The Sultan's Heir

by Alexandra Sellers

  “But you don’t have any faith in me. You made love to me and all this time you’ve believed…that you were making love to Ghasib’s spy in the al Jawadi camp? Do you know what kind of person that makes you?” she said, with a disdain that seared him.

  “You’ve made one big mistake, Najib, and I’m sure that kind of blind spot is bad news for a spy.”

  He laughed, but without mirth. “Yes,” he agreed. “I made one big mistake, and this kind of blind spot is very bad news for a spy.”

  “You started from the assumption that I was lying. In order to make that fit, you’ve had to jump to ridiculous, far-fetched, spy novel conclusions…and you had to act like a villain with me. None of that was necessary. All you had to do was trust me. I have never seen your damned al Jawadi Rose. I have not given birth to the next heir. All you had to do was be willing to believe that I was telling you the truth.”

  “And what then?”

  “Then you wouldn’t have had to go to all the trouble of making love to me from a cold heart,” Rosalind said bitterly, slipping off the end of the bed as tears burned her throat. “You didn’t have to pretend passion for me to get the truth, Najib. That was all just your spy’s fantasy. You already had the truth, right from day one.”

  Words leapt to his lips, but he held them back. He wanted to say that his heart had never been cold, but he was too close to telling her everything. His judgement was unsound. He could not afford to make any mistakes or let his heart rule.

  She stood for a moment looking down at him. “Well, you won’t do it anymore,” she promised, turned and went into the bathroom, and closed and locked the door.

  But there was one thing she hadn’t told the truth about, even if she hadn’t realized it till now. She had seen the al Jawadi Rose. Jamshid had given it to her.

  The dream had made her see what was right in front of her nose.

  Fifteen

  “Oh, that’s wonderful, Kamila!” Princess Zara exclaimed, as the ruby-and-diamond star was pinned into Rosalind’s hair. “That’s the perfect touch!”

  The Princess of East Barakat was stretched out on a divan, her elbow on a huge silk pillow, her young baby asleep in his bassinet beside her, watching avidly as her favourite designer tweaked the folds of Rosalind’s wedding outfit.

  They had flown to Prince Rafi’s palace the same afternoon. On their arrival Rosalind had learned that the wedding would take place in two days. At Zara’s hands she had been pitchforked into the preparations so quickly she had no leisure for deciding whether to call a halt or not.

  But even if she had had the leisure, she wouldn’t have had the courage once she saw how much planning had taken place. The palace was already filled with wedding guests. Every second person she was introduced to was a prince or princess. Rosalind knew she couldn’t do it.

  Anyway, what reason did she have? What had changed since she had told them she would do it? Najib had never pretended to believe her, or implied that he would come to love her. She had learned nothing new. It was only that her hopes had died.

  “And flowers to match,” murmured the designer.

  “Kamila is having a Paris show this autumn,” Zara told Rosalind. “This blend she does of Eastern and Western styles is just so unique. We’re convinced it’s going to be a terrific success, and your wedding being covered by Hello! will be the perfect launch, won’t it, Kamila?”

  “Insha’Allah,” Kamila agreed with a grin.

  Rosalind was watching her own reflection in the mirror. The outfit was a creamy white that suited her tanned skin and sun-bleached hair beautifully, but the colour was the only thing about it that spoke of the traditional Western wedding dress.

  It was composed of a full-length coat with small upstanding collar, worn over the traditional Eastern tunic dress and trousers, all in the same milky silk. Running down each side of the front opening and around the collar were panels of fabulously delicate embroidery in red, green and gold reminiscent of the decoration of an illuminated Quran. The embroidery was repeated in a broad band around the ankles of the trousers. Medium-heel mules in the softest white leather for her feet, and around her shoulders and head a finely woven white scarf.

  In her hair, the “something borrowed” from Zara.

  The two women were meeting for the first time, although Zara had been overseeing the design of Rosalind’s wedding dress for days. She was very anxious that Rosalind should like the result.

  “I love it!” Rosalind said. The effect was striking and unusual, and Rosalind could imagine that Kamila was going to be a raging success in Europe, and said so.

  “They call Kamila’s stuff ‘intensely wearable’ in the fashion pages back home, don’t they, Kamila?” Zara said. “We haven’t worked out yet whether that’s a dart or a laurel.”

  Rosalind laughed and, the outfit approved and the fitting done, the designer helped her take it off. When it was all in its bags again, along with several outfits for “the honeymoon,” the two women were left alone, lounging in the pretty sitting room that was part of Zara’s private apartments. It had a balcony overlooking a garden that, because of the climate in the mountains, was more like an English garden than Rosalind would ever have imagined possible so far from home.

  “Are you nervous?” asked Zara, reaching into the bassinet beside her and lifting out her baby, who had awakened and was beginning to make himself heard.

  “Yes,” Rosalind said bluntly.

  “I’m sure you’re doing the right thing, Rosalind,” Zara said. “You don’t need to worry about Naj not keeping his word. You can trust him completely.” Zara was warming to her theme. “I work with Najib, so I happen to know.”

  “You work with him?”

  “Najib supervises the National Museum and a couple of smaller ones. He does a lot of work in the West, trying to convince governments who accepted pillaged works in the eighteenth and nineteenth—and twentieth!—centuries to give or sell the stuff back to us. He and Gazi work together quite often—Gazi handles all our publicity—so I see a lot of Naj. I’m organizing the new Alexander the Great wing that’s going to house all the stuff from the dig at Iskandiyar.”

  Rosalind gazed at her. “I do know he’s a spy, Zara. Do you mean the museum work is his cover?”

  “Unh-unh.” Zara shook her head. “He’s not a career spy, I know that much. The Cup Companions all do whatever is necessary at times, and at the moment the game’s afoot, as old Sherlock used to say. There are certain affairs of state Rafi’s not telling me at the moment—but I think it’s tied up with Ghasib. Everybody’s pulling out all the stops, and Najib’s war experience probably makes him invaluable.”

  “Oh,” Rosalind remarked quietly.

  “You know Najib was in the Kaljuk War?”

  “Yes, he mentioned it.”

  “When he heard that Prince Omar was forming the Company of Cup Companions, he told Rafi he wanted to go with him. His father was a Parvani, you know, and he’s related to the Durranis on that side.”

  The baby interrupted with an imperative request for a meal. Zara cooed and kissed as she opened her shirt and fitted him to her breast, then looked up at Rosalind with a contented smile.

  “Did you breastfeed Sam?” she asked.

  Rosalind swallowed. “No, I…I’d have liked to, but I couldn’t.”

  “Aw, that’s too bad,” Zara commiserated. “Maybe with your next.”

  “I hope so.”

  The baby was suddenly asleep. Rosalind watched with a smile as Zara moved to disengage him from her breast, and only sparked a return to ferocious sucking.

  “It’s going to be a major exclusive—the first interior photos of Prince Rafi’s palace, and a Cup Companion’s romantic remarriage to his lost wife,” Zara said. “The magazine’s paying a huge amount for the privilege, to the Parvan War Relief fund, because, as Gazi says, if they didn’t have to pay for the privilege they wouldn’t value it. He wants the best possible spread.”

  No, she couldn’t p
ossibly call a halt.

  “I have something to tell you,” Rosie said.

  “And I have something to tell you,” Naj said. He took her hand and turned to lead her along the path. Overhead the stars were bright, and the moon glowed on the peak of Mount Shir far away. They climbed a little, and then sat on a crag, looking down over the palace. It sparkled with lights.

  “Shall I speak first, Rosalind? I want to say I am sorry. You were very right, I made a mistake when I took it for granted that you must be telling some lie. And as soon as I looked at what you had told me, believing and accepting that you told me nothing but the truth, I saw the truth. The only thing that answers every question.”

  “Did you?” she whispered.

  “I understand, too, why you could not tell me the story yourself. I am a fool, Rosalind. It is so obvious. Lamis is the answer, is she not?

  “Samir is my own sister’s child.”

  Rosalind and Lamis had always been friendly, and they were drawn closer together by the death of Jamshid. Rosie had been aware that Lamis was worried by something, though Lamis never spoke of it. But when the letter arrived from Jamshid’s grandfather, Lamis no longer needed to bear her load alone. “Now you will understand, Rosalind. Now you know what I am facing,” she had said, by way of preface.

  She told Rosalind the horrible story she had been keeping to herself for months: the man she had loved, who said he understood and respected her religious principles, had raped her. She was pregnant. And she had denied the pregnancy until it was a reality that could be denied no longer.

  Shame and fear together tortured her. Her grandfather…she did not know how far his anger would take him. And she was starting to show. She was resigned to giving her baby up for adoption, but urgently now, she had to find a way to keep any whisper of her pregnancy from her family. But London was a hub, and had so many eyes.

  Rosalind, product of a modern Western upbringing, with no real understanding of Lamis’s background, would, a few days before, have indignantly urged her to tell her family the bitter truth, because how could anyone possibly blame her? But not since the letter. Now Rosalind understood that at all costs Lamis must protect herself from her grandfather’s ugly rage.

  Both of them were crazy with their griefs, and no doubt that was why they never looked at possible consequences when the wild plan occurred to the two friends. It appeared so breathtakingly simple and brilliant a solution that they simply never questioned it: Lamis would have her child under Rosalind’s name.

  Rosalind would take a few months’ leave of absence from her job at the Parvan Embassy, which would surprise no one. Lamis meanwhile was researching her thesis and could take time away without causing comment. They would go to a city in the north, where no one knew them and the Middle Eastern population was high.

  Lamis would go to the doctor under Rosalind’s name, register the birth under Rosalind’s name, and give the child up for adoption. Simple.

  And it worked. The two girls kept very much to themselves in their apartment in the teeming heart of Birmingham. Although she hadn’t previously worn chador in her life, Lamis never went into the street without her face veiled, and when she visited the overworked National Health doctor in their neighbourhood under Rosalind’s name and told him that she was a widow, he had tacitly understood that she was lying to save herself from shame, but with no idea what the lie really was.

  Rosalind was Lamis’s birth assistant. She gave birth at home with a midwife, a choice common enough to be unremarkable. The birth was straightforward and uncomplicated.

  And all according to plan. Until the two friends looked at their beautiful baby and could not give him up….

  “She made me promise not to keep in touch,” Rosie told Najib now. “It killed her to leave him, though she knew she had no choice.”

  When the time came for Lamis to go home, she had wept over her baby with terrifying ferocity. And then she had asked Rosie one last favour. “Don’t call me, Rosie, don’t write, don’t stay in touch,” she had begged, emotion choking her, as she packed her bags. “I have to put him out of my mind. I’ll go crazy if I think of him. I’ll have to lie and pretend to everyone I know, and I can’t live two lives. It would kill me.”

  Rosie had forgotten, too. In her heart, Sam had become her own son.

  “I have something to tell you,” Rosie said a few minutes later, as the moon rose higher over the mountains. “I was wrong. I’m pretty sure Jamshid did give me the al Jawadi Rose.”

  “What?” Naj exclaimed.

  “Jamshid told me it was rose crystal. It’s in a little carved wooden stand that looks as if it was made in India. He said it was an old family heirloom with sentimental value. He made me promise that if he died in the war I’d always keep it and give it to his son as a memento of him when he was older.”

  He was staring at her, speechless.

  “Where—where is it now?” he croaked.

  “It’s sitting on my coffee table, Naj. Right beside that little rose of Lamis’s that you were looking at that day. You almost had your hand on it.”

  “Sam,” said Rosalind, “this is your Aunt Lamis.”

  She had been deeply nervous when she learned of Lamis’s arrival at the palace for the wedding, but the moment she saw her friend again it was all right. Lamis hugged her tightly, smiling and crying together, and saying, “Oh, Rosie!” over and over.

  She had asked to meet her son, and they had gone to Zara’s private apartments for the meeting.

  “Hello,” Sam said shyly, hiding behind Rosalind.

  “Oh, he looks just like Grandfather!” Lamis exclaimed. “Hello, Samir.”

  She held out her arms. Sam looked at Rosalind, and she smiled, so he stepped towards Lamis. She put her arms lightly around him and gazed down at him. “Oh, what a darling you are!” She kissed his cheek with a restraint that was painful to watch.

  She looked at her friend. “Thank you, Rosie. What can words express? Has it been all right? I can see by looking that he’s happy.” She bent and kissed Sam again, lightly, not frightening him with too much feeling, and let him go.

  He stood for a moment frowning in thought, gazing at her. “Why are you my aunt?”

  “Because I’m your new daddy’s sister,” Lamis said, wiping a tear from her eye. She sniffed. “And I love you. I love you very much, and I always will.”

  On the eve of their wedding, Rosalind and Najib walked alone.

  “What proved it to you?” Rosalind asked.

  “You did, with what you said.”

  She smiled, her eyes hot with unshed tears. “Really?”

  “When I trusted that you had told me the truth about everything, the solution was obvious. Like one of those visual puzzles that suddenly becomes some other image. But even if I hadn’t seen the truth about Lamis, I saw the truth about you. The truth that you were an honourable woman. Even if I had seen no further than that, it was suddenly clear to me.”

  She was choking with hope, and too moved to speak, and they walked amongst the flowers and fountains, the beautiful scalloped arches, the marble pillars, the trees, as the sun set behind the mountains, casting cool, delicious shadow.

  Najib was magnificent in the costume of the mountain men who were his forebears—loose trousers and a long tunic top, with a richly embroidered waistcoat on top. He reminded her of the photographs she had seen of the Parvan fighters.

  “You’ve talked to Lamis?” she asked.

  “We had a long talk this afternoon. It was a relief to her to be able to tell me. It was a relief she could have had at the time, but she was too afraid of my grandfather to see it.”

  “Would you have helped her?”

  He glanced down with bemused eyes. “What else, Rosie? Do you imagine that, like my grandfather, I would have blamed her for the man’s vicious crime?”

  “Sometimes what you said to me wasn’t very far off what your grandfather said,” she reminded him softly.

  He acknowledged it w
ith a rueful grimace. “I am sorry, Rosie, my beautiful Rose. One day I will tell you about the woman I judged you by, instead of judging you for yourself. Instead of seeing you as you were, I looked at you through my experience of Maysa. And even when I wanted most to trust you, my loyalty to others meant I had to assume the worst, to take the gravest precautions. I had to distrust myself.”

  “Lamis told me she thinks the family is gearing up for some kind of attempt to regain the throne, and that’s why it’s all so critical.”

  “She is right. But this is a secret that must be mentioned to no one, Rosalind.”

  “The two men I met at Sir John’s—are they the sons of Prince Wafiq?”

  “Ashraf was my grandfather’s choice to sit on the restored throne. He is the family’s choice, too. He is the eldest son of my Uncle Wafiq. We fought together on many campaigns and conceived our plans then.”

  “And is that why you were so horrified to discover Sam’s existence?”

  “There were many reasons why the belated discovery of a son of Kamil was an unwelcome surprise. The first being that, as our plans progressed, his existence was bound to be discovered by Ghasib’s agents. We had to move instantly to protect him, and that had its own risks. There was also the problem of the al Jawadi Rose. My grandfather made Ashraf his heir, but the ring was then missing. Ghasib might easily have set your son up against Ashraf in an attempt to divide the people. In such a situation, the Rose would be of huge importance.

  “But our campaign is already well under way. It would have caused very grave results if we had tried to stop it now. Things are going to be gradually revealed over the next few weeks. There is no effective way to stop the revelations from occurring. To try would only be to put lives in danger.”

  “Are you saying Ghasib’s days are numbered in weeks?” she asked breathlessly.

  “We hope so. But you must wipe this information from your mind, Rosalind. Do not even think of it in the privacy of your own mind. The news must not escape.”