Edgar said nothing.

“It is fine if you were thinking that, I wouldn’t blame you. I know all that is written about women of the East. I can read your magazines and I understand your conversations, remember. I know what they say, I have seen the way the sketch artists draw us in your newspapers.”

Edgar felt himself blushing, “They are terrible.”

“Not all. Many of them are right. Besides, to be painted as a beautiful dancing young girl is better than being painted as a savage—as your newspapers show our men.”

“Rubbish, mainly,” insisted Edgar. “I wouldn’t pay much attention…”

“No, I don’t mind, I only wonder, or worry, about those who come here expecting their own imaginings.”

Edgar shifted uneasily. “I am sure once they arrive they see it isn’t so,” he said.

“Or they simply change us to fit that image.”

“I…” Edgar paused, caught by her words. He stared at her, thinking.

“I am sorry. I did not mean to speak so strongly, Mr. Drake.”

“No…no, not at all.” He nodded now with the resonance of a thought. “No, I do want to talk to you, but I am somewhat shy. It is my character, really. At home in London, too.”

“I don’t care. I don’t mind talking. I get lonely here sometimes. I speak some Shan, and many of the villagers speak some Burmese, but we are very different, most have never left their village.”

“You have the Doctor—” Immediately he regretted saying this.

“That is something I wish I had told you in Mandalay. If only to save you from having to ask.”

He felt the sudden and unique relief that comes when a suspicion is answered. “He is away often,” he said.

Khin Myo looked up at him, as if surprised by his words. “He is an important man,” she said.

“Do you know where he goes?”

“Where? No.” She tilted her head. “Away, only. It is not my concern.”

“I might think that it is. You said you get lonely.”

She stared at him longer this time. “It is different,” she said simply.

There was a sadness in her voice, and Edgar waited for her to speak again. She was silent now. He said, “I am sorry. I didn’t intend to be inconsiderate.”

“No.” She looked down. “You ask me many questions. That is also different.” A tremor of wind ran through the trees. “You have someone, Mr. Drake.”

“I do,” said Edgar slowly, relieved now that the conversation had moved away from the Doctor. “Her name is Katherine.”

“It is a nice name,” said Khin Myo.

“Yes…yes, I suppose so. I am so used to it that I hardly think of it as a name anymore. When you know someone so well, it is as if they lose their names.”

She smiled at him. “May I ask how long you have been married?”

“Eighteen years. We met when I was an apprentice tuner. I tuned her family’s piano.”

“She must be beautiful,” Khin Myo said.

“Beautiful…” Edgar was struck by the innocence with which she had asked the question. “She is…although we are not young.” He continued, awkwardly, if only to fill the silence. “She was very beautiful, at least in my eyes…talking about her makes me miss her dearly.”

“I am sorry—”

“No, not at all. It is wonderful, in its way. Many men who have been married eighteen years have fallen out of love with their wives…” He stopped and looked out at the river. “I suppose I am different, maybe you are right, although I don’t know if I mean the same thing when I say this as you mean when you say it—I love music and pianos and the mechanics of sound, perhaps that is different. And I am quiet. I daydream too much…But, I shouldn’t bother you with this.”

“You don’t have to. We can talk of something else.”

“Actually, I don’t mind. I am surprised only that you asked, that you noticed something, about me. Many women don’t like the things I just told you about; English women like men who join armies or compose poetry. Who become doctors. Who can aim pistols.” He smiled. “I don’t know if this makes sense. I have never done any of these. In England we live in a time of such accomplishment, of culture, conquest. And I tune pianos so that others may make music. I think many women would think that I am dull. But Katherine is different. Once I asked her why she chose me, if I was so quiet, and she said that when she listened to music she could hear in it my work…Silly and romantic, maybe, and we were so young…”

“No, not silly.”

They were quiet. Edgar said, “It is strange, I have just met you and yet I am telling you stories I have never told friends.”

“Perhaps it is because you just met me that you are telling me.”

“Perhaps.”

They were quiet. “I know very little about you,” he said, and the branches of the willow rustled.

“My story is short,” she began.

She was thirty-one years old, born in 1855 to a second cousin of King Mindon. Edgar looked surprised when she said this, and she added quickly, “It doesn’t mean much, The royal family is so large that, if anything, my ounce of royal blood meant danger when Thibaw came to the throne.”

“You cannot mean you welcome British rule?”

“I am very lucky,” she said only.

Edgar persisted. “But many people in England strongly believe that the colonies should have their own governments. In some ways I am inclined to agree. We have done some terrible things.”

“And some good.”

“I wouldn’t expect someone Burmese to say that,” he said.

“I think perhaps it is a mistake of the ruling to think that you can change the ruled.”

She said this slowly, a thought like water spilled, now spreading around them. Edgar waited for her to say more, but when she spoke again, she told him that her father had sent her to a small private school for the Burmese elite in Mandalay, where she was one of two women in her class. There she had excelled in mathematics and English, and when she left she was hired to teach English to students only three years her junior. She had loved teaching and became good friends with other teachers, including several British women. The schoolmaster at the time, a sergeant in the army who had lost a leg in battle, had noticed her talent, and arranged to tutor her himself in the hours after class. She spoke of him the way one tells a story with a hidden ending, but Edgar didn’t ask her more. The sergeant had fallen ill when his amputation site suddenly became gangrenous. She had left school to care for him. He died after several feverish weeks. She had been devastated, but she returned to school. The new schoolmaster also invited her to his office after hours, she said, lowering her eyes, but with different intentions.

She was dismissed two weeks later. The spurned schoolmaster accused her of stealing books and selling them in the market. There was little she could do to answer the charges, and she hadn’t wanted to. Two of her friends had returned to Britain with their husbands, and she shuddered at the thought of the schoolmaster’s pawing hands. Captain Nash-Burnham, who had been a close friend of her father, arrived at her home two days after she was fired. He said nothing of the schoolmaster, and she knew he couldn’t. He offered her a position as a housekeeper in the visitors’ quarters. The quarters, he told her that warm morning, are usually empty, should you choose to have friends visit, or even hold classes. That week she moved in, and the following week she began to teach English at the little table beneath the papaya trees. She had been there for four years.

“And how did you meet Doctor Carroll?” asked Edgar.

“Like you, he was once a guest in Mandalay.”

They stayed on the riverbank for the rest of the afternoon, talking beneath the willows, and Khin Myo spoke mainly of Burma, of festivals, of stories she was told growing up. Edgar asked more questions. They spoke neither of Katherine nor of the Doctor.