The Passionate Sinner (3 page)

‘Couldn’t you have landed on the headland?’ she asked, as they began to climb the rock stairs side by side.

‘There is only a strip of land leading around the rim of the tea valley,’ he informed her. ‘It would be a very aromatic landing but a costly one.’

‘If there’s a valley, how do we reach the—Tiger House?’ She was intrigued despite her various fears. There was no denying the colour and strangeness of the island, and if fate had her on a chain, what else could she do but submit to being led into the tiger’s den?

‘We cross a bamboo bridge,’ he said, ‘slung across the tea valley to the gates of the house. It is somewhat like a fortress, for in the old days the Chinese pirates used to come raiding in search of girls and spices and teakwood. The island has a history,
nonya.’

‘I
sense that strongly,’ she breathed, and into her nostrils as they climbed towards the rim of the valley came the rich scent of the tea bushes, mingling with the spice trees that still grew here, and the slightly scorched smell of sun-burned palms, so tall that they caught the full blast of the sun rays.

Her heart beat fast from a combination of exertion, excitement, and fear.

Very soon now, she would see again the man whom as a student nurse she had worshipped from across the chasm that separates the surgery dogsbody from the surgeon himself. Young and so romantic in those days, she had sometimes thought that it would be lovely to have an unexpected adventure with Paul van Setan, such as being trapped alone with him in the express lift of the tall hospital building, when he would look into her eyes and discover that she was a real live girl instead of just a pair of willing hands. ..

The sharp pangs of memory clawed at her ... willing hands that in their youthful, unknowing eagerness had blinded him, the one man in all the world she would have served with her body and soul had he asked for them.

CHAPTER TWO

IT stood among the spice and camphor trees, with a great lofty veranda standing on palm pillars, and with an enormous thatched roof so thick it had a carved look. It stood back from a courtyard set round with stone lanterns and with a central fountain like a petrified lotus, and Merlin stood gazing at the house in spellbound wonder. It sprang complete from the colonial days when the Dutch had lorded it over these islanders, the spicemasters, the tea-planters, never brutal in their treatment but ruling with the iron hand in the gauntlet.

The casuarinas whispered, long-lost echoes of a past that still seemed to prevail as Merlin walked with the young Indonesian towards the steps of the veranda. There she paused and felt the shakiness in her legs ... now there was no turning back and she was committed to whatever fate had in store for her in the shape of Paul van Setan.

‘What do you think, Miss Lakeside?’ The pilot stood there with one foot on the veranda steps, studying her pale face and frowning a little as if he wanted to see behind the big rims of her sun-glasses. ‘Do you like your first glimpse of the Tiger House?’

‘It’s very striking,’ she said. ‘Very much in the old style.’

‘Things don’t change quickly on islands,
nonya.
Attitudes of mind remain fixed like dragonflies in amber. Are you sure you want to venture inside the house of
Sang Harimau?’

There was a long moment of silence on her part, while deep in the trees the cicadas went on chirring and the tendrilled leaves of the casuarinas went on whispering. She knew then that she was being offered a choice and that if she took the coward’s way this young man would take her back to the helicopter and return her to the mainland.

‘Is that you, Lon?’ The voice came suddenly, breaking in on the silence between Merlin and the pilot. ‘You have brought with you the lady from England?’

Merlin felt as if her legs were going to buckle beneath her, for she had recognised that deep and faintly accented voice immediately, and she knew that when she turned to the left side of the house she would see Paul van Setan standing there. Too late ... too late, cried a small mocking voice in her mind. Now she couldn’t run away!

‘Ja, mynheer.’
Lon swivelled his lean body and Merlin knew that he was looking full at the man she must face in the next few seconds. She had never felt so afraid and yet so eager ... she longed to feast her eyes on Paul and yet she retreated from seeing his blinded eyes, even though she knew they would be covered. A barb of iron seemed to fly into her throat and she flung up a hand as if to stifle that choked feeling.

‘All is well?’ Paul asked, as if his acute senses had detected in the atmosphere something that put him on the alert. ‘Miss Lakeside had a satisfactory journey?’

‘I am sure she did,
mynheer.’
The pilot replied for her, but Merlin knew the fatal moment had come for her to turn and speak, and become an actual presence to the man who couldn’t see her.

Very slowly she turned around, fighting for composure so her voice wouldn’t shake when she spoke to him. ‘I had a very good journey, Mynheer van Setan. Your pilot has been very kind to me.’

She watched breathlessly as that white-gold head slightly tilted, as if he were taking the measure of her voice and judging from it her height and disposition. Her heart ached and she was shaken to see that his eyes weren’t hidden away behind dark glasses. She retreated a step as if they could see her, gazing directly at her from that deeply tanned face, with the proud flare to the nostrils, with a definition both strong and commanding in the mouth and jawline.

A flame seemed to burn at the core of his eyes, a flickering illusion of being sighted. If there had been burn scars they had gone, and she knew the reason why. Sir Ivor Cliveland had done all he could for Paul at the time of the accident, and all he had been able to do was use his skill with the scalpel to restore to the steel-grey eyes the semblance of their keen, penetrating quality; to make them look as Merlin remembered them, deep-set, rather slanting, their heavy lids adding a sensuousness that now seemed more evident.

‘How do you do, Miss Lakeside?’ He approached her with a firm tread, as if he knew every inch of the courtyard, his hand held out to welcome her. ‘I hope you will soon find yourself at home on our island, which will seem strange to you at first.’

Merlin had placed her slender hand in that outstretched one a second before she realised the pilot’s warning about not allowing Paul to touch her. Her heart turned over, or it seemed to, as she felt the tensile fingers playing over hers, feeling their fine bones, their smooth skin, that lack of prominent veining in the hands of older women.

‘Being blind has its difficulties, as you can see, Miss Lakeside.’ He deliberately turned her hand and she felt his fingertips travelling her palm, finding the life lines and the mound below her thumb; his touch was exquisite to the point of excruciation, for with this hand she had given him the eye-cup whose contents had poured darkness into his grey eyes.

‘We have to employ such methods in our reading of those we must live and work with, so don’t mind too much—ah yes, I can feel that you do mind, Miss Lakeside. Tell me, do you play the piano?’

‘Why—yes.’ She felt that her face was white as the tiny flowers clustering madly down a stone wall beyond Paul’s wide shoulders; she didn’t as yet know that the flower was frangipani, the temple blossom, because it had such an innocent look.

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I hope you will play for me, for I have grown fond of music in my solitude and we have a rather grand piano indoors that we care for like a jewel, is that not so, Lon? Covering it in a sheet of felt in order to safeguard it from the termites and the heat. I hope you are prepared for the heat, Miss Lakeside? You have a very cool skin, but we have a very hot sun, so don’t go strolling in it as if this were Hyde Park.’

Her heart gave an awful jolt when he mentioned that part of London ... the hospital had stood within the vicinity of the park and the nurses had been fond of strolling there and rowing on the Serpentine with the young doctors. Her eyes were fixed upon Paul’s face and she searched his sightless eyes in panic and fear. Was it remotely possible that he had guessed who she was ... this hard brown man in the jungle cloth trousers and thin shirt open to his belt. He was no longer the civilised and humane surgeon. That veneer had been scorched away by pain and long months on an island lost in time.

‘Mevrouw,
have you nothing to say in answer to me?’ There was in his voice a note of amusement mingling with a certain indulgence, and the tension began to seep out of Merlin as she realised that he had called her madam in Dutch and was therefore unsuspicious that she was not a maiden lady, whom in his blindness he probably pictured as having an angular body clad hi something beige, with her grey hair severely coiffured.

Relief gripped her and a smile made its way to her lips. ‘I shall try not to be too much of a fool;
mynheer.
I do realise that I am now on a tropical island and I have come prepared with a big straw hat.’

His lip quirked. ‘I had an aunt who always wore a cartwheel gardening hat with a chiffon scarf tied round to hold it to her face. She said the scarf had two functions, to defeat the wind when it blew, and to see that her chin was kept in place if her Maker should call while she pruned her roses. She was in her eighties, but you are not quite that old, eh?’

Merlin felt a momentary spasm of panic when he said that, dispelled when he turned in the direction of Lon, uncannily aware of where the pilot was standing. ‘Has Miss Lakeside’s baggage arrived?’ he asked. ‘If so, get Rani to take it to the Jade Room, which has been thoroughly cleaned and polished and made ready for the
mevrouw.’

‘Ja, mynheer.’
As the pilot made his polite answer he caught Merlin’s eye and seemed to glitter a look of warning with his own eyes. For now it was all right, she had fooled a blind man into thinking her the mature type of woman who could share a dwelling with a man in his thirties and not cause speculation; a man who for all the sightless state of his eyes was brown and hard and utterly virile. Lon’s look warned her that she was playing with fire; that being deprived of his sight didn’t take away from a man all his other senses.

‘I will see to it at once,’ said Lon, ‘that the
mevrouw’s
belongings are brought from the boat and carried to her room.’ He too had used the word madam, hardly to be applied to someone of Merlin’s age, and in doing so he condoned what could only he called a deception. Merlin found she couldn’t look at him, and neither could she blurt out the truth to Paul. He might send her packing, and now she had seen him again she didn’t want to leave him; there was a poignancy to his blindness, but there was also something so physically exciting about this sun-and sea-hardened man that it would have been sheerest torment to be flown away from him now she had found him again.

‘You are quiet,
mevrouw,’
he said suddenly. ‘Are you wondering if you have done the wise thing in coming to work for me in what must seem to you a wilderness?’

‘I—I am looking about me,
mynheer,
at the exotic trees and plants.’ She forced a confident note into her voice, but for just an instant as he spoke his face had looked hard and menacing. What did he imagine, that now she found herself in his presence she was put off by his blindness?

‘Yes,’ he drawled, ‘they must present a very colourful array and I can only guess their beauty by their scent and the feel of them. Do you think you are going to find it unnerving, Miss Lakeside, to work for a man who goes through life as if it were an unending tunnel of darkness, with no light at the other end; no sudden relief of bursting into the blessed daylight? It can be nerve-racking for the sighted, to be for long periods of time in the company of someone who could go sprawling on his face if a chair or a table were moved only a few inches from then” set positions. Speak up,
mevrouw.
My pilot can always fly you back to civilisation if you feel that the job is going to be too much for you.’

‘I don’t want to leave,’ she said quickly, ‘not before I’ve had a chance to prove to myself and to you that I can do the work—and get accustomed to your blindness. I do assure you that if you fall flat on your face I shan’t scream. I’m not the screaming sort.’

‘Perhaps you aren’t, but have you ever seen a snake gliding across the floor, or heard the clicking of a tarantula a moment before it scurries up the wall? You aren’t blind, Miss Lakeside, and you are going to have to live with those things as well.’

‘I—I knew that when I applied for the job,
mynheer.’
All the same her skin had crawled. ‘But I hope I shall be sensible and not lose my head when I see those things.’

‘The tone of your application was sensible.’ he said. ‘I had almost made up my mind to employ a male secretary, and then your letter arrived and after discussing the matter with my cousin—who at present is taking some leave in Holland—I decided to risk asking you to come here. A blind man, Miss Lakeside, has to depend a great deal on his other senses and I have missed the sound of a woman’s voice. Does that strike you as strange?’

‘Not in the least,
mynheer.’
Behind the shield of her sun-glasses she allowed the compassion to flood her eyes ... he was fearfully lonely, she realised. The discipline of his surgical days made it as yet impossible for him to take an island girl for his mistress, but he missed having a woman around—all those nurses at his command—that comforting feeling that the feminine aura imparts to men; a certain tenderness and a submission to male strength.

‘You have a pleasing voice,
mevrouw.’
he said, just a hint of cool restraint in his voice. ‘I am glad about that... it is one of the trademarks of a nurse. Were you ever a nurse?’

That dread question had arrived and there was no evading an honest answer ... in her letter she had implied what he must have assumed, that she had done secretarial work in a hospital.

‘I was a nurse for a while.’ she admitted. ‘I found I hadn’t the right temperament, so I left.’