Desert Doctor by Violet Winspear
Madeline felt that her lines had fallen in pleasant places when she was asked to go to Morocco with her employer, a charming American womanso charming, in fact, that Madeline soon discovered that she was doing her best to manufacture an engagement between her secretary and her nephew, Brooke Van Cleefe. Certainly Morocco was a place made for love. Its very air breathed romance. But, life being what it is, Madeline’s heart was captured not by Brooke but by the glamorous Doctor Victor Tourelle-the one man who seemed permanently unaffected by Morocco’s romantic spell !
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CHAPTER I
A BRAZEN sun blazed down over Casablanca, intensifying the glare of the white buildings and the metallic green fronds of tall palms etched against the tropical blue of the sky. Brown men in striped robes milled like troublesome wasps about the people emerging from the air terminal, and it was not to be wondered at that Madeline Page experienced a moment of panic when her suitcases were whisked out of her possession by a large pair of hands.
“Me see after lalla come ! ” a guttural voice boomed above her head. She met a wide grin, then the brown giant was padding towards a line of waiting vehicles, and when Madeline reached his side he was stowing her cases into a cab with a fringed canopy and a sun-bemused driver nodding over the hindquarters of a drowsy old horse.
“We go Hotel Mamoudi.” The dragoman beamed down upon Madeline, evidently employed by the management of the hotel he mentioned.
Madeline shook her honey-bright head and firmly replied that she had no intention of going to the Hotel Mamoudi. She went on to explain that someone was coming to the airport to meet her, but her English was obviously beyond him, and she resorted to grammar-school French in an attempt to stop what was rapidly becoming an abduction.
She was halfway in the cab when a brown hand grasped her abductor’s robe and hauled him away from her. Arabic crackled, and Madeline saw that she had been rescued by tall man attired in the camel-roped headwear of an Arab.
she fell back a step as she encountered a pair of fierce eyes set in a face that made her catch her breath. The pride of some ancient race was stamped on every haughty feature, while the African sun had bitten his skin to a deep bronze. The tawny steel of his eyes impaled her; there was a relentless vigour about the man that left her weak and wordless.
It was a further assault on her nerves when his tigerish eyes scathingly appraised the uncovered, supple swing of her hair and the porcelain blue of her suit, beneath which she wore a silk blouse the amethyst blue of her eyes. Madeline wasn’t a vain girl, but she certainly didn’t think she rated so disapprov-ing a look.
Her chin tilted and she spoke with ice tinkling in her voice : “Would you mind telling this crazy Arab that I don’t want to go to the Hotel Mamoudi?” she said. “I’m being met by the nephew of my employer, Mrs. Van Cleef. He is to drive me to her villa at Marrakesh.”
The dark brows of the tall stranger drew together in a formidable line, then he spoke again in fluent Arabic to the dragoman, who had now relapsed into the docility of a scolded child. He addressed Madeline’s rescuer as El Hakim, showed off his sugar-white grin and hurriedly transferred her cases to the dusty pavement.
Madeline flipped open her envelope bag for a couple of coins. The dragoman took them, then loped off in search of his next victim, leaving Madeline to stammer her thanks to this man whose eyes remained unsmiling in his aloof, bronzed face.
“He is Bedouin, that one, and they are persistent as flies unless handled with authority.” Then very formally, and jolt-ing her pulses with surprise, he added : “It would seem that I am addressing the young woman who is to assist Madame Van Cleef with her husband’s biography?”
“You know her?” Madeline exclaimed.
“My house is situated in the vicinity of the Villa Mimosa.”
A pair of lean brown hands spread themselves in a gesture wholly foreign. “I must further inform you that Brooke Van Cleef was thrown from his mount while out riding yesterday morning. A bone in his right ankle was broken, therefore I shall be driving you to the home of your employer.”
“I see.” Madeline wasnt exactly overwhelmed by this piece of information. She knew the drive to Marrakesh was a fairly long one, and somehow she didn’t fancy several unfriendly hours of this man’s company.
She met his eyes and surprised a glint of ironical humour in them. “I I was wondering what was keeping Brooke.”
She spoke hastily, certain he had read her mind. “I’m sorry to hear about his accident.”
“He no doubt waits impatiently to hear those words of sympathy himself. Come, let us start !” Hoisting her cases, he made for a dusty black car. Madeline’s high-heeled shoes pattered beside his rope-soled sandals, while her glance lifted and dwelt on his hawk profile. El Hakim, eh? Surely in Arabic those words meant “the doctor”?
Again, disconcertingly, he seemed to read her thoughts.
“I must introduce myself. I am Victor Tourelle,” he informed her. “The ophthalmic department of a hospital in Marrakesh is in my charge.”
“You’re an eye surgeon?” Madeline was surprised and intrigued. She would not have taken this curt Frenchman for a doctor. With his arrogant bearing and his wide shoulders, he seemed a man of action in open spaces. She could not visualize him in a medical setting.
“Out here in the East, Miss Page, the term surgeon covers a wide area. Though I specialize in eye diseases, my medical tours into the desert involve the putting in order of various other matters hardly likely to be of interest to a young anglaise secretary.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Dr. Touelle,” Madeline protested, stung by a note in his deep, alien voice that almost dismissed her as a child. “I’ve come to Morocco in a very interested frame of mind.”
He unlocked his car and tossed her cases into the back. With a suave politeness he held open the door beside the passenger seat, and when Madeline had slid inside he closed down the sun-roof. “You would be well advised to wear a hat out here,”
he remarked crisply. “Fair-haired people are
particularly sus-ceptible to the African sun, and as the noon hour approaches the heat increases. You would not, c’est evident, enjoy a desert migraine.”
He joined her in the car. They swung out into the streaming traffic of a wide, palm-lined boulevard, and Madeline thought with irritation that this man’s name definitely suited him. Victor domineering and chockfull of his own authority. Tourelle tower, impenetrable and nail-studded !
Her slender fingers curled about the beige bag that matched her shoes. This was the most disturbing male she had ever encountered, she decided, noticing that only a few inches of olive green leather separated their elbows. Still, if they were going to be shut in together like this for the next few hours, she had better do something to relieve the antagon-ism that seemed to be bristling between them.
“I’m grateful for this lift into Marrakesh, Dr. Tourelle,”
she said, “but I hope I haven’t dragged you away from your duties at the hospital?”
“I would hardly permit a stranger to do that,” he replied bluntly. “When your good employer learned that I was driving into Casablanca on business she exerted her American charm on your behalf.”
“I see ! ” Madeline drew in her blue-clad elbow with rising temper. “If you hadn’t been coming into Casablanca, I take it I should have been left to the importunities of a bunch of hotel touts or worse ?”
She felt his tawny glance sweep her profile. She didn’t have to look at him to know his chiselled mouth had relaxed into a smile and that it was a caustic one.
“The good widow requires a secretary too badly to risk losing you to white slavers,” he gibed. “If I could not have picked you up, she would have come for you in person.”
White slavers ! Madeline could feel herself going pink. It was Aunt Cissie who had planted the absurd notion in her mind in the first place, but her widower father had laughed at his sister, who kept house for him, and told her that Morocco had advanced in its ideas since the days of the Rif bandits of The Desert Song.
Madeline’s father, who ran his own small market garden in Surrey, had been a dear about this trip to Morocco. The magazine for which Madeline had been working had gone into liquidation, and she was already acquainted with Brooke Van Cleef, who did freelance writing when he wasn’t taking part in car rallies, tennis tournaments, and various other activities indulged in by gay, attractive playboys with a doting relative to hand over monthly cheques.
“Morocco’s a long way from England, my dear,” her father warned her, when he agreed to her taking this temporary job with Brooke’s aunt, “so watch your step with that young man when you’re feeling homesick. He’s the type to cash in on a girl’s lonesome moods, but I doubt whether he’ll have marriage on his mind for some years to come.”
Madeline smiled a little to herself as she pondered on Brooke in Victor Tourelle’s car. No two men could be more opposite in looks and temperament.
Brooke, with his slender foil of a body, his chestnut hair and greenish eyes, had a lazy kind of charm that definitely had an appeal for women of all ages.
He admitted that his widowed aunt spoilt him. Youth, she said, was to be enjoyed a philosophy not surprising in a woman who had watched her archaeologist husband toil his youth away under cruel, relentless desert suns. But there would always be men like that, Madeline reflected, her glance on the forceful, sun-bitten profile of the man sitting beside her. They reaped the utmost satisfaction out of toil and were coldly con-temptuous of the lotus-eaters.
He swung the car round a string of overburdened mules, and Madeline’s glance slipped to his brown hands on the wheel.
They looked, she thought, as strong and supple as steel.
“You are already acquainted with Brooke Van Cleef, is it not so, Miss Page?” he remarked.
“We met in England when he wrote some articles for the magazine I worked on. He recommended me for this job with his aunt he knew I’d had experience editing raw material,”
she added firmly, seeing something cynical flicker on the edge of that boldly cut mouth.
“Permit me to remark that you are but three apples high, therefore it surprises me that you have been permitted to come alone to Maroc in this way.”
“I’m no helpless biddy-chick, Doctor ! ” Madeline retorted indignantly. “I’ve been earning my own living since I was sixteen. I should hope I’ve learned in four years to look after myself.”
The car halted at an intersection where a tropical-uniformed policeman was directing the traffic, and Madeline was treated to the full impact of Victor Tourelle’s startling eyes. With a cool detachment they raked her young, clear-skinned face. “You are easily ruffled, ma fine,” he mocked softly. “One can do that only to unfledged feathers.”
Madeline caught her breath at his audacity in speaking to her in such a way … in a voice that was edged with worldly mockery.
“Englishmen,” she said cuttingly, “are not in the habit of chaining their daughters to the domestic hearth until a satisfactory suitor comes along. I wanted to come to Morocco to work, and my father saw no objection to the idea.”
“What of la mere?” he drawled as the car started forward again. “Did she not object to one so young making a journey alone to a land such as this?”
“My mother died when I was twelve. Good heavens, Doctor, you talk as though this were the Victorian era! I feel sorry for French girls. What a life they must lead, surrounded by men with such antiquated notions! ”
“It is natural for a man to want to protect,” he retorted, “and if the women of your land have lost the ability to enjoy this, then it would account for their look of restless dissatisfaction.”
To her annoyance she couldn’t argue with this point of view. She had worked with women who had been, as he said, restlessly dissatisfied, career-conscious for the most part, their marriages a secondary consideration.
Tourelle’s car was now heading into the desert and the air that blew through the open windows was laced with strange scents. It was Biblical country, rock-strewn, with occasional exciting glimpses of tent dwellings. Madeline gazed at a grove of palms and thought they looked like war-bonnets waving against the intensely blue sky. She frowned when she saw a small donkey plodding across the sand loaded down to his hooves with camel-thorn.
“Poor little animal ! ” she exclaimed.
“Humility is another word for doormat to the Arab, consequently that is how he treats the patient burro,” said her companion. “The arrogant camel he treats with remarkable respect.”
Which, she thought irresistibly, would explain the attitude of that Bedouin outside the airport !
Laughter of a comprehending nature rang at her side, and warm-cheeked, half laughing herself, Madeline told this man he had X-ray eyes and was an uncomfortable person to be with.
“As a surgeon I merely have well trained eyes,” he replied.
“English women, perhaps because of the clearness of their skins and the directness of their glance, have easy faces to read.
Then again you do not like me very much, I think, and your cheeks rob the pink carnation each time I say something that pricks you.”
Madeline opened her lips, then closed them again. A startled current of awareness ran through her, she realized that she had been about to deny his assertion that she disliked him.
It would be nearer the truth to say that he was like no one else she had ever met alien, enigmatic, shot through by a fierce-ness that had its echo in the desert surrounding them With such a man you could not decide right away whether you liked or disliked him, his personality was far too vital and subtle for such quick judgment.
In that moment the car braked to a halt in a cloud of dust and Madeline saw a camel blocking their path. Long-legged and disdainful, it stood firmly planted in the dust of this rather narrow roadway, gazing into the distance with a supreme dis-regard of the fearful noise the car horn was making.
“Grand Dieu!” Tourelle swung out of the car and went str
iding towards the long-necked, supercilious-looking beast.
“Emshi! Emshi!” His khaki-clad arms waved about in the air.
“Out of the way, you old waterskin !”
The camel sneered, showing tombstone teeth, and with a lusty arm the doctor slapped the beast on the haunch and at last got him moving.
Then Madeline sat forward in her seat, a nerve jigging in her throat as a thin, ragged Arab appeared from behind a straggle of prickly thorn. He was scowling, and Madeline felt certain there was going to be a spot of trouble. But after a preliminary exchange of emphatic Arabic the desert doctor fell into conversation with the Arab, who kept pointing ,in a kind of despair towards the bushes at the roadside.
Madeline caught some words. Hakim, then aziz, which she knew meant beloved. Somehow she caught on that the man’s wife was behind the bushes and in need of medical help.
The doctor returned to the car, and Madeline wasn’t surprised when he reached into the back for his surgical bag.
“That young Berber is having difficulty getting his wife to a medic,” he explained. “I am going to take a look at her.”
Madeline was preparing to slip out of the car when steel fingers detached hers from the door-handle. She was crisply told to remain where she was.
“But I might be able to help you, Dr. Tourelle ! ”
“I doubt it.” The startling regularity of his teeth showed for a moment. “The woman, I venture to guess, has an abscessed tooth. She is behind those bushes indulging in a weep because of her swollen face and I am going to lance the infected gum for her.”
“Oh?” Madeline had been expecting something a lot more dramatic than this, and she saw with exasperation that the doctor was enjoying the joke as he strode to the prickly thorn where his patient awaited him.
A minute or two slipped by. Madeline decided to stretch her legs on the roadway, but the sun was now in its zenith and blazing much too fiercely for her English eyes to be able to stand it Her sunglasses were probably right at the bottom of her case, so she waited in the shadow of the car, nerves tensed for a wail of pain from the Berber woman. Madeline wasn’t yet acquainted with the stoicism of desert people, and she blinked with surprise when Dr. Tourelle reappeared, accompanied by his patient and her husband. The girl she was no more than that was now laughing over a piece of veiling she held across the lower part of her face, but upon seeing Madeline by the car she stood still and gaped. Her husband did the same, and very naturally Madeline wondered what was wrong.
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