The Sultan's Heir. ALEXANDRA SELLERS

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СКАЧАТЬ Rosalind?”

      “What, you mean a ring? He gave me a gold wedding band. We were in such a hurry before he went home…”

      “Not a gold band. A very large diamond ring—or perhaps, the key to a safety deposit box?”

      She shook her head, mystified. Again, he could not be sure of her. “A very large diamond? Larger than this?”

      “It is a family heirloom that belonged to Jamshid but was not among his effects when he died. He would have wanted his son to have it.”

      “His son,” she murmured.

      “The family is naturally very eager to meet you and the boy. We would like to ask you, Rosalind, to visit—”

      Rosalind looked down at her hands in her lap, watching the ring with deep sadness, and thought how different her life might have been.

      “I’m sorry,” she said, interrupting him with quiet firmness. “Jamshid had no son. The day after I got that—that letter from your grandfather, I had a miscarriage. I lost Jamshid’s baby.”

      Three

      There was a startled silence. “A miscarriage?” he repeated softly. He did not look towards the entrance, where the plastic dinosaur was just visible.

      She remembered the terrible, stabbing pain as she read the letter, as if the old man had taken a knife to her womb. As if her child had responded to such viciousness by refusing to be born into the world.

      “It was the letter,” she murmured. “I knew it was the letter. It’s why I’ve hated you all so much.”

      He sat in silence, staring at her with a mixture of doubt and sadness. But there was nothing more to say. Rosalind shook her head, made a slight shrugging movement, then got up. She went to the bathroom, rinsed her face in cold water, stared at the ring, gazed at her reflection for a minute in blank disbelief, and came back.

      He was sitting where she had left him, holding one of the glass ornaments from the table, absently watching the snow settle around a perfect red rose. He looked up as she crossed the room and stopped in front of him.

      “I’m going to make some coffee. Would you like some?”

      “Thank you.”

      Moving around the kitchen, getting down the cafetière, filling the kettle, laying the tray, she could see him through the doorway. He sat on the sofa in the kind of coiled relaxation that could leap into action very quickly. He absently shook the ornament again, and a cloud of snow bubbled up and hid the rose.

      “How did you meet Jamshid? Were you a student, too?”

      She shook her head. “Not at the same time he was. I’d already done an undergrad degree in Parvani, and was working at the Embassy of Parvan as a junior translator. I was mostly doing stuff for tourist publications. Prince Kavian and Arash and Jamshid came and were living upstairs at the embassy,” she explained.

      “I was studying in Paris for much of that time. But my sister was a student at the university here at the same time as Jamshid,” he remarked. She was measuring the coffee, and looked up as he spoke. “Do you remember a girl named Lamis al Azzam?”

      The little scoop caught the edge of the glass cafetière and leapt from her grasp, the fine-ground coffee spraying all over the counter. Rosalind muttered and reached for a sponge.

      Next thing she knew, he was in the doorway, still holding the rose ornament. With forced calm, Rosalind wiped up the spilled grounds, dusted the residue from her pale blue shirt, rinsed her hands and the sponge under the tap.

      As she carefully measured another scoop of coffee into the cafetière, she said, “I knew Lamis, yes.” How much would Lamis have told him? “She’s your sister?” she repeated, carefully wiping all expression from her voice.

      He nodded. Rosalind swallowed. This was a complication she didn’t need. She would have to be careful. She lifted the kettle and poured boiling water over the grounds. The scent of coffee rose strong in the air.

      “Why don’t you have the same name?”

      He waved his hand as if the answer would entail some obscure cultural explanation that wasn’t worth the trouble.

      “You must be from Barakat, then? Jamshid told me once that other branches of the family were in Bagestan and the Barakat Emirates.”

      He hesitated. “Yes. We are in Barakat. My mother was half sister to Jamshid’s father. But the family is Bagestani originally.”

      She wondered if he had mentioned Lamis as a way of gaining her trust. If so, it was having the opposite effect. She would have to be on her guard with him.

      She lifted the tray, and he backed out of the doorway to let her pass. She carried it into the sitting room and set it on the low black table as they sat again.

      “Jamshid was from Bagestan originally? He never told me that.” She poured coffee into the delicate cream-coloured porcelain cup, set a spoon in the saucer and passed it to him.

      “He was born there,” Najib said briefly. He noted the hesitation that had crept into her manner. So she did know something. The mention of Bagestan had made her wary. He stirred sugar into his cup, laid the little spoon on his saucer, accepted a sweet biscuit from the plate she offered.

      “Really! And what made the family leave?” she asked, in a light, false voice.

      Overdoing the ingenuousness, he advised her silently.

      “Lamis is married now, with a young child. She works in television in Barakat.” He lifted the little rose again. “She collects ornaments like this.”

      A fact Rosalind knew well. The ornament was not in the same style as the others on her table. The others were mostly her own choice, a carved jade figurine, a chunk of raw amethyst, a polished rose crystal set in an antique wooden tripod, a decorated egg, but… Think of me when you look at the rose, Rosalind.

      “I am on a permanent commission to buy her a new one every time I come to Europe.” She was hiding something, that much was obvious. You rushed her, he told himself. Relax. Let her tell you in her own time.

      She gazed for a moment at the perfect red rose, with its little translucent drop like a tear on one petal. Rosalind had never really liked the idea of the rose being imprisoned. Like a woman in purdah. It was natural to think of Lamis when she looked at the rose: Lamis was the rose.

      “My sister was not the same woman when she returned from her time in England,” Najib murmured. “Do you know what happened while she was here to change her?”

      The black gaze seemed to probe her. Rosalind dropped her eyes and nervously adjusted one of the other ornaments on the table, then forced herself to meet his gaze again. She shrugged. “What, for example?”

      “I never knew. She never spoke of it. But she had been a carefree young woman. She came home marked by…suffering.” He set down the glass ball with a kind of protective care, as if the rose, or the thought of his sister, called up an instinctive tenderness for anything weaker than himself.

      Rosalind СКАЧАТЬ