by Isobel Chace
‘You were right,’ he congratulated her. ‘A marvellous restorative to put any troubles we might have into their proper perspective. How could one help but feel better in such surroundings?’
‘There’s another dome on the other side,’ Stephanie told him. ‘A little smaller, but beautiful too. It was built in 1088, and some people say the mathematics of the stresses and strains were worked out by Omar Khayydm. He’s better known in Persia as a mathematician than as a poet.’
Cas was more than willing to follow her round the building, out into the court again and through the western iwan, into an enclosed prayer hall-cum-seminary that was entirely lit by alabaster windows. Then into another hall which contained one of the finest mihrabs in the world, incredibly intricate and decorative, its original use as a pointer towards the direction of Mecca enhanced by the fantastic ingenuity of its design.
‘Where now?’ he asked as they came out into the full glare of the sunshine in the paved court.
‘You still haven’t seen the second dome,’ she reminded him.
She took her time wandering through the vaulted arcades on the north side of the building. Standing in ten rows, they were deeper than those on the southern side, but were their rival in complexity of design, leading the eye from one arch to another with satisfying grace.
Stephanie took particular pleasure in showing him the little shrine close beside the smaller dome, where those who had been cured of any diseases which beset them left their mementoes of gratitude, perhaps a leg wrought in silver, perhaps a man in a motor-car who had recovered after smashing himself up in a crash, or perhaps a girl in a surprisingly short, modern skirt whose illness could have been anything. It was so exactly like those similar shrines that exist in so many Mediterranean Catholic churches that she thought it would please Cas too, but he was surprisingly indifferent to the human suffering the shrine represented and contented himself with turning one of the burned-out candles over in the palm of his hand, a strangely watchful expression on his face.
It was comparatively dark, almost gloomy inside the domed chamber.
‘Stephanie,’ Cas began, coming up close behind her, ‘are you ready to talk?’
She was thrown into confusion. She averted her face, not knowing how to answer him.
‘Won’t you trust me even now?’ he prompted her.
‘Oh yes!’ she exclaimed.
‘How much, I wonder? Enough to marry me?’
She turned to face him then, her heart in her mouth. ‘Marry you?’ she repeated. ‘But, Cas—’
‘I know it’s too soon,’ he said. ‘Too soon for both of us. But how else am I going to keep you here in Persia? I shan’t bother you, or force myself on you, unless you yourself should want it. It would be what they used to call a marriage of convenience, giving me the right as your husband to look after you until we’ve got everything sorted out.’
She thought it a cold-blooded arrangement. ‘I don’t know,’ she said foolishly. ‘I’d have to have time to think about it. I can’t believe you really want to marry me!’
He smiled. ‘Why should that be so difficult to believe?’
She spread her hands in an expressive gesture. ‘You know why! There must be dozens of girls you could marry, Americans like yourself, or—or beautiful and romantic like Amber.’ Her voice descended to a whisper on the other girl’s name and she bit her lip. ‘You don’t know me at all! I’m—I’m prosaic by nature!’
It was hard to resist the distinct twinkle in his eyes, but she did so nobly, shaking her head at him. ‘You can’t want to marry me!’ she insisted.
‘I very seldom do anything I don’t want to do,’ he assured her. ‘And as for you being prosaic, you’re about as prosaic as that dome up there! A constant and lasting delight to me!’
‘You can’t know that!’
‘Why not?’ he countered, his eyes bright and challenging.
‘You know why not!
‘I don’t know anything of the sort! If you really think that I am the wrong man for you, I am, of course, open to being convinced of that. I happen to think that I could make you very happy. I should certainly do my best to do so.’
‘But what about you?’ she asked in a little rush.
‘I’m not a boy,’ he said. ‘I know what I’m doing.’
The temptation was very strong to give way to him then and there. If he had said that he was in love with her, she would have done her best to believe him, because that was what she wanted more than anything else in the world. But he hadn’t said anything like that! All he had said was that he wouldn’t bother her—a marriage of convenience, he had called it, but convenient for whom?
‘Cas, I don’t know what to do!’
He was kind as always. ‘I know, love, but we haven’t time for a long, leisurely courtship. If you hadn’t found those letters, or if somebody hadn’t brought them forcibly to my notice, you could have gone on working for me as my secretary until you were ready to see me not only as your employer but as a man you wanted to marry. Now, we’ll have to get married first and come to terms afterwards. Is that such a bad idea?’
She shook her head. ‘But marriage is more than that!’
He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘That side of things can wait until you’re ready. All I want you to do now is to agree to go through a form of marriage with me so that you can stay on here as my wife. We’ll be going on tour almost immediately, where there won’t be anyone to ask any awkward questions of either of us. By the time we get back, I hope to have found out more about these letters. We can sort ourselves out when we’ve got that trouble behind us. Okay?’
She coloured brilliantly and was glad of the gloom all around her. ‘Can you wait until then?’ she asked him.
‘I can try.’
‘And what happens if I don’t marry you?’
He shrugged. ‘I won’t have any option but to send you back to England. I’ll follow you there as soon as I can, but I have to stay on here until our contract is fulfilled. It will be a long time before I can come to you.’
‘But you would come?’
He stood up very straight, looking impregnable and rather intimidating. ‘I mean to marry you sooner or later,’ he said.
Her throat felt stiff and dry and her voice didn’t sound like her own at all. ‘Then it may as well be sooner,’ she said.
How strange it was, she thought, that something momentous could happen, and yet the world could go on looking just as it had before. The schoolgirls were still crowding together in the central courtyard and the sunshine still blazed down in sharp contrast to the cool, shadowed interior.
Stephanie walked beside Cas, a stranger to herself, someone she didn’t know at all, someone so far removed from the orderly person she knew herself to be that she was shocked into silence by her own unnatural behaviour. She, who had always imagined that she would follow the usual logical sequence of meeting some man, getting to know him, falling in love with each other, and only then thinking about getting married, had committed herself to an incredible gamble, that at any other time she would have said was insane, of disrupting the usual order of things, marrying Cas while she could, and hoping against hope that she could persuade him to fall in love with her after the deed was done. She could only conclude that she had gone stark, staring mad! But she couldn’t bring herself to regret it! The quivering joy that fountained up inside her whenever she was with Cas rose to a spring tide of happiness that nothing could quench.
‘Have you decided you can trust me after all?’ Cas asked her as they emerged back into the teeming street.
She managed a rather prim little smile. ‘I’m not as fragile as you think,’ she told him. ‘I—I liked it when you took me to the Khajou Bridge!’
‘I liked it too,’ he mocked her.
‘Well then—’ she began.
He grinned at her. ‘We’ll take it as it comes, little one!’ He pushed her fringe back from her brow and she knew he was not entirely displeased. �
��If you show me what it was that caught your eye in that shop over there, I might even buy it for you,’ he added sardonically. And he bent forward and dropped a quick kiss right on the tip of her nose.
CHAPTER VIII
Stephanie was in her element packing up the Range Rover they were to take on tour with them. It was something that she knew she could do well and she found it a calming experience after all that had happened to her in the last few days. She could almost imagine that she was still the same person she had always known herself to be, except when she caught sight of the gold band on her finger and, with a little jump of the heart, realised that she was not, but somebody very different. She was now Mrs. Casimir Ruddock, sharing that name with a man she hardly knew and who seemed to be more distant every time she set eyes on him.
The strangest part of the whole business was that she had been able to feel nothing at all herself. She hadn’t resented the fact that Amber had known all about Cas’s plan to marry her before she did herself; she hadn’t even minded when she found out that it had been the other girl who had made all the arrangements for the ceremony in the Armenian Cathedral. All Stephanie had had to do was obey the various instructions that everyone combined to give her. If she was asked to give a blood sample, she gave a blood sample, though she hadn’t the faintest idea what it was for. All she was told was that it was a necessary preliminary when Americans entered the state of matrimony and that as Cas was an American she had to give a blood sample too. She filled in the forms that were put in front of her, signed her name what seemed like hundreds of times, and came close to having hysterics when Amber tried to coach her in her part of the brief marriage ceremony.
‘You’d better write it out for me and I’ll learn it by rote,’ she had said at last, repentant of the fuss she was making. Even Amber was beginning to look rather frayed, and it couldn’t have been easy for her, helping the man she was obviously in love with to marry another girl.
‘Oh, Stephanie, I can’t! I have never learned to write English! I know only the Armenian script—and the Arabic, of course! You will have to say it after me again and again until it sounds right!’
‘I don’t think we should be married in church at all!’ Stephanie had responded bleakly. ‘I can’t think why I agreed to go through with this!’
‘Because you are in love with him, perhaps!’ Amber had snapped, her patience exhausted. ‘Is it so difficult to learn a few words that express that love? I should have thought it worth a little trouble to become Cas’s wife!’
‘You don’t understand!’
‘Don’t I?’ Amber had laughed a decidedly brittle laugh. ‘Me, I understand very well! You want everything to come from him, all the time! He must be loving and understand you, but you can be as temperamental as you like, blowing hot and cold without any thought for how he must be feeling!’
‘He doesn’t love me!’
Amber gave her a look of pure contempt. ‘One does not love a child!’
‘But I want—’
‘It’s a woman that Cas needs. He needs the comfort of a wife, and children of his own. Why don’t you think about that? He is hoping you will make a home for him, not a battleground for scoring points because you can’t have your own way all the time!’
Stephanie had thought that a bit severe. ‘I only want him to love me!’ she had protested.
‘Be thankful that you can love him,’ Amber had advised her. ‘You resent it because you think he decides everything for you and you are afraid he will ride roughshod over you, no? But, believe me, there are some of us who would give anything to have their man able to take his place as head of the household and not to have to do everything themselves! It has always been the dream of my life to be able to be myself, and not be the breadwinner and the taxpayer as well!’ She had brushed the tears carefully off her long, mascaraed eyelashes with a snowy white handkerchief. ‘Never mind, soon I will go home and then everything will be better!’
Stephanie had been busy with her own thoughts. ‘Do you think Cas wants children?’ she had asked.
‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Amber had retorted. ‘You both express the wish to have children in the marriage ceremonial, so it would be well to know before you promise to bear his children, don’t you think?’
Stephanie had agreed with her absolutely, but only she knew the impossibility of asking Cas anything of the sort. Their conversation had become increasingly impersonal in the last few days.
Nor had it got any better as their wedding had drawn nearer. It had seemed to Stephanie that one day she had weakly given way to his demand to marry her, and the next they were standing side by side amongst the rather dark pictures that covered the inside walls of the Armenian Cathedral, both of them making their responses in a language that neither of them understood. There had been a dreamlike quality about the whole affair, as though nothing had been quite real, a dream that had taken on a nightmare aspect when they had finally been left alone together.
‘How are things going at the office?’ she had asked him stiffly.
‘Fatemeh seems to be managing quite well.’
‘So you haven’t missed me at all?’ Stephanie had reproached him.
‘I didn’t say that.’ He looked at her for a long moment. ‘I haven’t had time to do anything very much. I wanted to get a few things settled before we set off on tour.’
Stephanie sighed. He hadn’t even kissed her when he had been invited to do so when they had come out of the church. He hadn’t so much as touched her all day. She looked up at his stern mouth and wondered what there was about it that she wanted him to notice her so badly, indeed, wanted him to make her blood sing in her veins as he had before. Was he never willingly going to touch her again?
‘What sort of thing?’ she asked in an aggrieved voice.
Cas had opened himself a can of beer and began to drink it, without troubling to find himself a glass. Stephanie’s heart sank as she watched him. He could not have made it clearer that he had no intention of kissing her then. If he had, he would have had something else to drink!
‘You’d only make yourself miserable worrying about it if you knew,’ he had drawled. He had taken another long swig of beer. ‘We’ll be on the road for four days, honey. Why don’t you set about making up a list of the supplies we need and I’ll help you stow them away in the Range Rover?’
She had known that all he had wanted was to keep her occupied and out of his hair, but she had been quite unable to resist the challenge of showing how well she could manage such a task, and she had set about it with enthusiasm, enjoying herself for the first time that day.
The Range Rover was already very well equipped. Stephanie had been impressed by the amount of stuff Cas kept by him as a matter of course. There were a couple of sleeping-bags, both of them wider than any she had ever seen before, and both of them very well used. She wondered who had used the second one on previous occasions, knowing even as she did so that she was being foolish to taunt herself by speculating on her new husband’s romantic past.
The cooking equipment was far more sophisticated than she had expected as well. There were a couple of burners as well as a grill, which opened up all sorts of possibilities as to what she might be able to cook on it. ‘Having fun?’ Cas asked her.
She jumped and looked round and to her relief he was no longer looking at her as though he hated her. On the contrary, the amused affection was back in his blue eyes and he was looking as relaxed and as much at his ease as she had ever seen him.
‘Is this a company car?’ she asked him.
‘No, it’s my own. I brought it over from the States with me.’
‘It’s British,’ she said with satisfaction.
‘I guess I have a penchant for British luxuries.’
‘And American know-how?’
‘Could be,’ he agreed. ‘How about you?’
She looked him straight in the face. ‘I’m waiting to find out,’ she said.
He didn’t prete
nd not to understand her. ‘It’s something you’d better be sure about before we make a mistake we can’t rectify. What’s the rush, honey?’
Stephanie turned back to the stove, fiddling with the taps between her fingers. ‘I can’t think why you married me?’ she said.
‘But then you’re not very sure of yourself at all, are you?’ he countered. ‘Why don’t you concentrate on working out your own motives first? I can wait.’
She was silent for a moment, then she said, ‘You don’t have to wait because of me. You don’t have to treat me like a child.’
‘I just think it’s something that can easily get out of hand,’ he answered wryly. ‘I want you very badly, sweetheart, but I don’t feel that now is the right time for us. I want it to be perfect for you too, and I don’t think it will be while you’ve got this other business on your mind, and while you’re uncertain of me. You haven’t been able to forget that I was sent here to replace your father, have you? It must have occurred to you that I might have been behind his going in some way. Me and who else?’
‘No!’ she exclaimed passionately. ‘It isn’t true! Oh, Cas, how could you think I could think such a thing of you?’
‘Didn’t you?’
She could tell that he didn’t believe her and she stood up to convince him the better, banging her head on the top of the door. ‘I’ve never doubted you!’ she declared angrily.
He put his arms right round her, lifting her down on to the pavement beside him, rubbing her head with surprisingly gentle fingers.
‘Then you should have done!’
‘Why? You said I could trust you. You told me to!’
‘Let’s hope you’re always so obedient,’ he teased her. He sounded amused, and more paternal than loverlike.