The Wildest Heart

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by Rosemary Rogers


  “Mr. Wilkinson—Tom—I do wish you’d stop making a ridiculous fool of yourself!” I protested angrily, but my denial of his suddenly declared passion only seemed to make him more ardent.

  I moved backward, and he moved forward. I passed by the window, blinking in the light let in by the partially drawn blinds, and I saw him give a start of amazement.

  “You’re not wearing those spectacles today! I’ll be damned if you don’t have pretty eyes, after all. In fact, you’d make a handsome woman, once you’re dressed right and proper—damned if you won’t! And I’ll have the last laugh on all those others, won’t I?”

  By now I was as much annoyed with myself as I was with him. I stopped running from him and with my hand on the back of a chair, said forbiddingly, “Mr. Wilkinson, you are taking far too much for granted!”

  But I think he mistook my annoyance for an attempt to play coy, and shook a finger at me. “Come, come, Lady Rowena—or may I call you Rowena? Surely—yes, we cannot stand on formality now! I respect your shyness and your modesty, but after all, since we are to be engaged, a little kiss at least will not be out of order, would it?”

  At any other time I might have found some humor in the situation I now found myself in, but the expression on Tom Wilkinson’s face as he followed me around the room made me almost apprehensive.

  I retreated. He followed, still grinning, as if we were playing some kind of game.

  “Mr. Wilkinson,” I said firmly, “I hardly think it proper for us to be here alone. I’ve no desire to give rise to belowstairs gossip, and I’ve nothing to say to you. I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”

  “Ah, but I’m not ready to leave yet, and I’m sure you don’t want me to—not till I’ve said what I came here to say! Come, what’s the harm in a little kiss, eh? After all, we are to become engaged.”

  “I would not marry you, Mr. Wilkinson, if you were the last man on earth!” I said forcibly.

  “Want to play hard to get, don’t you? There’s no need for all that. I’ve made up my mind, you see!”

  Without warning he made a grab for me, and I found myself clutched in a man’s arms for the first time in my life, while he planted wet, repulsive kisses on my averted face and neck.

  “Give us a kiss, then, lass! Eh, will you stop struggling? I’ll be wanting more than just kisses when we’re wed, you know!”

  “Will you stop it?”

  Forgetting all my coolness I pushed violently against his chest with my hands, and when he still wouldn’t let me go, but kept muttering how pretty I was with my hair coming loose and my eyes not shielded by those ugly spectacles, I slapped his face as hard as I could.

  He released me and stumbled backward with an expression of shock and bewilderment on his face. I seized this respite to escape to the doorway. I was panting. I hadn’t realized until this moment how disgusted and how afraid I had been.

  With an effort, I managed to force some semblance of coldness into my voice as I told him I hoped he would manage to find his way out.

  His mouth twisted in an ugly fashion. “You bitch! By God, you’ll be sorry for what you just did!”

  I walked out of the room, and left him standing there, still mouthing threats at me. I heard his voice call after me as I began to ascend the staircase, forcing myself to walk slowly, and not to run from the sound of his words.

  “Think you’ll ever get yourself a husband, an ugly creature like you?” he shouted thickly. “Why, I’d never have offered for you in a thousand years if Sir Edgar and my da’ hadn’t cooked it all up between them! Offered to pay off all my gambling debts, they did. No wonder they’re anxious to get rid of you!”

  I found myself wondering where the servants were—hiding in doorways and broom closets, no doubt, the better to enjoy such a juicy little scene! I wanted to flee from that ugly, sneering voice, but I would not let myself; I was a Dangerfield, and the likes of Tom Wilkinson with his loud, vulgar voice, were beneath my attention.

  At last I had reached the head of the stairs, with my hands wet and sweaty, and my back stiff—and at last I heard the distant slam of a door somewhere below me.

  When I reached the safety of my room I was shaking. That ugly, vulgar, repulsive little man! How dare they send him to me, deeming him good enough for me? And even he had had to be bribed to make an offer for me!

  Ugly—dowdy—frumpish—a born spinster—was there really something wrong with me? Was I some kind of freak, set apart from other females?

  For the first time in my life, as I leaned against the door of my room and fought to control my emotions, I was conscious of a feeling of rebellion, of almost overpowering rage and humiliation. I had been brought up to believe that birth and education were enough, that I needed nothing else to make a success of my life. But—and the thought came insidiously, cracking the foundations of all my beliefs—had my grandfather been wrong? Had he deliberately turned me into an introverted bluestocking to protect me from the devil that was said to taint the Dangerfield blood?

  “I’m a woman—a woman!” I raged inwardly, and my fingers began to tear viciously at my ugly, constricting clothes. Perspiration had begun to pour from my body, trickling down the back of my neck, down my thighs and between my breasts.

  Still panting, hardly conscious of what I was doing, I found myself standing unashamedly naked before my mirror, my clothes strewn haphazardly around the room. My hair hung down about my shoulders and tickled the back of my waist, and my eyes looked enormous in the whiteness of my face. Was this the real Rowena? What had happened to the laughing girl who had worn a sari and an exotic black caste mark between her brows? The same girl who might have married a prince? “Do you think you’re living in a fairy tale?” I had chided myself then, proud of my own good sense and practical turn of mind. But I should have married Shiv. I should have stayed in India! I was a stranger among strangers here.

  Suddenly, I saw myself as I had been then, viewing my reflection in a polished silver mirror. Perhaps if I wished hard enough Shiv would appear behind me, as he had on that day, striding in with his high, polished boots and fawn jodhpurs, the white silk turban he wore giving him an air of barbaric splendor. Dear Shiv—my brightest memory!

  The sari, carefully packed away in layers of tissue paper, emerged like a jeweled treasure from the bottom of my small, battered trunk. It was made of gossamer sheer silk that shimmered when the light caught it—a deep blue-violet shade that Shiv had told me matched my eyes. A design worked in gold covered the material like an intricate spider web, and the pallau—the section that was meant to be draped around its wearer’s head—was even more resplendent with gold than the rest of the sari.

  A garment fit for a queen—the gift of an Indian prince. What was I thinking of as I slowly wound it around my body as the women had taught me? Did I imagine that I would be magically transformed into a princess? I cannot remember what thoughts went through my head, but when I put it on I shook my hair loose so that its straight, fine strands hung about my face, giving it a shadowed, mysterious look.

  Beneath the thin material my pale flesh seemed to take on an amber glow as I saw myself outlined against the fire—all subtle shadings of hollows and curves. Seized by a strange, trancelike feeling, I stared at myself, and it was like looking at the shadowy portrait of a stranger. Was that exotic creature in the mirror really me? All the features I had so despised in my face seemed to take on a new, softer look. I felt like Narcissus discovering his own beauty in a pool of water, and could not stop staring at myself.

  I think I was a little mad that afternoon. Not only did I look like a stranger, but even my thoughts were not my own. I remember putting my hand up to touch my face, as if I could not believe it was mine, and the gesture had a strangely sensuous grace I had never possessed before. I was a woman, discovering her own beauty before a mirror—an Indian princess, carefully cloistered from men, and yet born to please them… and then, with a shattering force, the spell was broken.

  I had
n’t heard the door open until it slammed shut behind him, and I whirled around with an involuntary, gasping cry of fear.

  “What in hell do you mean, treating Tom that way? I tell you, girl, once and for all…”

  He had begun to shout at me in his loud, blustering voice, and I smelled the liquor on his breath as he came closer. And then his words trailed away as his jaw dropped, and I saw the look in his eyes as they slowly widened and then became narrow.

  “Good God!” he said, very slowly, and I saw the look of rage on his face replaced by something else. “Are you really the shy little spinster we all took you for? Is this what you’ve been hiding away all these months under those ugly clothes you wear? For what lover are you guarding those treasures I see, little Rowena?”

  For those few moments, while he was talking to me in that strange, thick voice, while his eyes were moving greedily over my body, I remained as frozen as a marble statue, incapable of motion, or of coherent thought.

  And then Sir Edgar began to laugh, and his arms reached for me.

  “To think—to think you had me fooled—all these months, and right under my own roof too. Why, you’re a raving beauty, girl! The prettiest body—”

  “No!” I remember saying. Had I already, without any experience to warn me, sensed his purpose? I had meant to scream the word, but it came out as a choking whisper from my dry throat.

  And then, when he put his hands on me, it was too late. My pride would not let me cry out aloud and beg him for mercy, and nor, I think, would it have done any good, for he had become a man possessed by lust.

  I struggled—I beat at him with my fists and kept on struggling until I was half-swooning with exhaustion. Somehow he had dragged me over to the bed, ripping my lovely sari off my body with his greedy, grasping fingers. His face loomed over mine and I heard him mutter hoarsely.

  “God, you’re a lovely thing! I’ve got to have you, don’t you understand that? You’ve no right to hide such beauty away—no right to wear any clothes at all with a body like yours…”

  He kissed me, his mouth covering mine, stifling me so that now I panted and gasped for breath and heard the strange, whimpering noises that came from the back of my throat.

  The weight of his body pressed me down until I felt my back must surely break. But that pain was forgotten when a worse one took its place—a terrible searing agony like a knife thrust between my thighs. I would have screamed, then, if his mouth had not been pressed over mine. I remember that my body arched with shock as he gasped, groaned, and shuddered against me.

  It was over. He still leaned heavily above me, his sweat dripping onto my still body, but the terrible pain I had felt was gone, succeeded by a sticky wetness that I knew was blood.

  Of course. It’s normal for a virgin to bleed when she first lies with a man. I remember lying there, feeling as if every bone in my body had turned to water. I was no longer a virgin. I had been raped by my own stepfather. I watched his face change, its muscles growing slack as the taut expression of lust was wiped out by the gradual realization of what he had done.

  He suddenly rolled away from me with a groan, and I lay there watching him as he staggered to his feet, fingers fumbling with his clothing.

  “Dear God, Rowena! I didn’t know. Girl, just seeing you the way you were, half-naked—so lovely—I don’t know what got into me!”

  “It’s too late to feel guilty now, isn’t it?”

  Was that my own voice I heard, sounding so calm, so dead? Suddenly I felt a sickening feeling of distaste for the soiled, stained sheets I was lying on. Without looking at Sir Edgar, who still stood there watching me, I used the corner of the sheet to wipe the blood from my thighs fastidiously, and then I stood up, and brushed past him, to walk to the mirror.

  I think I wanted to see if I had changed in any way—if my face would carry the marks of my experience, but it looked unchanged. Pale, still a stranger’s face, with black hair lying in tangles around it. “It shows in the eyes, when a maiden becomes a woman.” Where had I heard that? But my eyes showed nothing, except a kind of blankness.

  Without knowing why I did it, I seized my silver-backed brush off the dressing table and began to brush my hair, with long, viciously tugging strokes. Perhaps I was suffering from shock, perhaps my strange action was due to my instinct of self-preservation that fought to keep me sane by forcing me to concentrate on some small, ordinary task.

  Strange as it seems, I had almost forgotten Sir Edgar’s presence as I stood there at my mirror, with not a stitch of clothing to cover my nakedness. And then he came up behind me. I saw him in the glass, his eyes gleaming with a strange light, his mouth twisted in a smile.

  “Damnation, but you’re a lovely creature! First virgin I ever took without paying for it. Only one who didn’t cry afterwards. You’re a strange girl, aren’t you?”

  He put a hand on my bare shoulder, and although I stiffened, I didn’t flinch away from him. He gave a small, satisfied chuckle.

  “You’re sensible. I like that. So cold, so lovely—” his voice dropped, and I heard him say softly, “You’re the kind of woman who can carry off diamonds, you know. With that dark hair and your eyes—yes, by God, you’re a diamond girl, all right! And I want to make it up to you. See here, Rowena, I’m not a brute, I’m a fair man, and I can be generous too.”

  He quickly left the room and I remained standing, trancelike, before the mirror.

  I saw something sparkling in his hand as he returned and my arms dropped to my sides, very slowly, as I felt him lift the heavy mass of my hair—felt a coldness like ice around my throat.

  “There!” he said triumphantly. “There, now. Look at yourself in the glass, girl! You should not wear anything else. Diamonds—and maybe sapphires on some occasions, to match your eyes. What do you say, eh? I’d be kind to you—wouldn’t hurt you again for all the world. Dress you in jewels.”

  His hands, with the reddish brown hairs on the back of his fingers, slid slowly down my shoulders, and still I did not move, but my eyes met his levelly in the glass.

  “What exactly are you suggesting to me, Sir Edgar? Are you attempting to bribe me not to tell anyone what you have done, or are you proposing I become your mistress?”

  I felt his fingers tighten about my arms for an instant, and then he swung me around to face him.

  “Will you always be so cold? There’s flame burning under the iciness of a diamond, Rowena. I’d like to uncover the fire in you!”

  I stood passively in his crushing embrace, and watched his eyes search my body greedily. I felt nothing, except for a slight soreness between my thighs. Was that all there was to the act of love between a man and a woman? Love, lust. I suppose the two were inextricable.

  “Rowena—Rowena! Now that I’ve discovered you for myself, I’ll not let you go.”

  When his mouth had lifted itself from mine I twisted from his grasp and went back to brushing my hair. If I had a thought at that moment it was, strangely, that I hated my mother even more than I despised her husband. This was the man she had left my father for—this man who had so little self-control that he had taken her own daughter by force only moments before, and now proposed to make her his mistress! This same man, who had seemed so arrogant and overbearing at the beginning, but now pleaded with me for warmth and a response to his bestial embraces. He could have overpowered me again by sheer brute strength, but no. He wanted more. He wanted response—the feigned passion of a whore! Was that the only way a woman could dominate a man? How easy it would be to exploit this man. Yes, and to make my mother suffer too! If I wanted to…

  “For God’s sake, girl, aren’t you going to say anything to me?” He was pleading again, eyes almost haggard now. “What’s done is done. I would have preferred it to have happened differently, but I had had too much to drink at the club, and when Tom came storming in—”

  For the first time since Sir Edgar had entered my room, a spark of anger pierced my defensive shell of reserve. “Don’t speak to
me of Tom Wilkinson! To think you sent him to me, knowing I’d be alone—to think you considered him good enough for me!”

  “No, girl, no! But how was I to know! By God, I think I’d kill that young pup if I thought he’d touched you! Didn’t I just say I’d make it all up to you, for everything? Listen—” his voice became feverish, his hands touched my shoulders again as if he could not help himself—“listen, you shall have everything, anything you want, do you hear? Fine, fashionable clothes, jewels—would you like your own horse to ride in the park? A small carriage? I’m a rich man.”

  “And how will you explain your sudden generosity to—your wife?”

  Deliberately I hesitated before my choice of a word, and he flushed dully.

  “Don’t turn hard, girl. Fanny—well, you don’t know her, do you? She—she’s not the same. Always those headaches, dragging me off to dull dinners.”

  “Don’t you mean that my mother is no longer young—and I am?”

  He could find nothing to say to refute my blunt statement, and I moved away from him.

  “Please, I’m rather tired now. I think I would like a bath.”

  I was trying my power over him already, and we both knew it.

  He looked at me, at my body, and I saw his shoulders sag.

  “I’ll—I’ll send Jenks in to you. She won’t talk—owes me too much. I’ll have her move you to the blue room. It’s larger, and has a view of the park. And—we’ll talk tomorrow?”

  “Perhaps,” I said coldly. And for the moment, that was the end of it. He left my room and I was alone again. Automatically, I took my one, ugly flannel dressing gown from the wardrobe and draped it around myself.

  “Vanity, Rowena! It was your own vanity that caused this to happen.”

  Why did I suddenly imagine I could hear my grandfather’s voice? Deliberately I shut it out. He had educated my mind, but taught me nothing about the world as it was. I had realized, in the space of an afternoon, that I was ignorant in many other ways. All of my education had not taught me to get along with other human beings, any more than my birth and breeding had protected me. For the first time, I realized that I was completely alone, with only myself to depend upon. And yet, somehow I would survive—and I would use any methods I could think of to do so.

 

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