Rapture of the desert

by Violet Winspear

  "Are you being curious, milor, or are you being personal?"

  "Both." He reached to the wall and pressed a small button for the return of the waiter. She knew that other couples were dining close by, and yet the portieres seemed to muffle all sound and it was intensely intimate to be here like this, being asked such questions by a man so worldly, and yet at the same time so primitive.

  Chrys was startled by the thought ... he wore his perfectly tailored evening suit as if it were a second skin, and yet she sensed a restlessness in him, a barely suppressed desire to wrench open the tie of black silk at his throat, to toss back his head and breathe a free wild air in a wild and open place.

  "When do you return to the desert?" she surprised herself by asking.

  "Soon — perhaps in a month from now."

  "I have the feeling you can't wait to see and smell the sands again. You are like a sailor who while at sea longs for dry land, but as soon as he comes ashore he

  finds himself hemmed in, restricted by the civilities of civilized living. You appear to be incredibly sophisticated, milor, but I believe you are really a Tartar."

  He inclined his head and laughed so softly in his throat that it was almost a purring sound. "The steppes are in my blood and the freedom of the desert supplies my need for what I cannot have in reality. I visit Russia, but I cannot live there . . . it is not my person but my spirit which is exiled from the land of my grandparents. You understand?"

  She nodded, and was glad when the waiter reappeared to dispel the air of seriousness which had crept into the alcove. The waiter carried two large menu cards, but with a slightly lazy smile she requested the prince to choose for her. "You are the epicure, milor."

  "En effet," he rather mockingly agreed, and for an intent moment his eyes looked directly into hers, and from that look there sped through her person the quicksilver awareness that he thought her a rather beautiful object... something which he might desire to possess . . . perhaps for an hour. Immediately her eyes went as cool as ice, and the soft shimmer of her dress was like a coating of ice over her slender figure. She sat very straight against the dark leather of the banquette, entirely untouchable, virgin as fresh fallen snow . . . only the gems in her earlobes had animation in that moment.

  Then he looked at the menu card and began to order their meal in his impeccable French. Fresh asparagus and Irish salmon, with tiny new potatoes . . . the delicious, almost simple food of the epicure, following the richness of the oysters and champagne. Finally richness again when he chose fruits au kirsch, and coffee with Armagnac.

  "You have wined and dined me," said Chrys with a smile that was still a little cool, "like one of those dancers of the Edwardian era, who were so underpaid that they lived almost on birdseed all day and relied on the stage-door admirers to keep them from starving to death."

  "Really?" he drawled. "Is that how you regard me, as a stage-door admirer? And what did the little dancers do after the supper a deux? Did they pay with kisses and pleasure?"

  "Very likely," she said. "But if you are expecting a similar kind of repayment then you are in for a disappointment, milor. I dined with you because I lost a bet not because I needed the food, delicious as it was."

  "I am pleased you found the food to your liking, at least." There was a quirk to his lips as he raised the cognac glass, but a faint angry flare to his nostrils as he breathed the aroma of the Armagnac. "You are a cool one, Miss Devrel. You need the lash of love to break the ice around your heart "

  "All I need," she retorted, "is to find a job in which I can bury my feelings for a year, until I can get back to the thing I love. There are different sorts of love, and you as a man of the world must know it."

  "Perhaps." And then very curtly he broke the epicure's rule and tossed back his cognac in a single gulp, as if it were vodka. "You find physical fulfilment in dancing ... you find love in the applause which your dancing receives. That is because you have not yet met love in the guise of a man ah, you think it couldn't happen?"

  "I am making no bets with you, Prince Anton." She gave a slight laugh. "All my life I have wanted only to be a dancer, unique like Markova, poetic and perfect in line and action. I dare not love —"

  "Ah, what a significant word, matushka. Does your heart warn you that you might love a man with a greater force than you love the dance?"

  "No," she denied, "not at all. Men are all alike. They want a slave, a meek and willing keeper of the home and the hearth. Their egoes demand that the domestic slave produce a child, and then another, ensuring that the slave is doubly enslaved. Oh, I know for girls like Dove, my sister, this is a kind of heaven on earth, but I — I'd stifle if my body and my soul were tied to the stove and

  the cot, and the demands of a man! "

  "You shuddered when you said that, matushka." He leaned a little towards her, and there was a danger to him, and a subtle knowing quality that made her cry of the heart seem the cry of a child who had yet to grow up. "Are you afraid of lovemaking? Afraid it will dispossess you of your 'slim gilt soul' in your slim, white body?"

  "Stop it! " Her words were a whisper and a cry. "You have no right to speak to me in such a way! "

  "And why not? There are women who find their excitement in such conversation."

  "I don't." Her eyes blazed through the openings of her mask. "All I want right now is to go home! "

  "Don't be a child," he rejoined. "The night is young and I intend first to dance with you, and then to take you for a long cool drive. For once in your self-contained, planned and passionless life you will let someone else rule you, if only for a few hours. Now relax from all that tension which is making your pupils dilate and your heart beat too quickly for comfort. Relax! "

  She stared at him a moment longer, then gradually she leaned back against the soft leather of the banquette. "I — I had an idea you could dance. It's in the way you walk."

  "I am very fond of the pastime." He leaned back himself, his demi-tasse of coffee in his lean, well-shaped hand. "With a grandmother such as mine there was always music in the house and she had me taught all manner of dancing when I was a child. Miroslava was never a woman to displease, for her smile was as lovely as her anger was terrible. A true Cossack woman, composed of honey and iron. Anyway, I liked to dance, especially as I grew older and could tango and foxtrot with attractive girls."

  His lips smiled nostalgically beneath the black rim of his mask. "I did not go to public school. I had a tutor until I went off to college who had been a Guard's

  officer; a rake with women, but with a brilliant mind. He and Miroslava between them made a man of me before I was sixteen." His mouth as he spoke those words became a dangerous one, with a glint of hard white teeth. "Leben seele was the motto of my German tutor. Life is soul, and soul is life — so live it! I have lived, matushka, and you can also say that I have died."

  She gazed at him as if mesmerised, and his face in that moment had a cruel dark beauty. He was everything her training, her upbringing and her instinct fought against. She wanted to leave with all her mind, yet her body was excited by the thought of dancing with him. Oh, how long it had been! Weeks since she had known the heaven of music in her limbs and the delight that only dancing could give her. She would have wanted to die if they had told her at the clinic that she could never dance again . . . and now had come the moment when she could dance again, if not as a ballerina, at least as a woman.

  A woman ... in the arms of Anton de Casenove!

  CHAPTER IV

  "WELL, have I set your mind somewhat at rest, and made your feet impatient to dance?" he asked abruptly. "I hope your cri du coeur is no longer that I take you home?"

  "You learned well from your tutor, didn't you?" She gave a rueful little laugh. "Even as you give a woman what she wants, you lay on the lash."

  He shrugged and finished his coffee. "I grew up among Arabs, who regard women as mettlesome as horses. It does only harm to feed a woman and a horse with too much sugar."

 
; "The comparison is hardly flattering. I hope you don't think, milor, that I shall trample all over you in

  my friskiness on the dance floor?"

  "That is hardly likely, matushka. I saw you dance at the Bolshoi — and it occurs to me how my baboushka would have enjoyed that. She would indeed find a cool angelic creature like you, Miss Devrel, enjoyable to shock."

  "You are speaking of your grandmother?"

  "Yes. She would say to you 'the key to life is love of it' and tell you there is no harm in tasting the wine of every experience, so long as you avoid the dregs." He moved his mobile hands in an expressive gesture. "It is being alive that counts, whether it brings pain or gives rapture. Desire itself is a crucifix — ah, but you have your heart fixed on dreams not on reality."

  "At least I harm no one with my philosophy," she said.

  "But is it any fun for a girl to be so miraculously virtuous? What has held the men at bay? Ah, but you don't need to tell me — it is that cool hauteur, that tilt to the chin, that threat of the sand cat in your eyes that exactly match the darkest sapphire. Do you wish to dance with me?"

  "I dislike modern dancing," she said, even as anticipation leapt alight in her veins and there was a tingling in her toes racing upwards through her slim dancing legs.

  "So do I, matushka. Do you want more coffee, or are you replete?"

  "Quite replete, milor. It was a splendid dinner, thank you very much."

  "Bon." He rang the bell for the waiter, and while he was engaged in settling the bill and commenting favourably on the food and wine, Chrys took a swift look at her face in the tiny mirror of her powder-case. She ran the tongue of her lipstick around her lips, and tried to be as composed as her companion would allow. She knew he was looking at her, watching each of her movements with those smoky eyes that held elements of the dramatic, the mysterious, and the subtle.

  They were eyes that would look terrible in real and overwhelming anger . . . eyes that would smoulder with all the passions of his fierce inheritance when he held a woman in his arms.

  Soon . . . quite soon he would hold her in his arms when they danced. As the waiter held aside the portieres and they left the alcove she could hear the dance music drifting from the terrace which overlooked the oldest, most historic river in England. The river upon which the carved barques of royalty had sailed to and from the palaces; to gilded and gay receptions ... and to the block, and the dark-masked axeman at the royal Tower.

  A tremor ran all through Chrys as they stepped on to the terrace and she saw the masked couples dancing so close in each other's arms. The atmosphere was seductive, with the river running by and glimmering in the dim light of the lamps along the balustrade of the terrace. The orchestra was concealed so that the music seemed to be in the air itself rather than played by musicians.

  Chrys tautened as an arm encircled her waist and she was drawn so inevitably against the smooth dark suiting of the prince, against the lean suppleness of his body, her limbs and her body responding to him at once, as if he were her partner in a pas de deux instead of her partner in a foxtrot.

  Anton de Casenove was a devil without a doubt, but in his blood and his bones ran the inheritance of rhythm from Miroslava herself, and he danced like an angel. The wonder of it was like a magic igniting Chrys so that within seconds, no more, they were dancing as if they were one person. He had all the mastery, all the control of some of her best ballet partners, with that wonderful strength in the legs, that instinct that guided a girl through the most intricate steps. And the foxtrot could be wonderfully intricate, and inexpressibly evocative as the music played . . . a music from another time, when war had swept Europe and sons and lovers had choked in the mud of battlefields, where soon mas-

  ses of poppies had grown as if to defy death with their scarlet beauty.

  "Poor butterfly,

  In the blossoms waiting. .. ."

  Chrys was lost in the music as it went from one past melody to another; it was an incredible delight to be so in step with this man who so antagonised her at other times. His guidance was so sure and strong so that her body knew instinctively that it could enjoy the fabulous pleasure of dancing without a moment of fear that suddenly the disintegrating pain would flare in her spine and her legs would give way beneath her.

  She was in a kind of heaven and when at last the music ceased she came down to earth almost too abruptly.

  "No —" The word broke from her in protest. "I want to go on and on —"

  "No! " He spoke firmly and led her from the terrace. "You have danced for an hour and that is sufficient."

  "It was so perfect — oh, please, Anton! " She spoke his name almost unaware. "Please, let us stay! Let us go on dancing! "

  "You mustn't overtire yourself." Now they were in the foyer and he removed the mask from her brilliantly blue eyes and looked down into them . . . unseen by her because she was still in that rapt, enchanted mood in which dancing always left her. It was as if she stood in the wings of a theatre as the applause died away and the curtain fell for the last time . . . strung to go on, to dance and dance until her body ached and her toes were on fire.

  "Come, we will go for a drive! " Her velvet wrap was clasped about her shoulders, and something soft and scented brushed her cheek. With a little shiver of realization she saw the prince being helped into a topcoat, and felt under her hand the curled petals of the orchids which had decorated their table. Now they were pinned to her wrap, and the prince was unmasked and looking at her with intent and glinting eyes.

  "They are bringing round the car," he said, and very casually he took a blade-thin cheroot case from his pocket and opened it. He selected one of the dark Russian cheroots, and immediately the foyer attendant was at his elbow flourishing a lighter. Smoke jetted from the imperious nostrils and the faint, strange perfume of the orchids was drowned in the aroma of the cheroot.

  "Is it late?" she asked.

  "Not too late," he said enigmatically.

  The attendant held open the door and they went out into the night air, cool against her skin, golden from the tall lamps along the embankment. In the kerb there stood a long, racy car in a bronze colour. Chrys hesitated and stood by the tonneau of the sleek car, a pale, silvery figure with questions in her eyes. "Where are we going?" she asked him.

  "Somewhere — anywhere. What does it matter? You are not Cinderella who has to be gone by midnight, are you?" A quizzical smile gleamed deep in his eyes as he regarded her in the amber light. "All that finery will not turn to rags, I trust?"

  "My sister will be wondering about me."

  "Why, because you are with a man of uncertain reputation?"

  "Something like that. Dove is the anxious sort."

  "A dove by name and nature, eh?" He glanced at his thin gold wrist-watch. "It should not unduly ruffle her gentle feathers if I take you for a spin in my new car? It was delivered this morning and I am having it shipped to the Middle East in a few days, so I wish to enjoy it like a new toy. Don't you like it?"

  She turned to look at the rakish lines of it, and saw that the top was back and that the upholstery was leopard-pelted. A smile touched her lips. There was a streak of the exhibitionist in milor.

  "It's very sleek, and has an air of danger about it," she replied. "It suits your personality."

  "Is it my dangerous personality, Matushka, which makes you hesitate to take a drive with me?" His voice

  had softened to that husky purr and he had drawn a little nearer to her, silently, until suddenly her wrists were locked in his fingers. "You danced with me. You enjoyed that with every nerve in your body. Do you think I don't know? That I didn't feel your pleasure?"

  "I — I hadn't danced for so long." Her eyes met his, resistant and deeply blue; her breath quickened. "Yes, it made me happy to dance."

  "Will it make you less happy to drive in an open car with me?" he quizzed her. "My hands, this time, will be occupied with the wheel, and my thoughts with the road and the other traffic."

 
"You make me sound a prude." She gave a slight laugh and pulled free of him and went to the car. She opened the door and slipped inside . . . he was too tantalizing to argue with, and she didn't really wish to end yet this fascinatingly dangerous evening. Being with Anton de Casenove was like being on the edge of a volcano, or within range of the unpredictable temper of a leopard. She gave a little sigh and settled down in her seat ... but he danced divinely, the devil, and she could dislike no man who moved as if his muscles were of silk and steel. Her artistic nature was at the mercy of his lean and fascinating grace . . . she wouldn't think of the roué in him which had climbed forbidden balconies.

  They drove away from the Adonis Club, and the night wind blew the soft hair from her brow. A half-hour spin with him wouldn't hurt, she told herself. He wasn't to know that Dove was spending the night at her fiancé's home, where discussions regarding the forthcoming wedding were to be held with the forthright Mrs. Stanton presiding and directing in a way which Chrys would have rebelled against, had she been the bride-to-be.

  She smiled a little to herself . . . how easy on the system to be malleable like Dove, but she would sooner have her own flash fire temperament and independence. It wouldn't suit her to be a dove by nature.

  "It is a fine night," said the man at her side, who drove the Rapier as he did everything else, with the skill, verve and style of the man who feared no one, not even Destiny herself. "On a night such as this in the desert I would be riding instead of driving. Can you ride, Miss Devrel?"

  "Yes." It was faintly disconcerting the way he switched from the informality of calling her 'little one' in Russian back to the formality of her surname "Dove and I had riding ponies when we were quite young. My father has always worked for the local council and my mother liked us to have 'nice things' and to be a little more privileged than she was herself when a girl. You understand?"