Flowers For the God of Love Page 7

  “Will you give me those books?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he replied. “I have had them unpacked and they are here in a bookcase.”

  He found them and realised that they were only three slim volumes that he himself usually took with him on his travels.

  One was on Buddhism, another a beautifully written description of Indian mythology and the third was on Tibet.

  He had included it on his voyage home because, knowing that it was a subject which would come up in his conversations with Sir Terence, he wanted to know more about the strange secretive country that lay behind the Himalayas.

  It never struck him at the time that he might be closely connected with it apart from his ordinary activities in The Great Game.

  Now it occurred to him that it must have been Fate that had made him choose that particular volume, because the knowledge he had gained from it was something that would concern him greatly in the future.

  Lucknow was not far from the border of Nepal, which lay between Tibet to the North-West and on the South-West Sikkim, through which was the way to Gyangtse, which he was to discuss with the Viceroy.

  Quenella took the books from him and Rex would have suspected if she had been a more ordinary person that she would be excited to have them and yet with her he was not sure.

  Her reserve encircled her like an iron fence.

  “Thank you,” she said coldly. “Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Quenella.”

  He would have liked, as this was their Wedding night, to make her a little speech reassuring her that she need not be afraid of him or indeed of their future together.

  It would not only have been polite but it was what he wished to do. After all she was very young. She bore his name and, through no fault of her own or his, they were united in perhaps the strangest union any two people could possibly have imagined.

  But she gave him no time for courtesy.

  Before he could even open the door for her she had passed into her own cabin and he was alone in the sitting room.

  Almost absent-mindedly he poured himself a glass of champagne from the bottle that still lay in the ice cooler and, having drunk half of it, he left the cabin and went up on deck.

  It was a cold night, but not freezingly so because the weather was mild for early February.

  He thought as he went to the rail to look out at the lights of England that were still visible, as they moved down the English Channel, that he would have liked to stay long enough to have a day’s hunting and perhaps some shooting before he returned to work.

  In the circumstances this had been impossible and he told himself that one blessing was that there would be no time to see his father.

  He sent him a polite letter excusing himself, thinking that it would be hurtful if his father learnt that he had visited England without visiting him.

  “I shall be due for leave later next year,” he had written in apology, “and I hope by then that I shall hear better news of your health.”

  He had posted the letter yesterday and another letter had gone to the Agent of the estate giving instructions that certain things, which had long wanted doing, should be put in hand.

  He felt slightly guilty as he did so, knowing that it would be Quenella’s money that would pay for what he had just ordered.

  Then he told himself with good common sense that if he lived in unwarranted luxury the least he could do would be to share his good fortune with his father and with the estate that would one day be his and Quenella’s home.

  He was not certain how she would fit in, just as he was not certain about anything that concerned her.

  He told himself with a sigh that he would try in every way he knew to make her happy and the first step in that direction would be to try to understand her.

  ‘Girls are something,’ he thought with a smile, ‘that I am lamentably ignorant about.’

  There were not many subjects he could say that about, but Sir Terence had been right when he assumed that Rex Daviot knew few unmarried women and had done his best for the last five years to avoid the species.

  Quenella was certainly unlike the bouncing and laughing members of the ‘Fishing Fleet’, he had noted during their dinner in the dining room.

  Their high spirits, their eyes looking at every man provocatively, their obvious ignorance of the world and in many cases their lack of education, made them as different from his wife as chalk from cheese.

  Quenella, sitting opposite him, was looking, he thought, very like the orchids she wore at her waist.

  Yet he was not sure if that was the right flower to compare her with

  ‘More like a tiger lily,’ he thought to himself and recalled those he had seen growing vividly gold with their black-spotted petals.

  They were exotic and yet somehow they personified the danger that could lie in sheer beauty.

  ‘That is Quenella,’ he thought to himself almost with satisfaction. ‘Beauty that is dangerous enough to be inflammable for any man who attempts to possess it.’

  He laughed at his own fantasy and as he did so he heard a voice beside him cry,

  “Rex! Dearest Rex. Can it really be you? I had no idea you were aboard!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “I must say being a Lord becomes you,” Lady Barnstaple declared with a teasing look in her blue eyes. “It will add to the glittering aura that already surrounds you.”

  Rex did not reply because he was used to Kitty Barnstaple’s provocative remarks that she embellished every flirtation with.

  “Do you not agree with me, Lady Daviot?” she asked now of Quenella.

  There was a little pause before Quenella replied seriously,

  “I don’t know– I have never thought about it.”

  Kitty Barnstaple laughed.

  “You will find, I am afraid, that a great number of women think about Rex! As I have often told him, he attracts them as if he was a honeypot.”

  “You are making me embarrassed,” Rex protested.

  He rose from the chair to go to the table and refill Kitty’s glass.

  As he did so, he thought that it was a mistake for her to sound so familiar in front of Quenella, but there was nothing he could do about it.

  From the moment she had found him on board, Kitty had fastened on to him in the tenacious manner that he remembered all too well was characteristic of her.

  They had enjoyed a fiery but brief love affair last year in Simla.

  It had not only been enjoyable but it had suited Rex at that particular moment to appear to the world to be nothing but a carefree soldier on leave from his Regiment..

  Every summer the Viceroy, followed by all the social figures in India, moved to Simla, seven thousand feet up and eighty miles from a railway line, which was one of the most extraordinary places in the world.

  A small ugly town set in a bowl of hills on the South side of a ridge, it would have been like any English watering place except for the magnificent mountains of the Himalayas behind it.

  The air seemed electrified and was thin enough to make the visitors pant at first as they climbed the stairs and sharp enough off the snows to keep them unnaturally alert and vivacious.

  This inevitably resulted in Simla becoming not only a place of feverish and incessant entertainment, the Viceroy’s staff numbered three hundred, but also a rendezvous for love.

  Kitty Barnstaple had undoubtedly been the most attractive and quite the loveliest of the ladies staying at Viceregal Lodge.

  She had made it clear from the first moment she set eyes on Rex Daviot that he was the man she not only had been looking on this trip to India, but the man of her dreams as well

  He was used to women falling in love with him, but Kitty was rather different in that behind her frivolous facade she had a wit and intelligence that was unusual amongst her contemporaries.

  Viceregal Lodge, finished in 1888 and decorated by Maple and Company of Tottenham Court Road, was like a shooting box in the Tyrol with
one big chalet-like roof and two tiers of wooden verandas.

  It might, however, have been planned entirely for clandestine affaires de coeur.

  What made it so convenient for those who wished to meet in secret was that it was too small to hold a large house party and the Viceroy’s family.

  The aides-de-camp and many guests were therefore accommodated in various little bungalows and, as Rex was a bachelor, he was given one of these to himself.

  There had been something adventurous and certainly very pleasant in knowing that when he retired, Kitty in a dark cloak with a disguising chiffon veil over her fair hair would slip through the flower-filled garden, looking like a ghost to those who saw her.

  She would join him in his chalet, which, built right on the edge of the hill, appeared likely at any moment to slip down into the valley below.

  Their love affair had had an enchantment about it, but Rex had known when he left Simla that it was over.

  He therefore had no intention of resuscitating what had been a charming interlude while he was supposedly on his honeymoon.

  The second night after she had found him aboard, Kitty had joined him on the upper deck where he had gone to take a last breath of air before he retired.

  He had hoped to be alone, but she had come and stood beside him, warmly wrapped in a sable coat with a hood of the same fur framing her piquant mischievous face.

  “I have missed you, Rex,” she said in a low voice. “I so often think of that small room under the stars that was to me a Heaven on earth.”

  He remembered the softness of Kitty’s arms, the hunger of her lips and the fragrance of her hair. Then he told himself that, whatever unpleasantness his marriage entailed, he would play his part as a gentleman.

  There was no need to put his thoughts into words, Kitty had loved him enough to understand his different moods.

  She just gave a deep sigh and then he found himself alone, the grey sea unpleasantly turbulent as they left the English Channel.

  *

  Fortunately Rex and Quenella were both good sailors and, although there were few people in the Dining Saloon during the next few days, neither of them missed a meal nor surprisingly did Kitty.

  It was inevitable that in the empty Saloon she should gravitate towards them and Rex felt that her chatter and her laughter relieved the tension that existed between himself and his wife.

  In their private sitting room Kitty now said,

  “I wonder if you will like India, Lady Daviot. It’s not a country that one can ever feel indifferent about. It’s like a person one either hates or loves.”

  “I am very much looking forward to seeing it,” Quenella answered.

  “You will certainly find it a rival in your married life,” Kitty went on.

  Sitting back in an armchair, holding a glass of wine in her hand, she had crossed her legs to show the pointed toe of a black glacé slipper and an inordinate amount of lace under her silk gown.

  There was a twinkle in her blue eyes and her fair hair was well dressed, as if she was going to a ball.

  She was very lovely and desirable and she could stir a man’s senses in a way, Rex thought, that Quenella so far as he was concerned had not managed to do.

  He looked across the cabin at his wife and thought that her beauty was as cold as the snows on the Himalayas. And once again he wondered if there was any fire beneath the icy surface.

  “I have never known a man who loved a country as much as your husband loves India and his work,” Kitty went on, still speaking to Quenella.

  “I can understand how absorbing it can be,” Quenella replied.

  “You will have to be very understanding to put up with the times when he works for twenty-four hours not speaking to you or disappears in a mysterious manner!”

  She laughed before she added,

  “You will not know whether it is some exquisite houri who has lured him away or merely a threatened rebellion amongst a lot of scruffy natives who have nothing better to do.”

  “You are very knowledgeable on the subject, Kitty,” Rex said, “but stop trying to frighten Quenella. She will have many duties to perform and inevitably I shall be with her.”

  “Rex is attempting to reassure you,” Kitty cried, “but remember my warning and don’t let him off too lightly when he produces the most plausible excuses for his absences.”

  Rex knew that on the whole Kitty was too good-natured to try to make serious trouble between himself and Quenella.

  At the same time he was aware that she was piqued by his indifference towards her and also was experiencing the usual feminine jealousy towards the woman who had married her past lover.

  Kitty’s husband was one of those convenient men who complacently allowed his wife to go her own way as long as it did not interfere with his own interests.

  Charles Barnstaple was rich, charming and popular. He came to India for one reason and one reason only and that was to enjoy the sporting facilities, tiger shooting, pig sticking and polo.

  Wherever sport was best he was to be found and, although he loved his wife, he said quite frankly that women were a nuisance when a man wanted to concentrate on sport.

  *

  It was the fourth day out and a gale force wind was making the ship do acrobatics when Quenella came into the sitting room where Rex was working at a desk where he had arranged his writing materials.

  He had a great deal of paperwork to get through before he reached India and he found it an unexpected relief that Quenella was quite happy to sit reading without talking incessantly as another woman would have done.

  They talked at meals, but otherwise so far they had appeared to live almost separate lives and he thought that in this respect, if in no other, she made an admirable companion.

  The voyage to India would take nearly three weeks, but Rex, who usually found the long days at sea monotonous, was beginning to think as he ploughed through the piles of documents that Sir Terence had given him, which he would need every hour of these days.

  He glanced up from his writing because, although she had not spoken, he sensed that Quenella unexpectedly had something to say to him.

  She was not standing, because that would have been impossible with the roll of the ship, but had taken a chair near to his desk.

  As he turned his head to look at her, he found that her eyes were resting on his.

  “What is it?” he asked, “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “I wanted to ask you something if you have the time to listen to me.”

  Rex put down his pen.

  “I apologise if I have been inattentive and, of course, I have time.”

  Quenella glanced down at the book she held in her lap and he saw that it was the one that he had given her on Indian mythology.

  “Are you enjoying it?” he asked. “There are much larger and more detailed books on the same subject, which I will get for you when we reach India. That, as you can see from its appearance, is a very favourite travelling companion of mine.”

  “I find it fascinating,” Quenella replied. “And that is why I want to ask you if I can learn Urdu.”

  “Urdu?” Rex repeated in surprise.

  Of all the women he knew in India and had known over the years, there was not one Englishwoman he could remember who could speak the language of the country that they lived in, with the exception of a few basic words that they gave orders in to their servants.

  Quenella must have thought that he was hesitating and she added,

  “I am very quick at picking up languages. I can already speak five quite fluently and I would like to be able to understand what the people in your Province are saying amongst themselves.”

  “Of course,” Rex agreed.

  “I thought perhaps there might be somebody on board,” Quenella carried on, “who would be prepared if we paid him or her to teach me and I understand from the Purser that there are quite a number of Indians in the Second and Third Class.”

  It wo
uld, of course, have been impossible for any Indian but a Prince to travel First Class and even then they would undoubtedly keep very much to themselves.

  “I will teach you,” Rex offered quietly.

  “No – please – I did not mean – that, I know how busy you are and how much you have to do.”

  “I would really like to teach you,” he said slowly, “and it is important that you should be taught in the right way and understand how much the language varies amongst the different castes who speak it and in different parts of the country.”

  For the first time since he had known her he saw her eyes light up.

  “If you – could do that,” she said, “perhaps you could give me books to read or even – homework to do, so that I need not to be a nuisance.”

  “You could never be that,” Rex answered, “but we will only start the lessons on one condition.”

  “What is that?”

  “That if you find them boring, if you decide that after all it is too much effort, you will be frank and I say so.

  “Of course I will,” she answered, “and you must be equally truthful if I am too stupid, in which case you can find me another teacher.”

  They started at once because Rex felt that Quenella was eager to get going and he soon found that she had not been boasting when she had said that she was quick to learn languages.

  He discovered to his surprise that she could speak Russian as well as the more commonplace European languages.

  “I always hoped one day to visit the country of my great-grandmother,” Quenella explained, “and, as Papa was always busy when we were travelling, I found teachers for myself and directed my own education.”

  She gave a faint smile as she added,

  “I am afraid that in consequence there are lamentable gaps in my knowledge, because I concentrated only on the subjects – that interested me most.”

  “And what were they?” Rex asked curiously.

  She hesitated before she replied and he had the feeling that she did not wish to speak of anything that concerned herself intimately.

  Then at last she said,

  “Geography and the customs of people who live in various parts of the world and their different religions.”