by P. J. Fox
“It sounds so sad.”
“Don’t feel sorry for them.” That edge was back. “They chose their lives; we all do.”
Everyone, that was, except Belle.
TWENTY-FOUR
They walked back slowly. From a distance, they might have been any couple: the night over, the parties involved both energized and exhausted from a long night of having fun. Walking along side by side, sharing a companionable silence.
But Belle knew the truth.
She wondered what Ash was thinking, and didn’t dare ask. He kept her continually off guard; just when she felt like she’d figured him out, he did something to surprise her. He could be solicitous, almost kind at points and then turn vicious in a moment. For every courtly gesture, there was an offhanded comment illustrating how he viewed people as little more than objects. And yet the day before, by the window, he’d touched her like a lover.
And hadn’t touched her since.
She’d learned something about him, tonight. He’d been the one with the stories, of life in India and of school in London. He’d lived most of his adult life in London, having been sent off to boarding school at age eleven. She had a hard time picturing what that must have been like. For any child, but especially for him. English had been his first language, but English culture was alien. In his bespoke wool he looked the picture of an English prep school refugee, of someone whose family had occupied the same sprawling manse on some blasted heath for a thousand years, but she found herself wondering what he might look like in traditional Indian dress. The heavily beaded and embroidered robes of the maharajahs, fitted through the wait and flared to the knee.
Almost like he’d looked the other night.
And then she castigated herself for empathizing with him, for thinking of him as a person at all. It didn’t matter what he’d been through; there was no excuse for what he’d done. And if he’d jaded himself to the point where romance held no meaning for him, and normal sexual intercourse failed to arouse him, that was his fault. He’d done it—he’d done it all—to himself.
The truth was, her ability to empathize with this horror of a man frightened her. Badly. She didn’t want to see him as a real person, because she could barely bear to contemplate what that might mean. Each implication was worse than the last; she felt like she was losing her grip.
“It’s alright not to hate me,” he said, as though he’d read her thoughts.
She flushed. The loathsome truth was that under other circumstances she might have enjoyed their conversation. That—that she had, at times. When she’d let her guard down and allowed that strange sense of unreality to creep back in. He was interesting and he aroused some impulse in her that she didn’t understand. To fight back, where she was usually passive. To talk. She’d never yet been able to keep her mouth shut.
“It might make things easier on both of us, if you don’t.”
“I have to,” she said quietly.
She couldn’t believe that she was telling him this. What had happened in the past forty-eight hours, that they were talking at all? She’d asked herself, at multiple points, if this was Stockholm Syndrome. Could this—this creeping, inexorable familiarity be the very horror she’d read about? Except she felt no gratitude toward him, no sense that she owed him anything or was dependent on him for survival. Quite the opposite. She was as aware that she hated him as she’d ever been.
And yet there had been points during the night where she’d had to forcibly remind herself that they were not equals. That this wasn’t a date, and whatever sense of safety she’d developed since leaving Prague was an illusion. He hadn’t rescued her; far from it. He was treating her like a guest, but he could stop at any time. But the fact that she’d forgotten any of that, even for a minute, that she was able to talk to him at all under these circumstances was in its own way even worse than being captured in the first place.
The castle rose before them. Black against black, lights twinkling in only a few of the windows. It was late, although it didn’t feel late; Belle had, after all, slept in until past noon. But most of the castle must be in bed. She still wasn’t entirely clear on how many people lived there. Ash’s servants tended to be invisible. Like wraiths.
She’d felt, at times, like she was in an enchanted castle. Like she really had gone through the portal, and into some fairy kingdom. Luna had been a refreshing breath of normality. Refreshing and jarring, with all of Luna’s slang and pop culture references, some of which were extremely dated. She still thought groovy was a thing. Here, the whole idea of television seemed so out of place.
They reached the steps to the colonnade, and then the door.
Opening it, Ash put his hand on the small of her back and led her inside. She was, once again, hideously aware of him being close. Another human being, a virtual stranger, sharing her space. A guard watched them from the shadows, saying nothing. He was armed, a testament to the fact that the unlocked door—like everything else—was an illusion.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Ash said quietly. “The rule of law is thin.”
He meant that she wasn’t trapped; that his private militia wasn’t symptomatic of his need to control but merely a necessity.
She nodded thoughtfully, even though she didn’t wholly agree. Life along the Canadian border was much the same. The turn of the new millennium had brought telephone service to even the remotest areas, but it still took hours for a fire truck or an ambulance to arrive. Those who cared about their own survival took responsibility for it. They learned early on how to defend against the home invaders who preyed on isolated farms, and the mountain lions who crouched in darkened hay lofts.
He led her down the hall in silence. She peered into the shadows. In her room, in front of the fireplace, the shadows had flickered and danced against the walls and almost seemed to be alive. Here, they…waited. Sullen. Ready to devour her. The sheer size of the castle struck her again. Why had anyone ever built a place this large, and how could they call it a home?
She shivered, in spite of herself. He glanced at her but said nothing. Moments later, she found herself climbing the same staircase that she’d descended hours ago. She didn’t know why she was doing this, why she was going along with him so passively. Perhaps because part of her knew, even if she couldn’t consciously admit this to herself, that resistance was futile. He’d do what he felt like doing. She could only make things harder on herself.
And part of her…she didn’t want to, surely?
No. Of course not. It was more that she was morbidly curious. She’d stumbled into some kind of dark fairy tale and she had to stay the course. Find out what happened. To all of them.
He led her down another hall, which ended at a door. The door to his apartments. What must have been, when the castle was first built several hundred years ago, the apartments of whatever potentate lived here. Belle wondered, briefly, what he must have been like. This part of the world had been rife with conflict for a long time; the history of Wallachia and its neighbor, Transylvania was one of conflict. Romania had been the edge of Christendom, the last barrier against the encroaching armies of the mysterious east.
She’d read the historical accounts of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia. Vlad Țepeș, Vlad the Impaler. Although revered as a folk hero throughout much of the modern east, his reputation for cruelty was still legendary five hundred years after his death. Highly educated and fluent in many languages, he was nonetheless a confirmed sadist. Little was known about his wife, who died under mysterious circumstances. His lone issue was Mihnea cel Rău, Minhea the Evil. He put his father’s love of torture to shame, beginning a reign of terror after he ascended the throne that was only stopped by his assassination.
Perhaps something in the empty mountains attracted cruelty.
Ash was right: the rule of law was thin. A man could come here, where people were desperate, and do whatever he pleased. Like take a woman hostage. Or keep a harem of them. Or torture them, as Vlad the Impaler had.
Ash, too, was unable to feel a man’s…normal feelings.
To want what other men wanted.
Belle wondered if she was about to discover, as Vlad’s wife had, and perhaps as Ash’s other women had, what that meant. She shivered again, wrapping her arms around herself. She was still wearing his jacket.
And then she was inside, and she realized that this was the room she’d seen earlier from inside her own. Of course. The finest apartments in the castle would have both the safety of looking out over the internal courtyard and that balcony. A place for a man to enjoy the outdoors, without being seen. To read a book, perhaps, or entertain a favored guest.
Ash’s space dwarfed her own. Where she had a room, he had rooms: some sort of sitting room, that they’d first entered, which was larger than her mother’s living room by tenfold; and then he showed her a library, and an office, a small, what he referred to as a morning room, and a bedroom. His bedroom. It, like hers, was baroque, only decorated in shades of red that resembled dried blood. Maroon velvet, cordovan leather, the faint smell of polish on the wood-paneled walls. The windows were slightly open, letting in the night air.
After giving her the tour, he walked back to his office and poured himself a drink from the sideboard. Then he stood before the fireplace. Some unseen hand had lit a fire and he stared into it, drink in hand. The mantel was an oversized confection of evil-looking cherubs that seemed to wink in the flickering light.
She stood behind him, near the couch, and waited.
“If you have questions,” he said finally, “ask.”
“Are you married?”
He turned. “Not quite the child you appear, are you.”
“No.”
“Sit,” he instructed.
She sat.
“To answer your question, no, I’m not.”
He sipped his drink, still standing before the fireplace. She tucked her legs up under her. The couch was comfortable enough, for something stuffed with horsehair. She watched him, and he watched her.
“As an American journalist once observed, a successful marriage requires falling in love many times and always with the same person. I’ve never fallen in love, much less remained in love, with anyone. I don’t think I’m capable of love.”
“How sad.”
“You’re too young to have been in love.”
“No,” she said. And then, “are you going to give me a disease?”
He smiled slightly, but without feeling. “No. I’m careful.”
“How many partners have you had?”
“I don’t know. I don’t notch the bedpost. A few hundred, I think.”
“All women?”
“No.”
He poured her a drink and handed it to her. She accepted it, but didn’t try the pale liquid. So he’d hold a woman hostage, but he wouldn’t marry her? If not love, then what did he want?
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
She’d asked before; he hadn’t answered.
But this time he did. “Because I want something honest in my life. One thing. Something pure.” He paused. His eyes held hers. “Something that’s mine. I’m a powerful man,” he continued. “I don’t say this out of some false pride, or because I desire to impress you, but because it’s true. I control important resources; I’m wealthy beyond the dreams of most men. I have a title. People tell me what they think I want to hear.
“Women tell me what they think I want to hear. They grit their teeth and bear it when I’m rude, acquiesce to my most revolting requests because they see doing so as a necessary evil. To win the prize, which is me. Or, rather, the person they imagine me to be. The dream of a life with someone who’s cultured, and educated, and handsome, and who can give them whatever they want.”
“You’re quite conceited.”
His lips quirked in that same small smile, the one that was somehow cruel. “But I’m not. I am those things. One can be purchased by anyone, and the other is an accident of genetics. But I don’t have what really matters.” He paused again. “I have no soul.”
She considered his words. They seemed so strange. The whole conversation did. So strange, to be so blunt, and about such a topic as this. For a long time there was no sound in the room except for the fire, and her breathing, and his.
“So,” she clarified, “you’d rather have genuine hate than false love.”
“At least then I’d know it’s real.” He turned back to the fire. After a moment he continued. “At first I didn’t know what drew me to you. But from that first encounter there was something. And when I saw you again, I knew I had to have you. That you were there, and I was there, for a reason.”
How strange, Belle thought, what he was saying could almost be romantic.
“I realized later, after I’d acquired you, that it was your honesty.” He laughed, a more genuine sound this time if still disillusioned. “Your willingness to insult me. To, as you might say, tell the truth as you perceived it. I need that in my life.” He turned. “Moreover, I don’t think you hate me. I think you want to, think you’re supposed to, because your rulebook tells you that this is wrong.”
How wrong he was. “What are you going to do with me?” she asked.
“Use you for my own purposes. But I see no need for you to live in penury, just to prove a point.” Because, came the unspoken end of his sentence, they both knew who was superior. Who was in control. “You may have whatever you like, within reason, spend your days however you like. I ask—require—only that you be available to me when I need you.”
“Are you going to hurt me?”
He fixed her with that inscrutable gray gaze. “Yes, a little,” he said calmly, as if the question were meaningless. “But nothing permanent and nothing you can’t handle. I don’t find maiming women to be arousing. And I don’t care for blood, particularly, or fire. I crave control,” he said bluntly. “Which I have.”
“I…I don’t understand.”
“You’ll enjoy it,” he said darkly, “if I want you to.” The words were somehow a threat. “You’ll enjoy it, and you’ll feel guilty for enjoying it, even though you shouldn’t. The body has no control over its responses and in the end we’re all slaves to our own needs.”
“And then what?” she asked. “You’ll use me and dispose of me and then I’ll have nothing.”
Not even her pride. As mercenary as it sounded, she had to be practical. This was about more than the violation she’d experience tonight. It was the violation of her future. She’d have no education, no friends, no income. No way to make her way in the world. And after however many—days? Weeks? Months? She could hardly go home to Scarborough. She’d be ruined. Forever.
“You don’t trust me,” he observed, rather coldly.
“I saw the other women being led off in cages,” she whispered.
His eyes narrowed, and then something in his expression changed. Something she couldn’t quite credit, but it frightened her. He frightened her, more and more with each passing minute. She didn’t understand how, earlier, she’d almost convinced herself that he was a real human being. Perhaps to make this—this, here, right now—more bearable.
“What bothers you more,” he asked, “the violation of your body or the uncertainty of your future?”
She considered the question. “Both,” she admitted honestly.
“Would it be easier if you were married?” he asked again in that same cold, arch tone. He was mocking her. “That is what you were waiting for, wasn’t it? Marriage?”
She nodded, certain that his words were a trap but just as unaware of how to avoid it.
“Like your medieval forebears, paired off in arranged matches. Did the thought ever excite you, when you were younger? Imagining yourself, trembling and frightened, sharing your wedding night with an almost complete stranger?”
He, at least, was attracted to the image. She could tell from the tone of his voice, the hungry look in his eyes. He savored the idea of her terror. He’d
certainly imagined himself as the lord, given free reign to do as he would with his virgin bride.
“At least then,” she replied in a small voice, forcing herself to meet those eyes, “I’d have some guarantee of his intentions,” she almost whispered. And that was true, wasn’t it? She’d enter into this nightmare, at least knowing that she wasn’t about to be out on the street.
He walked back to the sideboard and poured himself another drink. Then he sat down in the chair opposite her. As usual, the alcohol seemed to have no effect.
“You’re wrong,” he said bluntly. “You imagine that marriage is as the poets say. That everyone enters into it for the same reasons, wanting the same things. But you’re wrong.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“My mother married my father when she was eighteen and he was twenty-seven.”
Ash paused, not remembering but imagining. After awhile, he spoke again. The world he created for Belle, with his words, was one of strict social structures and unbelievable excess. A world of moonlit picnics and elephants and men in pith helmets. A world out of time, where after consulting top astrologers a young maharajah’s advisors had chosen him a bride. And where a young woman, barely a woman at all, had left her home to marry a man she’d never met. They wouldn’t even speak until their wedding night.
“My father was married already, of course. He’d married for the first time when he was twenty-three, just after he’d inherited his title. His first marriage was a marriage of state. His bride was young, but she too understood the purpose of the union. She was no naïf.
“They had my eldest brother, Aadinath. Aadinath means first God in Sanskrit and is a common name for first born sons. He, too, was a result of obligation. It wasn’t until much later that my father would have a child from love. After Aadinath,” he continued, “came Anish. And then, having done her duty by him in producing an heir and a spare, Kamala—that was her name, Kamala, it’s an alternate name for the Goddess Lakshmi—requested that she be pensioned off. She went to live at our summer estate, in the hills. It’s where, during the worst of the heat, the wives of British soldiers stationed at Lucknow used to retreat. And she’s there still,” he added, surprising Belle. He’d talked about her like she was dead, what with beginning the story by mentioning a second wife.
