Laura Kinsale (14 page)

“Allah cut her off!” cried one of the men with Khalid, all in puritanical white too, one of their religious sheiks who expounded the laws of the Koran. “May she be blackened, and her parents blackened, and her family, and all of the Englezys, by the Prophet!”

Zenia took a step forward, lifting her hand as if she would slap him. The men nearest her shrank back, a faint start, but she held her hand erect a moment, and then dropped it. “Cowards,” she spat at them.
“Billah,
do you flinch from a woman?”

“A woman in the clothes of a man! An abomination!” the sheik cried. “Cover your shamefulness, and may Allah rip up your belly in you!”

Zenia’s throat was tight with terror. Her face was frozen in calm. She ignored the sheik, staring steadily at Prince Rashid. Lord Winter had said that the prince had taken them under his protection.

“Shall I suffer this?” she asked.

“You are my guest,” he said.

“No.” The Saudi emir’s bitter voice interposed. “She has no appeal to the laws of hospitality. This woman comes before me accused of immorality and vice. She must be punished. And the man with her, as a Frankish spy.”

The Egyptian general looked up. With an expression of boredom, he leaned on the rifle stock and watched the emir with dark unblinking eyes.

“At the proper hour tomorrow, before the assembled people of God, the man’s head shall be struck off with a sword,” Prince Khalid declared, “and the woman stoned until death. That is my judgment, in the name of the Prophet and of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

They sat silently, returned to the room of their imprisonment. Arden stuffed a cushion behind his back and leaned his head against the whitewashed wall. For a long time, he sat with his eyes closed. It was a battle within himself. His mind refused reality, and he concentrated on physical sensation for an anchor: the slightly rough pressure of the wall against his shoulders, the carpet beneath him, the occasional sound of a water wheel from outside the barred windows. He breathed the dry air, scentless, that whispered in off the desert.

He opened his eyes. The figure opposite him seemed too small, propped up against one of the two great columns that supported the chamber.

He saw a Bedu boy; beardless young Selim, timid and courageous, a handsome child with wild elf-locks and huge kohl-darkened eyes, small calloused hands and feet. A boy whose death sentence lay on Arden’s shoulders, grieving him beyond speech.

But the perception was like a picture he had seen once, a black and white silhouette that in one glance appeared to be an ornate vase, and in the next a pair of faces looking at one another. The same way he had frowned at the silhouette and seen only a vase, he stared and stared and could not distinguish anyone but Selim, until in one instant of transformation his mind made the leap and he saw the other image.

A woman, full-grown. Willow-slender, with skin sun-dyed to darkest gold—and the same huge eyes that gazed back at him in distress—a woman that he did not know, and yet he knew. An Englishwoman. Her mother’s daughter, but beautiful, so savagely unkempt and beautiful that his soul seemed to sink down in anguish, unable to bear the intensity of it.

He felt that Selim was lost already. He was angry, surrendering a friend; mourning the boy who had never been, but when he looked in this new perception and knowledge, his feelings were beyond enduring. He could not suffer them. He was numb.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and he heard a woman’s voice, pitched in a fair, clear timbre like the desert air.

He shook his head. Her lips parted to speak again.

“Don’t,” he commanded. He was afraid that she would say that it was her fault, when it was his. When he had been blind, blind, blind. Repentance was not a familiar sentiment to him. If one could die of an emotion, he was dying of it. Crushed and annihilated by it, until he could barely pull air into his chest.

She said nothing more. Only knelt, her feet tucked up under her, her delicate shoulder resting against the great pillar. The tangled locks of hair framed her face.

After a long time, she said, “I should have told you.”

And what was he to say to that? That she should have; that he would never have brought her; that he would have abandoned her at the first possible place if he had known? Because she was female, and he would never have believed it possible that such heroism could quietly exist in a female heart.

She glanced up at him diffidently. The late afternoon light glowed on her hair, picking out the tiny flying strands, and brought rose to the deep gold of her skin. It was as if he had been traveling with a shabby cocoon, a secret, and something magical and fragile and brief had suddenly appeared from within it.

He thought—She’s going to die tomorrow. They’re going to stone her to death. If Prince Rashid, God rot him in hell, had stood up for them...

But he had not. He had bowed to his emir and fanatical sheiks and the Egyptian officers and given up his little stab at revolt with a calm smile.

There was a depth of panic in Arden that he couldn’t touch, did not dare feel. He could think of his own death. A just penalty for this, for bringing her here. She had wished to go to England, and he had led her to destruction instead. And she had come so bravely, warning him, imploring him to turn back, and still riding beside him into whatever hell he chose to take her.

Even now she looked to him, without tears or recriminations. The way she looked at him—in sober trust, a wild creature wandered into the hunter’s camp.

“Tell me,” he said. “Do you wish to be known as Miss Stanhope, or Miss Bruce?”

As soon as he said it, he thought it an idiotic thing. He never knew the precise thing to say, the way to be easy and charming and comforting. But she answered instantly, lifting her face.

“Miss Bruce,” she said. “I should like to be known as Miss Bruce.”

He said, “Miss Bruce, come here.”

She rose with a grace that seemed new to him, as if he had not seen her rise a hundred times before. As she settled on the carpet before him, folding her legs beneath her, he felt a brilliant rush of physical desire, a longing that seemed the culmination of all the days he had watched her and not known himself or her.

He lifted the braid that fell from behind her ear, fingering it. Such braids were the pride of young Bedouin men, their ornament to beguile the ladies. With his ringers, he broke the twist that bound the braid, and began to comb out her hair.

In silence he worked, his hands gentle. He spread her braids, and then began to draw his fingers through the wild disorder, unknotting a lifetime of tangles. He had never combed a woman’s long hair before, but he found the way, tiny threads, with each snarl caught up in his fingers so that he would not hurt her. He was aware of her eyes upon his face, but he could not look directly into them. He kept his gaze on his work.

“Lord Winter,” she whispered, “would you tell me what England is like?”

He smoothed her hair against his palm. “What do you mean?”

“What is it like? Your home—is there a garden?”
 

“Yes. A garden. A rose garden.”
 

“And water?”

“A lake. With swans on it.” He turned her chin with his finger, to reach another tangle. “My home is called Swanmere.”

A faint smile touched the corner of her lips. “And great trees? Is there a forest?”

“Several forests. Lawns of grass between them. And paths through the trees, that lead great explorers to silly little Grecian temples where the ladies like to take tea.”

“Oh yes,” she said, with a pleased glance up at him.

“And meet their lovers,” he said.

Her eyes dropped shyly. She played with a lock of her hair that hung over her shoulder. “Where is your Swanmere?”

“Buckinghamshire. The green heart of England.”

“Oh,” she breathed. “And is the house very old?”

He had not been there for eleven years. But he found himself describing it in perfect detail, from the iron gates and the sweeping drive to the stone lions that guarded the stairs, the places where he had chased dreams as a boy and played alone.

“And the town?” she asked, and he described it too, the wheeled carriages with rims painted gold and the farm carts piled with hay, the church and the green and the cottage dogs that chased the geese.

“London,” she said, and as the sunset threw red light in a square against the wall, he told her of London. He wove a dream of an elegant place, left out the smoke and the smells and spoke of the tall houses and fashionable bonnets, of colored ribbons in shops, flavored ices and fireworks in the parks.

He combed out her hair, and held it up, coiling it in a mass atop her head. He tilted up her chin, turning her face from side to side, examining her judiciously, and said Miss Bruce must wear a white gown to her debut.

She smiled at that, but he saw under the smile, saw the terror and melancholy beneath. He stood up in the very last light, and raised her. Her hair fell about her shoulders, a dark, dusty cloud, still curling untamed. It blended with the shadows, so that he only saw her face.

“Miss Bruce,” he said, bowing over her hand. “May I have the honor of this dance?”

She bit her lip. And then, with a shaky grip upon his hand, she made an awkward curtsy.

“It is a waltz,” he said soberly. “Because it is May, and London, and you’re the loveliest girl in the city, and I want you in my arms.”

And she smiled up at him brilliantly. He smiled back, because he had said something pleasing for once, a lucky shot. Barefoot, upon the silent carpets, he drew her into the dance. She had a little of the way of it, as if she had long ago learned the steps, though he could not imagine how. With her palm lying in his hand, and his arm about her slight waist, they turned and turned without a sound.

“You dance splendidly, Miss Bruce,” he said, another attempt.

“Miss Williams taught me,” she said.

He could no longer see her face but as a pale shape in the dark. She was gone, lost to him. If their jailers came before dawn, he would never see her face again.

“There are candles,” he said. “Two thousand candles in crystal chandeliers. Everything is light and sparkling.”

“But why did you leave? It must be so beautiful.”

“Well, you know, little wolf, I killed a girl there,” he said, in the dreaming flow of the night and the dance. “And so I could not bring myself to stay.”

She looked up at him without aversion or alarm. With simple gravity, a child born among wolves, accustomed to such things.

He hardly believed that he had told her. It seemed as if he hadn’t, and yet he heard himself say, “I drowned her.” He stopped the dance and put his face against her dusty hair. “I didn’t want to marry her. I was drunk. Hellish drunk. And the boat tipped. I didn’t try to save her. I didn’t want her, and I let her drown.”

Her hand curled about his. She said nothing. He lifted his head and looked up at the windows, where the sky still held a last flush of light against a black horizon.

“She was afraid of her mother,” he said. “She was afraid of my father. She was afraid of her shadow. I hated her, because she was going to lock me up in her fear. But there was never so much as a kiss between us. God, I’d think they might have guessed, I was such an awkward devil—too shy to hold a coherent conversation. What a gauche pair we must have been!” He made a faint, cheerless laugh. “I don’t think she cared much for me either.”

Her face was upturned to his. He lifted his hand and cupped her cheek, sliding his fingertips over the smooth skin. “Where were you, little wolf? Eleven years ago, when I needed you?”

“With the Bedu,” she said.

“Fate,” he murmured. “Bloody fate. I’ve looked all my life for you.” He touched her, tracing her face that he could not see. “And I find you today.”

“I’m not what you think I am. I’m always afraid,” she said into his chest as he drew her close. “I’m afraid now.”

“I know,” he whispered. “I know it, wolf cub.”

She shivered, holding to him. He bent his head and kissed her cheek, but there was no comfort to be given. She made a small moan and turned her face down, burying herself against him, and he was instantly aflame.