My Beautiful Enemy (9 page)

He walked to the fireplace and tapped the ashes into the grate. Did he turn on the light and look? Did he return to bed and pretend as if nothing were the matter?

She was directly behind him. No sounds, no movements, but the heat she radiated was palpable, almost coercive.

“You should not be here,” he said.

They lived in uncertain times. Those who protected the crown were tense and jumpy. She would not wish to be caught.

No response from her, except . . . did she move even closer to him?

The air was thick with her intentions. She wanted to touch him, with her hands, her lips, and all the rest of her, a desire as primal as the origins of the world.

She wanted to hold him within her.

His own pulse accelerated. His awareness of her grew excruciating. And the answering desire that arose within him shocked him with its vehemence and recklessness.

He drew on the cigarette again; his other hand closed into a fist. “I am going to walk out of this room. You have two minutes to make yourself scarce.”

W
hen he returned, one window of his room was wide open, the curtain whipping in the draft.

Someone with her skills could have easily closed the window behind herself, if she wanted to.

Instead, she had chosen to acknowledge her presence. Her invasion of his privacy.

And in doing so, reaffirmed the desire on her part that had set him on fire, like a city already ransacked.

Chinese Turkestan

1883

T
he Persian was up at the crack of dawn. He first saw to the horses, grooming them and taking them to the stream for water. Then he went down to the stream by himself. When he returned, he packed up his things and walked around, gathering fuel for a new fire.

Ying-ying was not the kind to remain on her back while a stranger moved about. But this stranger’s movement was quiet and soothing, almost like a lullaby. She allowed herself to sleep on to the rhythm of his morning routines.

When she woke up again, it was quite bright. The Persian was tending to the fire, kneeling with his back to her. He was not wearing his turban, revealing a head of thick black hair that curled at the ends. This fascinated Ying-ying more than she would have thought possible: She wondered whether touching his hair would feel like plunging one’s hand into a sheep’s wool.

That hair was also slightly damp. Foreigners. Her amah would have been livid if Ying-ying had washed her hair first thing in the morning in the ice-cold water of a snow-melt
stream—that kind of chill, according to the principles of Chinese medicine, was terribly injurious to the health.

The Persian, however, did not seem to suffer any deficiencies, healthwise. And despite the loose fit of his clothes, she could tell, by the way the fabric stretched across the width of his shoulders and upper arms, that he was well built and well muscled.

“Good morning,” he said, without turning around.

“Good morning.”

“Do you take tea in the morning?”

“If there is hot water.” She was usually too lazy to do such things for herself.

He turned around at last. “There will be, in a few minutes.”

She smiled a little. “Perhaps I ought to make friends more often.”

His gaze swept her person before returning to her face; she did the same to him. Alas, he had not become less handsome—or confident—overnight. Had he been anyone else, looking down at her in her bedroll, she would be on her feet in a fraction of a second, a weapon in hand. But he was not anyone else, so she stretched, her hands clasped together, her arms extended beyond her head.

His expression did not change, but something did. She had the feeling that he had to restrain himself, and rather violently.

“Help me get up?” she murmured, wanting, perversely, to test that restraint.

Slowly he approached, his eyes never leaving hers. He sank to one knee—a surpassingly intimate act, as if he had sat down at the edge of her bed. Her breaths came in shallower.

He took hold of her bedding and flung it aside. Underneath she was fully dressed, of course, but still she tensed. His eyes seemed to turn darker as he took her in. Her stomach felt strangely light, the rest of her strangely heavy.

He wanted her, she had no doubt. He wanted to see her, touch her, and press himself into her.

But what did
she
want?

Old habits die hard—for too long she had defended her virtue, sometimes at terrible costs. Of their own volition, her fingers closed around the hilt of her sword.

He noticed. She sensed no anger or frustration on his part—not even surprise. He only took a deep breath, and then another.

When he spoke, his voice was almost playful. “Do you never wash your face?”

She needed a moment to find her voice. “It isn’t manly to be too clean.”

The Persian took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “And we would never question
your
manliness, would we?”

L
eighton was used to letting women talk. Whether by temperament or by the requirement to be amiable, women talked, their speech the unguent that greased the gears of polite society.

The day before, there had been no question of conversation while they traveled, as the girl always rode ahead of him. Now she spent as much time riding alongside him as she did out in front, yet still, for hours not a single word would be uttered. And when they did say something to each other, almost invariably it concerned such impersonal matters as feed for the horses and the amount of fluid that remained in their waterskins.

He was at a loss, faced with a woman who spoke as little as he did. Even worse, he
wanted
her to talk. Everything about her fascinated him. She could speak of herself for a fortnight without stop, and he would listen raptly.

But she felt no such need to unburden herself. From time to time, he would try a question.
Will you return to the bosom
of your family to celebrate Eid? Where did you acquire this fine horse of yours? Are you meeting anyone in Kashgar?

Her answers were always short, sometimes to the point of brusqueness.
I’ll think about it when it’s almost Eid. It was a gift. No.

He was beginning to despair of ever learning anything about her when they stopped that afternoon. When she wanted to travel fast, she used the caravan route; to rest and water the horses, she preferred to find meadows and valleys where there was fresh water—and groves of poplar for her privacy.

When she returned from this particular grove of poplar he already had a fire going and water nearly at a boil. She made herself a cup of her snow chrysanthemum infusion. He spared a pinch of his own tea leaves—there was hardly any left—and set it to steep, while he knelt down facing the direction of Mecca and pretend-prayed like a good pretend-Muslim.

“Is that tea from Darjeeling?” she asked as soon as he finished, her expression oddly intense.

“Yes,” he said, surprised, as much for her quick identification of the tea as from being spoken to at all. He extended toward her his dwindling supply of sultana raisins. “You know of it?”

She declined his offer—she did not accept any food or drink from him the preparation of which she had not witnessed—but she did answer his question. “I once had a friend who drank this tea. Black, without milk or sugar.”

He, too, once had such a friend, the friend for whom he had made the long trek to China. “A very dear friend?”

After a moment, she said, almost as if to herself, “Yes, a very dear friend. Although when he was alive, I had thought of him more as a teacher, because he was much older than me. It was only after he passed away . . .”

Her face had gone blank, but it was there, a grief that had not yet lost its anguish.

He remembered his own disbelief when he’d been informed
of Herb’s death.
No, it cannot be
, he had said numbly.
I saw him only yesterday. He told me he was coming back today. With firecrackers for Chinese New Year. And when I get well we are to go to a teahouse theater—and eat candied haws in the street.

That night he had wept, for Herb, for Father, for the ten thousand miles that he had journeyed in vain. With the passage of the years he had come to see that he had been fortunate to have met Herb again at all, even if it was only for half an hour. But her pain, just beneath the surface, called to the sorrow he would always carry.

“Did you often take tea together?” he heard himself ask, his voice quiet.

“Yes, quite frequently in those days.”

“And what did you talk about?”

It was never the tea, but the conversation.

Her eyes took on a faraway look. “We talked about the outside world. The places he would like to see again. The places I would like to see for the first time.”

He remembered the wistfulness in her voice, when they spoke of Kashmir. “Was he the one who told you that Kashmir was a nice place?”

“Yes. He had visited Kashmir in his youth—and a great many other places in India. The white marble palace that a king built for his beloved, the holy river in which tens of thousands of people seek blessings, and hill stations like Darjeeling, where the British go to escape the heat of the plains of India.”

Leighton felt a little light-headed. Herb had toured India many years ago. And before his exile, during those years when he visited Starling Manor regularly, sometimes he, too, had spoken to Leighton of those places he had loved best.

How marvelous would it be—

He stopped his wishful thinking. No, the world was full of people who had traveled through India; she was talking of someone else altogether.

“I have been to Darjeeling,” he told her. “From the hills of Darjeeling, if you look north, you’ll see a wall of glacier-covered peaks—so massive that the tallest of them was once thought to be the highest summit in all the world. There is nothing like standing outside at the end of the day, a cup of tea in hand, and watching the mountains. The snowcaps are golden, and sometimes the slopes turn the color of the setting sun itself.”

She looked down into her cup—did he see a sheen of tears in her eyes?

“What a sight to have seen,” she said, her voice soft.

“Come and see it for yourself,” he said impulsively.

She laughed a little. “Darjeeling must be as far as the sky itself.”

“About a thousand miles as the crow flies. But once we cross into India and reach lower elevation, it will be forty miles an hour by rail most of the rest of the way. I should be very surprised if it takes us more than two weeks before you are walking between rows of tea bushes.”

A light of wonder came into her eyes, as if he had told her that the very end of the universe was within a day’s journey. But that light extinguished as quickly as it had come to be.

She shook her head. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She shrugged. “I’m too poor.”

“You can sell your horse.”

She shook her head again. “Far better to have a horse here than to be a beggar in Darjeeling.”

He doubted that was truly her reason, but her tone was quite closed: The matter was not one for debate. “Where are you going after Kashgar then?”

And how long could he reasonably—or even unreasonably—follow her around?

“Somewhere that won’t bankrupt me so thoroughly.”

“A shame,” he said, leaning back on his elbows. “There are still places in India where the teachings of the
Kama Sutra
are
practiced. And two girls well versed in the
Kama Sutra
, my friend, will give you every taste of Paradise in a single night.”

“Add insult to injury, why don’t y—” Her expression changed. “Don’t move an inch. And don’t speak.” He held perfectly still and silent. Something hissed softly in the grass.

She felt on the ground about her person and made a seemingly careless flick of her fingers. He did not see anything leaving her hand, yet he heard their impact, two tiny thuds. The hissing stopped.

Signaling him to remain motionless, she rose to her feet and came to inspect the grass just beside him.

“You are safe now,” she said.

He turned and saw an adder, lying dead six inches from his hand. The snake’s bite was usually not fatal, but it was definitely poisonous.

He looked up at her. “Allah willing, my friend, you will always be by my side to save me from certain death.”

She snorted and sauntered away. “No use wasting your prayers. We already know I won’t be.”

T
he Persian took care of Ying-ying as no one had in a very long time.

Every time they stopped, he saw to the horses. In the evening he hunted, cooked, and did the washing up afterward. The next morning he packed everything to get them back on the road.

All without asking for anything in return.