She shot a glance at her travelling clock. Five minutes to five ! Oh, dear ! She flipped open a blue satin purse and slipped in her lipstick, compact, and a handkerchief. The georgette tunic of her dress fluttered like her heart as she made for Amalia’s room.
Her employer lay against a mound of pillows, a paperback thriller in hand, a box of fondants within reach. “My dear child,” she beamed over her reading spectacles, “how charming you look! I do declare that dress is just about the prettiest I ever did see. And how very nice your hair looks. I do think the sun out here has made it lighter than it was when you first came.”
“It is a few shades lighter,” Madeline agreed. “When I go home I hope my father won’t think I’ve been at the bleach bottle !”
“Don’t talk about going home not just yet,” Amalia pleaded. “Now get your wrap, or we’ll have Victor marching up the stairs. He’s the punctual type, being a medical man.”
Madeline’s hands pressed into the soft fur of the cape as she swung it about her shoulders. Nerves danced inside her and she experienced a desire to laugh when Amalia blithely added that Victor would be delighted to be escorting such a pretty companion. “Have a real good time, my dear,” she coaxed.
“Thank you.” Madeline pressed her cheek against Amalia’s, then, braced, she made her way downstairs. The salon door stood ajar and voices mingled inside in conversation. Came a purring laugh Donette, gesturing with a cigarette in a holder and looking tiny in contrast to the man standing facing her.
The sun-bronzed strength of Victor’s face was thrown into relief by the starched whiteness of his tropical dinner-jacket, this Madeline saw in a flash before he realized she had entered the room. He gave her a crisp bow, his expression betraying neither pleasure nor surprise at her appearance.
“Bon soir, Miss Page,” he greeted her.
“Good evening, Doctor,” she replied coolly.
Donette’s dusky eyes took in the white cape. “How kind of Tante Amalia to lend you a wrap,” she purred. “It quite makes your gown, petite.”
Madeline’s gown, as it happened, was a model from one of the haute couture boutiques in London. She had bought it with money won by a lucky premium bond, and she was quietly infuriated by Donette’s disparaging tone of voice.
“You look like a work of art, honey.” Brooke spoke out of the depths of an armchair, his air of laziness belied by the clenching of his right hand on the chair arm. “Guard her well, won’t you, mon vieux?” he said to Victor.
Victor quirked a dark brow and shared a glance between Brooke and Madeline. “I promise to be everything a gardien should be.” His tone of voice was very Gallic; he was obviously assuring the other man that this was business and nothing more. “Come, Miss Page, we have an hour’s drive ahead of us.”
“Have fun, honey,” Brooke murmured.
“Yes, do enjoy yourself, petite.” Donette puffed smoke and smiled with her mouth. “Victor is quite nice to go out with.
I know from experience.”
Madeline walked out to the car ahead of Victor, taut with dislike of Donette Samson. She was a little cat, and it was just like a highly intelligent man to be bowled over by her !
He came to Madeline’s side and held open the door beside the passenger seat. She stepped inside, noticing how spruced up the car was this evening, polished and brushed, with no sand grains crackling underfoot.
“Permettez-moi.” The georgette of her dress was in the way of the door and Victor carefully lifted the filmy material out of harm’s way. “I would not wish to spoil your gown.”
“Thank you.” She spoke rather breathlessly, then he was sitting beside her, the engine was humming and they were sweeping away from the villa. The window beside Victor was partly open and the air that blew in from the Bled was filled with the scent of the wild flowers that had sprung magically to bloom in that downpour of rain. They were fantastic, born of rain and sunshine in a matter of hours, gloriously golden, lavender, and blue.
“The incoming breeze does not blow your hair, Miss Page?”
Victor asked, a faint note of smiling indulgence in his voice.
“No I was just thinking how marvellous those wild flowers smell. How long will they last, Doctor ?”
“No more than a day. The desert is cruel to its flowers, though it gives them such splendour for a while.”
She gave a tiny sigh and felt him glance at her. “Sorry to be sentimental about them,” she said, “but those blue irises are so lovely, and I hate to think that in a few hours all the vivid life will be burned out of them.”
“Enjoy them and do not think about tomorrow,” he advised.
In a while they were speeding along one of the wide trunk roads laid by the French, the modernity of big road signs and petrol stations presenting quite a contrast to the occasional yoked camel or mule plodding round a well with a rag cover-ing its eyes, working a primitive irrigation system in order to keep alive a small olive grove or a field of crops. They passed a wood dense with conifers and came out beside wild open country again, made mysterious by the quivering sunset radiance of the sky, which held many colours, an Oriental vat of them spilling on to the desert in pools.
“Oh, look!” Madeline’s fur cape brushed against Victor as she leant forward to peer out of his side of the car. He slowed their speed so that she might get a good look at a great herd of camels with many calves among them, buff and brindle bundles on long, fragile legs, much more lovable than their disdainful, hare-lipped elders. The immense herd was in charge of several mounted Berbers, turbaned and rather Mongolian-featured. Recognizing the doctor’s car, they waved their cloaks and smiled broadly. Victor pressed the car klaxon in response, and Madeline thought with wonderment that this man could not have an enemy in all this vast desert.
“The baby camels are cute, no ?” he murmured.
“Delightful oh, by the way, Doctor, how is the fox cub you were kind enough to let me christen?”
“The little Ruff has become quite a house pet. Jeanne grumbles, but she never forgets to coddle him with a dish of milk.”
Madeline smiled and thought it possible that Victor’s rather dour housekeeper would do a lot to keep him happy. She had served his parents when he was young, and Madeline knew instinctively that he had not always been so cool and self-sufficient; as a boy he had probably been very lovable. A bit of a wild one in some respects, maybe, but Astrid Tourelle would not have tried to restrain this in him; her love for her son would have been full of humour, tolerance, and the right kind of pride in his fierce young energy and his good looks.
This evening he was looking wonderfully distinguished.
There were jetty mother-of-pearl studs at his snowy wrist-bands, while a thin gold watch had replaced the sturdy pigskin-strapped one he normally wore. He was scrupulously groomed in every detail, and Madeline felt a sudden glow of pure pleasure in his company. She wanted very much, she realized now, to enjoy the hours that lay ahead of them.
The sky had deepened to lapis lazuli when they sped into Jezara, passing a river bank where women idled in the cool dusk while their children played. They entered the town centre, a place of lime-washed houses and avenues planted with bitter-orange and jacaranda trees. Garlands of pigeons circled the narrow minarets and there were many white storks nesting on the flat roofs and peering down from the bastions that followed this upwinding road. The town fell behind as the car turned into a private driveway. Their headlights illumined a pair of graceful gates which were opened almost immediately by a white-uniformed figure, who saluted as the car rolled past him and smoothly braked in front of a flight of steps, down which came a second uniformed man. He held open the car door for them, then escorted them into a hall that made Madeline catch her breath. It seemed to run the length of the house, with a frieze of Moorish archways supported on columns at either side and a magnificent floor of tiles laid in mosaics. Lush azaleas frothed in copperware containers, tubbed orange and camellia trees flanked the archways,
while from a ceiling glowing with colour the chains of enormous brass lamps were held in the grasp of gargoyles.
In the household of a powerful Sheikh there are many attendants, and as Madeline walked the length of the hall beside Victor she was aware of them standing to attention in the alcoves and she realized that they were the Sheikh’s bodyguard. This, after all, was Morocco, whose politics were often in a state of turbulence.
Their escort paused before a draped entrance, through which at that precise moment stepped a man whom Madeline guessed right away was their host. The uniformed attendant melted away and the Sheikh Raschid stepped forward, a man of striking appearance, not quite as tall as Victor and very dark-bearded. He wore a folded turban of white bound with an agal of gold thread, but was otherwise clad in tropical evening wear. “Bienvenu, my friend ! ” He shook hands with Victor, then bowed charmingly as he was introduced to Madeline.
“You have made a conquest of my son, Miss Page,” he smiled, speaking in English with an accent not unlike Victor’s, which seemed to indicate that he had been educated in France.
“And I wish to thank you for the kindness you showed him while he was a patient at Green Palms.”
“Tahar is a delightful little boy,” she replied shyly, “and I was so pleased that he made a full recovery from his accident.”
“Praise Allah and our good friend le docteur. I offered him the pick of my stable, Miss Page,” a twinkle came into the Sheikh’s dense, sloping eyes, “but he desired instead that I donate a kidney machine to the hospital. What will you with such a man?”
Admire him, Madeline thought, with a glance that caught the edge of Victor’s smile. They entered the room from which their host had appeared, to find a young Moorish woman of fragile, amber beauty awaiting them. Though she was clad like her husband in European evening dress, her gown was styled along the simplest of lines and fashioned from the gos-samer silk of the East, with a pearly sheen over it that was reflected by the pearls braided into her coiled dusky hair.
Emerald cuffs were locked about her fine-boned wrists, while there was a delicate lacing of henna on her slim amber hands.
She could not speak English and greeted them in broken, pretty French, everything about her suggesting the ghazel of Eastern poetry. She seemed a little shy of Victor, though eman-cipated from the veil and obviously treated by her husband in a European manner. He regarded Dalina, Madeline noticed, with a humorous twinkle deep in his eyes, as though he under-stood her very well indeed and had not the slightest desire for that paradise beyond life which the Moslem male is taught to believe can never be provided by earthly women. His pride in the woman who had given him a son like Tahar was a tan-gible thing, and Madeline could feel herself relaxing in their company.
“I will take you to my apartments, Mees Page, where you can remove your cape,” Dalina said.
“Yes, run away for a while, my bit of sugar,” her husband laughed, “for I wish to show the good doctor my falcons.”
Falconry was a sport much enjoyed by Moroccan men, and on the way to Dalina’s private apartments the Sheikh’s wife paused in the hall to point out to Madeline an impressive por-trait of her husband in full Eastern regalia with a hooded falcon perched on his left wrist and a lean Saluki hound standing beside him. “I do not care much for the sport,” Dalina confided, “but men must have some outlet for their aggressive-ness, otherwise they indulge it in the home.”
Madeline could not see the Sheikh Raschid being anything but kind to this pretty creature, who might have been fashioned from amber porcelain, but she smilingly agreed that it was just as well to let a man hunt with falcons, or, as in England, encourage him to march round a golf-course knocking the devil out of a little white ball.
They smiled at each other as women will when it comes to men, and there and then friendship sprang to life between them.
Dalina’s apartments reflected the restrained sumptuousness of the salle d’attente, and after Madeline had laid aside her wrap and made a few minor repairs to her make-up she followed her hostess into the adjoining room. Tahar had been allowed to remain up to see her, and the lively child had collected together an array of his treasures to show his “si belle lalla”. He was adorable. His injured eye was now quite healed, with not a trace of a scar, and Madeline’s flare of pride in Victor’s skill was a pain and a pleasure at the same time.
She was introduced to Dalina’s sister, Lilah, who was sixteen. She had a pretty, pointed amber face and a bee-stung underlip, and in a week’s time she was going to be married.
Silk-trousered and bright-eyed, she darted to a painted chest.
“Regardez!” She smiled at Madeline and unfolded out of tissue the kaftan she would wear at her marriage ceremony. It was of shimmering brocade, pearl-buttoned to the hem and with the Hand of Fatima embroidered in gems on the back of it. The head ornament she would wear was beautifully set with pearls and cloudy green emeralds. It would hang in the centre of her forehead and for the first time her hair would be covered by a silk scarf, a gift of her husband-to-be.
In England sixteen might have been considered a rather youthful age for a girl to take on the responsibilities of marriage, but Madeline knew that here in Morocco it was quite usual. The really remarkable fact was that Lilah had not yet met the young man who was to be her husband; he had been selected for her by her brother-in-law as her father was dead and she was without brothers of her own. She twined an arm about Dalina’s waist and said with dimpled assurance that her sister had seen to it that the Sheikh chose someone young and handsome for Lilah.
“He is a patriarch with a long white beard,” Dalina laughed.
“I know he isn’t, so do not tease me.” Lilah smiled at Madeline. “Are you betrothed to the big fierce hakim?” she enquired ingenuously. “I watched him through the mesharabiya of my balcony when he came here once before. He has the eyes of a hawk, that one !”
A blush sprang into Madeline’s cheeks. “The doctor is just a friend of mine,” she explained.
“English women are allowed such friendships ?” Lilah exchanged a shocked look with her sister. “Oh, I think I would be afraid to be alone with him it is said by the Berbers that
he has magical powers, and I would fear he would cast a spell over me.”
Though Madeline smiled at this piece of nonsense, she did have to admit to herself that he had a most unusual type of personality. Angry as he could make her, he was also capable of charming her and charmed by him well, it was best not to pursue that thought !
“You must come to my house during the daylight hours, Mees Page.” Dalina’s great brown eyes smiled softly, for her guest shared a divan with Tahar, who was absorbed in an examination of the tiny photographs inside the gold heart of her wrist chain. “You can then see our peacocks and humming-birds. We have, too, a sunken pool in which Tahar swims with Lilah. There is much here to enjoy if you would like to come?”
“I’d love to ! ” Madeline had never felt so sure of anything in her life. Amalia was always saying that a car and a chauffeur were at her disposal whenever she cared to use them, and it would be interesting as well as fun to get to know this charming Moroccan family really well.
“Thees is le poppa,” Tahar announced, nodding to himself as he touched a finger to the photograph of Madeline’s father.
She had not had to tell him this and was delighted by his intelligence. “Thees is maman yes?”
“Yes, poppet!” Madeline couldn’t keep from hugging the child, unaware that Lilah had suddenly darted through a draped entrance into another room. The girl had caught the approaching timbre of male voices and she fled in shyness from the “big fierce hakim”, who came into this room just in time to see Madeline cuddling the boy. As Madeline realized Victor’s presence, her eyes met his, bright and very blue.
“How is Tahar?” He came over to the divan on which Madeline sat with the child and bending with a smile he cupped Tahar’s chin in a big hand and took a look at his eye.
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“Ah, yes, that is very satisfactory. You see very well with it, that is assured, eh, my small cigale?”
Tahar nodded and grinned, then was swept up in his father’s arms for a good night kiss. An attendant arrived to take him to bed, to which he went without a murmur when Madeline assured him that she was coming one day to see him swim in his pool. Victor listened to all this with a quirked eyebrow, but when he handed her the blue bag she had left lying on the divan behind her, she noticed the relaxed gentleness of his mouth. Something sweet and stormy raced through her when his fingers brushed hers, and she knew that no matter what had gone before in their relationship, no matter what lay ahead, tonight she was happy just to be with him.
Dinner was served in a dining-room furnished with carved Oriental furniture. Filigreed lamps burned softly, and the dark, glossy table was set with lace mats and uniquely decorated with white, pink, and lavender water-lilies floating in a silver bowl. Silent-footed servants appeared with each course.
The Sheikh had provided wine for his guests, and the meal began with avocado pear, its shiny green skin peeled back in attractive petals. Madeline tried a little pepper and a squeeze of lime at Victor’s suggestion and found her tiny spoonfuls of pear quite delicious. Conversation flowed with ease, then in came the first real kus-kus Madeline had eaten in Morocco. A large silver dish with an ornamental cover was brought to the table. The cover was removed to reveal a steaming mound of semolina studded with ortolans, apricots, juicy lamb cutlets and sections of chicken. A selection of vegetables followed, accompanied by a boat of richly brown gravy. Madeline had a good appetite and she did full justice to her first kus-kus. It was delectable. So too was the orange mousse with almond cream.
They had coffee in the adjoining room, which was Moorish in every detail. Crescent-shaped divans invited relaxation against silk-thread cushions, and there hung on the air a subtle fragrance of sandalwood. Madeline remarked how pleasant it was, and Dalina told her a censer had been swung to dispel food smells.
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