Flames of Desire

by Vanessa Royall

  “I wish to spare you this torment,” she said, and touched Selena’s face.

  The question was natural. “But if what you ask me to do incurs Ku-Fel’s anger,” Selena asked, “am I not certain to find myself, very soon, in a similar predicament?”

  “Not if you are clever in dealing with our master. You must remember, as I told you, his love of pleasure from a woman, and his desire to know all. Give him pleasure, and sow doubt in his mind, and you can advance your own position and help me at the same time.”

  “You have mentioned that I can help you. How, precisely?”

  “There is something I need to know,” Rupal said, leaning forward. “The child. I must know where the child is!”

  Selena thought fast. She had to decide what to say, how much to reveal. And she did not know how best to proceed. Perhaps Rupal already knew what Davi had told her on the barge, and was speaking with her now in order to learn if she could be trusted with a secret. Or was she trying to ascertain if Davi had revealed something he ought not have, in which case an answer on Selena’s part would be dangerous to Davi. Was the child dead, or was it alive somewhere in the country with the woman Shan-da, whom Davi had named? And did Rupal already know what the answer was?

  “Why do you wish to know about a child?” Selena asked, steeling herself for the rebuke that was sure to follow. “Why am I the one to help you find out? And what child?” she asked, feeling uncomfortable with the deception, but knowing that it was necessary.

  Rupal believed that Selena truly did not know about Gayle’s blond baby, or at least she was satisfied to give that impression.

  “Because you are a new concubine!” she said, with heat. “You will be fresh to the maharajah, and he will not dismiss your interests as quickly as he does ours. He will not believe you have become caught up in the politics of the harem. And,” she added, “he will be monstrously enraged if the child is still alive.”

  “I…I do not think I would wish to see him enraged.”

  “But you don’t understand. Ku-Fel was to have killed the child. If she has not, he will hold it against her! And that will help us…”

  Or you, Selena thought, with a sense that skill in this sinister art of deception, while welcome, would also be damning.

  “…that will help us reduce her influence, or have her put aside altogether.”

  “Why should the maharajah wish to see the child dead?”

  Rupal’s answer this time was consistent with some of the things Selena had been told earlier: “Because he felt he was cheated,” Rupal explained. “Gayle was with child by another man when she came here. He wanted both of them dead.”

  Yes, but Selena thought of something else.

  “But could not Ku-Fel herself have been outraged? It was she who inspected the girl and made the purchase from Captain Randolph?”

  Rupal sat back, and for the flash of a second Selena saw that glint of reckoning, that cold intelligence.

  “Ah, you are a bright girl, a bright girl, indeed,” she said, warmly again. “And you doubtless wish to know why I want to find the child?”

  Selena said she did.

  “Because I can find a way to have her taken to Calcutta,” Rupal said. “It is not good that she grow up far from her people, where no one looks as she does…”

  “I look as she does,” Selena said, too quickly.

  “How do you know?” The suspicion was hard and sharp as the blade of a scimitar.

  “I…I just meant the…the blondness,” Selena said hastily.

  There were traps everywhere. Pitfalls. And all the contradicting stories and explanations. It would get worse. She thought of the seven lies required by the injudicious one.

  “So will you help me?” Rupal demanded.

  “I…I am nervous,” Selena confessed truthfully. The evening meal would begin in minutes, and then…“I…I shall try…”

  Then Ku-Fel’s signal bell rang for them, in another part of the harem.

  “You go first,” Rupal said, “so she’ll not know we’ve been speaking.”

  “So you’ve been speaking to Rupal,” was the first thing Ku-Fel said when she inspected Selena’s appearance, her skin, her sari. The rest of the women were there for her inspection, as always, but she paid little attention to them. All knew it was Selena’s night to be called.

  Selena smiled and said that, yes, she had. There seemed nothing else to do. But she did not understand how Ku-Fel had known. There must indeed be spies everywhere.

  “She has a good imagination, I’ll say that for her,” Ku-Fel hissed. “Did you know that she is desperate to escape here and go to Calcutta? No, of course you didn’t,” she continued, still smiling, as Selena tried to fit together Rupal’s desire to find the child—if the child were alive—and the desire to take it to…Calcutta!

  “Ah, she wants the excitement of Bengal, that is all. But do not worry. No one has ever escaped this harem, and no one will. I will corroborate one thing, though,” she offered, drawing Selena aside so that the two of them might enter the dining room together and sit near the master, “what she told you about the elephant whip is entirely true.”

  The brass gong sounded, and they entered the opulent, sweet-smelling room and went toward their seats. Davi stood, ready for the maharajah’s entrance. His eyes met hers for the shred of a second, and it was as if her mind were suddenly washed by ominous light:

  Beware! he told her with his power. Beware! And speak not of Shan-da!

  The Maharajah of Jabalpur bade her enter his scented bedchamber, and nodded to his servants. The curtains were drawn. They were alone. But the High Lord barely looked at her. He yawned and settled into a low, couchlike bed, and idly pushed several soft cushions to the floor. He yawned again.

  “Do you dance?” he asked, as if he did not care. His eyes were weary, almost without expectation. “Do you have any talents which might amuse me?”

  It was going to be vastly different than any experience she had known, Selena realized. Here in India, at least in Jabal-Mahal, it was she who was expected to arouse and please and win the man! Well, you did that already with Royce, spoke the tiny voice of her conscience. No, do not think of Royce, or you will fail here for certain. And this may be the only chance to establish for yourself a rapport with the maharajah, hence a measure of safety.

  Selena had been prepared, by Ku-Fel and the others, to be subservient, obeisant, and obedient to this man’s every whim. He regarded her with that aspect of languorous impassivity which she had observed in the dining room, but which she guessed was only one part of his nature, and perhaps not even the most significant part. But then he said something which caused her own nature to rise, in spite of Ku-Fel’s instructions.

  “Ah, you are a blonde, too. Ku-Fel knows how I admire them.” His face darkened slightly, as he thought of another woman. “Gayle was a blonde.”

  The manner in which he spoke the name gave Selena a sudden insight—indefinite but instinctive—into the mystery of Jabal-Mahal. She permitted her nature to speak then, rather then submit to the caution she had been warned to practice.

  “I’m not Gayle,” she told the maharajah. “You can see what is left of Gayle at the gateway to this…to this zoo!”

  That’s the end, she thought. Maybe the MacPherson blood was fashioned for self-destruction from the very beginning. Certainly the MacPherson tongue was.

  The reaction to her impertinence—a foreshadowing of her likely fate—shone in the maharajah’s eyes. The lower lids closed up, and she sensed that he was a man capable of great, precipitate cruelty. But she met his eyes and faced him unflinchingly.

  “Proud prince,” she said. The rest of her control melted away as anger came boiling up. If you are going to speak, speak now! “Proud prince, who kills his lover with horses. I,” she said, “would have had the courage to do it myself.”

  Immediately, his mood seemed to change.

  “You would have?” he asked, in his clipped, precise way. “You have
great certainty.”

  Then she interpreted his tone. Curiosity. Pure curiosity, fascinated now by what she had said and the manner in which she had spoken. Rupal may have been correct: the maharajah wanted to know about everything. She sensed that the man would prod and explore and inquire, but only to a certain point. Obviously, he had sought inadequately the reasons for his lover’s death, and the persons responsible. Perhaps he shrank from examining the nature of his court, just as a sinner might be loathe to scrutinize his own soul.

  “I did not order her killed,” the maharajah said, waving the matter away, as if he had relieved himself of any connection with the skull and the shattered skeleton at the entrance to his palace.

  The full measure of Selena’s courage returned to her then, like a drink of Highland whiskey on a frosty night, like the thrill of the Gathering of the Clans, with the plaids and pennants of ancient Scotland stiff and crackling in the wind, and with something that must have been like the taste of the blood of a wolf.

  “You know nothing,” she snapped at him. “And knowing nothing is your greatest desire!”

  He stared at her, too surprised even to form anger.

  “And that will destroy you in the end,” she said. She spoke it as a truth. Knowing nothing—or very little—had contributed to the hubris of her youth, from which, only now, she was recovering.

  A long, long silence passed between them. She stood straight, as a princess ought to stand, especially a princess in the land of barbarians. Her posture was strange to one used to the bent knee, the deep bow, even the groveling of supplicants. Rage was there, even an instinct to murder. She could see it. But the curiosity won.

  “What is it about you that is not like Gayle? You look as she did. You have the hair of floss. But it is not the same. What is it?”

  “Because,” she said, “I am Selena MacPherson, daughter of Lord Seamus MacPherson, of Coldstream Castle. And in my land one like you would peddle rugs. I am a…” Why not? she thought. “…I am a queen!”

  Silence. Then he smiled.

  “I see the difference,” he said. “I understand that part of it now. But, tell me, how do you put it…majesty? Have you not contrived an excessively devious plan to visit me?”

  He laughed, and she was once again a slave.

  “I shall explain it when you tell me why you killed her,” she snapped, hoping to regain that moment of pride, of grandeur.

  “I did not,” he said flatly. “In fact, I loved her very much.”

  The disbelief must have been more than evident in her eyes.

  “That is the truth,” he said again. “I wept when I learned that she was dead. I loved her. She was killed and the child, too. Ku-Fel has told me. Beyond that, nothing I have been able to learn makes sense to me. There are too many stories.”

  “I can understand that,” Selena said truthfully. She knew the endlessly unfolding schemes of courts, the compulsive necessity of courtiers alternately to seek the blessing of, and then deceive, their sovereign. “I can understand that, but you were here! You must have known.”

  It was as if he looked right into her. “I was not,” he said. “It happened in my absence. I was in Kanpur, to the north, discussing what we must do when the British traders come into our regions. It took place in my absence. And I do not…”

  She understood. Again, Rupal had been right. “You do not wish to admit you did not know of it? That is correct, is it not? And the bones are on the wall because to remove them would be to admit you did not sanction the killings from the start.”

  He waited, then nodded. She saw his eyes narrow again, but this time she saw the respect. Her life, anyway, was safe for a little. It was her turn to wait, but again only for a moment.

  “I think the child is alive,” she said.

  Electricity fairly danced from him, and he became incandescent with pure intensity.

  “Oh, great lord Vishnu,” he breathed, raising his eyes to the silken canopy that covered his chamber, “pray that it be so.” It seemed as if he meant it.

  From a place of soft shelter, very near, she felt the light dance again in her mind.

  I praise you, I respect you, Davi said.

  “We will become one now,” the maharajah said abruptly, motioning, her toward his couch. “We are close already, and then we shall be closer still. You are right about me, in a sense. I know my own world, but very little of the world outside. There is a mystery which we can solve. And,” he added, looking frankly, directly and—she thought—honestly into her eyes, “…and I have great need of you.”

  Saying that, he took her, and brought her down with him.

  It is all right, Davi told her with his mind. It is what you must do.

  “Pleasure me,” the maharajah ordered.

  He was a man like any other, and as good a one as Selena had yet known. True, his ways were foreign to her—his initial passivity in lovemaking more curious than disconcerting—but then, he was used to being served. He demanded service. Selena did not choose to disappoint him, knowing that she had no other choice but this, and knowing, too, that any hope to better her position here in Jabal-Mahal rested with him and with no other. (Or with Ku-Fel?)

  And was it true, too—or did she simply imagine it?—that, on her first night with the maharajah, speaking up to him, making her mark with him, she was already dreaming of escape? Had she not already seen the possibility of someday fleeing this passionate, appealing, quicksilver man, whose emotions glinted now and again above the surface of his apparent passivity, like the tips of icebergs jagged above the sea?

  Davi was with her for a time, but then she felt him slide away; she would be all right. The maharajah bade her strip naked for the pleasure of his eyes, and then, slowly, to fold away his garments, too, revealing his body’s readiness. In her mind, she locked away the times she had been with Royce—those had been sacred—and, realizing that the human being makes love in the same ways, whatever the emotion behind it, she bent to please him. Soft and teasing, she traced again and again, with tender fingers, the throbbing length of him, the hard gourd of his lust. He was keening, writhing, when she ceased, just before the ultimate. He understood, and held and kissed her deeply, while she waited for his fire to subside. Then, once again, she began, and then again, and after that another time, and always, between times, they kissed and embraced, until she, too, felt genuine passion take her up the first low foothills of sensation. Before he asked her for another kind of pleasure, she gave it to him, this time kissing him until she felt the quivering rigidity that precedes release, and then again she stopped, now to take his caresses and dark kisses in her turn, she herself now well up into the high ranges where air is scarce, and rare.

  Afterward, he was drowsy, slightly self-satisfied. But the curiosity in him, and what she realized was a certain insecurity—or, at least, a willingness to admit doubt—kept him from sending her away. Ku-Fel had told her to expect that, and not to be concerned about it.

  “You have pleased me greatly,” he said, his hand tracing the soft curves of her body, lingering where she had grown scarlet with passion fulfilled, gathering place of the blood. “No one has pleased me so since…”

  He did not finish. Selena guessed it might be Gayle; it could also have been Rupal, who was called most often to his bed.

  “I am here to serve you,” she said in a neutral tone.

  “Are you really?” He smiled. “It did not seem so before, judging from your hard words.”

  “They were not hard. It was what I felt.”

  “That is good. You are much like the…the other one.”

  “Gayle?” she prompted.

  He nodded, but said nothing. There was bitterness in his expression, and pain.

  “I swear to you, if I knew who had done it, I would act against them. But I do not know how to find out. One lie is as plausible as another. But I am as much a prisoner here as I am a master. The two go together. But we will find the child.”

  She had the impre
ssion that, for him, the child’s existence was some form of heavenly gift, a living symbol of an affection for the dead girl that had been genuine, if magisterial.

  “But how do you know it is alive? Who told you?” he said.

  “I cannot say now.”

  “There must be no secrets from me in this palace.” He laughed immediately at the ridiculousness of the statement.

  “I do not know for certain. I must find out, and I will tell you when I do. But you must promise that the little girl will come to no harm, and, if it seems best, that she be given over to Europeans in Calcutta, to be raised with her kind.”

  She watched him as she spoke, and realized, from his attention and from his smile, that she was able to captivate him now because she herself was different, exotic. He had never—with the possible exception of Gayle—been with a woman who spoke to him as Selena did, who asked questions, stated conditions, made demands.

  But what would happen when he tired of this novelty? When he wished again for a woman who would tremble at his touch, entertain him with a combination of debauchery and debasement?

  He did not tire of her that night, however, nor for many more. Returning to the harem in the morning, Ku-Fel would be waiting, with a question behind her slitted eyes. Selena would say, “He was pleased,” and then again in the evening after dinner, the maharajah would whisper a few words to Davi, who would in turn summon Selena for the evening’s tryst of pleasure.