Distant Choices (16 page)

Rose Oriel, waiting to become the guiding spirit, the healing balm of that lovely, neglected garden and of the family which ought soon to be playing there. Dare she allow herself to believe it possible? Had her eyes been less dazzled she would have been able to judge more clearly. Yet why else should he seek her out in every gathering? Why else should he give a rose in his garden her name? She would have known exactly what to think had any other man behaved in that fashion, and had had no difficulty at all in understanding, at once, that Mr Garron Keith admired her and had started to consider her –
at once
– as a possible mother for his children. And since Francis Ashington's need of a wife was equally pressing, then …? Why not?
Why not?
When surely he could see her fitness for the task, could sense her desire for it, the warm ocean of her love for him. A summer sea without storms, calm, nourishing waters flowing through his life and the gloomy house he had inherited.

She had no way of knowing, of course, that he had never wanted the house and, had the inheritance not been thrust upon him, he would never, for one moment, have considered marrying Oriel Blake or anyone else. Indeed he would not even have met her since nothing but the sorry business of family funerals and an irritating sense of family loyalty which he had never quite managed to root out of himself, would have recalled him to England.

He was twenty-eight years old and had spent no more than a few scattered months of his life at Dessborough, his first conscious memories being the ripe odours and vibrant colours, the hot pinks and gold and burnt siennas, the passionate perfumes and spices of India. Impressions so deeply and dearly held that when, as a child of nine, he had been ‘sent home'to school, the taste of England had seemed very bland on his tongue, the scents and shades of his native land dull and damp and giving him no sense of belonging. England, not India, had been the foreign land. It still was. He had spent his schooldays longing for one thing only. To return.
Home
. To the vivid, tragic, profoundly compassionate land which so excited and moved him.

Home. To a commission, at first, in the Bengal Army, the careless privileges of a European officer in the service of the Honourable East India Company, polo and pig-sticking and junketing in the mess, mild flirtations with the ship-loads of young English gentlewomen who came out, every year, on what had been called the ‘fishing fleet' in search of husbands. A pleasant enough life, until India itself overcame him his knowledge of Indian languages, his taste for Indian society, his ability to
become
an Indian, setting him apart from his brother officers.

And setting his brother officers decidedly and uneasily apart from him. Francis Ashington, a chap who had gone a shade too native, who spent too much time in the bazaar and the temple or squatting around the well of some outlandish village listening to a man whose claim to holiness seemed to be that he never cut his hair or his toe-nails. Letting the side down, rather, with his fakirs and gurus and dervishes, instead of drinking tea with his colonel's lady and playing croquet on her manicured lawn like the rest of them, pretending they were in England.

But social neglect by Europeans had troubled him so little that, finding the few hundred a year his father had left him more than enough to live on once he had shed the obligation to keep up ‘appearances', he had resigned his commission and disappeared into his own concept of the India he loved. A few miles away in distance but a thousand in spirit from tea and croquet on an imitation English lawn.

A time of living to the limits of himself, of exploration and self-discovery from which he had emerged, three years later, to publish the journal of his experiences, or such of them as he could bear to expose to the public view, and had become a minor celebrity. Francis Ashington, rum sort of a chap but likely to take the fancy of somebody in high places. Best keep on the right side of him, then. Best invite him to dinner, and all that. And it had been partly to escape the attentions of too many colonels'ladies, far too many romantic, impossibly innocent, overpoweringly English girls, that he had gone off again to the deserts of Syria and Arabia, wandering alone – which meant, of course, in Arab company – for so long that he had been reported dead, winning fame all over again by his sudden reappearance, bearded, emaciated, gaunt from a dozen bouts of fever, wanting nothing more than to set off again.

But now he had come back to Dessborough to perform what he had been brought up to consider as his duty, to marry and impregnate as quickly as possible a woman who would be a good mistress not for himself but for Dessborough, thus paying his debt to his ancestors by ensuring the continuance of their line. After which he could feel free to set out on his carefully planned journey to Mecca, the holy city of Mohammed forbidden on pain of death to all infidels where, disguised as one of Mohammed's faithful, it was his intention to kiss the Black Stone of pilgrimage and, should his disguise prove inadequate, be flayed alive for it. He knew of no other European who had survived the experience intact. He wished to be the first. Although this as he well knew, was not his true reason.

The most profound experiences of his life, the things which had moulded him, moved him and scarred him had all been Indian. He had only loved Indian women and had married one of them in his heart and his soul and in her traditions, in every way except the Christian ceremony which he had almost forgotten, her early death leaving a void in him which only danger, risk, the constant picking up of a lethal challenge – not another woman – could even partially fill.

Not such a woman as Oriel Blake, certainly, although he fully appreciated her beauty and her quality as well as his own good fortune in finding so soon the very girl – this calm and serious and very lovely Rose Oriel – who would be so perfect in every way for Dessborough.

Lord Merton, of course – his mother's cousin – had felt obliged to warn him about the question-mark hovering above Miss Blake's identity. Not that Lord Merton, who had sown his own wild oats in plenty, had any truck himself with all this middle-class prejudice against bastardy. Not he. Nor any of his old companions from the Prince Regent's day either, when nobody had blamed a fellow for following his natural inclinations. But what with the Prince Regent's young niece, Queen Victoria and her German Albert getting so prim and proper and so deucedly middle-class themselves – which ill became Victoria when one remembered the carryings on of her father and uncles – it seemed worth mentioning. Lady Merton, who valued her place in court circles, had thought so, in any case.

But what could such things matter to Francis Ashington, squire of a small north country manor, whose moderate means and lack of political and social ambitions made the opinions of royalty irrelevant, and whose personal tastes inclined him, moreover, to a huge tolerance? A man whose first, much-loved, deeply-mourned wife had been the daughter of a silk merchant from Kashmir, a woman the Mertons would have found impossible to acknowledge as anything but a native and, therefore, a temporary concubine.

What concerned him was neither Miss Blake's illegitimacy nor her lack of the princely dowry his name and station might have commanded elsewhere, but simply to discover whether or not that name and station were the ones she wanted. To be certain, in fact, that
she
, and not merely her mother, sincerely wished to see herself as the mistress of his house, the patroness of his village, and his wife.

Not the wife of his heart, of course.
That
had ended, three years ago, beside a flower-decked funeral pyre, scarlet and orange petals and the naked face of a woman burning all together beneath his crazed, suddenly too European eyes. His woman, the root and reason of his life, who had accepted her own death peacefully, easily, seeing it as the mere casting off of a worn garment in order to assume another. Leaving him only to await him, she had said, on another plane of existence in which he, that day and on all the days that followed, had never managed to believe.

Wife of his heart. Thank God – when one remembered the pain of it – that there could be no other. But Miss Blake – if she wished it – could be his wife of reason, of respect of warm appreciation and content. The silver and ivory of her too pale for him, perhaps, as this land of England was too pale, too subtle, too civilized, too elusive, but beautiful nonetheless. It would be his pleasure to give her the life for which she had certainly been created and to share it with her whenever, and as best, he could. Rose Oriel, who would bloom equally in his presence or his many absences, nurtured by the very soil which so burdened him. She was the one, exactly right, perfect in all her moods and manners, just as Kate, the legitimate Miss Stangway, was so exactly wrong.

Although he had enjoyed Kate's company that spring and summer rather more and certainly more often than anyone may have realized, beginning one crystal-clear English morning in Merton Woods where no young lady, of course, ought to have been rambling – particularly now that Mr Keith's navvies had poached the Merton estate clean of rabbits, driving his lordship's irate gamekeepers to set man-traps under the trees and in the long grass.

Assuming Kate to be ignorant of such things he had warned her and even offered, somewhat reluctantly, to escort her back to her carriage, or her governess, or her gaggle of aunts and cousins from whom he supposed she had strayed.

‘Don't trouble,' she had said and, suddenly tossing her head, had plunged – he could think of no other word for it – into the tangle of undergrowth where the traps were most likely to be concealed and gone dancing off, courting terrible trouble and laughing at it in a way he knew, from his own experiences, to be thrilling; leaving
him
, the great traveller, on the tame and tedious pathway.

Astounded, he had watched her for a moment and then, almost hearing the snap of metal jaws biting through her ankle, had rushed to catch up with her.

‘Why?' he had demanded, sounding, he suspected, more like an elderly uncle than a man who had crossed the burning wastes of Arabia. ‘Why on earth did you do that?'

‘Oh – why
not
?'

Why not indeed? Was that his own voice he could hear, or one dangerously akin to it, bidding her, as so often it had bidden him, to take the wild chance, to glorify life by risking it, to value each breath because it might be the last, so that eventually one could value it
only
because there might never be another? Surely this fragile, awkward girl could not be similarly addicted?

‘Do you even know.' he had waspishly enquired, feeling in honour bound to lecture her, ‘what would have happened if there
had
been a trap?'

And she – little minx – had lowered her eyes meekly, modestly and folded her hands like a good child at school.

‘Might I have caught my foot in it?'

Was she mocking him? Of course she was. And because he could not – could he? – ruffle her hair and laugh at her, laugh
with
her, he had taken refuge in an entirely justifiable pulling of rank and seniority.

‘You might. Which would have been painful at the very least and possibly lethal if you had been alone …'

But she knew that – damn her – knew it very well. Otherwise, without that fine appreciation of her peril, where would have been the fun? Had her addiction really gone so far? Dear God – and she was so slight and small, her bones so brittle, her narrow, nervous body having no more real stamina, real toughness in it, than a sparrow.

Urgently, uncomfortably, he had feared for her.

‘But I was not alone, Francis. I expect you would have got me out and carried me home.'

‘I dare say. And what then?'

‘At home?' Her pointed chin had risen abruptly, her long eyes glittering as if he had issued a challenge. ‘You mean what would my father say, or do? Oh – anything, I suppose, to cover his embarrassment.'

‘Embarrassment?' Hardly the reaction to be expected, surely, from Matthew Stangway should he see his daughter carried home, her leg a mangled ruin, in the arms of a bachelor who must clearly have been alone, at some stage, in the woods with her. Horror, more likely. Fury. Distress, perhaps. Certainly a good many pertinent questions.

‘Embarrassment,' she said, suddenly laughing at him. ‘Well, of course, Francis, for Lord Merton's sake, don't you see? Because man-traps are illegal, aren't they? So how – if my father wants to go on inviting Lord Merton to dinner – could he admit to knowing he's been setting them on his land? Certainly my father's wife would never admit it. So they'd just have to put themselves to the bother of making up some story to account for my mangled leg, or my blood-poisoning, wouldn't they? Perhaps they could say I'd been bitten by a mad dog. I expect my father's wife could even arrange it.'

He shivered.

‘Kate – were you afraid just now?'

‘Oh yes.' He understood it was the question she had been waiting for. ‘Oh
yes
– very afraid. Terrified. Were
you
– in the desert?'

‘Yes. Part of the time.'

The only part, in fact, which he could now remember, the rest of it – the safe part – leaving on his tongue the same bland, wholly alien taste of England.

‘I've not heard you talk about it, Francis.'

‘No.' He preferred to talk to these alien people only of life's irrelevancies, the safe,
bland
topics of landed interests and the social calendar, weddings and christenings and the right number of invitations to dinner which had no meaning for him whatsoever. But, nevertheless, he found himself talking to Kate Stangway, on that day and others, a whole series of clear, cool English mornings when she, forgetting to be an English lady, would sit down on the grass, her head bare, her knees drawn up to her chin in the rapt posture of village lads squatting around an Indian well, listening to him – the guru, the master – with the fervent attention of a disciple.