[Stephanos 02] - Dragon Bay Read online

  ‘I ask, but you can of course refuse.’ He spoke whimsi­cally. ‘You take me, or you leave me. It’s as simple and as final as that.’

  His hands drew away from her face and he pulled off his mask and put back his head to show himself un­masked in the moonlight. There was a magnificent inso­lence about the action. He was straight out of Shelley, Kara thought, full of a pagan pride that said: ‘I am what I am, and cannot pretend to be otherwise.’

  Kara looked at him and thought of her brother Paul, who was also a man in every sense of the word, defiant and proud, and capable of great suffering in silence. The chirring of cicadas was loud in the silence of this pro­found moment, one that could change her life for better or worse.

  ‘Come, don’t the Greeks say that reflection produces timidity?’ Even as Lucan spoke, there was a sound of bursting fireworks and a cascade of stars seemed to fill the sky for a moment. Kara ran out of the pagoda to watch the display, and Lucan strode after her. He caught hold of her shoulders and held her back from further flight. Held her in bondage to feelings she had never dreamed of—so unlike her feeling for Nikos. In that there had been liking and laughter—in this Lucan stood like a beacon around which she flew like a lost bird.

  His hands tightened about her shoulders as a flight of rockets exploded into a thousand pieces of Stardust. ‘I leave for Dragon Bay in a few days,’ he said. ‘We would have time to be married, in church if you wished.’

  ‘Yes,’ the word seemed to pass her lips of its own ac­cord. ‘I would like to be married in a church, if that is possible, Lucan.’

  On Monday morning he took her to a little side-street shop with windows that jutted and distorted the shape of the antiques on display. The scent bottles and snuff­boxes; the old clocks and figurines. And there in the musky interior of the shop he bought her a gold wedding-ring with a pattern of tiny lilies carved round it, and an engagement ring set with a large flawless pearl. He slipped the pearl ring on to her finger, looking serious as he admired the effect.

  ‘I could not have wished for anything lovelier, Lucan,’ she said, and it did not occur to her at the time that the pearl was like a glimmering teardrop on her hand.

  They hurried in opposite directions after they came out of the jeweller’s, he to buy a special licence, Kara to send off a wire to her brother and his wife. They must be told that she was getting married, but she shrank in­wardly from Paul’s reaction to her news. As head of a Greek household he expected to meet and approve the man she wished to marry. She knew that he had always hoped to give her away himself, and to Nikos, and when he received her wire he would probably assume that she was marrying Lucan Savidge on the rebound.

  Her heart held misgivings as she came out of the post office. Was it on the rebound from Nikos that she was marrying Lucan? Had she really given enough serious thought to what life at Dragon Bay would be like, in that big, isolated house where Lucan’s crippled brother was the master?

  She glanced at her left hand, and it was then that the pearl took on the semblance of a large teardrop and made her think of the old superstition about pearls. They were said to bring tears!

  Thrusting this thought from her mind, she went in search of a smart dress shop, where she bought an attrac­tive little dress with a cowl neckline, and a tiny hat made of white velvet flowers with bead centres. She bought white gloves, and then gave her name and hotel to the vendeuse so the boxes could be delivered.

  ‘Almost the outfit of a bride,’ gushed the vendeuse. ‘Is mademoiselle to be married?’

  When Kara nodded, a gleam lit the woman’s eyes. ‘Perhaps I know the gentleman,’ she said inquisitively. ‘I am sure I saw mademoiselle at the carnival with Mon­sieur Savidge—’

  ‘You did,’ Kara said drily. ‘We are to be married on Wednesday.’ And as she made her way out of the shop, the vendeuse was hurrying to break the news to one of her colleagues.

  ‘Some of the more curious are bound to be at the church to see us married,’ Lucan said, when they met for lunch at their favourite harbour restaurant. ‘The notor­ious Lucan Savidge will be making an honest woman of you, my love.’

  My love, she thought, her gaze upon him over the rim of her coffee cup. If only he said it without that smile of cynicism!

  ‘A church is a cold place without people in it,’ she said. ‘I am glad there will be people at our wedding, even if they only come out of curiosity.’

  His eyes flicked her grave face, and tousled hair. ‘You hardly look old enough to be a bride, Kara. At home on your Greek island, I imagine you would have been mar­ried very properly in white silk and yards of family lace.’

  ‘And Paul would have given me away,’ she sighed.

  ‘I am sorry there will be no lace, no family—and no young Greek at your side.’

  ‘I am only sorry that Paul and Domini will not be with me,’ she said, flushing. ‘What of your own family, Lucan? Won’t they be surprised when you arrive home with a bride?’

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Pryde expects me to marry, and my sister Clare has little or no interest in anything but her sculpture. Rue, of course, will be disappointed that she was not at the wedding. The child likes a little gaiety, and there is little enough of that at Dragon Bay.’

  Kara slowly put down her coffee cup and gazed wide-eyed at her husband-to-be. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you might have told me before that you had a sister who sculpts—and who is this child Rue ?’

  ‘Rue?’ He tinkered with a spoon. ‘She is eight years old and she lives with us at Dragon Bay. She was left on our doorstep—a mere baby in a basket, whose mother had abandoned her. Pryde adopted her. If she had been a boy—’

  There he broke off, his eyebrows drawn together in almost a frown as he beckoned their waiter and asked for his bill. They went out into the sunshine and turned their steps in the direction of the hilltop church that reared its turrets into the tropical blue sky. Kara walked silently at Lucan’s side. Her heart was beating Unevenly. If the child whom Pryde had adopted had been a boy, there would have been no need for Lucan to be taking as wife a girl he hardly knew—and did not love.

  Kara stopped walking and she was tugging at the pearl ring on her finger as she said agitatedly: ‘I can’t go through with it, Lucan. You will have to find some­one else to—’

  ‘That ring stays where it is!’ He caught hold of her left hand and forcibly pushed the ring back into place. His face was utterly ruthless in that moment; his eyes the colour of a stormy sea, his mouth hard, and his jaw set. ‘You promised to marry me, Kara, and by Lucifer you are going to stand by that promise!’

  Her hand was held firmly in his as he marched her along the path of the church to a side door. Half an hour later Kara came out dazed into the hot sunshine, her marriage to Lucan all arranged and due to take place on Wednesday morning.

  As they went down the path, Kara saw a butterfly clinging to a flower, beating its wings as if held fast to the pollen on the petals of the fiery hibiscus. Kara’s heart beat like those wings; she wanted to fly away from what held her. To fly, and yet to stay and be lost as the butter­fly was suddenly lost in the heart of the bell flower.

  ‘When next we walk down this path,’ said Lucan, ‘we will be husband and wife.’

  The sun caught the pearl of her ring and it gleamed with captive colours as he swung her hand and looked at her with a curious smile in his sea-coloured eyes.

  ‘I believe the bride-price equalled four cows in the days of Niall the Pirate,’ she said with forced lightness.

  He put back his head and laughed, his hair showing glints of fire in the blaze of the sun. ‘Is that how you see yourself, my girl, the booty of an Irish pirate? You will get along famously with Rue. She delights in the fact that the Savidges trace their beginnings to the warriors of Ulster, and that the grand staircase of the Great House was wrought from the Spanish wood of a wrecked cor­sair galleon.’

  ‘Rue is a wry name to give a child,’ said Kara.

  ‘The mother was
no doubt rueful,’ he said drily. ‘We like to regard the other meaning of the word—herb of grace. She is very graceful, and full of mischief.’

  ‘I—look forward to meeting her, Lucan. To tell you the truth—’

  ‘You are relieved there will be a child in the house.’ For a moment his fingers tightened painfully on hers, and she was reminded vividly of what he had said at the moment of his proposal—that his main reason for marry­ing was to provide an heir for the Great House.

  Her heart quickened. In so short a time this tall, savagely attractive man would be her husband … her lover….

  Kara awoke to the dawn rapture of the birds of the island—today she became the bride of Lucan Savidge.

  The next few hours passed all too swiftly. She ate breakfast alone, for she and Lucan must not meet until they met in church, and at nine o’clock she began to dress for her wedding. Her hair had been shampooed the day before and was looking like the soft, sleek cap of a young child, and she removed the little gold rings from her ears and replaced them with the tiny pearls Lucan had bought her yesterday to match her ring.

  ‘No,’ she had said, when he gave her the little box.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The bride-price has gone up this year.’

  She faced the mirror and saw her lips curve into a smile as she smoothed the cowl collar of her dress. The white cowl made her look almost like a young nun about to take her vows, and her smile was too fleeting to hide her fine-drawn look this morning.

  She gave a nervous jump as fingers suddenly tapped upon her door. She went to open it, and there was Nap, beaming all over his face and holding the spray of white and gold rosebuds which Kara had chosen to carry in church. The scent of the flowers filled the room as Kara took them from Nap.

  ‘This come too, mam’zelle.’ He handed her a small envelope and then stood staring at her as though never before had he seen a bride-to-be.

  ‘Please wait, Nap.’ She withdrew into her room and set aside her bouquet so she could open the wire. Her fingers shook, her throat went dry, and a cloud passed over the morning. Paul forbade her marriage to a man unknown to him, and ordered her to return home to Andelos!

  He did not send his love, and that on top of his anger and disapproval brought quick tears to her eyes. She blinked them away determinedly, for it would bring bad luck for her to weep on her wedding morning. She went to the dressing-table where her handbag lay and rum­maged in it for her pen and notebook. She tore out a page and wrote on it, shakily:

  ‘Dear Paul, when you receive this I shall be mar­ried to Lucan. Please forgive, and understand. My best love, Kara.’

  She folded the piece of notepaper and handed it to Nap with some money and instructions to send it off at once for her. A tear had splashed on to the paper, and her voice shook. She strove for calmness and picked up her bouquet and buried her face in the cool, ferny roses. White roses for innocence, golden for warmth.

  At a quarter to ten, Kara was ready and Nap was at her door to tell her the hired car awaited her at the side entrance of the hotel. Her hotel bill had been paid the evening before and she did not linger here any longer. Nap followed her down the patio stairs with her suitcases and put them in the car for her. She was aware of people watching her from the balcony above, curious and silent.

  ‘Come with me to the church, Nap,’ she said on im­pulse, and he climbed into the car and sat beside her, surely the most picturesque pageboy that ever attended a bride.

  He chattered all the way to the hilltop church. Kara clutched her spray of rosebuds and felt curiously numb.

  It was like that all through the wedding ceremony. As if in a dream she stood beside Lucan in the church, with its sprinkling of people in the pews, its coral pillars and baroque panelling, the sunlight turned to jewel colours by the stained glass windows.

  Flowers were massed at either side of the altar, great clusters of tropical blooms. Kara guessed that Lucan had arranged to have them put there and she glanced at him in shy gratitude. He was very erect and tall at her side in his tropic worsted, his tie superbly knotted against his white shirt, a small golden rose in his buttonhole. Her heart misgave her when his eyes met hers, then a smile warmed their sea-green depths and she felt less lonely and unsure of him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE river on which they travelled by raft pursued its course through wild and lovely country. Birds suddenly disturbed fluttered like living jewels against the green walls of the forest, where mossy lianas hung like snakes and big jungle flowers grew in abundance, tongued and alive as great spiders.

  Every now and then they shot the shining curve of a waterfall on the long, graceful raft that was made from plantain-logs and bamboo. Their Carib punter stood at the narrow end, looking like a jungle warrior with his high-boned face and tilting eyes beneath a black fringe of hair. The blade of his paddle was studded with shells and scraps of coloured glass and it glittered as it rose and fell. He was lean and copper-coloured, outlined by the sun like a carved idol.

  ‘They were cannibals once,’ Lucan said from his seat that faced Kara’s. He smiled at the shocked widening of her eyes, and flicked ash from his cheroot into the water. ‘Their mode of courtship is intriguing. When a girl "fills the eye" of one of them, he invites her into the high woods and there he takes her, you understand, like a warrior. Afterwards she is his woman and they marry.’

  The Carib began to chant a song of his ancient race, and it blended with the wild country into which Kara was being swept with every stroke of the great, decorated paddle.

  ‘He sings a wedding chant in our honour.’ Lucan sat back lazily in his low wicker seat and stretched his long legs. The white silk of his shirt clung to the muscles of his chest and shoulders, his throat showed hard and brown in the opening of his collar, from which he had stripped his tie. The silvery green river light was in his eyes.

  ‘Do you still feel a stranger to yourself, Mrs. Savidge?’ he drawled.

  She nodded, and then said lightly: ‘Change the name but not the letter, change for worse instead of better.’

  ‘Do you expect life with me to be—worse?’ His eyes narrowed to a glittering green. ‘I am not a boy, Kara, to kneel before you and make promises of heaven, but life with me here on earth will not be dull, I promise you. I work hard, and I want someone to come home to when the sun sets red across the cane fields.’

  Someone … anyone. Kara glanced away from him at the wild cane brakes they were passing. She saw great white birds in the rushes, and women from the isolated houses doing the family wash at the riverside, using boulders on which to bleach their cottons in the sun.

  ‘When will we reach Dragon Bay?’ she asked.

  ‘Some time tomorrow morning.’ He tossed the butt of his cheroot into the water and it floated away beneath a great elephant’s ear. ‘We will not travel through the night as I usually do—the river grows treacherous as it nears the sea—but will make camp in the forest just before sundown.’

  Her heart raced—so her bridal night was to be spent among those giant trees and shiny green shield-plants that might be hiding warriors in ambush!

  ‘I am longing for my first glimpse of the Great House,’ she said, a tiny nervous shake in her voice. ‘Have you wired your family, Lucan? Do they know you are bringing home a—bride?’

  ‘No,’ he said lazily. ‘I thought we would give them a surprise.’

  ‘Lucan—’ She was disconcerted, and did not look for­ward to being an unexpected, even unwelcome surprise. ‘I think it might have been more tactful of you to let them know. Your sister might not like adjusting her household arrangements at the last moment.’

  ‘Clare?’ He put back his head and laughed. ‘She doesn’t bother with the running of the house—that is left to Da, who used to be in charge of the nursery when we were children. Clare is not the domesticated type. She lives only for her art,’ he added mockingly.

  ‘I see.’ Kara dabbled her fingers in the water and didn’t know how pensive her profi
le was. ‘What will your family think of me, I wonder?’

  He gazed at the strained triangle that was her face, and the spray-wet hair that clung to her slim young neck and thin cheeks. A smile came fleetingly to her sensitive mouth as she met his eyes; from nervousness she went to shyness, and then to confusion as his green gaze slipped to her lips. The spray over the bows of the raft had stung them berry-red.

  ‘You have a certain wild Greek charm,’ he drawled. You will have to use it to slay the dragon.’

  ‘The dragon?’ she whispered.

  ‘Pryde, my brother. He is my twin, remember, and he cannot leap on a horse and ride out the devils that pursue all the Savidges.’

  She drew a shaky breath. ‘I begin to be afraid, Lucan. You said that it takes the strong and the ruthless to live at Dragon Bay. Will I be strong enough?’

  ‘Surely it took courage and daring to marry me, Kara?’ His look was one of irony, as though no woman could have tender reasons for marrying him. ‘By the way, did you receive an answer to the wire you sent to your brother?’

  She nodded, and felt a sinking at heart.

  ‘Tell me what he had to say.’

  ‘Oh, the usual—’

  ‘The exact words, Kara!’

  ‘All right.’ She flung up her head almost defiantly. ‘He forbade my marriage to a man unknown to him and ordered me to return home to Andelos.’

  Silence and shadow fell down about them as they en­tered one of the cool tree tunnels where the river nar­rowed and the raft almost touched the banks at either side. Leaves shifted and dappled Lucan’s face, and then they were out again into the sunshine and shooting a series of miniature rapids with aplomb, the spray like a soft rain that made Kara blink rapidly.

  ‘Paul would have wired in that way n-no matter who I chose to marry,’ she said.

  ‘But not if it had been the estimable Nikos.’ Lucan gave his sardonic laugh and caught hold of her left hand. He studied the gold band upon it, and the pearl that glimmered like a teardrop. ‘He probably thinks that you have married me on the rebound—have you, I wonder?’