The Passionate Sinner (2 page)

Only his eyes had ever made an aching protest ... his steel-grey eyes from which the precious sight had been struck that awful haunting afternoon, after long hours of rebuilding the entire side of an injured woman’s face.

‘Now,’ he had smiled, ‘she will be able to face a mirror again.’ Then he had turned to Merlin and accepted from her hand the small white eye-cup ... and still her heart echoed with that tortured cry ... oh God, like the howling of a tiger as the moon went dark.

‘What is it—what is the matter?’

The helicopter pilot was speaking to her and she gave him a look she didn’t fully realise was desperate and anguished.

‘You groaned,’ he said. ‘Does flying in this cage make you feel sick?’

‘A—a little,’ she lied. ‘It’s my first time.’

‘Of course, but soon we will be landing, and no doubt you are feeling in need of a cup of tea.’ He broke into a smile that showed even white teeth. ‘The British they are very fond of tea, eh? We grow it on the island and a cousin of the
tuan
is overseer of the plantation. They are Dutchmen, of course, and perhaps you thought that this part of the world had rid itself of the white boss?’

‘I did rather think so,’ she admitted. ‘But isn’t the island owned by someone quite rich, who owed Mynheer van Setan a rather big favour?’

‘That is so. A government officer of high standing, of one of the old royal houses. As in your country,
nonya,
we are inclined still to respect the blue blood.’

She smiled a little in return. ‘It was good of him to let Mynheer van Setan reside on the island. Paul—he must have needed a kind of haven after.’ Her smile was lost and her face was losing its control. ‘It’s always sad, isn’t it, to hear of a man like that going blind? He must have had so much to give.’

‘Be warned not to show pity,’ the pilot said. ‘He won’t stand for it. He has the will of iron and in many respects one would take him for a sighted man. You know, Miss Lakeside, I am surprised by something.’

‘And what is that?’ she asked.

‘You are much younger than we thought you would be. The
tuan
said to me only this morning, fly to the mainland and pick up a lady who is coming to work for me, and be polite and helpful, for middle-aged English spinsters are rather circumspect.’ The young Indonesian gave Merlin what could only be termed a very old-fashioned look. ‘I have seen English maiden ladies in my time at college,
nonya.
They were not half so youthful, nor had they skin like the inside of the oyster-shell.’

Merlin blushed, right down into the neat neckline of her dress, where the heat spread and pooled in her collarbone. It wasn’t only that she was a stranger to flattery, but she felt riddled with guilt, well aware that in writing to Paul van Setan she had deliberately made the tone and style of her application rather old-fashioned, so that anyone reading it to him would impart the nuances of a staid woman to whom work was of more importance than a social life.

It had taken Merlin several hours to get the
tonejai
her letter just right, using the language of a bookish woman who had very little else but work in her life.

That blush burned her skin, for Paul had obviously got the message and believed her to be a mature person of middle years, and all she could hope was that being blind he wouldn’t realise that she was far younger than she had led him to believe. There would hardly be any physical contact between them, and she had a low, softly modulated voice that shouldn’t give her away.

But the helicopter pilot was in a position to do so, and she just had to appeal to him.

‘You won’t say anything, will you, about the fact that I’m younger than he thought? I—I very much wanted the post, you see. I longed to travel, but there was no hope of coming this far afield unless I took work in this part of the world. You do understand, don’t you?’

‘Do I,
nonya?’
His smile was subtle and wholly foreign. ‘To me there is mystery in a young woman travelling thousands of miles to a strange island to be among people who will find her strange in return. You are not the sort that a man sees in the Far Eastern capitals, a woman of wealth who travels to pass the time, a good-time girl who takes work as a nightclub hostess, or a member of a religious order in the nursing profession.’

His dark, elongated eyes flicked her mouth and saw the tiny nerve that pulsed there, he took in her hands that were gripping the handle of her bag with an unnatural tension, and then he swung the throttle of the helicopter engine and they began to descend, nearer and nearer to a glistening strip of beach that had suddenly appeared on the edge of the ocean.

‘I never approach the
tuan
with tales,’ he said. ‘If you have a secret, then it is your concern, but beware of
him.
His senses are abnormally acute and he may well guess that you are a bit of girl instead of a stolid maiden lady. We have a saying, Folly always demands a penalty.’

‘You think I’ve been a fool in coming here?’ Her heartbeats quickened as the helicopter dropped smoothly towards the pale stretch of sand, curving away like the undulating tail of a snake, out from among the trees,
through a towering archway of black rocks to where the sea pounded.

The helicopter settled, a moment of shrill noise and then abrupt silence as the rotors came to a stop. The pilot turned to face her, peeling off his earphones as he did so. A jag of black hair was sharp against his smooth coffee skin. ‘A pebble and a diamond are alike to a blind man, as we say, but Tuan Paul has never been an ordinary man and it is well known in this part of the world that he worked upon the oil-burned face of a boy, the son of the man who owns this island, and made it good to look at again. If there should be harm to him in your arrival among us, then you would be wise to leave before I take you to him.’

‘How could I possibly want to harm such a man?’ Merlin gasped, feeling the deep twist of pain, the sudden grip of fear, the realisation that she would be in peril from these people if they ever discovered her secret.

‘Women are creatures of intrigue and no man really knows if his heart is safe in the hands of a woman. Your eyes, Miss Lakeside, are not easy to read. They are impenetrable like a forest flower, and they are shadowed when your lashes veil them. I can see you, but I don’t know you. The
tuan
will not see you, but to his fingers a pebble will not feel like a diamond.’

‘A-and what is that supposed to mean?’ Merlin asked, nervously.

‘Just this,
nonya,
don’t get too close to him.’ The pilot swung open the exits of the machine and Merlin alighted before he could come and assist her. He had unnerved her with his remarks and the way he seemed to guess that there was more to her being here than the mere wish to satisfy an urge to travel. She could feel a tremor in her legs as she stood there on the hot sand that was like crushed shell and replaced her sun-glasses in order to offset the dazzle and to hide her eyes from the young Indonesian. Fear couldn’t be altogether concealed and she could feel it in herself ... the mounting apprehension of what faced her within the next few minutes ... her meeting with Paul van. Setan for the first time in months.

King Tiger, whom she had been warned not to approach too closely.

‘Have we far to go to reach the house?’ she asked. ‘Is it a big house?’

‘It’s the island residence,’ he replied, a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he indicated a rock stairway that led up from the sands to a plateau above them.

‘Up there?’ she said, frowning. ‘Does that mean that Mynheer van Setan makes his way down that stairway? Isn’t that rather dangerous for him?’

‘He gives no thought to the danger,
nonya.’

‘I see.’ She swallowed drily and wondered if Paul was careless of his life because he considered chat he had very little to live for since being cut off from his life’s work. Oh God, this was going to be harder than she had dreamed of, being here with him and having to endure the sight of him stumbling around, beholden to other people for the small things that sighted people took for granted, not caring very much if he plunged down those rocks and broke his neck.

‘He has a small island boy who leads him down,’ the pilot drawled, as if reading her mind. ‘You could not keep the tuan away from the sea, even though for him there is the danger of not seeing the silent approach of the tiger shark. We islanders go into the water with a knife strapped to the hip, but the strange part is that he has been swimming in our sea ever since he came here and the shark has not yet attacked him. Perhaps being blind he cannot exude the fear or panic that sighted people cannot suppress when danger comes close to them, and maybe the primitive shark senses that he shares the sea with someone who swims in total darkness.’

She shuddered at the words and tried to picture that tall, assured man of medicine living a life so primitive, so far removed from the clinical environs of the hospital where he had been a kind of god to those he healed and those he worked with. Paul van Setan, the most brilliant young surgeon Sir Ivor Cliveland had ever trained and who would have carried on the tradition ... and who was now a kind of blind beachcomber who in need of something to occupy his keen mind had hit upon the idea of writing a casebook and outlining the methods he had used in his restoration of the human face and body.

The tragedy of it struck through Merlin like a knife and as she stood looking about her, a hand was pressed tightly to her side.

‘You are all right?’ A hand touched her shoulder and she gave a start and found the Indonesian pilot close to her.

‘Yes.’ She tensed at his touch. ‘I—I’m taking in the strangeness of everything, and I do feel slightly nervous. Do you think he’ll mind terribly if he discovers that I’m a young woman?’

‘You had better let him first discover that you are a good worker.’ The white teeth gleamed against the coffee skin. ‘Then when the whispers reach him …’

‘The whispers?’ Her breath caught in her throat.

‘A
nona,
a young single girl in the house of a bachelor!’His black eyebrows quirked. ‘On an island everything is known, everything is discussed, and you are very attractive.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ she gasped, jerking away from him. ‘I’m not at all the type of girl that men look at.’

‘He will not be looking, will he,
nonya?’
The foreign voice was insinuating. ‘He will be attuned to your voice, which is low and pleasing, and at some time his blind hand will brush against you.’

‘How dare you speak like this!’ Merlin felt that she had gone ashen, for his words struck at hidden and forbidden feelings deep inside her. It actually made her feel a little faint, the idea of one of Paul’s lean clever hands coming in contact with her body. She swayed and clenched her hand against the scaly trunk of a nearby tree. ‘I—I’m not used to this amount of heat,’ she said me infernal island of the devil’s.’

‘Perhaps you have,
nonya,’

‘Yes, perhaps I have.’ She wanted to sink down on the sand and fall weakly into the shadow of the palm tree, and that would be childish of her. She was here on Pulau-Indah and must face the consequences of her own foolhardy action in coming all this way to be with a man whose life was blighted because of her. She might as well have handed him hemlock and then at least he would have dropped dead and not been condemned to a walking darkness.

‘Come,’ a hand closed upon her arm. ‘The afternoon is closing in and the sun is waning and you will find that the evenings on the island are a thing of magic. Come, let me take you to the Tiger House.’

‘Are you being funny?’ she exclaimed.

‘Not in the least.’ he replied. ‘That is the name of the residence—it was so named by the owner and, of course, it does have its significance in view of what the islanders call the
tuan,
but we are a people wrapped up in myth and symbol. We don’t take for granted the whims of fate, nor the joys and sorrows. We know that most things are ordained and that to fight against what fate has in store for us is a waste of energy. Don’t waste energy, for it is quite a climb.’