Free The Hamilton Case by Michelle de Kretser Page A

when I cornered her one afternoon in her bedroom. She had conspired with Mater and Jaya to deceive me.
    From the
suriya
tree outside the window, a saw-edged cry was hacking through the thick air. My ayah used to say that when a rice stealer died, his soul entered the body of a crow. The irrelevant detail floated around my brain; I batted it away, endeavoring to concentrate on Mater’s news.
    “How do you intend to get by without an income?” I inquired, as unpleasantly as possible. “Carry on sponging off Uncle Kumar?”
    “Don insists I make my home at Green Crescent after the wedding. You know what a pile the old boy built—there are corridors and staircases by the mile.”
    They had arranged everything. I clawed at the back of the nearest chair. Mater, however, had regained her composure. She settled herself on the settee, lit another cigarette. “The suite in the tower will do me very well. As for pocket money . . .” She waved one of those narrow hands that so resembled a snake’s head, setting ash falling and bracelets clinking like coins. “I daresay I’ll scrape by.”
    In that instant I saw everything, the sickening pictures garlanded in wavering blue smoke as if conjured from an evil Aladdin’s lamp. Mater and Jaya. Claudia, poor child, could have no inkling of what they were about. Perhaps Jaya’s widowed father—
the old boy
—was in on it too. Mixed doubles, screamed the crow in the
suriya
tree, mixed doubles!
    Mater’s voice followed me out of the room. “I’m sure you would be welcome too, Sam.”
    The next day or the day after, I contrived to get Claudia alone on the croquet lawn, out of earshot of the house. I had it all planned, the sentences arrayed with parade-ground precision, the arguments—veiled but unmistakable—rehearsed like troops. Then I looked into my sister’s face, those long eyes, so like Mater’s, yet so different in their defenseless transparence, and knew I could no more utter my thoughts than bring my heel down on a nestling and grind till I reduced its softness to a bloody mash of bone and feathers. Instead—and I am ashamed to confess this, but I have set out to tell the truth—I sat on a garden roller and cried like a child.
    After a while Claudia came and sat at my feet. She put out a little hand and stroked one of my conker-brown brogues with a tentative finger. “It’s all right,” she said. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
    When at length I had mastered myself, I clasped her by the wrist and led her to the house. She preceded me into the hall. There was a grass stain on her skirt, its dampness visible even on the dark frock she wore in mourning.

THE VOICE THAT BREATHED O’ER EDEN
    S ix months later I found myself walking up the aisle at St. Luke’s, Claudia quivering on my arm. An Englishman called Canning had recently been appointed vicar. At a christening held the previous week, he had dropped the baby; an alert godmother sprang forward just in time to prevent the eggshell skull from cracking open on the marble basin of the font. Now the silly ass contrived to drop the ring. The slim platinum band rolled a few inches, came up against the bridegroom’s monumental foot, fell flat with a tiny clattering. You could see everyone thinking it was an omen.
    Less than a year had elapsed since Pater’s death so the reception was a muted affair, just two hundred or so guests. My brother-in-law danced first with his wife and then with her mother. Did anyone else notice his paw straying below Mater’s waist? Probably not; he leashed it in promptly like a wayward puppy. An occasional whim would lead my mother to abandon European dress, and that night she was decked out in a crimson Manipuri sari, with a royal-blue blouse that left a scandalous quantity of midriff on display. Even the Reverend Canning was unable to keep his eyes from drifting toward that expanse of taut brown flesh, like fish trailing a lure.
    I glanced at Claudia, enthroned beside a