Far Pavilions (68 page)

Had he kept his head he would almost certainly have succeeded in keeping his good resolutions as well. In which case the two of them would have sat out the storm without touching each other, and set off for the camp the moment they heard the wind drop. Yet if they had done so they would have missed Kaka-ji and the
ruth,
and returned, innocent, to find themselves the centre of a major scandal and facing serious charges.

In the event, they had no idea of how long the storm lasted or when the wind dropped. It could have been an hour, or two hours, or ten. They had lost all count of time, and even the silence and the fact that they could hear each other's smallest whisper did not remind them of its passing.

‘I never meant this to happen,’ murmured Ash; which was true enough. But if there had been any hope at all of his making a last effort to avoid it, it was lost when Juli, found at last, had flung her arms about his neck and clung to him. And then he had kissed her –

There was nothing of tenderness in that kiss. It was hard and violent, but though it bruised her lips and took the breath from her body, she did not draw back from it but clung closer, and the moment was almost one of desperation, as though they strove against each other as enemies, intent on inflicting pain and careless of receiving it.

The brief frenzy ended, and Juli's taut body relaxed as the panic ebbed away from her, leaving her soft and supple in his arms. Desperation died and gave place to a slow delight that burned its way through every vein and nerve and fibre. Her tears were salt on Ash's tongue, and he could feel the ripple of her hair all about him: long, silky strands that smelt of roses and slid over his skin like a cloak of feathers, or caught and clung to him as though they had a life of their own. Her lips were no longer tense with terror, but warm and eager and sweet beyond relief, and he kissed them again and again until at last they opened under his own, and he felt her whole body shiver with desire.

He would have lifted her then and laid her down on the floor of the cave, but even as his arm tightened, he checked himself and broke off that kiss to ask what seemed, in the circumstances, a superfluous question. Yet he too had been panic-stricken in the inky darkness, and knowing that Juli had been equally frantic, he had to be sure that her passionate response to his kisses was not merely an emotional reaction from terror. Therefore he spoke harshly, forcing himself to say the words, because he was suddenly afraid of how she might reply. ‘Juli, do you love me?’

The cave, and caves beyond the cave, repeated it after him, again and again:
do you love me?
…
you love me
…
love me
… And Anjuli laughed very softly – but so lovingly that his heart seemed to turn over – and answered against his ear, too low for the echo to catch her voice: ‘How can you ask me that when you know I have loved you all my life? Yes, always! From the very beginning.’

Ash's hands went up to grip her smooth shoulders, and he shook her roughly and said: ‘As a brother. But that is no use to me. I want a lover – a wife. I want all of you – for my own, for always. Do you love me like that? Do you, Juli?’

She leaned her cheek against his left hand, rubbing it caressingly as it held her shoulder, and said slowly, as though she were reciting a poem or repeating a profession of faith: ‘I love you. I have always loved you. I have always been yours and I always will be; and if I loved you first as a brother, it was not a brother that I waited for as I grew up and became a woman, but a lover. And – and –’ She leaned forward to lay her cheek against his own and he felt the taut nipples touch his chest like light finger-tips: ‘– this you do not know: but when you returned again I loved you before ever I knew who you were, for when you lifted me out of the
ruth
that night in the river, and held me in your arms while we waited for my women, I could not breathe for the beating of my heart. And I was ashamed, because I thought you were a stranger. Yet something in my blood rejoiced to be held so, and would have had you hold me closer and closer. Like this –’ She tightened her arms about his neck and kissed the hollow below his cheek bone, and said in a shaken whisper: ‘Oh, my love! Love me – love me now, before it is too late for me.’

The whisper ended in a gasp as Ash's hands slid down from her shoulders to catch her again into a close embrace and pull her down with him onto the floor of the cave.

The dry, silver sand was cool and smooth and very soft, and Juli's black hair spread a silky coverlet over it as she lay in the darkness and felt Ash's hands strip away the only garment she still wore, and move up again slowly and caressingly: warm and firm and very sure. For a moment only she knew a pang of fear, but it passed as quickly as it had come, and when he said: ‘I' m going to hurt you,’ she tightened her arms about him, and did not cry out at the lovely cruelty that ended her girlhood.

‘I never meant this to happen,’ Ash had murmured. But that had been hours later – they did not know how many – and after it had happened again. And again…

‘I did,’ whispered Juli, lying quiet and relaxed in the curve of his arm, with her head pillowed on his shoulder.

‘When, Larla?’

Juli did not answer immediately, but Ash was already thinking of something else, and the question had been an idle one for his mind had turned to plans. He was trying to visualize the large-scale Ordnance Maps that he had studied almost daily as the camp moved down across India, and decide which route would be the safest to take. Because the sooner they quit Rajputana and the south, the better. They had their horses, but no money… They would need money, yet they could not go back to the camp. He felt Juli move her head, and the cool touch of the jewel in her ear reminded him that the stones she wore that day were pigeon's-blood rubies, set in gold, and not only in her ears, but as buttons on her
achkan.
If they were careful they should be able to get a good price for them, and they could dispose of them one by one as the need arose.

‘A long time ago,’ said Juli softly, answering his question at last. ‘A month or more; though I did not plan it this way. How could I know that the gods would be so good to me as to send a storm in which we two would be caught, and find refuge here, together? You will think me shameless, but I planned to come if I could to your tent, and if you would not take me willingly, to beg of you… because I was desperate, and I thought that if only –’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Ash, recalled abruptly from his own plans.

‘The Rana,’ whispered Juli, and shivered. ‘I –I could not endure to think that I must lose my maidenhead to another man, one whom I neither knew nor loved and who did not love me, yet who would use me, by right – for lust or to beget heirs from my body. An old man and a stranger…’

She shuddered convulsively and Ash tightened his arm about her, holding her hard against him, and said: ‘Don't, Larla. You don't have to think of it any more. Ever.’

‘But I must,’ insisted Juli, her voice shaking. ‘No – let me speak. I want you to understand. You see, I knew from the beginning that I must submit to him, and also that – that even if he did not find me desirable he would use me, because I was a woman and his wife, and he desires sons. That much I could not escape. But that he should be the first – and the last… That I must be taken without love and submit with loathing, and never, never know what it was to lie with a lover and rejoice in being a woman – It was this that I could not endure, and therefore, Heart's-heart, I planned that I would ask you, would beg of you if need be, to save me from it. Now you have done so, and I am content. No one can ever take these hours away from me, or spoil or defile them. And – who knows? – the gods may even add to their kindness and permit me to conceive from this night. I will pray to them that it may be so, and that my first-born will be yours. But even if that is not granted me, at least I have known love… and having known it I can endure the lust and the shame, and not mind it too much.’

‘You won't have to mind it at all!’ said Ash violently. He pressed his fingers through her hair and pulled her head back so that he could kiss her: her eyes, her forehead, her temples, her cheeks and chin and mouth. He kissed them in turn and spoke between the kisses: ‘My love… my foolish love. Do you really think I would let you go now? I might have done so before, but not now. In spite of everything, I couldn't now…’

He told her then how he had planned to ask her to run away with him and been forced to decide that he must not do so, because the danger was too great – for both of them, though for her most of all – but that the dust-storm had changed all that. It was the miracle that he had needed so badly and despaired of, since it gave them a way of escaping unsuspected – and without any fear of pursuit. They had horses with them, and if they set off as soon as the wind died down they should be able to cover a good many miles that night, and by sunrise be far beyond the reach of any search, for the confusion and havoc that the storm must have wrought in the camp would make it impossible to send out search parties to look for them before daylight. When they were not discovered it would be assumed that they had lost their lives in the storm, and were lying dead and buried in some sand drift among the hills; and the search for their bodies would soon be abandoned because the country for miles around would be changed by dust and blown sand, and too many gullies and hollows would be newly silted up withit.

‘They'll give up after a day or two, and go on to Bhithor,’ said Ash. ‘They'll have to, because of the heat if nothing else. And we don't even have to worry about money, for we can sell my watch and your rubies – those earrings and the buttons on your coat. We can live on those for months. Probably for years. Somewhere where no one knows us: in Oudh, or among the foothills in the north, or in Kulu Valley. And I can find work, and then when they have forgotten all about us -’

Anjuli shook her head. ‘They would not. Me they might forget, for I am of little worth to anyone. But with you it is different. You might hide for a year, or for ten years; but when you showed your face again, either here in Hind, or in
Belait
, and tried to claim your inheritance, you would still be an officer in the army of the Raj who had run away without leave; and for that they would catch you and punish you. And then all would become known.’

‘Yes,’ said Ash slowly. ‘Yes; that's true.’ There was a note of surprise in his voice as though he had made a new and disconcerting discovery. In the intoxication of the past hours he had genuinely forgotten about the Guides. ‘I could never go back. But – but we shall be together, and -’

He stopped, for Anjuli had laid a hand over his mouth.

‘No, Ashok.’ Her voice was a pleading whisper. ‘Do not say any more. Please, please do not, because I cannot go with you… I cannot. I could not leave Shushila… I promised her that I would stay with her. I gave her my word, and I cannot go back on that…’

For a while Ash had not believed her. But when he tried to speak, her fingers pressed tighter against his mouth and her voice hurried on in the darkness, explaining, pleading. Each word a hammer blow. Shu-shu loved her and depended upon her, and had only agreed to marry the Rana on condition that she, Anjuli, stayed with her. She could not possibly abandon her little sister now and leave her to face the terrors of a new life alone. Ashok did not understand how frightened and homesick and unhappy Shu-shu was. How terrified of the prospect of marriage to a middle-aged stranger and of living among people whose ways would be different from hers, in surroundings that were so unlike those she had hitherto known and loved. Shu-shu was only a child still. A frightened and bewildered child –

‘How could I ever be happy, knowing that I had deserted her?’ whispered Anjuli. ‘She is my little sister, whom I love; and who loves and trusts me – and needs me, too… she has always needed me, ever since she was a baby. Shu-shu gave me love in the years when I had nothing else, and if I failed her now, when her need is greatest, I would feel guilty all my days and never be able to forgive myself; or to forget that I had run away and left her… broken my word and – and betrayed her -’

Ash caught her wrist and wrenched her hand away: ‘But
I
love you too. And
I
need you. Does that mean nothing to you? Do you care so much more for her than you do for me? Do you?’

‘You know that I do not,’ said Anjuli on a sob. ‘I love you more than life. Beyond anyone and anything else. Beyond words – beyond shame! Have I not proved that to you tonight? But – but you are strong, Ashok. You will go on living and learn to put all this behind you and make yourself a good life without me; and one day -’

‘Never. Never.
Never,’
broke in Ash vehemently.

‘Yes, you will. And I too. Because – because we are both strong enough to do it. But Shu-shu is not; and if I am not there to give her courage when she is afraid, and to comfort her when she is ill or sad or wild with homesickness, she will die.’

‘
Be-wakufi
!’ said Ash roughly. ‘She's probably a lot stronger than you suppose, and though she may be a child in some ways, she's her mother's daughter in a good many others. Oh, Juli, my darling, my Heart's-love – I know she's your sister and you're fond of her, but underneath all that shyness and charm she's a spoilt, selfish and demanding brat who likes her own way; and you've allowed her to have it, and to tyrannize over you for far too long. It's high time you let her stand on her own feet and realized that she isn't your baby sister any more, but a grown girl who will be a wife within a month and a mother inside a year. She isn't going to let herself die. Don't you believe it.’

Anjuli was silent for a moment or two, and then she said in a curiously flat and unemotional voice: ‘If Shu-shu were told that I had perished in the storm, and that she must go on alone to Bhithor, she would go mad with grief and fear, and there would be no one who could control her. Nandu is not here, and only he was able to do so before. I tell you I know her; and you do not. And though I love her, I am not blind to her faults – or to my own. I know that she is spoilt and selfish and self-willed; and Janoo-Rani's daughter. But I also know her to be gentle and loving and very trusting, and I will not bring her to her death. If I did, how could you love me? – knowing that – too was selfish and self-willed, as well as faithless? And cruel, too! For I should be all those things if I were willing to jeopardize my little sister's life and reason for the sake of my own happiness.’