by P. J. Fox
“A guest who can’t leave.” Alec’s face was a mask.
Ash turned. “Are you looking for other employment?”
“No, sir.”
Ash slumped back into his chair, feeling defeated. The fire still crackled in its grate, as though a thousand years hadn’t passed. “Then furnish her with whatever clothes she desires,” he said. He wanted another drink, but he didn’t want Alec to see him drinking. Sometimes the man felt like his father. Only marginally less horrid.
“Yes, sir.” And then, “you’ve received another communiqué from your brother.”
“How?”
“The telephone. He called.”
“Well I didn’t think he’d lit the damn thing on fire. What does he want?”
“To visit.”
“Tell him to go fuck himself with the most unpleasant thing he can find.” Which would be his wife. Anish had been married now for ten years to a ruthlessly moralizing cunt who sounded like a hyena when she talked. And ate like one, on the rare occasions when she stopped talking long enough to manage the feat.
“And tell him no, he can’t visit. Tell him the palace is closed. Tell him it burned to the ground. Tell him I have the Black Plague.”
Tell him anything you want, so long as it keeps him from coming here.
Eventually Alec left.
Ash didn’t know why he’d reacted as he had. The man’s questions were reasonable. He’d said that Belle wasn’t like the other girls, but wasn’t she? He’d paid too much money for her and he hardly intended to leave her in that bedroom forever. They both knew what he wanted.
He’d wanted to rip his coat off her in the morning room and take her on the table. But he hadn’t, and he didn’t know why. Only…he supposed he could tell how scared she was, and seeing himself through her eyes had made him feel like an ogre.
He found her reluctance both upsetting and oddly alluring. She was so delicate. When he’d put his hands on her he’d half worried that she might break. Like a twig, thin and brittle. And then he’d seen her feet, her charming dancer’s feet, once and again and then peeping out from under the bottom of his coat as she ate. Feet that bore the scars of years of abuse. So she can take pain, he’d caught himself thinking. Perhaps even likes it.
In centuries past, the sultan’s concubines had been trained on how to approach him. There was a room, or sometimes suite of rooms, adjoining the harem. And harem, taken from the Arabic word haram, merely meant forbidden. The mysterious place where women, wives and daughters and female servants and favored concubines and grandmothers alike, lived together in luxury. And little boys, too, until they were ready for the adult world. The sultan would select a woman, or ask that one be selected for him, and she’d be sent to that room.
Lounging on his bed, a bed reserved solely for recreation as the sultan’s personal apartments were usually elsewhere, he’d watch through lidded eyes as she approached the foot of the bed and then, climbing onto it, crawled toward him.
And the sultan in turn had to pleasure her, or she’d complain to the entire harem that he was impotent. It didn’t matter if he’d rather read a book; there were expectations on both sides. Everyone followed a script.
The whole thing was hollow, pointless.
The dance hadn’t changed much, either, except that now it was less structured. A piece of jewelry, a trip, an expensive dinner. Flowers, candies, and promises he didn’t intend to keep. Women, and men, still traded sex and money for security. And even the women who weren’t blatantly after him for his money, he didn’t know whether they truly liked him. There wasn’t much about him to like. A great many people were afraid of him. And just like men were taught to be gallant, women were taught to be submissive. And not in the way he wanted. Nice girls didn’t cause a fuss by disagreeing. There was nothing genuine about their reactions to things; they said and did what they thought they were supposed to say and do, out of habit. There was no challenge, no ego to overcome.
He sighed. The night before, he’d referenced The Far Pavilions. That doorstop had been about a man who couldn’t decide. Much like Hamlet. At university, what felt like a lifetime ago now, he’d pointed out that Hamlet was a study in the consequences of indecision. His professor had, in his mind, proved himself an absolute idiot when he’d responded with, but Hamlet is very decisive! Show me one place in the play where he doesn’t know exactly what to do. Ash, overwhelmed with the man’s stupidity, hadn’t.
Yes, Hamlet was decisive—in the way that a chicken that’s just had its head cut off is decisive. He knew which direction to run in, but not where he was going. He had no plan. And as Lucius Annaeus Seneca had observed, when one does not know to which port one is sailing, all winds are favorable.
The Ash of Far Pavilions fame couldn’t decide who he was: English or Indian, or even gay or straight. Ash had always thought, reading the book as a child, that this was because he’d allowed himself to become so bogged down in what those concepts meant. He had a rulebook, and it was rigid. He couldn’t discard it, so instead he discarded his own life.
Ash, as someone who’d made a conscious effort not to live by the rules for most of his life, found the other Ash’s decisions ridiculous. And sad. Too sad, really, to bear thinking about. How limited his life had been, and by his own hand. Ash supposed that, at root, he loathed the character because he feared turning out just like him. At times, in his most honest moments, he feared himself.
His own name was Ashwin; as Belle had correctly identified, the name of a god. And at least he had the saving grace of knowing who he was and who he wasn’t. Most of the time. The Ash in the book hadn’t even been able to decide on his name. Ash, to his English persona, stood for Ashton: from the place with ash trees. A fine, if common name. Ashton was the sort who fantasized about his barracks mates and hunted grouse. And married someone appropriate. Ashok, on the other hand, had never been a name of statesmen. And that was the name that the character’s foster mother gave him. Ashok, meaning without sorrow in Sanskrit. He’d thrown both personae away in the end, for an ideal.
And so ended up with nothing.
Ash stared into the fire, and thought.
EIGHTEEN
Belle opened her eyes, winced, and shut them again. Her eyelids felt gummy and the sunlight was very bright. Her mouth tasted like something had died in it. Something revolting.
The pillow under her cheek smelled of cedar and lilac sachet and the canvas tarp that had been used to cover the bed until she arrived. She found the thought comforting: that at least there hadn’t been too many women sleeping in this bed. The room had, the girl who’d brought her lunch had confirmed, been opened just for Belle.
After presenting Belle with the plate of fruit and cheese and bread, she’d stayed and chatted with her while she ate. Belle, fresh from the shower and wrapped in a fluffy robe, had felt almost human again. She’d enjoyed her conversation with Luna, who’d told her all about the estate and the people who lived and worked there. The estate was self-sufficient but, moreover, employed a substantial number of locals—and not just as domestics. Like a medieval estate, the castle’s grounds encompassed a village. Except instead of its purpose being to serve the castle, its purpose was to serve the rest of the world. Belle had been astonished to learn that software and network support were both growth industries in Romania; the village, which was really more of a small city, was home to not one but three companies providing offshore programming.
Luna seemed happy enough to live at the castle; her mother was the pastry chef and she’d grown up here. After high school, she’d trained to become an esthetician but she couldn’t find a job in her field. So, she was back home until she figured out what else to do.
Belle found herself reminded, surprisingly, of people she’d known back home in Scarborough. Old classmates, friends; she’d seen them when she came home for various school breaks. Some had dropped out of college. Some had never gone at all. They still frequented the same hangouts, still did the same thing
s for fun on the weekend. They listened to her stories of Cambridge interestedly enough, but she could tell as she was talking that they didn’t really hold any significance for people whose world outlook hadn’t changed. Her friends were just being polite.
Luna wasn’t sleeping on her mother’s couch, but she might as well have been. As for Ash, she didn’t have much to say about him and Belle was afraid to ask. She didn’t want her interest to be misconstrued, and who knew what Luna’s real purpose was in visiting her. As prosaic as everything appeared, Belle couldn’t help but be suspicious. She’d only been here a few hours and didn’t know how much of this—this friendliness, this normality—was a front.
Like the club had been a front.
Because she was so suspicious, she’d expected Luna to bring up Ash. And part of her had wondered if Luna…if every girl…? But Ash seemed, to the young esthetician, to be largely irrelevant. He hadn’t been the lord of the manor, as it were, for that long and before him there’d been a different man who traveled all the time and seemed to belong to a different world. Belle, though, seemed more like her. And they, Luna had speculated, seemed about the same age. They could be friends.
Belle didn’t want to be friends, but she didn’t have the heart to say so.
That had been the day before.
Nothing had happened since then.
Under different circumstances, Belle might have liked Luna. Now she just found the girl’s constant chatter grating. And the fact that she thought they could be friends, jailor and prisoner, made Belle want to punch something. Even after Luna had brought her a bag of clothes from some local store and promised her more the next morning.
Belle had waited until Luna left before getting dressed. Lululemon was, apparently, a universal brand. And, thank God, there was underwear. Then she’d blow dried her hair and nibbled on the remains of her lunch and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
Gradually terror faded into boredom. Boredom was the true enemy of terror. Not actual safety from whatever was causing it and not reassurance of same. Terror took a lot of energy and, like the energy required to run a marathon, was simply impossible to maintain indefinitely. Eventually, in the absence of something to feed it, it burned itself out. And left her sitting there, staring at the wall.
Minutes stretched into hours. Belle wondered if this was what the rest of her life would be like: sitting, waiting. For nothing. In a cell, cut off from the rest of the world, a hothouse flower in its own specially constructed terrarium. As dusk finally began to fall she almost, almost would have wished for Ash to reappear. Almost. Just so she’d have something to do.
Instead, much as she’d initially found the idea impossible, she ended up reading a book. The books, luckily, were all in English: the only language she could read. And so her night had passed, enlivened only by the appearance of dinner—brought by yet a third servitor, one she’d never seen before—and finally she’d given up and gone to bed.
Part of her had wondered, as she stared up into darkness, if this was some kind of elaborate plan on his part to put her off her guard. Either to come to her at night, when she was unprepared and defenseless, or to leave her alone here for so long that she craved any kind of human contact. The book she’d been reading to pass the time, a bodice ripper styled after the life of the Empress Theodora, had featured one such plot.
But that book was as unrealistic as—as the situation she now found herself in.
On that unsettling note, she’d fallen asleep.
Now it was morning again.
Since she’d first agreed to follow that waiter, whoever he’d really been, nothing had been what she’d expected. Particularly since she’d fallen into the clutches of her captor.
Ash.
The enigma.
At first she’d loathed him unreservedly, but that kind of energy too was hard to maintain. He hadn’t done any of the things she’d expected him to do. And he employed people. Lots of people. Which…meant something, right?
Before, she’d been able to think of him as a gorgon. A cardboard cutout of evil who bought and sold people. Who kept untold scores of women somewhere. He was, in a phrase, everything her mother—and her pastor, and the news—had warned her about. People who bought and sold other people were bad; this wasn’t up for debate. If he’d been a good man, a decent human being, he wouldn’t have been in that room in the first place. Leering at her, drugged and naked. And if by some chance he had been in the room, he should have bought her simply to free her. Made it clear that he wanted nothing from her except goodwill and returned her to her dorm at TUD. Not spirited her away for his nefarious sex schemes, ignoring her pleas.
That was what her rulebook taught.
It was simple, and logical, and right.
Except….
He hadn’t forced himself on her. He hadn’t hit her, or locked her in a cage. And although he frightened her, he spoke to her like she was a human being. He didn’t strike her as a kind or pleasant person, and he’d certainly threatened to hurt her, but the fact was he hadn’t.
So far, what he had done was rescue her—however backhandedly—from some kind of black market sex ring, give her something to wear, talked to her about various subjects that had nothing to do with sex, bought her dinner and then brought her home with him. To a castle. Where, instead of being escorted to the dungeon, she’d been given a tour and then put to bed.
She couldn’t honestly say that, apart from an awareness of her situation, she had a reason to be scared. No one had asked her to do anything she didn’t want to do. At least, not yet.
Although she was sure that they would.
The door opened. She tensed, hearing the faint whisper of wood on carpet. All manner of scenarios, each more upsetting than the last, flew through her mind. By the time she worked up the courage to open her eyes again, she’d convinced herself that she was about to participate in a ten man gang bang.
And then she heard the voice.
NINETEEN
“Good morning!”
It was Luna.
She bustled in, her arms full of assorted packages, once again acting like nothing was wrong. A second girl came with her, carrying even more packages, but she didn’t introduce herself. After putting them down on the table, she exchanged a word with her friend and left.
“This is so exciting!” She grinned.
Belle just stared at her.
“We have, oh, six hours or so.” Luna glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, an ornate ormolu thing that was hideous. “That should be enough time.”
“Wait—enough time for what?”
“Your big night!”
Belle paused, processing what the other girl had just said. “What time is it?” she asked hesitantly. And…her big night? What on earth was Luna talking about? A thrill of fear shot up her spine, making her shiver. Luna made it sound like she was going to prom, was acting as happy as if she was going to prom, and again that sense of unreality returned.
Luna seemed surprised. “It’s past noon,” she said.
“Wait—what?”
Belle glanced at the window. Her eyes widened fractionally as she reoriented herself. What she’d initially taken for especially strong morning sun was, in fact, noon sun. She’d slept for hours. Hibernated. She’d had no idea that she was so exhausted, or even capable of sleeping for what—eighteen hours straight?
She realized, still in the process of waking up, that she once again needed to pee.
Ignoring Luna, she extricated herself from the bed.
As she stumbled off toward the bathroom Luna called after her, “would you like a cup of coffee?”
Belle just grunted. Luna’s seemingly boundless enthusiasm was an irritant. And Belle felt hung over. She hadn’t known that it was possible to actually be hung over from too much sleep but there it was. She shut the bathroom door. It didn’t lock but at least it shut. She reviewed what Luna had said again: your big night. What big night? What wa
s she on about? Luna persisted in acting like Belle was here on purpose, and this was some sort of fun adventure.
It wasn’t.
She emerged, having prolonged things as long as she could. She’d hoped that if she hid long enough, Luna might be gone. She wasn’t. Coffee had appeared on the table near the fireplace, and a fire had been lit. The room was slightly chilly.
“Drink your coffee,” Luna said, “then go back into the bathroom and get into the shower.” She helped herself to some coffee of your own. “You were in there for so long I thought you were taking a shower.” And then, worried, “are you well?”
“I’m fine.” Belle sat down.
Luna still looked dubious. “Are you…I mean….”
“Luna,” Belle said, “I don’t want to be here.”
“But….” Luna gestured. “You came with the prince, and—”
“Prince?” Belle queried, stunned. A prince, with a castle. How perfect was that.
“I don’t think the title means much,” Luna said apologetically. “After all, in most of the world there are no princes. At least, not who do anything other than appear at polo matches.” She sipped her coffee. If she was supposed to be a servant, she seemed to have forgotten that. Rather, she appeared to have installed herself as Belle’s instant girlfriend. Belle, for her part, was too fascinated to be offended. “Most princes—and, for that matter, princesses—have careers and mortgage payments just like everyone else. It’s sad, really.”
“No it isn’t,” Belle said reflectively. She tried her own coffee. It was surprisingly good. “Well that explains why he’s such an ass,” she said without thinking.
“Oh!” Luna’s exclamation was half amused, half scandalized.
“You don’t seem to hold him in terribly high regard,” Belle accused.
“Oh, but I do. He signs my paychecks.”
The moment stretched, and then they both burst out laughing.
Despite her reservations, Belle found herself warming to this strange new person. As she sipped her coffee, she listened to Luna ramble and it was almost like having a real friend. Even Charlotte, as well-intentioned as she’d been and as fun as she’d been, hadn’t been someone Belle could really talk to. It had been a long time since she’d met someone else whose family concerns centered on issues like lost livestock.
