Sheikh's Ransom. ALEXANDRA SELLERS

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      Kaifar nodded once and withdrew, leaving her on her own. Caroline went to the exotically arched patio door, drew it open, and stepped out onto terra cotta tiles delicately interspersed with a pattern in white and blue. She sighed in deep satisfaction. How good it was to get away, to be alone, to think. She seemed to have had no time for thinking since her father had first told her of David’s offer.

      Far in the distance, scarcely discernible, a muezzin was calling the faithful of the city to prayer. Ahead of her stretched the fabulous blue waters of the Gulf of Barakat. Palm trees, planted in the courtyard below, stretched up to the vaulted, pillared canopy that protected half the terrace from the sun. There were plants everywhere her eye fell. A table and chairs nestled against the trunk of one of the trees, and Caroline sank down, dropped ice into a glass, and poured herself some mineral water.

      The surroundings were so soothing. Her troubles and responsibilities seemed miles away. She had no choices to make, no unpleasant facts to face, tasks to perform. She was facing two weeks where she need please no one save herself.

      

      Sayed Hajji Karim ibn Daud ibn Hassan al Quraishi reached a deceptively lazy hand out to the bowl of glistening fruit and detached a grape. He examined the grape, his curving lids hiding the expression in his eyes. The fruit was plump and purple-black, but not nearly as deeply dark as the monarch’s angry eyes, a fact which Nasir could verify a moment later, when Prince Karim slipped the juicy globelet between his white teeth and raised his piercing gaze to his secretary.

      “In truth, Lord, no one save yourself and Prince Rafi and I know what your intentions are. Who could have revealed them? Only I myself have knowingly been engaged in the execution of these plans. The truth has been disguised from all the others. All has been as secretly done as you ordered, Lord.”

      “And yet he did not come,” said Prince Karim.

      The secretary bowed. “If I may speak plainly,” he began, but he scarcely paused for the permission the ritual question implied. He was a trusted advisor and he spoke freely in conference with his prince. “This may easily be the action of a guilty man who fears some nameless coincidence, or a busy man contemptuous of the arrangements and desires of others. It is not necessarily the action of a man who has been warned of trouble.”

      “He is a man who subverted one of my own staff,” Karim said flatly. The monotone did not fool the secretary. Prince Karim advertised his anger only when there was something to be gained from a show of royal rage.

      The secretary bowed his head. “True, Lord. By my eyes, he has not subverted me.”

      Prince Karim lifted a hand. “No such suspicion has crossed my mind, Nasir.”

      Prince Rafi spoke. “Good! Then we must operate on the assumption that there has been no leak of information, and alter our plans to suit the circumstance. All is not yet lost! The woman is here, after all!”

      

      The sun set as she waited; the air was cooler, and a breeze moved beguilingly across the terrace. The transformation from light to dark happened quickly, a bucket of molten gold dropping down into the navy ocean and drawing after it night and a thousand stars. Now the world was magical.

      She was waiting, half for Kaifar, half for a phone call to go through. She had tried and failed to call David earlier, then had given up, showered and dressed. She was wearing a green cotton sundress with wide straps and a bodice cut not too low across her breasts; a gauzy, gold-shot scarf patterned in greens with pinks and blues and yellows would cover her shoulders if necessary. Her hair was clean and obedient again, swept back from her forehead and neck as smoothly as the vibrant natural curls would allow. She wore a gold chain, gold studs, and her engagement ring.

      Caroline had been absolutely astonished when her father had approached her with David Percy’s proposal of marriage. She hardly knew the man, although she was aware that he was a friend of her father’s, an antiques dealer and collector who had sold Thom Langley a few things in the old days. They had met only once or twice. She believed then that he had fallen in love with her from a distance, and she had been ready to laugh with her father over David’s middle-aged foolishness.

      Then she had seen that her father wanted her to marry David Percy. And when her mother came in, Louise had made no effort to pretend her husband had not already informed her of the great news. “Oh, Caroline, isn’t it a miracle! Who would have thought that a man like David Percy would want you!” she had burst out with such relief and gratitude in her tone that Caroline understood that for both of them David Percy’s offer represented a salvation worth any sacrifice. Even a daughter’s happiness.

      “But Mother, he’s so—” Caroline stopped, because she couldn’t find the words to describe the awful coldness that she felt from David. Worse, much worse, than her own father’s.

      Thomas Langley had always disapproved of his elder daughter’s “emotional extremes,” her capacity for deep feeling and unguarded responses, so unlike his own nature or even that of his wife’s. Whether she was touched by the plight of a stray cat in a Caribbean resort, or moved to tears by a painting in an Italian church, her father frowned. Caroline had grown up under the constant pressure to contain her laughter, restrain her tears, to walk sedately and talk quietly.

      “Darling, it’s not forever,” Louise had hastily assured her. She had talked fast, not giving Caroline time to express objections. “David won’t expect you to stay married to him for long. He knows better than that. You’ll be divorced by the time you’re thirty!”

      Caroline shuddered. “And who will get custody of the children?”

      “Darling, you’re looking for problems! David may not even want children. And at thirty, look where you’ll be. You’ll have serious money—you can trust your father to see to that—and you probably won’t look a day older than you do now. The cosmetic aids you’ll be able to afford! The massage, the clinics! Whereas I’m aging a little more with every day that passes.”

      “Being eternally young isn’t really high on my list of priorities,” Caroline responded dryly, but her mother overrode her.

      “Caroline, you’ll have money. Don’t underestimate it. Money is the power to do whatever you like. You will have total freedom, Caroline.” She emphasised each word of the last sentence.

      Caroline had frowned as something whispered in the back of her mind that she would have total freedom now if she left her parents to the fate which their own foolish actions and constant living beyond their means had brought upon them.

      And as though she sensed that, Louise had added quickly, with a pathetic catch to her voice, “We’ll have freedom, too, Caroline. You can purchase our freedom as no one else can. And think of Dara. She’ll be able to go to university, and I know you want her to be able to do that....”

      But she would not have agreed to the engagement if she had not believed that David wanted to marry her because he loved her.

      David had begun taking her to museums to introduce her to his way of life and her future, and one fine day he had introduced her to “herself”—a marble bust thought to be Alexander the Great. And that was when she discovered just what it was about his fiancée that David loved: Caroline looked like a Greek statue.

      In profile her broad forehead sloped down into a finely carved nose with scarcely any change in angle; her slim eyebrows, set low, followed the line of her large, wide-spaced, grey eyes; her СКАЧАТЬ