“Love me,” Laddy pleaded, almost beside herself, feeling as though she had moved into some new dimension of consciousness, of existence. “Please love me.”
“I do,” Mischa said, and it was a promise. “I will.”
Some barrier around her heart that she had never known existed began to crack then, and she understood that she had been a prisoner behind that barrier, that the barrier was her own self and that soon she would be free.
“I love you,” she cried again, and the words were the distillation of a truth so profound she thought the world should shatter in its presence; and she heard the rasping intake of his breath in answer.
Her body was long since operating on primitive instinct. Her hands moved over him, his back, his head, his thighs, wherever she could reach. His chest lifted away from hers and she arched up in search of the contact again. When he held her head tightly, firmly, so that she could not move, and his hand on her jaw held her mouth open, when the teasing kiss stopped and he deliberately lowered his mouth over hers in a thrusting, urgent, powerful kiss that told her more directly than words exactly what he wanted of her, it was in answer to that same primitive instinct that she wrapped her legs convulsively up around his hips. The kiss was destroying her, turning her bones to water, her flesh to fire, blotting out reason so surely that she felt she would never need to think again. She felt him tremble at the response of her body and his kiss deepened in fever and intensity. His hands ran along the length of her arms, fierce with passion, and his fingers threaded between hers and clenched, lifting her arms onto the table above her head and holding her immobile. The knowledge that she was completely in his power burned white hot in her, and with every cell of her being, every iota of body, brain and soul, she wanted him to take her then, there; she hated the heavy fabric that kept his body from her, kept him from making her a part of him forever.
As though that final yearning ache was transmitted to him, he lifted his mouth from hers and let go her hands to stroke her hair. His jaw clenched, and then his mouth moved in a smile.
“I will,” he promised, “but not yet.” And when she understood what he meant dismay ripped through her like a scream.
“Why?” she pleaded, as though Truth, Beauty and Life were all being torn from her at once, and she reached up her hands to hold his head as he moved to straighten away from her.
Mischa went still when her hand touched him, as though in spite of himself he was a slave to her touch.
“Because I am going to court you,” he said, his voice low and caressing. “Because I am going to teach you slowly about love—so slowly that you will hate me, so slowly that we will both be mad before you have learned. I will teach you that you are seventeen and a woman, as I would have taught you then. And each one of our eight lost years we will reclaim with love.”
She closed her eyes and felt tears on the lids, and immediately his mouth was tender on her lashes.
“Lady,” he said. “My Lady.” And through the ache of loving that suffused her she could hear that this decision was hard for him; that he was in her power as much as she was in his, that he could not stop now unless she allowed it—and suddenly she wanted him more desperately, more profoundly than ever.
“No!” she cried, reaching for him.
He caught her hands determinedly and he said hoarsely, “Yes.”
But he had to fight both of them—his desire as well as her own. She had for opponent only his determination, and she wanted him with every cell of her being.
“Mischa!” she moaned, as she had done in that Moscow apartment eight years ago; and as though she had called down the canyon of time, she heard the echo, “Mischa...Mischa!” in a high young voice. Only when he let go her hands and moved to disentangle her legs from his did she understand that it was not her own voice she heard, but that of a child. A child who was knocking on the door of the Mischa’s cottage and would doubtless soon turn towards Laddy’s cottage and the door that still stood open to the setting sun.
Chapter 8
“Mischa,” the young voice called, and Laddy raised herself first to her elbows and then to sit on the edge of the table. She gazed at Mischa as he pulled away from her and took a long shuddering breath. She felt as though she had been suddenly jerked into another world, and she shivered as though that world were achingly lonely, and colder than the one she had been inhabiting; and as her passion left her, an anger born of her sudden loneliness took its place.
“Friend of yours?” she demanded sarcastically as the knocking on that other door continued.
Mischa nodded, holding her gaze with an expression in his eyes that said he delighted in her anger, and she snapped,
“His timing’s excellent. I don’t suppose you bribed him?”
Mischa laughed outright, and his hand touched her cheek caressingly. “Yes, this is good,” he said, the laughter dying out of his eyes. “Find anger, and hatred, too—for we will take every emotion imaginable to our love bed.”
She gasped against the sudden twist of emotion that churned in her, and he bent and kissed her with a sudden and swiftly curtailed passion.
“And every emotion will be destroyed,” he said, “save love, and the innocence in your eyes.”
Running footsteps sounded on the flagstones, and he moved away from her towards the open door. Laddy dropped her head forward onto her heaving chest and tried to calm her breathing.
“Hello, Rhodri,” she heard him say, and the young Welsh voice, full of admiration and hero worship, burst out,
“There you are, then! You’ve moved into this cottage, have you?”
“Not I,” Mischa explained. “My friend from London is staying here.”
And with heightened sensitivity she heard jealousy in the tone that repeated, “Your friend?”
In response to the answering jealous pang that scratched through her, she jumped off the table and moved over to stand beside Mischa in the doorway and smiled down at the thin, dark young boy whose gaze, when it transferred to her, held a worried frown.
“Lady, this is my friend Rhodri. Rhodri, my friend Lady.”
Rhodri smiled up at her in sudden relief, and Laddy knew that he was responding to the warmth of Mischa’s voice and the double use of the word “friend.”
“Hello, Rhodri,” she said.
“Hello, Lady.”
She heard her changed name on his wide lips with a little shock, for somehow when Mischa said her name, she had never really heard it as anything other than “Laddy” in an accent that charmed her. She opened her mouth to correct the boy, and instead she was saying,
“I was just going to make a cup of tea. Will you have some with us?”
“Oh, yes, please,” he said. “If it isn’t too much trouble....I can go and take tea with Brigit, you know,” he added in some anxiety, as though to dispel any suspicion that he might have come in search of a meal.
“No trouble at all,” Laddy said, moving back into the kitchen and over to the table. One bag of groceries—not the one with the eggs, she devoutly hoped—was on the floor, the other on the table, squashed up against the wall. It was a compelling reminder of what had just transpired, and as she stood up from the floor holding the bag, Laddy’s eyes met Mischa’s, and to her annoyance, she blushed.
Mischa checked a sudden, involuntary move towards her, and suddenly all her anger was destroyed, wiped out by the knowledge that he could never have been proof against her if she had held him and begged him to make love to her. She stared into his eyes over Rhodri’s head, the smile broadening involuntarily on her lips still swollen from his kisses, her eyes telling him she knew he loved and wanted her as much as she loved and wanted him.
“More,” he said quietly. “But you will learn.”
Laddy turned abruptly away from him to set the groceries on the counter.
“You know Brigit, then?” she said to Rhodri. “Brigit up at the big house?”
“Oh, yes, I know her, she is my sister!” Rhodri laughed.
“Is she!” Laddy exclaimed, unloading the bag. It did hold the eggs, and four were broken. “And are you, by any chance, twelve years old?” She put the eight whole eggs into the straw basket on the counter and carefully poured the meat of the broken ones from the cardboard carton into a bowl. At the price of eggs in Trefelin she would use them to make an omelette.
“I’ll soon be thirteen,” Rhodri said, with the air of a scientist setting the facts straight for a layman.
“Well, then, you must be the family genius. Brigit talked about you last time I was here.” Laddy filled the kettle and put it on the stove, then went back to where Mischa and Rhodri sat by the table to get the other bag of groceries.
In Rhodri’s young eyes she saw a reflection of the dark intensity of Mischa’s, and the two could almost have been father and son. Husband and son, her heart amended, and with an intensity that swamped her, she suddenly wanted to have Mischa Busnetsky’s child, she wanted to create someone who would be a part of them both, a child who would sit across the table from its father as this one did and smile at her from dark eyes....
The feeling washed through her and left her in the space of a moment, but Rhodri had seen the look in her eyes, and Mischa had seen it, and the young boy smiled at her in a responsive kinship. The three of them were suddenly inside a bubble of sunlight, united by the bond of intelligence and dedication—and, incredibly, by the ties of love.
Laddy smiled at Rhodri as though he were the son she had had eight years ago when she had first met Mischa Busnetsky, and a warm sense of belonging settled on the room.
“Well?” she prodded, the sunlight bubbling into laughter in her blood. “Are you a genius?”
His smile was remarkably broad. “Oh, yes,” Rhodri laughed. “And you are, too, I think, and for certain he is!” He flashed his engaging grin up at Mischa.
“But of course,” Laddy said, moving to the stove as the kettle began to whistle. “So then what would two geniuses like for tea?”
“That depends,” Mischa interjected, “on what the third genius has to offer.”
She loved every pebble in creation from the dawn of time, every blade of grass, every living creature. Surrounded by a warm glow, the three of them laid the table and made toast with cheese and chutney and talked over the meal as though they had been friends for a hundred years.
Rhodri Lewis’s passion was archaeology, in particular the prehistoric archaeology of Wales. It was his burning conviction that cave painters had lived in Wales, and his great ambition was to find an example of cave art. And he believed he would find it near Trefelin.
“You see, here we are below the line of the furthest extent of the ice during the Würm glaciation,” he said excitedly to Laddy, when she asked him why. “From above Fishguard down through to Land’s End, you see, was below the glaciation.” He began to trace a map on the table with his knife. “But in Cornwall and Devon, the west coast faces the ocean. Here on the peninsula we face Ireland, you see. And the water level, then, it would have been lower. Perhaps St. George’s Channel would have been only a river. The caves along out here—” he waved an arm towards the cliff edge “—would have looked down a valley to a river. You see, it was cold during the Würm glaciation, and you would not wish to face straight out to the ocean in arctic weather, would you?”
“I see the logic of it,” agreed Laddy, who was dredging up the very few and long-ago learned facts she could remember about the earth’s history.
“So,” Rhodri said, taking a hasty sip of tea and throwing an approving smile at her, “they would have chosen to live between Fishguard and St. David’s Head.”
“And why right here at Trefelin?” Laddy asked. “There must be a lot of caves between Fishguard and St. David’s Head.”
“I need a map,” Rhodri said, as Laddy, realizing that the sun had set and they were sitting in near darkness, got up and put on the light. “Because we are on Pen Mawr here, and when the water level was lower, from the caves here you would have been able to see the whole length of the river valley.”
“Will you show it to me on a map sometime?” Laddy asked, as Mischa, who had crossed over to his own cottage a few moments before, returned with a pipe and a tobacco pouch and began to press some strongly scented tobacco into the bowl.
“Perhaps you will come with us one morning when we explore the caves?” Mischa said, raising a questioning eyebrow first at Laddy and then at Rhodri. “Rhodri explores the caves nearly every morning, and sometimes I go with him.”
“Saturdays, too, when my work is done,” Rhodri said, clearly delighted at the prospect of having them both exploring for proof of his theory.
“Well, I’d love to come,” Laddy said.
“It’s wet,” Rhodri said, as though he had better tell her the worst of the matter before she got to it. “Cold, too. And dark. But you will dress for it, won’t you?”
The three of them were engrossed in their conversation and with one another, and the pool of soft light seemed to encase them in its protective glow, so that when the knock came on the door they all jumped, surprised that there was anyone else in their world. Laddy got up and opened the door to Brigit.
“Helen asked me to tell you that dinner’s in an hour,” she said, then looked over Laddy’s shoulder into the lighted kitchen.
“Are you here, then, Rhodri!” she exclaimed. “I wondered where you had got to. If you’re not home soon, Mairi will be sending out the searchers. Good evening, Mischa.”
“Good evening, Brigit,” he said, a cloud of smoke encircling his head.
“Dinner in an hour,” she repeated for his benefit. “Your special drink is in the refrigerator if you want to have it now. I’m going home, Rhodri. Do you want to walk with me?”
Mischa and Laddy stood in the doorway as the two walked off across the field in the dusk, and silence fell between them. Mischa removed the pipe from his teeth and knocked it against the stone wall, and they watched the glowing embers drop to the grass.
“I have smoked shag for too long,” he said, smiling ruefully. “Nothing else is strong enough.”
“Shag?” she repeated, her voice, like his, subdued in the darkening dusk.
“Shag is a very strong, coarse tobacco,” he said. “All we could get in prison. After a while one gets accustomed to it.”
The darkness was increasing, and the warm glow of the kitchen light spilled out between them as they leaned against opposite doorjambs, staring across the fields towards the slowly appearing lights of Trefelin.
“God damn them!” she said suddenly, fiercely, the cry coming out against her will. He turned his head and she felt his gaze rest on her.
“You will have to say it,” he said with weary acceptance. “Say it all.”
“I couldn’t say it all in a million years!” she burst out. “I hate them, I hate all of them, and I’ll hate them forever!” Her body was rigid against the doorpost, and she kept her gaze fixed in the direction of Trefelin, but she was not seeing a small, peaceful village at night. Her brain burned with what she saw. “I looked at that boy tonight,” she said, “but do you know what I saw? I saw you!” Her voice was cracking with emotion that was impossible to control. “I saw back twenty years to what you must have been—a brilliant, intense child, so full of life, so...so....” A sob caught her unawares, and she swallowed, choking on it. “And what did they do to you? What did they do? They took away your books; they threw you in those horrible places and they took away your books and your paper and pens. They tried to take away your mind, too—and they’re sorry they didn’t succeed! I despise them for that and I always will! They took away eight years of your life! That’s what they did to reward you for your brilliant mind—they put you in a place where you got accustomed to things—where you got accustomed to smoking shag and eating a starvation diet and torture and things I have to grit my teeth before I can even read about them!”
Laddy was shaking now, and breathing in jerking gasps, but still she did
not look at him. She could feel that his eyes were on her, unflinching, and she knew what look of quiet resignation she would see there if she turned her head, and she did not want to see it. “And I hate them, and that’s all I can do—hate. I want to kill them all—I want to scream at them the truth of what they really are, I want to rip the lies away and show them the truth, and then I want to tell them I hate them and wipe them off the face of the earth! And I can’t—I can’t! I’m powerless, helpless, impotent! I had to stand by and let them do that to you, and all I can do is hate them!”
The tears were pouring down her cheeks; she could no longer stop them, nor could she speak. But she held her head up, refusing to submit, and turned at last to meet his gaze.
It was not resignation but fierce pain that burned in his eyes as he watched her, and she stared at him, shocked into immobility, as though a knife had stabbed her abdomen.
“Oh, God,” she moaned, but he continued to watch her as though the pain was of no account.
“Lady, say it all,” he commanded quietly, and then what she felt ripped its way through her. She sobbed uncontrollably and gasped out the burning anguish and pain of having loved him, knowing that each word, each sob was like a knife stabbing him, but unable to stop, incapable of holding it back any longer...knowing that her greatest sin lay not in the fact that she was hurting him, but that she was forcing Mischa to be strong for both of them; Mischa, who had had to be unremittingly strong for so many years and who had a right now to rest.
When it was finished she turned away from his gaze, wiping her face childishly on her sleeve, and said hoarsely, “Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mischa. That was unforgivable.”
Her sleeve was soaking and she stared down at the black smears of mascara across the blue and white of the plaid and wished that she had died before doing what she had just done.
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