The Monsoon (88 page)

Impatiently she pushed away his hands and undid the ribbon. She reached in and scooped out one of her breasts and pushed it into his hand, closing his fingers over it.

“There,” she said, into his mouth, “it’s yours. Everything is yours.” He kneaded her flesh, and though she whimpered she exulted in the pain.

“Oh, I have hurt you.” He pulled away.

“I’m sorry.

Truly, I’m sorry.”

“No, no!” She reached for his hands and replaced them on her bosom.

“Do it. Do whatever you want.” He stared at the breast in his hand. It was as white as though it had been freshly carved from ivory, but with the pink marks of his rough fingers on it.

It filled his cupped hand. The nipple was engorged and hard, dark with blood.

“So beautiful. I have never seen anything so beautiful.

He bowed his head and placed his lips on the nipple.

She arched her back, thrusting her chest up to meet him.

She reached up with both hands, twisted and entwined her fingers in the thick, springing curls at the back of his head, guiding his mouth. When at last he lifted it to look at her face, she locked her mouth on his once more.

He was on top of her now, and suddenly she realized what that hardness was that he was pushing against her thighs and belly. She had never felt it before, but often she and Caroline had discussed it, and she had wheedled every detail out of her elder sister. As the realization struck her, she stopped breathing and stiffened with shock.

Immediately Tom tried to break away again.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you. We should stop now.” The threat terrified her. She was desperate at the thought of being deprived of him and the hardness of his body.

She pulled him back.

“Please, Tom, don’t go away!” Almost timidly he embraced her again, but he arched his lower body away from her. She wanted to feel him ago in, that wondrous man-thing hard against her.

She reached around behind him and locked her hands over his buttocks, pulling him in and hunting for him with straining hips.

“Yes!” She had found him.

“Oh, yes.” She was in a transport, her emotions tumbling and twisting like a twig caught in a whirlpool. She felt him tugging at her clothing, reaching down between them, and she realized what he was trying to do.

She raised herself on her shoulders and heels, arching her bottom off the deck, and reached down to help him, pulling her skirts over her thighs, then as high as her navel.

The monsoon wind was cool on her naked belly, and Tom was kneeling over her, plucking frantically at the fastenings of his breeches. She raised herself on her elbows, wanting to see him. Caroline’s descriptions had been graphic, but she wanted to see for herself. Tom was taking so long, she felt she could not wait longer. She wanted to help him and stretched out her hand.

Then, with one movement, he wrenched his breeches down to his knees, and she gasped aloud. Nothing her sister had told her had prepared her for this. Staring at him, she fell back on the hard deck and her legs fell apart weakly as if she had no control of them.

A long time later he lay heavy and inert on top of her.

He was gasping like a man rescued from drowning. Droplets @ of his sweat had fallen upon her like rain, and wet the front of her bodice, her face and her bare breast. She had locked her legs around him, and she held him still. The felucca under them rocked them like infants in the cradle.

Tom stirred and tried to rise, but she tightened the grip of her arms and legs to prevent him leaving her. He sighed raggedly and slumped back on top of her. She felt a strange sense of triumph and.

possession, as though she had achieved something of almost mystical importance, something beyond mere flesh. She could not find the words to describe it to herself, but she stroked his head and murmured gentle but incoherent endearments to him.

With infinite regret, and a sense of aching loss, she felt him shrivel inside her, and though she ached where he had forced his way into her, she tightened her muscles and tried to hold him in, but he slipped away, and she had to let him sit up. He looked about him with a bewildered expression.

“We have drifted a league out to sea.” She sat up beside him, smoothing down her skirts, and saw that the island was a blue line on the horizon. Tom came up on his knees, pulling up his breeches, and she watched him. She felt maternal and protective, as though she had miraculously become a full woman, as though she had put her girlhood behind her, that she was now the strong one and he the child who must be fostered and cherished.

Tom staggered to the halyard, unsteady on his feet, raised the sail and put the felucca on the wind. Sarah straightened her clothing and retied the ribbon of her bodice, then rose from the deck and went to sit with him at the tiller. He put his arm around her shoulders and she snuggled close to him. They were halfway back to the island before either of them spoke.

“I love you, Sarah Beatty,” he said.

She rejoiced to hear him say it and tightened her embrace.

“As I said before, I have loved you since the first day I laid eyes upon you, Tom Courtney. Even though I was only a child, I prayed that one day I would be your woman.”

“That day has come,” he said, and kissed her again.

They met as often as Sarah could escape the vigilance of Caroline and Guy. Sometimes the intervals between their meetings were two or three days, but then their passion was inflamed by the delay.

These trysts were always in the afternoons, for in the mornings Sarah helped her sister run the household, or looked after little Christopher. Neither could Tom leave the Swallow and his crew: the ship had suffered extensive storm damage to her hull and rigging after leaving Good Hope, and this had to be repaired, the ship made fully seaworthy again.

Most mornings Tom was up at the fort, for he was desperate to have news of Dorian from Muscat, and he was still waiting for his licence to trade. Although he lavished flattery and baksheesh on the vizier, he was still in bad grace and the vizier punished him with flowery excuses and apologies for the delay. Without the Sultan’s firman in his hands Tom could not deal in the island markets.

Those precious hours when Tom and Sarah could be together sped by too swiftly for both of them. Some afternoons they lay in each other’s arms, not bothering to touch the delicacies that Sarah had brought with her, making love as though it were for the last time. In the intervals between they talked, breathless in their need to say everything they felt for each other, making fantastic plans for the future, for the time when they could escape the island together and, with Dorian, sail away in the swallow.

On other days they took the felucca and sailed to the outer reefs, anchoring over the coral and fishing with hand lines, laughing and shouting with excitement as they dragged up the lovely creatures from the depths, kicking on the lines, sparkling like great gemstones in the sunlight as they were swung inboard.

One afternoon Sarah brought the box of duelling pistols her father had given her when they parted in Bombay, for her protection in this land of wild animals and wilder men.

“Papa promised to teach me to shoot, but he never found time,” she told him.

“Will you teach me now, Tom?” They were magnificent weapons. The grips were carved from lustrous walnut, and the locks and long-rifled barrels were chased with gold and silver. There were ramrods of horn, and powder flasks of silver. Fitted into the case was a screw@ topped pot containing fifty lead balls that had been selected to ensure that they were perfectly round and symmetrical. The patches were of oiled leather.

Tom loaded -with half-measures of powder to reduce the recoil.

Then he showed her how to place her feet, and address the target, turned half away, presenting her right shoulder. Then with her left fist on her hip, to bring up the weapon with a straight right arm, pick up the foresight bead in the notch of the back sight and fire as she swung through the target, rather than trying to hold her aim until her arm ached and shook.

He set up a coconut on top of one of the low walls of ” the monastery, fifteen paces away.

“Knock it off!” he said, and called her misses.

“Low! Still low! Right!” He reloaded swiftly, and she changed pistols. With the fourth shot she Agent the nut spinning and spraying milk. She squealed gleefully, and soon she was hitting more often than she missed.

“I should be given a prize for each hit,” she demanded.

“What sort of prize did you have in mind?”

“A kiss might be appropriate.” With this incentive, she hit five nuts in succession, and Tom told her, “Clever girl, you have won the grand prize.” He picked her up in his arms and carried her, protesting weakly and insincerely, through the gateway, into their secret place in the ruins.

A few days later he brought one of London’s best muskets with him in the felucca, and showed her how to load and fire it. Tom had purchased four of these extraordinary weapons before they sailed from England. He could not afford to buy more, for they were staggeringly expensive.

The cheap military muskets were smooth-bored, and the ball did not fit snugly in the barrel, so spin was not imparted to it as it driven through the lands. Because they were not stabilize ds the balls flew erratically.

However, with this rifled weapon the accuracy was startling. Tom could be sure of hitting a coconut with every shot at a hundred and fifty paces. Sarah was tall and strong enough to be able to level the heavy musket from her shoulder without difficulty, and once again she proved she had the quickness of hand and eye to make her a natural marksman. Within an hour of practice she was able to claim her reward from him after almost every shot.

“I suppose the next thing I shall have to teach you is swordplay,” Tom remarked, as they lay together on the plaited sleeping mat with which they had now furnished their secret roofless cell in the monastery.

“You have done a fine job of that at already.” She grinned wickedly, and reached down his body.

“Here is my trusty sword and, sir, I know already full well how to play with it.”

In serious mood, they discussed their plans for when

Tom had succeeded in rescuing Dorian.

“I will come back for you,” he said, “and take you with me, away from Zanzibar and Guy.”

“Yes.”

She nodded as though she had never doubted that.

“And then we will sail back to England together,

wOn’t we, Tom?” She saw his expression change.

“What is it, my darling?” she asked anxiously.

“I can never return to England,” he said softly.

She scrambled to her knees and stared at him in dismay.

“What do you mean, never return Tom?

“Listen to me, Sarah.” He sat up and took both her hands in his.

“Something terrible happened before I left

England, something I never intended.”

“Tell me,” she pleaded.

“Anything that touches you, touches me.”

And so he told her about William. He started at the beginning, describing their childhood, and the growing tyranny the elder brother had exerted over the younger ones. He recounted many small incidents of heartless cruelty that William had inflicted.

“I think the only time that Dorian, Guy and I were happy was when we were free of him, those times when he was away at university,” he said.

Her expression was filled with sympathy.

“I did not like him when I met him at High Weald,” she agreed.

“He reminded me of a serpent, cold and poisonous.”

Tom nodded.

“I had almost forgotten how vindictive he could be when I was away from home, on the voyage of the Seraph. But when we took Father home after Flor de la

Mar it was all brought back to me with a vengeance.”

He told her how William had treated their father when he was dying, and how he had repudiated his oath to help find Dorian after Hal’s death.

“We fought,” he said.

“We had fought before, often, but never like this.” He paused and the pain of the memory was so plain to see that she tried to embrace him to make him stop the recital.

“No, Sarah, I have to tell you everything. You have to listen, so that you can understand how it happened.” Sometimes halting, at other times in a fierce rush of words, told her about that fight on his last night at High aid.

“You asked how I broke my nose, and I could not tell you then.” He touched the lump.

“Billy did that.” He described the battle in simple words that were so vivid and affecting that Sarah paled and clutched his arm, sinking her nails into his flesh.

“In the end I could not kill him, though he deserved it a hundred times. I was moved by Alice, as she stood there with the baby in her arms, pleading for his life, and I could not kill him. I put up my sword and rode away, thinking that that was the end of it.

But I should have known my brother better than that.”

“There is more?” she asked in a small, frightened voice.

“I don’t think I can bear to hear more.”

“I have to tell you all of it, and you must listen so that you can understand.” He came at last to the fatal meeting on the river landing below the Tower of London.

He described the fight with the band of hired cutthroats. His voice sank lower and lower, and there were long pauses as he searched for the words to describe the terrible climax.

“I still did not know it was Billy. It was dark. He wore a wide hat and his face was covered. I thought he was the boatman, and I ran to him, asking him to ferry us away. I was thunderstruck when he drew out the pistol. He fired and the ball struck me here.” He lifted his shirt and displayed the long pink scar across his ribs beneath his arm.

She stared at it, then reached out to trace the raised, twisted cicatrices with her fingertips. She had noticed the scar before, but when she had questioned him, he had been evasive and dismissive. Now she knew why.

“He might have killed you,” she breathed in awe.

“Yes, I thought he had. But, luckily, the ball struck my ribs and glanced away. It knocked me off my feet, and Billy stood over me and aimed the second barrel. That shot would have finished the business.