by Olivia
With Freddie finally away, Olivia once again felt free and unfettered, at liberty to wander where her fancy dictated. The scullion, designated by her aunt to alternate with the stable-boy as her morning escort in Freddie's absence, posed no great problems. Given the price of a hearty breakfast in the bazaar, he was only too happy to save himself an arduous run and wait for her in a tea shop till she chose to return home.
The splintered path that zigzagged through the yellow jacaranda, the sinuous banyan, the mango and the peepuls was suddenly invaded by green parrots making spiralling loops through the trees, their squawky cries indignant at the human intrusion. A family of fat, green buds separated to reveal the questioning face of a beady-eyed mongoose; keeping warily to the top branches, a band of black-faced monkeys followed her passage with apparent distrustful curiosity.
Olivia reined sharply, all at once confronted by a most unlikely barrier: a massive spider's web spread across the lower branches like a magical curtain so fine that she almost didn't see it. Enchanted by its delicacy, she dismounted to watch the incredible labours that went into the fashioning of so intricate a maze. The home-maker, a plump little black berry of fur and bristles, stilled at her approach to glare with beady, suspicious eyes that seemed not at all pleased at the visit. For a while they stared at each other, then Olivia laughed softly. "Don't worry, little fella, I shall not damage your premises." The spider seemed to understand the reassurance, for, turning its back to her, it continued with its spinning.
It was just then that Olivia noticed the barking of the dog.
Persistent and getting louder, the bursts of sound seemed to be heading in her direction. It could, of course, be someone's friendly pet, but it could also be a stray, since the city abounded in them, many of them diseased and mad. Her aunt had warned her to be careful. Leaving the spider to its travails, Olivia turned to quickly remount Jasmine and be on her way. But it was too late; before she could haul herself up, the animal came bursting out of the bushes. Olivia nervously remained standing where she was.
The dog, large and shiny black, pranced around her feet for a moment in a state of some excitement. His intentions, however, seemed not to be belligerent. Then he sniffed her feet and her clothes with a quite professional thoroughness. His jaws opened and something fell out—a piece of fabric. The dog settled back on his haunches in front of her and whined.
Olivia's stomach hollowed. In the same instant she recognized both the dog and the piece of fabric. He was Akbar, Raventhorne's pet, and the lace-edged white cloth was the handkerchief she had left inadvertently on the Ganga that calamitous morning.
With an agonised sob trapped inside her throat, Olivia galvanised into action. In a trice she had mounted Jasmine, dug her heels into the mare's side and was flying towards the heart of the forest guided by Akbar, who, overjoyed at the success of his mission, raced ahead. The wind roared in her ears and stung her cheeks into fiery life; in her temples her blood pounded, reducing her breath to gasps. And in her heart an overwhelming happiness exploded; she was going to see Jai Raventhorne again!
He sat on a boulder by a stretch of water, shoulders hunched, tossing sticks into the trees, which Akbar's mate dashed to retrieve. Nearby, his midnight Shaitan grazed languidly on a verge. Beyond that Olivia saw nothing.
He looked up as she arrived in the clearing and for a moment their eyes locked. He rose, walked towards her and took charge of Jasmine's reins. Then he held out a hand and helped her dismount. Slowly, against him, Olivia slid to the ground. Anxiously, her gaze scoured his face but it told her nothing—and yet so much! His arms opened for her and, without a sound, she slipped into the shelter they offered.
Against her, he trembled. "Forgive me ..."
She laid an ear against his chest and, for the first time, listened to his heartbeat. It galloped, like hers, telling her more than words ever could, his breath, hot and uneven, fanning her own cheeks into warmth. She kissed the pocket of his rumpled mull shirt beneath which lay his heart. There was nothing she could think of saying, nor was there any need for words.
"I wounded you," he murmured, heaving with remorse. "I made you cry. Can you forgive me?"
"Yes," she murmured back mindlessly, hearing neither what he had asked nor what she had answered, "yes . . ."
"Did I make you very unhappy?"
Olivia shook her head, inhaling the freshness of his skin pressed into her face, the misery of the past few days obliterated in blinding happiness. He laid small, frantic kisses on the side of her neck, her ear lobes, her temples—and she shivered. "No."
He released her abruptly to return to the boulder to sit down again, his brows drawn together in self-anger. "People say I have a streak of madness in me. They are right. I have."
Olivia perched herself on a tree stump opposite him, pulled up her knees and hugged them tightly. Just to hold him in her vision, to caress him with her eyes, was enough to content her. "Yes, I know."
"You know and you are not alarmed?"
"No."
"But you should be!" He picked up a stone and flung it into the trees to send Saloni bounding after it with excited yelps. "I carry within me a poison that infects everyone around me." He looked deeply perturbed.
"Poisons have antidotes, or they can be cast out if one wishes." Dreamily, Olivia shut her eyes as if wanting to preserve in them forever this rare moment of something precious shared and harmonious.
"No." He shook his head fiercely. "I do not wish it cast out. Without it I would be half a man. You see?" His bark of a laugh was harsh. "I am mad!"
Jolted out of her soporific trance, Olivia paid attention. His expression was one of anguish. Concerned, she rose and walked over to him, squeezing herself into the space beside him on the boulder. "I cannot understand that, Jai," she said gently, smoothing his hair back with a hand that still trembled with welling love. "You know I cannot unless you explain it to me."
"There is no explanation possible that you will accept."
"At least let me be the judge of that!"
"You cannot judge something you cannot understand."
Then make me understand! Olivia wanted to cry out in mounting frustration but held her tongue. They were again teetering perilously close to the limit of his endurance; she could never again risk losing him, forcing him into corners from which he needed to battle his way out gasping for air. Even now, it wounded her unbearably to see his silvered eyes swim in pain that she would not have thought them capable of feeling. He had fallen once more into those vast, private, secret silences from which she was so mercilessly excluded. She watched helplessly, searching for a crack, a chink, through which to peep into his cloistered mind, but there was none. Only his pain persisted.
"You are young and untouched and a stranger to sorrow, Olivia," he said, breaking his silence, his voice heavy with those unsaid burdens he would not allow her to share. "And you have come into my life, uninvited and unexpected, like some unseasonable storm delighting in its capacity to surprise, unsettling everything. I feel uprooted. My foundations are shaken and I have been made defenceless. I am horribly disturbed at having to do battle with a force that is totally strange to me."
Olivia listened without breathing and now she exhaled cautiously, fearful of again upsetting the fragile balance of his curious mind. But what he implied filled her with aching, enchanting joy. "Is it necessary to ... do battle?" she asked, treading on egg-shells. "Is it not possible just to accept that force?" She reached up to smooth his forehead, to press out the creases of worry, and he rewarded her with a smile.
"No," he said. "Oh no."
The tinge of uncertainty emboldened her. "I too feel uprooted, Jai," she ventured, holding his hand and pleating her fingers through his, frantic not to ruffle the communion between them yet hungry for his confidence. "My foundations too are shaken. I did not seek to feel for you what I do. For me too it is an ... unseasonable storm neither invited nor expected. As such," she took a deep breath, "at least something is owed
to me."
"Yes. Something is owed to you." He unlaced his fingers from hers and moved away to stand at the edge of the water and peer down into it. "Since you risk so much by including me in your thoughts, it is my duty to repeat my warning."
"Duty!" His sudden, stiff formality was hurtful.
"Perhaps unthinkingly I used the wrong word but I am unable to think of another."
"So, it was a sense of duty that made you send your dog to sniff me out this morning?" she asked, again disconsolate.
"No!" He spun around and there was passion in the way he threw out the denial. "I sent Akbar after you for purely selfish reasons. The memory of those incredible eyes bruised with unhappiness haunts me, Olivia. It ruins my sleep and fills me with shame and guilt, both of which are alien to me. They are feelings I resent even more than I resent you for causing them." His shoulders dropped and the passion faded. "I sent Akbar to fetch you because I have a degrading need to see you."
The sun exploded through the clouds and drenched her world with radiance again. She ached for him, yearning for his embrace and the taste of his lips, but she forced herself to be content with only his closeness as he sat down again beside her. "It is a need that is mutual, you must know that." Her whisper trembled.
With an absent-minded smile he trailed the back of his hand down her cheek, making the nape of her neck sting. "There is no decision in my life that I have not made for myself, Olivia. Many of them have been cruel. I have made them in spite of that. But now, I must ask you to make one for me."
Again she stopped breathing. "Yes?"
He turned to take her face gently between his palms. They felt cold and moist. "Since I seem unable to, you must make the decision not to see me again."
A sinuous chill crawled up Olivia's limbs. To make a wilful, self-destructive, masochistic decision as vile as this? Never to sit like this with him again? To abandon willingly the taste of his lips, the touch of his hands in her hair, the sight of those ashen eyes now looking into hers with such soft confusion? To be denied forever the chance of entry into the lost, melancholy worlds that lay beyond his stubborn barricades and turn her life into a desert? She might as well be dead!
Olivia covered his hands with hers and pressed them into her face, fingers of panic clawing at her insides. "You know that that is a decision I can never make, Jai." Her voice shook. "I am not afraid of taking risks, I am not afraid of anything as long as I can see you."
"You can invite disaster so blithely?" He seemed puzzled, and he stared into her distraught eyes as if to search for an answer there. "What is this stubbornness that drives you?"
She laughed shakily. "It is a stubbornness called . . . love."
He echoed the word with some slight mockery, then repeated it several times, feeling it with his tongue as if sampling a morsel with an unfamiliar taste, unaware of just how irreversible a commitment, how much of herself she had laid at his feet. "It is not possible to love someone like me," he said curtly but with wonder, looking at her as if she might be a wayward child bent on some whimsical mischief. "Even to myself I am sometimes reprehensible, an eccentric not to be tolerated."
"I can tolerate anything you choose to be."
"Anything?" He continued to humour her.
"Yes, anything!" she said fiercely, clenching her fists, knowing that her eyes were beginning to fill. It twisted her with pain that this once loveless, lonely boy cast out by the world should still be so deprived as to not know a word of such universal understanding. "Why do you not take me seriously?"
"If I did not take you seriously I would not be here! But what you profess for me is perhaps a chimera, a mirage, an illusion of your mind." He tilted his head and observed her through slitted eyes, wary and suspicious. "I know that you have learned much from Kinjal," he said softly. "Considering your obsessional curiosity it could not have been otherwise. Is it therefore love you feel, or pity?"
The ease with which he seemed to delve into her thoughts and pull out the most immediate one made her heart miss a beat, but she was not intimidated by the tautness of his jaw line, the angry twitch of a muscle just below his temple. "If I feel pity for anything," she said, irked, "it is for your mulishness that makes you so unworthy a recipient of either!"
He broke into a laugh that loosened the lines of his face and brought genuine amusement into it. "For you to complain of my mulishness is the height of impudence, my obstinate American!" His arm brushing her shoulder slipped down to her waist and he drew her close to him. With infinite tenderness he kissed her behind an ear. "You are very stubborn, Olivia," he breathed with a heavy sigh, "and I am weaker than I had thought."
"You, weak?" She laughed, shutting her eyes, not daring to move.
"Weak and insane, a vicious combination." His voice turned husky as he stroked her hair lightly. "You make it impossible for me to stay away from you."
"Why should you want to?" Held in his arms, revelling in the fact of his crumbling defences, in her ability to at last breach the barricade, the answer to that question was immaterial to Olivia.
But he gave her an answer anyway. "Because I am not used to being a slave to my wants. I am not used to being commanded."
She pulled back, wounded. "I have never commanded you!"
He kissed her mouth. "You command with every look, every touch, each time I think of you. You command when I am awake and trying to sleep and when I am asleep trying not to dream. You command," he ended savagely, "because I desire you more than any other woman I have known."
His resistance cracked; his arms tightened to crush her in an embrace that was harsh and violent and yet with the sweetness of honey. In the moist fullness of his lips there was anger, but to Olivia his kisses were touched with magic, the culmination of every dream she had ever dreamed about him, every fantasy she had ever played out with him in the secret niches of her mind. Extraordinary sensations, acute and piercing like shards of glass, chased each other around her body, awakening in it longings that might have been frightening had they not also been so exquisite. In his whispered endearments she heard not the hoarse confusion of sound in alien languages but the music of angels; in his trails of fiery kisses across her face, her neck, the dip between her breasts, she felt a flight of doves, soft and feathered with love. His fingers of darting quicksilver, inciting her nerve ends into flaring rebellion, covered her body with caresses such as she had never known.
"Olivia, Olivia . . ." His muffled groan was one of anguish. "What damnable tortures you are devising for me . . .!"
"Hush." She pressed his head between her breasts, spilling over with impossible joy. "Hush . . .!"
"Have you any idea, you callous sorceress, how much I desire you?" Buried in her bosom she could feel his teeth clench, his breath so hot that it seemed to burn craters in her flesh.
"Yes." In this moment of perfection there was nothing, nothing she could have denied him.
He raised his head to grip her shoulders with clawlike hands and nails that bit into her, making her wince. "Then why do you encourage me, you rash, foolish girl?" His eyes were wild and in his helplessness he shook her roughly. "Do you not know that men like me are animals who take their pleasures where they find them?"
The pressure of his nails brought tears to her eyes but she held them back. "I love you, Jai." Gently, she wiped his forehead clear of moisture, looking into his wild, wonderful eyes without flinching. "Whatever I have is yours."
He held her stare, chest heaving rapidly as he struggled for control, and then his hands dropped. "Don't say that, Olivia," he said, wincing. "Don't ever say that again."
"It is the truth," she said simply.
"You make yourself into such an easy prey! Just as well I refuse to participate in your damned recklessness. If I did," he started to pace again, still agitated, "it would only make me hate myself more than I sometimes do now. And for that I would never forgive you." He paused to glower at her, bristling eyebrows locked together like warring caterpillars. "I have quite
enough hate from others to last me through one lifetime!"
Olivia said nothing. She knew it was useless to argue. How quickly she was learning his chameleon colours, his fickle moods! Instead, she sat hugging her knees, watching him in silence, waiting for him to expel and expend the fearful energies that had blown him once more out of her reach. His kisses still clung to her skin like peach down, making it glow; what he had revealed of himself was like an oasis of hope in a desert of uncertainty. For the moment, it was enough for her.
Picking up stone after stone he flung them violently into the trees like trajectiles aimed at an invisible enemy. Excited by the game, both dogs pranced around yelping and dashing back and forth to hunt out the prizes from the undergrowth and fetch them back. It was only when the neat pile at his feet had grown substantially and the dogs, spent and panting, had flopped to the ground again that Raventhorne finally stopped. He was breathing hard from the exertions, and the fabric of his shirt clung wetly to his back, but whatever private demons had been haunting him had been cast out from his system. His expression was one of regained control.
"It is time you returned," he said, chastising his unruly hair with his fingers, "or your uncle will get Slocum to send a police posse after you."
Olivia didn't move for a moment. She filled with dread, for he said nothing more as he untied Jasmine's reins from a branch and held them out to her. Once again it seemed a dismissal, but now she was no longer willing to accept it without comment. Her eyes held challenge. "Will I see you again?"
He said nothing while he tightened the girth on her mare, then turned to search her face with sombre, speculative eyes. "Do you truly wish to?"
"Yes," Olivia said, pink faced and morose since it was she who had had the need to ask. "I truly wish to."
Lightly he trailed his fingers down her arm, his eyes cloudy and distant. "So be it," he sighed.
Olivia's colour deepened as she almost snatched Jasmine's reins out of his grasp. "If you believe it is me you are indulging—"
He cut her off with a snort. "If it were you I were indulging," he said irritably, "there would be no problem. Unfortunately, my gross selfishness allows me to think only of myself. I am angry because it is not you I am indulging!"
