hoped to raise some funds by selling the violin. She had planned her deed skillfully. She had bought herself a little time by leaving behind the violin case, since the absence of the case would have been noticed before the loss of its contents.

  Helen was shocked to hear that her music teacher had been found with a broken neck. Of course no one told her openly; the word was merely that Miss Hadeland had suffered an accident that she did not survive. But Helen heard her mother and father talking as they stood outside her door, assuming she was asleep.

  No one spoke of the theft of the violin, either. The instrument had been found undamaged close to the corpse, and as there was still no one else who had claimed it, it was returned to Helen. It appeared one morning, as if by magic, on the chair by her bed, and the girl immediately recovered from her strange illness. The fever cleared up, and Helen was her old cheerful self within hours. And she played. She played fervently and for hours at a stretch, as if to recover the lost hours in a single day. She had made a promise to the mystery lady and intended to keep it.

  Just a few days later, her parents called her into the parlor and asked her if she wanted to go to Mrs. Faraday’s Music School in England. Helen was delighted. She had heard a few stories from London, the city from where her great-grandparents came, and was now burning with a desire to see the place for herself. The fact that her mother wanted to travel with her only made the decision even easier. She was worried about not seeing her father for such a long time, but she thought about what the lady had said. If she kept her promise now, if she did all that had been asked of her, then perhaps everything would be all right and stay that way.

  27

  Padang, 2011

  In her hotel room that evening, with the impressions of the day still alight in her mind, Lilly took out the thin diary.

  After leaving the governor’s house without making any further noteworthy finds, they had driven back to Padang. Lilly was lost in thought during the journey. Should she write to Ellen and Gabriel today? Or would it be better to keep the news until she was back? After a little to-and-fro debate, she decided not to release the bombshell until she was back in London. After all, she still needed to examine her find properly herself.

  Verheugen had offered to present the album to the museum and ensure that the photographs were copied. Lilly had thanked him and asked him to take her back to the hotel. There Verheugen took his leave of her, saying that he had to go meet someone at the airport that evening.

  After taking a refreshing shower and eating a little fruit brought to her by a friendly chambermaid, she felt in the right mood to devote her attention to the notebook. Outside her window a magnificent sunset was spreading its colors over Padang. Oranges, reds, and violets blended to form a breathtaking veil as lights came on one after the other in the buildings, and the character of the street sounds gradually changed. The traffic was still swarming, but Lilly hardly noticed the blaring of the horns now, although she liked the scraps of music that occasionally drifted up to her. Was there a shadow play taking place somewhere in the city right then? Or a concert?

  Ellen would certainly have insisted that she should go to see it, but this evening belonged to Rose Gallway.

  With a feeling of awe, Lilly traced her finger over the cover of the little book before moving to the hotel bed, from where she had an excellent view of the sky.

  “Well then, Rose,” she murmured. “Tell me more.”

  This diary is my atonement. Rose Gallway

  Perhaps it is too late to begin a diary, but I need to do this to get my thoughts in order.

  Writing is an effort for me, but I want something of myself to live on. Something that might survive the passage of time, something that will explain to people in the future why I acted as I did.

  Since the doctor gave me the diagnosis and I found out how little time I have left, I have been consumed by a single thought: making good my previous mistakes.

  I have been reproaching myself for all those years. I may have avoided the major scandal, for which I was initially very grateful to Mijnheer van Swieten, but the price I paid was emptiness, loneliness. The loss of my talents. My decline. I hardly trusted anyone anymore; I was completely indifferent to men.

  And now a man has appeared who gives me new hope. He is completely different from those who see in me only the beautiful woman whose image accompanies them in their dirty desires.

  Cooper Swanson is one of the most unattractive men I know, and that in itself makes it possible for me to trust him. He only speaks as much as necessary but is an extremely good listener and gives you the feeling that his mind soaks up every detail like a sponge.

  He is prepared to carry out my wish, although it will be difficult. Van Swieten has been dead for three years—are there really documents recording what was done back then? I doubt it. They will surely have done everything possible to remove all trace.

  But I will begin at the beginning. At the crossroads of my life where, without knowing it, I chose the wrong path.

  After my father was killed in the accident at the harbor, life changed for my mother and me. I prepared myself to continue my tour without any idea of whether or not I really had the strength to go through with it. My mother began to make her own preparations—to return to her home village of Magek. As a new warehouse supervisor had already been found and the house would only belong to her for a few more months, she sent a messenger to her village to inform the old woman who had come to find her that she would take up her place with her family in the village.

  As we said our good-byes I wept bitter tears. During my travels it had always done me a lot of good to know that she was there, in the little house by the harbor. Now if I wanted to see her, I would have to travel deep into the jungle—impossible, given the schedule Carmichael had planned for me.

  We parted one day before my ship was due to set sail, as an oxcart had already been sent from the village to collect her.

  Once again she urged me to listen to my own heart whenever I was faced with a decision. Unaware of the situation that I was already in, I promised her I would, and watched the cart disappear into the jungle with tears in my eyes.

  Full of pain and longing, full of reluctance and unce
rtainty, I finally went on board the MS Flora that was to take us to India.

  During the crossing I began to feel strange. My moods swung like the ship on the sea. Sometimes up, sometimes down. Sometimes my dresser, Mai, would seem like the kindest person in the world to me. Sometimes I detested her deeply and drove her away when she came to fix my hair. I could imagine her talking about me to Carmichael. She thought me a raving madwoman. And Carmichael? No, I’m sure he didn’t share her views. He had worked with artists before and knew how eccentric they could be.

  In my case he believed that my condition was shaped by past events, and he indulged me. When I was raging, when I hit Mai, when I failed to show up, when I was in a bad mood, he said nothing. But I knew myself that something was happening within me, something that controlled me like a puppeteer moves a marionette, causing me to behave irrationally.

  Otherwise how could I have turned into such a formidable dragon?

  On our arrival in Delhi, with many miles still to travel overland, I felt awful. My legs were swollen as if I were afflicted by dropsy; I would sweat with the slightest exertion. And then there was the nausea.

  At first I tried to hide it. I told myself it was because of the dreadful food on board the ship and during the journey. I was determined that Carmichael should not know what the matter was, as he would start in again with his reproaches and insistence that I should not abandon the tour. He would even have propped me up in the middle of a swoon, leaning me against a pillar and pressing the violin into my hands.

  And so, once in Delhi, I secretly sought out a doctor, who gave me the revelation that shocked me to the core and which, from that moment on, removed my ability to play like I had before. It was as though something suddenly rose up inside me against the music that had previously been my source of wonder and fulfillment.

  Even when practicing for the concert, I noticed that the images had gone. For as long as I could remember, images had always been inextricably linked with my music. Every piece triggered new ones. When I played, the weight of the world was lifted from me—I believed I was no longer standing on the stage. But now I only felt weighed down. Not even when I played at my father’s graveside did I feel so heavy, so incapable.

  The absence of the images, the absence of the high, made my fingers uncertain. I was suddenly afraid I could no longer do justice to the music. And fear hung over it all. Fear that I could no longer hide the secret I had been keeping. It made me even more uncertain, and my anger became my shield and my weapon, which I began to use to drive people away.

  I still remember the day when my secret could no longer remain concealed. It was the day on which I had to admit that my passion for my music was about to expire.

  “The concert was a disaster!” Carmichael cursed as he paced up and down in front of me in my hotel room. “What on earth was the matter with you? You played as if your head was somewhere else completely. If you allow yourself to repeat that performance, your career will be ruined!”

  I made no reply. I stared past the music stand into empty space. The memory of the disastrous concert resonated inside me like the harsh note of a breaking string. Again and again I heard the passages, felt the refusal of my fingers, the weakness of my bowing hand.

  I had played badly. So disastrously that the shock of it was clearly noticeable among the audience. Never before had anything similar happened to me!

  And never before have I felt so small. I felt all those feelings that I had been concealing beneath my mercurial temper: sadness for my father, yearning for my mother, and the destructive longing for Paul. Since that guilty night at the plantation, I had been hoping every day to hear from him.

  Of course I was fooling myself. How could he reach me in Delhi? I had left a message at the hotel where I had stayed the night, just in case he tried to contact me, but he was probably not yet even back in England.

  There was something else to add to my state of uncertainty. Spiteful voices arose in my mind, voices whispering to me that he had merely been using me to satisfy his desire, to be able to add me to his collection of trophies from the tropics.

  However much these voices babbled insistently, I refused to believe them.

  Could the man who had stroked my back so tenderly, kissed my skin and my lips so passionately, really have lied to me?

  No. Impossible. Paul may have been trapped by social convention, he may have been promised to another and not have found the strength to call off the engagement, but I was sure he was not a liar.

  It fueled a remarkable defiance in me. As Carmichael continued his tirade, warning me how it would all turn out if I did not come to my senses, I took a deep breath and said, “I’m pregnant.”

  Carmichael sagged in shock against the door frame. I will never forget the expression on his face. No blow could have silenced him as effectively as those words.

  “What did you say?” he asked in bewilderment.

  “That I’m pregnant,” I replied.

  Carmichael let out a noise that sounded like air escaping from a balloon.

  “Bloody hell! It was that Englishman, wasn’t it? I’ll wring his neck if I ever see him again! When did you . . . That evening when you were away?”

  “That’s nothing to do with you,” I snapped at him.

  Carmichael snorted like a bull in the bullring. “Do you know what this means?”

  “That I’m going to have a baby.”

  “That you’re about to destroy your whole damned career!” Carmichael slammed his hand down on the chest of drawers by the door so hard that I started in fright. “What do you think the concert promoters are going to say when a pregnant woman steps out onto the stage? Let alone the audiences? If you were married, it might be different, but as it is . . . ”

  I stared at him defiantly. What he was saying was true, but at that moment I felt superior to him. And I also felt a wicked delight in the fact that I had caused him such annoyance.

  Of course it was bad for my career, since an angel was only given the role if she stayed pure and at least gave the appearance of living on nothing but light and air like a flower. Passions and desires of the flesh were not part of the image.

  “You should go to see an abortionist.”

  These words lashed me like a whip. I should have known that a man like Carmichael was always ready with a counterattack.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I said, stunned.

  The doctor’s pronouncement may have shocked me, but the last thing I would have thought of was to get rid of the baby. It was Paul’s child, a little Lord or Lady Havenden. It was my assurance that he would come back to me.

  “Not here, of course,” Carmichael said, relenting a little while ignoring my reply. “We’ll go to England. And once there, you can simply get rid of it.”

  “No,” I replied icily. “Apart from the fact that I would be risking my own life, it would be sheer murder!”

  I didn’t mention the third reason—that I hoped I would soon be Lady Havenden—because if I had, I would only have earned myself Carmichael’s scorn. It was enough that the voices in my head continuously plagued me with the notion that Paul’s intentions could have been dishonorable.

  Carmichael looked at me in anguish. “Rose, don’t you understand? This could grow into a horrendous scandal. An illegitimate child! No one will allow you to play for them until you’re married.”

  “We can keep it a secret,” I suggested. “Granted, I wouldn’t be able to play for a few months, but—”

  “And where would we tell the audiences your child came from?”

  “Do I have to justify myself to my audiences?” I muttered.

  It turned my stomach to think of the people watching me as I played those false notes, glaring as if I had conjured up the devil.

  “You’re in the public eye, in the spotlight! You’re not the kind of woman who can simply disappear for a few months to give birth to a baby. We have a schedule!”

  “But what would be the problem with
taking a six-month break?” I countered. “We’ve been touring for two years already. The public will understand.”

  Carmichael snorted again. “And in the meantime someone new will be raised up as the public’s darling, won’t they? No, I won’t allow it.”

  “I refuse to have an abortion!” My voice rose shrilly. “If I were killed by some back-street abortionist, you’d have even less of me; I’d never play ever again. I intend to have this child. When I’m on tour, it can stay with my mother, and that’s that!”

  Carmichael ground his teeth. He was furious. Let him be! I knew what his reaction would be. He would simply leave. Turn on his heel and slam the door behind him. And so he did this time, too. The crash of the door in the frame made me shudder.

  That night I sat at my desk and wrote a letter to Paul. I told him what had happened, in the hope that it would strengthen his decision to return to me.

  I did not make a single mistake during the next concert. I played every note flawlessly, giving no one cause to suspect anything was wrong, but once again I did not see the music. I felt how soulless the sound of my violin had become.

  This time, Carmichael didn’t turn up to reproach me. For a whole week we communicated, when strictly necessary, through Mai, whose sympathy for me was disappearing rapidly. Carmichael had presumably told her about my condition.

  I played concert after concert, each time losing a piece of my soul as I played. Deep inside, I felt that everything would be better when Paul returned. A few times I imagined I saw him in the audience, and on those occasions my playing improved so that, even though I no longer saw the images floating in my mind’s eye, a little of my soul returned to the melodies.

  The pit I was falling into grew deeper when I would realize at the end of the concert that I had been mistaken—he was not there. I felt as though I had wasted valuable energy, and so I shunned my admirers, and if conversation with them was absolutely unavoidable, I kept it as short as I could.

  “Well, it’s coming back,” Carmichael felt obliged to say when, after two weeks, he came into my dressing room once again. No—I was still not playing any wrong notes, but my playing was as flat and cold as a slab of marble. Week after week, venue after venue, I waited for word from Paul. I imagined that if he had wanted he could have reached me, that if he really loved me he would have made a reckless journey around the world. But that did not happen. If he appeared, it was only in dreams that reduced me to hours of weeping.