Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(101)

She hadn't intended to love him. She knew what was expected of her as an Asian daughter, despite her English birth. She would marry a man carefully chosen by her parents because, having her interests at heart and knowing her better than she knew herself, her parents would be able to identify the qualities in a prospective husband most complementary to her own.

“Marriage,” Wardah Malik had often told her, “is like the joining of two hands. Palms meet”—she demonstrated by holding her own hands up in an attitude of prayer—”and fingers intertwine. Similarity of size, shape, and texture make this joining both smooth and lasting.”

Sahlah couldn't have this joining with Theo Shaw. Asian parents did not choose Western men for their daughters to marry. Such a choice would only serve to adulterate the mother culture from which the daughter sprang. And that was unthinkable.

So she hadn't considered Theo anything other than the young man—affable, attractive, and casual in a way that only Western men were casual with a woman—who was doing a friendly service for Malik's Mustards. She hadn't really thought of him at all until he placed the stone on her desk.

He'd earlier admired her jewellery, the necklaces and earrings fabricated from antique coins and Victorian buttons, from African and Tibetan beads intricately carved by hand, even from feathers and copperas that she and Rachel collected on the Nez. He'd said, “That's nice, that necklace you're wearing. It's quite different, isn't it?” And when she'd told him she made it, he'd been openly impressed.

Had she been trained in jewellery making? he'd wanted to know.

Hardly, she'd thought. She'd have had to go off somewhere to school to be educated in her craft, perhaps to Colchester or regions beyond. That would have taken her away from her family, away from the business where she was needed. It's not allowed was what she wanted to say. But she'd told him instead a version of the truth. I like to teach myself things, she'd informed him. It's more fun that way.

The next day when she'd come into work, the stone had been on her desk. But it wasn't a stone, Theo explained to her. It was a fossil, the fin of a holostean fish from the Upper Triassic period. “I like its shape, the way the edges look feathered.” He coloured slightly. “I thought you might be able to use it for a necklace. As a centerpiece or something …? I mean, whatever you call it.”

“It would make a fine pendant.” Sahlah turned the stone in her hand. “But I'd have to drill a hole through it. You wouldn't mind that?”

Oh, the jewellery wasn't for him, he told her hastily. He meant her to use the fossil in a necklace for herself. He collected fossils out on the Nez, where the cliffs were collapsing, you see. He'd been looking through his display trays last night. He'd realised this particular fossil had a look and a shape that might lend it to being used artistically. So if she thought she could make something of it and with it, well … she was quite welcome to keep it.

Sahlah had known that to accept the stone—no matter how innocently it had been offered—would be to cross an invisible line with Theo Shaw. And she saw the part of herself that was Asian lowering her head and quietly sliding the serrated bit of prehistoric fish across the desk in polite refusal of the gift. But the part of herself that was English took action first, fingers closing round the fossil and voice saying, “Thank you. I know I can use it. I'll show you the necklace when I've finished it, if you'd like.”

“I'd like that very much indeed,” he said. Then he'd smiled and an unspoken bargain had been struck between them. Her jewellery making would be their excuse for conversation. His fossil collecting would justify their continuing to meet.

But one did not fall in love because a single stone or a thousand stones passed from a man's hand into a woman's. And Sahlah Malik hadn't fallen in love with Theo Shaw because of a stone. Indeed, until she was in the midst of loving him, she hadn't even realised that there was a simple word of four letters that explained the softness she felt round her heart, the yearning she experienced in the palms of her hands, the warmth that rose from her throat, and the lightness of body as if she had no real body when Theo was present or when she heard his voice.

“White man's slag,” Muhannad had cursed her, and she'd heard the hiss—like a snake's—in his words. “You're going to pay. The way all whores pay.”

But she wouldn't think of it, she wouldn't, she wouldn't.

Sahlah raised her head from her arms and looked down at the paper, the pencil, the beads, the beginning of a sketch that was no sketch because nothing within her could create a design or put objects together in a pattern that was balanced and pleasing to the eye. She was lost, now. She was paying the price. She'd been awakened to a longing that couldn't be met within the narrow definition of the life she was expected to lead, and she'd begun to pay the price for this longing months before Haytham's advent among them.

Haytham would have saved her. He possessed an earnest concern for others that set the self aside, and because he was capable of acts of generosity beyond her ken, he greeted the news of her pregnancy with a question that swept aside both her guilt and her fear. “And have you carried this dreadful burden these two months all alone, my Sahlah?”

She hadn't wept until that moment. They'd been sitting in the orchard, side by side on the wooden bench whose back legs slid too far into the soil. Their shoulders had been touching but nothing else touching, until she confided in him. She hadn't been able to look at him as she spoke, knowing how much depended upon the next few minutes of conversation. She couldn't believe he would take her as his wife once he knew that she carried another man's child. But by the same token, she couldn't bring herself to marry him and then to attempt to pass off the birth of a healthy baby as the birth of an infant that would have to be taken as at least two months premature. Besides, he'd been in no immediate hurry to marry, and her parents had seen in his suggestion that they wait not a reluctance to fulfill his part of the marital agreement but a wise man's decision to learn to know the woman who would be his wife. … before she became his wife. But Sahlah had no leisure to pursue an acquaintance with Haytham Querashi.