Silence Is Golden (Storm and Silence 3)

See how well it works?

So I tried it on this situation.

I want to dance the fandango de pokum with Mr Rikkard Ambrose. I want it really, really bad. But if I do, I will probably get pregnant and have to do the unspeakable m-thing. You know the one that involves churches and priests and vows of obedience. Ergo: I can’t get my hands on him.

But…I still wanted to! Blast!

Logic didn’t seem to work here. Instead, I secretly started plotting ways of getting him to take his clothes off. For days and days, I brooded ov

er dozens of plans, one less likely to succeed than the last. But it turned out that I needn’t have bothered. All I had to do was wait, for fate was on my side.

*~*~**~*~*

‘Take care where to step.’

Those were the first words I had heard Chandresh say for several days. He was almost as tight-lipped as Mr Ambrose. So, I had to admit, I was curious why he was speaking up now.

‘Why?’

He didn’t look at me. Instead, his eyes kept doing what they had been doing before: scanning the ground.

‘There are dangerous animals here.’

‘What kind of animals? Jaguars? Leopards?’

He pointed upwards. I followed his finger with my gaze, but all I could see were a couple of cobwebs stretched between tree branches.

‘I don’t see anything. What-’

Then it clicked.

‘Oh.’

‘Yes. As I said - take care where you step.’

I was tempted to ask whether the little fellows we should be on the lookout for were poisonous or not - but then I decided that, on the whole, I’d rather not know. Once or twice I saw something dark scuttle past underfoot, but the day passed without a major incident. It was towards evening that events took a more interesting direction.

We had made camp near a clump of tall, dark trees, just right for hanging our hammocks from. Our supplies were beginning to run low, so Chandresh posted a few guards some distance away around the camp, and then took the rest of the men hunting into the jungle. Karim went with them, but Mr Ambrose, for some reason, decided to stay behind. Maybe he wanted to lean back, relax and calculate how many millions of pounds he was going to make from this trip. Maybe he had found a stain on his tailcoat that he needed to eradicate. Most likely, though, it was fate.

I was lying in my hammock, contemplating the unfairness of life and the perfection of Mr Rikkard Ambrose’s profile when I heard a noise from the direction of his hammock. I turned and saw that he wasn’t lying down like me, but standing upright. In fact, you could hardly have stood more uprightly uprighter. His posture was as stiff as a board, his eyes fixed on some point in the distance. His hands, his arms, his face - they were all perfectly still. Even his left little finger didn’t twitch.

‘Mr Ambrose?’

He didn’t reply. What was the matter with him? Had he finally truly turned into stone?

‘Mr Ambrose, Sir? What is the matter?’

He parted his lips, infinitesimally, and whispered so low it was hardly more than a tickle against my eardrum, ‘Drr ss smsm crlnp mm lg.’

‘Pardon?’

His cool eyes bored into me. Every other part of his body still stayed perfectly still. ‘I said there is something crawling up my leg.’

Swinging out of the hammock, I examined his lower half with a frown. ‘I don’t see anything on your trousers.’

‘It’s inside the trousers.’

‘Oh.’