“Did you drink any?”
“No.”
That didn’t make sense. A rakosh had come here last night. She was sure of that. The elixir must have drawn it. She shuddered at what might have happened had Jack been here alone.
“You must have.”
Jack’s brow furrowed. “Oh, yes… I tasted it. Just a drop.”
She moved closer, feeling a tightness in her chest. “When?”
“Yesterday.”
“And today?”
“Nothing. It’s not exactly a soft drink.”
Relief. “You must never let a drop of that pass your lips again—or anybody else’s for that matter.”
“Why not?”
“Flush it down the toilet! Pour it down a sewer! Anything! But don’t let any of it get into your system again!’’
“What’s wrong with it?” Jack was becoming visibly annoyed now. Kolabati knew he wanted answers and she couldn’t tell him the truth without his thinking her insane.
“It’s a deadly poison,” she said off the top of her head. “You were lucky you took only a tiny amount. Any more and you would have—”
“Not true,” he said, holding up the still unstoppered bottle. “I had it analyzed today. No toxins in here.”
Kolabati cursed herself for not realizing that he’d have it analyzed. How else could he have known it contained durba grass?
“It’s poisonous in a different way,” she said, improvising poorly, knowing she wasn’t going to be believed. If only she could lie like Kusum! She felt tears of frustration fill her eyes. “Oh, Jack, please listen to me! I don’t want to see anything happen to you! Trust me!”
“I’ll trust you if you’ll tell me what’s going on. I find this stuff among the possessions of a missing woman and you tell me it’s dangerous but you won’t say how or why. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on! Really. All I can tell you is something awful will happen to anyone who drinks that mixture!”
“Is that so?” Jack looked at the bottle in his hand, then looked at Kolabati. Believe me! Please, believe me! Without warning, he tipped the bottle up to his mouth. “No!” Kolabati leaped at him, screaming. Too late. She saw his throat move. He had swallowed some. “You idiot!”
She raged at her own foolishness. She was the idiot! She hadn’t been thinking clearly. If she had she would have realized the inevitability of what had just happened. Next to her brother, Jack was the most relentlessly uncompromising man she had ever met. Knowing that, what could have made her think he would surrender the elixir without a full explanation as to what it was? Any fool could have foreseen that he would bring matters to a head this way. The very reasons she was attracted to Jack might just have doomed him.
And she was so attracted to him. She learned with an explosive shock the true depth of her feelings when she saw him swallow the rakoshi elixir. She had had more than her share of lovers. They had wandered in and out of her life in Bengal and Europe, and in Washington. But Jack was someone special. He made her feel complete. He had something the others didn’t have… a purity—was that the proper word?—that she wanted to make her own. She wanted to be with him, stay with him, keep him for herself.
But first she had to find a way to keep him alive through tonight.
12
The vow was made… the vow must be kept… the vow was made…
Kusum repeated the words over and over in his mind.
He sat in his cabin with his Gita spread out on his lap. He had stopped reading it. The gently rocking ship was silent but for the familiar rustlings from the main hold amidships. He didn’t hear them. Thoughts poured through his mind in a wild torrent. That woman he had met tonight, Nellie Paton. He knew her maiden name: Westphalen. A sweet, harmless old woman with a passion for chocolate, worrying about her missing sister, unaware that her sister was far beyond her concern, and that her worry should be reserved for herself. For her days were numbered on the fingers of a single hand. Perhaps a single finger.
And that blond woman, not a Westphalen herself, yet the mother of one. Mother of a child who would soon be the last Westphalen. Mother of a child who must die.
Am I sane?
When he thought of the journey he had embarked upon, the destruction he had already wrought, he shuddered. And he was only half done.
Richard Westphalen had been the first. He had been sacrificed to the rakoshi during Kusum’s stay at the London embassy. He remembered dear Richard: the fear-bulged eyes, the crying, the whimpering, the begging as he cringed before the rakoshi and answered in detail every question Kusum put to him about his aunts and daughter in the United States. He remembered how piteously Richard Westphalen had pleaded for his life, offering anything—even his current consort in his place—if only he would be allowed to live.
Richard Westphalen had not died honorably and his karma would carry that stain for many incarnations.
The pleasure Kusum had taken in delivering the screaming Richard Westphalen over to the rakoshi had dismayed him. He was performing a duty. He was not supposed to enjoy it. But he had thought at the time that if all three of the remaining Westphalens were creatures as reprehensible as Richard, fulfilling the vow would be a service to humanity.
It was not to be so, he had learned. The old woman, Grace Westphalen, had been made of sterner stuff. She had acquitted herself well before fainting. She had been unconscious when Kusum gave her over to the rakoshi.
But Richard and Grace had been strangers to Kusum. He had seen them only from afar before their sacrifices. He had investigated their personal habits and studied their routines, but he had never come close to them, never spoken to them.
Tonight he had stood not half a meter from Nellie Paton discussing English chocolates with her. He had found her pleasant and gracious and unassuming. And yet she must die by his design.
Kusum ground his only fist into his eyes, forcing himself to think about the pearls he had seen around her neck, the jewels on her fingers, the luxurious townhouse she owned, the wealth she commanded, all bought at a terrible price of death and destruction to his family. Nellie Paton’s ignorance of the source of her wealth was of no consequence.
Avow had been made…
And the road to a pure karma involved keeping that vow. Though he had fallen along the way, he could make everything right again by being true to his first vow, his vrata. The Goddess had whispered to him in the night. Kali had shown him the way.
Kusum wondered at the price others had paid—and soon would have to pay—for the purification of his karma. The soiling of that karma had been no one’s fault but his own. He had freely taken a vow of Brahmacharya and for many years had held to a life of chastity and sexual continence. Until…
His mind shied away from the days that ended his life as a Brahmachari. There were sins—patakas—that stained every life. But he had committed a mahapataka, thoroughly polluting his karma. It was a catastrophic blow to his quest for moksha, the liberation from the karmic wheel. It meant he would suffer greatly before being born again as an evil man of low caste. For he had forsaken his vow of Brahmacharya in the most abominable fashion.
But the vrata to his father he would not forsake: Although the crime was more than a century in the past, all the descendants of Sir Albert Westphalen must die for it. Only two were left.
A new noise rose from below. The Mother was scraping on the hatch. She had caught the Scent and wanted to hunt.