The Formidable King Page 9

  ‘I lived in Misanti for eighteen months,’ she told him. ‘Knowing the community and how desperate they were for international funding, I was the one who brought Eden’s attention to the village and recommended the foundation consider raising funds for the school and hospital.’

  A deep trench appeared between his brows as he digested her words. ‘What on earth were you doing living in Misanti?’

  Time to tell all. Well, not all, but she could tell him some of her background. ‘I was there as part of an international aid organisation. We were funded for eighteen months to live in the village and try to improve the standard of hygiene and education, but due to... unforeseen circumstances... we had to leave before the project was finished.’

  ‘That’s the reason you didn’t have paid employment? You worked for an international charity?’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him, with a quick nod.

  He leaned forward in his seat, his forearms resting on his thighs. ‘Why didn’t you tell me this when I asked you what you’d done prior to your work at the foundation?’

  ‘Your attitude towards me was adversarial from the moment I walked into your office in Santaliana,’ she countered. ‘I wasn’t inclined to justify my life to you.’

  Raising one hand, he rubbed his fingers along his jawline. His eyes were as hard as sapphire chips as he said. ‘You could’ve told me all this from the outset and saved a lot of angst. You’re exceedingly stubborn.’

  ‘Possibly.’ She’d been told that on more than one occasion.

  ‘How old were you when you were in Misanti?’

  ‘Sixteen.’

  Gabe’s frame snapped up straight. ‘Your parents let you volunteer in Africa when you were still a teenager?’

  There was no humour in her laugh. ‘I was with my parents. I believe I told you they did a lot of work for charity.’

  ‘You did mention it, but I hadn’t visualised them working in an African village.’ He shook his head and frowned as though he tried to digest her words. ‘I’d thought more along the lines of your mother organising the local church fete, or volunteering at the local second-hand shop or some such thing.’

  This time her laugh held more than an edge of bitterness. She couldn’t disguise it. She’d accepted her parents’ way of life while she’d known no other, but once she’d returned to England, she’d resented not having had a normal upbringing. ‘My parents dedicated their lives to the international organisation. I was born in London only so I could have British citizenship. My mother left the country with me when I was just a week old. She was anxious to rejoin my father in Northern Iran.’

  ‘Northern Iran? What took him there?’

  ‘They were both doctors who worked for the organisation. Dad was helping out in the aftermath of the Manjil-Rudbar earthquake. It was a disaster that claimed fifty thousand lives and injured one hundred and five thousand. My grandmother told me that she begged my mother to stay in England, or at least leave me behind. My mother was desperate to get to the site and to do whatever she could to help. Although she quite probably would’ve preferred to leave me behind, she and my father had no intention of letting my grandmother have her way on any issue.’

  ‘Northern Iran doesn’t sound like a safe place for a baby—especially in the wake of an earthquake.’ If the wind changed, he’d be left with a permanent frown.

  ‘Nowhere we went was a safe place,’ she exclaimed. Briefly she looked away from him and tried to get a handle on all the resentment that boiled inside her and threatened to bubble over.

  Remember, you’re not telling him this to gain sympathy, her inner voice reminded her. You’re telling him this so he stops misjudging you. Just stick to the facts and don’t get emotional about it.

  ‘I wasn’t raised as a British aristocrat, Gabriel. My father scorned his title, preferring to be called Doctor Hamilton—the title he’d earned himself. As for living a wealthy lifestyle, nothing could be further from the truth.’ Her tone was neutral. Flat. She tried to relay her life as though it hadn’t really been her life at all, sticking to the facts and whitewashing over the horror she’d known as she’d been dragged along on her parents’ mission. ‘I travelled with my mother and father from one natural disaster centre to another.’

  ‘How often did your family come back to England?’

  ‘My father left when he was twenty-five and never set foot on British soil again. My mother didn’t return after my birth, and I returned for the first time a little over seven years ago. I moved in with my grandmother and I’ve been at Dunmorton Estate ever since.’

  ‘No wonder you have such a unique accent.’ He was silent for a few moments before he shook his head and said, ‘I’ve done you a great wrong, India. When you said you’d travelled, I imagined you’d globetrotted around the world first-class from one ski resort and one elitist party to the next.’

  ‘Planning church fetes. First-class globetrotting. What a luxury life that would’ve been,’ she scoffed. ‘Those assumptions were very narrow-minded of you.’

  His jaw clenched and unclenched a couple of times before he said, ‘Forgive me. You’re right. I held an extremely biased view on baseless assumptions. All I can say by way of reason is that I judged you incorrectly by the standards of... another woman I knew. She was definitely part of the jetting social set I thought you belonged to.’

  Angelique.

  He had to be referring to his late wife.

  Eden had confided her dislike for Angelique and told India many stories about Gabriel’s bride. From what she’d heard, India had formed a very low opinion of the woman who’d been Queen of Santaliana.

  Even after she’d married Gabriel, it seemed Angelique hadn’t been prepared to curtail her jet setting from one party to the next. Eden hadn’t even needed to speak about the wild partying—it was plastered all over the tabloid newspapers, and had brought shame to the de la Croix name, and to the kingdom.

  ‘I may not deserve it, but I hope you can accept my apology,’ he told her earnestly.

  The genuine regret in his voice made all her anger at his misconceptions disappear into the ether.

  ‘I can’t imagine a childhood like the one you had,’ he said.

  His words were an invitation. When she met his blue gaze, she saw his need to reach out to her—his despair for what he could only imagine she’d gone through. She saw real care. And she saw a tender, more human side of the formidable King of Santaliana—the side her closest friend had loved and admired in her brother.

  Eden would’ve wanted them to be friends.

  Clasping her hands together on her lap, India decided to confide a little of her childhood to him. When she spoke again, it was from a genuine desire to share her background with him and have him understand her, rather than shoving it all down his throat so he’d feel guilty about misjudging her and be forced to eat humble pie.

  ‘Of course, I don’t remember anything about Northern Iran. My earliest memory is probably from when I was about five and we were in China after an earthquake in Wuding County.’ The poverty had been chronic, the communities incredibly ill-equipped to deal with the natural disaster. ‘I also remember a mudslide tragedy in Venezuela the year after, and flooding in Mozambique the year I celebrated my tenth birthday—’ she shrugged, ‘—if you’d actually call it a celebration. At that time, we lived in a tent among one hundred thousand displaced families and where dysentery was rife. It’s amazing what you learn to appreciate and celebrate when you’re surrounded by people who’ve lost their families, their friends and their homes.’

  ‘I can’t believe your parents exposed you to all that suffering.’ There was a sharp edge of anger under the empathy of his words.

  The outrage in his voice made her warm to him, because it had been a hard life and she’d only realised, since she’d come back to England and seen the way other children were raised, the unnatural extent of bleakness and sorrow she’d been exposed to because of her parents’ way of life. ‘I knew no other circu
mstances. I thought what I saw everywhere I went was quite normal.’ She lifted her hand to brush away a loose tendril of hair from her face. ‘The natural backdrops changed, the languages differed and tones of people’s skins altered, but there was a commonality between the people everywhere I went—grief, uncertainty for their futures and a degree of helplessness and, sometimes, hopelessness.’

  ‘I understand your parents must’ve had a calling to help those in desperate need, and that’s an incredibly admirable thing. What I don’t understand, or forgive, is why your parents didn’t allow you to live in England with your grandmother right from the outset.’

  She felt her features soften into a smile when she thought of her grandmother. ‘Gran would’ve had me to live with her in a heartbeat. She heartily disapproved of my parents’ way of life and of their exposing me to all the despair, illness and poverty.’

  ‘I’m guessing your grandmother probably sent you books of fairytales in the hope that you’d have something resembling a normal childhood?’

  He remembered she’d mentioned that? ‘You’re very astute. She told me when I met her that she’d hoped the fairytales would allow me to escape from my surroundings. She also hoped they’d give me a belief in a happy-ever-after ending and I’d want and find that ending one day for myself.’

  Gabriel raised one hand to the back of his neck and kneaded the muscles there for a second before he asked, ‘She had no influence on your father? She couldn’t push him to make her your guardian?’

  Oh, if only!

  ‘My father had a falling out with Gran when she refused to sell the family estates and donate the money to the organisation he worked for. Gran, in turn, couldn’t accept that her son had turned his back on the title and essentially walked away from her and his heritage.’

  India settled a little more comfortably in the sumptuous leather aircraft seat. Incredibly, she found it was good to talk to Gabriel about this—far easier talking to him than it had been talking to the therapist her grandmother had sent her to when she’d returned to England. Maybe it was easier because so much more time had elapsed?

  ‘Dad and Gran didn’t speak for years. My parents only gave me the option of returning to England to live with Gran after...’ She only just stopped herself in time. Even as she recomposed her sentence, it surprised her how easily she’d almost referred to the darkest moments in her life.

  ‘After?’

  No. She wasn’t going there. ‘After I told them I’d had enough,’ she invented. ‘I met my grandmother just before my twentieth birthday.’

  ‘Where were you before you returned to England. Still in Misanti?’

  ‘No.’ Good grief, no. ‘We left Misanti and headed for Malaysia. Typhoon Uter had struck and there were floods right through South-East Asia. We stayed there for two years helping with the clean-up—the longest we’d ever stayed in one place. After that, it was off to help with the Sichuan earthquake. It was after...’ Again, she clamped down on a memory she had no desire to verbalise. ‘It was halfway through the mission I returned to England.’

  ‘That must’ve been a cultural shock after all the Third World places you’d been to and all the chaos you’d known.’ His tone was neutral, but she got the impression from the intensity of his regard that he’d picked up on her hesitations and filed them away to bring out and probe into at a later point.

  ‘The culture shock was huge.’ She could admit that much. ‘It took me a long time to... adjust. I had no formal education and pretty much zero employability. Although helping others was the mission I’d been born to, I couldn’t... that is, I didn’t want to go back to fieldwork. So when Eden suggested I do voluntary work for the foundation, I jumped at the chance.’

  ‘Eden knew about your upbringing?’

  ‘Yes.’ Most of it. There’d been one aspect of her life abroad she’d never wanted to admit to. One deep, dark secret she’d wanted to bury forever. She hoped it would never be exposed, but it still haunted her. ‘You know, Eden truly was the closest friend I’ve ever had. There isn’t a day that goes past when I don’t miss her.’ And knowing she honoured Eden’s memory through her work at the foundation helped India feel close to her friend.

  ‘I’m guessing it would’ve been hard to make friends growing up—moving from place to place and having language barriers.’

  ‘It was what it was.’ She shrugged. Enough of the negatives. ‘I’m sure there were advantages to growing up the way I did. I certainly saw a lot of the world.’

  ‘But you saw the world at its worst.’ The light in his eyes, the milder furrows across his forehead, told her he was still having difficulty coming to terms with her childhood.

  ‘Not entirely at its worst. My parents were fairly alternate and they did possess something of an adventurous streak—probably their way of finding a release after they’d worked such long hours in appalling conditions.’

  ‘Adventure?’

  ‘Well, there were the occasional breaks from hotspots. We went white-water rafting once on the Zambezi River, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and I got to see an eclipse in Indonesia. I came face to face with a gorilla in Rwanda and one time when we were in India we attended an “inner awakening retreat” where we practised silence for a few days and had our chakras aligned. Now, how many people can say that?’ She smiled at him, determined to lift the heavy mood that’d settled around them in the aircraft cabin.

  ‘Unbelievable.’ He shook his head again. ‘I lost my parents when I was seven, but I was extremely close to Eden and Dev. It’s a shame you didn’t have siblings, at least.’

  ‘My parents didn’t plan to have any children. Actually, I was conceived quite accidentally in India—hence my name.’

  ‘No brothers or sisters.’

  ‘My mum had her tubes tied when I was delivered to make sure there were no more accidents.’ She voiced it calmly enough, but it was sad to know she’d been an accident—more of an inconvenience to her parents than a joy. Stoically, they’d kept to their original goals, determined that becoming parents wouldn’t disrupt their plans. The only concession they’d made in their life plan was when her mother had flown back to England to give birth. Otherwise, it’d been business as usual and she’d been raised right in the midst of their work.

  The flight attendant came back from the crew galley. ‘Excuse me, Your Majesty, Miss Hamilton, can I offer you a drink or a light snack?’

  ‘I’ll have a glass of Pinot Noir and some of the cheeses,’ Gabe told her. ‘Will you join me, India?’

  Why not? ‘Yes, please.’

  The flight attendant smiled and went back to the galley.

  ‘You said your parents didn’t read you the fairytales,’ Gabe said. ‘What did you do with your time while they were busy doctoring?’

  ‘I was kind of farmed out to the volunteer teachers and I learnt to read very young. As soon as I could read I was put to use teaching the local children to read. Outside the hours of the makeshift schools, I helped Mum and Dad in the clinics they ran. By the time I was ten I was quite good at finding veins and taking blood samples, or giving vaccinations.’

  ‘Hardly legal!’

  ‘Of course not, but legalities didn’t matter when there were thousands who needed vaccinating and only a handful to do it.’ She’d been terrified at first, but had adjusted fairly quickly. ‘I was also useful in sponging people down when they had fevers.’

  He shifted forward in his seat and his tone was incredulous. ‘They had you sponging down people with fevers? They exposed you to illness at the clinics?’

  ‘I’m probably all the healthier now because of it. I’m never sick.’ But she agreed with him. She’d never expose a child to what her parents had exposed her to.

  ‘My God! It was a dreadful risk. There must’ve been all sorts of rare diseases rife in the areas you visited.’

  ‘You’re right, but my parents also exposed themselves to those diseases. I don’t think they thought twice about it, and they were
always very careful to ensure I wore a mask and made sure I washed my hands well when I came into contact with someone infectious.’

  Gabriel drummed his long fingers against the armrest of his seat. ‘You said they never returned to England, but mentioned they’d passed away.’

  Grief stabbed at her. For all that she harboured some resentment toward her parents, she still loved them. ‘They were in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak, stationed in a remote rainforest as part of a very small medical team.’ She sighed heavily and Gabriel got up from opposite her and moved to the seat next to her.

  He placed a comforting hand on her forearm. ‘They contracted Ebola?’

  She nodded. ‘One of them contracted the virus from one of the villagers, and probably gave it to the other. Even though they were both doctors, they didn’t realise initially that the fever exhibited by the villager was Ebola. There was no suitable laboratory close by for testing. By the time the haemorrhaging started and they realised what it was they were dealing with, the village was cut off by flooding and the aid organisation couldn’t get the immunological and drug therapy to them in time.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘You know, with all the work they did, I guess it was almost a given that they’d die like that. I realise, now I see other parents with their children, that Mum and Dad were really doctors and their first instinct never to become parents was probably the right one for them. In their own way they loved me, but they were almost obsessed with their cause to the exclusion of all else.’

  ‘Including your wellbeing.’ His hand squeezed her arm.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she said sadly.

  The flight attendant returned with their red wine and two plates of cheese. They’d no sooner uttered their thanks than she left as unobtrusively as she’d arrived.

  ‘Had you had enough of the lifestyle?’ he asked. ‘Was that what prompted your return to England?’

  Her brain froze. Her body chilled and a type of paralysis set in as effectively as if she’d been shot with a curare-tipped dart.

  ‘India?’