The Mountain of Love Read online

  She had not really expected Christopher to come to her room.

  She thought now it must have been her father who had warned her to be on her guard.

  She put his revolver under the pillow again. She realised that she must remember to pack it the next morning before Harriet called her.

  Then she blew out the lights and closed her eyes. It had certainly not been the wedding day she had dreamed about, but at least now she was on speaking terms with her husband.

  It was something that had been questionable during dinner.

  She sent up a prayer to her father.

  ‘You have helped me over that difficult fence, Papa, but I expect there are a great many more ahead so please, please keep watching over me.’

  She thought she heard her father laugh before she finally fell asleep.

  *

  They left the house in Park Lane at ten o’clock the next morning.

  They drove to Tilbury in a different carriage. It was drawn by two excellent horses and their luggage was strapped onto the back of the carriage.

  There were also a number of pieces of Christopher’s hand luggage on the small seat in front of them.

  As they set off, Kayla exclaimed,

  “This is indeed an adventure. I was thinking when I came downstairs how lucky I am not to be left behind.”

  “I expected you to say that was what you would have much preferred,” said Christopher. “Most women I know dislike travelling unless it is in a vast yacht or by the Orient Express!”

  “I am thrilled to be on a P & O liner. Mama and I often looked at them enviously as they passed us when we were in a cargo boat or a very slow sailing ship.”

  Christopher laughed.

  “That sounds like a nightmare.”

  “It was at times, but at least we could see the world.”

  “That is what we will do now. I have been to India before, but never to Nepal and I intend to climb one of the Himalayas simply because I cannot think of any way I could be further from my father than on the top of Mount Everest!”

  “If you get there.”

  “I can at least have a good try,” he retorted. “And if I fail, a great number of people more important than I have failed already.”

  “That at least is an original way to look at it,” Kayla countered and they both laughed.

  The Bezwada was one of the larger P & O liners and Kayla found that Christopher had booked three cabins.

  It was the policy of P & O not to have private suites and he therefore had the middle of the three cabins converted into a sitting room.

  They were much more luxurious than any cabins Kayla had ever occupied before on her trips around the world with her parents.

  She so wished her mother could have been with her, because she knew how much she would have enjoyed it and they had always laughed at the discomforts they had endured.

  The food more often than not was inedible and all that concerned her father was that the ship, whatever it was like, would transport them cheaply to their destination – that being a place where he could paint the pictures that were already in his imagination.

  Kayla had left the trunk containing his pictures in Park Lane with Harriet.

  “Promise you will keep it very safe,” she had said, “because it contains objects that are very important to me and are in fact irreplaceable.”

  “Don’t worry, my Lady,” Harriet replied. “I’ll have it put in a locked storeroom and I keeps the key.”

  That was reassuring, but she wished she could have brought her father’s pictures with her.

  The ship sailed at noon and there was a large crowd waving their friends and relations goodbye.

  Like most of the passengers, Kayla hung over the rail as they moved slowly down river. Christopher was not with her because he was in discussions with the Purser.

  When finally Kayla went down to the sitting room annex to their cabin, Christopher quizzed her,

  “I was wondering where you were. In fact I thought perhaps you might have jumped off the ship at the very last moment!”

  “And leave my luggage behind?” Kayla retorted. “I would never do that! Those trunks hold everything that I possess.”

  There was a faint twinkle in Christopher’s eye.

  He was ruminating that all the lovely ladies he had ever known would have sworn that they could not leave him.

  He was amused by Kayla’s interest in the liner and her insistence that, as soon as the ship was underway, that they inspected the library.

  “I ought to have asked you,” she sighed, “if I could bring some books from your library, but I did slip into my luggage the book on India that I was reading when you came to my room last night.”

  “I wondered if it would interest you.” “I was thrilled with it because it mentioned some of the places Papa had talked to me about.”

  Christopher was thinking how often he had gone to the bedroom of a beautiful woman he was attracted to and had invariably found her in bed pretending to read a book.

  Elegantly arranged on the pillows, she would exclaim in surprise when he appeared and this would quickly change into the delight they both expected.

  Kayla found three more books in the ship’s library that she wanted to read and took them at once to their cabin in case someone else reserved them first.

  When they came down to the Saloon for luncheon, they had the choice of sitting at the Captain’s table or having a table on their own.

  Christopher hesitated.

  “Oh, please,” Kayla urged him, “do let’s sit with the Captain. I am sure there will be interesting people to meet.”

  He thought this too was a new experience as well, as other women would definitely prefer to be alone with him.

  To Kayla’s obvious delight, because her husband had the highest precedence amongst the passengers aboard, she was on the Captain’s right.

  He was a middle-aged man who had, she discovered, been all over the world by ship and she was absorbingly interested in everything he told her.

  Christopher, who had rather a boring woman on his other side, felt somewhat piqued.

  “It is time you talked to me,” he muttered to Kayla, when they were more than half way through their meal.

  “Do you realise that the Captain has been to the South Pole?” Kayla enthused. “And he has visited countries that I thought were too dangerous for white men to set foot in.”

  Christopher thought that amongst everything else, the Captain was a very good storyteller and then he whispered to Kayla so that no one else at the table could hear,

  “I can see that if I want to impress you, I shall have to conquer the Himalayas and doubtless dive to the bottom of the sea as well!”

  “I am sure you are capable of doing both,” Kayla replied. “But I hear you find it more comfortable to explore the entertainments of Paris – ”

  The Viscount stared at her.

  “Who has been talking?” he demanded.

  “Everyone, whenever your name is mentioned. The French girls at the Convent talked about you and I only wish now I had listened to them more attentively.”

  “I am extremely glad you did nothing of the sort!”

  Kayla laughed and he thought it was a very pretty sound.

  *

  The days on the liner passed quickly.

  It was burning hot in the Red Sea, but they played deck tennis early in the morning.

  And, when it was even hotter in the afternoon, they read books.

  There was dancing in the evening.

  It never occurred to Christopher that Kayla might want to dance.

  However, as she was looking extremely pretty, one of the passengers asked her if she would join him in a waltz.

  She looked at Christopher eagerly for permission.

  “That is just what I was going to ask you to do,” he said quickly, “but I thought perhaps you were too tired.”

  “Tired!” cried Kayla. “I am never tired! Not when a part
y is as amusing as this.”

  She thanked the passenger kindly for inviting her onto the floor, explaining that she had already promised the dance to her husband.

  “I must admit,” the young man replied to her, “that he has a prior claim. All the same I shall try again!”

  Kayla smiled at him.

  While she and Christopher were dancing the waltz, she said to him, “It was very nice of that young man to ask me to dance. I hope he asks me another time.”

  “In which case you will refuse – ” “Why should I?” Kayla enquired innocently.

  “Because, as he pointed out, I have a prior claim.”

  “But you cannot want to dance every dance with me,” Kayla protested. “One or two of those women over there are very pretty.”

  “I prefer to dance with my wife,” he countered in a lofty tone. “And I can only hope that she prefers to dance with me.”

  “Of course, – but I don’t want you to find me a bore.”

  “I think that is unlikely,” answered Christopher.

  Kayla looked up at him a little questioningly.

  He was certainly being pleasant, but at the same time they were still strangers and she found it difficult to know exactly what he was thinking.

  When she had been with her father, they had thought the same and enjoyed their life together the same way.

  And she almost felt as she grew older that she could anticipate what he was thinking before he actually put it into words.

  Her husband, however, was an enigma.

  She was never at all certain if he was pleased with her or somewhat critical of whatever she said or did.

  He was angry on one occasion when he had found her talking to three young men.

  He had been playing a game of deck tennis with a man who was renowned as an expert at it and Christopher knew he had to show outstanding form to beat him.

  He was, however, annoyed, when he found that Kayla had not sat watching him, as he expected her to do.

  Instead she had moved away and, because she was so pretty, the young men who had seen her at every meal had not missed the opportunity.

  They were paying her compliments and teasing her.

  The first thing Christopher heard was her laughter.

  He then joined the party in what was quite obviously a somewhat stiff manner.

  The young men had then tactfully walked away.

  “Why are you looking so cross?” Kayla asked. “Is it because you lost the game?”

  “I am most put out at finding my wife, who I thought was watching me,” he replied, “flirting with some young men who are not at all the type of people who would be invited to Rothwoode Court.”

  Kayla stared at him in surprise.

  “They were very pleasant,” she told him, “and gave me a drink of lemonade.”

  “That does not surprise me, but equally you are my wife and I am most particular as to who my wife associates with.”

  Kayla was genuinely astonished.

  All her life she had talked with men and women of so many different nationalities and they had indeed come, now she thought about it, from every class.

  It had never occurred to her that she should pick and choose carefully those she associated with.

  She then had quite an argument with Christopher as to whom she should and should not know on board the liner.

  Later that night she told herself he was stuck-up and far too puffed up with his own importance.

  ‘Papa was just as grand as he is,’ she mused. ‘In fact he was far grander. He had the courtesy title of Earl and if he had not died he would have been a Duke.’

  And he was always friends with everyone and did not mind if they were living in the gutter or had just crawled out of a cave.

  But she had no wish to annoy the Viscount Roth.

  She had the distinct feeling that he was expecting her not to know how to behave with other people because of her mother’s dubious position in Society.

  ‘I shall do as I like,’ Kayla told herself, tossing her head, but she sensed that it was not going to be particularly easy.

  Having no wish to make Christopher angry, she went to see the Purser.

  “Is there anyone on board this ship,” she enquired of him, “who is able to speak Nepali?”

  The Purser looked at her in astonishment.

  “Why do you ask, my Lady?” “My husband and I are on our way to Nepal,” she replied, “and I believe their language is different from Urdu, of which I know a little. But Nepali is, I believe, a mixture of Tibetan and Burmese.”

  “I will certainly find out for you,” the Purser offered. “But I doubt if, even in Third Class, there will be anyone who speaks it.”

  “Please try for me,” Kayla begged him and the Purser promised that he would.

  Later in the day he told her with pride that he had discovered a man who spoke Burmese and who had actually visited Nepal.

  When Kayla asked Christopher if she could have lessons with him, he agreed a little reluctantly, but he was astonished that it was something she really wanted to do.

  “My father always said it was extremely important we should be able to talk to the native inhabitants wherever we went,” Kayla asserted. “Although I have never been to India, we had an Indian servant for a short time on one trip, so my Urdu is quite fluent.”

  Christopher mused that she never ceased to surprise him, but he merely added,

  “Of course, if you think you can learn Nepali, it will be useful to us. But I have always been told that the monks in Nepal speak Tibetan, which is a very difficult language.”

  “I will try them all and please don’t forget, if I can do any necessary translating, you will find me quite helpful.”

  She reflected, however, that Christopher might think it insulting if she could do anything better than he could!

  Having gained the permission she wanted, she then changed the subject by talking about India.

  She found out that Christopher had been invited at one time to be an aide-de-camp to the Governor-General, but had refused.

  “I feel sure that you would have found it thrilling,” she pointed out.

  “An awful lot of kowtowing and endless talking with people I had no interest in,” he retorted.

  Kayla laughed.

  “That is where you are wrong. You will find anyone interesting if you dig deeply enough into them. When Papa was painting someone, they always told him their innermost secrets.”

  “Were they really all that interesting?” “Papa found every last bit of information fascinating because it revealed parts of their character, which he put into his portraits.”

  She felt that he still did not understand and explained,

  “You do realise that Papa was what is now called an ‘Impressionist,’ and he painted what he could see underneath the surface.”

  “Then I will be really intrigued to see your father’s pictures.” “They promised me, at your London house, to guard them more carefully than they would guard anything else,” Kayla told him. “After all if a burglar steals your silver or your jewels they can be replaced – but I can never replace Papa’s wonderful pictures.”

  There was a broken note in her voice as she spoke of her father and it told Christopher how much he had meant to her.

  The more he heard her talk about it, the more he thought that the whole story seemed extraordinary –

  The Duke’s second son being exiled by his father and never allowed to return to England.

  And given a small allowance that any man brought up in the height of comfort would have found intolerable.

  Yet apparently Lord Alastair had been so blissfully happy with his wife and his very attractive daughter.

  Faced with similar circumstances Christopher knew that he had given in to his father and had accepted a suitable marriage rather than face starvation or being sent to prison.

  He could not believe that, if he had resolutely refused his father’s orders to m
arry Kayla, he would not have saved him at the very last moment.

  Yet, because the Earl was so unpredictable, he could not be sure of it.

  Aloud he said to Kayla.

  “I was just thinking that your father was a much braver man than I am.”

  “I daresay Papa would not have been so brave if he had not lost his heart completely and absolutely,” she replied. “I know that nothing else would ever have compensated him if he had lost Mama.”

  “I suppose that is the love we all want to find,” he reflected. “But I still think he was a very brave man.”

  “He never regretted it and he was always happy and when he and Mama were together you could just feel their happiness radiating from them almost as if it was a light.”

  She spoke in a dreamy voice and Christopher looked at her.

  She was so very different from any woman he had ever known.

  She was so young and so innocent in many ways.

  Yet it was difficult for him to believe that she was not well acquainted with the world as it is today.

  “You have told me a great deal about your father and mother,” he now enquired, “but very little about yourself.”

  “I am quite sure that is something you don’t want to hear,” replied Kayla. “You have already said some scathing things about people on board, who have tried to tell you their problems and who hoped, because you have a title, that you would be able to solve them.”

  “I think actually that the problem they were worrying about is simply money and they think I have some.”

  Kayla laughed.

  “Now you are being modest. If people are worried, they go to a man they think is cleverer than they are. And where our fellow passengers are concerned, I am sure that is true.”

  Christopher smiled.

  “I take that as a compliment, Kayla, and I have so far had very few on this trip.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed.

  “Is there something I should have said?” she asked, feeling a little worried.

  “There is no compulsion about it,” he replied. “But while I have heard you praise the man who is teaching you Nepali and you have lavished a great deal of admiration on the Captain, I feel rather neglected.”

  Kayla gave a peal of laughter.

  “What would you like me to do about it?” she asked. “I feel rebuked, but, if I tell you quite honestly what I think about you, I might make a mistake and then you would be angry.”