by Isobel Chace
THE HOSPITAL OF FATIMA by
Isobel Chace
Katherine was going to live in Tunisia because old Monsieur Edouard de Hallet, who had left her his estates there, had made it a condition in his will.
But she had reckoned without the old man’s disgruntled niece, Chantal, who could — and did — do everything to make life unpleasant for her.
CHAPTER ONE
THE NIGHT was so black that the stars seemed doubly bright and the moon a polished silver disc suspended in the heavens. It was a warm evening and unbelievably silent except for the soft whisper of sounds that were strange to a newcomer’s ear — the sound of the palm trees in the gentle breeze and the sound of a car travelling fast some distance away.
Katherine Lane walked right to the edge of the concrete apron and gazed out into the darkness beyond. If she were facing south there would be nothing but land now between her and Cape Town; miles and miles of land, the land that went to make up the great continent of Africa. Smiling a little at the thought, she turned and rejoined the group who had just left the aeroplane that stood, enormous, in one corner of the airfield. On the other side, destroying the illusion that they were alone in all Tunisia, were the airport buildings with their bright lights and restless activity.
At last the queue moved forward and it was Katherine’s turn to present her passport to the vigilant official whose job it was to check and stamp it. He looked at her photograph for a long time and then looked at her.
“This is you, mademoiselle?” he asked, his voice tinged with disbelief.
Katherine swallowed nervously and nodded.
“Yes,” she said huskily.
"Vraiment? I find it hard to believe! You are far more lovely than the camera would have us believe!” He stamped the open page with a firm, deliberate movement. “I hope you have a pleasant stay in our country.”
Katherine accepted her passport with grateful fingers, taking an oblique look at the photograph inside. It was not very flattering, perhaps, but neither was it as bad as some she had seen of other people. It had caught that clear, wide-eyed look that had made the other nurses tease her by saying that at least she looked honest. It showed too the fairness of her hair that she wore in two plaits round her head because she could never quite bring herself to cut it all off. It suited her that way, though, giving her a quaint air of dignity that the responsibilities of her profession had added to, making her look a good deal more confident than she actually was. But she wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even what she would call pretty.
She put her passport carefully away in her handbag and hurried over to retrieve her luggage from the ever-growing chaos on the Customs counter.
“This is yours, mademoiselle?”
“Yes, all this,” she replied automatically.
It was not a great deal when one considered that the two suitcases held most of her worldly possessions. It had meant paying a little in excess baggage, but Katherine had thought that it was worth it. It was the one luxury that she had allowed herself, for she still couldn’t quite think of the money as being hers and, for the moment, it was quite sufficient to be going to a completely strange country in any capacity whatsoever.
The Customs official lifted his scarlet skull-cap and scratched his head thoughtfully.
“You are a doctor, perhaps?” he asked her.
Katherine smiled. Really it was too absurd to be asked all these questions, but it was nice too.
“I’m a nurse,” she said.
A broad smile answered hers.
“Welcome to Tunisia!” he laughed, very much in the grand manner, and waved to a porter to come and carry her baggage away.
“Taxi, madame? I find taxi while you change money, yes? No?”
“Yes,” she agreed.
It was strange to stand and listen to the babble of French all around her with the harsher sounds of Arabic underneath as the porters called to one another. It was fascinating too to watch the people. A little group of veiled women huddled in a corner, and men in djellabahs stood gossiping in every doorway.
Perhaps it was because it was all so strange to her that she noticed when a single European walked in and went over to the Customs counter. She watched him unfold some official-looking papers and present them to a tubby little man dressed in a
burnous.
Katherine watched him getting angrier and angrier, and wondered why. He didn’t look a patient man at the best of times. His nose was too prominent and he had odd, lop-sided features that were attractive in their own way, but added to the fierce expression that his bushy eyebrows gave him. The Arab waved his hands in the air, helplessly and a little apologetically, and the man said something to him in Arabic that sounded rude even where Katherine was standing. White-faced, the official went off to confer with his colleagues and the man was left on his side of the counter, impatiently drumming his fingers on the wooden top. Then he turned and his eyes met hers.
Katherine smiled nervously and busied herself with getting out her traveller’s cheques, aware that he was still staring at her. Didn’t the man have any manners? she asked herself angrily. She would glower back, she thought, and then she knew she wouldn’t because he looked a great deal more practised in that particular art than she would ever be.
She changed her money with a growing sense of relief and stowed the notes she had been given into her purse without pausing to count it, or even to see what it looked like. Bother the man! If there was one thing she disliked it was being made to feel self-conscious. With an effort she pulled herself together and walked slowly across to the main doors and the waiting taxi.
She was just getting into the taxi when a distraught voice called to her from behind.
“Just a moment!”
She paused, sitting down on the seat of the minute scarlet and white car, and looking out through the open door.
It was that man! With increasing indignation she glared up at him.
“Well?” she asked coldly.
The anger had gone from his face. In its place was amusement, and another expression that brought the blood coursing up into her cheeks.
“Well?” she repeated even more coldly.
He smiled.
“I believe you have an addition to your luggage,” he drawled. “An addition that belongs to me.”
More flustered than she would admit even to herself, she glanced wildly into the back seat at her suitcases.
“Wh-what does it look like?” she asked him.
He stood there for a moment looking down at her with that same inscrutable expression.
“I’ll ask the driver,” he said at last.
Katherine sat up very straight on the edge of her seat while the argument raged all round her. Suitcases were hauled out of the taxi and re-stacked neatly inside again, and all the time the men carried on a violent battle in words, their gestures becoming more and more threatening every moment.
“Why don’t you look in the boot?” she suggested at last.
The taxi-driver looked at her with a dawning appreciation in his eyes. He put up a hand and banged his own head sharply. But of course, where else would it be? Now perhaps everyone would be satisfied.
The package was small and hardly seemed worth all the fuss. Katherine raised her eyebrows slightly and clutched her handbag before it fell off her knee.
“May I go now?” she asked sweetly.
The man held his package tightly, his fingers tense and excited. He had nice hands, she noticed, beautifully manicured and well under control, as though they were used to carrying out the most intricate demands he could make on them. Perhaps he was an engineer? Or something to do with irrigation? She couldn’t make up her mind.
He smiled at he
r, his eyes lighting.
“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said. “I can’t understand how they allowed you to take it away with you. But there’s no harm done.”
He wasn’t French, she decided. He had the very faintest accent, but it wasn’t one that she could place. Impulsively she smiled back at him.
“Where are you going? Can I give you a lift?” she asked, and wished as promptly that she hadn’t.
“No. No, I have my car. Thank you very much,” he added belatedly.
He gave a slight nod to the driver and the taxi shot forward into the black night. Mysterious shapes came and went on either side, looming up out of the darkness and fading away again before Katherine could identify them. Only once was she sure that they had passed a palm tree. It was caught in the orange-yellow headlights for seconds together, looking exactly like a picture postcard, and then they swept round the corner beneath it and there was nothing but darkness once again.
Edouard de Hallet had swept into London like a tornado.
“So,” he had said, “the English doctors are the best in the world! Very well then, cure me!”
And the English doctors had done their best. He had been taken to one famous nursing home after another, blood tests had been taken, other doctors had been called in, and yet nobody could really discover exactly what was the matter with him.
He was, physically, a frail old man, but one was apt to forget this when faced with his fierce and extraordinary personality. He would fix the object of his displeasure with one of his strange yellow eyes and watch them wilt before him with a contemptuous pleasure. There was only one person whom he could stand being close to him for very long, and that was the quiet, rather shy nurse they had hired for him because she spoke a smattering of French and was willing to try and use it.
The nurse had been Katherine Lane.
At first she had been frankly terrified of him, but she had soon discovered that he was lonely as well as ill, and she had done her best to include him in her own simple pleasures and had listened by the hour as he had told her of his own life. He had been a very rich man. He had properties in France and an enormous citrus farm in Tunisia, as well as half an oasis in the south of that country, where they produced some of the famous Deglats Nours dates.
Not many men could have personally supervised so much land,” he had told her proudly. “Certainly there is nobody else in my family.” He had snorted angrily. “Have you written to tell them that I am dying? We may as well give them the good news as soon as possible!”
Katherine had written, but there had been no reply to her letter, and she had begun to doubt that he really did have a family at all. He was a very old man, and although he certainly had a great deal of money, who knew how many of his more or less incredible stories were no more than a figment of his imagination?
It had been sad though, when he had died and there had been none but herself to mourn for him. His body had been shipped back to France to rest in his family’s vault and Katherine had found herself a new job, nursing a young man who had jumped out of his aeroplane without a parachute and had, somehow, survived the incident.
It had been all of six months later when Katherine had received a letter from a firm of solicitors in London. If she would call, she had been told, they had something to tell her regarding the estate of the late Monsieur Edouard de Hallet. She had been oddly touched to think that he had left her some memento, but it had turned out to be rather more than that. He had left her the whole of his Tunisian property on the condition that she lived in that country for at least nine months in every year!
They drove into Tunis down a broad highway, lit on either side by the very latest in street lights. The approach was intersected by several other roads, and at the last of the junctions was a large roundabout planted solidly with flowers that looked weird and ghostly in the fluorescent light.
“You said the Hotel Maghreb?” the taxi-driver confirmed.
Katherine nodded.
“They told me in London I could get a room for the night there.” She hesitated. “Is it — is it a good hotel?” she asked him. She didn’t like to tell him of her secret fear that uninvited animal life would be sharing her bed. She was prepared for almost anything in her new life, but that —! She gave a little shudder.
“Very nice hotel,” he reassured her. “Very central.”
He set the taxi straight at a small gap in the traffic and cleared it with only a couple of inches on either side. In a few seconds he had shot round another corner and braked violently outside the imposing entrance to the hotel.
“Shall I carry your bags in for you?”
Katherine thanked him. She stared up at the sky-high frontage of the hotel with the occasional chinks of light showing through the tightly shuttered windows. It smelt faintly of distemper and orange-blossom as the street smelt of traffic, woollen clothes and doughnuts. It was a warm, welcoming smell, and, straightening her shoulders, she walked up the marble steps and into the hotel.
It had once been a French hotel, though now the receptionist was a Berber with the deeper tan of the south and the manager was a tall, dignified young Arab who had taken his training in Paris and was adhering closely to the high standards he had been taught there.
Katherine went straight to the desk.
“You have a reservation for me,” she said in French. “Miss Lane.”
“But yes. Will you go up to your room now, or will you have dinner first?”
Katherine hadn’t considered it before, but now she found she was very hungry indeed.
“I think I’ll go straight in to dinner,” she said.
He pulled her suitcases forward and sent them upstairs with a porter, giving his instructions in the harsher tones of Arabic and then turned easily back to French as he directed her to the diningroom.
It was a large room, completely white except for the vivid splash of orange of the curtains, picked up again in the small bowls of marigolds that stood on every table. Katherine stood for an instant in the doorway before the head waiter saw her and led her to a small table. At the same moment another man rose and came towards her. He was obviously French, with his hair cut short and the quiet, elegant movements of his hands, but it was his eyes that she noticed in particular. They were of the brightest blue that she had ever seen.
“I imagine that you must be Miss Lane?” he asked her lazily.
“Yes, I am.” She sounded surprised and that made him smile.
“I am Guillaume de Hallet.” He bowed slightly. “Old Edouard’s
nephew.”
She was shocked.
“His nephew?” she repeated.
He looked a trifle mocking.
“Do you mean you did not know?” he asked her. “There are two of us. Myself and my sister, Chantal.”
“But I wrote to you,” she began, “and you didn’t —”
“Didn’t what? Didn’t answer? How were we to know that he was really ill?”
Katherine’s outraged glance met his. How very blue his eyes were! Periwinkle blue!
“You could have made inquiries!” she said coldly.
He laughed a trifle ruefully.
“How wise you are, Miss Lane,” he mocked her. “Not only could but should have made inquiries, it seems! However, I have not come over to quarrel with you. I came to ask you if you would join us at our table. It will be better all round if we are seen to be friendly, don’t you think?”
Katherine’s eyes widened with dismay.
“I never dreamed he really did have any close relatives,” she said miserably. “He was always so alone.”
Guillaume de Hallet took her hand in his.
“That is past,” he said authoritatively. “It does not do to dwell too much on these things. We must think of the future, and your life here among us in this new country.”
She rose a little uncertainly. He had sounded kind — and yet there was a kind of menace behind his words. What was there to think abou
t? She had to live on one or other of the two estates for nine months of the year, and that was that. His blue eyes smiled at her and she smiled back. She was being too imaginative, she thought, he was only trying to be kind.
Chantal de Hallet greeted her with a smile. She wore a dress of blue wild silk that fitted her like a glove and was smart in the way that only a Frenchwoman — and a very rich Frenchwoman at that
— ever could be. She too had her brother’s blue eyes, but with her the blue was paler, like cloth that had been faded in the sun, and her other features were not so well put together.
“Welcome to Tunisia, Miss Lane,” she said dryly. “We heard you would be arriving today.”
Guillaume held out a chair and Katherine sat down on it, wishing now that she had taken the trouble to change before she had come into dinner. That wild silk took some living up to, and her own neat grey linen dress was not the answer.
“It’s very kind of you to ask me over,” she said quickly. “I hope I shan’t keep you waiting too long for your next course.”
The French girl shrugged.
“We have only just begun,” she said indifferently.
So, Katherine thought, not without exasperation, it had not been Chantal’s idea that she should be asked over. She wished she could like the other girl, but that ultra-smart, cold exterior was not very encouraging.
Her soup was brought and she picked up a spoon thoughtfully.
“Do you both live in Tunisia?” she asked.
There was a moment’s silence while Chantal fingered her collar restively and Guillaume pretended he hadn’t heard the question.
“What did she say?” Chantal asked at last of her brother in French.
“She asked us where we lived, cherie.” He laughed without any amusement. “We live, my dear Miss Lane, with you. We have lived with our uncle ever since we were small children, and I imagine that you would not be so unkind as to turn us out of our home now?”
Katherine took a quick, shocked breath.
“But didn’t he leave you anything?” she asked.
Chantal looked bored.
“He left me the French estates,” Guillaume said uncomfortably. “But unfortunately I do not enjoy living in France. To Chantal —” he glanced at his sister — “he left nothing at all. It is sad, hein, that he should have been so lacking in gratitude when she has kept his house so well all these years?”