Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries (The Crystal Fragments Trilogy) Read online

  Fragile Crystal: Rubies and Rivalries

  M. J. Lawless

  © M. J. Lawless 2012

  The right of M. J. Lawless to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted in accordance the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Copying of this manuscript, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the author and her publisher is strictly prohibited.

  All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Black Orion Press, 2012.

  Cover design by Arkangel Media.

  All rights reserved.

  To the memory of John, who first taught me storytelling.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell,

  Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel!

  Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow,

  This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow;

  But vainly thou warrest,

  For this is alone in

  Thy power to declare,

  That in the dim forest

  Thou heard'st a low moaning,

  And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair:

  And didst bring her home with thee, in love and in charity,

  To shield her and shelter her from the damp air.’

  S. T. Coleridge, Christabel.

  Chapter One

  Through the window she could see the wide, open water of the river and beyond it the darker line of the distant shore. Although it was autumn, the sky was blue—a deeper, richer shade than she was likely to have seen had she remained in London. Occasionally there were clouds in the sky, and on such days the humidity could make it unbearable to be clothed, but here, in her own place, she felt no need to be burdened in such a trivial way.

  Indeed, thought Kris as she watched the sunlight shining across the water, she felt unburdened in so many ways. Only a few months before she had been weighed down, her life a mess not so much because of disasters but rather because it was going nowhere. And now so much had changed. Everything really.

  She turned back to the canvas fixed in place on its easel. Thoughts buzzed around the edges of her mind, but this fixed board, nearly a metre wide and half as high, it was what mattered now, just for the moment. Simply looking at her work would bring back a thousand thoughts but all that was irrelevant. Instead, as she lifted up her brush and smelt the familiar, warm scent of the oils with which she mixed her pigments, what she wanted to do was lose herself for a few hours.

  Yet she could not forget everything, not just yet. She was dressed in a loose T-shirt and shorts, her slender arms and limbs much darker than they had been months before, a delicious nutty brown. Her Avelar blood was coming through in the pigments of her skin, just as the creativity of her father showed itself in the canvas before her.

  Her father. For so long she had hated him. No, not hated. She had never hated him. Resented him, despised him even, but not hated. A sculptor who had drunk himself to death long before his time, the sadness now inside her was that he was no longer here to see her. He would have liked it that she was living in Lisbon: he had brought her to the city plenty of times, as well as to the countryside just north where her relatives lived. More than that, however, he would have taken pleasure in the fact that, after so many years, she was painting again.

  Not that she was entirely happy with the work itself, but then she never was. You didn’t overcome years of neglect in a couple of months, but she was working and that was what was important. There were so many things that conspired to stop her, not least her own self-doubts or the perfectionism that presented itself as a harsh censor but which, she knew, was merely another guise for those very doubts. What you had to do, she told herself as she paused, chewing the end of the brush, was to put those doubts to one side and continue.

  Her face was marked with streaks of burnt Sienna and raw umber, here a flash of Naples yellow on the cheek beneath her blue eyes (Pthalho rather than Prussian, she decided, though flecked with green and yellow), and her pale pink lips twitched as she chewed on the brush. Her hair was tied back so that at least it wouldn’t get too messy, but her shirt was smeared with fingerprints and brush marks.

  Messy. Something else that had changed. So recently she had feared anything out of place—but look at this room! Other canvases were stacked against the walls, while discarded palettes were a riot of bubbling colours. The walls themselves, spotless and whitewashed when she had moved in, now had charcoal and pencil drawings tacked up to them, as well as photos, odds and ends, bits and pieces—anything that had taken her fancy in the Feira da Ladra or the shops of the old city.

  That insistence on pristine purity had been another part of her armour she now realised. No mess. Nothing out of place. Everything pure. Everything sterile. It had been no wonder that she could not create.

  More than this, not only had she not been able to create, she had been unable to experience the simplest joys in life—the simplest ones that were also the most complex. By denying her own chaos, her own complexity—her own messiness—she had been withering and dying inside for so many years. The insistence on pristine purity had been a defence against the same darkness that had claimed her father, the chaos of his mind that had led him to drink and drink and drink until he could drink no more. She had been tempted by that abyss, and against it she had withdrawn into a cold, clean cell, a prison for her mind.

  Chaos under discipline, that was what she needed instead: complexity that knew when to pause and relent, to allow order to smooth over her. And that was what she had here in her own rooms, her own apartment. This room, where she had such a perfect view over the Tagus, where the sun shone through the south-facing windows almost every hour of the day, this was her chaos, her brilliant, soul-shuddering explosion of colour and disorder. Elsewhere, the quiet order that Kris Avelar needed to rest, to keep on living in peace so that she could create again and again, was maintained in each tidy room.

  She observed the painting critically now. Large wings stretched across most of the canvas, dark shades of browns, greys and blacks in the shadows of its almost prehensile feathers. But the body was more anthropomorphic, lighter, with a scarred face and hands that reached down to the naked woman, strong fingers grasping her flesh. A raptor.

  She could not resist a smirk as she looked at it. This was no swan, certainly—if you had to name the bird, and there was no reason why anyone would have to identify this avian beast of prey, then it was more like some gia
nt condor, an ominous-looking eagle or perhaps even a vulture. And yet in its way this was Leda with her swan, all sudden blows and feathered glories pushing at thighs. Fragments of Yeats came back to her. Her Agamemnon was not dead. His pillar of the world was still strong and vigorous.

  She had no desire to shove that feathered glory to one side—her own thighs were always parted eagerly for him. He was the source of so many of her images: dark, foreboding, loving. Daniel.

  Daniel Stone. That was what she was to call him now (if she ever referred to his full name), but there was part of him that was always Daniel Logan, the stranger she had met when summer had only just begun. Was it really that recently? It felt to her as though years had passed, and yet in truth it was little more than five months. Autumn was now upon them, though here in Lisbon it felt more like spring or even a mild summer than the rainy, dreary season leading up to winter that she had experienced all her life.

  Five months. For some reason, an old song sprang into her subconscious. We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot, we’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got. At first, the lines appeared more ominous to her than the brooding canvas before her, until she realised where the unconscious tracks of her mind were leading her. David Bowie and his strange, asymmetrical eyes, just like those of Daniel Stone.

  Smiling now, any dark thoughts as distant as the far-off streak of brown shoreline across the river, she dipped her brush into paint and began to work it along the canvas, building up the thick texture of the wings, so tangible, so real. Daniel had once chided her for using “real life” as an excuse not to create, a shield to run and hide behind. Desire was real life, he had told her, as well as necessity. Chaos and order, love and discipline.

  Discipline. She could not suppress a tremble as that word entered her mind, and for a second the brush flickered across the birdman’s wings. How funny that the thought of discipline should bring with it a loss of control, however momentary. The truth was she had not been disciplined enough recently. Daniel was away, in New York on business. He had asked her to go with him, but she wanted to stay and finish her painting. There would be other times, she told herself—and, she knew, there was something else.

  She was crazy about him. He knew it. She knew it. He was in his own way crazy about her, but the discipline was easier for him—a lifetime of control was more than a match for a couple of months, and she had to learn to take herself in hand. She wanted not to be reliant on him so completely.

  A hand on her, grasping her, squeezing her, moving down between her thighs. Hard on her buttocks—some pain, but oh so much more pleasure. Fuck. She was wet now at the memory of his touch, her crotch getting hot and damp and sticky. Fuck fuck fuck! Her brush strokes became more erratic. He would be back tomorrow and she hadn’t finished the painting (just as, jokingly, he had told her she wouldn’t be finished when they spoke the day before). Fuck it! She needed another kind of messiness now.

  As she left the room she flung her T-shirt down. Her breasts were already swelling, the skin tightening as she made her way through to the bathroom and let the water flow into the white curves of the bath. At least when she did make a complete mess this afternoon she would be able to clean herself more or less immediately.

  It was early evening by the time she left her apartment and the bright afternoon sun was slowly turning to a delicious dusk. There was a spring in her step as she locked the front door and took the steps down to the street below. Her neighbours were nowhere to be seen, a fact which gladdened her today. Kris was by no means as misanthropic as Daniel could be when the mood was on him, but she had no particular desire to speak to anyone else at the moment. He was coming tomorrow, and the thought of that alone had been enough to rouse up a burning passion between her thighs. She wanted to be wrapped up in her own thoughts and emotions.

  Leaving the building, she paused and looked back up at it. This was one of the few in the street that had been renovated in recent years, although slow progress was being made on repairing the ancient, crumbling blocks that lined the narrow street in this part of Alfama. The walls were a deep yellow ochre, with blue sills and white shutters for when the sun became too much and to keep out the night. She had really wanted one of the old buildings that were covered with brightly painted tiles, but the chaos she had found inside the ones she considered had, in the end, been far too much to consider. Kris Avelar may have been inspired by the romance of the city but she was also far too much a pragmatist to do without properly functioning utilities.

  That made her smile. For all his wealth, she thought that sometimes Daniel would have been better able to cope without running water and with dodgy electrical connections. Well, perhaps not Daniel Stone, but certainly Daniel Logan. She thought of Comrie, the hideaway in the Scottish highlands where sometimes he ran to escape, his haven where first she had met him. That half-built crofter’s cottage contrasted so greatly to the penthouse apartments and villas he owned elsewhere, and yet the thought of Comrie was itself almost enough to bring on an orgasm in Kris’s body. If the Khan Kubla had ever built a pleasure dome, she was sure that his own delights had been nothing compared to what she had experienced in that rustic building.

  Her home in Alfama was, in some ways, a balance between the rough, almost brutal delights that she had discovered at Comrie and the urbane, super-civilised ones that lay in wait for her at Daniel’s other homes. Here was chaos and order combined.

  She had him to thank for that, of course, but this was also slightly different. The apartment in Alfama was hers, and had been her decision. She had been shocked when he told her how much the sapphires he had given her were worth, though she had been utterly unsurprised when he also told her to keep them, that he would buy her the apartment and let her keep her jewels. But no.

  Those sapphires had been hers. They were a gift, a beautiful gift, but she had no regrets about selling them. If she was careful, frugal, she would never have to work ever again. She had no intention of being that frugal. She wasn’t an idiot, and with a lover as rich as Daniel she realised also that she could ask for any pleasure and it would be hers.

  At the same time, however, having something of her own, something that was her idea rather than Daniel’s, was important to her. A man so dominant as Daniel Stone—in height, in physical and sexual prowess, in financial and worldly muscle—could easily drown her. Sexually, yes: she wanted to submit to him, again and again and again. But that didn’t mean that she wanted to be his shadow in every way.

  As she walked down the narrow cobbled street that led its often treacherous way down through Alfama, she smiled as she also considered that this wasn’t what Daniel wanted either. It was simplicity itself for Daniel Stone to buy whatever he wanted. He could buy her shadow a thousand times over and still barely dent his vast wealth. Daniel Logan, however, had never wanted to buy her at all. She had given herself to him—and in return, he had made himself a gift to her.

  Pausing for a moment, she looked down towards the red steel bridge that spanned towards the large statue of Cristo Rei, Christ with his arms outstretched towards the waters of the Tagus in benediction and peace. Somewhere down there was the port where Chiado Shipping lay, one of the companies that worked with Stone Enterprises, and the ostensible reason for her visiting this city. In truth, it had been a pleasant deception, but that didn’t matter now. She was here and here she would remain.

  There was no need to rush. That was, indeed, one of the things she loved about her new home. No one rushed. One of the sardine nations, Daniel sometimes disparagingly referred to Portugal, particularly when business was moving more slowly than he liked. The herring nations were hardworking, industrious, a little too cold perhaps, but that was why they were not in the same desperate straits as their poorer neighbours to the south. Kris never disagreed with him: instead, she would impishly observe that the north may have been where all the money was, but the south was where everyone wanted to live.

  And so she did not rush but walked,
sedately, pleasantly, past the Se and down the tumbling hills towards Rossio Square. The yellow trams trundled past her, not so full as they had been in the summer and filled now with regular inhabitants rather than hundreds of tourists—though, she had to admit, even with her darkening skin and her rapidly improving Portuguese, she still felt a bit of a visitor to the city.

  She shrugged at the thought. What did it matter? For the first time in too many years she had no cares and she was creating again. Deep down inside her she knew that this was home.

  In Rossio she went to one of the cafés with canopied tables outside. These were far from the best places to eat, and Daniel had been a little irritated when she brought him here for more than a coffee, but the truth was that this was an easy half hour walk from her home and she could sit here and drink wine, enjoying the evening. On three sides of the square were the neoclassical porticos and buildings, both stern and easygoing with the large arch leading to the old city, their solid proportions facing the baroque fountain on top of which was the equestrian statue of Dom Pedro IV. On the fourth side was the open, free space of the river.

  And so, as the sun began to descend further to the west and the sky turned a darker blue, she sipped at her red wine and watched people coming and going. She did not feel an outsider—as she suspected Daniel sometimes felt. No. She was content to be a quiet observer, looking at the handsome locals as they went arm in arm. The economy might be fucked, she thought to herself, all that money swimming north to the shoals of herring, but they did not, in the end, care too much. There was always more to life than money. That was one of the gifts, she suspected, she could give to Daniel.

  As she sat there, her phone on the table before her, its screen flashed. She read the message from Daniel and smiled before replying.

  Tomorrow. He would be here tomorrow. Simply that thought made her wet again.