Although the Count was prepared to pay for anything that was required, there would, Roxana told him, be little drinking.
“The men like beer, rice wine or palm wine,” she said, “but they are a most abstemious people and dislike drinking to excess as for their minds to become fuddled is a sensation they despise.”
Because it was such a different marriage from anything she had ever imagined. It was in a way, she thought, more wonderful than any ordinary Ceremony at home could have been.
It was all part of the magic that she and the Count had felt for each other ever since they met, the magic they had found in the Ketjak and in that ecstatic moment when he had kissed her under the fragrant frangipani tree.
The Count had not stayed the two nights after his arrival as Roxana had expected him
