Distant Choices (19 page)

So, he supposed, would it always be. Arshad. The fierce need of her channelled now, since he could not be rid of it, into his need for the desert, the bare mountain, the forbidden city. The need for danger to replace the loss of love. And even so he would be a good husband to Miss Oriel Blake, would take her pure alabaster body with patience and tenderness and such skill in the erotic arts as he had acquired from women who were not ashamed of their sensuality, as he knew England's young ladies were taught to be. He would release her from her prudishness, if at all possible, give her children and take pride in her fertility. And when she had had enough of childbearing he would inflict no more of it upon her. If he lived long enough to achieve contentment then he believed he could be content with her. And if he left his bones on the road to Mecca, as seemed more likely, then the future of his house would be safe in her pale, steady hands.

He
must
settle it today. He wanted it settled. He would give her the sari now as a personal token of his past and future, to take home with her until he should follow and claim it back again, with her inside it. A romantic piece of nonsense which might please her. Yet, as he picked it up, the gold threads glinting in the sunlight, he saw how badly some of them were tarnished, how raucously the vivid orange and burning pink shouted alien words – so deeply significant to him – at the ice-blue and cream and ivory of Miss Blake. No, it could give her no pleasure, this gaudy, dusty relic of a past he did not even wish her to share and so, in order not to embarrass her with it, he glanced quickly around him and tossed the silk, on impulse, to Kate.

‘My goodness,' said Evangeline. ‘What does one do with it?'

But Kate, by what could only be instinct, swiftly draped the sari around her, or draped herself inside it, so intimately did the thin body, the exotic fabric seem to fit together, the vivid, clamorous colours, the sudden release of sandalwood from the swirling folds filling the room with an alluring disturbance of other worlds, other moods and morals which had Kate – and Kate alone – at its heart.

‘Have I got it right?' She was talking only to Francis.

‘Oh – I think – near enough.'

‘I want an elephant to ride on,' she said. ‘And a tiger to lead around on a golden chain, like a dog, Francis …?'

‘Of course,' he said. ‘You shall have them.'

‘Now.'

‘Even sooner.'

She laughed, the drab, beige dress of Aunt Maud's choosing disappearing entirely, growing pale and fainting away before the vibrant impact of India, all that was vibrant in her nature – so contrary to the drab, beige teaching of Aunt Maud – rising now like a torrent of hot rain to her dry surface, giving her the brief, riotous bloom of desert land touched by water.

Not for long, though.

‘Kate, dear,' murmured Evangeline, understanding the effect of ice on desert flowers. ‘Do I detect a smudge on your cheek? Here we are, dear – my handkerchief – if you have left yours in the carriage again, with your gloves.
Do
keep it.'

The moment passed. The visit with it. And, as the carriage from High Grange drove off into the by no means unattainable distance, Francis Ashington, obedient only to impulse, sent a swiftly penned note after it, requesting the permission of Mrs Evangeline Stangway to visit her that evening, after dinner, on a matter very close to his heart.

The die was cast. He would be a fiancé tomorrow, a bridegroom the month after, a father as soon as may be. And even before that, as soon as his seed should be safely planted, he would have embarked on his journey to Mecca.

‘He is coming to propose to you, Oriel,' said Evangeline, having called her daughter to her bedroom to show her the letter.

‘Yes, mamma. I think so.'

‘And may one assume it is what you want?'

Had she not said so? No. The longing was still too deep for words, the wonder of it too precious, too intense. But tonight – four hours away, then three, then two, then
almost
here – then she would speak of it. Tonight, when her life had been transformed, enriched, made magical, when he had lifted her from her uncertain perch at High Grange to the one place in the world, the one life she wanted. Going to her room, needing absolute silence, perfect solitude, she placed her hands lightly against the windowpane, the sunlight, as it filtered through them, seeming to symbolize the joy and love and deep contentment already in their grasp. Or very nearly. Tonight when he came to ask her to love him, to be wife, mistress, mother, friend, healer, entertainer, comrade, defender. Woman.

Yet dinner that night at High Grange was considerably delayed. Matthew Stangway, upon whose convenience all such arrangements depended, returning very late from some appointment in Hepplefield, thus obliging his wife and his cook and his entire household to wait for him. So that when Francis arrived with his bouquet of cream roses and his various speeches – to Evangeline, to Matthew, to Oriel herself – ready in his mind, the family were still at table and, in the opinion of the butler, likely to remain so for another hour.

But Mr Ashington was, of course, expected. Provision had been made.

‘Would you care to wait here, sir. Mrs Stangway asks you to take your ease.'

The door of the South parlour was held open, a tray with glasses and decanters of port and brandy placed at his disposal with a suitable array of sporting and political – safely High Tory – magazines.

‘Mrs Stangway will join you presently, sir.' And privately, of course, since the family, once the meal was over, would adjourn to the drawing-room and the coffee tray, allowing Evangeline ample opportunity to grant him permission to marry her daughter and then send Oriel to him in this cosy little place while she conveyed the news to the others. Then, he supposed, there would be an interview with Matthew Stangway, a business meeting of dates and mutual finances during which he may, or may not, be told the truth about Oriel's birth. Not that it mattered a jot to him. He would take her as she was, for what she was, although having spent a few tedious mornings going through the estate account-books with his land-agent, he knew he could not afford the grand gesture of refusing whatever money came with her. Enough, he supposed, to salvage her mother's pride without causing fresh gossip by its excess. A delicate balance. A mere pittance, no doubt, compared to Kate's portion, something of an injustice to Oriel if she really was Matthew Stangway's daughter; except that Kate, of course, would always need more of everything. More care, more effort, more love, more money, more concentration, more time than he – since Arshad – thought reasonable, or safe, to invest in anyone.

And it was then, standing alone – surely alone – in the discreet, almost twilit atmosphere of Evangeline's parlour that solitude tore itself away from him, every nerve, every taut muscle within him straining through the shadows to the presence in the far corner, the distant swirl of colour and odour forming, like a desert mirage – still distant through the gloom – into the body of a woman, the frail amber of her limbs, the fine, mystical purity of her mind, veiled in the gold and orange, the wild, hot pink of her sari.

His woman. The only woman to whom his mind and his heart had been joined at the same moment as his limbs. And although, as she moved slowly from her corner towards the civilization – not necessarily merciful – of lamplight and firelight, he knew her to be Kate, it was still Arshad – only Arshad – who drew him within her, as she had always drawn and held him, Arshad who possessed him.

Silence came, and stillness, a moment long and deep enough, it seemed, fatal enough, to take him –
at last
, he rather thought – across the barrier Arshad had told him of.
Yes
. Until, as always before, he blinked fiercely and shook his head.

‘Kate?' And even then he could hear the question in his own voice, the hope still painfully whispering
Arshad, here I am
.

Was he even asking
Take me now. I'm ready
? Yet his words, as he had expected, came swiftly and – he even admitted – quite possibly to his rescue, from the European turn of his mind.

‘Kate.'

‘Yes.'

Of course it was. Kate. Yet even then, with the shadows still around her, how delicate, how smooth her awkward body seemed beneath the vibrant silk, how intense her face, and how dark, half-veiled as it was in the pink and gold of
his
country. Of
his
woman.

‘Kate –' He felt a pressing need to get all this – whatever it was – in order. ‘What are you doing here?' Surely she ought to be at dinner? ‘Are you ill?' Yes. That must be it. Illness, which had set her face in these taut, well-nigh tragic lines beneath the swirling, the eternal sari.

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I suppose I am.'

What had they done to her? Abruptly – as he cleared his head – it came to him that he had been expecting her to look like this one day, when it finally entered her head that this house, this room, this sofa, would be the final boundaries of her one and only and inescapable life, that there would be no adventurings in Arabia, no adventurings anywhere, no escape of any kind from these spinster aunts and stepmothers, this cold man her father, and that other cold man her cousin, who did not really want to marry her but would certainly do so, just the same. Was that it? Had they fixed the date for her marriage to Quentin Saint-Charles and sent Aunt Maud off to Leeds or Manchester to buy the wedding-dress? Rich white brocade, he supposed, pearl-encrusted and silk-embroidered, to announce her value as a bride, but which would suit her no better than the drab, plain beige in which they had dressed her today.

He did not want to see it. He would manage to be off on his honeymoon with Oriel, or away to Mecca, long before it happened.

‘Kate – what can I do for you?'

‘I waited here for you, Francis …'

‘Yes?'

‘I couldn't dine. I waited. I have to tell you …' And her voice, through the swirl of Oriental silk, might have been reaching him across the exotic scents and shades of a temple.

‘Tell me …?' And accustomed as he was to life's pains and perils, the hoarse whisper of her reply came to him as the greatest shock he had known.

‘Francis – please – I know why you have come here tonight. And if they say I can't be your wife, that I'm promised to someone else, or that I'm – not fit, not
strong
– don't believe them. It's not true, Francis. I can marry you. And if they won't consent, then I'll come away with you, just like your mother did with your father. Yes – yes, I will. You have to know that. That's why I waited here – to tell you. To see you myself, first, before
they
saw you.'

He had no voice, no breath, he had frozen to the marrow of every bone in his body and beyond, caught in the trap of her words and their impossible meaning and held there so tight that he could not even unfasten his eyes from her suffering face.

And of the intensity of that suffering – albeit still in the shadows – he had no doubt.

‘Don't believe them, Francis. Don't let them send you away. Quentin did ask me to marry him, I admit it – but whatever he says, or Aunt Maud says, I refused him. Oriel knows I did. And as for the other – about my not being strong – let
me
tell you about that. Listen to
me
.'

‘Kate …' Struggling through shock, knowing panic could not be far away, he managed, nevertheless, to recognize how totally Kate had lost herself in her emotion – as totally he knew, without wanting to remember, as he had abandoned himself to Arshad – the power of it holding her before him, her desperation – he saw it clearly enough to hurt his eyes – turning the sari she still held around her, into a garment of sacrifice, the offer – and he wished quite desperately that he could not see this – into a heart seeking to be taken, or destroyed.

‘Kate.' And he heard with alarm the break in his voice, knowing it to be pity, dreading what she might make of it.

‘I love you so much,' she said. He believed her. He had seen love like this before and understood its absolute submission, an intensity of feeling he had thought to be Asian, never European: Arshad, whose surrender to him of her body and soul had been glorious because he had craved that velvet body and humbled himself, in sheer pleasure and thankfulness, before its spirit. And now here was Kate, standing before him in the grip of a love he had aroused by accident and never noticed, never intended, and with which he could not – absolutely could not – cope.

Nor, it occurred to him on a wave of anguish, could she.

‘Yes, I love you, Francis. Lord –
how
I love you!' And once again, as her hoarse voice reached him, he found – with horror now – that the parlour had once more given way to the deeper intensities, the darker tragedies, the golden bliss of the land he thought of now, in itself, as Arshad.

‘
Kate
…' Somehow he must restrain her, must save her some little part of the agony to come, must stop her – at once – from saying these things which, afterwards, she would find so atrocious to remember. He must. Yet, no matter the effort, he could not force his voice past the barrier of pity and guilt, and fear he supposed – yes, fear – lodged in his throat. He had lost his nerve and, while he struggled desperately to retrieve it, he was helpless to prevent her from going so tragically on. And on.

‘Yes, every day since that first day in the woods when I ran all among the man-traps just to make you notice me – yes, ever since then I've
thought
love to you, Francis. When did you begin to feel it? Not that day, I suppose – although I loved you then. That wild day of the man-traps. I knew I had to do something startling enough, hadn't I, so that you'd remember me – and remember me. But of course you knew that. Lord – how wild I really was that day.
Wild
. Dear God – I thought I understood wildness. I thought I'd been wild all my life. Until you came. Until our days in the woods with nobody knowing, just being there with you and feeling it happen – feeling us come together in our minds –
letting
it happen. And now I can hardly breathe for the love I feel. It fills me. It even terrifies me sometimes. Does it terrify you?'