go and open them.
‘What is it? What’s wrong?’ she asked her. After a brief struggle where it seemed to Sophia that Parveen wasn’t going to answer her, eventually she managed to blurt out quickly, her head down as though she didn’t want to look directly at Sophia, ‘So sorry, Maharani Sophia, but the clothes of the Maharani Nasreen are in there.’
Nasreen’s clothes were still here all these years after her death. Shock, anger, distaste—Sophia felt them all. A cold shiver ran over her skin, soon followed by an overwhelming feeling she didn’t want to name.
Ash obviously loved his first wife so much that he couldn’t even bear to dispose of her clothes. They were still stored here in the room that was now hers. Nasreen still had Ash’s love; she had his devotion, his loyalty. She had probably been inside his head on their wedding night, and it was probably because of his love for her that he had not been able to bring himself to return to that bed. Well, she might have to put up with all of that, but she was not going to put up with Nasreen’s clothes in what were now her wardrobes, Sophia decided wrathfully.
‘Very well, Parveen,’ she told the maid, adding, ‘you can go now, I will deal with the rest of my own clothes myself.’
The girl looked relieved to be dismissed, Sophia saw.
As soon as Parveen had gone and she was alone in the dressing room, Sophia went over to the short length of wardrobe doors. Standing in front of them, she took a deep breath and then before she could change her mind she yanked open one of the two pairs of double doors. The draft of air caused by the speed with which she had opened the doors caused the delicate silks inside the wardrobe to move sinuously together almost as though someone was actually wearing them. Sophia closed her eyes. The heavy scent escaping from the wardrobe was making her feel slightly sick and dizzy but as desperately as she wanted to close them and to shut away the sight of the delicate garments so different to her own clothes, once worn by the wife Ash had loved, she couldn’t.
Her mood suddenly changed, her earlier fierce, righteous wrath giving way to something more self-destructive and painful. Just seeing the clothes of the woman Ash loved touched those scars within her she knew she must not allow to be reopened. But it was too late. Like serpents escaping from a carelessly sealed basket, the old pain was back.
Reaching out she touched the clothes—red and gold ceremonial saris, sugar-almond-coloured salwar kameez in soft pinks, blues and turquoises. What would she look like dressed in these clothes of another woman? The woman Ash loved. It was as though a terrible compulsion that she couldn’t resist had possessed her.
Unable to stop herself she reached into the wardrobe and removed a pale blue salwar kameez set. Like someone in the grip of a dream—or under hypnosis—she walked into the bedroom with it. She was shaking from head to foot. She knew that what she was doing was wrong—for Nasreen, for Ash and for herself—but somehow she just couldn’t stop herself, and it made her feel sickened and ashamed of her need to see how Nasreen would have looked. Because Ash had wanted Nasreen, desired her as he did not desire Sophia?
No. She did not care about that, but she had her pride and she and Ash must have a child, a son who would one day continue the royal line. That was how it was for them. And besides … Besides, didn’t she herself long for the promise of a new life to love, a child—children—to whom she could give the love she already knew instinctively she would have for them? Quickly she started to undress, despising herself for what she was doing and yet unable to stop herself.
Walking in the private gardens into which his apartment opened, Ash asked himself why the surroundings which normally gave him so much pleasure and solace, this evening made him feel so alone. Was it because their enjoyment, like the enjoyment of the act of love, should be a shared pleasure? His muscles tightened, his body heavy with desire. Sophia. Just thinking about her was enough to send that desire spilling urgently through him.
Every night since their first as a married couple the memory of the way she had looked at his body had tormented him as he tried to find sleep. He wanted to see that look in her eyes again. He wanted to touch her, hold her, lose himself in her as he blotted out the past while together they created their own shared future in the shape of their child. He wanted. He wanted her…. A tormented groan broke from the rigid tension of his throat. He turned back towards the palace, his stride quickening with impatience, just as his body was quickening with his need.
In her bedroom Sophia stared at the stranger looking back at her from the full-length mirror, a stranger wearing another woman’s clothes and smelling of another woman’s scent…. The salwar kameez was slightly loose on her own narrow waist and Nasreen must have been a shade taller than her because the fabric was pooling slightly on the floor around her bare feet. The fine silk shimmered as she walked, subtly hinting at the body that lay beneath it, the diamante beading decorating the scarf with which she had covered her head shimmering as she moved.
Experimentally, Sophia draped the scarf over her lower face, and watched her image in the full-length mirror in front of her. Was this what Ash longed for whenever he had to look at her? Another woman, the woman he truly loved?
He shouldn’t be doing this but he couldn’t help or stop himself, Ash admitted, too impatient to use the public twisting labyrinth of corridors that led to Sophia’s apartments, using instead the passage that his great-grandfather had had installed when the royal apartments had been remodelled so that he and Ash’s great-grandmother could come and go to each other without the knowledge of the servants or the need for formality.
The hidden door in the wall of the entrance hall to Sophia’s apartment, disguised to look like a painting, opened easily to his touch. He might not normally use the passage but that did not mean that it was not kept clean and in order by his household.
Ash pushed open the door to Sophia’s bedroom. And then froze as he stared at the back view of the woman in front of him, not wanting to believe the evidence of his own eyes.
Nasreen. Even though he knew it couldn’t be, a surge of the darkest feelings he thought he had ever experienced eviscerated his guts. His first wife had no place here. Just as she had, in reality, no place in his heart? Just as he now had no right to want to forget that his marriage to her had ever taken place? His own thoughts fell into the darkness of his guilt, trapping him ever deeper in its grip.
The woman moved, and instantly he knew.
Sophia.
Only Sophia with that incredible body of hers could move and walk like that.
Anger. A huge rolling wall of it powered through him. Anger against Nasreen for betraying the duty they had owed each other, anger against Sophia for her intrusion into that place within his conscience where even he could not bear to go, and most of all anger against himself. An anger that came out of nowhere, like a desert storm obliterating reality, destroying the landscape within himself, leaving him alone and defenceless against its power and what it had created. In three strides he was at Sophia’s side, reaching for her to turn her round, to face him as he demanded, ‘Take it off. Take if off now unless you want me to tear it from you.’
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE shock of Ash’s presence as a witness to something she could only ever want to be private, never mind the fury she could see and feel in him, had Sophia dropping the corner of the scarf, guilt darkening her eyes and burning up under her skin.
What a dreadful thing to happen. It was bad enough that she had been caught by anyone trying on Nasreen’s clothes, but that it should be Ash who had found her just at the moment when she herself had tasted the acid agony of shame
