The Marquis Who Hated Women (Bantam Series No. 62)

by Barbara Cartland

  It would never occur to either of them to let anyone know where they were going, and certainly not to inform their relatives at home of what had aroused their interest.

  “Papa has always been hopelessly vague,” Shikara told herself.

  But never so vague that he had not communicated with her over such a long period of time.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she thought, ‘one of the reasons I hate men is because of Papa’s casual behaviour towards Mama and me.’

  When they were all together they had been happy enough, but it was always her father’s wishes that were pandered to and her mother would never think of wanting to do anything to which he did not give his permission.

  When he was away or wished to travel to excavate a site in some outlandish place, he would go without a thought of how lonely her mother would be in his absence.

  What was more, he never made provision of any sort for her to have the companionship of one of her relatives in his absence.

  “I think Papa is very selfish!” Shikara had said once to her mother.

  But in return she had only received a smile and the laughing reply of:

  “What man is not? Men rule the world, Shikara, and the sooner you realise it the better! A woman is only a secondary consideration to a man beside his work or where his interests are concerned.”

  The men Shikara had met had never led her to think any differently.

  They had all been selfish and self-centred, and her Uncle had been the personification of everything masculine that she loathed and despised.

  All his household went in fear of him; she had never known him to do a kindly action that was not to his own advantage, or even to say a kind word if it was possible to find fault

  ‘It is not surprising,” she told herself, “that I was not prepared for anyone like the Marquis.”

  She had not missed the invariably pleasant way in which he spoke to his servants, nor the fact that the accommodation for the crew had been thought out with the same attention to detail as had been devoted to the cabins for himself and his guests.

  ‘He is kind, he is generous, and he is considerate,’ she thought, remembering how he had treated her.

  Then the remembrance that he hated women swept over her to make her feel despairingly that he would never feel anything for her except possibly an amused tolerance.

  Because she was in love, it seemed to her that time was rushing towards that inevitable moment when, having reached Cairo and seen the Tombs of the Bulls, the Marquis would inform her that he was returning to England and she would never see him again.

  ‘Perhaps it would be better if I had never met him,’ she thought sometimes in despair.

  Yet because she was in love, her eyes shone more brightly and she became lovelier than she had ever before been in her life.

  Hignet had placed a chair with a footrest on deck in a place protected from the wind and over which when the sun was bright there was an awning to protect her from the heat.

  Sometimes to her delight when she was sitting there alone reading, the Marquis would join her, and now that she realised that he was interested in Egyptian mythology she told him many of the things which she had learnt from her father.

  “I am so looking forward to seeing Alexandria,” she said.

  “Why particularly?” he asked.

  “I think, if I am honest and because I am a woman, it is because in Alexandria there was the Palace of Cleopatra and somewhere I think there is her tomb and that of Antony.”

  “I had forgotten that,” the Marquis said. “I was more interested in the fact that it was the city of Alexander the Great and that on the Island of Pharos there was the famous lighthouse—one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”

  “I like to remember that Menelaus brought his beautiful wife Helen to Egypt after the fall of Troy,” Shikara replied, "and later they returned to Sparta with rich and valuable souvenirs of the visit.”

  “I can see that once we reach Egypt we shall have a lot to discuss” the Marquis smiled. “While you will be looking for the jewels and Palaces, I shall be thinking of the great lighthouse and the beacon light which was kept constantly burning and passed through a lens of transparent stone.”

  “What happened to the lighthouse?” Shikara asked. “I cannot ever remember hearing the reason why it is not there now.”

  “The Architect provided for the refuelling of the beacon, which could be seen as far as ninety miles out to sea, by constructing a spiral lamp up which laden horses or even wagons could ascend, carrying wood-fuel for the fire.”

  “And so it was burnt down,” Shikara exclaimed.

  “No, nothing so ordinary,” the Marquis answered. “A spy in the employ of a Christian Emperor persuaded Caliph Al-Wahid that the builders had buried a great treasure under the lighthouse.”

  “And the temptation was too great!” Shikara cried.

  “Exactly!” the Marquis agreed. “Excavations were made. The huge lantern fell and was smashed and nothing Al-Wanid or his workmen could do could put it back into place again.”

  “Oh, how sad!” Shikara said. “So it was destroyed by greed!”

  “I am afraid so,” the Marquis said, “just as greed, according to your father’s friend, Monsieur Mariette, is depriving us of the amazing treasures that Egypt must hold hidden in the sand, the knowledge of which could benefit the whole world.”

  “You make me long to fight, as Papa is fighting, to preserve the past,” Shikara said.

  “As a mere woman,” the Marquis replied provocatively, “I think really you should be concerning yourself with you own future.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “I can hardly believe I am really here!” Shikara said.

  “Did you doubt your own determination?” the Marquis enquired.

  She smiled at him.

  “Not really, because I had to reach Papa by some means or other. But I could not believe you really meant to sail up the Nile in your yacht.”

  She had grown more and more excited as they neared Alexandria, and as they approached Egypt the yacht had churned up for miles reddish-brown water, the mud-retained effluent of the Nile.

  Then on the flat sky-line had appeared first the harbour-works, then the domed Palace of the Khedive, and then the harbour.

  They had gone ashore at Alexandria to be received by beggars, hawkers, and “gully-gully” men, the conjurers who did miraculous tricks with baby chickens which made Shikara feel their lives must be very short-lived.

  Shikara and the Marquis both were anxious to hasten on to Cairo, and soon they had left Alexandria behind and were steaming along the wide river with embankments rising twenty feet or so above the fields.

  Everything she saw had for Shikara an enchantment: the emerald-coloured crops of maze and sugar-cane, the chocolate-coloured earth where the wooden hand-ploughs had turned it, and the dense groves of date palms and banana plantations.

  She noticed in the fields that the fellah, or Egyptian workman, bending over his hoe, used the same kind of implement which her father had shown her in Museums labelled 3000 B.C.

  Or else naked to the waist he walked behind a plough drawn by two black oxen or a camel, and the plough, Shikara knew, was exactly like those she would see later on the tomb paintings.

  Despite the fact that the first railway had recently been opened between Alexandria and Cairo, the Nile still carried a lot of traffic.

  The white slanting sails caught the slight wind as the boats sailed noiselessly up and down the river.

  On the top of the embankments, camels passed in single file, donkeys heavily over-laden trotted in the smouldering black dust, and in the black mud of the canal banks half-naked men ceaselessly turned the handles of barrels which sucked up the waters of the Nile in the same primitive manner they had since time immemorial.

  As they journeyed Shikara and the Marquis talked of Egyptian history, and she found that the Marquis was extremely interested in Napoleons campaign in 1796.

 
“Do you realise,” he said to Shikara, “that he sailed with a Fleet of 328 vessels, carrying 38,000 men on board—almost as. large a force as Alexander commanded.”

  “I hate Napoleon!” Shikara cried. “He is a typical case of a man who must always be the conqueror, whatever cruelty and suffering he inflicts upon other people.”

  “You must admit at the same time he was a superb soldier.”

  “I admit nothing!” she answered. “He was supremely indifferent to how many men died in his campaigns. It was poetic justice that Nelson descended on his Fleet like an avenging angel and that a great number of French soldiers were blinded by the Egyptian eye disease!”

  “You are a blood-thirsty little thing at heart!”

  “I like people who build up the world, not destroy it,” Shikara said crossly.

  He laughed at her then, but when they went on deck after dinner to look out into the star-strewn darkness they were both of them for the moment caught up in the mystery and magic of the Egyptian night.

  There was no twilight in Egypt.

  There was a brier, expectant hush when it had seemed to Shikara in the vast stillness that time itself had stopped.

  The first star appeared overhead, there was the shrill squeak of a bat, and the wings of darkness seemed to sweep down upon the world.

  She could understand why her father had told her that the Egyptian labourers were afraid of the dark.

  This sudden cessation of light falling upon the heels of golden day had inspired weird pictures of the underworld which the ancient Egyptians had painted on their tombs.

  They believed that death would be like the night of Egypt, haunted by strange creatures of the imagination, half-man and half-animal.

  But when the stars had come out and a faint moon had risen, there was a new light over the land, silver and mystic. The Nile became like molten silver and Shikara felt herself listening to the silence as if it would speak to her.

  She was wearing one of her new gowns which she had bought in Lisbon, and she thought that when she had entered the Saloon before dinner there was a glint of admiration in the Marquis’s eyes, but she could not be sure of it.

  She wanted so desperately for him to admire her, but she felt she could never compete with the allurement and the seductiveness of the Senhora.

  And yet, irresistible though the ballerina had seemed, the Marquis had deliberately left Lisbon far sooner than there was any need, and had he not said “enough is as good as a feast”?

  Shikara wondered a little wistfully how any man could have enough of a woman who was so enchanting. Then she told herself it was all part of the Marquis’s dislike of women—all women—and that of course included herself.

  When he came to stand beside her on deck she was pulsatingly aware of him and every nerve in her body seemed to tingle because he was beside her. “What are you seeking?” he asked.

  She glanced at him in surprise, not expecting him to be so perceptive as to realise that part of her reached out towards Egypt, feeling that spiritually it held something special for her.

  Because she could not explain in words, what she felt she said:

  “I think I am trying to visualise Cleopatra’s great barge coming down over this very same water on her way to meet Antony. I like to think of the golden perfumed sails, the presents she had prepared for him, and the beautiful women on board, of whom of course Cleopatra herself was much the most beautiful!”

  “And Antony certainly appreciated what he was offered,” the Marquis said cynically.

  “They fell in love with each other,” Shikara said in a low voice. “He had come to conquer Egypt, but Cleopatra conquered him!”

  “On the contrary,” the Marquis said almost sharply, “she was the one who was conquered. She loved him and unless the books I have read are incorrect he was always her master. In fact she loved him more than he loved her!”

  “They were happy,” Shikara argued almost fiercely, “very happy!”

  “Why not?” the Marquis answered. “She was an extremely beautiful woman!”

  There was silence. Then Shikara said in a very small voice:

  “Is that all that men want? For a woman to be ... beautiful?”

  The Marquis hesitated for a moment.

  “If you are asking me to speak honestly,” he said at last, “I think a man seeks much more, although it is something he seldom if ever finds.”

  “What does he seek?” Shikara asked.

  The Marquis was looking out over the darkness and by the light of the stars she could see his profile quite clearly. She knew that they were talking in a manner they had never done before.

  He was not being cynical or mocking, nor was he teasing her.

  He was telling her what he really felt, and she held her breath for fear she should do anything to disrupt the train of his thoughts.

  “I think every man, if he is truthful,” the Marquis said slowly, “has an ideal in his heart of the type of woman he would wish not only to love but also to marry.”

  “And what would ... she be ... like?” Shikara asked, hardly daring to breathe the words.

  “You asked me if a man wants only beauty in a woman,” the Marquis replied, “but I believe that when a man loves, the woman on whom his affections are fixed always seems to be beautiful. But it is not facial appearance that is of any great consequence.” He paused for a moment before he went on:

  “It is something which is deeper, something which comes from the spirit or perhaps what religious people would call the soul.”

  Again there was silence and as Shikara did not speak he continued:

  ‘I cannot pretend to be a great authority like your father on ancient religions, but from what I have read, the people of the past were all seeking something greater, something beyond themselves, something which they sensed but could not actually describe in words.”

  His voice deepened.

  “That is why it is often music, painting, or sculpture which expresses what lies in a man’s heart better than anything he can say in commonplace words.”

  “Is that ... what you seek?” Shikara asked.

  The Marquis did not answer and after a second she said:

  “I think I understand, and in a way it is frightening because what is outside us is so much bigger and more powerful than we are.”

  She sighed.

  “It makes me feel very small and ... unimportant, and yet I want to be ... part of it.”

  “No-one is really unimportant to himself,” the Marquis replied, “and I believe we are extremely important in the pattern of the universe.”

  “How can you be sure of that?” Shikara enquired. “How can I know that I am not utterly dispensable and that if I vanished into the darkness of the night and was never seen again, it would have no effect whatever in the world? Nor would anyone care what happened to me.”

  The Marquis smiled at the passion behind her words and turned to look at her.

  Her eyes were pools of darkness. Yet the starlight seemed to glisten on her hair, and he could see the whiteness of her neck and shoulders and the delicacy of her hands as they rested on the rail of the yacht.

  “You are being very modest this evening,” he said. “That is not like you.”

  “I am afraid,” Shikara confessed, “not of physical dangers but of letting my life slip by without living, without knowing any of the things that lie beyond myself.”

  Her voice seemed to throb in the darkness. Then she said:

  “Like you, and perhaps like everyone else, I am searching for an ... ideal. I would be such a complete and absolute ... failure if I did not find it.”

  “I think you will always find what you seek.”

  The Marquis sounded very reassuring and she looked up at him, thinking how tall and broad-shouldered he seemed and that it would be impossible to be afraid of anything when he was beside her.

  “You are very lovely, Shikara,” he said in a low voice that was unexpectedly deep. “I would wish
you to be happy.”

  She felt herself vibrate to the way he spoke. Then as she looked at him and he was looking down at her something magnetic seemed to pass between them.

  It was something she could not explain, and yet it was there, vibrating in the air so that it was impossible for her to move, although she felt as if he drew her closer to him.

  For a long moment they were both silent and still. Then slowly, as if it was inevitable, like the waters of the Nile moving beneath them, the Marquis put his arms round Shikara and drew her against him.

  Just for a moment he looked down into her face, before his lips were on hers.

  She could not move, she could not breathe; all that she could think was that his lips were hard and his arms seemed to encircle her completely.

  Then a sensation of joy and excitement such as she had never known before seemed to rise in her throat and fled from there into her lips.

  A thrill like forked lightning ran through her body so intensely that it was almost painful, and yet it was a rapture such as she had never before known or dreamt existed.

  The Marquis's arms tightened and she felt that her whole being melted into his and became part of him.

  She knew that this was what she had wanted since the beginning of time, and that because it was so perfect, so much a part of the Divine and came only from him, it was why she had hated all other men.

  The Marquis held her closer and closer and his kiss became more intense, more demanding, until Shikara felt as if her whole being passed into his and she no longer had any identity of her own.

  She was not herself but him; her lips became his lips, her body his body, and there was no division between them.

  This was love!

  This was the mystery and the wonder she had sought in the darkness, this was the answer to all the yearnings of her mind and the cravings of her heart.

  How long the Marquis held her against him and kissed her she had no idea; she only knew that she was no longer conscious of the moving yacht, the shimmering water, the stars overhead, the darkness of the land.

  There was only him in a magical golden world where she belonged to him.