Some background info: Kate is finding India to be rather less adventurous and rather more hot than she had ancitipated; Clara is talking even less than usual, and so Kate is bored. Also, magic exists in this world, but only as illusions.
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“I don’t suppose you’ve got anything to read
lying about, do you?” she asked, turning to face her sister at last.
Clara shook her head, not taking her eyes off
the orderly black lines and dots of her sheet music. A conversation, it seemed,
was out of the question. Clara had been awfully tense ever since arriving in
India, and it was beginning to frustrate Kate. If Clara was more taciturn than
usual, then she really had no one at all to talk to during these long
afternoons.
But she was not quite cross enough yet to bring
it up, and so she wandered out of the library and ventured off through the
house, not looking for anything in particular. She wandered through the parlour
and the dining room, glancing at each end table she passed for the sign of a
book that someone might have left unattended, but all she found were elephant
statuettes and table linens and a surprisingly large cadre of Indian servants. Most
she passed in hallways or outside the half-hidden passages to the servants’ quarters,
and they seemed not to be doing anything at all. Perhaps that was how they
dealt with the positively oppressive heat. She interrupted one in the breakfast
room, polishing glassware. The man, who wore a blue turban and a very
impressive white beard, bowed as soon as she entered the room.
“Forgive me, Kumaari,” he said, making to exit
the room.
“Oh, no, please don’t trouble yourself. I’ll be
on my way in a moment,” Kate said, flashing him a smile. The old man paused a
moment, but then he returned to his work as Kate circled the room once, in
search of something interesting. All she found was a dusty painting of a
gentleman she didn’t know and a few discarded newspapers left on her father’s
chair. She lingered over these for a moment – the articles left on top detailed
increasing tensions with Russia, and a strange magical kerfluffle in London.
Neither made any immediate logical sense, and so she left them behind, waving
to the old servant as she left. He gave her a tentative smile and she saw that
he was missing a tooth or two. She wondered if Rajesh might help him work on
his English a bit; his accent had been so thick she’d hardly known what he had
said.
The ground floor of the house had given her
nothing near exciting enough, and so she flounced her way up the stairs. The
room she shared with Clara was wildly uninteresting, so she passed it by and
continued down the hallway. Unexpectedly, the door to her father’s study was
ajar. She did not hesitate a moment before slipping inside.
There were more bookshelves inside the dark
room, and she gravitated immediately towards them, but there were fewer books
here than downstairs and they were nearly all military histories. She sighed
again and turned her attention to her father’s large desk. There were more
books and a globe set to one side, and the centre of the desk was strewn with
letters – old letters, she realized quickly, from her mother. She scanned the
first page for her name or Clara’s, but there was no immediate mention of them
and so she turned aside.
She circled the desk again and saw another
statuette that had been mostly hidden by the globe a moment ago. It was, for
once, not an elephant, but instead a little gilded lion. She suspected it was
meant to be a symbol of English heroism, but she thought its face conveyed more
gentleness than fierceness. The carving was very detailed, showing every curl
of the lion’s mane. She smiled, wondering how she could ask her father about it
without revealing that she’d been in his study without permission. She reached
out to stroke it, expecting to feel gilt paint over wood.
Instead, the little lion disappeared
completely.
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