Bonds of Matrimony (2 page)

'But you wouldn't be really married !'

He laughed. 'You know what Leonardo da Vinci said about marriage - putting one's hand into a bag of snakes on the off-chance of drawing out an eel? I thought I'd like a practice run with someone whose poison was well and truly drawn by circumstances before I tried the real thing.'

Hero swallowed. Really, he was quite detestable! 'Have you someone in mind?'

He smiled, as self-satisfied as anyone Hero had ever

seen. 'A pretty little snake with a fine pair of fangs that will want very careful handling — ' 'Does she know?' Hero gasped.

'She hasn't a suspicion of it,' he replied. 'I'll let her go on sleeping in the sun, then—!' He brought his hand down and caught her by the wrist with a speed that set her back in her chair. 'Snakes only bite because they're frightened, you know. Really very like women!'

Hero found herself looking at his colourful shirt again and shut her eyes, opening them again when she had them safely fastened on her tomato juice. 'I don't see how marrying me will help you catch her,' she said with an evenness that belied the pricking sensation round her

wrist where he had grasped her.

'No?'

She shook her head. 'I shouldn't think she'll be at all pleased! Not if she's fond of you!'

'She's not - not yet. I'd say she doesn't like me at all right now - any more than you do!'

Hero coloured. 'I hardly know you,' she told him. 'You can't go by me, anyway. I'm not the type who falls in love. I shan't ever get married properly. I prefer being by myself.'

His snort of laughter made her look at him again. The look he gave her made her press her own lips together in a disapproving line. 'What's so funny about that?' she demanded.

'I'll tell you one day when I know you better,' he promised her. 'Finish your drink, my dear, and I'll take you in to lunch.'

'Oh, but—' she protested. 'There are much better and cheaper places than here. Wouldn't you rather go somewhere else?'

'I don't think so. We shall have some privacy here and, as we still have much to discuss, it may as well be here as anywhere else.' He took her by the arm and led her into the dining-room with a firmness of touch that defeated her. Besides, it was seldom that she ever ate out in such grand surroundings and it would probably be a long time before she did so again.

'I think I should be happier if we went Dutch,' she said at the doorway to the huge, ornate room where they were to eat. 'It would be more businesslike. Or perhaps I should pay for us both?'

He gave her an easy smile and she had a sudden thought that if she had met him in other circumstances, she might even have liked him.

'Hero, if you're going to marry me, I'd advise you not to be forever arguing with me.' He seated her at the table and then went round to his own chair. 'Did your mother argue with your father?'

Hero raised her eyebrows. 'My mother was Greek,' she reminded him. 'The Greeks are very passionate and proud, but a Greek woman would never tell her husband what to do. She gets her own way by other means if she has to, but she always submits to his dictates on the surface!'

'Good, then let's hope you can be as Greek as your name!'

'Kaufman? There's nothing Greek about that.' 'But it won't be Kaufman,' he reminded her. 'It will be Hero Carmichael.'

'Yes,' she agreed.

She felt him looking at her and she blushed. 'I'm no Leander, my dear,' he said with a sudden gentleness, 'but I think I'll make you a better husband, even if a temporary one, than that swimming lunatic.'

'You forget,' she said, 'I haven't any romantic dreams. I can't help my name. It was my mother's idea. If you did swim across the Hellespont, I'd probably think you silly and not be at all complimented. I never can admire that sort of thing. The only heroic thing about me is my name. I'm quite ordinary, and I prefer other people to be ordinary too!'

'I'll try to remember,' he said. 'Not that I believe you're as prosaic as you pretend.'

Hero laid her napkin neatly over her knee, determined to enjoy her lunch despite her companion. 'I'm hungry,' she announced. 'I'm going to eat an enormous meal!'

'Greek fire,' he observed, more to himself than to her. 'Betsy is shrewder than I thought. I think she might very well be right about you. It might be very rewarding to find out.'

'You mean you'll marry me?' she said bluntly.

'On certain terms,' he nodded. 'I'm not ready to go back to England quite yet, but I'll give you British nationality and I'll take you to England in the end, when I've finished my business out here. Will that suit you?'

Hero took a deep breath of relief. 'Oh yes!' she exclaimed. 'As long as I'm British I'll put up with anything!'

He smiled slowly. Really, she thought, he wasn't too bad at all. 'That's quite an offer,' he observed, handing her the large, engraved menu.

She looked quickly up at him, but the expression on his face was deadpan.

Hero Kaufman had been alone for more than a year now. She had almost pushed into the background the moment when she had been told that her parents' light aircraft had come down somewhere over the Tanzanian border. She had not been at home at the time, but was in Nairobi completing her final exams in accountancy. It had been more than a week before the plane had been found, a week that she sometimes lived again in her dreams, but which she had come to terms with in her waking life, more or less. Everyone had been very kind, that went without saying, but it had soon become obvious that no young girl on her own was going to be able to run a mixed farm, miles from anywhere, with only the rather inadequate help of a half-trained African foreman.

Nevertheless, she was glad that her parents had died together. They had been a complete unit on their own, interested, really interested, only in each other. Naturally they had both loved their daughter, but there had been moments when she had felt that they would really rather have been on their own. Because of that she had been glad when they had sent her away to board at the Loretta Convent and, later on, she had been more glad still to stay with her friend Betsy's family in Nairobi while she was gaining the qualifications her father had chosen for her to work at with an eye to her future usefulness on the farm.

It had taken Hero only a few months to decide that the best thing she could do was to sell up and leave Kenya, but in this she had been baulked at every turn.

It had come as a shock to her to find that she was not a British citizen. She felt British. She had studied English history and English geography at school. She spoke only English and a rather garbled kitchen Swahili that had served her well enough on the farm. Her second language at school had been French, not the German of her father's family. She looked Greek, or so her mother had never tired of telling her, with her short, curly black hair and olive skin, but what did she know of Greece? That the capital city was Athens, and that Sparta lay in ruins, though she couldn't have pointed to its position on the map with any accuracy.

She had gone to the British High Commission and had applied to go to Britain, but their rejection had been firm and absolute. Didn't she know that there were plenty of bona fide British citizens waiting to go to Britain; they had been waiting for years, their resources diminishing daily as they did so; if they couldn't get there, what made her think that Britain would welcome an alien, one who had no claim at all on the country, before her own citizens?

There had been no answer to that. Hero had decided that she had better stay where she was, though she couldn't help feeling that sooner or later the Kenya government was going to inquire into her status in that country. It seemed she was nothing and had nowhere to go where she would feel at home.

Betsy, a Kenya national like her parents, had shared Hero's indignation to the full. She was a volatile, pretty girl, who had done quite as badly at school as Hero had done well. She didn't generally make friends with other girls. It was not that she disliked them, but she certainly didn't like them either. Besides, she had very little time left over from her fierce social life, spending her time getting to know any and every man in the district.

'You'll have to marry an Englishman,' Betsy had said one day.

Hero had made a grimace of distaste. 'I don't want to marry - at least not for ages.'

'Personally,' Betsy had drawled, I can't wait! The oftener the better!' She had flicked her long, elegant fingers in Hero's face to make sure she was listening. 'The fact is, my dear, you haven't any choice. Marry someone and let him have the worry of getting you into England. Once there, you can divorce him on some pretext, and there you are !'

'He'd have to know!' Hero had objected. 'I couldn't pretend to be — fond of a man just like that.'

Betsy had regarded her with tolerant amusement. 'Why not?'

'It would be immoral!'

'Oh, Hero, really! If you gave him a good time and made him feel good while you were his wife — ' 'I couldn't! I wouldn't know how to begin!'

Betsy had sighed. 'No,' she had agreed finally, 'you would make a mull of it and blurt out the truth just when it would do the most damage. What a pity our positions aren't reversed. Now I should actually enjoy the whole affair!'

'Would you?' Hero wasn't so sure. Betsy liked to be thought dashing, but it was mostly talk in Hero's opinion. 'Anyway, as an idea it's out.'

'Don't you believe it!' Betsy had smiled. 'I'll find you a man, Hero, my sweet, a solid English-born Englishman whom you'll be able to wrap round your little finger. What's more, I'll tell him why you have to marry him myself and then you'll be able to do something more than blush and stammer like an idiot when you meet him. If you want to be English, then English you will be!'

Hero had laughed. She hadn't expected to hear any more about it, but Betsy was nothing if not determined, and she had found a man.

'He's fantastic!' she had declared happily. 'But fantastic! Best of all, he's willing.' And that was that. Now

Hero had met 'the man' for herself and she wasn't at all sure that she could ever like him, and she would have described him as frightening rather than fantastic. She felt uncomfortable at the thought of having to spend much time in his company, but perhaps she wouldn't have to.

She put the menu away from her, her appetite destroyed.

'I don't think I can many you after all,' she said in a small, husky voice. 'I'm very sorry to have put you to so much trouble - but I can't !'

'I see,' he said, as grave as she. 'Don't you think you may be hungry? When you've had something to eat you'll feel much more courageous — you'll even be able to take me in your stride!'

'But that's the trouble!' she confessed in a rush. 'Even in an arranged marriage like this one, I'd have to see quite a lot of you, wouldn't I? But you see, I've got used to being by myself..I don't fit in with other people very well.'

He looked at her from beneath his eyelashes and she wondered what he was thinking. The colour rose in her cheeks and she picked up the menu again, glad to hide behind it until she had recovered her savoir faire.

'I think it's too late for you to withdraw,' Mr. Carmichael said, his voice as inflexible as steel, and yet gentle. 'I want your farm, Miss Kaufman. I've always wanted to own land out here. It's important to me — ' 'Why?' she asked baldly.

He shrugged his shoulders. 'I have my reasons, isn't that enough? They are important enough for me to be willing to take you into the bargain. I consider them to be more important than either of us and our squalid motives for getting married to one another. You want to be British and I'll make you British. That will have to be enough for you !'

Hero gave him a look, half dogged and half scared. 'I think I have a right to know what your reasons are. I don't know anything about you!'

'One of the penalties of being an adventuress,' he told her dryly. 'You have to back your own judgments of people, because they're most unlikely to tell you the truth.'

Wide-eyed, Hero retreated further into her chair. 'I'm not an adventuress,' she whispered.

He raised his brows, saying nothing.

'I'm not!' she declared more loudly. 'How dare you call me such a thing?'

'Wouldn't you call someone who marries for profit to herself an adventuress?'

'I've told you, I've changed my mind!'

He shook his head at her. 'Too late. You're going to marry me, Miss Hero Kaufman, whatever you think of me. It won't be half as bad as you think. You may even get to like it.'

'Never!'

He paid her no heed, turning his attention to the menu and what they were going to eat. He ordered for both of them, ignoring her gasp of protest as she slapped her copy of the menu down on the table. She had wanted to choose her own meal, she had wanted to enjoy every mouthful of this unexpected treat of eating in such a restaurant.

'Does your non-drinking go as far as not taking wine with your meals?' he asked her.

She had never tasted wine in her life. 'Of course not! I don't like the taste of spirits, that's all. If I did, I'd drink you under the table, I dare say. Adventuresses do, you

know!'

His mouth showed amusement as he ordered a bottle of some vintage she had never heard of and sat back, his eyes never leaving her face. Goaded into further speech, Hero muttered something quite unintelligible and then burst out: 'If anyone's an adventurer, it's you! Does your little pet snake know that?'

He grinned, the confident, masculine look in his eyes very much in evidence. 'She'll learn all about me, I expect, before we're through, but I don't think she'd much like being called a snake. Most women don't.'

'It was you who called her that!' He shook his head. 'Leonardo da Vinci.' His smile widened. 'As a matter of fact,' he went on, grinning easily, 'I'm beginning to think I'm lucky enough to have drawn the eel from the bag — '

'Eels have a wicked bite!' she informed him with a satisfaction that she couldn't adequately explain to herself.

'Conger eels. This one is a small, friendly eel who's rather frightened to find herself loose in the ocean. I don't think I'll have any trouble with her,' he concluded.