by Pamela Kent
Romilly was pleased, but certainly not alarmed, when her"'"
great-aunt left her a house in Cairo. Why should Crighton Bey warn her to be careful of her possessions?
Romilly soon found herself thinking of him more than was good for her - but was he really interested in her � or only in what she had inherited?
PRICED IN CANADA
OTHER
Harlequin ^Romances
by PAMELA KENT
791�CITY OF PALMS 80.4�BLADON'S ROCK
(Originol Harlequin title: "Doctor Gaston") 829�SWEET BARBARY 909�DESERT DOORWAY 943�ENEMY LOVER 983�MOON OVER AFRICA
1005�GIDEON FABER'S CHANCE 1035�STAR CREEK 1061�MEET ME IN ISTANBUL 1091�CUCKOO IN THE NIGHT 1134�THE MAN WHO CAME BACK 1234�DESERT GOLD
1274�MAN FROM THE SEA 1384�BELOVED ENEMIES
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by
TORONTO WINNIPEG
�
CHAPTER I
ROMILLY felt the moonlight pouring all over her, bathing
her in a flood of silver, and in some strange way trans
forming her and setting her apart from the desert behind
her. But at the same time that she was aware of this phenom
enon she was also aware that the smile on the face of the
Sphinx was becoming increasingly mocking.
The sensual lips of the carven mouth seemed to be curv
ing upwards derisively, and a voice emerged from behind
the giant mask that had drawn millions to gaze at it since
those far-off days when ij was first placed where it was and
drawled at her softly and provocatively:
"Pretty Romilly!" it said. "Come all this way to look
at me! ... Just as your great-aunt did, only she never
returned to her own people. She used to stand there just
where you're standing now, and she thought she knew so
much about Ancient Egypt, and of course she knew noth
ing at all i She was much like you when she was your age.
... The same pale skin and Anglo-Saxon blue eyes and
pretty hair. What do you call it ... chestnut hair? I like the way it shines, as if it was powdered with gold dust; but in my day we fancied something lusher and more
exotic.... We liked our women to be exciting!"
"How do you know I'm not exciting?" Romilly answered the great beast silently, rebelling against such a tepid description of herself.
"Because you're not.... You know very well you're not! You're thoroughly conventional and thoroughly English. It's in your bones!" " .
6
"I've been told I've very shapely bones!" she protested
mutinously.
The mocking smile spread until even the eyes lit up with
it.
"What are bones?" the Sphinx demanded. "It's the flesh
that covers them Aat is important! ... Your curves are not
pronounced enough, and you're too thin. At least, that's
my opinion."
"Have you never heard of dieting?" she enquired sarcas
tically. "Women don't wish to run to fat nowadays."
"The women of Ancient Egypt were slender as gazelles,
and their skin was as firm as ripe fruit to the touch! Their
eyes were all velvet with the shimmer of starshine, and
they had mouths like wild red buds...'""
"Hothouse plants," she scoffed. "I've heard about
them!"
Kalim was standing not very far off, guarding her great
aunta tired-out Daimler. Kalim was one of the local Fella
heen and she was quite sure used to the ways of tourists, with their strange preoccupations and obsessions with monuments such as this; but at the same time she suspected he was moving a little restlessly in the shadows, and having already provided her with a brief history of the Great Pyramid of .Cheops and the slightly smaller one of Chephren, as well as nostalgically recounted for her benefit episodes in his own past life when he had attached himself with unshakable firmness to the Great British Tourist who had had a habit of wintering in Egypt as well as uncover
.ing her extraordinarily colourful and magnificent past, and was now no more, she was not surprised.
Kalim was getting old, and had grown old in her late aunt's service. The splendours of moonlight at the foot of the Sphinx, while a rather nagging wind from the desert on the edge of which they were virtually standing reached
7
them, and the stars burned somewhat remotely overhead,
had few charms for him nowadays, and he would have
infinitely preferred to be back in his quarters, which with
out being luxurious were comfortable enough for him. He
wished the sitt would stop standing there in quite such a
rapt manner and remember diat he suffered from rheumat
ism, and the hour was very late anyway.
Romilly sighed. She supposed she would have to tear
herself away from the great sprawling monster which at
tracted her far more than the Pyramids, and plan to come
back and see it another day ... or rather, another night.
For the Sphinx was at its best by moonlight. And she
was quite sure it had all sorts of things to say to her.
She caught that soft, mocking whisper again.
"Little girls like you should be in bed by this time! ...
You're keeping Kalim out of his I"
She spun round. From where she stood she couldn't see
Kalim, and the noise of the occasional car on the distant
road seemed very far away, but somebody was standing
quite near to her, and although the moonlight touched him
only faintly she was quite sure he was unusually tall. He
had an impressive breadth of shoulder, and yet at the same
time a leanness of build that was rather like the lean, clean lines of the Sphinx. She received the curious impression that he was poised for flight, and that he had only suddenly alighted there ... not arrived there in anything so prosaic as a car, or even walked there from the nearest hotel. And as he stood watching her, with slightly back-flung head and narrowed eyes, a mouth that curved upwards at the corners and seemed to be smiling at her disdainfully, just as the Sphinx was still smiling down at her, she received a shock.
He could be the very embodiment of the Sphinx, the heart and soul of the Sphinx - if that indescribable creature
had a heart and soul. And although he appeared to be cloth
ed in modem dress, and she thought she saw the moonlight
glinting on his tie-pin - or was it an ornamental stud in the
front of a dress-shirt, since it could be that he was wearing
a dinner-jacket? - there was nothing emphatically modem
about mm. His vague shape, standing there, with patches of
moonlight creating all sorts of extraordinary illusions, and
his back-flung head and a line of shadow across his fore
head indicating that he was wearing some sort of a head"
dress� although that could have been simply the effect of moonlight and shadow, had the almost literal effect of
bringing her heart up into her mouth.
She had seldom felt so startled in her life, and yet there
was noAing really to startle her. Just a man, like herself, admiring the Sphinx,
Or was he concentrating all his attention on her? And was he just a man...?
She heard Kalim cough, and nearer, on the road, she caught the fat tdss of tyres as a car drew closer to the Pyramids. If she had turned her head she would have caught the beam of headlights.
But she did not turn her head. She felt quite unable to move even an inch, and if her life had depended on it she could not have found a voice to call out to her silent neighbour and ask him what he was doing there. Which would have been an impertinence in any case, since it was anyone's right to approach the Pyramids, just as she herself had done, and remained there fascinated by what there
was to see. Emboldened by weariness and a growing craving to compose his limbs for what remained of the night, Kalim deserted his own particular block of shadow and approached nearer to her. "It is growing late, sift," he called out to her thinly.
"Ought we not now to leave ...? The sitt can return another day."
Romilly did not even start. She was still staring at the tall man - was he only six feet away from her? - whose eyes, curious and gleaming in the dark, were holding her own. She saw his white teeth as his shapely lips parted and he smiled in an utterly inscrutable fashion.
"Sittr
"Oh, Kalim," she called breathlessly, "is that you?"
"Of course, sitt I"
"Oh, Kalim, I'm coming.... Don't go away!"
The man vanished as if he had never been just as Kalim
arrived within a foot of her, and she put out a hand and
grasped his arm to ensure that he, too, didn't vanish. Her
breath was coming unevenly between her parted lips, and
her eyes were staring.
"Kalim, did you see a man... just now?"
"No, miss. No one," he assured her.
"But there was a man ... someone! He was tall, and he
stood -" she gestured with her hand - "over there!"
Kalim felt that niggling little wind from the barren de
sert finding out the weak spots in his bones, and he shivered
although he had lived many years under blazing suns. He 'supposed that like the late Miss Styles he was growing so
old that he was vulnerable, and soon even waiting for a new mistress at the foot of the Sphinx would be too much for him. He shook his head unhappily at the prospect of
workless days in store.
"We will go now, sift," he muttered. ' But Romilly was completely bewildered. One moment |the man had been there, and the next he had vanished into Sthin air. He was real - he must have been real! - and |real people could not just disappear as if they were crea| tures of phantasy. She listened for the sound of a car start
1 9
ing up on the road, but there was only that distant hum of another car which had approached and then turned and driven away again. And while it was still driving away � subconsciously she had registered that much - the man had been there!
She accompanied her late aunt's servant back to the Daimler, and as he opened the rear door for her and she subsided on to the seat she felt she had to have some sort of reassurance. Almost coaxingly she asked him:
"But you must have seen someone, Kalim? Just for a moment, out of the tail of your eye? Or is this place -" laughing a little shakily - "haunted ? "
Quite clearly Kalim did not relish such a suggestion. His toffee-ball dark eyes rolled in a distinctly unhappy manner.
"Always the burial places of the Pharaohs are haunted," was his reply. "Many people see things in places such as this.... Even I. Once!"
"Oh, Kalim," she insisted, "what did you see?"
He glanced around him uneasily, his hand still on the door of the car, taking in the dark shape of the Sphinx, and the darker shapes of the nearby Pyramids, their conical outlines etched against the stars and the purple night sky. There was utter silence all around them, a silence that could be felt.... No longer even the comforting noise of a
car. He shook his head, while his eyes rolled wildly. "Nothing, mistress." "I don't believe you," she replied. "It is true, sitt," he returned. "And in any case, I prefer not to speak of it." Romilly smiled slightly. In the face of such determination not to reveal any of his past experiences what could she do? And by this time, in the comforting enclosure of
10
the car, she was certain the man had been real. That had been an ornamental button on the front of his shirt, she
was sure.
They drove away along the road which leads to Cairo, and she decided to say nothing more about her experience at the foot of the Sphinx. She realised she had rather a vivid imagination, and the curious atmosphere of the place they had just left must have affected her. Or at any rate, it could have affected her.... But she was reasonably cer
tain it had not. The experience had been real. The man, who could have existed in the days of Ancient Egypt, had just slipped away. Possibly he was an expert at dematerializing himself. Which caused her to smile again, although very faintly, as she lay back against the comfortably upholstered back of the seat, for the first time she realised that it had been a long day. Arrival in Egypt followed by a first visit to the Pyramids, and now already it was a new day. Soon "dawn's left hand" would be in the sky, and all the scents and sounds of a strange new world would be around her. She felt vaguely exdted by the thought, just as she was excited by the thought of exploring the contents of the late Romilly Styles' house - now her own. She found it difficult to believe. She had come all this ' way to inspect a house which was now hers, and only a few weeks ago she had had no idea at all that such a place ; existed. She bad known about the great-aunt after whom she had been mysteriously named, but that was all. That the ; scventy-eight-year-old spinster had remembered her in her '. will had come as the biggest surprise of her life. The i equally elderly solicitor who had broken the news to her i seemed to think she ought to be tremendously grateful, but | at the moment she was simply bewildered. | It was too much to take in, just as this first long day in a
country utterly alien to her own had been like something
out of a dream. Any moment now she might wake up and
find that it was a dream, but while the illusion lasted she
thought longingly of curling up in one of the big beds with
enormous feather pillows which had made life comfortable
for the late Miss Styles, and with which she had seemed
to fill her crumbling mansion on the outskirts of the Egyp
tian capital.
In the days when the British influence was most strongly
felt in Cairo many fine houses were built for their comfort and convenience, together with the race-course, golfcourse and polo grounds of the Gezira Club, which was actually concentrated on the island of Gezira in the middle of the Nile. But the years have passed and the influence of the British has not merely waned, it has practically ceased to be an influence at all. Romilly, who was very British, and didn't care who knew it or suspected it - in which she closely resembled her unknown namesake and benefactress, had she but been aware of it - was conscious of being an oddity from the moment she arrived in Cairo, sticking out rather like a sore thumb while she was being closely questioned by the immigration people, and had to admit that the purpose of her visit was to arrange for the sale of a house which had been left to her by her relative.
There could have been difficulties, but apparently Miss Romilly Styles - the seventy-eight-year-old version - had, despite her predeliction for all things British, got along very harmoniously with the local authorities, and she had even benefited one or two local institutions with bequests under the terms of her will which had endeared her to them still more. She had been very much in favour of the emancipation of Egyptian women, and had helped them greatly in her time. Her father had been a well-known archaeologist
12
whose particular passion was the Valley of the Tombs of
/>
the Kings, and Cairo museums had benefited as a result of
this passion during his latter years.
Romilly had had no idea what to expect when she first saw the House of the Seven Stars, as it was called. Kalim had arrived at her hotel, where she had had an early breakfast, with the ancient Daimler, and had driven her ponderously to inspect the house, which was bathed in brilliant December sunshine, and far more impressive than she had dared to hope,
The sunshine delighted her, after the raw cold of England, and the fact that the garden was carefully tended and full of flowers delighted her still more. She had already been amazed by the unexpected fertility of Egypt, which she had imagined a dried up, sun-scorched land with little to relieve the bareness, and to discover that her late aunt's house had flower borders which were regularly looked after as well as a fascinating palm grove and a tennis-court which, unfortunately, was very badly neglected, pleased her so much that she actually commented upon her surprise to Kalim.
The house itself stood well back from the road, and was ensured a good deal of privacy by its extensive gardens.
Inside, it was not quite so welcoming, for the contents would have appealed much more to a collector than a home-lover.
Everything smelt of age, and there was so much of it that Romilly felt slightly appalled. There must have been hundreds of ivory statuettes and brass, bronze, jade and silver ornaments, lacquer cabinets filled with treasures, and one or two fine Persian rugs and Turkish hangings which would probably fetch a good deal of money when the house was put up for sale. There was one room which Miss Styles had plainly made a stupendous effort to deceive
13
visitors into believing was a faithful copy of an English
drawing-room, but even that was rather pathetic for the divan coverings and cushions were threadbare, and the flowered carpet was so faded that one could only guess at the original design.
The bedrooms were just as crammed with antiques as the rest of the house, but at least the beds, without exception, looked comfortable and capacious, and the linen was exceptionally fine, and there were endless stacks of it.
The dining-room was more like an armoury, lined with weapons of every sort and kind from many different countries. It also contained some rather sad Birmingham junk, which caused the new owner to shake her head and wonder what had come over Aunt Romilly when she allowed herself to acquire that lot.