Court of Veils Read online

  ‘Some scratch, Miss Fernao.’ Roslyn’s eyes were blazing. ‘I think it’s insulting of you to suppose that Duane would make love to any girl he happened to be alone with for a few hours - or that I would let him! I’m sure he finds the majority of women quite resistible - even the beautiful ones.’

  She hit a nerve that time. Isabela shot her a glare that headed them straight into a pothole, causing a bump that rattled Roslyn’s teeth. ‘You’ve got what we came driving for,’ she said tartly, ‘now let’s go home. Besides, that sky is beginning to look a bit peculiar.’

  A saffron glare was creeping in behind the blue, and the heat was pressing down on the open-top car now Isabela had slowed down their speed.

  ‘Perhaps you will be obliged to share this storm with me,’ Isabela drawled.

  ‘I don’t think either of us would enjoy that - do you?’

  Roslyn was tensed up, to the pitch where she wanted to grab at the wheel and turn the car herself, back towards the direction of Dar al Amra. All around the desert stretched away in an aridity broken only by the distant Gebel d’Oro, which seemed to blend today with a fire-coloured sky.

  ‘What did you talk about - that night?’ pursued her inquisitor.

  ‘His father, their place in Kent where Mr. Hunter now lives.’

  ‘If you got caught in the downpour, you must both have been very wet.’

  ‘We were.’ Exasperation had got the better of Roslyn. ‘We had to strip and dry off. Tell me, Isabela, are we driving back to the scene of the crime?’

  Roslyn had a sense of humour, but she didn’t reckon on her companion’s lack of one. The road ahead was bare of traffic, and as Isabela turned the car, the chiffon on her hat blew in her eyes. She pushed at it with her hand, and the next moment the filmy scarf was sailing through the air, to land on the dusty road some yards behind the car. Isabela braked and they halted. ‘Do you mind getting the scarf for me?’ she asked Roslyn. ‘I am sentimentally attached to it.’

  Roslyn opened the door beside her and stepped out on to the road. She ran obligingly back to where the length of chiffon lay curled like a spotted snake. As she picked it up, she heard the car start up. She whirled round ... hardly able to believe her eyes as the car shot away and she was left running after it, in its dust trail.

  ‘Isabela,’ she cried out, ‘wait for me!’

  She was sure that the car would stop before it went over a rise on the road ahead. But it didn’t. It dropped out of sight, and when Roslyn reached and mounted the rise, all out of breath, the car was being swallowed up by distance and dust.

  It was unbelievable that Isabela had done such a thing, left her on this desert road to walk all those miles back to Dar al Amra. A wedge of anger mixed with tears filled her throat. What a simpleton she had been to trust Isabela ... hadn’t she been warned by Tristan that people of Isabela’s temperament could be savagely jealous?

  Oh, but surely she would return and pick her up. Even Isabela wouldn’t be mean enough to leave her stranded like this, miles from home . .. with a sandstorm coming on.

  Roslyn pulled her lips into control and trudged on, hoping any minute to see the open-top car heading back towards her. The chiffon scarf trailed along in her hand. Soon her cotton dress was sticking to her, and her bare sandalled feet were hot from the stones of the road. She decided that it would be easier to walk on the sand, which crunched underfoot like burnt toast.

  She tried to work out how long it would take her to reach the plantation on foot. She and that vixen of a woman had been out in the car about three-quarters of an hour, which meant that right now she was a long way from home. It would surely be nightfall before she reached the house, and from the look of that sky she would be at the mercy of the sandstorm before long.

  A dark vapour was drifting across the sun, which was like an inverted cauldron of molten gold. Thick gold that didn’t pour down, but which was distilled in an oppressive, slow sliding of warmth. Roslyn was grateful for this, at least. It was better to be slowly broiled than crisped.

  What, she wondered, would they say at Dar al Amra when Isabela returned without her?

  Nothing, she reminded herself. She had not told Nanette where she was going, and Tristan had shut himself in his room with his lunch and his guitar to work on an obstinate passage of music. She had not seen him all the morning. And she wished to goodness she had not seen Duane. That conversation with him on the patio was the cause of her present predicament.

  Her heart twisted oddly, and she stood still as she thought she heard something. Yes, a distinct shuffling sound ... the sound of leagues of sand shifting in the wind that would rise suddenly, like an angry giant. She gave a shiver, and then her heart was in her throat and she was running on to the road as a vehicle came steadily towards her in a cloud of dust.

  It was a Renault wagon ... conjured like Cinderella’s coach out of space and the growing fear that Roslyn had been feeling increasingly.

  ‘Hey!’ she yelled, waving her arm. ‘Please ... can you give me a lift!’

  The wagon braked in a haze of dust, and Roslyn ran gratefully to the side of it. ..

  ‘What the devil,’ said the driver, ‘are you doing all alone out here?’

  Roslyn blinked her sweat-tangled lashes, and the brown, green-eyed face came into clearer focus. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you.’

  ‘Yes,’ he mocked, ‘me.’ He leaned forward and opened the door with which she was fumbling. She climbed in beside him, wearily wondering what she had ever done to put Fate so against her. It would have to be Duane who rolled up to witness her latest misadventure.

  ‘Well,’ he said, arms crossed on the w'heel, ‘I’m waiting for an explanation, miss.’

  ‘Your girl-friend,’ she said shakily, ‘dumped me here in the middle of nowhere.’

  ‘My who?’ He was looking at her as though at a nitwit.

  ‘I was a nitwit all right, when I agreed to come out driving with Isabela.’ Roslyn now had more control over her voice, but less over her temper. ‘She must be neurotic, imagining that we - you and I spent that night together at Lake Temcina for the fun of the thing.’

  ‘So that’s it,’ he drawled, leaning back to light himself a cheroot. His nostrils thinned and ejected tangy smoke. ‘Isabela heard us talking together this morning, eh?’ Roslyn nodded. Her throat was so dry that it hurt to speak.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Brown fingers tipped the brim of her hat and touched her moist temple. ‘Child, how long have you been out under that sun?’

  ‘About half an hour,’ she said huskily. ‘I’m so dry—’

  At once he reached over to the back seat of the wagon and there was a delicious gurgling sound as he handed her a leather water-bottle. She unscrewed the top and gulped down about half a pint of the cool, longed-for water. Some of it ran down her chin and fell in cool drops on her throat.

  ‘I was dying for a drink.’ She smiled gratefully as she handed back the container. ‘Thank you.’

  He made sure the top was well screwed on, then he tossed the container behind him. He then opened the map compartment in front of him and took out of it a fistful of small yellow limes. These he dropped into her lap. ‘Water quenches a thirst, but the fire still smoulders,’ he grinned. ‘Suck those limes. The best remedy I know for easing a touch of desert throat.’

  She tucked into a lime right away, and found it juicy and tart. ‘Delicious,’ she sighed. ‘Manna from heaven.’

  He smiled through his cheroot smoke, as though at a child. The engine of the Renault throbbed away, but it didn’t quite drown the weird shuffling sound creeping across the desert.

  ‘There’s going to be quite a storm,’ Duane said quietly. ‘Did Isabela know?’

  Roslyn licked a globule of juice from her lip. ‘I don’t suppose she thought of that. Her scarf - this one - blew out of the car and she asked me to get it for her. I - I didn’t dream she would drive off and leave me stranded.’

  ‘She’s like most neurotics.’ Duane f
licked ash out of the open window beside him. ‘Fascinating charmers, with less sense of wrongdoing than children. I knew what Isabela was like from the moment I met her. Gorgeous to look at, totally absorbed in herself, unscrupulous to the tips of her fingers. Such people just don’t care about hurting others. Their own desires are all that count.’

  He drew hard on his cheroot, and when Roslyn glanced at him she saw that he was gazing straight ahead of him, his face a brown, stony, chiselled mask. He was looking a hard fact in the face, and Roslyn knew that it was hurting him.

  ‘My own mother was like Isabela,’ he said quietly. ‘So lovely to look at... so utterly selfish to know.’

  What he had said was so unexpected that Roslyn didn’t take in its significance for several moments. Then as they moved forward, her stunned thoughts moved and the crashing truth hit her.

  The woman who had hurt Duane so badly had been his mother. Céleste, the adored daughter of Nanette ... the woman he couldn’t talk about because he couldn’t bear to hurt his grandmother.

  ‘My mother ran out on my dad when I was a boy,’ he went on. ‘She got bored with my father, fed up with our jungle home. She ran away with a wealthy Brazilian who owned a large coffee fazenda. They dived off to Lima — where only a few days later they were both killed in an earthquake. Dad never really got over the shock. He always believed that if he had gone after her, he might have persuaded her to return home with him. I doubt it. I was just a kid and though I loved her because she was my mother, I had witnessed the rows, the reconciliations and the torment which she caused my father.

  ‘There had been other men beside the Brazilian,’ Duane added harshly. ‘Affairs which my dad forgave because he knew he had been wrong to marry Céleste Gerard. He was on the point of throwing in his job for her sake, when this Brazilian fellow came along. I remember him, though I’ve forgotten all the others. He was her sort. The type she should have married ... not a planter. Not a man who needed - well, a different sort of life ... a life close to nature.’

  He fell quiet, and Roslyn listened to the drumming of her heart and the rising of the wind as the landscape darkened all around. The atmosphere was one of melancholy, and Roslyn felt sand on her lips, and grains of it were clinging to her moist forehead.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Duane,’ she said. What else could she say, that it was awful to lose a mother twice over, to see her run away, and then hear that death had claimed her?

  ‘I don’t want to frighten you,’ he was having to raise his voice above the growing roar of the wind and the lash of sand against the windshield, ‘but it looks as though we’re running into the storm head-on.’

  ‘I’m not frightened - not now,’ she said, and oddly enough it was true, even though the wind was howling like so many cats chained together. She felt Duane’s glance and met his grimly humorous smile. She smiled back, for now she understood what had made this man so seemingly hard and unfeeling.

  ‘It seems as though we’re doomed to share storms together,’ he said.

  ‘I should have hated to be alone in this,’ she gave a shiver. ‘Thank heaven you came along when you did.’

  ‘I had some business to see to at Ajina—’ there he broke off as a great gust of sand blew right over the wagon and blinded the front windows. Again, and then again this happened, so that they seemed to be driving through an impenetrable fog. Every second the wind was growing more forceful, they were right in the midst of the storm when suddenly a giant hand seemed to lift the wagon and throw it bodily to one side of the road. Duane fought with the wheel as Roslyn was pitched forward against the controls.

  A cry of pain broke from her as her forehead came in contact with something hard ... she felt nauseated, and then slid stunned into a small heap as Duane braked furiously and the wagon bucked to a halt in the raging sandstorm.

  She felt an arm around her, and water was being gently dabbed against her throbbing forehead. Her eyes blinked open and met the keen anxiety of Duane’s.

  ‘W-where are we?’ she asked, dazed. ‘Did we crash?’

  He shook his head and held his water flask so she could take a drink. There,’ he murmured, ‘are you feeling a little better?’

  She nodded, and gazed in wonderment at the shattering gentleness of the face that had always looked anything but gentle. ‘I - I feel as though I’ve got a bump,’ she said unsteadily.

  ‘You have, my dear,’ then she heard him swallow harshly. ‘It’s a lucky thing you hit your forehead and not your eye.’

  ‘Mmm,’ her head moved drowsily against his shoulder. ‘What’s that roaring noise? Is it - in my head?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he held her close in his arms as the blinding waves of sand crashed over their shelter. ‘Sandstorms make a fearful racket, but we’re quite safe, shut in here together.’

  The roaring grew louder, and with a sudden little sob of fear she buried her face in his shoulder and clutched at him as the world spun round and she thought she was going to pass out again. Her fingernails dug into him, though she wasn’t aware of the fact. All she knew was that Duane was the only solid object in her spinning world and she held on to him, shuddering as the darkness was split open and the truth rushed in, causing her the same pain that the eyes feel when a light is suddenly switched on in a dark room.

  After a moment or two she felt a hand soothing her brow. ‘Duane?’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ his hand stroked gently and the pain was going, ‘what is it you want to tell me?’

  ‘Duane,’ his name broke from her, ‘I’m not Roslyn Brant. I never was.’

  ‘You’re Juliet, of course,’ he said. ‘Juliet Grey.’

  ‘Yes,’ she breathed. ‘Everyone thought I was Roslyn because of the ring, and looking a little like her.’

  ‘Can you remember the crash?’ Duane asked - in that voice that was so shatteringly gentle.

  ‘It was awful,’ her fingers clenched his shoulder. ‘I was standing in the aisle of the plane talking to Roslyn and Armand ... suddenly everything went dark, the whole plane shuddered, and the last thing I was conscious of was clutching the hand which Roslyn threw out towards me. Her engagement ring was on that hand. I must have pulled it off as the crash tore us apart.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what must have happened.’ Duane put a hand beneath her chin and tilted her face so that he could study her features in the dimness of their shelter. ‘You and the real Roslyn only resembled each other on the outside, I think.’

  ‘She was much more carefree, but because we were the same build and we both had fair hair which we wore shoulder-length when not in uniform, most of the pilots used to mistake us for sisters. She and Armand were very much in love. It always mystified me that love could be forgotten as easily as I seemed to forget it - and the answer is such a simple one. My heart belonged to no one when the plane crashed. I was just a stewardess on the journey, not Roslyn Brant on her way with her fiance to meet his family.’

  She looked at Duane with the open eyes of Juliet. ‘What made you think that I might not be the real Roslyn ?’ she asked.

  ‘Better than most, Juliet, I know that men do fall for girls unsuited to them,’ he said. ‘I wondered whether Armand had done so. Whether that merry young cousin of mine had fallen under the spell of a quiet girl, a deep girl who looked as though the woods were her natural home. But just prior to his engagement I had a letter from Armand in which he rhapsodized - as Frenchmen will -about his girl. So chic she might almost be French herself. So very gay-natured, with a love of dancing which equalled his own.’

  ‘So that was why you made me dance with you - that evening - that Lake Temcina evening.’ She half-smiled, and her eyes lifted from his throat to his chin, to his mouth. A quiet girl, he had said. A deep girl. He had made those qualities sound wonderful, as though he admired them beyond gaiety and beauty.

  ‘I never cared much for dancing,’ she said. ‘Roslyn and I were always friends, but the only thing we really had in common was the orphanage. W7e
were both heartily glad to get away from that place.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ Duane said gruffly.

  ‘Institutions are always cold, you see, and charity isn’t the same as love.’ She drew a sigh. ‘You have to invent a family for yourself, or find one in the pages of books. You have to imagine the kisses you never had as a child, and if I had been more like Roslyn I should have taken the kisses of some of the pilots we flew with and got over my loneliness. But we only looked alike, we never thought alike, or really wanted the same things.

  ‘On the plane, just before the crash, I was saying how lucky I thought she was because soon she would be part of Armand’s family. Subconsciously, perhaps, that was why I put myself in her shoes after the crash - but it wasn’t her fiancé I wanted, it was his family.’

  ‘You can still be part of his family,* Duane reminded her.

  ‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘I shall be going back to England.’

  ‘Don’t you care enough for Tristan?’ he demanded.

  ‘I care for him very much - as a friend,’ she replied. ‘And that is how he cares for me.’

  Duane’s eyes were tigerish in the gloom as they raked her face. ‘Are you sure of that?’ He spoke savagely. ‘You said that at the time of the crash your heart belonged to no one - what about now?’

  ‘My heart is my own business.’ Suddenly she was struggling with him, for all at once it hurt too much to want to be close to him. ‘Duane, let me go!’

  ‘Not just yet!’ His savagery seemed to be getting out of control. ‘You’ve said often enough that you don’t want my touch, or my friendship, so I’ve nothing to lose if I do this.’

  ‘This’ was being tipped over his arm ... being lost for an eternity of breathless, unimaginable seconds in his kiss. His mouth on hers was relentless, hurting her until she ceased to struggle ... then, eyes closed, senses fully awake, she surrendered to the kiss that searched through all her being until it plundered the heart right out of her.

  ‘Now you can slap my face,’ he said at last against her mouth.

  ‘Why?’ she whispered, still dizzy and shaken by his kiss and the complete awakening which it had brought.