HEARTS AFLAME

by Nancy Morse

  For several moments all he could do was stare. She was unlike the women he saw at the Muthaiga Club who wore their hair in finger-waved bobs, flattened their breasts and hips, hiked up their hems, and plucked their eyebrows, each one looking like their jazz-age American counterparts. With her dark hair hanging in loose waves to her shoulders, she was a vision from a bygone era, a rare and beautiful thing against all that was ordinary and familiar to him. She embraced a sensual, easy style that was uniquely her own. She didn’t need to wear short skirts, bob her hair or dance wildly to jazz on the gramophone. The mere fact of her chosen profession of photojournalism, a field dominated by men, was proof of her independent nature.

  He got up and stood there, feeling awkward, and said the only thing he could think of. “She walks in beauty, like the night.” The blue of his eyes was darker in the lamplight of the parlor but no less intense upon her face.

  Julia lowered her lashes, her gaze sweeping the floorboards beneath her shoes, seeking refuge from his stare and the intimacy of Lord Byron’s verse. “I don’t know why I brought this dress along. It’s not as if I planned on wearing it.” Moving away nervously, she glanced around, and said, “This is such a lovely room.”

  There was a quiet confidence to the room. Deep, comfortable chairs and a sofa covered in washed cotton were arranged intimately around a stone fireplace within which a fire blazed, for even in summer the nights were cold in the hills. Nestled between the chairs was a small table for afternoon tea. Two bookcases hugged the wall on either side the fireplace. A writing desk was situated at the window. Portiers of damask framed a passage into the front hall. On the white plaster walls were hung groups of framed engravings. The smell of polish, the wood paneling, and the animal skins laid over the creaking floorboards gave the room an easy, unpretentious look.

  “Where did all these things come from?” she asked.

  “My parents had most of them shipped over from England when we emigrated here. These were some of my mother’s most treasured possessions. I’ve added a few things over the years, but for the most part, not much has changed.”

  She wandered over to one of the bookcases flanking the stone fireplace and ran her finger along leather-bound volumes of Dickens, Hardy, and Eliot. “Were these hers?”

  “No. The books are mine.”

  Turning back to the room, she said, “The bedroom furnishings seem somehow different from the rest of the house.”

  “That’s because my grandfather brought them back from India.”

  “He must have been quite the adventurer.”

  “He was. Until he set eyes on Africa. He convinced my parents to pack up and move here. He and my father built this house.”

  “Your father must have had a bit of the adventurer in him as well to leave England and come here. What was he like?”

  “My father was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was the perpetual adolescent, always eager for an adventure. He loved this land and the freedom it symbolized.”

  “He would have made a good Wyoming cowboy.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “America would not have been his cup of tea. He was educated and adventurous, but not very ambitious. He never saw the need to work particularly hard. He spent much of his time taking British hunters out on safari, until he was killed by a big tusker.”

  “How dreadful. That must have been very hard on your mother.”

  “All of Africa was hard on her. I was five years old when we emigrated from England to Africa. For four pounds per acre, a hefty price in those days, my grandfather purchased one thousand acres of land here in the Ngong hills hoping to carve out a future. He tried flax until the market collapsed, then switched to coffee. My mother did the best she could to adjust, but thirty years ago, Nairobi was just a bunch of corrugated iron shacks teeming with Indians, Somalis, Abyssinians, and natives from all over Africa. There wasn’t much of a social life here. The Muthaiga Club opened about eight years ago. It’s a place for the elite white society to gather. She would have liked it. She didn’t live long enough to see what happened to my father. She died the year before from malaria. It was from my grandfather that I learned how to work the farm. He spent most of his last years at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi with the old boys, consuming copious amounts of gin. One day, while standing at the bar, he just keeled over and died. That year the harvest was a miserable seventy tons. When he left, it was as if he took the life of the farm with him.”

  “What about you?”

  “I attended the European School in Nairobi with the children of other white settlers, and then University College in Reading where I received a diploma in agriculture. I couldn’t wait to get back Africa. We were never rich on the farm, but it took hold of me and never let go. To me, this has always been home. My grandfather used to take me hunting with him when I was a boy. He’d bring down some big game, but even at that young age I couldn’t see the point in killing for sport. Aside from that, this place was one big playground for me. From our old Punjabi cook I learned how to wind a turban, and from the native boys I learned how to throw a spear. I must have been quite a sight, a little white boy running around with a turban on his head, throwing spears at the workers. It wasn’t so much the spears my mother objected to as it was the turban covering my hair. It was much lighter than it is now, and she adored it.”

  Julia could just picture him as a beautiful little blond-haired boy, a stunning contrast to the dark-skinned native children with whom he ran wild. But that precocious boy was now a handsome, broad-shouldered, potent man. He was rugged, and yet, from everything she saw around her, also refined, a compelling contradiction of old-world British charm and raw African tenacity. A solid, untamable man with a powerfully independent spirit who set her heart beating erratically.

  For several wordless moments their gazes locked. The scratch of the needle over the disc infiltrated the silence strung like a tight wire between them. “I’d better see to that,” he said distractedly. Tearing his gaze from hers, he strode to the gramophone and lifted the needle.

  They were spared another prolonged moment of awkward silence when Raj Singh poked his turbaned head into the parlor and announced that dinner was being served.

  In the dining room an ecru cloth was spread over the table that was set with sparkling white dinnerware and bowls. Gleaming silver candlesticks and the candelabras atop the sideboard threw light across the wood paneled walls, and the yellow glow of candles on the table was captured in the cut crystal glassware.

  Jonathan held the chair out for Julia, and after he was seated to her left, he reached for a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem and poured the Bordeaux into two glasses.

  Julia smiled with appreciation. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen an alcoholic beverage. Even wine has been banned since Congress passed the Volstead Act.”

  “Ah, yes, Prohibition. You Yanks have a funny way of doing things. But from what I hear, you have developed a way to get around it.”

  “Bootlegging is big business. As long as people want their alcohol, there will always be men who provide it.”

  “You mean gangsters,” he said wryly.

  She took a sip of wine. “Where do you buy this?”

  “I don’t. Kermit has it sent to me from France”

  “Kermit?”

  “Roosevelt. Teddy’s son.”

  “President Roosevelt?”

  “None other. I had the honor of meeting him when he and Kermit were on safari here in oh-nine. Kermit and I remained friends. He claims this vintage is head and shoulders above any he’s ever tasted, and I’m inclined to agree.”

  Roosevelt. A taste for expensive wine. Literature. Poetry. Beethoven. What else was there to discover about this man, Julia wondered as she sipped the Bordeaux. To her chagrin, she was not surprised by what she was learning about him. It was as if she somehow knew. She stifled a little laugh, for that simply could not be possible.

  Raj Singh appeared balancing a sterling sil
ver tray on his palm.

  When the tray was set down on the table, Jonathan asked, “What happened to the guineafowl you went out for?”

  The Indian cook shook his head. “Could not find any guineafowl, Sahib. Chicken tikka masala will have to do.”

  “I saw plenty of them on the ride back to the farm earlier,” Jonathan said. “But that’s all right. This smells delicious.”

  Nutmeg, coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and ginger filled the room with a magical aroma. He speared a grilled chunk of chicken from its bed of Indian flatbread and placed it on Julia’s plate along with some rice and watched her take a bite. “What do you think?”

  “It’s delicious. I’ve never tasted anything like it.”

  “At least not that you can remember,” he said.

  She conceded with a hapless shrug. “There’s so much I don’t remember. I’m a stranger to myself.”

  “There are plenty of people who would forget some things if only they could.”

  “What things would you forget?”

  Not you. Never you. “The war, for one.”

  “It must have been difficult fighting German guerrillas,” she said without thinking.

  He laid his fork down and looked at her, the blue of his eyes brightening with hope. “How did you know I fought German guerrillas during the war?”

  “Did you?”

  “I did.”

  She stopped eating and went suddenly still, a cloud of confusion shadowing her lovely features. “How did I know that?”

  At the strain of panic he heard rising in her voice, he said, “British troops of the King’s African Rifles attacked German outposts near Lake Victoria. You must have read about it in the newspaper, and since I live here, it wouldn’t be too big a leap to assume I took part in the war.”

  Julia grew paler as she struggled to reconcile what was real and what was not. “Yes,” she said weakly, “I suppose you’re right.” Moonlight radiance flooded the room, catching her face in shadow and light and lingering on the distraught look in her eyes. “I have to find Roger.”

  Every muscle in Jonathan’s body tensed. She called a man she did not know by his first name as if there were an intimate history between them. He could have told her the truth, but she would not have believed him. As much as he rebelled against it, he had no choice but to keep silent. He had his own selfish reason for wanting her to remember, but it wasn’t about him. It was about her and the missing pieces of her past that would haunt her forever.

  He recalled the time hunters had captured a pair of giraffes and caged them for the boat ride back to England to be put on display. They had brought them by the farm on their way to Mombasa. He would never forget the look of fear and desperation in the eyes of those animals and his mother’s bitter whisper that she hoped they would die before they reached England to be spared a life of confinement. That must be what Julia felt, he thought, confined in a cage of amnesia.

  The rest of the meal passed between silence and small talk. Whipping the linen napkin from his knee, he rose and went to her. “Come on.” He took her hand and drew her to her feet. “Raj Singh can serve us coffee on the veranda.”

  Outside, shadows crept across the land and disappeared over the peaks in a ridge along the Great Rift Valley. Jonathan lifted the smudged shade of a hurricane lamp and lit the wick. The darkness gave way to the golden glow of the lantern, and the penetrating stillness was broken only by the squeak of the screen door hinges and the shuffle of Raj Singh’s bare feet when he appeared with a serving tray which he set down on the tea table.

  “Thank you,” Jonathan said. “I won’t be needing you for the rest of the night.”

  With a look of cool disdain, the cook disappeared back into the house.

  Julia accepted the cup of coffee Jonathan poured, and said, “Is it me, or is he just naturally unfriendly?”

  He leaned back in the wicker chair and sipped his coffee. “The Indians recently turned down the offer of two seats on the legislative council because they claim it’s not representative of the size of their community. Tensions are naturally a little high. You can’t blame them for wanting the same rights as the white settlers. I suspect he’s been meeting with other Indians in secret and doesn’t want me to know about it.”

  “I can imagine how he feels,” she said. “In America, women only recently won the right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. I can’t tell you how good it felt to be able to vote in the recent election. It was as if a whole new future had opened up for me. Now,” she added, her voice taking on a wistful note, “if only the past would open up.”

  She lifted her head and smiled, sparking an emotion in him so swift and strong he felt as if he’d been punched. He swallowed hard, his mouth tightening. “What will you do if…when…you do remember and it’s not what you expected?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “I never considered it.”

  Jonathan regarded the coffee in his cup and let the silence lengthen. He had considered it from the instant he found out about her amnesia. What if she remembered and didn’t feel the same way about him as before? What if she remembered and hated him for not having protected her? What if…what if… The agony of unanswered questions was driving him crazy.

  “Are you cold?” he asked when he saw her shiver.

  “A little. I left my shawl in the bedroom.” She began to rise, but his hand, warm and solid on her forearm, halted her motion.

  “I’ll get it for you.”

  She watched the long line of his body disappear into the house. Closing her eyes, she hugged herself, not against the chill of the night, but against the need that welled up inside of her. The need to be touched by him, kissed by him, taken by him. What was happening to her? Why did she have this inexplicable urge to be wrapped in the protection of his arms? Why did she feel such an overwhelming connection to a man she scarcely knew?

  So caught up was she between want and need that she did not hear the screen door open and close or the sound of his boot heels against the planks. There drifted into her nostrils the scent of palm and olive oil from the soap he used mingled with the natural musk of his skin, creating a heady fragrance that was impossible to ignore. She felt the soft weight of the shawl he draped over her shoulders and trembled when his fingers lingered. His hand slid downward. The breath caught in her throat and her head fell back to rest against his torso as he ran his thumb along her spine.

  He bent close, his warm breath upon her neck, his voice a desperate whisper at her ear.

  “Julia.”

  One word, her name, carried a profound intimacy that both thrilled and frightened her. She knew where this was leading but she had neither the will nor the desire to stop it.

  He came around to the front of her chair and stood there looking down at her, a tall, broad-shouldered shape silhouetted against the night.

  She looked up into his eyes, struck by the desire to rise and melt against the protection of his embrace. He was so strong and self-assured, a powerful lure against the uncertainty that haunted her every moment.

  He smiled down at her, the blue of his eyes like the ocean at midnight, deep and dark. She felt herself drowning in their depths, with no lifeline to grasp and nothing to anchor her to reality.

  As if his eyes held the power to set her in motion, she rose and stood before him. For many long moments neither of them moved. Then, she felt him reach for her hand and lift it to his mouth and press light kisses to her wrist and palm. She swayed and leaned toward him. His arms went around her waist, pulling her against his chest.

  Her lips parted in anticipation of his kiss.

  It was gentle at first, a mere brush of his lips against hers. His hold slowly tightened. His mouth opened over hers and the kiss deepened and filled with urgency. He was all strength and power, comfort and salvation. She wound her arms around his neck and clung to him as if clinging to life, feeling wanted and alive, yes, alive for th
e first time in a very long time.

  Unlike the kiss in the kitchen that had been filled with urgency and desperation, this kiss had the feel and taste of love. She knew that could not be possible. She wasn’t in love with Jonathan Shane, nor he with her. But somewhere in the deep, dark cavern of her mind it evoked a familiarity, and she knew with all certainty that she had indeed loved a man with all her heart and soul before his face had been erased from her memory. Who was he? Where was he? Whoever he was, was her desire to be in this man’s arms a betrayal?

  Her emotions were spinning out of control. It was easy…too easy…to surrender to her desire, to let him carry her away from the uncertainty of her past and live only for tonight…for this moment. She longed to believe that he would not use her weakness against her, that she could trust him when there was so much about herself that she could not trust.

  It might not have been him she remembered, but Jonathan knew by the way her body arched and shuddered against his that she bloody well remembered what it was like to be loved and wanted and needed. He could have used that need to satisfy his own desperate longing. He could have laid her down on the floorboards, pushed her black silk dress up above her hips and taken her right there and then on the veranda.

  But he didn’t. With the blood pumping hot and heavy through his veins, he somehow found the strength to stop himself. He couldn’t do it. There was no way he could take advantage of her like this. Damn her and that supple, lithe body that had him acting like an adolescent with hormones running amok. But it was more than the sating of his physical desire. She didn’t remember the love they shared, but he did. He remembered every whisper of love and word of promise spoken between them. To take her now, when he was a stranger to her, would be to dishonor that love.

  His hands slid up her arms and rested upon her shoulders for a haunting instant before his fingers flexed against the tender flesh and tightened, pushing her away.

  The strain of quashed desire was evident in the rigid way he turned his head away from the look of surprise on her face and in the beat he lost when he said, “You’d better get some rest. We leave for Nairobi in the morning.”