Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  “Perhaps you should spread some newspapers before you open them up,” Laddy said. “Brigit won’t thank you for a carpet covered with foam bits—they’re the devil to clean up.”

  Richard looked at her in amazement. “Brigit?” he exclaimed. “How on earth do you know the name of our daily?”

  Laddy laughed. “I had to stop in at the store to ask directions,” she explained, and Richard rolled his eyes.

  “I’m not sure a village was the best place to bring you for anonymity,” he said to Mischa. “You’d be less likely to be noticed in Trafalgar Square!” He stood up. “And the Lord knows we’d better not have Brigit talking about bits of foam on the carpet.”

  Helping him spread yesterday’s Times over the sea-blue carpet, Laddy wondered whether he was concerned that the press might hear about the guest at Tymawr House or that someone else might. Another stranger in the village of Trefelin, perhaps, who might have an undue interest in the doings at Tymawr House.

  “I suppose a knife would do the trick,” Richard said when he had laid the cushions in the centre of the Times front page—right beside the old familiar picture of Soviet dissident Mikhail Busnetsky. Laddy gazed down at the ink-on-newsprint face and then up into the eyes of the real man, and it was as though in a single second she catapulted through the eight years between the two faces. “Or scissors, if I knew where they were...” Richard was saying, as he moved to the door.

  “Where is the bag of valuables I brought with me?” Mischa Busnetsky asked suddenly, surprising them both, and then got up and left the room. Laddy and Richard blinked at each other.

  When he returned, Mischa was carrying a tiny flat object wrapped in a bit of dirty paper, and he sat down in the chair and painstakingly unwrapped it. In a moment he held a small black object up to view. “One of the valuables they sent with me out of prison,” he said softly.

  It was a razor blade. Mischa Busnetsky regarded it with a bemused air. “Two days ago,” he said, “this could have been traded for some hot food—the equivalent of two weeks of life for someone. Now it is worth a few pence.” He laughed wryly. “And it will serve to cut open a pair of cushions.”

  He dropped it gently onto Laddy’s extended palm, and she looked down at it for a moment. Then slowly and deliberately she closed her fist over the blade, feeling the sharp edges slicing into her palm, and she smiled at Mischa with a small smile through the pain.

  When he understood what she was doing, he made a sharp exclamation, leaned forward and grasped her wrist. His grip was rough; she might bruise.

  “Let go!” he ordered harshly, and she opened her hand flat and stared at the bright droplets of blood against her flesh.

  Mischa Busnetsky shook her hand so that the razor blade dropped onto the newsprint. Then he pressed his lips to her palm and she felt his mouth move over her wound.

  After a moment he closed his eyes and Laddy gazed at his bent head, with its close-cropped, almost shaven hair, and suddenly, kneeling there on the floor with his dark head bent over her, she was trembling. It was a painful, aching trembling that choked off her breathing, and when she saw that he was trembling as much as she, she bit her lip against a moan.

  Richard Digby looked at them like a swimmer in the shallows vaguely recognizing that someone was diving to depths he scarcely knew existed, and at his awkward movement Mischa raised his head.

  “Let us look at the manuscripts,” he said calmly, and the razor blade that two days ago would have bought extra weeks of life for someone sliced open the bright cheap cotton of two homemade cushions and then was dropped and lay useless on a day-old headline.

  Moments later, two black oilskin-wrapped packages lay on the newsprint. Mischa’s hand dusted the foam from one of them and brought it up on his lap to unwrap it.

  “To Make Kafka Live,” he translated the title page, then flipped the pages slowly under his thumb. “This one indeed they will not like to see in print,” he said quietly, and she knew that someone might well have thought that the suppression of this manuscript was worth a life. Her father’s life.

  She swallowed. But it had been the way her father had chosen to live, and she must not dishonour him now by laying his death at Mischa Busnetsky’s door, even in her thoughts.

  Mischa passed the manuscript across to Richard as though his interest would be somehow personal, and suddenly Laddy remembered that Richard Digby was a respected literary agent.

  “Do you want to have a go at translating it yourself?” he asked. Mischa waved his hand as he bent to pick up the other package. “My English will not stretch to that, I think,” he said.

  He unwrapped the second package and stopped short as he read the title page. He laughed a little; his eyes flicked to Laddy and then into the distance, and he smiled at a memory.

  “This one is not political, I am afraid,” he said to Richard. “It is fiction. In fact, it is a love story. Odd that your father should have acquired this one,” he said to Laddy. “Perhaps he took what he could get.”

  “What’s the title of it?” she asked, for three months ago she had sewn the manuscripts up in her cushions without having the courage to look at them.

  His dark eyes held hers as though he wished to see the first reaction in her eyes.

  “Love of a Lady,” he said quietly, and she looked at him and knew that nothing would ever hurt her again.

  Chapter 6

  Richard Digby took the manuscripts and went to his study to begin the work of finding publishers and translators for them. Already he was talking about simultaneous publication for the two very different works.

  Mischa smiled at her slowly when Richard had gone. “He is very excited about this,” he said. “He thought he would have to wait for me to write something, and here are two books ready and waiting.”

  “It’s a literary coup,” Laddy said. “He’ll get a very good advance for you, I’m sure—I wonder if he’ll put the books on auction. By this time next month you might be rich.”

  “Good,” Mischa said, and smiled. He stopped for a moment and breathed deeply. “I am very tired,” he said simply. “I tire easily.”

  It did not seem in the least odd that she should get up to stand beside him and stroke his forehead with a cool hand, nor that he should rest his head against her breast in fatigue, like a battle-weary warrior. It seemed fitting, like something that had been destined from before time.

  After a moment she felt him take a long breath, then he stood up and smiled down at her through what she could see was deep exhaustion.

  “If I lie down here, you will stay?” he queried, and she nodded, unable to speak. Nothing and no one could have made her leave his side in that moment.

  He lay on the long blue-flowered sofa in the shadowed part of the room, and she put a blanket over him, drew a chair up close and sat watch.

  “Talk to me,” he commanded quietly. “Tell me everything about your life that I have missed. Tell me about your eight years.” His voice began to grate with exhaustion. “I cannot speak to ask questions, so you must remember everything for me.”

  She told him then, about university and her first job, the excitement of being a reporter, getting a job on the Herald, her father’s death. She told him everything about herself, in a quiet, slow voice.

  Everything—except the central fact of her existence; everything, except the fact that she had been in love with a memory through all those years—with the memory of a man of indomitable courage whom she had fully expected never to see again. She talked as though her only guiding light had been her work, her career. She told him only half a truth, because at twenty-five she no longer had the courage she had had at seventeen, the simple courage to touch his hand and say, “I love you,” without knowing for certain whether he wanted that love or not.

  She talked about learning of his release with only the faintest betrayal of emotion in her tone, talked about how Harry had rewritten her story, how she had worked to find him so that she could deliver his manuscrip
ts to him.

  But she did not tell him of the letters she had written him, all those years ago, the parcels she had sent—or the ache in her heart when she had finally stopped asking her father which prison he was in.

  He might read those things between the lines, if he wanted to. Or if he asked her one question, she might have the courage to tell him all that she wanted to say.

  But he was at the point of collapse. He did not speak at all. He listened, he heard every word, and when she stopped speaking he said, “Your voice is like moving water,” and turned his head and fell asleep.

  * * *

  “How long did you actually spend in prison?” Dr. Edmund Bear asked Mischa as they all sat in the sitting room after dinner that evening.

  “Most of the past nine years,” Mischa replied, “in prisons or hospitals or camps.”

  While Laddy had slept that afternoon in the little blue-and-white bedroom that was prepared for her, Dr. Bear, a friend of Richard and Helen’s who practiced chiropractic and nutritional therapy, had come from London to examine Mischa.

  “Well,” he said now, “I don’t want to underestimate what you’ve been through, but you’re in remarkable shape for someone who’s suffered what you have.

  “Naturally, you’ll have to take things slowly at first while you build up your health. But I’ve seen a number of exiles over the past few years, and I think you must have had the constitution of a horse to begin with.”

  Edmund Bear, a vital middle-aged man with warm brown skin and a Canadian accent, looked as though he had never suffered a day’s poor health in his life. No doubt he knew about strong constitutions, Laddy thought, but she was remembering the sudden exhaustion she had seen in Mischa’s eyes.

  “That’s not to say that you’re not feeling hellishly weak right now, of course,” Dr. Bear continued. “But with good food—Helen knows all about that—lots of rest and some exercise, you’ll start to recover, all right. There’s no serious pathological damage. And the important thing to remember is patience. You can’t recover nine years in a few weeks.”

  Laddy watched Mischa Busnetsky sip his coffee while he listened to Dr. Bear. Was he a patient man? She knew nothing about him—everything and nothing.

  Richard laughed. “Are you feeling hellishly weak, Mischa? No one would have known it this morning!” He turned to his wife and Edmund Bear and smilingly explained, “If you can believe it, we were suspicious of Laddy here this morning, and while I was still wondering what to do, Mischa took her down in a flying tackle that would have done credit to—”

  “What?” Helen stared at her husband in amazement while Laddy and Mischa exchanged a glance. Laddy felt her cheeks flush.

  “Mischa held her down while I very tamely went through her handbag,” Richard said. “Fortunately, before too much damage was done, I found her name and remembered who she was.”

  Mischa held Laddy’s eye. “Not before the damage was done,” he said quietly, for her ears alone, and she remembered his body on hers and the way the grip of his hands had changed from anger to possession....She could not look away.

  “Well, there you are,” said the doctor. “The reserves of strength in the human body fool us every time. I would have said you couldn’t easily have sustained such a shock.”

  And his glance flicked almost unconsciously between herself and Mischa, and Laddy understood with a little jolt that Dr. Edmund Bear had picked up on what was between them, while Helen—and perhaps even Richard—had not. She was intrigued by what had given him that sensitivity towards other people. Was it professional expertise or personal experience?

  “You have treated other exiles?” Mischa asked him then, and Edmund Bear explained that he was a member of the ICF and usually looked after the treatment of the dissidents whose freedom the group obtained.

  “I would like to ask you about one or two people,” Mischa said. He breathed deeply. “Perhaps tomorrow.” Edmund Bear nodded.

  “How long will you stay with us, Ned?” Helen asked then.

  “Just the night,” he answered. “I’ll have to get the train back tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid.”

  “There’s no afternoon train tomorrow. It’s Sunday,” Helen said. When she had first emerged from her studio before lunch, Helen had seemed rather remote to Laddy, as though she were seeing everything around her as a possible subject to paint. But Laddy had had to revise that opinion quickly. Helen Digby was an extremely practical and well-organised woman. “There’s no train at all on Sunday. You’ll have to stay till Monday.”

  Dr. Bear looked put out by this information. “I checked with the railroad!” he said. “And I’ve got to get back before Monday.”

  “I’m going back tomorrow afternoon,” Laddy said. “We can drive back together if you like.”

  Mischa Busnetsky was in the act of filling a pipe with tobacco. This quiet motion was arrested as he looked over at Laddy.

  “You go back to your work—to your newspaper?” he asked, and he was as still as a cat.

  “Yes,” she answered with a smile. “Work again on Monday.”

  “Your last assignment, I think, was me,” he said, still motionless.

  Was it? she wondered. It seemed as if an age had passed since she had asked Harry to let her cover Mikhail Busnetsky’s arrival in London. Two days. How many things could happen in two days! She gave vent to a surprised little laugh.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And now you have found me,” he said, an odd harshness threaded through his tone. “When you go back to your editor on Monday, will you tell him that?”

  God help her, she hadn’t even thought of that. Laddy’s lips parted and she breathed through her mouth as she gazed at him.

  “Oh, no!” she said, in dismay.

  “You have a story here,” Mischa pressed. He had everyone’s undivided attention now; they were all watching him and shooting awkward glances at Laddy. “A Welsh hideaway, a literary agent, a doctor of chiropractic who is frequently consulted in the treatment of dissidents and two lost manuscripts.” He enumerated the points with his pipestem on the fingers of his left hand, his eyes calm, cool, and suddenly Laddy knew she was facing the man who had held his own against psychiatrists, investigators, prosecutors and KGB colonels. The calm patient power of his intellect was terrifying.

  He didn’t trust her. He could look at her the way he had looked at her, say what he had said—but he was as suspicious of her now as he had been when he had accused her of carrying electronically bugged cushions.

  Into the absolute silence that fell when he stopped speaking, he struck a match, and his eyes dropped to the flame while he lighted his pipe.

  Inside Laddy’s head the battle lines between the public and the private woman formed up, and she was aghast at the speed with which she was suddenly at war with herself.

  What a dry term “conflict of interest” was! It carried no emotional overtones at all. It made you think of a lawyer who had two opposing clients and cared about neither very much.

  But she cared desperately about both her clients: Lucy Laedelia Penreith, staff reporter, who ought to file this story with Harry Waller; and Laddy Penreith, father’s daughter, whose true love had come home against all odds, wanting peace and quiet after years of an unequal battle.

  “How long would it be before you would be willing to talk to the press?” she asked tentatively.

  Mischa, who had watched the battle beginning in her, said in that calm, cold, silent way, “No. I will not bargain for a few days or weeks of peace against an exclusive story. I have played enough games with my rights, my freedom, my life.”

  “But I could—”

  “No,” he said. “Not anymore. And not with you. Now I will live my life the way I wish to live, and other people will do the same with theirs. I have paid for my right to privacy and freedom. If you are going to take them from me now, you must make up your mind to steal them. They are not for sale.”

  She should have known he wo
uld be a no-bargains man—he had spent the past nine years refusing to compromise with the might of the Soviet government, he would not begin with her. She had known it, had seen it in their first moments together in that crowded Moscow apartment: “I do not want to go to prison again,” he had said, “but this is a choice that is not mine to make.”

  As far back as that she had wanted to beg him to give in, but his strength had been equal to spending much of the next eight years behind locked doors, and he was telling her now that it would be equal to anything she could do to him.

  She knew if she could only tell Harry Waller that by keeping the lid on Mischa Busnetsky’s whereabouts for two or three weeks they would have an exclusive at the end of it, Harry would agree. Of that she was certain... ninety percent certain, she amended.

  But if she told him they were to keep the story quiet until Mischa Busnetsky decided to call a press conference—with no promise of advance warning as to when that would be? Of course Harry would not sit still for that. It would be a case of the story or her job.

  She had two choices: say nothing to Harry Waller and hope that he would never find out that she had known Mikhail Busnetsky’s whereabouts...or file the story now and never hope to see in Mischa’s eyes anything but the calm, cool look of a man whose freedom was more important to him than life.

  She felt bruised, battered, torn. It would have been easier if he had asked her to die for him. She would not have needed an instant’s hesitation for that.

  It was not the story. If he had asked the private Laddy Penreith, who loved him, to protect his privacy.... But he had deliberately confronted the professional woman, as if there was nothing personal between them. He had set his integrity against her own. He had created an insurmountable problem out of nothing.

  Whom did she love—the memory or the man? If she loved the man, how was it he could not trust her, and why was she looking at him now through a blaze of anger and hurt and a desire to hurt back? Nothing made any sense.