“I did not know. But the path you took ends at the tree, and the choice is to turn back or go into the river. If you go into the river you find the stone. You have come this way several times, it was possible this time you would go on.”
“Have you been following me every day?” she half shrieked.
He glanced at her without answering.
“Why?” she cried, and again he made no answer.
“Where are you staying?” she demanded next.
“In the bedroom next to yours, Rosalind!” he replied impatiently, turning to grasp her arms. “Have I not told you that you and Samir are in danger? Do you imagine that I would let you wander the world, vulnerable and knowing nothing of where the danger is thickest? Don’t be a fool!”
She blinked under the storm of words. She didn’t know how to answer, so she said nothing, and he dropped his hands and they went on in silence through the ancient wood.
“I want an explanation,” she said at last.
He glanced down at her without breaking stride. He looked grim. “You will get one.”
They came out of the wood and paused for a moment, looking at the sweep of lawn that led towards the house. It was a beautiful building, long and elegant, and she was more used to seeing this lawn from the other direction. There was no hail here. The dark cloud seemed to have departed, and the sun had risen above the trees now and was warm on the grass. The library windows, at the front of the wing that jutted out on the left, glittered.
“I’ve lost my shoes somewhere,” Rosalind realized absently.
He only shook his head and led her across the grass towards a small door over to the right. It had once been a servants’ entrance. Now it was the place where jackets and wellies were left, the paved stone floor having coped with mud for generations. In the tiny washroom off to the side, Rosalind quickly washed her feet in warm water, and wiped the blood from bramble scratches she didn’t remember getting.
Naj was waiting when she came out again, still barefoot.
“Come,” he said, and turned to lead her along the little hallway to a door at the end, where another hall ran at right angles. Here the floor was gleaming, polished oak, covered with a Parvan carpet runner. The jackets lining the walls gave way to art.
Najib seemed very familiar with the house. He led her in silence through the halls till she saw that they had come to the door into the library. He opened it, and closed it behind them, then led her across the familiar space, up to one of the portraits that Sir John had pointed out to her on her first day here.
“Do you recognize this man?” Naj asked her, breaking the silence at last.
“Yes, it’s Hafzuddin al Jawadi,” she said. “The old Sultan of Bagestan, who was overthrown by Ghasib in 1969.”
Naj looked at her with an expression that frightened her. “I am glad you recognize him,” he told her flatly, “because you have hated him for five years. This is the man who wrote you the letter.”
Eight
“Breathe!” a deep voice insisted. “Rosie, breathe!”
She opened her eyes and recognized the brocade of one of the window seats under her thighs. Najib’s hand was on the back of her neck, holding her head down between her knees.
Breath burst into her paralysed lungs. “I’m all right,” she muttered, and then more firmly, “I’m all right.”
His hand released her and she sat up, looking around at surroundings that seemed weirdly unfamiliar for a moment. Naj was leaning against the window embrasure, watching her with dark unreadable eyes.
“I’ve never done that before,” she murmured, putting a hand to her forehead. “Phoo!” She blew her breath out, trying to relieve the sudden headache in her temples.
“You’re just one surprise after another, aren’t you?” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Is it true? About him?” She nodded towards the portrait.
“Of course it’s true!” he said impatiently. “Why would I lie about such a thing?”
“I don’t know,” she said levelly. “I don’t know why any of this has happened. I feel as though I’m in a James Bond movie or something.” She tried to ease her neck; it seemed to have seized up with shock. “Why did you tell me like that? My God—Jamshid was Sultan Hafzuddin al Jawadi’s grandson? Why didn’t you—?”
“I’m sorry. My judgement had been disturbed,” he said levelly.
She suddenly remembered that insane scene in the woods, and embarrassment stabbed her. Never again would she doubt the thesis that odd corners of the earth have strange powers….
“Who—” She coughed and heaved a sigh. “Who was Jamshid, then?”
“His birth name was Kamil. He was the only son of Crown Prince Nazim. An infant at the time of the coup. He was smuggled out of the country to Parvan when his father was murdered.”
“Dear God in Heaven!” she whispered. “The son of Prince Nazim? He—he would have been the…the next…”
“Without the coup, Prince Kamil would have been sultan one day,” he agreed. “There were many who hoped he might still be so.”
“The refugee groups,” she said. Everyone knew that most Bagestanis in the West lived for the day the monarchy was restored and they could go home.
“The whole country,” he corrected her.
No wonder he had said Jamshid had no right to marry her.
Silence fell again as he let her absorb it all. She sensed him move to the old-fashioned bell rope and pull it, and a moment later he issued a low-voiced instruction to one of Sir John’s servants.
To the manner born. Of course. He too was a grandson of the sultan.
“Are you the sultan-in-waiting yourself now?” she asked as he returned.
“I? No.”
“Why not?”
He hesitated. “Others have a better claim.”
“Do you wish you could?” she asked curiously.
“I have no desire to sit on my grandfather’s throne.”
She didn’t question that. It wasn’t a fate she would choose in a million years. Rosalind plucked absently at the still-damp hem of her dress. “How could he marry me without telling me? Why didn’t he—?”
“It is impossible to say. Perhaps when you got pregnant he felt his duty to you and the child was paramount.”
“But why didn’t he tell me? He never gave the slightest…” A thrill of horror went over her as she imagined how she would have felt if Jamshid had told her, after the fact, who she had married.
“Would you have married him if he had done so?” Najib asked.
She flicked him a startled look, then turned her eyes away. “I don’t know. I…I loved him, but if there was any chance of him actually becoming sultan…” She shook her head. She was a private person and always had been. “I would have hated that so much.”
He looked at her. He understood his cousin, but he could not explain to her how her femininity and beauty might drive a man to want to bind her to him, no matter what the future cost….
“Perhaps that is why he did not tell you.”
She got to her feet and stood looking out at the green expanse of lawn.
“Sultan Hafzuddin had three wives,” she remembered. “Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“How do you all fit in?”
He said easily, “Rabia, his first wife, was a Quraishi, related to the Barakat royal family. She had two boys, Wafiq and Safa. Sonia was a Frenchwoman, daughter of the Comte de Vouvray. She had three girls, Muna, Zaynah and Yasmin. Maryam, his third wife, was a Durrani, related to the ruling family of Parvan. She was the mother of Nabila and of Nazim. You already know that Nazim was Hafzuddin’s favourite and nominated to succeed him.”
Standing with her back to him, she half turned her head “My mother is Yasmin,” he said, in answer to the unspoken question. “My grandmother is Sonia, Hafzuddin’s French wife.”
Her chest seemed frozen. Rosalind took a long, deliberate breath. A deer stepped delicately out of the woods onto the lawn. In a voi
ce that was suddenly expressionless, he went on.
“My grandfather had an adopted son, as well. His name was Ghasib. Perhaps you have heard the story. Grandfather saw him in the street one day when he was a child—an urchin, an orphan, who scrambled through rubbish heaps for his food. He was playing at war with some other street children—he impressed my grandfather with a strong sense of his abilities. Hafzuddin adopted the boy, sent him to school and military college, trained him for power.”
Behind the resolutely level tone it was possible to sense deep-rooted anger and pain.
“Nothing trained him in loyalty, however. In 1969, Ghasib, the man who now calls himself Supreme President of Bagestan—” Najib’s voice was dry with contempt “—was my grandfather’s commander in chief of all the armed forces. You must have studied the history.”
“Yes.” She knew the history, but as something in a book. Not as the story of her husband’s family’s life….
Ghasib was an orphan, but he had had a brother and plenty of cousins. One by one he had brought them into the military, given them positions of power. Under their leadership the entire military save the Royal Guard was loyal to Ghasib. On the day of the coup they surrounded the palace, the parliament, all the main public buildings.
Crown Prince Nazim was killed in the first moments of the assault on the palace. Princess Hana saw her husband shot down, and pretended to be a servant. It was said that she washed the shirts of her husband’s killers for a week before she was able to escape from the occupied palace, taking her infant son in a bundle of laundry. Loyal subjects helped to smuggle her and her son to Parvan, her homeland.
Princess Hana was her own mother-in-law. Rosie could hardly take it in.
“But there are things you cannot know, for they figure in no history book,” Najib said. “Soon after the coup, Safa was killed by an assassin. To protect his remaining heirs, my grandfather ordered that the whole family should take assumed names and go into hiding. Hana went to the mountains, where she took the name of a tribe which has always been loyally linked with the Durrani, and Kamil Durrani ibn Nazim al Jawadi Bagestani became Jamshid Bahrami when he was four years old.”
Rosalind watched the deer pick her delicate way across the lawn and stop again, large ears flicking this way and that, then lower her head to nibble a small plant. The sun was breathtakingly beautiful on the rich, brown pelt. So tender, so fragile. Her heart seemed to break with love for the delicate majesty of the animal.
“Not everyone could disappear so effectively. My Uncle Wafiq was killed in 1977, leaving two sons. The fact of his death was revealed by the family only in 1984, and the cause was said to be a heart attack. If it had been confirmed that the Jabir al Muntazir whom Ghasib had had killed was in reality Prince Wafiq al Jawadi, his sons would have been endangered. They are now the nearest to the throne.”
He stopped speaking, and silence fell on them, heavy and suffocating. Rosalind wandered back to the portrait, and they stood side by side looking at it. She glanced up into Najib’s face, and at his nearness the memory of what had almost happened in the forest stole over her. He moved a little away, as if he felt the pull, too.
“This,” Najib said, pointing to a ring on the sultan’s hand, “is the al Jawadi Rose. By tradition it was passed on from the sultan to his designated heir on the day he was appointed. Jamshid—Prince Kamil—was given this ring by my grandfather on his twenty-first birthday. It has disappeared.”
It was massive, too big for a ring. A fat circle running from knuckle to knuckle.
“And you thought Jamshid gave it to me?”
“Did he?”
“I’ve never seen it or anything like it. Didn’t you say it was a diamond? It doesn’t look like a diamond in the painting.”
“It is a very rare pink diamond, cabochon cut,” he said. “It’s very old. Diamonds are not cut in cabochon today. Sixty-three carats.”
She almost laughed. “Sixty-three! Well, you can be sure Jamshid never even showed me such a thing!”
Rosalind glanced from his face to that in the portrait. The portrait had been painted when the sultan was still relatively young, perhaps forty, and the face was impressive for its strength and intelligence. There was a certain family resemblance, most noticeable when a particular expression occurred in the eyes. And it was shared by Sam. She hadn’t realized until now just how much Sam and Najib resembled each other.
Well, no surprises there.
“Can you understand my grandfather a little, now, Rosalind? He was a good and just ruler, but that did not save him from betrayal by the man who most owed him loyalty. One by one his three sons were murdered. And then there were the long, tortured years of hoping his grandsons would be allowed to grow to manhood.
“And then—Jamshid returned from England to announce that he would go to war at Prince Kavian’s side. A wanton risking of his life, my grandfather said. His life was not his to risk. Prince Kamil al Jawadi owed his life to his own people.
“His death was the last blow. My grandfather was broken by it, as by nothing else that had occurred. When he wrote you that letter, Rosalind, he was no longer himself.”
Silence fell. After a moment, she asked, “And Jamshid—was he assassinated, too?” she whispered.
“No. Jamshid was killed because he fought bravely.”
Rosalind licked her lips and turned to him. “What now? Why is Samir’s life suddenly in danger, if no one knew that Jamshid…”
“They did not know then, Rosalind. But we are almost certain that Ghasib now has the name Jamshid Bahrami as being one of the names taken by Hafzuddin’s heirs. It is a stroke of good fortune that we discovered the will—and you—when we did.”
“Did you lead him to me?”
“No. But the first thing he will do is have investigators track Jamshid’s life, to see if he left an heir. Unless we take steps to prevent it, he will unquestionably find you.”
Find her. Ghasib, the world’s favourite demon. A man who, it was said, had thought nothing of killing his own brother when he suspected him of disloyalty. Rosalind took a deep, terrified breath and turned away.
The deer had disappeared. As if from a distance, she heard her voice say, “And what will happen when he finds us?”
Without answering, Najib took her through a door that led from the library into the adjoining room, what Sir John called the small breakfast room. Breakfast had been laid out. The butler was setting a pot of coffee on a little table beside an expanse of window. On the sideboard were several dishes under silver lids.
They exchanged greetings as Rosalind sat. The butler tweaked a fork, bowed and withdrew.
Najib poured her coffee and set it in front of her. She needed it. She was in a state of shock. Shock upon shock. Rosalind stirred sugar into her cup, took a healthy slug, and felt a little revived. She set her cup carefully down and looked at the dark man sitting opposite. He seemed more of a stranger now. Grandson of a sultan.
“Tell me,” Rosalind said, although the last thing she wanted to know was that the Supreme President of Bagestan was going to try to kill her son.
“Ghasib is not a sane man. If he comes to the conclusion that a grandson of Crown Prince Nazim exists he will feel very threatened. We must prevent this at all costs.”
Rosalind’s cup rattled in the saucer. Her hand was trembling like an old woman’s. She felt like an old woman. Fear made you old.
“The important thing,” Najib continued, “is that while he knows that Jamshid Bahrami was the assumed name of one of the heirs of Hafzuddin, Ghasib is not yet certain who Jamshid Bahrami really was. We may be able to confuse his investigations.”
“How does he know the name?” she demanded.
Najib shrugged. “We can’t be certain, but you have only to think about it. Ghasib’s mismanagement of the water resources and agriculture in Bagestan last year produced another terrible crop failure. Hungry people may betray their own honour, Rosalind. Be grateful if you have never had cause to
learn that fact.”
He seemed a very different man now. He was not gentle anymore. Incisive intelligence was his dominant trait at the moment. She wondered suddenly what work he did.
“All right, if he finds out, what then?”
“He would have two choices. Ghasib has no son of his own, and since his brother’s death has named no successor. If he is sane enough to see it, the intelligent option would be to take Samir under his ‘protection,’ to say that he himself is merely governing as regent, waiting for Sam to reach the age where he can rule. I am sure I don’t have to explain the great advantage this would give him. You know how unpopular he is.”
Naj paused to refill their cups. He picked up his and watched her over the rim until her eyes met his. “If he also has the al Jawadi Rose, the symbol that would prove Samir the designated heir of Prince Kamil, he is virtually unassailable.”
“And is he smart enough to see it that way?”
“He might be made to see it. Armed with the information you now have, Rosalind, you could go to Ghasib. No doubt he would offer you the moon and sky to go to Bagestan and play the role of happy, trusting mother of the sultan-in-waiting. But you would have to deliver your son’s safety into his keeping. It would be a great risk. Even if Ghasib himself intended Samir to be his heir, there are too many nephews and cousins already in contention. Samir’s chances of ultimately becoming sultan would be very small.”
He was looking at her questioningly, and she stared at him and frowned.
“Are you seriously asking me if I would go to a monster like Ghasib and offer him my son in return for—for—what? The chance to wear diamonds and drive around the desert in a Rolls? The chance to be mother of the Sultan of Bagestan one day? My God!” she exploded wrathfully.
“I am sorry. But how could I know how you would take the news?”
“Well, if you’ve been watching us as closely as you say you have, you might have noticed that I love my son!” she snapped.
“Rosalind, the world is full of people who imagine that they have a spoon long enough to allow them to sup with the devil in safety.”
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