The Karma of Love (Bantam Series No. 14) by Barbara Cartland Read Free Book Online Page A

Neil is all right”
    “Yes, of course, Mrs. Lane. Good-night,” Lady Critchley said.
    Orissa rose quickly and moved away from the table before anyone realised that she was about to do so and there was no need for the gentlemen to rise to their feet.
    She walked across the Saloon conscious as she did so that the other passengers having their coffee looked at her as she passed.
    She managed to appear indifferent to their attention, but when she reached the door she hurried as quickly as she could to her cabin.
    She entered, shut the door behind her and then stood with her back to it as if it were a protection against what was outside.
    “How could it be possible,’ she asked herself, ‘that Major Meredith should be on board this particular ship?’
    It must, she thought, have been a chance in a million that they would ever encounter each other again. Yet her heart was still beating violently in her breast from the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly.
    She thought now she should have looked at the Passenger List when she first came on board. It was, she knew, always pinned up outside the Purser’s office. Yet even if she had seen the name, what could she have done about it?
    It would have been impossible to go ashore and refuse to sail, and equally impossible to remain in her cabin for the whole voyage.
    But as it happened, everything was all right.
    He had not re cognised her—she was sure of it!
    There had not been even a flicker of recognition or interest in his eyes and she felt if there had been she would not, agitated though she was, have missed it.
    But she would have to be careful—very careful. Charles had said Major Meredith was “snoopy.” But there was not the slightest reason in the world why he should make enquiries about her. And if he did — who could tell him anything?
    General and Lady Critchley had believed the story told them by the Adjutant, and there was no-one else who was likely ever to have seen her before or have any idea she was not who she pretended to be.
    ‘I am safe .. . quite safe!’ Orissa told herself reassuringly as she started to undress.
    Yet she knew it was impossible to dismiss Major Meredith from her mind. There was something disturbing about him; something even in the tone of his voice that affected her.
    When she got into her bunk she went over in her mind all the things Charles had told her about him.
    He was thought to have been responsible for Gerald Dewar’s death. That in itself was enough to condemn him, apart from the fact that he had had Charles “on the mat,” as her brother would have described it, which was certainly something Orissa resented.
    ‘He will spoil the voyage for me,’ she told herself, and then with her natural resilience she determined she would not allow him to do so.
    She had escaped by a miracle. By some marvellous chance of Fate she had been spirited away from the misery, humiliation and degradation she had suffered these past years at the hands of her Step-mother.
    From being, as it seemed to her, confined in a dark cupboard, the doors were suddenly opened to light and hope.
    She was going back to India! She was returning to the land she loved and which had always meant home.
    Already she imagined she could feel the sun and see the beauty which had remained in her mind all through her unhappiness in England like an oasis of wonder and joy.
    She shut her eyes and thought as she had thought so often before of the heat, the colour of the fruit and vegetables and grain in the Bazaar, the smell of musk, spices and ghee, mustard oil and masala.
    She could remember the silk shops with their gay bales piled high, the jostling, drifting crowds, the great, lazy, sacred Brahmini bulls, sacred to Shiva.
    And over it all the brilliant, burning sun-shine, golden and blinding, enveloping her like the love for which she had been starved all these years in the cold and rain of London.
    ‘Forget Major Meredith,’ Orissa told herself. It is India that