Desert Destiny

by Sarah Holland

  Chanderay laughed drily. ‘No, of course not!’ The light French accent was pleasing to the ear, softening his every word with a trace of summer and sophistication. ‘I came of my own free will—and with the greatest of pleasure, I can assure you.’

  ‘But how?’ Bethsheba was still incredulous. ‘I mean—how did you find this place?’

  ‘I flew to Marrakech and turned right,’ drawled Chanderay, white teeth flashing against that red-gold beard. ‘On y va! I have coffee with halva in the kitchen. I will tell you my story there—before we start our work.’

  She followed him along a winding corridor and found herself in a small sunlit kitchen, the ancient stone painted thick white and hung with jaunty mugs and photographs and wicker plant-baskets. There was a photograph of Chanderay with Picasso, and Bethsheba looked at it with a sense of wonder.

  ‘I’ve been here five years already,’ Chanderay told her as he poured rich coffee into two cups, and set halva out on a brass plate. ‘And I can’t tell you what a difference it has made to my life.’

  ‘The privacy?’

  ‘Alors!’ He laughed, blue eyes flashing to her face. ‘No reporters! No crowds! No fans! And above all—no phonies standing around discussing my paintings in order to impress their friends!’

  Bethsheba took the coffee he handed her, and smiled at the French painting and lettering on it: ‘Chaperon Rouge cherche jeune loup’—Red Riding Hood seeks young wolf!

  ‘Here,’ Chanderay perched on a white stool, ‘nobody cares about my reputation. They just admire my status, my paintings—and then they get on with their own lives! There is no invasion of privacy. I am accepted for who I am—not for the proclamations of the Western Press.’

  ‘You found all that a headache?’ She nodded, understanding. ‘Yes, it can be distracting at best—painful at worst.’

  ‘Besides,’ Chanderay shrugged broad wiry shoulders, ‘all this colour and life in Suliman’s world! What a fabulous place it is! The weather, the noise, the landscape, the flowers…’

  ‘It’s paradise, isn’t it?’ she agreed, and her gold eyes slid to the window of yellowing stone behind him, half in sunlight, half black shade. ‘But how did you find it, Chanderay? It’s hardly a major place on the tourist trail.’

  ‘I met Suliman in Paris,’ he said simply.

  ‘Paris!’ She stared, eyes wide.

  ‘Yes, he’s a very cultured man, isn’t he? Deeply artistic, highly educated, very progressive in his attitudes.’

  Bethsheba just stared, speechless. Were they discussing the same man? Sheikh Suliman El Khazir, the man who had re-introduced her to the wilderness of the desert, the barbaric luxury of Arabia, and the freedom of everything that went with it? Of course, she had grown so accustomed to his perfect English—with only a light Arabic accent that grew stronger when he was angry—that it had never occurred to her to wonder where he had acquired it.

  ‘Suliman came to an exhibition of mine,’ Chanderay told her. ‘We hit it off instantly. He loved my paintings and sculptures—he bought several of them on the spot. We ended up talking for hours, and finally met for dinner at Fouquet’s on the Champs Élysées. I spent the evening complaining—as usual!—about the lack of privacy my success had brought me. I complained about the Press, about modern life, about phonies and about my growing inability to believe as strongly in my work because of it as I once had.’

  ‘You lived in Paris at the time?’

  ‘I had an apartment in Paris—a villa in the south: Grasse, to be specific,’ he said. ‘Suliman suggested a month’s holiday at his place in the Sahara. I was going to Marrakech that summer anyway, so it seemed quite predestined. I took him up on it.’

  The mention of destiny took her breath away. Quickly, she said, ‘You came here? To this palace? Not his House of the Seven Suns at Agadir?’

  ‘I came straight here,’ he agreed. ‘Stayed for a month, fell in love with the place, and couldn’t bear to leave. I went home, sold my villa and came straight back with as many things as I could carry!’ He laughed. ‘I’ve been here ever since.’

  ‘You rode from Marrakech?’ she asked, frowning. ‘By horse? That must have been a terrible journey!’

  ‘Rode!’ He burst out laughing. ‘Of course I didn’t ride! I flew here in Suliman’s private jet!’

  ‘His jet?’

  ‘Yes.’ Chanderay’s straggly red brows lifted. ‘Didn’t you know Suliman had a jet? There’s a landing strip at the back of this palace. Haven’t you seen it?’

  Bethsheba stared, shaking her head, her eyes wide with shock as she reeled under the impact of all this information from a renowned genius who obviously knew Suliman El Khazir better than she did.

  Chanderay idly handed her a sweetmeat and took one for himself. ‘Yes, it’s really very handy. I can fly anywhere I want, come back when I like, live with one foot in the West and one in the East.’

  ‘You continue to go back, then,’ she asked shakily, struggling to accept all of this, ‘to the West?’

  ‘Of course! I am not a complete lunatic, madame! The art world is in the West, and I need it as much now as I ever did. The peace and anonymity I need is here, in the East. But I need to exhibit my work. I need to sell it and I need to keep my name in the public eye. These things are important to every artist, no matter how successful he becomes. An audience, after all, is still an audience, and I do not paint solely for my own pleasure. Like small boys, all artists need to cry, “Look, look what I have done!”‘

  Bethsheba laughed, fellow-feeling in her gold eyes as they met his. ‘It’s no different for little girls!’

  ‘Of course.’ Chanderay smiled, inclining his head. ‘For you, it is the silence when you hold a perfect note and let it fly above the music, knowing that those who listen are as impressed by it as you.’

  She flushed a little, lowering her lashes at the accuracy of his statement. ‘I still find it incredible, though,’ she said huskily, and looked up at him, ‘to think that Suliman brought you here…’

  ‘Yes.’ Chanderay nodded. ‘I am proud to be his friend.’

  She smiled, touched.

  ‘And you must be very proud,’ he added, ‘to be his wife.’

  A shiver ran through her as her heart skipped several beats. Chanderay thought Suliman loved her. The pain suddenly returned, and with it the sting of rejection as she remembered what Suliman had said this morning: love is a plaything of Western vanity and has nothing to do with the duty of a queen.

  He would never love her. Never; and suddenly the pain was intolerable.

  ‘Shall we get on with our work?’ Chanderay drained his coffee and stood up.

  ‘Our work?’ She looked at him with a jolt.

  ‘Didn’t Suliman tell you?’ He frowned with some surprise. ‘I am to sculpt you.’

  ‘Sculpt me!’ Bethsheba stood up, staring in awed disbelief. ‘You! Edouard de Chanderay!’

  His frown deepened. ‘I am flattered by your awe, Sheba. But I would rather not encounter it here. This is my sanctuary. Here, I am just a man who paints: I would prefer to keep it that way.’

  She flushed. ‘I’m sorry…forgive me…’

  ‘ça fais rien.’ He shrugged. ‘You must have the same pressures, the same violation of privacy. All I ask is that you remember why I came here, and treat me as the man you find me—I have the right to be real while I am still alive.’ A smile touched his mouth and his blue eyes glittered. ‘Time enough to be a genius when I am dead!’

  Bethsheba laughed, and followed him out into the hall, then up the winding white-painted steps to his studio which overlooked the bohemia he had found here, the huddled yellowing houses and acres of blue sky so clear that it seemed closer to God and eternity than any sky on earth.

  ‘Remove the yashmak, please,’ Chanderay said as they entered the studio, ‘and the cloak and veil. Suliman wants your statue to do your beauty justice.’

  The veil, cloak and yashmak fell to the floor, and Bethsheba posed on the white st
one plinth in white harem silks, her breasts full and straining at the white-gold bodice, her belly left bare, her slender legs clearly visible beneath the white silk skirt. Bells on her ankles and gold hair tumbling down around her slender shoulders, she posed like a legged mermaid, her hands lifting strands of hair behind her head, her spine arched like a bow. The statue would be unutterably sensual.

  ‘Tell me of your work,’ Chanderay asked as he made a primary impression of wet clay, his strong fingers kneading it into shape. ‘Your career must have introduced you to many fascinating people.’

  ‘It has,’ she said, smiling with pride as she watched him, ‘but I think the most incredible thing about it has been meeting such famous people and finding they have heard of me!’ She laughed, lifting her brows. ‘It never ceases to amaze me!’

  He nodded. ‘And that will never change. One meets people one admires and is astonished to find admiration in their eyes, too.’ He slid a finger over her clay shoulder, rounding it deftly. ‘You will be happy here with Suliman. He understands artists, and his love for you can only grow.’

  She stiffened, pain in her eyes. ‘I might not be happy here. Certainly not if I’m being turned into a statue of an old dead legend!’

  ‘You’re used to fame,’ he said, frowning at the obvious emotion in her voice. ‘Surely this is no different?’

  ‘It feels different!’

  ‘I don’t see why.’ He said, ‘It was inevitable that Suliman would marry an artist.’

  She stared, lips parted in surprise.

  ‘Now—could you resume the pose? Yes…arch your back…flaunt your sensuality for the man who has commissioned this statue!’ His eyes danced. ‘You are Sheba—remember?’

  For hours they worked in the sunlit studio. Chanderay’s hands and fingers moulded the clay lovingly. A pot of water beside him had knives, spatulas and needles it in which he used, wetting the clay constantly with a small soft-haired brush. The scent of the clay was in her nostrils as she sat in her provocatively sensual pose by the stone window, but the clay itself was all over Chanderay’s hands and bench and clothes.

  At three o’clock, Suliman sent for her.

  With a thudding heart, Bethsheba slipped her cloak, veil and yashmak on and left Chanderay’s house, preparing herself to see her new husband and hear the answers to the questions she had asked this morning.

  The two handmaidens had an armed guard with them, and Bethsheba walked in the centre, escorted as befitted a queen—or a prisoner. Back through the teeming alleyways and courtyards she went until the royal quarters loomed ahead in yellowing stone, and as her eyes traced the gold carvings on the walls she felt a lift of her heart and thought: home.

  To her surprise, she was led to the office section in the circular courtyard that was the entrance to the royal palace. The handmaidens led her across the marble floor, typewriters and fax machines clattering louder now as she approached a large oak door.

  Inside the room, she stopped dead, catching her breath. It was a modern office, with a champagne carpet, mahogany desk, black leather chairman’s seat behind the power-desk, a fax machine in the corner, and vast panoramic windows at the back.

  Outside, on a long strip of black tarmac in the desert, glittered a bright red Cessna private jet. The jet gleamed at her, symbolising everything that was Suliman, as it stood, a brilliant piece of twentieth-century power, on the stark landscape of the desert.

  Her image of Suliman collided with the reality and split apart into two men, deeply opposed, the schism healed by her presence and by the deep split in herself, which she was only now beginning to understand as she stood in that modern office in the barbaric palace and stared out at that jet.

  The door closed behind her. Bethsheba whirled, heart in her mouth.

  Suliman closed the door slowly and leant on it.

  CHAPTER TEN

  SULIMAN wore an expensively tailored grey suit that fitted his broad shoulders to perfection, a dark red silk tie gleaming against impeccable white shirt and a tight grey formal waistcoat, a gold watch-chain glittering across it.

  He was more handsome, more sexy, more formidable than any man had ever been to Bethsheba, and in the darkness of his eyes lay the desert barbarian who had kidnapped her on horseback, dragged her into life, and taken her, last night, to an ultimate surrender that had changed her forever.

  ‘Suliman,’ she said huskily, and her love for him shone with dark gravity from her eyes as a lump formed in her throat.

  ‘Well?’ His voice was as hard as his mouth as he spoke. ‘What runs through your mind, bint?’

  She tensed, saying, ‘I can’t believe it’s taken you so long to reveal this side of yourself!’

  ‘Why?’ he asked tightly. ‘Do you prefer it so much to the desert sheikh you first met?’

  ‘No…you don’t understand. I——’

  ‘I understand only too well!’ he cut in with a harsh laugh, and gestured with one strong hand to the window. ‘You come here and see my Cessna on the tarmac and suddenly realise you can——’

  ‘Chanderay told me you had a jet!’ she broke in urgently. ‘I already knew before I got here.’

  ‘Chanderay.’ He nodded, eyes hostile as they flickered over her. ‘You liked him?’

  ‘Very much. Suliman, I can’t believe you have him living here!’

  ‘No,’ he drawled tightly, ‘a respected artist living here, in the home of a desert sheikh! Quite inconceivable!’

  ‘Suliman, I didn’t say——’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said with a harsh laugh, and pushed away from the door, striding round to his desk with masculine arrogance, sitting in the black leather chair, every inch the chairman of the board with his dark head back and his dangerous eyes focused on her with dark hostility. ‘Sit, bint. We have so much to talk about!’

  Bethsheba moved to the chair opposite him, sank down on it and faced him across the desk, aware of the exciting role-reversal: he in Western power clothes, she in seductive Eastern silks.

  ‘Chanderay told me how you met in Paris,’ she said carefully, ‘at an art exhibition.’

  ‘You are so impressed by my Western inclinations,’ Suliman said with a dangerous look in his eyes.

  ‘I feel we will have more to share now,’ she said.

  ‘Yet this morning I was a barbarian holding you prisoner,’ he said tightly. ‘Well, well, well. How quickly things change.’ He shut the lid on a box of cigars which had lain open, and watched her, rapping long fingers on one arm of the black leather chair.

  ‘This morning you shouted at me and slammed out of the bedroom for no good reason!’ Bethsheba reminded him tensely.

  ‘You threatened to end our marriage, bint,’ he said flatly, eyes narrowing. ‘What did you expect me to do? Smile and put you on a plane back to Tangier?’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a plane!’

  ‘But you do now,’ he said coolly, one hand gesturing to the view behind him, ‘do you not?’

  Bethsheba was silent, studying him as the pain returned, spreading deep into her soul, as she looked into that hard face and knew her love would never be returned. Never.

  ‘So,’ Suliman said softly, ‘now you see me differently. I am no longer the barbarian you rejected so often, but a civilised man with a lot of money, power and, above all, a private jet.’

  Colour flooded her face. ‘You’re twisting my reaction!’ she said angrily. ‘You must see that it makes a difference to our relationship—to our marriage and future!’

  He smiled, eyes hard. ‘A marriage you previously detested.’

  ‘Because I thought we couldn’t possibly hope to make anything of it!’ she lied in despair—how could she tell the truth? That she had been in love with him for days? That none of this made any difference to her feelings for him—if anything it only deepened her existing love to a well-spring she had never believed she could feel.

  ‘You did not want this marriage,’ Suliman said, his arrogant head back as he regarded her c
ontemptuously through heavy-lidded eyes. ‘You were afraid I could not hold my own in Western society. How could you marry such a man? How indeed? Only a fool marries for love!’ His eyes flashed as he drawled with a sneer, ‘Now you find I can more than hold my own in your society—you suddenly find our marriage not only acceptable but desirable!’ He gave a cold laugh, his face hard. ‘If you were not so beautiful I would despise you!’

  ‘You should have told me sooner!’ Bethsheba said angrily, stung by his contemptuous remarks. ‘You shouldn’t have kept the truth about yourself secret from me!’

  ‘Why?’ he asked flatly. ‘Would you have gone to bed with me sooner if I had?’

  Her breath caught at the insult. ‘My God, you bastard…’

  ‘Would you?’ He got to his feet, dark brows rising. ‘Or shall we find out? Hmm?’ He walked lazily around the desk, but there was nothing lazy about his eyes or his mouth; both were hard and hostile and deadly with intent. ‘Take off your cloak,’ he said, standing in front of her and thrusting his hands in his pockets. ‘Come on. Take it off.’

  Bethsheba watched him with eyes that hated him. ‘Go to hell!’

  He laughed, and his hand gripped her arm, lifting her ruthlessly to stand before him. ‘Take off your cloak, Sheba,’ he said coldly, ‘that I might better see what my Cessna jet has bought me!’

  Her mouth shook with anger. ‘I’d rather die than ever let you see me or touch me again!’

  ‘Yet you longed for pleasurable lovemaking from your desert sheikh!’ he drawled tightly. ‘And last night—you got it! You had to go through a pointless marriage ceremony to get it—but everything has a price, does it not, bint? And perhaps one night of pleasure was all you ever wanted from me.’

  Bethsheba whitened. ‘I don’t want anything from you!’ she said hoarsely, and turned on her heel to walk out.

  His hand caught her wrist and jerked her back against him. ‘You wanted me!’ he bit out thickly. ‘You wanted sex from your desert sheikh and you got it! But now you find yourself married and a prisoner for life! What better time to make friends with your gaoler than when you see his private jet parked outside and realise he is a very rich gaoler!’