Court of Veils Read online

  Violet Winspear

  COURT OF THE VEILS

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the Author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the Author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

  The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published 1968

  Australian copyright 1981

  Philippine copyright 1981

  This edition 1981

  © Violet Winspear 1968

  ISBN 0 263 73752 7

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE plane crashed in the desert during a storm. There were not many survivors, but among them was the fiancée of Armand Gerard.

  The young Frenchman had been travelling home to the date-palm plantation owned by his family at El Kadia in the Sahara. Roslyn Brant had been with him; a young air line hostess on leave whom Armand had been planning to introduce to his family after a whirlwind courtship.

  Now Armand was dead, and Roslyn lay a victim of amnesia in a hospital run by the gentle-faced nuns of El Kadia, a desert oasis which had flourished over the years into a city of palms, arcaded streets, and villas above the Temcina Lake.

  Most of Roslyn’s clothing had been tom off in the crash, and though unconscious when taken to the hospital she held tightly in her right hand a lovely engagement ring set with a single blazing diamond. The ring she had doubtless been admiring just before the crash, studying, perhaps, the words carved inside the rose-gold band. ‘We will always be together,’ they said, so simply and trustfully.

  Armand’s family had been informed by letter that he was bringing his English fiancée to the plantation known as Dar al Amra, and a few weeks after the crash Armand’s grandmother told Roslyn firmly that she was to come and recuperate at the plantation and try to find the peace of mind that might help her to regain her memory. It was perhaps a blessing in disguise, the Frenchwoman added, that at present Roslyn could remember nothing of the storm, the crash, and the tragic death of her fiancé.

  Even her name had been a blank to her. Other people had to tell her that she was a twenty-two-year-old airline hostess, whose home in England was a hostel near Air field in Middlesex.

  ‘My poor petite.’ Madame Gerard patted Roslyn’s hand. ‘Tomorrow you will be out of this place. You will come home to us, and to have you there will be like having a small piece of Armand.’

  ‘But I - I can’t impose myself on you, madame.’ Roslyn looked troubled and uncertain. ‘You don’t have to feel responsible for me just because—’

  ‘Because Armand loved you and wished to marry you?’ Madame Gerard looked affronted, icy in a moment as her snow-blue hair. ‘We of Dar al Amra wish you to stay with us out of concern for your welfare, and the love you had for Armand. We are not offering you charity!’

  Roslyn flushed sensitively. ‘I’m sorry, madame, for being so stiff-necked,’ she apologized. ‘It’s most kind and generous of you to want me to stay a while at the plantation.’

  ‘You are anglaise,’ Madame shrugged with Gallic eloquence. ‘I had a son-in-law who could be, as you call it, stiff-necked in his British pride. All is forgiven petite, if I hear no more talk of you imposing yourself on us.’ And Madame Gerard smiled, little eyelines showing through make-up applied so skilfully that her true age was difficult to assess. Her dress of grey silk had Paris written all over it, her hat was brimmed with shadow-lace that enhanced eyes still as blue as anchusas.

  ‘Until tomorrow, my child.’ She bent over Roslyn and kissed her cheek. ‘Au revoir.’

  ‘Au revoir, madame.’ And the scent of anchusas lingered in that hospital room after the indomitable éminence grise of Dar al Amra had made her departure.

  Madame Gerard had loved her youngest grandson very much, Roslyn reflected, and for about the hundredth time she took into her hands the photograph of Armand Gerard which she had asked for, and studied his lean handsome face, and smiling Gallic eyes under peaked eye brows.

  For a long while Roslyn sat holding the photograph, a quiet and tearless Cinderella whose glass slipper had smashed, whose Prince Charming was dead. Only the glitter of his ring proved that she had known and loved the young man who seemed a total stranger to her. She rose from the cane armchair in which she was resting and went across to a plain mirror that hung on the wall. She studied the rain-grey of her own eyes, the clipped fairness of her hair, the nose, mouth and chin that had nothing very dramatic about them. What had Armand seen in her? He was so handsome in his photograph that he would have been forgiven for loving a raving beauty rather than a boy-slim creature like herself - who might have looked a bit more striking before the disaster and the loss of shoulder-length hair. Most of it, Madame Gerard had told her, had been sheared off in the operating theatre.

  Roslyn Brant. She spoke the name aloud. Her brows, several shades darker than her hair, puckered with the effort she made to remember. Roslyn – Armand ...

  They might have been names in a book for all the personal meaning they had for her. Her memory was gone, like smoke in her face, and all that was left was the sudden smart of tears. But for the kindness of the Gerard family she would be going back to England, which seemed far more distant and strange to her than this place called El Kadia.

  Madame Gerard had talked a little about the plantation, which ran to many miles of the finest and most fertile date-palms in the Sahara and was under the super vision of her grandson, Duane Hunter. His father had been the proud and stiff-necked Britisher, as Madame had put it, who had married her daughter Celeste and taken her to live on a very different plantation out in British Guiana. Celeste had died there when the boy was about ten years old. Duane had grown up in the bush, receiving his education in England and returning later to manage with his father a large Government-owned plantation.

  Four years ago, when Duane was twenty-seven, his father had decided after almost a lifetime to go home to England. About the same time Madame Gerard had contacted Duane and asked him to come to Dar al Amra to run things for her. Her son who for many years had helped her to manage the place had died. Armand was still being educated in Europe, while Tristan, his brother, was more interested in the composition of music than the production of dates.

  Roslyn, fascinated by the name of the plantation, Dar al Amra, had asked what the words meant. ‘They mean House of the Master,’ Madame had smiled. ‘The plantation house was long ago the residence of a wealthy Aga who had a large harem, and our main patio is called the Court of the Veils.’

  Despite the bleakness of having her entire past swept from her mind, Roslyn was looking forward to going to Dar al Amra to live for a while among these French plantocrats. Madame Gerard had been a famous stage actress before her marriage. Nina Nanette, the toast of Paris, she had told Roslyn, until Armand Gerard senior strode, desert-tanned, into her life, drank champagne from her slipper and captivated her for always.

  ‘Such men are not often made,’ she had sighed. ‘How they can love and wound, and make life a heaven and a hell! A woman might find peace with a gentler man, but how she would miss the fighting and the making up.’

  ‘Was – the y
ounger Armand like his grandfather?’ Roslyn had asked.

  ‘Your Armand was charming, gay-hearted, a nice boy,’ Madame told her. ‘He would have made life very pleasant for you - but we must not talk about that. You have enough to bear, the injury to your poor head and the losing of your memory.’

  It felt strange, frightening not to know anything about herself beyond what other people told her. She had no family in England, and only very recently had she learned that her best friend, a girl without family like herself, had been one of the air hostesses who had died when the plane had crashed.

  Her name had been Juliet Grey and she had lived at the same hostel as Roslyn.

  Roslyn’s remaining hours as a patient passed swiftly, and true to her promise Madame Gerard arrived early the next morning to take Roslyn home with her. Very little passenger luggage had been salvaged from the crash, and Nanette - as Madame insisted upon being called - had gone shopping the day before and bought Roslyn a set of lingerie to go under a cool linen dress; a smart pair of sandals, a handbag in raffia and a shady hat to match.

  Roslyn just didn’t know how to thank her. Nanette waved away her thanks with a tiny hand, more concerned with the fit of the dress and highly pleased that the white tube was just right on Roslyn’s boy-slim figure. There was a lipstick and a compact of cream-powder in the handbag and she watched critically as Roslyn applied them. ‘Don’t be shy with the lip colouring, my child,’ she exclaimed. ‘Your pale features need emphasis - ah, but wait until you have lived in the desert sun for a while! The sun will turn you into a real blonde - I wonder if you can ride? En tout cas, Tristan or Duane will teach you. There is nothing better for the circulation than an early morning gallop on a good horse.’

  Roslyn caught her breath at the idea, quite certain somehow that she had never been on a horse in her life.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind learning how to ride,’ she smiled. ‘Aren’t Arab horses rather fierce?’

  ‘Of course,’ Nanette said imperturbably. ‘But you are not a timid child. How could you be when you worked as an air hostess, and loved a Gerard?’

  ‘Are the Gerards so intimidating?’ Behind Roslyn’s smile there lurked a sudden strange fear - a fear she couldn’t account for in view of the kindness Madame Gerard had so far shown her.

  ‘We live on the edge of the desert, so perhaps it has made us a little savage in some respects.’ Madame shrugged and pulled on her gloves. ‘Now we depart, my child, for Dar al Amra. Are you excited?’

  Roslyn nodded, and as they walked out of the hospital she smiled goodbye at the kindly nuns and felt apprehensive of her meeting with Duane Hunter, and Tristan. Madame had said that Tristan was working on an opera based on an old legend about the favourite of the Aga of Dar al Amra. Her name had been Nakhla, grace of the palm, and a French officer had fallen in love with her. Assuming the guise of a veiled visitor, he had managed more than once to get into the harem to see Nakhla. The Aga found them out, and had the handsome head of the Frenchman presented to his favourite in a jewel casket!

  Roslyn had an idea she was going to have tastes in common with Tristan, but his cousin sounded tougher, more formidable.

  A car with a uniformed Arab driver waited at the gates of the hospital, and soon they were honking their way through the busy city streets, where tiers of flat-roofed houses caught the sun on their walls of limewash, ochre and cobalt blue. Arcaded lanes were honeycombed with Eastern shops, above which the strange Hand of Fatma was carved or pressed into the plaster.

  Through the open windows of the car there came a spicy-plummy-goaty smell, and Roslyn leaned forward eagerly to take in the passing Arabs of all shades, a mosque of white stucco, blue-domed, with a lace-like minaret, and the camels that hung lugubrious heads over the gate of a fondouk.

  ‘It’s like being in another world,’ she breathed. Her eyes met those of the woman beside her, whose expression was thoughtful and sad, as though she had Armand on her mind and the boyish pleasure he would have got out of showing the attractions of El Kadia to his English bride-to-be.

  Soon the city was left behind and they were speeding along a road cut through the desert. It was now mid-morning and the sun was burning overhead, the cause of crests and troughs in the road which their driver had to take at high speed in order to save his passengers from too much bumping. Though the big car was air-conditioned, Roslyn was beginning to feel the heat. The crests of sand dazzled her eyes, a vibrating landscape with serrated hills in the distance, like stairs leading into the sky.

  ‘That is the Gebel d’Oro,’ Nanette told her. ‘Seen close to, those hills are a strange colour, like petrified flames - Barbary bandits are said to have a stronghold there.’

  ‘In this day and age?’ Roslyn exclaimed.

  ‘This is the East, chérie.’ Nanette fitted a cigarette into a holder and flicked her lighter at the tip. The smoke of a Caporal Jaune was sweet and strong in the car. ‘Men of the desert will never be completely tamed, and that is one of its primitive pleasures, that the desert harbours wolves, leopards and hawks that are not always four-footed and winged.’

  Roslyn studied her benefactress. ‘The actress in you is still very fond of the dramatic situation, isn’t it, Madame Gerard?’ she said. ‘Confess that I intrigue you because I have no memory? I am stormdrift, to whom you are offering your home like a castle of refuge.’

  Nanette gave a soft little laugh. ‘Yes, you intrigue me, my child. I will admit that when I first saw you, bandaged, bruised, thin as a boy, I could not fathom your attraction for my handsome Armand. I can only suppose that he was beguiled by your air of retreat; your grey eyes that are clear as rainpools, and yet full of concealment.’

  There was a brief, electrical silence. Roslyn could feel her heart pounding from the heat, and from what Nanette had said. Was there in the Frenchwoman’s manner the hint of a question? Did she think that Roslyn had something to conceal... and that she concealed it behind the mask of a false amnesia?

  She pulled her gaze from the blink of a large ruby on Nanette’s hand, turned her head to the window to hide the little leap of pain in her eyes. The dense green of many palm trees lay to the left and right of them, towering, meeting overhead as they drove through the endless forest of Dar al Amra date-palms, along a smoothly cleared track that was shaded from the burning sun by the huge palmate leaves of the giant trees.

  Under the fingers of her right hand Roslyn could feel the carbuncle of a diamond set in the rose-gold band of Armand Gerard’s ring. ‘We will always be together,’ he had said. But Roslyn could not remember him, or the moment when he had said those words and slipped the lovely ring on to her finger.

  She could not remember - and she caught her breath as the song of a forest bird echoed through the trees, and the chirring of katydids filled the air. It was cool under the trees, green as a sea-cave, the track ahead spattered with arrowheads of gold that shot down through chinks in the canopy of leaves.

  Roslyn glimpsed the white gowns of men working among the trees, and Nanette told her that soon they would harvest the fruit, grade it and pack it, and then transport it to the dock where it would travel by ship to many ports all over the world. The Dar al Amra dates were famous, Nanette added proudly. ‘We have, also, almond trees, oranges and olives, apricots, quince and figs. Our soil is very fertile, fed from underground streams, you understand. Then again my grandson Duane is a man of ideas with the ability to carry them through, and the plantation is now producing many more side fruits than before he came here to supervise things for me.’

  Great bunches of ripening amber fruit gleamed among the green, and when the car branched to the left, Nanette pointed out another section of the plantation where a white Moorish house stood alone, its walls ablaze under a cloak of bougainvillea red as dragon’s blood. ‘Duane wished to live alone when he came here,’ his grandmother said, ‘so he occupies the supervisor’s residence. The house always seems very solitary to me, set among the trees, but Duane was determined.’ Nanette laughed
and stubbed her cigarette. ‘He has a will of iron which bruises a woman until she gives in to him.’

  Soon the solitary house of Duane Hunter was left behind, and they drove past row upon row of low, globular orange trees whose bouquet filled the air like a thousand and one weddings all taking place at the same time. Roslyn took deep breaths of it, and she was sure that all her life this moment would return to haunt her, when the Moorish entrance of Dar al Amra came into view, flanked by high tawny walls.

  They drove under the great horseshoe into the Court of the Veils, where once upon a time the favourites of the harem had sauntered, their anklets tinkling at every step, their eyes demure or Persian-cat above gauzy yashmaks.

  Roslyn climbed out of the car in something of a daze, and stood looking about her at the mosaic of tiling, the triangle of fountains and the great shade tree that gushed cascades of cool green all over the courtyard ... there was something symbolic and enchanted about the tree. Its wonderful sprays of leaves might have been carved from jade.

  ‘I don’t think I could ever have seen anything more beautiful,’ she said to Nanette, and as she turned to look at the older woman her grey eyes caught the sun and seemed alight.

  ‘I prophesy that El Kadia has many more surprises in store for you,’ Nanette smiled. ‘Now let us go in - ah, do you hear music? That is my Tristan, playing part of the opera he is composing.’

  They followed the piano music along a corridor of carved archways and it stopped as Nanette’s high heels tapped across the tiled floor of the salon, a high cool room with a cedarwood ceiling, low divans and tables, glimmering oriental rugs and hammered lamps slotted with jewel-toned glass.

  ‘Grand’mère!’ The slender young man jumped to his feet and came over to them. He was in his early thirties, Roslyn guessed. Of middle height, with black hair threaded with grey, Latin eyes and the features of his dead brother!