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‘Why do you climb the rigging if you won’t look over the side?’ Alistair demanded as Averil sat down in the bos’un’s chair with complete unconcern.
‘The further I get from the sea, the happier I am,’ Dita said and turned her back firmly on the rail and all the activity around it. She fixed her gaze on Alistair’s mouth, which was a reckless thing to do for the sake of her emotions, but was a great help in taking her mind off small boats and open water. ‘Don’t ask me to explain it, I know it is irrational.’
‘That is no surprise, you are female after all,’ Alistair remarked. She glanced up sharply and met a look that was positively lascivious.
Dita opened her mouth, shut it again with a snap at the expression in his eyes and took two rapid steps back. Alistair followed her, gave her a little push and she sat down with a thump in the chair.
‘Why, you—’ He flicked the rope across the arms and signalled to the sailors hauling it up. Seething, Dita found herself in the flat-bottomed boat being helped out by Averil.
‘You devious, underhand, conniving creature,’ she hissed as Alistair dropped into the boat from the ladder.
‘It worked,’ he said with a grin as he sat down beside her. ‘And I take it back—you are irrational, but not because you are female. But I cannot apologise for any looks of admiration—you do look most charming.’
Dita sorted through the apology and decided she was prepared to accept it. ‘Thank you. But you really are the most provoking man,’ she added. ‘I don’t recall you being so—except when you wouldn’t let me do something I wanted to, of course.’
‘Which was most of the time. You always wanted to do the maddest things.’
‘I did not!’ The boat bumped alongside the ghat. ‘You wretch! You are doing it again, arguing in order to distract me.’
‘I have no idea why you are complaining,’ Alistair said, as he got out on to the stone steps and held out his hand to Mrs Bastable, who glanced from one to the other with a puzzled frown. ‘You have made the transition from ship to shore without turning green in the slightest.’
They were enveloped in the usual crowd of porters jostling for business, trinket sellers, garland merchants and beggars. Alistair dropped into rapid, colloquial Hindi as he cleared a way through for the ladies to climb the steps; by the time they had reached the top they had two of the more respectable men at their heels.
… double that when we get back here with all our packages intact, Dita translated when she could hear more clearly. Coins changed hands, the men grinned and set off.
‘I told them I wanted the best general market,’ Alistair said as they followed, skirting a white-clad procession bearing a swathed body towards the burning ghats.
‘Oh, I can never get used to that,’ Mrs Bastable moaned, turning her head away. ‘I so long for the peace of a green English churchyard.’
‘But not yet, I hope,’ Alistair murmured. Dita caught his eye and stifled a choke of laughter. Now that she had recovered from his trickery she discovered that today she was quite in charity with the man, which was dangerous. She reflected on just how dangerous as she picked her way round potholes and past a sacred cow that had come to a dead halt beside a vegetable stall and was placidly eating its way through the wretched owner’s produce.
‘And cows that stay in a field would be nice,’ she remarked.
The market they were guided to was down the usual narrow entrance that opened out into a maze of constricted alleys, lined on each side with tiny stalls and booths, many of them with the owner sitting cross-legged on the back of the counter.
‘Do you know what you want?’
‘Not fish!’ Mrs Bastable turned with a shudder from the alley to their left, its cobbles running with bloody water, the flies swarming around the silvery heaps.
‘Down here.’ Averil set off confidently down another lane and they soon found themselves amidst stalls selling spices, baskets of every kind, toys, small carvings and embroidery. ‘Perfect!’
Soon their porters were hung around with packages. Mrs Bastable fell behind to haggle over a soapstone carving and Alistair stayed with her to help.
‘We’ll be in the next alley on the right,’ Averil called back. ‘I can see peacock-feather fans. They are charming and useful,’ she said as they stood examining them. ‘We could buy a dozen between us; they will do very well for gifts.’
‘Yes, I—what’s that?’ Both swung round at the sound of screams and running feet and a deep-throated snarling. The alleyway cleared as though a giant broom had swept through it. Men leapt on to counters, dragging women with them as a small boy ran down, screeching in fear, followed by a dog, snarling and snapping, its mouth dripping foam.
‘Up!’ Dita grabbed Averil and thrust her towards the fan seller, who took her wrists and dragged her on to the narrow counter amidst a heap of feathers. Time seemed to slow to a crawl as the boy and the dog hurtled towards her and she realised there was no room on any of the stalls now and the alley was a dead end. Dita snatched the child as he reached her and clambered up a pile of baskets as though it were a stepladder until they were perched on the top of the teetering heap, the dog leaping and snarling at the foot.
‘Hilo dulo naha,’ she murmured to the boy as he clutched her, his dirty, skinny little body wrapped around hers. But he needed no warning to keep still and, as their fragile sanctuary began to tilt with an ominous cracking sound, he seemed to stop breathing.
The dog leapt at them, clawing at the baskets. It was mad, there was no mistaking it. Dita tried to put out of her mind the memory of their jemahdar who had been bitten. His death had been agonising and inevitable. She had to stay calm. If the baskets collapsed—when they collapsed—she would throw the boy to Averil and pray she was strong enough to hold him. And she would try and get behind the baskets.
Something flew through the air and hit the dog and it turned, yelping. Alistair, a long, bloody knife in his hand, came down the alley at the run and kicked out as the dog leapt for him, catching it under the chin. As it spun away he lunged with the knife, but his foot slipped on rotting vegetables in the gutter and he went down on to the snapping, snarling animal.
Dita screamed as she slid down the baskets and thrust the little boy into Averil’s reaching arms. As she hit the ground, groping for the stone he had thrown, Alistair got to his feet. The dog, throat cut, lay twitching in the gutter.
‘Did it bite you?’ Frantic, she seized his hands, used her skirts to wipe the blood away. ‘Are you scratched? Have you any cuts on your hands?’
Alistair dropped the knife and caught at her wrists. ‘I’m all right. Dita, stop it.’
‘You fell hard, you might not have felt a bite.’ She tried to see if there were any tears in his coat or the light trousers he wore. ‘Alistair, don’t you know what happens if you’ve been bitten, even a graze—’
‘Yes, I know. I am all right,’ he repeated. ‘Dita you are getting covered in blood. What the devil were you thinking of, scrambling up there with that child?’
‘There was nowhere else to go,’ she protested as the alley began to fill up. One man, a fish seller by the state of his clothes, picked up the bloody knife and walked away with it. A woman, weeping loudly, ran and snatched the child from Averil. The noise was deafening.
‘It wouldn’t bear the weight of both of you.’ Alistair released her and she began to shake. ‘It was going to collapse at any moment.’
‘I know that. I couldn’t leave him!’ ‘Most people would have.’ Someone brought a bowl of water and Alistair plunged his hands into it. Dita held her breath until they emerged, the skin unbroken. His coat was stained, but she could see no evidence of teeth marks on it, or tears in his trousers.
Alistair gestured for more water. When it was poured he took her hands in his and washed them and she thought back over the crowded, terrified, minutes. ‘You came to rescue the child,’ she said. ‘You must have gone for the knife the moment you heard him scream, or you wouldn’t have got here with it when you did.’
‘Well, that’s two of us who are sentimental,’ he said, his voice harsh, but his eyes as he looked at her held admiration and the shadow of fear, not for himself, but for her. ‘Don’t do that to me again, Dita. My nerves won’t stand it. The mast was bad enough, this—’
They stood, their hands clasped in the reddening water and the noise of the crowd faded. Dita wondered if she was going to faint. Alistair was staring at her as though he had never seen her before.
‘Dita! Dita, are you all right?’ She looked round, dazed and a little dizzy, to see her friend supporting their weeping chaperon. ‘I don’t think Mrs Bastable can walk back.’
‘Rickshaw,’ Alistair snapped at their two porters. ‘Two. Can you help Lady Perdita, Miss Heydon?’ As Averil’s hand came under her elbow he scooped Mrs Bastable up and followed the porters out of the market.
‘Oh, my,’ Averil said with a laugh that broke on a sob. ‘She’s gone all pink. At least it has stopped her weeping.’
‘Are you all right?’ Better to think about Averil than what might have happened to the child, to Alistair, to her.
‘Me? Oh, yes. I’ve feathers sticking in me and doubtless any number of bruises, but if it wasn’t for you I don’t know what would have happened. You are a heroine, Dita.’
‘No, I’m not,’ she protested. ‘I’m shaking like a leaf and I would like to follow Mrs Bastable’s example and have hysterics right here and now.’ I wish he was holding me. I wish …
Mrs Bastable sank into the rickshaw with a moan. ‘I’ll get in with her,’ Averil said. ‘I have a vinaigrette in my reticule and a handkerchief.’
Dita held on to the side of the other rickshaw while Alistair got Averil settled. She would like to sit down, but she didn’t think she could climb in unaided. Her legs had lost all their strength and the bustling street seemed to be growing oddly distant.
‘Don’t faint on me now.’ Alistair scooped her up, climbed into the rickshaw and sat down with her still in his arms.
‘Can’t I?’ she murmured against his chest. ‘I would like to, I think. But I never have before.’
‘Very well, if you want to.’ There was the faintest thread of amusement in his voice and he shifted on the seat so he could get both arms around her as it tilted back and the man began to trot forwards between the shafts.
‘Perhaps I won’t. This is nice.’ That was he said when he kissed me on the maidan. Nice. ‘Where’s my bonnet?’
‘Goodness knows. Lie still, Dita.’
‘Hmm? Why?’ He is very strong, all those muscles feel so good. His chest was broad, his arms were reassuring and his thighs … she really must stop thinking about his thighs.
‘Never mind.’ He was definitely amused now, although there was something else in his voice. Shock, of course. Alistair wasn’t made of stone and that had been a terrifying few minutes.
‘You are all right, aren’t you?’ she asked after a moment, the panic spiking back. ‘You would tell me if you had been bitten or scratched?’
‘I am all right. And I would tell you if I had been bitten.’ Alistair added the lie as he bent his head so his mouth just touched the tangled brown mass of her hair. He was still shaken to find that his skin was unbroken and his stomach cramped at the thought of those few seconds after the dog had collapsed twitching into the gutter and he had looked, felt, for any wound on his body and on hers.
It was good that he was holding Dita, because he suspected his hands would shake if he was not. Never, in his life, had he been more afraid—for himself, for another person. She thought he had grabbed the knife when he heard the screams because he wanted to save the child and he could not tell her the truth, that he had reacted purely on instinct: she was where those screams had come from.
‘Something smells of fish,’ she said. She still sounded drugged with shock; the sooner she was in bed, warm, the better. Despite the heat she was shivering.
‘I do. That was a fish-gutter’s knife and I ran through those puddles by their stalls to get it.’
She chuckled and he tightened his arms and made himself confront the nightmare that was gibbering at the back of his brain. If he had been bitten, then he would have shot himself. He had seen a man die of the bite of a mad dog and there didn’t seem to be any worse way to go. But what if it had bitten Dita? What if he had arrived just too late? The vision of her slender white throat and the knife and his bloody hands and the dog’s foaming muzzle shifted and blurred in his imagination.
‘Ouch,’ she murmured and he made himself relax his grip. All his young life it seemed he had looked out for Dita, protected her while she got on with being Dita. Eight years later and, under the desire he felt for her, he still felt the need to do that—but would he have had the courage to do for her what he would have done for himself? Would it have been right?
‘Alistair? What is wrong?’ She twisted round and looked up at him, her green eyes dark with concern, and he shook himself mentally and sent the black thoughts back into the darkness where they belonged. The worst hadn’t happened, they were both all right, the child was safe and he had to keep his nightmares at bay in case she read them in his face and was frightened.
‘Our wardrobes are wrecked, I smell of fish and now you probably do too, we haven’t finished our Christmas shopping, Mrs Bastable is still wailing—it is enough to send a man into a decline.’
Her face broke into a smile of unselfconscious amusement and relief. ‘Idiot.’
It was the least provocative thing to say, the least flirtatious smile, but the desire crashed over him like a wave hitting a rock. He wanted her, now. He wanted her hot and trembling and soft and urgent under him. Somehow he knew how she would feel, the scent of her skin, of her arousal. He wanted to take her, to bury himself in her heat and possess her. He wanted her with all the simple urgency of a man who had felt death’s breath on his face and who had tasted more fear in a few seconds than he would surely ever feel for the rest of his life.
She was still looking at him; her wide mouth was still smiling and sweet and her eyes held something very close to hero worship. Alistair bent and kissed her without finesse, his tongue thrusting between lips that parted in a gasp of shock, his hands holding her so that her breasts were crushed against him; the feel of soft, yielding curves against his chest, against his heart, sent his body into violent arousal.
Dita must have felt his erection and she could not escape the message of a kiss that was close to a brutal demand, but she did not fight him. She melted against him, her mouth open and generous, her tongue tangling with his, her hands clinging while he tasted and feasted and felt the need and the primitive triumph surge through him. He had killed the beast for her and now she was his prize.
The seat tilted sharply, almost throwing them out of the rickshaw as the man lowered the shafts to the ground. Alistair grabbed the side with one hand and held tight to Dita with the other, shaken back into reality and the realisation that he had damn near ravished a woman in a rickshaw on the streets of Madras.
‘Hell.’
She stared at him, apparently shocked speechless by what they had just done, then scrambled down on to the ground unaided and went to the other rickshaw.
Alistair got out, paid the drivers, found the boat, paid off the porters and oversaw loading the parcels before he turned to the three women. By then, he hoped, he would have himself under control again. Mrs Bastable was leaning on Averil’s arm, fanning herself, but looking much more composed. Averil smiled. Dita, white-faced, just looked at him with no expression at all, although if either of the others had been themselves they could not have failed to see her mouth was swollen with the force of his kisses. She had said nothing, he realised.
He got them into the boat, the three women in a row, and sat down opposite them so he could look at Dita. She sat contemplating her clasped hands, calm while they were rowed out, calm when he helped her into the chair, last of the three so he could get up the ladder and be there when she landed on the deck.
‘I’ll take Lady Perdita to her cabin,’ he said to Averil and picked her up before either of them could react.
‘Second on the left,’ she called after him. ‘I’ll come in a moment.’
If there was anyone in the cuddy he didn’t see them. He fumbled a little with the ties on the canvas flap, uncharacteristically clumsy with delayed shock, then he had her inside and could put her on the bed.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said as she raised her eyes to meet his. ‘It happens, it’s a male reaction to danger, fear—we want sex afterwards. It doesn’t mean anything … It wasn’t you. Don’t think it was your fault.’
‘Oh.’ She arched her brows, aloof, poised, the acid-tongued lady from Government House despite her stained, torn gown and tumbling hair and bruised mouth and shaking hands. ‘Well, as long as it wasn’t me. I would hate to think I was responsible for that exhibition.’ He could not read her eyes as she watched him and her smile when it came did not reach them. ‘Thank you for saving my life. I will never forget that.’
‘Dita?’ Averil said from outside. ‘May I come in?’
‘Ma’am.’ He opened the flap and stepped out, holding it for her to enter. ‘I’ll have the parcels sent down to the cuddy.’
‘Oh, Dita.’ Averil sat down on the trunk. ‘What a morning. Mrs Bastable is resting and I’ve asked the steward to make tea.’
‘Thank you. A cup of tea would be very welcome.’ Incredibly she could still make conversation. Alistair had kissed her as though he was starving, desperate—for her. And she had kissed him back with as much need and desire and with the certainty that he wanted her. And then he said it wasn’t her. That any woman would have provoked that storm of passion. That kissing her as she had always dreamt he would kiss her meant absolutely nothing to him. He needed sex as Mrs Bastable had needed to have hysterics.
That time when they had made love fully, gloriously, he had looked at her as she had smiled up at him dreamily afterwards and told her harshly to get out, to go, all his tenderness and passion hardening into rejection and anger.
Alistair had saved her life, risked a hideous death, behaved like the hero she had always known him to be—and stamped on her heart all over again.
‘Oh, don’t cry!’ Averil jumped up with a handkerchief. She must have an inexhaustible supply, Dita thought, swallowing hard against the tears that choked her throat.
‘No, I won’t. It is just the shock. I think I will lie down for a while. That would be sensible, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’ Poor Averil, she doesn’t need another watering pot on her hands. ‘You get into bed and I’ll bring your tea and tuck you in. I’ll put all our shopping in my cabin; you just rest, dear.’
Chapter Eight (#ulink_795fdd72-d989-5ee5-8b34-41477d4cfbff)
24th December 1808
They rounded the southern tip of India and headed across the ocean towards Mozambique as dinner was served on Christmas Eve. The stewards had brought a load of greenery on board from Madras and the Great Cabin and cuddy were lavishly decorated with palm fronds and creepers.
The ladies cut both red and gold paper into strips to weave amongst it and there were garlands of marigolds that had been kept in the cool of the bilges and were only a little worn and wilted if one looked too close.
‘At least that reduces the look of Palm Sunday in church that all those fronds produced,’ Averil observed as they made table decorations to run down the length of the long board.
The captain had decreed a return to formality and precedence, Dita noticed as the stewards began to set out place cards with careful reference to a seating plan. It meant she would be sitting next to Alistair. She had been avoiding any intimacy ever since their return on board ship, despising herself for cowardice even as she did so.
She had tried not to be obvious about it: she owed the man her life, after all. But it was torture to be close to him. She wanted to touch him, to have him take her lips again, and yet she knew that the passion he had shown her would have been the same for any woman. It was not much consolation that he appeared to have been avoiding her, too.
‘We can put out the presents now,’ Averil said. ‘The place cards will help.’ Dita made herself concentrate on the task at hand. The stewards were having a difficult time of it, trying to lay an elaborate formal setting while ladies ducked and wove between them, heaping up little parcels that slid about with the motion of the ship, but the mood was good natured and, as Miss Whyton said, sorting out the gifts could only add to the jollity.
Dita juggled her pile of packages, squinting at labels and tweaking ribbons while she tried to avoid thinking about the fact that there was one person she had no gift for. Alistair wouldn’t notice, she tried to tell herself, not with such a pile of parcels in front of him. But she suspected he would. It was not that she wanted to snub him, but she had had no idea what to give him. A trivial token was just that: trivial. She could not insult the man who had saved her life with a trinket. A significant gift—and she was a good enough needlewoman to make a handsome waistcoat from the silks in her trunk if she applied herself—would cause comment.
There was only one thing and it nagged at the back of her mind until the last teetering pile was stabilised with tightly rolled napkins.
‘Just time to get changed,’ Averil said as they all stood back to admire the effect, then Dita followed her to their cabins.
The jewellery box was locked in her trunk and she lifted it out and set it on the bunk. Emeralds for dinner, she decided, and lifted out the necklace and earrings and set them aside.
Her hands went back to the box, hesitated, then she lifted out the top tray, then the items below until it appeared to be empty. There was a pin to be pulled, a narrow panel to be pushed and then the secret drawer slid out. In it was a slim oblong package wrapped in tarnished silver paper. The amber velvet ribbon was frayed and the label, Alistair, Happy Birthday with love from Dita XXX, was crumpled.
It was almost nine years since she had wrapped it up. The stitches might be embarrassingly clumsy—she should check. Certainly it needed rewrapping. Dita hesitated, then lifted out the package, slid it into her reticule just as it was, and reassembled the box before she locked it safely away.
