Court of Veils Read online

  Roslyn reached up a hand to touch the jade leaves, renewed each year on this tree which had stood like a guardian of the court throughout its long history. Here and there the walls had small slots in them, and when Roslyn put her eye to one of them and it looked directly into the room that was now the salon, she guessed that the slots had been used by the eunuchs to spy on the girls of the harem. There they would have lounged about on cushions, tinkered with their jewellery, gossiped and eaten the sweets and sherbets that made them so plump and appealing to the Moslem male.

  Roslyn frowned to herself, recalling the gleam of suspicion in Duane Hunter’s eyes last night. But it was odd, the way her mind yielded all this schoolbook trivia while obstinately refusing to give up the essential personal facts that seemed buried in some lost pocket of her mind. She lifted a hand to feel through her growing hair the scar where she had been stitched up in hospital. It was about an inch long and was still a little puckered about the edges. That was why she had to use a hairbrush instead of a comb, in case the teeth of the comb tore the edges of her scar.

  She sighed and stood gazing pensively at the weeping pepper tree, the thought of poor Juliet Grey coming into her mind.

  Her heart missed a beat. Why had that Hunter man called her Juliet? Whatever did he think, that she was pretending to be his dead cousin’s fiancee? It wasn’t possible anyway, a deception like that. The crash had been investigated by officials from England; they said she was Roslyn Brant ... then there was the ring. She had been clutching Armand’s diamond ring in her hand when the rescue team found her and rushed her to hospital with the other few survivors. Two of those had died in hospital, the third, a business man, had gone home to England before Roslyn was fit enough to be allowed out of bed.

  She gave a cold little shiver as she remembered waking up in hospital to pain and loss of self. She hadn’t known her name, and that had been the worst feeling of all, until they addressed her as Roslyn and a distinct sense of familiarity had come to her. Yes, she had nodded eagerly, I know that name!

  Lost in her thoughts, Roslyn opened a slave gate in the wall of the courtyard and wandered through it. There came stealing back into her mind that remark of Duane Hunter’s heard under her window last night; his curt confession to Isabela that there had been another woman in his life, one he never talked about. It was she who had made him cynical towards all other women; amazingly he must have loved her if she had managed to scar a heart as hard as his.

  Duane Hunter in love was a picture Roslyn couldn’t imagine. Even his response to the seductive Isabela held tinges of mockery.

  The Court of the Veils had been filled with sunshine, now Roslyn became aware of a cloister-like coolness and she saw that she was walking beneath the giant fans of the Dar al Amra date-palms. Great pendants of desert fruit hung among leaves almost as tall as herself, and alongside her path she could hear toads croaking in the irrigation ditches, and overhead the cawing of birds in the tall trees.

  Half-bewitched, she wandered on, barely noticing that the aisles between the rows of trees were all alike, flecked with strange green shadows and offering no guide to a stranger of the way-out of the plantation. She caught no glimpses of cowled workers, as she had in the car yesterday, and was quite unaware that the plantation extended to fifty square miles and that today the men were busily at work in another section of this vast network of date, sago, oil, and betel-nut palms.

  Her keenest awareness was that the smells all around were musky and heady, everything was quiet but for the hidden toads and birds, not for weeks had she felt such a sense of peace.

  Some time later she saw something gleaming among the trees, a stream coursing through the cool silence of the palm forest with grass and flowers growing on its banks. She knelt in the grass and scooped the clear water into the palms of her hands. Her throat was dry, and she drank thirstily, and dabbed her temples and nape with her moist hands. Mmmm, that felt good, and sitting back on her heels she took stock of her surroundings.

  The sky through chinks in the fans overhead was a brilliant blue streaked with honey, and the down-stabbing lances of sunlight were hot as they touched her. The sun of early morning had blossomed into its desert lushness, which meant that she had been wandering in these ‘wild woods of Hella’ for some time.

  I ought to start back, she thought, but it was so peaceful here. A squirrel with a dark-striped back and a large bushy tail darted up a palm trunk and made her think of Tristan’s quaint little tune last night. A toad hopped out of the stream, went still as a stone and peered at her with huge eyes of topaz. She felt at one with these forest creatures, and resting on the banks of the stream she studied her drowned reflection in the water.

  ‘Mirror, mirror, in the woods,’ she murmured with a smile. ‘Should I stay, or run away?’

  The water rippled, as though touched by a cat’s paw. The furrow at the nape of her neck went strangely cold ... she twisted round where she sat and saw a few yards away a sleek, cat-like creature staring at her with baleful green eyes. Her blood seemed to go to ice, for its tail was lashing back and forth and it looked as though it was getting ready to spring at her. Its top lip drew back and bared wicked-looking fangs, it spat and gave a snarl as Roslyn leapt to her feet.

  ‘Stand quite still!’ a voice rapped out.

  And Roslyn stood petrified as something as sleek as the cat launched itself from among the trees and landed square on the back of the snarling feline. In an instant the air was filled with the rage of the battling animals, spitting, ripping, rolling over and over until they fell with a splash in the stream and the big cat eluded its attacker and fled away, leaving a lean, long-legged dog to shake itself on the banks of the stream.

  ‘Good lad, Hamra!’ A hand slapped the wet, reddish coat of the dog, and Roslyn, her heart still pounding in the vicinity of her throat, watched as Duane Hunter looked the dog over and pronounced him scratched but otherwise unhurt.

  ‘It was a good thing you both c-came along when you did,’ she said shakily.

  ‘You shouldn’t be wandering about here as though you were taking a stroll through Middlesex,’ he snapped. ‘Mountain cats and wild dogs come down from the hills now and again, and you stood a very good chance just now of getting badly mauled.’

  ‘I know.’ She flinched from the cut in his voice, and turned for relief to the lean dog who had come a little closer to her and was snuffing her sandals. She gave him a pat and at once he backed away from her.

  ‘A Saluki isn’t a pet dog,’ Duane Hunter said crisply. ‘He’s a hunter.’

  ‘An appropriate companion for you,’ she retorted, flashing a glance over the dark fire of his hair, down his haughty blade of a face to the bark-brown throat bared by his white shirt. His breeches were latched into knee-boots of Moroccan leather.

  ‘I see you are now over your fright.’ Something gleamed in his eyes. ‘Do you mind telling me what you are doing so far from the house?’

  ‘No, I don’t mind.’ She thrust her hands into the pockets of her pants and tilted her chin in the air. ‘I felt like a walk before breakfast and it was so cool and peaceful under the palms that I lost track of time.’

  ‘And direction, I don’t doubt.’ He snapped his fingers and the Saluki bounded towards him. ‘You’d better come and have some coffee and something to eat at my place. Then I’ll take you back to Dar al Amra.’

  She gulped, none too sure that she wanted to accept his invitation. ‘Come on!’ He was striding away among the trees with Hamra loping along in front of him. Roslyn hesitated, then followed, brushing bits of grass from her pants. When he shot a look over his shoulder and paused so that she could catch up with him, she felt like running away.

  ‘I believe I scare you more than that cat did,’ he jeered.

  ‘You’re about as uncivilized,’ she rejoined breathlessly, for she was striving to keep up with his free desert stride.

  ‘I am not très sympathique like Tristan, eh?’ He laughed, and here in these palm-green
aisles it sounded extra deep and relishing, and caused a shaft of small bright birds to fly out in alarm from among the dense foliage.

  ‘Tristan takes after Nanette, who is the very best of women,’ he said. ‘Gracious, witty, with too much heart to break.’

  ‘She is very kind,’ Roslyn agreed, a catch in her voice because it would hurt, leaving Nanette. ‘Her visits to me in hospital were more than welcome and I—’

  ‘You are in a position to hurt her, and you had better not!’ His glance flashed downwards, copper green, almost as menacing as the baleful glare of that mountain cat.

  She couldn’t drag her eyes from his, agleam with a narrow smile. ‘There were two Kilkenny cats,’ he drawled, ‘who fought until only their tails were left.’

  ‘Is that how it’s going to be if I stay at Dar al Amra?’ she shot back at him.

  ‘Inevitably - Miss Brant,’

  They stopped walking, as if by mutual consent, and faced each other beneath the towering palms. Her eyes lifted to his face were the colour of grey jade in this light. ‘I think I had better leave Dar al Amra,’ she said.

  ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘I won’t have Nanette hurt in any way. You’ll stay as long as my grandmother wants you to. You’ll stay because she has lost Armand - because of this.’

  And before Roslyn could elude him, he shackled her left wrist with his hard fingers and lifted her hand so that a streak of sunlight fired the big diamond. ‘Nanette cherished three rings which were given to her by her husband,’ he said deliberately. ‘When Tristan, then I, and finally Armand reached the age of twenty-one, we each received one of those rings to give in our turn to a woman we wished to marry. You wear Armand’s ring without a shadow of doubt in the world. The inscription inside was put there by my grandfather, for that was how he felt about Nanette, that they would always be together in life and death.’

  ‘And you refuse to believe that Armand could have felt the same way about me?’ she said quietly.

  Silence spun a web about them as he studied her upraised face. Then a bird cawed and Roslyn attempted to pull free of the fingers about her wrist. It was impossible. They were steely as his eyes, obstinate as his chin, cruel as his mouth.

  ‘It isn’t for me to judge Armand’s taste in women,’ he drawled.

  ‘Yet you are judging me, Mr. Hunter. You think me plain, which I admit is true, but not all men are attracted by a jay bird, some prefer a jenny-wren.’

  With a lift of a satirical brow, he caught at her chin with his free hand and turned her face from left to right. ‘No, you’re not a beauty,’ he agreed coolly, ‘but neither are you a jenny-wren. A chameleon is a better name.’

  ‘A chameleon changes from one moment to the next,’ she said indignantly.

  ‘So it does.’ His fingers gripped her chin, then let go, and a minute later they emerged from the green gloom of the plantation and were confronted by the arched entrance of his Moorish house. The Saluki gave a bark and bounded off across the patio, disappearing through an archway that led indoors.

  It was a house built from blocks of desert stone, with an air of mystery about it, Roslyn thought, as she stepped under the patio entrance stamped with the Hand of Fate. Fate was surely playing a game with her, leading her like a lamb into the lair of the wolf.

  She glanced about her and saw tiles overlaid with coloured arabesques, ironwork seats, and some stone troughs of red geraniums, marigolds, blue irises and tall lilies — knights and their ladies - and cascades of aromatic wall creepers blending with the dragon’s blood of the bougainvillea that half-concealed the whitewashed walls.

  There were trees that towered above the house, shading it and also exposing it to the risk of lightning in a storm.

  ‘Come indoors and have a glass of abri,’ Duane said. ‘If s about the most refreshing drink I know of.’

  She walked beside him across the tiles and entered one of the rooms that, like all the others, faced the walled garden in a crescent. The house had no upper storey, only a flat roof with some lines of washing hanging still in the heat.

  Roslyn caught her breath as she entered for the first time the barbaric den of Duane Hunter. The floor was decked with jungle pelts, the furniture was of cane, the lamps and pottery Moorish, while a big cedar recess was jammed with books, thrust in here and there with no attempt at neatness. Another cupboard with a glass front held several rifles; on a chest of carved cedarwood there stood a hi-fi, and on a low table a musical box with, a dancing girl on top of it.

  This item caused Roslyn a jolt of speculation. It was out of tune with the rest of the room and made her wonder if it had belonged to the woman he never talked about.

  ‘Take the weight off your feet while I get my boy, Da-ud, to fix us a couple of abris and some breakfast.’

  Roslyn couldn’t resist his ocelot-covered divan, and taking him at his word she curled up on it, along with her thoughts as Duane strode off to order their breakfast. She felt primitive among the spotted pelts, brought from the jungle where the Hunter man had learned to be so self-sufficient, with the power to impose his will upon others and not care that he was feared or disliked for his strong will in a body of iron.

  She didn’t hear him come back into the room and she gave a little start as he moved, jungle lithe, across her line of vision. ‘I see you take after Tristan in one respect,’ she gestured at the hi-fi. ‘You appear to be fond of music.’

  ‘It tames the savage breast,’ he grinned down at her curled-up figure on the ocelot skins. ‘Shall I put on a record while we eat our breakfast?’

  ‘Have you any electricity?’ she asked.

  ‘Plenty.’ His glance crackled with meaning. ‘Dar al Amra has its own generator and my house benefits, naturally.’

  ‘Naturally,’ she murmured, her fingernails digging into the skins of the ocelots he had no doubt killed. ‘You make sure you always get what you want, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, there have been one or two occasions when I have been foiled.’ He lifted back the lid of the hi-fi and took a look at the record on the turntable. ‘I’m not exactly modern-minded when it comes to music,’ he said. ‘This is one of my favourites, which I used to play a lot at our plantation in the rain forest. Der Rosenkavalier.’

  ‘The Rose-Bearer.’ She broke into a smile. ‘You would come armed with a club.’

  ‘No doubt,’ he drawled. He switched on the Richard Strauss music, and lowered the volume so they could still talk. An iridescent dragonfly hummed into the room and they watched it circle the white walls. Its wings were magnetic as the flash of Duane Hunter’s eyes.

  ‘The male dragonfly is utterly ruthless towards its mate, you know,’ he remarked. ‘Out in the rain forest some of them were as big as birds.’

  ‘Do you miss all that?’ she asked. ‘I detect a note of nostalgia in your voice.’

  ‘It was my home,’ he made a gesture that revealed the French blood in him, lean, burned a leathery brown, his eyes glinting like tourmalines in his face that could have belonged to a seventeenth-century corsair. ‘Naturally Dar al Amra has provided compensations in that I am the head man of this outfit, that I have the desert to ride in, and fifty square miles of palms to cultivate and care for.’

  ‘Fifty square miles!’ she echoed. ‘I had no idea the plantation was that immense.’

  ‘Doubtless, from the way you were wandering about in it.’ He bared his teeth in that mocking smile of his. ‘It harbours snakes as well as an occasional cat. Scorpions too.’

  ‘Are you warning me to keep out of your territory?’ She regarded him with the gravity of a child who couldn’t quite understand his attitude.

  ‘Not specifically. But this isn’t Epping Forest, and apart from snakes and scorpions there are the Arab workers.’ His eyes raked her boyish figure from her throat to her heels. ‘You are on the skimpy side, it’s true, and they prefer a plump wench, but all the same you are a female and I can’t be in a dozen places at once.’

  ‘I am sure you try,’ she
said tartly. ‘Anyway, what makes you think I’m going to stay at Dar al Amra?’

  ‘You are, of course.’

  ‘Because of the free board and lodging, not to mention other perquisites?’

  ‘Sharp as a nail, aren’t you?’ That baffling gleam came and went in his eyes as he picked up from the bureau beside him a carving of a forest Indian arching his body to aim a spear. He ran his thumb over the wood that was already smooth and dark from much handling. ‘Maybe you were planning to leave, but now you’ve breathed the desert I don’t think you will. Primitive places can do that to some people, just as cities like Paris can enchant others.’ ‘You think the primitive is more likely to appeal to me?’ The idea excited her deep down, and she forgot for a while how he had threatened her under the trees, his fingers biting into her wrist as Armand’s diamond blazed between them,

  ‘Time will tell,’ he drawled, and in that moment babouches shuffled into the room and a lean youth in a galabieh and a red skull cap brought a tray to Roslyn. She took one of the frosted glasses of pink abri and met slanting eyes of blue above high cheekbones.

  ‘El Rumh not often eating breakfast at home,’ Da-ud informed her. ‘I make cafe noir in a flask and giving him dates to eat under the trees.’

  ‘I am sure El Rumh prefers that,’ she said, looking, wickedly demure as she cast a glance at the boy’s master.

  ‘This morning I am making liver kebabs with tomatoes and onions.’ Da-ud lifted his snub nose and sniffed. ‘It is all smelling pretty good, no?’

  ‘It is all smelling very good indeed,’ she smiled back at him.

  ‘I’ll have my abri before the ice melts.’ Duane whipped his glass off the tray. ‘Now hop off to the kitchen, pronto, before those kebabs turn into cinders.’