CHAPTER ONE: THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE ORDERS
The third underhousemaid was dismissed on the morning of the frost fair, for laughing in the portrait gallery — which was unfortunate, as I had been fond of her, and as it had been my joke.
I did not say so. One learns, in my father’s palace, which confessions are ornamental and which are structural, and I had been raised among load-bearing silences the way other girls are raised among sisters. My name is Mehrunissa. My mother chose it, and it was the one choice of hers the palace had let stand. I sent the girl my grey wool cloak by way of the laundry, where such things could happen invisibly, and went down to breakfast, and was told by three separate people that it was a beautiful morning, and it was. That was never the difficulty. The mornings were always beautiful. The palace saw to it.
You will want to know the palace, since for the purposes of this account the palace was the world. Gas had come to it forty years ago and been threaded through it like jewelry: brass lamps along the corridors, hissing their soft continuous note, and if you walked the east wing at dusk you could hear them find a chord. Beneath the brass, here and there, the older sconces were still in the stone — iron rings set too high for any servant’s reach, scorched at depths no gas flame could account for, shaped for something that had burned hotter and been ashamed of nothing. No one cleaned them. No one ordered them removed. The palace kept its old jewelry the way great families keep mad uncles: unmentioned, fed.
The corridors breathed in winter. This was explained to us as a matter of flues and pressures, the building’s lungs of warm air moving as doors opened far away, and the explanation was offered every winter, fresh, as though it had not been offered before, which ought to tell you something about how well it satisfied. The flowers in the long conservatory lasted three weeks past their season, every season, and were admired for it. The mirrors in the south gallery were very old, and if you watched one carelessly you would see the room arrive in it a half-second before the room itself caught up — a footman entering glass before he entered doorway. It was considered an effect of the lead in the silvering. Everything in my father’s house had an explanation, and the explanations, like the flowers, lasted longer than they should have.
We were taught why. We had a man for it.
Ustad Munir lectured the household every fourth evening in the winter library, and I want to be fair to him, because it would be easy to make him ridiculous and he was not ridiculous; that was the difficulty. He was a small radiant person with beautiful hands, and he had never in his life been outside the walls, and he taught — with genuine kindness, with something close to love — that this was the best of all possible orders. Not the best imaginable, he would say, lifting one finger, as if catching the objection out of the air like a moth; imagination is cheap, child, any fool can imagine a better world before breakfast. The best possible. Outside the walls, he said, there was cold without fires, hunger without kitchens, men without law, and every cruelty we permitted ourselves within the order was the modest tax that kept the greater cruelty out. Suffering elsewhere was the proof. The wars beyond the mountains were the proof. The beggars at the city gates — we could hear them, some nights, when the wind set from the river — were the proof, and should be pitied, and should above all be heard, because their voices were the sound of the argument being won.
He believed it. His students believed it. The chamberlain quoted him while dismissing housemaids. It was a beautiful doctrine in the way the conservatory was beautiful: warm, symmetrical, and lit by something that had to be paid for in a room you were never shown.
I had opinions about the doctrine that I had not submitted for approval. I kept them where I kept my mother’s letters and one or two other contraband warmths, and I took them out at night and turned them over, and one of them was this: an order that could be brought down by a laughing housemaid did not seem, to me, to have been built as well as advertised. I was twenty years old. I had lived my whole life inside one building. I knew nothing, and I was right anyway, and I would learn that being right in unauthorized ways is its own kind of door, and that doors, in my family’s house, open whether or not anyone is shown opening them.
I should say — because you will have begun to suspect the shape of this account — that doors opened for me.
I mean only that I was lucky in small ways. Latches gave at my touch that stuck for the footmen. Candle flames leaned as I passed down the chapel corridor, all together, a congregation turning its heads, and I had long ago decided this was draught; the palace was old; old houses have currents. My father’s falcons came to my arm without being called, which the falconer said showed an affinity, and said it in the flat voice of a man electing not to finish a sentence. If I walked the south gallery quickly, my reflection kept up. I never wondered what it would mean for a reflection to keep up. You do not interrogate your own luck. Luck is the one thing in a well-ordered house that nobody files.
Somebody filed it, of course. But I am coming to her.
I went to the conservatory at the hour between tea and dressing, when the household was occupied with becoming its evening self, because on the fourth shelf of the potting room, behind the orchid trays, there was a chessboard, and the chessboard had a game on it, and the game was eleven months old.
Behram was already there. He was generally already there; I had stopped being able to determine how. The wazir’s son was the largest thing the palace contained that was not furniture or architecture, and palace life had taught him to be neither — to sit carefully on chairs as though apologizing to them, to stand near walls the way ships stand near harbors, to keep his voice in the low register that does not carry past the second listener. He performed stillness the way I performed delight at dinners: fluently, and at a cost that was nobody’s business.
He had taken his move already. Knight to the rim, which was wrong, and deliberately wrong; he played the way some men tithe, setting aside a fixed portion of every game to spend on making me explain why he was a fool. I sat down across from him among the orchids and looked at the board and then at him.
“You’ve been thinking about this for four days,” I said, “and that is what you arrive with.”
“The rim is underrated.”
“The rim is where knights go to be widowed.”
“And yet, Mehr,” he said, in the voice that didn’t carry — he was the only person living who shortened it, and the only one I permitted — “everything at the center of this board gets taken. I’ve been studying the question for eleven months. The survivors are at the edges.” He turned the captured pawns over in his fingers while I considered the position — he did this always, when his hands thought he wasn’t watching them: smoothing each small piece with his thumb, finding its grain, like a man verifying that delicate things could pass through his keeping and come out whole. It had no strategic value, that gesture. I noticed it anyway. I had a ledger of such gestures, kept in the same unauthorized place as my opinions, and I will not pretend I didn’t know the ledger was longer than it ought to be.
We did not say how are you. We had not greeted each other in years; greetings are for people whose conversation ends. Ours had been going on since before I could date it — one conversation, in installments, conducted in alcoves and at the margins of state dinners and across this hidden board, and its subject was officially chess and gardens and the incompetence of the astronomer royal, and its actual subject I declined to name, with the same discipline I declined to wonder about candle flames.
“They dismissed Parveen this morning,” I said, moving my bishop. “For laughing.”
“I heard. The chamberlain quoted scripture.”
“He quoted Munir.”
“I no longer distinguish,” Behram said, and that was sedition, mildly spoken, between the orchids and the glass — and there, since I am being honest in this account, is what he was to me. The one room in the palace where the doctrine had no jurisdiction. We sat inside our eleven-month game like two people sitting inside a lit window in winter, and the order ended at the edge of the board.
“I think,” I said — my unauthorized opinion, out loud, spent at last on the one listener who would neither report it nor applaud it — “that the best of all possible orders should be able to survive a housemaid.”
He didn’t laugh. He looked at me the way he sometimes did, with an attention so complete it had weight, as though I were a position he had been studying far longer than eleven months and had no intention of resolving cheaply — being looked at like that was an event; I have been admired, which is weather, but I had only ever been seen in the potting room — and he said, quietly: “Orders that fear laughter are afraid of something. I’ve wondered all my life what.”
Below us, through the glass, the under-gardeners were carrying in the night-soil for the roses that bloomed past their season, which everyone admired, and no one asked what they were fed.
The bell went for dressing. The conversation folded itself away as it had learned to do, into the potting-room shelf, behind the orchids, sixty years of future installments implied.
At the conservatory door I had my hands full of stolen hothouse plums — theft was the one privilege of princesses that I exercised religiously — and the door opened before me. I want to be exact, because exactness is all I have to offer against everything that came later: my hand was still rising toward the handle, a full half-second from touching it, and the latch turned itself with a small confiding click, and the door swung open at precisely my walking pace, and I went through it thinking about Parveen and the rim of the chessboard and did not notice. I am told — I was told, much later, by someone with no reason left to lie to me — that I never noticed. That it was, of everything, the thing about me most worth filing: not that doors opened for me, but that I had lived twenty years in a house of explanations and never once required that one be explained.
Behram noticed. Behind me his hand had come to rest on the iron balustrade, and as I passed through the door that had volunteered itself, the railing made a sound — a low groan of strained metal, the sound a ship’s timber makes when the whole sea leans on it, a sound that iron simply does not make under a resting hand. I heard it without hearing it. It went into the ledger, into the unauthorized place, filed under sounds the conservatory makes in winter, and lay there in the dark of me, waiting, the way filed things wait.
If I had turned — I have had years to construct what I would have seen, and the construction is precise — I would have seen the wazir’s son standing very still beside a railing bent by a quarter-inch of grief or hunger or whatever name that pressure had, with his eyes closed and his shoulders settling by slow degrees, the way snow settles a roof, a man fitting something enormous back into a space tailored too small for it, because the alternative was to let it out in a glass room, near me, in the best of all possible orders.
I did not turn. The plums were sweet. The corridor breathed.
The Remembrancer stood at the end of the long gallery, where she always stood at the dressing hour, in her grey gloves, with the household book on its brass chain.
You will not have heard of her office; it does not exist in the kingdoms whose courts are written about. My father’s palace was older than my father’s line — the lintels of the oldest doors were worn smooth at a height no head in our portraits could have reached; there were stairs in the north wing whose treads were hollowed deepest along the wall, as though generations of something had descended sideways, hugging the stone — and a building that old accumulates offices the way it accumulates sconces. The Remembrancer watched. That was the whole of the office. She attended every lecture of Ustad Munir’s and wrote nothing; she stood at thresholds during festivals and wrote nothing; she had watched me my entire life and as far as I knew had never written anything, and I had concluded, in the way of children raised under harmless surveillance, that she was furniture.
That evening, as I came down the gallery with plum juice on my thumb and the conservatory warm at my back, her pen moved.
Once. One line, unhurried, in the great book chained to her belt — and then she looked up at me, over the gold rims of her spectacles, with an expression I had never been shown in twenty years of being looked at in that house. It was not suspicion. It was not disapproval. It was the look of a clerk who has carried an open account for decades and has just, finally, received an entry for it — and has not yet decided, weighing the book’s chain in her grey glove, to whom the account is owed.
She inclined her head, exactly as always. I inclined mine, exactly as always. In the old mirror beside her the gallery hung a half-second ahead of itself, and in that sliver of borrowed future I saw the two of us already parted: her turning toward the king’s wing, me turned toward mine.
At supper, Ustad Munir rose and blessed the assembled household and told us, as the frost flowered on forty windows and the gas lamps found their chord and somewhere below the wind off the river carried up the proving voices of the beggars at the gates, that we lived — through the grace of order and the wisdom of walls — in the best of all possible orders.
I smiled my structural smile. And I remember thinking, in the unauthorized privacy behind it, that an order is like a gown: loveliest at the fitting, on the very last night before it tears.
The order is holding. For now.
——
If the door opened before she touched it — what else in this palace already knows she’s here?
Chapter 2 →
