Distant Choices (20 page)

‘Yes,' he said.

‘And so, when you gave me the sari, I knew it would be today. I came home on fire – I can tell you –
burning
. Wild again. And then there was your letter to Evangeline, and the way she smiled when she said you would be calling later on. I understood. Lord – how I started burning
then
. That's why I had to get to you first. It never seemed right to talk about these things in the woods, so I never did. Quentin, I mean – and the rest. They never seemed to exist there, so I forgot them. Cancelled them out, I think. But I knew I'd have to explain tonight – myself – before
they
could tell you … About Quentin. And about my mother. You have a right to know.'

She had ‘cancelled them out'. Quentin, her mother, and how much else? How, he wondered desperately, had it been possible? How had she lived, this spring and summer, so close to Oriel without understanding his real intentions? Had she really been so engrossed in the weaving of her own romance, her eyes so dazed by the dream, the fairytale, that she had missed even a hint of the reality? He believed so. For Oriel, sweet soul of discretion, would have confided in no one but her mother who was not the woman to count any unhatched chickens in the presence of Letty or Maud. And so they had all seen exactly and only what they had wished to see, themselves mainly, their own desires, and ‘cancelled out'the rest.

What now? How much harm had he already done to this girl who so terrified him with her fragility, her terrible innocence? How much guilt and shame could he carry with him to Mecca?

‘What about your mother?' he said gently, speaking to an invalid, knowing, as he asked the question, that it had already become impossible to proceed with his proposal to Oriel. He could not do it. Could not – quite purely and simply – invite Kate to dance at his wedding and to live, very probably forever, as a near neighbour to his wife. Such callousness was not in him. No. there could be no Rose Oriel now. And if he regretted it – and he rather thought he did – then so much the better. He would have to live out this night as best he could, make whatever excuses he could lay tongue to, and
leave
, early tomorrow, in disgrace if need be, to make the final arrangements for his journey into Mecca.

His intentions had been good, their performance disastrous. He would be leaving Dessborough untenanted, Oriel puzzled and disappointed he supposed, Kate in a condition of mind he could not bear to contemplate. But Oriel, surely, was only fond of him? He was hardly more than fond of her himself. It was Kate's anguish that mattered.

Kate. And once again, as he leaned forward to catch the hot, dry scent of her, his eyes were possessed by the colours of Arshad around her face, the slight, amber-skinned body beneath the musky silk, waiting – it seemed – to welcome him back to the only real level of his life which had ever been vital, or even true. Arshad.

‘Francis …'

And he regretted the reluctance with which he returned to her, forcing himself back into this place, this hour, the clamouring of this present. And of her.

‘Yes, Kate.'

‘I have to tell you of my mother.'

‘Yes.'

‘Francis – she loved my father. But he had nothing to give her. Hatred would have been better than nothing, but he even kept that from her. Deliberately, I think. And dislike isn't much to live on. She couldn't live on it. They say it drove her mad.'

‘They?'

‘Aunt Maud – and Evangeline – and others.'

‘Do you believe them? Is their judgement to be trusted?' Here at least he could help her.

She shook her head. ‘No. It suits them too well to think so. Perhaps she just had a kind of melancholy – a kind of deep disappointment she never could shake off. But if not – if they should be right, and if madness goes from mother to – to
me
, Francis …?'

‘It hasn't.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I know.' Although, in truth, looking at her fevered eyes he admitted, with the sense of picking up an extra burden, that he was not sure of it. And if the balance of her mind should be as fragile as her body, as easily broken as those brittle, restless bones then what a crime he had indeed committed. Of negligence perhaps, but just as terrible.

‘It doesn't matter, Kate.'

‘Oh yes it does. It does. She was strange – my mother – but she was rich too. Which means there'd be no need for me to explain her to – to the other men who might want to marry me. “Rich” would be all they'd need to know – since I inherit quite a lot one day. So they wouldn't care about the “strange”. And – for them – neither would I. It wouldn't matter. But it matters with you, Francis. I want to be honest. And strong. Damn it, I want to be
perfect
for you.'

And he would have given a great deal – aimost anything but the ultimate sacrifice of his freedom – to have been able to tell her that she alone, blessedly imperfect, was all he wanted.
I love you, Kate. Beyond any damage your mother or father may have done to you, beyond anything but the possession of your uniquely precious self. You are all in all to me
. She deserved a man who could say that to her. She needed it, he fully understood, as Arshad had needed it. Some man, somewhere in her future, who was not Francis Ashington.

‘And one has to think, I suppose – one
has
to – about a child. That is part of it, after all – isn't it?'

This was terrible. Whatever it cost him, he must stop her now. But, her passion in full flight, she could not be halted.

‘I want … Oh Francis, I know females are supposed not even to know about such things. But
I
know.
I
feel – well – as men feel – about loving you – wanting you to love me.
Wanting
you. So there's no reason to be shy with me because I'm only eighteen and I've never been anywhere in the world further than Manchester. I have eyes, after all, and dreams, and I understand, Francis. Yes, I do. And if I ought to be afraid of it – as they all say one should – then I just can't be. Not with you.'

She was offering him the love not only of her heart and mind now but of her body, as Arshad had done, a virgin not afraid but glorying in the riches she had to bestow, the joys to be learned and shared, bemused by her own sensuality.
Touch me, Francis
. He did not think she spoke the words although it hardly mattered with the clarion-call of her body, beneath the sari-silk, ringing loud in his head, setting up, along the complex pattern of his nerves, the familiar vibrations leading him, inevitably – as such calls always did, always had, he was not proud of it – to a wholly physical desire. A fierce thrusting urgency of it far beyond anything he had experienced this morning in the rather mannerly stirring of his body towards Miss Oriel Blake. A heat aroused in him not infrequently by the unexplored, the unexpected, the spice and peril of the unknown.

Caution, then. He knew he had need of it, for it would not be the first time he had lost his head, briefly, over a chance encounter, a forbidden woman tempting him sometimes as greatly as a forbidden city. Except that he would burn for Mecca tomorrow, and the day after, the year after, whereas a woman who was not Arshad could not detain him long. And this girl, above all others, must not be used or deceived any more than he had already used and deceived her. Somehow he must find a way –
now
– to convince her that he loved her yet would be forced to leave her, to write her another romance in place of the one he was about to tear to shreds.

‘I lead a terrible life, Kate. How can I ask any woman to share it?'

But he saw by the leap of excitement in her throat that he had merely taken another step into the trap.

‘Ask me? I would follow you barefoot – don't you know that? – just to lead your life, even if I didn't love you. Francis – I loved your life – your adventure – your freedom – even before I met you. I was thirsty for that life. And then I was thirsty for you. Parched dry with wanting you, so that it was you and not the life that mattered. You became the adventure – the freedom. The miracle. I thought they would end up suffocating me, Francis – Aunt Maud and the rest. I knew – really – that I wouldn't be strong enough to stand against them alone. To get away. And then – you …'

Closing her eyes, throwing back her head as he had seen Oriental heads poised for sacrifice, she opened both her arms, the sari separating, sliding away, not even the satin English dinner-gown beneath it concealing the nakedness and intensity of her desire.

‘Kate.' Was that the name he had really called her?
Kate
. He was by no means certain of it.

‘Yes, Francis. Oh – yes …' And even if he had never heard a voice making a total sacrifice to passion before, he could not have mistaken this one.

She was an English schoolroom miss with no more knowledge of the erotic arts than a new-fledged gosling. She was an odalisque glorying in her power to entice and arouse him, naked already in her own mind. And – to his horror – in his. Unless he moved away from her now, at once, then he would fall into her and drown. What an insane notion. Yet that was what he felt. Fall into her and drown, with the scent of her desire in his nostrils, the desperate odour of her need for him, his pity and tenderness for her, and the brutal fact that he now desired her too, choking him even before the water closed over his head.

Desire and drowning.

Touch me
. Who spoke? What insane folly,
his
madness now, not her mother's, filling his mind as he put a hand on her shoulder and heard her moan out loud at his touch. A thrilling sound. He touched her again just to hear the long-drawn note of it, to feel the quivering of her shoulder blade beneath his fingers, to know how absolutely she was crying out to him to possess her. He was in deep water now, deeper, as, moaning again, she seized his hand and pressed it hard against her breast, giving herself and taking him in an act of simple unrestrained passion which mesmerized and thrilled him.

He was truly drowning now.

‘Love me, Francis.' She had claimed him and, the sari silk wrapping them both together, the whispering of another voice – another name, dear God – there, still
there
in his ears, he knew he had surrendered, her arm around his neck now, her mouth finding his and opening beneath it as if sexual love came quite naturally to her.

To him, in matters of sensuality, too.

What was he doing? For God's sake, had he taken leave of his senses? What
was
he doing? Kissing her and loving it, but not loving her. Harming her. A girl whose plight had moved him more than anything else he had encountered in this alien land. Being a damned fool. Certainly he was doing that, which would not have mattered too much in England had she been married or of a lower class, but which mattered a great deal with her. Mattered
to
her.

Stop it then. Make some damnable foolish, cruel excuse, play out a grand scene of renunciation: ‘I love you but this cannot be. I shall mourn you all my life.' And
go
. But she had found his mouth again, was moaning now into his ear, had taken his hand and was guiding it, this time, between her breasts beyond the sari, so that his fingers were touching bare skin and the tiny, brittle bones of a bird.

Lovers drowning together, clinging, amidst the wreckage of good sense and reason, to the very limbs, the very needs which had provoked it, dragging each other down beneath a raging floodwater which, in the manner of such torrents, might drain away as quickly as it had arisen, marooning them – fatally perhaps – on dry land. And had Evangeline been the one to open the door upon them, then she, understanding none better the speedy evaporation of passion, would certainly have closed it again and kept it closed until some other plan of concealment had occurred to her. But, as the family came out from dinner and were being shepherded to the drawing-room by Evangeline – safely out of her way, so far as she knew – it was Letty Saint-Charles who, remembering the needlework she had left by the parlour fire, made a sudden dart for the door, wishing to get on with the shirt she was pin-tucking for Quentin; the sight which met her eyes causing her to shriek and fly out into the hall again as if she had witnessed murder being done.

As indeed she had. The murder of her hopes for Quentin, her ardent desire to see him established here as master of High Grange, which could only be achieved through marriage to this unstable, ungrateful and now, it seemed, wanton girl. And it was of this she babbled and cried out to the family party still gathered in the hall, her meaning not clear to everyone, although Evangeline and Quentin, both grasping it at once, moved forward, for entirely different reasons, to restrain her.

‘Mother – for Heaven's sake – do calm yourself. There is –
I am quite sure
– no need to make a fuss.'

Very clearly, very forcefully, he wished Letty to be sure of it too, to have the sense to realize that he quite simply could not afford to find Kate in the arms of another man until
after
he had married her and secured her property for himself. ‘Mother, you must be mistaken. The poor light, I expect, which makes shadows …'

But sense and Letty had never gone much together.

‘No, no, my dearest. I saw them plainly – and her dress in such a state as your father has never seen
my
dress in all these years …'

‘To be sure,' murmured Evangeline, the arch of her eyebrows conveying amusement, although no surprise, at the modest nature of vicarage lovemaking. ‘But Letty dear – forgive me – your nerves, of late, have been so agitated, so very often – such storms, which surely cannot be good for you. Do come and sit down, quite quietly, and take a glass of port – what could be better? You may leave the rest to me, which will turn out to be nothing at all, as Quentin has just told you.'

‘They were kissing,' said Letty, defending, or so she imagined, her best-beloved son. ‘And holding each other. It was disgraceful.'