Moonflower Madness (26 page)

When she returned to the front of the mission, Ben was placidly waiting for her, still flower-garlanded. On seeing her he tossed his neck, and reading his message she removed the flowers, handing them to Jung-shou.

‘Did they tickle, my love?' she said to him fondly.

He gave a whinny, nuzzling her with his head. She thought of how near her uncle had come to shooting him and tears pricked the back of her eyes.

‘Where are your bearers?' Lionel Daly was asking Zachary.

‘At Peng. They are going to stay there tonight with the pack-mules and catch up with us sometime tomorrow afternoon.'

Gianetta slipped on her bolero jacket, mindful that the day's heat would soon be turning cool, and mounted Ben.

‘Goodbye, my dear,' Elizabeth said to her, her eyes suspiciously bright. ‘And God bless you.'

Zachary shook hands with Lionel Daly, and swung himself up into his saddle. Twenty-four hours ago he had ridden up to the mission a bachelor, now he was leaving it a married man. Never again would he think life incapable of surprising him.

‘Goodbye!' the Dalys and Jung-shou called out as they began to canter away in the direction of Peng. ‘Have a safe journey! Goodbye! God Bless!'

Their shouts rang out after them until, when Gianetta turned and waved for the last time, they were so far distant as to be mere doll's figures.

She looked across at Zachary. In profile his face was as hard-boned and as sensually aware as ever. A smile touched her lips. At moments like this, when he seemed broodingly lost in his own thoughts, she no longer found him intimidating or taciturn. The long silences that had always existed between them when they were riding together were not uncompanionable and when he shot her one of his sudden, flashing smiles, all the more heady and precious.

They drew nearer and nearer to Peng, and as they did so activity on the river and on its banks increased. Punts and one-man skiffs plied to and from the many landing-stages; junks lay at anchor, some of them upturned for repairs; buffaloes wallowed in the shallows; housewives trudged towards the river with empty buckets and toiled away from it with full ones.

They entered the town by the main gate and Gianetta was surprised to see that it was much cleaner and pleasanter than any of the other towns they had passed through. The gatehouse and main buildings were built of beautiful, russet-coloured sandstone; the inn-yards they glimpsed were spacious and well-swept and the little shops lining the busy, bustling streets were stocked high with rolls of dazzling coloured silks.

Despite the hubbub of activity, they traversed the town at a steady pace, emerging down the wide, stone steps of the north gate with nothing to mar their view but the glittering, glorious curves of the Kialing and the distant, cloud-topped mountains of Kansu.

Gianetta gazed rapturously northwards. ‘This is the happiest day of my life,' she said with utter truth.

Zachary grinned, amused as always by her disarming frankness. His eyes, however, as they rested on her, were still speculative. Even if she had married him for mere convenience, her sentiment would still, no doubt, have been the same. He wondered how, and when, he would ever know the truth of the matter. The memory of walking in on her love-scene with Charles still rankled. It had hardly been the behaviour of a young girl intent on nothing else but finding blue Moonflowers. She had previously spoken barely two words together to Charles and, despite all her subsequent protestations and his own recent doubts, he couldn't quite rid himself of the conviction that if Charles had asked her to marry him she would have acquiesced just as readily as she had acquiesced to his own proposal.

‘How long will it take us to reach Kansu?' Gianetta asked, her eyes still fixed on the diamond-hard brightness of the distant mountains.

‘Four weeks, maybe five.'

His sex stirred pleasurably. He had never wanted to make love to a woman more. He wondered if, when he did so, he would finally know the truth about her motivations for leaving Chung King. However adept she might be at deception, he knew with utter certainty that she would never be able to deceive him in bed. She didn't have the sexual experience for that particular kind of deceit.

As Peng fell farther and farther behind them, the day began to lose its steamy heat. Woodland scattered the gentle slopes flanking the river and the bank itself was a sea of golden Globeflowers, as thick on the ground as buttercups in an English meadow.

‘I think we'll camp here,' Zachary said suddenly, reining in his horse.

On the hillside behind them, peeping through the trees, was the rose-red roof of a pagoda. To the south, Peng was lost in a fold of the hills; to the north there was only the distant mountains, their summits milky-white and as ephemeral as a Chinese water-colour in the gathering dusk.

As she reined Ben in and slipped from the saddle, Gianetta was again overcome by a wave of shyness and apprehension. What if he had truly only married her in order to save Ben from being shot? What if he had not the slightest intention of consummating their marriage? Even worse, what if he had every intention of consummating their marriage but expected her to be far more worldly-wise than she in fact was?

He unrolled the bedding bundles from his pack, rolling them out on top of the Globeflowers, not assiduously adjoining each other, but intimately near. Far nearer than they had ever been previously.

‘Can I leave you to unload Ben and Bucephelus while I get a fire going?' he asked, his eyebrow quirking slightly.

She nodded, wanting to trace the satanic line of his eyebrow with her forefinger; wanting to feel the crisp coarseness of his hair against her palms; wanting to feel his mouth, hot and ardent, against her own.

As he strolled the few yards to the river bank in search of stones to edge the fire, she began to unload Ben. In the nearby trees a bird warbled. Somewhere, far out in the river, she heard a fish jump.

In easy silence he brought back stones, and as she loosely hobbled Ben and began to unload Bucephalus he began to build a fire.

The crackle and the aroma of the wood-smoke was infinitely comforting, reminding her of the many camp-fires they had shared previously.

‘Are you hungry?' There wasn't the slightest trace of nervousness in his voice.

She shook her head, knowing that even if she had been she couldn't possibly have eaten. Her mouth was too dry, her throat too constricted.

‘Then I think we should go for a walk.'

There was a hot flush at the backs of his eyes and she was suddenly sure that it was, in fact, the last thing he wanted to do. He had suggested it in order to give her a breathing-space; in order that when he took her as his wife it would be in the moonlight, and not in partial daylight.

‘Yes,' she said huskily, agreeing with his suggestion, grateful for the surprising sensitivity he was showing.

He hobbled Bucephalus and then took hold of her hand, beginning to walk in the direction of the woods and the pagoda. Her fingers slid willingly between his, her shyness ebbing with the same rapidity with which it had engulfed her. Everything was going to be all right between them. There was absolutely no need at all for a disabling emotion that could only mar, and not enhance, the precious experience of their first night together.

The pathway was narrow and obviously little used, and she half expected to find the pagoda a deserted shell. Instead, the ground-floor room was meticulously swept, the enormous statue of Buddha in its centre, splendidly ornate.

‘Do we light candles?' she asked, a little breathless after the steep climb through the trees.

Zachary shook his head, ‘No,' he said, amused. ‘We're not in St. Peter's.'

They stood, hand in hand before the statue, in the gloom and the rapidly deepening dusk.

‘What do Buddhists believe?' she asked at last, quietly.

‘They believe that existence is unhappiness, that unhappiness is caused by selfish desire, that desire can be destroyed and that it can be destroyed by following the noble eightfold path.'

There was respect in his voice and she said curiously, ‘What is the eightfold path?'

He turned towards her, drawing her very close.

‘Right views; right desires; right speech, plain and truthful; right conduct, including abstinence not only from immorality but also from taking life, whether human or animal; right livelihood, harming no-one; right effort, always pressing on; right awareness of the past, present and the future; and lastly, right contemplation or meditation.'

She was as close to him as she had been on the evening when they had visited the Viceroy and when he had so nearly kissed her.

With her heart beating fast and light she slid her hands up against his chest. His lips brushed her hairline and then he hooked a finger under her chin, tilting her face to his. For one long, electrically charged moment, their eyes held and he bent her in towards him, his lips coming down on hers in swift, unfumbled contact.

Unleashed desire sang along her nerve-endings. In happy submission her hands slid up into his hair and her mouth parted, her tongue slipping lovingly and willingly past his.

Shock roared through him. Whatever response he had expected, it had not been one so passionately ardent, so headily unrestrained. For a fleeting second he wondered if she were still virginal, and then common-sense returned. A girl who had lived a shielded life behind the high walls of the British Residency could be nothing else. The sensuality she was now so artlessly displaying was innate, not practised. He remembered her Italian blood, her warm and generous nature, the fearlessness and daring she had displayed in riding alone from Chung King through bandit-ridden and leopard-inhabited country. He knew that where physical love was concerned, such a girl could never be anything else but stunningly hot-blooded.

And she was his wife. As he thought of his great good fortune, he trembled. Never in his life had he expected to feel such a fierceness of emotion for another human being. The knowledge that he was irrevocably in love with her swept through him with the suddenness and certainty of a forest-fire. How could he ever have imagined that he had volunteered to marry her simply to save her from her uncle's petty tyranny? He had wanted to marry her because she was the most bewitching, most arousing, most intriguing woman he had ever met. Because she was his soulmate; his other-half; because they were going to spend a lifetime travelling the world together, searching for flowers still unknown in Europe.

As she pressed herself close to him, he raised a hand to her still-chignonned hair. The white rosebuds fell to the ground, her hair tumbling, silky and scented around her shoulders. His mouth continued to move hotly and demandingly over hers. He wanted to take her now, in the pagoda, without any further preliminaries. As his hand moved to her breast he felt her sway slightly.

‘It's all right,' he whispered hoarsely, drawing his head away from hers, looking down at her in the now near darkness. ‘I'm not going to hurt you. I will never hurt you.'

‘I want to make love by the banks of the river.' She was so confounded by desire for him that she was amazed she could still speak articulately, and even more amazed that she should be suggesting delaying the consummation of their marriage by so much as a moment.

His breath was raw in his throat, his sexual need of her so great he thought he was going to explode. Gently and with superhuman restraint he took hold of her hands, raising them to his mouth, kissing her fingers one by one.

‘Then let's go,' he said, his voice so charged with emotion that it was all she could to prevent herself from sinking to the ground there and then.

With fingers tightly entwined, they turned their backs on the inscrutably carved face of the Buddha and ran towards the woods and the path. The darkness made their swift descent hazardous and their headlong run was intermittently halted as Zachary pulled her out of the way of low-lying branches, swinging her round to him every time he did so, kissing her until he lost his breath in the passion of her mouth.

When they finally emerged from the trees, only the glow of their campfire and Ben's rough pale coat were visible in the moonlight. Both of them were panting from the exertion of the run, both of them were sweat-soaked.

‘Let's go for a swim,' Zachary said, pulling his shirt over his head.

As he did so Bucephalus whinnied and cantered towards him, his hobble trailing loosely.

‘The bank is too stony just here to be able to walk in comfortably,' he continued, attempting to catch hold of Bucephalus as he veered in his direction, and failing. ‘There's a sandy shore a little further up, where the trees dip almost into the water. I'll secure Bucephalus and join you there.'

In the moonlight, both man and beast looked magnificent. Bucephalus's coat shone like black satin as he pranced annoyingly out of Zachary's reach, and Zachary's broad shoulders and magnificent arm and chest muscles were sheened with perspiration.

Unhesitatingly she turned, running through the grass and the closed heads of the Globeflowers towards the point he had indicated. The trees spilled down to the water's edge and she had to slow down, picking her way through them with care until she reached the bank.

As she unbuttoned her blouse, letting it fall onto a damp, narrow arc of sand, she remembered the time she had surprised him while he was bathing. Not in a million years would she have believed then that the day would come when she would bathe naked with him. She laughed joyously as she slipped out of her riding breeches and then, in her lace-edged undergarments, she stepped into the delicious iciness of the water, wading out until she was out of her depth and then swimming languorously, her skin tingling, her hair eddying around her.

As Bucephalus charged once again out of Zachary's-reach. Zachary made a dive for the trailing hobble-rope and missed. Blaspheming, he picked himself up off the ground. With Bucephalus in such a mischievous mood he couldn't take the risk of letting him run free. He had to be caught and hobbled no matter how much precious time was wasted in the process.