Heart of the Tiger

by Lynn Kerstan

  “I suppose so.” She sounded prickly. Felt brittle and resistant, as she always did when she’d no idea what to expect. Darkness licked at the edges of the private world he had created here, a world encompassed by fire, made lavish with fur rugs and tasseled cushions, mysterious with strange potions and ancient rituals. She feared it, longed for it. “What am I to do?”

  “Sit here.”

  She lowered herself onto a satin cushion and curled her legs to one side. “Adorn the hands with what?”

  “A dye,” he said, moving the tall candleholders and oil lamps until she was embraced by their light. “It’s made from a shrub that grows in desert climates. The leaves are dried, powdered, and mixed with oils, cloves, and coffee or tea into a paste that is applied to the hands and sometimes to the feet.”

  “My heavens. Is it permanent?”

  “Don’t worry.” He settled cross-legged directly in front of her, so close that even in the midst of candles and lamps, she felt only the heat that radiated from him. “At most, the dye lasts a few weeks, and not so long unless the paste is blended a day or two beforehand and left to dry on the skin for many hours. We haven’t the time for that, nor, I expect, would you wish it. May I remove your gloves?”

  Teeth clenched, she raised her arms and held her breath while he peeled the glove slowly from her right hand and then from her left. They dangled there for a moment, her hands, as if wondering what to do with themselves, until she let them drop onto her lap. Her horrible hands that had made her schoolfellows laugh and the farm children skulk away when she approached because they believed she had been cursed. But she had been a self-assured child and hadn’t minded their foolishness, had not begun to care until much later. How odd she should now remember the sideways glances and the whispers behind her back.

  He had poured water into a basin and added a few drops of perfumed oil. At his nod, she dipped her hands into the water. It was warm and smelled of roses. A little steam wafted from the basin, hovered between them, vanished on a puff of air as he leaned forward to pick up a towel. He held it out, and as if they had done this at some other time and place, she knew to place one hand onto it, let him fold the soft fabric around her fingers and palm and wrist, gently pressing it before releasing her.

  There was a fresh towel for her other hand, but this time, he kept hold of her wrist when he was done. Lifting it atop two brown fingers placed where her pulse beat madly, he suspended her hand in the air.

  “Relax,” he said. “Allow your hand to drift as it will. See there? A bird. A flower. A feather borne on a breeze. For many years I lived with a nautch dancer who told stories with her body, but most especially with her hands. Each position, each motion, expressed more than I ever understood, although her gestures conveyed to her countrymen legends that were centuries old. When first I saw your hands, they reminded me of her hands and the way she held them. Except that she trained herself for years and practiced daily, while for you it is natural. Your hands were created to be birds and flowers, and to dance.”

  Stunned, she could only gaze wide-eyed at him as he let go her hand. It fluttered to her lap like a leaf falling from a tree. Who are you? She longed to ask him, didn’t dare to, didn’t know how. Mercenary. Duke. Scholar. Serpent. Tiger. Poet. All of those things, all of them dangerous. All of them seductive.

  He had already turned away from her, his attention directed to the table. “Nageena Kaur mixed the paste early this morning,” he said, taking up his knife and slicing the lemon neatly in half. “Lemon juice and a little sugar will improve the color and help it to set.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about this,” she said, watching him squeeze half a lemon over a bowl containing a thick, dark paste.

  He sprinkled sugar over it and stirred the lot with a spoon. “I’ve seen it done a few hundred times,” he said. “When Priya was to dance, she generally painted her hands and feet. I never paid any mind to the process, though.”

  “She was your mistress?” Mira loathed the woman for no accountable reason. “You must be sorry to have left her.”

  “She left me,” he said. “And who could blame her? But she has no place here, Miranda. I only thought of her because of the henna. That’s what it’s called in English, the paste, and this morning, Nageena Kaur gave me a lesson in how to finish blending it and how to apply it. She also sketched patterns for me to follow. You should be warned that I have no skill at this sort of thing, as anyone who has seen my efforts to carve wood will testify.”

  Again, that slender current of uncertainty beneath the usual confidence in his voice. She wasn’t even sure it was there, or if she was interpreting it correctly. But she felt somehow that she was learning to tune herself to him, the way, long ago, she had tuned the strings of her lute to one another. “It will be fine.” Halfwit! But what else could she say?

  “Probably not. The dye will soon fade, though, and in the interim, no one will see the damage. Shall we start with your right hand? It will help a great deal, Miranda, if you hold perfectly still.” He draped a towel over his lap. “Place the hand here, on my knee.”

  Each time he touched her, and each time she found the courage to touch him, she was sure she could not bear it. Her throat tightened, her pulse raced, her mind went blank with terror. And then, nothing intolerable happened.

  Something much worse than intolerable happened.

  She wanted to touch him, or be touched by him, again.

  Except that she couldn’t possibly want any such thing.

  He spread a sheet of paper inscribed with drawings beside him on the table, dipped one of the wooden wands into the paste, and bent his head over her hand. A swatch of black hair, thick and shiny, fell across his forehead.

  With a tentative stroke, he swabbed a line of paste on the back of her hand. Dipped, painted, dipped, painted. She couldn’t see the paper well enough to make out what he was copying, and from the streaks on her hand, it could have been anything from an escutcheon to a plate of mackerel.

  She watched him instead. The chiseled lines of his face. The bronzed skin. The nose that must have once been broken. The long dark lashes, longer and darker than her own kohl-blackened lashes. The beat of a pulse on his jaw. The strong neck. The ferocity of his concentration.

  The air was heavy with fragrances—lemon and smoke, cloves and coffee, soap and roses and melting wax. She closed her eyes, letting the sensations wash over her. Heat emanating from candle flames. Hard male bone and muscle where her palm rested. The light scratch of wood on her hand, the sound of his breathing, the beat of her aching heart.

  He’d moved to her fingers now, narrow curving lines from the feel of them, and small images set along them like jewels on a bracelet. She understood, for the first time in her life, how a man’s touch on one innocent part of her body could echo on her throat, at the tips of her breasts, on her thighs. And between them.

  No!

  Her eyes flew open. She looked down at his hand. It was so dark, so large and rough, with a hint of black hair where his white sleeve met his wrist. And it wasn’t touching her at all. Only the wand met her skin, creating another tiny leaf on the vine that snaked down her forefinger.

  She released her drawn-in breath. It was lovely, what he had done. Delicate as tracery in a stained-glass window. Vines trailed down all her fingers, and at the back of her hand, a starburst of a flower.

  “That’s it, then,” he said, setting the wand on a saucer. “Are you out of patience, or shall I do your other hand?”

  Pride demanded she thank him politely and take her leave, but she could not have moved if elephants were charging in her direction. “It’s beautiful. What is the flower?”

  “A lotus. The Buddha sits on a lotus, which is a symbol of enlightenment. Hari would approve.” A hesitation. “Do you wish to continue?”

  In response, she removed her painted
hand from his knee and replaced it with her other hand. He shifted his position then, putting him nearly side by side with her, and this time he began with her fingers. More vines, she thought at first, but these bloomed with small flowers.

  “Look away,” he said when he got to the plane of her hand. “The centerpiece is a surprise.”

  She closed her eyes instead, drifting again into the world of pure sensation, except this time his shoulder was touching her shoulder and the scent of him was strong in her nostrils. No enlightenment for her, she thought. No abandonment of earthly pains and desires. She was only just beginning to understand the nature of desire. And as it coiled around her and tightened its grip, she knew there would never be, for her, an end to pain.

  But for now she drifted like a feather on the wind or a bird riding a current of air, more contented than she could remember being in a long, long while.

  At some time, when she had lost herself in a fantasy that she would never admit to herself she had enjoyed, his voice called her back to where he really was, seated beside her. Not where he had been seconds earlier, in her volcanic imagination. She’d no idea, until it manifested itself, that she even had the capacity to imagine such a scene.

  He must have noticed the change in her. The fluttering pulse, the flaming cheeks, the moisture on her forehead. Michael Keynes missed nothing, damn him. He seemed to be waiting for her to come to herself again.

  Her palm was still resting on his. She looked down, saw the picture he’d dyed on the back of her hand, and after a gasp, broke into laughter.

  Three wavy lines for the river. And coiled on top, with a smug look on its pointy face, an impertinent snake.

  “But where’s the camel?” she asked when she could speak.

  “Here, and there, and everywhere. You are the camel. You are the hand under the water, under the land, supporting all that lives on the earth.”

  “How very lyrical of you.” She wanted to laugh and weep, all at the same time, which must be why she continued to fight him.

  “Or I couldn’t draw a camel. You can scrub it all away, Miranda. Nearly all, because a little of the stain will remain for a few days. Alternately, you can let it dry for an hour or two before the wedding supper and be decorated for a longer time. Do as you like. And because of your gloves, I won’t know what you decided. Nor would I care in either case.”

  But she wanted him to notice and care. Except, she didn’t. She was losing herself, the core of herself, in his kindness, and she resented him for it.

  Except, she didn’t.

  She resented herself for needing his comfort and yielding to the cloak of safety he wrapped around her. She had stayed strong for such a long time that strength had become all she was. He made her feel weak. Or perhaps she was weak, and he had done no more than make her realize it.

  She rose, and put her hands together beneath her chin, and bowed. “Thank you,” she said, meeting his upturned gaze. “Whatever becomes of us in the future, Syr, I shall never forget this night.”

  Chapter 26

  The summons came with bells and cymbals and laughter. A tidal wave of women and children swept Mira up, bore her into the courtyard and dropped her off just outside the open gate. Arcing on either side of her like wings, they left her to wait in a circle marked out with salt for the coming of her bridegroom.

  The night sky, clear and cold, blazed with stars and a crescent moon. Orion ruled the heavens, Orion the Hunter, putting her in mind of what the Beast had said of his brother. “Michael is a hunter as well.”

  And so he was. A good one, too. By his arrangement, the prey of the evening was standing right here at the gate, staked like a chained goat for him to pounce on.

  I want you under me, open to me. Why could she not put those words, that image, from her mind?

  In the distance, light bloomed on the hillside. Moments later, it illuminated horses and riders and the men running alongside, bearing torches. Boys leaping and dancing like fauns. She heard drums and flutes. Male voices raised in rough-sounding songs punctuated with laughter.

  As the procession drew closer, the riders peeled neatly off, adding their half circle to the one formed by the women. And into the center, prancing like a show horse, came a splendid white steed caparisoned in red and silver with bells on its halter. The rider, a masterful black-haired man, sat at ease in the high-pommeled saddle.

  She could not have moved if her life depended on it, which it probably did. A duke’s prize, less reluctant than she ought to be, she stood alone before the man who had laid before her a frightful dilemma.

  He would take her in marriage, or he would die for her.

  What impoverished, despoiled scholar’s daughter had ever before been offered such a choice? And she had nothing to offer him in return. Nothing. Not even herself, because she had been taken from herself a long time ago. No man could want what was left of her—a husk of ice and at its core, a bitter heart.

  But he, unaccountably, did want her. Had gone to impossible lengths to acquire her. She might at least fashion for him a smile.

  She did, and got in return a smile that curled the toes in her embroidered felt slippers. Then he was off the horse in a liquid motion and crossing to her with arms extended. What he said, not in English, must have been part of the ritual. There was an answer from the crowd, another pronouncement—firm and possessive—from him, and a shout of joy in return.

  “You have come to claim me, I gather,” she said, not expecting him to hear her in the clamor. But his eyes flashed with amusement at her remark, and in spite of the continuing noise, it suddenly seemed to her they were alone together.

  “The Punjabis make much ado about arrivals and departures,” he said. “Our send-off will be nearly as riotous, if only because most of them will be drunk.” His eyes softened. “Is this a great ordeal for you?”

  She felt foolish then, and mean-spirited. “No. It’s quite wonderful, actually, although it should be happening for someone else.”

  “But it’s for us,” he said, offering her his arm. “And they do love a party. Let’s repay them by enjoying it.”

  When she slid her arm around his, he glanced down at the hand resting on his forearm. Went still. She put her other hand on his wrist so he could see the whole of her offering to him. On her cold white hands, the henna vines and flowers he’d painted, the lotus and the river and the snake, shone rust-colored in the torchlight.

  He looked over at her. Their gazes locked. She experienced a communion with him at that moment beyond any she’d ever experienced, even with her father, who communicated to her mostly with his eyes.

  This was different. Physical. A look that became a touch that became an act of—

  She didn’t know what. Not love. Not honesty. A gift from her to him, perhaps, and his acceptance of it, but more than that. He understood, as no one else could understand, what it had cost her to expose her webbed fingers to so many people.

  Birindar Singh and his wife came forward then, their arms full of hothouse flowers– orange and red and white—that had been strung into garlands. Birindar draped one around her neck, and Nageena did the same for Syr. Then the celebration moved inside to the largest room in the house, rectangular in shape and lined with long, low tables. There were cushions for the guests to sit on, but otherwise the polished wooden floor was bare. Birindar led the wedding party—bride and groom, Hari Singh and Mira’s father, Nageena Kaur and her newly wed daughter and son-in-law—to a table elevated on a platform.

  She was to be on exhibit, Mira understood, glad of the salwar trousers when she settled on the plump cushion and arranged her legs. Laughter and chatter filled the room as the others arrived and took their places. The children, all but the very youngest, had a noisy table of their own, and a pair of well-behaved dogs began to prowl the room, alert for a handout.

  The fea
st arrived in waves, platters appearing and vanishing as if by magic, but nothing was offered directly to her. Syr accepted a little of everything until his plate was piled high with exotic, colorful, mostly unidentifiable foods. “I am to serve you,” he said. “With my fingers.”

  She became glad of the bowl filled with rosewater by his plate. “Is that necessary?”

  “It symbolizes my servitude to you, which comes to a resounding halt after the marriage. From then on, you are expected to provide food for me, not necessarily by your own hand.”

  “Just as well, then. You’d starve.” She accepted an olive and chewed it thoughtfully. “I thought men and women were equal here.”

  “In many ways, yes, because they are of the Sikh faith and tradition. But the men and women have different tasks and responsibilities. Also, some customs are passed down through families, and this ceremonial feeding is one of them. Hari spent an hour lecturing me on proper deportment to make sure I wouldn’t embarrass him. He hasn’t said so, but I think he means to join Birindar’s clan by way of the doe-eyed beauty sitting at two o’clock.”

  She looked in that direction and saw a girl with her gaze fixed about where Hari was seated. Love was in the air, it seemed, except for the air surrounding the bride and groom.

  Syr went on feeding her, selecting morsels, telling her what the dish was called and what it contained, giving her small bites and not many of them. His words sounded like music—mah ki dal, sarson ka saag, roghan josh, makhee ki roti. She was too apprehensive to enjoy them, and he seemed more interested in his brandy glass, kept filled by one of the men, than the supper.

  “Am I supposed to do anything for you?” she asked at one point.

  “Not now.” He waggled his brows. “You are supposed to be saving your strength for the wedding night.”

  Flushing hotly, she turned her attention to another platform where musicians were beginning to take their places and tune their instruments. She saw drums and flutes, instruments with one string and instruments with many strings, earthenware vessels, wooden clappers with bells on them, and lots of happy faces.