Captive of Desire

by Alexandra Sellers

  They were then back on the Coastal Path and Tymawr House was behind them, white in the morning sun against the fresh spring green that enclosed it.

  They passed farms and clambered over stiles from field to field, even their unhurried progress causing the sheep that ranged the cliff top to run off in baaing clusters when they suddenly took it into their woolly heads that Laddy and Mischa represented danger.

  The sun climbed the clear sky and warmed them in their exertions until, with unerring instinct, Mischa turned off the path and moved down to the cliff edge and jumped over onto a grassy patch that had sunk a few feet down the face of the cliff, creating a sunny protected platform that was one of Rhodri’s discoveries.

  Mischa dropped the knapsack and unstrapped the rug, and Laddy moved to help him spread it over the thick rough grass. This sheltered place, protected by an outcrop of rock on both sides, caught the sun most of the day. She slid her denim jacket off and stood, in her blue plaid cotton shirt and blue jeans, in its rays.

  It was not as warm as she thought, and she shivered a little and dropped onto the blanket. Laddy watched with pleasure as Mischa’s two large hands pulled their food from the knapsack and laid it on the blanket between them.

  “I’m starving,” she said. After years of having an appetite for nothing but coffee in the morning, these days she actually looked forward to breakfast.

  “Good,” he said, smiling over at her and tossing her an orange. “I, too.”

  She peeled the orange and ripped it apart, watching the juice droplets spray up and sparkle in the sun, her heart thudding. She wondered how it could be that she was so constantly aware of him, physically, emotionally, mentally—as though she were near a power source that produced a heavy field.

  Mischa sank into the blanket as he finished off his own orange, and she saw how his body enjoyed the sensuality of the rough blanket, the softness of grass underneath, and the sun. He smiled at her.

  “After a certain length of time in prison,” he said quietly, as though this were part of a conversation they had begun long ago, “your mattress gets very uncomfortable. Your sleep is broken, you wake up at intervals to get up and shake the lumps out of this thing they call your mattress, but no matter how you shake or beat it, the lumps are still there.” She moved closer to him, and he drew her head down onto his warm shoulder and stroked her hair. “And then you realise that it is not the mattress at all, but your body. You are so thin that the lumps that stop you from sleeping are your own bones.”

  She accepted it wordlessly because she had to, because he had lived it, and she could only share it with listening. They lay in silence for a long time. “I sent you letters,” she said at last. “My father always found out what prison you were in, and I wrote you.”

  “We were allowed only a certain number of letters each month,” he said, his hand stopping its stroking motion to hold her head gently as though to comfort. “Often only one, or two. Sometimes I knew when you wrote, but I could not receive your letters. There were letters I had to have, from people on the outside, in Moscow, people who were fighting for me, who were sending me important information.” He moved, and she felt his kiss on her brow. “But I knew when you wrote, and when the letters stopped I knew—”

  When the letters stopped he knew she had found a lover, he meant, and she wrapped her arm around his chest and held him tightly.

  “No,” she said.

  He kissed her brow again, his lips light against her skin. “No,” he repeated. After a moment he moved up onto one elbow, his face above hers, his eyes watching her, full of tenderness. Laddy’s heart leapt in a response so deep it was almost pain. She brought a hand up to his cheek, and he caught it with his own hand and turned his face to press a kiss in her palm.

  “Mischa...” she began, and he placed her palm against his chest and dropped his hand against her head.

  “Lady?” he answered.

  “What was the worst—” she faltered “—what was the worst thing of all, the hardest to bear?” She spoke softly, but her voice was threaded with tension, with her need to share his anguish and horror. He gazed down at her, understanding, his fingers gently stroking her hair.

  “In the end,” he said, after a long pause, “the pains of the spirit hurt much worse than the physical tortures, the deprivations. When you cannot trust anyone, inside or out, the number of your friends grows smaller and smaller. Then you lose these friends to death or to the West… or because they have recanted, have betrayed you and everyone who is fighting. That is worse than if they had died, worse than looking at your own sure death.”

  For some reason it shook her to her foundations. That betrayal should be worse to him than starvation, cold, deprivation, injustice, imprisonment—the whole catalogue of torture that through her father she had become so familiar with! Betrayal—in conditions where betrayal must surely have been the order of the day.

  This was something she knew, something she could understand. If he had named a particular torture, the cold, the isolation, how could she have hoped to understand, to share? She had never experienced even the smallest brush with real physical deprivation. But betrayal she knew and understood—and she had known it was the worst pain possible in the world from that moment, at the age of six, when she had sat in a classroom and heard her best friend tell the teacher, and thereby the whole class, her deepest secret. She could not remember now what the secret was, but she had never forgotten the pain of being betrayed.

  Betrayal was the one unforgivable sin, and from that day to this, anyone whose loyalty had failed the test ceased to be her friend as irrevocably as if they had died.

  And she was looking into the eyes of a man who understood that and who would never betray her.

  “I love you,” she said, and it seemed as though no human language could compass this truth.

  “I love you,” said Mischa Busnetsky, and drew her body against his and held her as though he would never let her go.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, Helen left to spend a few days in town with Richard, and Laddy spent the early evening in her kitchen preparing a perfect dinner for Mischa and herself—the first they would eat alone together since her arrival. And she thought that tonight it would not be so easy for Mischa to leave her at the end of the meal. They had waited long enough.

  When it was nearly ready she showered and slipped on the wine-coloured caftan. She brushed her long hair over her shoulders, humming to herself as anticipation began to build in her stomach. Her face was fresh and lightly tanned by her days in the spring sun, and she used only a touch of mascara and a hint of perfume before she cast a last glance at the table and set out, barefoot, to tap on the door of Mischa’s cottage. He should have come over before this.

  Mischa had moved his belongings from the big house into his cottage more than a week before, but there was no answer to her tapping, and after a moment she opened the door and slipped into a dark kitchen.

  “Mischa?” she called softly, a sudden irrational fear beginning to tinge the heady anticipation that bubbled in her blood. She groped her way to the sitting-room door in the near blackness of the cottage and saw with relief that there was a faint glow coming from a lamp in the bedroom. Mischa still tired easily, and Laddy was used to his dropping down for a catnap whenever fatigue overtook him.

  The sound of a tortured groan wiped the smile from her face and sent her headlong to the door of the bedroom, breathless and afraid.

  Fatigue had overtaken him after his shower, for he wore his black towelling bathrobe, and the pillow slip was damp under his dark head. He lay half on his side, half on his back, one arm above his head, the hand on the blue pillow clenched into a fist, the other lying across the mat of dark hair where the robe fell open over his bare chest.

  The golden glow of the lamp beside the bed fell softly over the bed and over his sleeping shape, revealing in its mellow light Mischa Busnetsky’s tortured face. He was in the grip of a nightmare.

&nb
sp; He moaned again and called out hopelessly in Russian something she did not understand, and Laddy ran to him and knelt on the bed beside him, softly calling his name.

  His forehead was hot as she gently stroked it, whispering his name over and over; his jaw clenched and relaxed, and suddenly his eyes were open, burning up into her own. The torment left him as he recognised her, and then, so suddenly and devastatingly that it blinded her, she saw a naked, unprotected need of her that had its roots in the depths of his soul.

  “Lady,” he whispered, as though it were a prayer. “My God, Lady, Lady!” and suddenly she was in his arms, breathless with being pressed tightly against him, her face against the pulse beating powerfully in his throat, his buried in the perfumed cloud of her hair.

  “Lady, I need you—” The words seemed torn from him, his voice was cracked with emotion; then his mouth found hers and clung with a need so fierce that her own need of him burst the careful barriers she had set up against it, swamping her, carrying away fear, reason, self.

  “Ya lyublyu tibya,” he said against her lips, her cheeks, her eyes, his mouth urgent against her. And then, in English, “I love you, Lady. Do you hear it?” His mouth found her throat and the deep hollow between her breasts, unconfined under the burgundy silk.

  She cried, “I love you, I love you so much!” and heard her own voice break on a sob. Every barrier was down; she was reduced to her essential being, and it was a tearing, aching joy, like birth or death. And she knew there could be no drawing back for either of them now.

  He took her not in passion but in love, from the deep well of their need. His body found hers with a deep, thrusting urgency, as though the union of their bodies would make them one being for all time; she accepted the sudden tearing pain from the same deep need, remote from pain as she floated formlessly and drowned in the dark, dark eyes that accepted everything she ever was or would be.

  He held her head in his two hands at the last and kissed her and cried out against her lips in passionate release. She knew she had made him tremble as he had said she would so many years ago; her senses staggered with the knowledge, and she thought there was no greater joy the world could bring her. She clung to him, knowing that at last she was perfect, at last she was complete.

  Mischa was stroking her face, her hair. “Lady, you are so beautiful,” he whispered, touching her long body, golden in the lamp glow. She reached her arm up around his neck and gazed into his loving eyes.

  “You, too,” she said achingly. “So beautiful—”

  He wrapped both arms convulsively around her while his eyes devoured her face. “I am afraid I will lose control,” he whispered hoarsely, “that one day I will break your body against mine.... When you wake me from such a nightmare I am lucky you are still whole—” His arms tightened on her again and his eyes were dark.

  She gasped, “What is the nightmare?”

  “You,” he said. “You, walking down those stairs away from me, and I maddened with the need to stop you, to keep you with me. But I cannot cry out, and when I try to run after you they are holding me back—KGB men, Party members, sometimes my friends—and every time I tear one off my back another clings to me. And you do not know, you do not look back....”

  Passion leapt in his eyes and he bent and pressed his lips to her throat, her breast. “Stay with me tonight,” he whispered, desperate need in his voice, his mouth, his roughly caressing hand. “Lady, Lady, I can never hold you enough!” A wordless cry was torn from her, and Laddy arched her hungering body desperately against his, and they clung together as though they had both been starved of love since birth.

  “Laddy? Mischa?” A woman’s voice, high with emotion, pierced the night, and then came the sound of an urgent, desperate knocking on the door of Laddy’s cottage.

  “Rhodri? Laddy? Mischa?” the voice begged, and they both recognised Brigit’s voice, unnaturally high and strained.

  “Something’s happened!” Laddy exclaimed, their bodies reluctantly parting as the world burst in on them. She found her silk caftan on the floor and pulled it over her head while Mischa slipped quickly into his robe and knotted the belt as he moved to the bedroom door.

  Laddy was beside him as he pulled open the front door of the cottage onto the courtyard lighted by the rays from Laddy’s kitchen lights. The startled face of Brigit Lewis turned from the other door to gape at them in surprise and, after a moment, dismay.

  “Brigit! What’s the matter?” Laddy called, running barefoot over the cool flat stones to the other woman.

  “Rhodri,” Brigit said. “It’s Rhodri—oh, we were so sure he would be with you, I rushed right over the moment we thought of it....He’s missing, Laddy. When it got late we checked with his friends, and he wasn’t in school today—”

  “Not in school!” Laddy and Mischa exclaimed in unison.

  Mischa said quietly, his deep, quiet voice somehow calming Brigit: “We passed him this morning on the Mill Path, and he was on his way to school then.”

  “He never got there,” Brigit said wretchedly, her eyes growing large in fear. “Oh God, do you think he was picked up by someone?”

  Laddy and Mischa exchanged a swift glance, and Laddy was filled with calm certainty as she said, “No. I think he went back to his cave.”

  Chapter 10

  They found him at dawn, its first long tendrils snaking over the horizon to illuminate the cold mist that hovered above the sea and the cliffs. They had searched and called into numberless black caverns through the night, stumbling and sliding over smooth damp rocks, somehow fighting aching fatigue and near exhaustion, and going on.

  When the light from Mischa’s flashlight and the greying mist fell on the jagged back wall of a much shallower cave than any they had previously searched, it caught at Laddy’s memory, and she gasped in sudden hope.

  “Mischa!” she said. “Didn’t he say it was a shallow cave?”

  The flesh of Mischa’s face in the faint light was drawn tight with fatigue and self-discipline, and she knew that he was too ill to be taking part in such a prolonged search, but his stamina seemed somehow to come under the control of his enormous willpower.

  “Yes, you are right,” he said. He led the way into the cave, the light of his torch moving systematically over the walls and the sloping floor.

  “Rhodri!” Laddy called, and at the same moment Mischa’s light, moving along the jagged, sloping back wall of the cave, caught in its glare a spreading pile of angular rocks that lay on the floor of the cave and ran partially up the slope of the back wall.

  Their two figures were gripped in sudden immobility, and then the light moved swiftly up the wall almost to the ceiling and found a narrow jagged hole of empty blackness.

  “Rhodri!” Laddy called again, scrabbling up the loose pile of rock towards that sinister hollow darkness, and they both gasped to hear the faint response.

  “I’m inside!”

  “Thank God!” Laddy’s voice cracked with relief and fatigue. “Rhodri, are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  “Just my leg,” Rhodri answered, his voice tired but bright. “And I’m awfully thirsty.”

  Clinging with one arm through the tunnel he had made, Laddy tried to see into it, but the light of her torch seemed frail against the darkness. Mischa climbed swiftly up beside her with his more powerful light, but even its glare seemed to be swallowed by the blackness.

  “How could he have dug such a deep tunnel?” Laddy asked in faint horror, imagining him caught in its suffocating narrowness deep inside.

  “All right, we have water, Rhodri,” Mischa said in his deep calm voice. “Can you see the light?” He held the light steady with his left hand and slipped the knapsack of supplies they had carried all night off his right shoulder and dropped it at his feet.

  “Yes, I’m nearly underneath it,” the little voice said.

  “Underneath it!” Laddy exclaimed, gripped by an irrational fear of the unknown. “How can he be underneath—has he fallen into a hol
e?” In the back of her mind was the fear that Rhodri was so ill he was delirious, but she did not say it aloud.

  “More likely into a cave behind this wall,” Mischa said.

  In the steady light, they examined the jagged walls of the tunnel that soon disappeared in blackness. It was flat and narrow—too narrow for Mischa, Laddy realized after a moment.

  “I can get through,” she said, and Mischa glanced down at her as he bent to set down the lamp. He slid out of his jacket.

  “I will fit,” he said matter-of-factly. “I am used to squeezing through small spaces. We used to go under the fences every night to get some shag to the men in the box.” He smiled at her wryly. “I am, in fact, ideally suited to this rescue.”

  Leaving her the smaller torch he took the more powerful one, lifted his arms and the lamp and eased into the opening, his shoulders filling the space so that it seemed he would become wedged.

  “Mischa!” Laddy cried, watching his legs as they scrabbled up the wall. “It’s too narrow! The ceiling—”

  She broke off with a short harsh scream as his legs disappeared into the tunnel with a scraping sound. In the light of her torch there was nothing but blackness.

  “Mischa!” she screamed.

  Then his white face was in the light of her torch only a few feet away, and Mischa smiled into the glare. “A large cavern,” he said. “I am going to look at Rhodri. Get the water canteen out of the knapsack and call me when you are ready to pass it through.” Then his face was gone.

  “Lady, you come, too!” Rhodri’s voice called through to her. “I want you to see!” The excitement in his voice was unmistakable, and stopping only to take the water canteen from the knapsack, Laddy put her arms and head through the hole and began to work her way into the opening as Mischa had done.

  The tunnel, which had seemed to go on forever, was only three feet long, Laddy discovered, and within a few moments her head was projecting into a black cavern on the other side of the wall. The floor was higher on this side of the cave than on the other, as was the ceiling, and a few feet below her in the lamplight she saw Mischa’s tall figure bending over the thin form of Rhodri, who sat on the cave floor, his back resting against the wall. In the light of the torch on the ground beside them, the faces of the two were thrown into harsh relief, white plane and black shadow, and some essential kinship of character between them was revealed, as though in this eerie darkness Mischa had met his childhood self, or Rhodri the adult Rhodri.