Bold Destiny

by Jane Feather

  “Come and sit down, dear.” Mrs. Anderson spoke up comfortably, patting the bench beside her. “We were just talking about your wedding … Such excitement!” She rubbed her hands together and beamed. “All the little girls want to be bridesmaids.”

  Annabel turned and smiled effortfully. “You are very kind, but I don’t see—”

  “Oh, do come and sit down, sweetheart.” Kit picked his moment, permitting just the hint of impatience in his voice. “Quite apart from anything else, we need your views on what Akbar Khan intends, after his defeat at Jalalabad.”

  “Yes, indeed, Miss Spencer,” agreed the brigadier. “Your opinion would be most valuable.”

  This was Ayesha’s territory, an area in which she was accustomed to contributing. Maybe it could help to bridge the gap. “I do not think he will permit you … us … to stay so close to Jalalabad,” she said, taking a step into the room but still not accepting a seat. “He will need to keep his bargaining counter in case of reversals. I would imagine you … we … will be moved farther into the mountains.”

  “Soon?” Major Pottinger asked.

  She nodded. “Very soon.” She glanced at Kit. “They were armed and ready to move this morning, were they not, Kit?”

  “I judged so,” he agreed somberly. “How did you get your clothes back?”

  “Zobayeda brought them,” she answered. “Apparently the goatherd’s mother wanted her own returned. I can’t imagine why.”

  Kit stood up suddenly, as if he had come to a decision. “Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen, but Annabel and I have a few matters to discuss.” He got up and strode across the room toward where she stood just inside the doorway. His voice was low but assured. “Come, responsibility of mine. Let us walk in the sunshine.”

  She allowed him to ease her out into the courtyard. “What do we have to discuss?”

  His eyes narrowed. “A very great deal, it seems to me. Now you have your clothes back, I find it easier to grasp what has happened. We are free, Annabel.”

  “But not clear,” she replied.

  “Oh, you are such a Jonah!” Kit exclaimed, exasperated. “I had intended we should be married in St. George’s, Hanover Square, with your family—once we had found them—and mine, and an escort from the Seventh Light and—”

  “I may be a Jonah, but you are completely unrealistic,” she interrupted. “What a cloud-cuckoo-land you’ve invented. Apart from anything else, I haven’t decided whether I wish to be married yet. In essence I may belong with you, but I am not of your kind. I do not know what I am yet.”

  Kit’s expression darkened. “My sweet, if you think you have the slightest choice in the matter now, then you must rethink your position rather rapidly. Marriage is the only option, now that your place for better or worse is with us. You have to abide by our rules.”

  She kicked idly at a loose stone on the ground. “I don’t think there’s much point discussing it at the moment. See who’s coming.”

  Kit followed the direction of her eyes. Coming across the courtyard toward them was Mohammed Shah Khan, Akbar Khan’s lieutenant. He was accompanied by the usual armed escort.

  Annabel raised her hands to her forehead automatically at his approach. Then she felt Kit’s hands, warmly insistent, taking her arms and putting them at her sides. “You don’t do that anymore,” he said quietly. “Look him in the face.”

  A quiver rippled her slender frame, but she raised her eyes and looked boldly at the Afghan, asking in Pushtu, “Do you bring news, Mohammed Shah Khan?”

  “The prisoners are to leave here. You have an hour in which to prepare yourselves,” he said without expression.

  “Where are we to be taken?”

  “That is not for you to know.”

  She inclined her head and turned with Kit back to their quarters. “A wedding, Ralston, huzoor? When and where?”

  He gritted his teeth, reminding himself that for Annabel the irrevocable loss of Ayesha could not be a matter of indifference.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The cavalcade trekked through the spring sunshine, their worldly goods for many of them no more than could be wrapped in a towel. Annabel was once again riding Charlie, the children and most of the other women in camel-panniers or on ponies. Their escort was fierce and silent, and the shadow of an unknown destination destroyed the harmony the group had achieved in their community at Budiabad.

  At Tezeen, the hideous remnants of the January slaughter in the passes lay in grim reminder. The war was far from over, their fate as uncertain as it had ever been. Victory at Jalalabad brought them no closer to deliverance. At Tezeen they also left General Elphinstone, who was now too close to death to continue. Colin and Major Pottinger were ordered to remain with the general, a loss to the company that none felt more keenly than Kit.

  In the mountain village of Zandeh, the party halted. Annabel looked around at the squalid huddle of dirt-walled huts, their windows barred against brigands, the customary watchtower clinging to the mountainside. It was a village of the kind she had often stayed in on her travels with Akbar Khan, but she rather suspected that her fellow travelers were going to be in for yet another shock.

  “We are to stay here?” Millie Drayton’s dismal question spoke for them all. “But it’s worse than the fortress.”

  “It’s the way they live, feringhee,” Annabel muttered under her breath. Somehow, she didn’t have the patience to listen to the complaints of discomfort. The whole party made them to a greater or lesser degree, some serious, some with a redeeming note of humor, but only she seemed aware that what they grumbled at was the immutable lot of the majority of the Afghan people, struggling to scratch a bare subsistence in the short span allotted them between birth and death. There were times when the moans and incredulous criticisms irritated her beyond bearing.

  Kit heard the undertone and sighed, wondering for the thousandth time why the joy and relief they should have felt were so conspicuously absent, wondering what had happened to the passion and commitment of that night in Ayesha’s prison cell. Lovemaking was denied them in present circumstances—there was neither privacy nor opportunity—but they were together in this adversity and surely some closeness could come from that. But Annabel was distant and preoccupied. She treated her fellow prisoners for the most part with a degree of absentminded contempt that was all too reminiscent of Ayesha. And it was driving Kit to the edge of distraction, as much as anything because she seemed to treat him in the same way, as if he were an irrelevance to whatever preoccupied her. Had he been mistaken? If they emerged from this captivity, was it going to be possible for Annabel Spencer to return to the life she would have had but for a violent abduction? Was it even realistic for him to expect her to? And if it wasn’t, then what was realistic for either of them?

  She had dismounted and was engaged in discussion with their escort. He watched her, noticing how, while she no longer kept her eyes lowered when she spoke to them, she still behaved with a hint of deference. It angered him, as much as anything by the comparison with her attitude to her own people.

  “Six of the villagers have been instructed to give up their houses for us,” she said to Brigadier Shelton. “It will cause them and their families considerable hardship, so I suggest you accept the shelter with appropriate gratitude.”

  “How long are we to be here?”

  She shrugged. “They will not say. I expect they do not know. It depends on how matters are going with Akbar Khan. The villagers have also been instructed to feed us, something I don’t think they are too happy about it, since it’s the product of the sweat of their brows that’s to go into feringhee bellies, and they have little enough for themselves. I suggest you tell your people to behave with circumspection while they’re here.”

  Kit felt the last strand of patience and understanding tolerance snap as he saw the brigadier’s palpable annoyance at being spoken to in such fashion. He swung off his horse. “I apologize for Annabel, sir,” he said stiffly. “Standards of
courtesy in a zenana obviously fall somewhat short of what we are accustomed to.”

  The brigadier murmured some disclaimer as Annabel flushed to the roots of her copper hair with anger and embarrassment. “How dare you apologize for me?” she demanded.

  “It’s time,” he said grimly. “Past time. Let’s get this over with, shall we?” Taking her by the elbow, he hustled her down the narrow dirt track running through the center of the village toward a group of stunted, wind-deformed trees at the edge of the huddlement. The escort cast them a look of indifference. There was nowhere for two unarmed pedestrians to go up here in the mountains.

  The hostages looked around the circle of sullen, dull-eyed men of Zandeh, who were staring with hostile incomprehension at their unwelcome infidel visitors. There were no women in sight, although they were all conscious of unseen eyes upon them. It was not an audience to dispel unease.

  Well out of earshot amongst the deformed trees, Kit and Annabel faced each other.

  “I have tried to be understanding,” he said. “But I seem to have run out of patience. What do you want, Anna?”

  “Want?” She turned from him with a gesture of dismissal. “What has want to do with anything?”

  “Don’t turn away from me, you arrogant green-eyed lynx!”

  She swung around to face him again. “I did not mean to offend, Ralston, huzoor.”

  “Oh, no,” he said softly. “Never again will you call me that, and never again will you throw ‘feringhee’ at me. Now, what do you want of me?”

  “Of you? Why should I want anything of you? Why should I want anything of anyone?”

  “Because I love you, you provoking woman!” He took her by the shoulders and shook her as he had so often wanted to do. “And when people love each other, they want and expect things of each other, and they want and expect to give things to each other. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  “It’s not easy to understand anything when my head feels as if it’s about to leave my shoulders,” she cried. “Please stop.”

  “Oh, God!” He pulled her against him with a violence akin to the shaking. “I knew one day you were going to drive me to that.” He pushed her hair away from her forehead, ran his flat palm over her face, molding her features against his hand in a gesture of rough need, as if he had to reacquaint himself in haste and desperation with a temporarily lost intimate. “Anna … my darling Anna, you must help me. Tell me what I can do to make things right between us.”

  She heard his desperate unhappiness, and slowly the recognition of how selfish she had been filtered through her self-absorption. Locked in her own little world of confusion, she had ignored Kit’s confusion. It had seemed to her that he had no right to feel confused, since he was where he had always been, with the people who formed his customary framework. She was the one wrenched from the familiar, forced to make a place for herself with people diametrically opposed to those who had formed her customary framework. And in some perverse fashion, it seemed to her that she had not asked for any of this to happen, in which case Kit was to blame for her bewilderment. She appeared to have lost her lofty belief in Destiny, and was laying the blame for her present distress squarely at the door of the most convenient target… and the one most undeserving of her unkindness. So she had pushed him away and treated her fellow travelers with a contemptuous indifference that ignored their justified fears and miseries and hurt Kit abominably.

  “I think perhaps you’d better shake me again,” she said with a rueful smile. “I don’t know how you’ve put up with me … or why. I’ve been horrid.”

  He drew back and regarded her quizzically. “Now what game are you playing?”

  “Oh, unjust!” she cried. “I apologize and you accuse me of game-playing.”

  “Well, you must admit it’s a trifle sudden,” he said, continuing to scrutinize her expression. “If a little judicious violence can achieve such an about face, what would a little equally judicious loving achieve, I ask myself?”

  “Perhaps you should try it and see,” she said softly, putting her arms around his neck, standing on tiptoe as she brought her mouth to his.

  He held her for a moment, then said as softly as she, “I never refuse a challenge, responsibility of mine. If we have an audience, to hell with it!”

  She laughed, a low sensual chuckle of excitement, and her eyes glimmered their imp of Satan smile as she went down to the grass under his peremptory hand.

  “The grass is damp,” she murmured in mock complaint as he stripped off her trousers and her bare backside and thighs made contact with the ground.

  “Easily remedied,” Kit returned, kicking free of his britches and coming down beside her. Slipping his hands beneath her, he rolled her on top of him. “There, better now?”

  “Much.” Her tongue touched her lips as she knelt astride him, running her hands up and under his tunic, whispering wickedly, “Supposing someone comes looking for us?”

  “For God’s sake stop dawdling, then, you impossible creature!” he ordered, then drew in his breath with sharp pleasure as she shifted backward, raising her hips to take the hard impaling shaft deep within herself.

  “I hear and obey,” she murmured, that same impish smile in her eyes. “Shall we see how fast we can be?”

  He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the swift, febrile, spiralling glory, his hands gripping her buttocks as she moved with ever increasing speed, bringing them both to a climax that sent delighted laughter dancing in the air.

  “Oh, my Anna,” he said on a sigh of bone-deep contentment. “How I’ve missed you. What a miracle worker you are.”

  “Not just a horrid, selfish, bad-tempered, ungrateful female?”

  “Well, that too,” he teased, lifting her off him. “But not all the time, fortunately. Hurry and get dressed. We’ve taken enough chances for one day.”

  He pulled on his own clothes and then stood watching her for a minute as she straightened her tunic, tucked a recalcitrant wisp of hair into the heavy braid. “Annabel?”

  “Yes?” She glanced up, then frowned. “You look very stern. What is it?”

  “I am about to issue an ultimatum,” he said.

  “Is that wise?” She was standing very still again, the jade eyes calm pools, hiding whatever she might be thinking.

  “I don’t know whether it is or not. But I do know that there will be no peace for me otherwise.”

  “So?”

  “A wedding,” he said. “Now.”

  “And if I say not?”

  He sighed and rubbed his eyes wearily. “Then I will know that the love I have for you is not reciprocated. I cannot live with you with less, Annabel. But if that is the case, then I will promise to do all I can to help you establish yourself when … if … we get out of this hole.”

  “You will not renege on your responsibilities, in other words,” she said, a smile quirking her lips. “In the manner of all good English gentlemen.” She turned the bracelets that she still wore on her wrists. “Take them off for me.”

  “Give me the key.”

  She took it from the pocket of her chalvar. “Here.” She held out her wrists and he unlocked the clasps, sliding the bracelets off.

  “Is that your answer?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “What a complicated creature you are. Let us go and find the padre.”

  Lady Sale regarded them with shrewd eyes when they rejoined the other members of the party, who were dismally surveying their accommodations. “I trust you have come to an agreement.”

  “You could say that, ma’am … Annabel, where are you going?”

  “To talk to the aksakai,” she said. “I may be able to smooth matters a little.”

  “The brigadier has already talked to him,” her ladyship said, discreetly averting her gaze as Kit lunged for Annabel in the manner of a huntsman laying hands on escaping prey.

  “Yes, but he may not have understood fully,” she said. “Kit, I will be back in
a minute.”

  “Lady Sale, do you know where I may find the padre?” Kit asked, maintaining his hold. “There are some words I want spoken without delay.”

  “Well, I do think it’s about time,” said her ladyship, having no difficulty understanding what the captain intended. “But I do wish we could have made a little ceremony of it. I feel I owe it to poor dear Letty.”

  “I think my mother would understand the circumstances,” Kit reassured her soothingly. Her ladyship pursed her lips but did not look displeased as she hurried off to set matters in motion.

  “Annabel, if you keep trying to wriggle away, we are going to have a falling out.” Kit tightened his grip on her wrist as she attempted a second plunging bid for freedom.

  “Another one?” She wiped her brow with an exaggerated gesture. “Heaven forbid.” But her eyes smiled and there was much more than mischief in the smile. “I’m not running away, love. Where do you think I would go, even if I wanted to?”

  “And you don’t want to?”

  “Have I not said so?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” he tossed back at her, but released his grip on her hand. “I am afraid something will happen to prevent this. I can’t help it, Anna.”

  “Nothing will prevent it,” she reassured him. “What happens afterward is more uncertain.”

  “I’ll worry about that afterward. I am going to get this organized. Just make sure that when I need you, I can find you.”

  “Yes, Ralston, huzoor,” she teased. “Your bride will be waiting for you. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can find a veil.”

  “That,” Kit said bluntly, “is a joke in very poor taste.”

  Annabel laughed and swung off down the track. If a wedding would make Kit happy, what right had she to deprive him simply because she didn’t need a wedding to underscore love? In the scheme of things, it could make little difference. It was just a convention that mattered to Kit. But she knew Destiny had not finished with them yet. They might have the freedom to be together, but they were not clear. Something more than the simple fact of captivity was still outstanding, although she couldn’t put it into words yet.