Moonflower Madness (16 page)

Well aware that he was as likely to do so as fly to the moon, she ate her breakfast in frigid silence. If Serena had followed him from the Residency into the radiant stillness of Upper Szechwan he would, no doubt, have already proposed marriage to her. Perhaps they would have married at the Mission in Peng. Whether they would have done so or not, he certainly would not have described their situation as being a debacle.

She wasn't a small-minded person and she had never before experienced even the slightest twinge of jealousy or resentment, no matter what the situation. She felt something very similar to it now, however. Serena could never have contributed to the success of Zachary's expedition in any way. She would have been unable to travel a yard over rough country unless carried in a sedan-chair. The vastness of the countryside would have overwhelmed her. Her interest in the plants that were Zachary‘s passion would have been minimal. To Serena, flowers were something to arrange in a vase. Searching for them, drawing and cataloguing them, would have bored her unutterably. And yet, according to Charles, Zachary had been bowled over by Serena and had hopes of furthering their acquaintance when his expedition was completed.

Cross with him for being such a fool, cross with herself for minding so much about his foolishness, she finished her breakfast in silence and maintained her silence as the Chinese re-packed bags and boxes and loaded them on to the patiently waiting mules.

If Zachary Cartwright was disconcerted by her silence, he certainly didn't show it. She might just as well have not existed, for all the notice he took of her. Their route lay once more along the banks of the Kialing and he reined in his pony often, dismounting whenever something of botanical interest caught his eye. He never asked her to join him on his mini-expeditions, and when their journey continued, he never bothered to discuss his finds with her.

As the day progressed and his obliviousness to her presence continued, Gianetta's resentment grew until she could hardly contain it. She wanted to become a botanist. She wanted him to discuss his finds with her. She wanted to learn from him. And she wanted to travel with him to Kansu. That he was not now allowing her to do so was no fault of hers.
She
hadn't been so careless as to bathe nude. The scene by the river bank he was using as an excuse to be rid of her, had been his fault entirely. Nor had she reacted to it in a missish way. She had simply speedily retreated. She had not given way to hysterics. She had not declared herself mortally offended.
He
should have apologised to
her
. And he certainly shouldn't be off-loading her at Peng because of his carelessness and crassness.

It was mid-afternoon when he broke the silence between them. The grass beneath their ponies'feet was thick with pale little starry gentians and along the river bank were drifts of irises, blue and deeper blue and purple.

‘Does your cousin like China?' he asked suddenly.

Her eyebrows flew high. So he had been thinking about Serena during their long, unfriendly ride. And from the nature of his question he had obviously been thinking of a possible future with her, in China.

‘No,' she said crisply, ‘She loathes it.'

It wasn't strictly true. Serena's temperament was too equable for any such passion, but Gianetta saw no reason to encourage the course of Zachary's thoughts. Indeed, she saw no reason why she shouldn't put an end to them altogether.

‘Serena is to leave China very shortly,' she said, feeling a very unladylike surge of savage pleasure. ‘She is to marry Henry Plaxtol, the son of Lord Plaxtol.'

Whatever his reaction to her news, it didn't show on his handsome, hard-boned face. No eyebrow moved, no muscle twitched. Only his hands revealed his inner emotion. Gianetta saw them tighten on the reins, the knuckles showing almost white.

Strangely enough, her pleasure did not intensify at the sight. She felt only a great wave of desolation.

‘Mr Plaxtol is a clergyman,' she added inconsequentially.

‘I hope they will be very happy together,' Zachary said, not turning his head towards her. ‘There's an unusual-looking iris over there. I'm just going to take a closer look at it.'

He slid from his saddle, striding towards the river and a clump of irises so purple as to be almost black.

The depth of Zachary's reaction to news of Serena Hollis's marriage had taken him totally by surprise. He hadn't realised how much he had been assuming where she was concerned. He had never before even considered the possibility of marrying. Marriage was something undertaken by men who led conventional lives. Men who were accustomed to the structure of family life. He was far from conventional and the death of his parents had robbed him of any experience of real family life. He had never been filled with the desire to create a new family life for himself.

Only when he had sat opposite Serena Hollis in the candle-lit dining-room of the Residency had it occurred to him that marriage might, in fact, be a pleasant proposition.

There had been something infinitely restful about Serena. He could well imagine returning to her after a long, arduous expedition and discussing his discoveries with her. He had intended, once his expedition was completed, staying at the Residency for several days in order to become better acquainted with her. Then, if he was not disappointed at what he found on further acquaintance, he would have asked her to marry him.

Gianetta's words had put a swift end to his speculations. A clergyman. Any woman who fell in love with a clergyman would have been very unlikely to have ever fallen in love with himself.

Zachary had been staring unseeingly at the clump of irises. Now, his reflections at an end, he focused on them clearly. They were nothing special after all. Their glossy aubergine colouring had been a trick of the light. They were purple
Iris tigridia
and he walked away from them, wondering how he could have been so hare-brained as to have imagined that marriage was for him. Apart from Charles' spasmodic companionship, he had grown up alone. As no woman of sense would relish marriage to a man who spent months and sometimes years, hunting for plants in the world's remotest regions, he would most likely continue through life alone.

‘You haven't brought a specimen back,' Gianetta said as he returned to his impatiently waiting pony. ‘Wasn't the iris special after all?'

She was still wearing his corduroy breeches, his broad leather belt cinching her narrow waist. With her hair in a long thick plait and her plain white blouse reminiscent of a man's shirt, she should have looked extremely masculine. She didn't. She looked disturbingly feminine. He remembered his inadvertent physical reaction when he had been thinking about her the previous evening, pondering on the best way of having her escorted back to Chung King. And he remembered his split-second reaction when he had been striding naked from the freezing waters of the Kialing and she had walked around the bushes, facing him from a distance of mere feet.

She was a young lady who could lead even a saint from the path of virtue, and he was far from being a saint. The memory of the way Charles had taken advantage of her vulnerability checked the pleasurable rising he had begun to feel in his crotch. He had no objections whatsoever to amorous adventures with ladies of the town, married ladies, or with any other female well able to take care of herself, but Gianetta had not been in a position to take care of herself. The fact that she had not objected to Charles's amorous overtures was not of any consequence. Charles had taken advantage of her youth and her naivety and the unprotected position she had put herself in and he, Zachary, had felt ashamed of him for doing so.

To Zachary, manipulation of the weak by the strong was never acceptable, whether it was manipulation of natives by colonial masters, the poor by the rich, or sexual manipulation. And he had no intention of finding himself an offender in the latter category.

‘No,' he said tersely in answer to her question. ‘It wasn't special. Can you persuade your mangy animal to get a move on? I want to cover another twenty li before dusk.'

The cold, bleak feeling possessing her was instantly transformed into white-hot, bubbling fury.

‘Ben is
not
a mangy animal!' she flared, her voice shaking with the intensity of her indignation. ‘He is brave and gallant and … and he is a
friend!
‘

Only minutes ago his reaction to the news of Serena Hollis's impending marriage had been so savage that he had had to dismount and stand alone for a little while in order to compose himself. Now, incredibly, he felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. She was quite right to censure him. Her little Chinese pony
had
been brave and gallant, and he knew quite well what she meant about him being her friend. His own strong and sleek pony, named Bucephalus after Alexander the Great's much-loved horse, was very much a friend, and he would have reacted just as she had if he had been insulted.

‘My apologies,' he said gravely.

For a little while she didn't say anything and then she said at last, reluctantly, ‘Accepted.'

He looked towards her, about to say more. Her face was in hostile profile and there was the glitter of unshed tears on the dark sweep of her eyelashes.

He was seized by a rush of both compassion and affection.

‘I wish it could be different,' he said sincerely. ‘But it can't. There is no other alternative but for you to return to Chung King.'

The unexpected gentleness in his voice nearly undid her. She tightened her hold on Ben's reins, saying stiffly, ‘It
could
be different. Women are not so very different from men as men suppose.'

At this unexpected sally, the amusement she had aroused in him a few short seconds ago intensified.

‘In exactly what sense, Miss Hollis?' he asked, keeping his amusement out of his voice with difficulty. ‘Biologically, mentally or spiritually?'

At the ‘Miss Hollis,' Gianetta's wilful jawline tightened. Earlier she had been, for a short time, Gianetta. Now it seemed that he was regretting his marginal step towards friendship and camaraderie.

‘Some women enjoy adventure and travel just as much as any men,' she continued, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the grassy track ahead of them. ‘My uncle knows of a Miss Gertrude Bell who has made several first ascents in the Bernese Oberland and has had one of the newly conquered peaks named after her, and there was a obituary in
The Times
only recently of Miss Isabella Bird who travelled adventurously all through the American Wild West
and
to Korea and Japan and Persia.'

‘And was your uncle admiring of these ladies?' Zachary asked, unable to resist teasing her further.

Gianetta sought for words that would not be untruthful. Her uncle had made no comments on Miss Bird but he had certainly not been admiring of Miss Bell, saying of her that she was a tiresome overbearing female with a far too high opinion of herself and that her only originality lay in her linguistic ability.

‘He thinks Miss Bell very … original,' she said at last and then, remembering her uncle's grudging comments about Miss Bell's translations of Persian poems into English, added triumphantly, glad of the opportunity to make clear that her idol was also a woman of letters as well as a woman of adventuring spirit, ‘And he thinks her translation of poems by the Persian poet Hafiz very fine.'

‘And so they are,' said Zachary, deflatingly.

For the first time since they had begun the conversation she looked across at him.

‘Have you read them?' she asked, the tone of her voice indicating that she thought it highly unlikely.

His eyes met hers, his eyebrows quirking demonically. ‘But of course. Both Miss Bell's translation and the original.'

She swiftly looked once more ahead of her, unsure as to whether or not he was making fun of her.

‘I believe Miss Bell is at the moment exploring the Syrian desert,' he said, reluctant to end a conversation he was finding increasingly entertaining.

Gianetta would very much like to have maintained a dignified silence, but curiosity got the better of her.

‘To climb?' she asked, doubtful whether or not there were mountains in Syria.

‘To seek out and study early Byzantine churches.'

She knew that if she expressed ignorance about early Byzantine churches and asked him for information about them he would enlighten her, as he would if she were to ask about early Persian poetry, or Chinese history, or any aspect of botany. Unbidden came the realisation that, even if she were to spend a lifetime in his company, she would never be bored. He was a man who would always be full of surprises; a man whose conversation would always be diverting.

‘I can see a town ahead of us,' he said suddenly, breaking in on her thoughts, ‘If there's an inn we'll make use of it tonight, and not camp.'

She was just about to protest that the inn would be filthy and that she would much rather sleep out of doors, when she realised the reason for his decision. It was because of what had happened early that morning. He was seeking to protect her from any further embarrassments of camp life.

Miserably, Gianetta remained silent. For an obviously worldly, go-to-the-devil adventurer, he was behaving with deplorable primness. She wondered if he was, perhaps, a misogynist and then she remembered his reaction to Serena and dismissed the idea. Whatever Zachary Cartwright's underlying reasons for wishing to be so speedily rid of her, they were not because of a general dislike of her sex. Not only had he been very obviously physically attracted to Serena, but he had also spoken of Miss Bell in tones of admiration no misogynist would have used.

As the late afternoon sunlight smoked into dusk, she wondered about Miss Bell. She could not possibly be travelling through Syria unacccompanied, and her servants and guides would presumably be male. From the way Zachary Cartwright had spoken of Miss Bell's expedition it was obvious that he found no fault with it. And if he found it acceptable for Miss Bell to camp among members of the opposite sex in the deserts of Syria, why should he find it unacceptable for her to do exactly the same thing in remotest China?