Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  Laddy let the canteen slide out of her fingers to the ground and, finding purchase on the sloping uneven wall beneath her, lowered herself almost noiselessly to the floor of the cavern beside them.

  Suddenly the harsh glare of the lamp was in her eyes and Mischa cursed once in Russian. “What the hell are you doing?” he said, his voice coming angrily out of the blackness behind the torch’s blinding glare. “Did not you hear me say you must stay on the other side?”

  “No,” said Laddy, shielding her eyes from the light as she sat up, and abruptly the torch’s glare was on the wall above her.

  “That is a rockfall!” Mischa said harshly. “If the roof comes down again while the three of us are behind it, no one knowing where we are, what then?”

  He was right. A thrill of fear pulsed through her in response to his words. Then she got to her feet, breathed deeply and smiled at him in the darkness.

  “Well, we might all die together,” she said, “but somehow I think you’d dig us out by sheer force of will.”

  “If you were on the other side of the wall I might,” he said, his voice in the blackness glittering with an emotion she could not decipher. “When you are with me what could tempt me to want out of this cave?”

  The light on the wall flickered as his arm found her in the near blackness, and she was pulled against his body and kissed passionately, ruthlessly, his body bending hers back with the force of his need of her.

  Every nerve of her body stirred with the memory of what had occurred between them in the early hours of the night that was only now turning to day, and she clutched at him, but already he was forcing her away.

  “Go back,” he said. “It is foolhardy for all of us to be in such a place. And I must look at Rhodri’s leg.”

  “Not yet,” Rhodri said suddenly, the weakness in his voice startling Laddy so that she instinctively bent to the ground to grope for the water canteen she had dropped. “Don’t go yet—I want you both to see it.”

  “I brought the water in,” she said.

  But Rhodri interrupted passionately, “Never mind the water, look at the wall!” And they understood in that electrifying moment that Rhodri did not care if his leg was mashed to a pulp and he died of thirst; it was more important to him that they look at what he had discovered. Without another word Mischa directed the torchlight against the wall beside them.

  The massive chest and shoulders of the great deer leaping blood red in the torch beam startled Laddy so much that she leapt backwards. So intent had they been on finding the boy, and so exhausted had they become, that in the past few hours she had scarcely spared a thought about why he was here.

  “Rhodri!” she cried, her voice coming out an incredulous squeak. Mischa’s light had wavered in that first moment of discovery, but now the beam was steady as he explored the maddened eyes and great tossing antlers of the animal and its huge, black-outlined body. They gazed in silence for a long moment.

  “Well done, Rhodri,” said Mischa, commendation woven through his voice like a laurel. “What period is this?”

  “I think it must be Magdalenian,” said the boy, pride and a scientist’s excitement bursting through his tone, as at last he had a chance to say what had been whirling around in his head throughout the night, to the audience he preferred above any other. “The use of perspective, of the natural shape of the rocks, the colour—there’s a whole scene running right down that wall....”

  While he spoke, Laddy and Mischa gazed at that dark-red, maddened animal, its body stabbed through with spears, and at the scene of leaping animals that continued down the wall to a point beyond which the light of the torch did not reach. The colours and shapes were almost alive under the steady beam, and there was no doubt as to the skill of the artist.

  A deep sense of kinship grew between the three in the cavern as they silently drank in the proof of the ancient intelligence of their own species.

  “How old is it, Rhodri?” Laddy asked softly.

  “If it really is Magdalenian, it must date from ten to fifteen thousand B.C.,” he said, and she absorbed that in a kind of reverent silence.

  “And no one has seen it since then—until now?” she asked.

  “That will be hard to judge; it depends on when the rockfall occurred. But perhaps there will be other artefacts.” He paused. “I must phone the museum,” he said quietly, his voice just reaching them as Laddy and Mischa slowly followed the ancient artist’s progress down the cave. “They will send someone to look, and then everyone will want to come.” His voice was filled with satisfaction.

  “How far does it continue?” asked Mischa, when it was obvious they still had not come to the end of the artwork. On this side of the rockfall the cavern was enormous, high and deep.

  “I don’t know,” Rhodri said. “I tripped and hurt my leg and couldn’t stand up, so I crawled back here to wait. I examined what I could till my torch batteries went dead.”

  That brought his rapt audience back to reality and the remembrance of his needs. When Mischa’s searching light pinpointed the green water canteen lying halfway up the rocky slope under the passage, Laddy ran to pick it up and take it to Rhodri. He gulped thirstily while Mischa moved strong fingers over his hurt leg.

  “Nothing broken, I think,” Mischa said. “A badly twisted knee, though, and we’ve got to get you through that hole. I think we should splint it if possible.”

  There was a crowbar lying on the ground beside Rhodri’s tattered knapsack, and Laddy picked it up. “Can you bind this to his leg?” she suggested.

  In another second she had stripped off her shirt and handed it to Mischa.

  “What the devil are you doing?” Mischa demanded. “You’ll freeze!”

  “I can wear your sweater, but you can’t wear my shirt,” Laddy pointed out. “If we use your sweater you’ll get cut to ribbons on the rocks when you crawl out, and what good is that?”

  She bent over his kneeling figure in the torchlight, her breasts swelling against the delicate cotton and lace of her bra, her long black hair curtaining down, falling on his shoulder like a perfumed shadow. For a moment, as he reached to take the shirt from her hand, he turned his face deliberately into her hair’s softness, his forehead brushing her cheek.

  “Beware,” he said hoarsely. “You are in a cave where primitive passions have been locked up for ten thousand years.” Laddy straightened suddenly to combat a sudden hollow feeling in her stomach, and in a few economical movements Mischa bound the crowbar to Rhodri’s leg with her shirt. Then, putting his arms around Rhodri, Mischa climbed up the short sloping wall to a point a few feet under the jagged hole, now showing a grey silhouette against the blackness all around them.

  “Can you hold on here for a few minutes?” he asked as Laddy climbed up beside them to help hold the stiff-kneed boy. They both nodded at Mischa, and in a moment his body had stopped up the faint grey light of dawn that was showing on the other side of the tunnel. In the torchlight Laddy and Rhodri smiled at each other. His face seemed lighted by its own extraordinary inner glow.

  “How do you feel?” she asked him, smiling.

  He grinned. “Like a million pounds.”

  “What are you going to do now?” she asked, aware of a change in him, a new maturity that gave him an adult confidence for all his gamin grin.

  But at that moment Mischa called from the other cave and she bent to fix the lamp on a rock so that it would shine on the wall in front of them. When she stood up to give him a hand, Rhodri paused for a moment and smiled at her.

  “I’m glad you came,” he said. “I was waiting for daylight to try and get out, you know, but sometimes in the night I was sure I would never get out. I thought I would die here. And I knew that if it weren’t you and Mischa, you know, no one would find me.”

  Her breath caught at this bald revelation of what it was that had changed him into an adult overnight, and she was filled with admiration. He had faced death alone, in the dark, for hours, and when the ordeal was o
ver he had demanded that his rescuers examine his great discovery before even giving him water! Her arm around Rhodri tightened for a moment.

  “We had to find you,” she said. “There was no way we would have let you die in here alone.”

  Gingerly, painstakingly, he was eased through the tunnel, and then Laddy was alone with the painted figures and the torch in the dark cave. She shivered in the chill dank air, and then Mischa’s sweater reached her through the hole. The warmth of his body enveloped her and the masculine smell of him filled her nostrils as she pulled the sweater over her head, reminding Laddy of how she had lain in his arms so recently, and she clutched at the stones, feeling faint. He was her lover! He had escaped whole from every form of horror and torment, and after eight years they had found each other again. And his mark was on her now and she could never belong to any other man if she lived for a thousand years.

  In the dank, dark cave Laddy gazed at the evidence of an ancient, unknown ritual of her distant ancestors and felt a deep-rooted kinship with their primitive passion. She had discovered a well of unexplored emotions in her nature, of which she knew almost nothing. But she had the feeling that her artist-ancestor could have told her all about them.

  * * *

  “Good God, Laddy, is this true?” Harry’s voice crackled incredulously down the wire, and stifling a yawn, Laddy assured him that it was. It was ten in the morning and she still had not been to bed.

  “When was the discovery made?”

  “Rhodri—that’s the boy who found it—dug his way through to it late yesterday,” she said. “We found him in the cave early this morning.”

  “We?” Harry pressed.

  “A friend and I,” she said, her heart skipping a beat for who the friend was and what Harry would say if he knew. “There were about a dozen searchers out all night.”

  “And when you found him he was sitting beside the only known example of cave art in the British Isles,” Harry said wryly. “Any professional opinion as to their authenticity yet?”

  “The Welsh National Museum have been notified and someone will be arriving probably before noon,” Laddy said. “But they haven’t been faked, Harry. It’s no hoax.”

  “What about photos?”

  “If you send someone down here tonight, you can have exclusives by morning. Only three of us know where the cave is,” Laddy told him.

  “All right,” Harry said. “We’ll get a photographer down there. I suppose you want to cover it yourself in spite of the fact of your being on holiday?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said, sighing. She could stop another Herald reporter from arriving on the scene, but there would be no stopping the other members of the press and the fascinated public who would descend on Trefelin now. And on Mischa Busnetsky. The peace of Trefelin was going to be disrupted, and every time Mischa walked abroad he was going to run the risk of being recognised.

  But there was nothing she could do about that. This discovery could not possibly be kept quiet; this exclusive she would certainly have lost within twenty-four hours if she had not filed it: the whole village was talking about it.

  Harry was congratulating her on the story, and she said, “Does this put me on the credit side of the ledger, do you think?”

  Harry sighed. “What favour do you want now, dear girl?”

  “Isn’t it a touchy editor today, then?” Laddy responded lightly. “No favour at all, Harry. I was merely thinking that if I happened to be going after something in an unconventional way one day, and it happened to blow up in my face, and you happened to be upset by it...well, it might help to have such an exciting exclusive to remind you of. Don’t you think?”

  Harry exhaled noisily, and the sound conjured up his face for her, his large thumb propping up his chin, a fat cigarette between two upraised fingers, his mouth pursed in exhalation and one eye pensively narrowed as he tried to see through the keyhole of her soul.

  “It might,” said Harry. “That would depend on the story and just how unconventional your methods were. How unconventional are you being?”

  “This is all hypothetical, Harry.” Laddy grinned as she spoke. “I’m on holiday, remember?”

  “Umm-hmm,” grunted Harry, clearly unconvinced.

  When he asked her where she could be reached, she read him the number of the phone she was using in Helen’s sitting room, then told him how the Herald photographer could reach her when he arrived.

  Laddy was dropping with fatigue when at last she locked the door of the big house and headed towards the cottages. But the morning was crisp and fresh, and small field flowers were blooming underfoot in the green. She breathed in the fresh, damp-earth smell and looked about her at sun and sea and sky. Some distance away along the cliff the white horse wheeled and snorted in the breeze.

  She inhaled deeply and willed herself to relax, but her mind could not stop churning over her central problem: how to tell Mischa Busnetsky, if he had not already guessed it, that by tomorrow afternoon Trefelin would be housing an unknown number of her colleagues, so that he must either curtail his activities or run the risk of being recognised, and more—how to tell him that it was her fault.

  * * *

  A few minutes past six o’clock that evening, there was a knock on the door of her little cottage. Laddy had just showered and dressed after a sleep of several hours, and she felt refreshed and alive and glowing with love. With a secret little smile she raised the perfume bottle to give her hair one final spray, and then, with her long skirt rustling around her legs, she ran to the door to let Mischa in.

  The sight of the good-looking blond man on her doorstep startled her so much that she gaped at him for a moment in the blank amazement. He was smiling warmly but quizzically at her, as though almost but not quite sure of his welcome.

  “Hello, Laddy,” he said, and the tones of his northern voice jolted her into the realization that this was no stranger. It was John Bentinck! For a moment it had seemed to her that she had never seen his face before.

  “John!” she gasped.

  “Are you so surprised to see me, Laddy?” he asked wryly, smiling.

  “Well, I...but aren’t you supposed to be on holiday?” she asked lamely.

  John shrugged apologetically. “Oh, well, there wasn’t much point in going. And it was better for Richard if I didn’t go just now. How are you, Laddy? Your story broke all right, I see.”

  He was standing on the flagstones outside her door—the one photographer from the Herald who could not possibly fail to recognise Mischa Busnetsky if he happened to come out of the door opposite. With an awkwardness born of utter dismay Laddy stood back and invited him in.

  “This looks very comfortable,” John remarked, glancing around as she closed the door after him. “I’m in a dark bed-and-breakfast near the pub. I shudder for the blokes coming tomorrow, they’ll get nothing at all.”

  “There are at least two good bed-and-breakfasts in Trefelin,” said Laddy, “even assuming that Mairi Davies won’t be taking in—”

  “All full,” John said succinctly.

  She gasped in horror, “With whom?” But with a sickening lurch she knew before he said it.

  “Well, ITV, the BBC and CBC are here already, to my certain knowledge, and there seem to be quite a few local....”

  “So soon?” she whispered in dismay, her brain churning in misery. She should have told Mischa this morning; she shouldn’t have waited. But he had been completely exhausted and went immediately to bed and, coward that she was, she had decided to tell him over dinner....

  John was staring at her in surprise. “I take it you haven’t seen your story yet,” he said. “I suppose you didn’t realise that there’s been no other news at all this week—not even a strike threat.” And he reached into the ever-present camera bag over his shoulder and threw the noon edition of the Herald onto the kitchen table.

  The folded paper hit the table with a little slap, and the glaring black headline leapt at her: “BOY DISCOVERS CAVE ART
, from Lucy Laedelia Penreith, Trefelin, Wales.”

  With an amazed little laugh Laddy sank into a chair, unfolded the paper and began to read.

  The only known example of prehistoric cave art in the British Isles may have been uncovered today in a cave on the south coast of Wales. Twelve-year-old amateur archaeologist Rhodri Lewis, who made the discovery early this morning after months of searching....

  “Good grief!” Laddy exclaimed in half-laughing dismay. “He’s going to be a hero!”

  “Of course he is,” John said. “Isn’t that what you intended?”

  “Amongst the archaeological community, yes, I did intend it. But this....” Suddenly she saw an image of Rhodri holding court in front of the television teams of two countries tonight, and delight overruled her dismay. She began to laugh in earnest. “Oh, he’s going to love this!” she exclaimed. “No school for a week at least! And he’s the perfect little hero, you know—intense, intelligent, totally engaging. They’ll love him. I wish we’d had a picture with this, but....”

  “I must say I was surprised you didn’t,” John said. She looked at him in perplexity.

  “Well, I do have my camera here, but we only found him this morning, you know.”

  “Yes? But then how—” John began, then changed his mind and looked out the window. “The light’s fading,” he said. “Can we get those pictures in the cave now, do you think?”

  Laddy refolded the paper and stood up. “Yes, we’d better get going,” she said. “Give me a moment to change my clothes.”

  She carried the paper into the bedroom with her, and when she had changed her skirt for jeans she located a felt pen and wrote above the headline: “Mischa—Lots of press people in the village tonight. Be careful. Love, L.”