The Far Pavilions - Mary Margaret Kaye [453]
‘I have tried to,’ whispered Anjuli bleakly. ‘But… but it seems – that I cannot help myself…’ There was such despair in her voice that she might have been admitting to some physical disability like blindness, an affliction that could neither be cured nor ignored and that she must learn to accept and to live with. But Ash was not chilled by it for her mood matched his own.
He knew that though their love for each other had endured and would always endure, it had been temporarily submerged by a smothering weight of guilt and horror, and that until they had struggled free and could breathe again they had no desire for any active demonstration of it. That would return. But for the moment they were both in some way strangers to each other, because it was not only Anjuli who had changed. So much water had flowed under the bridges since they parted that even if they had met again under far happier circumstances it would have been surprising if they had found themselves able to pick up the threads again at the point where they had been cut off. But time was on their side – all the time in the world. They had come through the worst and were together again… the rest could wait.
He raised Anjuli's wrists and dropped a light kiss on each, and releasing her said: ‘That's all I wanted to know; and now that I know it I know too that as long as we are together nothing can really harm us again. You must believe that. Once you are my wife -’
‘Your wife –?’
‘What else? You can't think that I would lose you a second time.’
‘They will never permit you to marry me,’ said Anjuli with tired conviction.
‘The Bhithoris? They won't dare open their mouths!’
‘No, your people; and mine also, who will be of the same mind.’
‘You mean they will try and prevent it. But it's no business of theirs. This is our affair: yours and mine. Besides, didn't your own grandfather marry a princess of Hind, though he was a foreigner and not of her faith?’
Anjuli sighed and shook her head again. ‘True. But that was in the days before your Raj had come to its full power. There was still a Mogul on the throne in Delhi and Ranjit-Singh held sway over the Punjab; and my grandfather was a great war-lord who took my grandmother as the spoils of war without asking any man's leave, having defeated the army of my grandmother's father in battle. I have been told that she went willingly, for they loved each other greatly. But the times have changed and that could not happen now.’
‘It's going to happen now, Heart's-dearest. There is no one who can forbid you to marry me. You're no longer a maid and therefore a chattel to be disposed of to the best advantage. Nor can anyone forbid me to marry you.’
But Anjuli remained unconvinced. She could see no possibility of any marriage, based on religion, between two persons of widely differing faiths; and in their own case, no reason for it either. Or for any legal tie, as for her part she was more than content to spend the rest of her life with Ashok for love's sake, and no ceremony involving words spoken by a priest or magistrate, complete with documents in proof that it had taken place, would ever make any difference to that. She had already taken part in one such ceremony, yet it had not made her a wife in any sense except a purely legal one: a chattel of the Rana's – a despised chattel on whom, after those ceremonies, he had never again deigned to lay eyes. Had it not been for Ashok she would still be a maiden, and he was already the husband of her body as well as of her heart and spirit… his to do as he liked with. So what need had they for empty phrases that to one or other of them would mean nothing? or scraps of paper that she herself could not read? Besides –
She turned from him to watch the setting sun that was painting the tree-tops below her bright gold,