The Sultan's Heir

by Alexandra Sellers

  Why would a son of Jamshid’s be in danger? Some family feud? Some ancient tribal thing? She had heard of tribes taking vengeance against each other, one death and then another, down through the generations, but it seemed so improbable in the modern world.

  Jamshid had no right to marry you….

  Why? Why hadn’t Jamshid told his grandfather about their marriage? She remembered the letters he had written to her five years ago, before he went to fight. He had told her that the family was delighted with his news.

  His grandfather’s letter had proved that, far from delighted, they had been ignorant of her existence, and from that moment Rosalind had doubted everything. But Jamshid had always been optimistic. No doubt he had planned to get it all sorted out before bringing his wife home.

  And now they did know, or thought they did, and instead of happy, they were paranoid.

  Shivers chased up and down her back. It was like being surrounded by animals in the dark. All she could see was the firelight reflected in a dozen pairs of eyes.

  It did not help that when he tried to kiss her she had discovered how attracted she was. Well, he was a deeply attractive man, if too rugged to be conventionally handsome. And he also looked like a man you could lean on—so long as he was on your side.

  The trouble was that the central relationship of her life was with her son. Rosalind dated, she had friends, but there was no one in whom she fully confided, no one on whom she felt she could lean emotionally in a troubled moment. Her secret had isolated her, without her ever meaning that it should.

  Or perhaps it was just that, after Jamshid, she had been wary of trusting anyone.

  However much she distrusted him, though, she sensed in Najib al Makhtoum a masculine strength that had been absent from her life for too long. She had been strong for five years, and now she realized how tired she was.

  She could not risk leaning on Najib. But, trust him or not, she had to operate on the assumption that he was telling the truth when he said Sam was in danger.

  She couldn’t afford to ignore that. Even if she couldn’t be certain it wasn’t Najib himself who was the threat.

  “Yeah. She agreed. But unless I’m very mistaken, she will now be having serious second thoughts.”

  An involuntary yawn overcame him, and Najib rubbed his scalp with quick vigorous fingers, causing his short, thick hair, already tousled with sleep, to stand in spikes. Outside the window, a blackbird was singing of summer with full-throated ease. Sunrise slanted in from the east, illuminating his crumpled white pyjama bottoms and naked feet. Under the open bathrobe his chest was bare. His body, stretching out from his chair, was supported on sharply angled legs, firmly planted feet. His toes dug into the silk carpet, caressing the luxurious pile in absent sensual appreciation.

  “Which means what?”

  Ashraf did have a way of forgetting the time difference, Najib reflected. But he felt no complaint. During the Kaljuk War he had acquired the ability to wake and sleep at will, and it still stood him in good stead when doing business across the world’s time lines.

  “Well, my guess is, she’ll do a runner.”

  There was silence as that sank in. “Ripe pickings for the opposition, in fact,” Ashraf muttered.

  “Maybe.” Najib swung his bathrobe belt with his free hand. He was more annoyed with himself than he could remember ever being. He had practically jumped her. No wonder if she was afraid to trust him.

  He wanted her to trust him, to tell him. Najib thrust himself to his feet, the phone still at his ear, and wandered over to the desk in a far corner of the room, between two huge sash windows, both open onto the morning breeze. He stood for a moment looking down at the rich green of the world-famous park below. A rider went by on a high-spirited grey.

  “Do you think he’s already got to her?” Ashraf asked.

  Najib frowned. He did not want to believe her capable of that. “My guess is, no.”

  Rosalind’s five-year-old photo lay face up on the desk, the early sun bathing it in rich pink and gold. Leaning against the window, the phone under his ear, he reached for it and dropped his eyes to the smiling, trusting face of a girl who had feared nothing.

  Ashraf answered with another question. “Then why is she lying?”

  “It might be just because she sold the Rose.”

  She did not look at him like this. Cool suspicious mockery was the expression he saw, and he was aware of a deep irritation that it should be so.

  “That doesn’t cover why she’s lying about the boy.”

  What kind of fool was he? There was no reason on earth for her to look at him with this expression, and no good reason for him to want her to. Except for the strange sensation that rose up in him, telling him that he should have met her in other circumstances, that a different relationship would have been possible between them….

  She had entered his dreams last night, and in his dreams she had trusted him.

  “Is it possible Jamshid told her everything and she wants no part of it?” Ash suggested.

  “Then she would have known why I was there, wouldn’t she?”

  He gazed at the face. She was hiding something, he knew it. But what, and how dangerous was the information? “I’d like to tell her the truth, Ash. I think if she knew…”

  Ashraf snorted. “You just finished telling me she hates us all. If you tell her the truth and she goes to—we’ve been over that, Naj.”

  Najib nodded absently. They had discussed it from every angle, and Ash was right: it was a risk they couldn’t take. In the wrong hands—and with the Rose, too—Jamshid’s son would be an unbeatable weapon.

  “Is there any chance, any chance at all, that she is telling the truth and this isn’t Jamshid’s son?” Ashraf prodded.

  “It’s on the birth cert—” Naj began, but Ashraf interrupted.

  “She might have lied from the start.”

  That would mean she had cheated on Jamshid, lied to him about it…then lied to his grandfather in the letter, and all probably for no worthier motive than money. Naj stared at the photo. Women have cheated men going to war before this, haven’t they? he reminded himself cynically. And you don’t exactly have a history of recognizing when a woman is taking you for a ride.

  He didn’t want to believe that this face was capable of that kind of dishonesty.

  “If that were the case, why would she deny it now, when it’s finally payoff time?”

  Maybe it was just the sense of waste that consumed him. The waste of such loving trust, destroyed by a letter from his grandfather so viciously cruel it had poisoned the whole family’s reputation. Could he ever make her understand how history had destroyed a once-great man, made him prey to suspicion and contempt for his fellow creatures?

  It would be suicidally stupid to get emotionally involved with the mother of Jamshid’s child at a moment like this. They couldn’t afford to have him screw up over the next few weeks or months, whatever he did afterwards.

  Afterwards, he thought.

  Providence took a hand on Monday, from a completely unexpected direction. The agency through whom Rosalind got her freelance translation work asked if she would be interested in a long-term assignment, translating a classical Parvani manuscript.

  It sounded a lot more interesting than the trade and technical stuff that made up the bulk of Rosie’s work. But the real excitement came when she heard the terms: the manuscript’s owner didn’t want to let the valuable book out of his possession. The job entailed going to stay in his country house on the Cornish coast for the time it would take her to complete the work.

  It was the first time she had been offered a job like this, though she knew such assignments were not all that unusual. Many owners of ancient manuscripts or collections of coins or other valuables were reluctant—or forbidden by their insurance policies—to let the treasures out of their keeping. That meant that cataloguers and translators went to the treasures rather than vice versa—sometimes to Middle Eastern palaces. A
ssignments like that were at the top of the plum tree, and this ranked a pretty close second.

  “I’ve got Sam,” Rosie reminded her agent.

  “I have explained about Sam,” said Gemma. “And the response was that Sam would be welcome provided that he was a child who would obey when instructed not to play with priceless antiques. Is he?”

  Rosalind reassured her, and by the time she hung up she was wearing a smile a foot wide. This required no such drastic changing of her life as she had been considering. She and Sam could simply disappear for a while and await events.

  She sat back and started planning how to keep Najib al Makhtoum—or anyone else—from discovering where they had gone.

  The next two days were crazy with activity. As a first step she confided to Gemma that there was someone she was avoiding, who might try to track her whereabouts.

  “Oh, Rosalind! Is it a stalker?” Gemma demanded.

  “I hope it’s not going to come to that,” Rosalind temporized, and Gemma promised not to even admit she knew Rosalind to any enquirer, until and unless she had checked with Rosalind first.

  Rosalind casually mentioned a trip to North America to a neighbour and to the newsagent who delivered her morning paper. She booked and paid for tickets to New York through a neighbourhood travel agency, on a flight due to leave Thursday afternoon.

  Her mail she had forwarded to a post office box. She could travel down to London every couple of weeks to pick it up without going near the apartment.

  The house-sitting agency she engaged sent someone for an interview, a responsible-looking woman with grey hair who said she understood all about plants and would keep Rosalind’s in good health, was quite flexible, could start immediately and stay indefinitely if necessary.

  To her, too, Rosalind told the careful lie that she was taking her son to North America. They would be travelling the continent with friends in a mobile home, and she could leave no contact number. But if Helen would take messages, Rosalind explained, she would phone once a week to get them.

  So it was all in motion.

  On Thursday morning, without a hitch, Rosalind turned over the keys to Helen, and she and an excited Sam climbed into the taxi en route for Victoria Station. Rosalind talked of catching the train to the airport and mentioned New York to the driver. But at Victoria, after loading a luggage trolley with their bags, she and Sam went into the ladies’ room. There she tucked her hair up under a baseball cap, pulled on a pair of sunglasses and changed her jacket. She disguised Sam in a similar way and they came back out to the taxi rank.

  Speaking in what she hoped would pass as an Italian accent, and pretending they had just arrived from the continent, she took a cab to Paddington, where the trains from the southwest terminated. At the station they did another quick costume change, and not long after, Rosalind and Sam had boarded their train and were heading out of London.

  She was no expert, but she was pretty sure there had been no sign of a tail any part of the way.

  “So she opted to run,” said Ashraf.

  “She opted to run,” Najib agreed.

  “How did she orchestrate it, just out of curiosity?”

  “Agreed to come with me to East Barakat on Friday, took off on Thursday. She booked to go to New York…”

  “New York?”

  “But that was all dust in the eyes.”

  “You were pretty confident she’d do just what you wanted, weren’t you?”

  “There were only so many options, Ash.”

  Ashraf expelled a breath. “I wish she had trusted you. I’d a helluva lot rather they were both here.”

  “It wasn’t on the cards,” Naj said. “I knew it was going to be Plan B.”

  Six

  “My dear, it’s very kind of you to come all this way,” said Sir John, opening a door into a room that made her stop and gasp with surprised pleasure. It was a private library that looked like a movie set of a private library. Leather-bound books lined ornately worked oak shelves that ran from the floor to the very high ceilings. A movable staircase gave access to the higher shelves.

  One wall held a row of massive Georgian windows facing south over a beautiful expanse of tree-sprinkled lawn and garden, backed by the deeper green of thick woods. Every foot of wall space not filled with books held the most beautiful Parvani and Bagestani paintings and artefacts she had seen outside the British Museum.

  “King Kavad Panj,” Rosalind murmured, as she unconsciously moved towards a portrait that she recognized.

  “Indeed,” Sir John confirmed with a courtly nod. “It is one of two copies made by the artist. The other was for the palace in Parvan. His Majesty presented this one to me on my retirement, a great honour.”

  She had not really been surprised to learn the identity of her employer. The manuscript she was to translate had to belong to some noted collector. Sir John Cross, the former British Ambassador to Parvan, was a well-known Parvanophile, and from having served in the country for over twenty years, he had a large network of Parvani friends. They would naturally have turned to him when selling off their treasures during and after the war.

  Rosalind stood gazing at the portrait, and thought with a pang how different her life would be if the Kaljuk invasion had never happened. King Kavad Panj was the father of Crown Prince Kavian, whose Cup Companion Jamshid had been. She would have seen this same portrait, but in other circumstances—in the great palace in Shahr-i Bozorg. She would almost undoubtedly have met the king. And Sir John, too, she would have met under different circumstances.

  Would she have met Najib al Makhtoum? She had had a strange, indescribable feeling, both times she met him, as if she had almost known him in a different life. There was that curious phenomenon when reality flickered, as if between two different life paths….

  But, of course, she reminded herself, nothing would have come of any other meeting with Najib. She would have been Jamshid’s wife. So the feeling that in a different life stream they might have had the chance to be important to each other had to be wrong.

  She surfaced from her reverie and found the former ambassador smiling at her. “I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed guiltily.

  “Not at all, my dear. It’s a pleasure to see my treasures so keenly appreciated. And do you recognize this person?” he asked, stopping in front of another royal portrait.

  She frowned at another face from recent history. “I think that’s the ex-Sultan of Bagestan, isn’t it? Hafzuddin al Jawadi?”

  “It is.” He shook his head ruefully. “A great man. His overthrow was a tragedy not merely for him, but for the country. I was Her Majesty’s ambassador to Bagestan during that period, as no doubt you know. My first ambassadorial posting.”

  Rosalind smiled apologetically. “I didn’t know. I didn’t study Bagestani modern history in detail. I concentrated on Parvan,” she apologized.

  “History,” he said musingly. “I suppose it is just history now. The coup happened before you were born, of course. Nineteen sixty-nine. It doesn’t seem as long ago as that. Over thirty years now of such appalling misrule. What a wonderful, civilised country it was!” He shook his head.

  “A dreadful time. One felt at the mercy of very unpleasant forces—” He broke off.

  Rosie frowned in surprise. “But it was just a military coup, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, it was and it wasn’t, my dear. The coup could not have succeeded without the…complicity, shall we say, of Western oil interests. Some said it would not have been attempted without our government’s strong, if covert, encouragement.

  “Hafzuddin was a great democrat, you know, within his own lights. He was a firm ally of the West, but he had a way of resisting Western hegemony. He held the unpopular conviction that self-determination was the right of every nation. He learned that not every democracy agreed with this view.”

  Rosalind watched the old man, fascinated. “Do you mean the overthrow of the al Jawadis was orchestrated—”

  He smiled at her, witho
ut filling in the blank, then turned back to his contemplation of the portrait.

  “Of course it had been made to look like an entirely homegrown movement, but Hafzuddin was no fool. When there was no outcry from the Western democracies, when not one of the nations with whom he had been so friendly so much as murmured in protest, he understood that he had been betrayed not only by his protégé Ghasib, who owed him everything, but also by his declared friends among Western governments, including, I am sorry to say it, our own.”

  His inside knowledge of the area left her open-mouthed, and Rosie listened in fascination to the insights he had about the history and art of Parvan and its neighbours.

  “Now, my dear,” Sir John said later, when he had showed her the manuscript she was here to translate and she was settling down to work, “I hope you won’t feel you have to hurry. Irfani Arifan has waited over five hundred years for a translator, and a few weeks here or there will make no difference. I shall enjoy having your company about the place.”

  Sam was in heaven. There were acres of walled land around the broad expanse of lawn that surrounded the house, filled with streams and thick woods and enough secret places to delight any child. The housekeeper had two young daughters who were very happy to have a new, younger playmate to show it all to. He disappeared with them each morning and returned for lunch dirty, wet and happy, with tales of rabbits chased, foxes sighted, butterflies, frogs, and fish in endless profusion, before eating with a better appetite than Rosalind had ever seen in him and then rushing off again.

  One day, having seen Sam and the girls off on another adventure, Rosalind paused for a moment on the broad terrace to take in the glorious morning, and noticed a man in the distance, in the typical country Wellington boots, Barbour jacket, hat, and shotgun, striding across the lawn after them. She thought nothing of it until the next morning, when the same thing happened. And the next.

  “Are the children being watched?” she asked Sir John that evening.

  Sir John was reaching for his wineglass, but at her abrupt change of subject he turned his head. The glass went over, spreading red on the spotless white damask. He waited in silence as the butler attended to it and refilled his glass.