`I don't want to talk about that ...' She looked away from him, out of the window that revealed an infinity of star-shot darkness. Awesome to be so high in the night sky, one of ninety other passengers, and yet somehow alone with one man. A man who said devastating things, as if he had the right to shock her, to tear pity from her, to make her rebellious and submissive at the same time.
She hardly knew herself any more, a slim stranger in graceful clothes, her hand weighted by a fabulous emerald. `Did you tell Rachael about me?' she asked.
`No.' A flame reflected in the window as he lit a cigarette. 'I merely told her that I was returning home and she was not to worry. I would see to it that my grandmother did not withdraw her financial support because of Joyosa. This time we parted without tears.'
Janna could picture their goodbye, the kisses that would be passionately tender instead of fiercely hurtful.
`I'm glad you kept all this a secret, Don Raul. I'm not proud of the part I've agreed to play. Suppose—' `Suppose what, Miss Smith?' he taunted.
`Joyosa might turn up at El Amara.'
`I hardly think so. Did I not tell you that she finds me a sheik of the desert? She would be too afraid.'
`I think I could be afraid of you!'
`Do tell me why, Janna. It fascinates me to be let into your mind. Have I a wicked face?'
`You—you know too much about people,' she said defensively.
`You mean I am not easy to fool.'
`Impossible to fool, or mystify.'
`Ah, there you are wrong. I find you a mysterious person, Janna. Never before has my path been crossed by a young orphan girl who reminds me of a petal trapped in ice. I wonder what our desert sun will do to you? Will you bloom there, or melt quite away with apprehension?' He smiled, his eyes dark and glimmering through the smoke of his cigarette. 'You know, it isn't such a terrible thing that I ask of you, to pretend to be the sweetheart with no sweetness or heart to give me. You should enjoy the part. It should come natural to you to show only coolness to a man you disapprove of—ah, the blue eyes open wide! Not with a protest, but with surprise that I speak with such candour. I am a Spaniard, you know.'
`I know!' she echoed.
`And how could you approve of a man like myself, when you are a girl who has been taught to eat her crusts and be grateful for them, and not have the sins of pride and self-will. I have both, have I not? In your eyes, chica, I must be a sort of masculine Mildred, without the titian hair.'
`Of course you aren't.' Janna had to laugh. 'She's impossible—and so ready to think the worst of people without being an angel herself.'
`Only an angel may judge the faults of others?'
She looked at him quickly, detecting a note of irony in his voice. 'I'm no angel, senor. I didn't mean to imply that.'
`On the contrary, I find you are one of the few people who has a conscience. It worries you that people seem to care only about themselves. It concerns you that the pursuit of pleasure takes precedence over kindness and the will to help. I think, Janna Smith, that you will like very much the folk of El Amara. In them you will find a lot of kindness, and it will delight you to hear them chanting their old Andalusian songs in the fruit groves.'
`Andalusia is in Spain,' she said, puzzled.
`Quite so, and many of our people are descended from the Moors who lived in Spain for many years. One of my men has ancient keys that would open the doors of several large houses in Spain. Does it amaze you, senorita, to hear that the soul of Iberia sings on the edge of the desert? The Moors took their cultures and their traditions to the old country and implanted in Iberians the love of fountains and flowers, and enclosed courtyards where their women might be kept mysterious. Many lords of Spain are descended from the Moorish princes. My own grandfather married the Princess Yamila, who is a real daughter of Morocco. When I was a boy, she was still a ravishingly beautiful woman. Even yet she retains much of her beauty, as jade does, or a piece of carved ivory. You will be fascinated by her.'
`I shall be frightened, Don Raul, that she will find me an impostor.'
`Even if she does,' his smile was teasing, 'she will not have your head cut off. We are not that uncivilized.'
`It can't be passed off as a joke, Don Raul. I'm nervous.'
This seemed not to worry Raul Cesar Bey. His main concern was for the lovely Rachael, and Janna was sure it wouldn't trouble him if in the end she was sent away in disgrace from his grandmother's house.
`Decide now.' There was a sudden hard note in his voice. `In a few hours we land at Casablanca, where I have booked rooms at a hotel. You come all the way with me, or we part there.'
`In a hotel garden?' she said whimsically. She gazed from the window into the darkness gemmed with stars. A beautiful night ... and all such nights would be so lonely again if she decided not to go all the way to the desert, to the house that stood there, white-walled and surely beautiful.
If she looked at Don Raul, into his dark, demanding eyes, she would be lost again, like a child who takes the hand of a stranger and hopes to be led homeward.
Where was home?
No more the orphanage, or the bedsitter in the heart of London. No more the hotel on the Côte d'Azur. Each one in its turn had seemed to lead to this moment, to flight across the sands to the gateway of a stranger's house.
Was it written in the stars ... or in the eyes of the man seated beside her?
She tensed as she felt his touch on the Romanos emerald on her hand. 'I offer you a trip to enchantment, little orphan.'
`It could turn out to be a mirage, senor.'
`I assure you El Amara is real, and for once in your life you will be treated like a princess.'
`I never went that far in my dreaming,' she protested. `Most girls go that far,' he mocked. 'They even dream of a prince.'
She looked directly at him, a flash of defensiveness in
her eyes. 'I don't have silly dreams, Don Raul, or get crushes on men who are not of my real world. You needn't worry that I shall get so fond of the Romanos emerald that I shall want always to wear it. I can guess for whom it's really intended.'
He returned her look with narrowed eyes. 'Then you are a clever girl,' he said curtly. He spoke of impersonal things for the remainder of the trip, and it was a relief when the landing lights flashed on and they hovered over the airport. His hands felt brusque as he took hold of the buckles of her seat-belt and clicked them together.
`We have arrived at Casablanca,' he said.
They drove in a cab to the hotel, and were shown to rooms that turned out to be adjoining ones. After the bellboy had left them, Don Raul said sardonically that the clerk must have assumed from his wire that the Princess would be with him. When in Casablanca together they always stayed at this hotel.
`It is of no consequence.' He smiled lazily. 'We slept last night in adjoining rooms.'
He glanced about the large, grand bedroom, and at Janna marooned on an oriental carpet. 'You look tired,' he said. 'Though it's late I feel myself like a walk to a restaurant that stays open late and serves Turkish coffee. Would you like to come with me, or do you want to go to bed?'
It was true she was rather tired, but she decided against going with him because she had the feeling he wished to be alone. All day they had been in each other's company and he had seen more than enough of her.
`I'll go to bed,' she said. 'Do we continue our journey in the morning?'
`Yes. We take the train to Benikesh, where a car will be waiting to pick us up. But you may like to stay there a day or two, to do a little sightseeing.'
`Whatever you wish, Don Raul.'
`Don't be humble.' He snapped the words and made her
jump. `Benikesh is an old legendary city and I am sure you would enjoy seeing it.'
He bowed briefly and almost snapped his heels together as he left her and went into his own room. She walked to the dressing-table and winced to see how pale and tense she looked. So much had happened in so short a time, and she sank down
on the dressing stool and allowed herself to droop a little now Don Raul was out of sight. He was so active and vital, and seemed never to get tired. Like the city beyond her windows, which still hummed with late-night sounds. As in London and New York there were people who seemed never to sleep. All night the neons burned with colour, spelling out the names of a thousand different things to be consumed or adorned by. They blazed above the sound of motor horns and music spilling from the clubs and late-closing restaurants.
Benikesh sounded much more like a desert city, and she looked forward to seeing the souks and the minarets, and the robed Bedouin who came in from the realms of sand, sunburned and free as hawks.
She heard a door close in the corridor and guessed that Don Raul was on his way out to his solitary supper. He was a strange man. There were times when he could charm her; others when he pounced and frightened her. She stared at her own face in the mirror and wondered if her likeness to Joyosa made him occasionally cruel to her. At other times he did unexpected things, such as dropping into her bag the white jade compact with the jewelled J. on the front of it. She was aware that Joyosa would possess such things, but all the same it thrilled her in a way she must guard against to be given such expensive trifles.
For powdering that funny little nose,' he had said, and never before had anyone paid her a casual endearment, and she was beginning to understand why girls longed for love and affection from a man.
A thought that sent her spinning away from the mirror, which showed her a face that for Raul Cesar Bey was a re-
minder of someone for whom he had felt no love at all. It could have been that lack of love, sensed by Joyosa, which had sent her in flight with another man. To be the unloved bride of a man of pride and self-will, whom only love could tame, would be impossible. Joyosa had fled from that.... and Janna could hardly blame her.
She undressed, washed her hands and face, and climbed into the large silky bed. She reached up and pulled at the lamp cord. The room went dim, and then was lit at intervals by the neons that weaved a rose and green pattern upon the ceiling. She drifted off to sleep long before there was any sound from the adjoining room, any indication that Don Raul had returned from his jaunt. It may have been the strangeness of the place, or perhaps the flicker of the neons that induced the dream, one that recurred whenever she was worried about something; a reliving of a childhood incident, suffered in the grounds surrounding the Essex Home.
It was Christmas time. There were red berries on the bushes and the leaves were green and shiny. The children were out with a teacher, wrapped up in their woollies, collecting sprays of holly to decorate the rather austere hall where they would eat their Christmas dinner, and play games, and open the puzzles and books presented by the Board, substitutes for the toys that spilled so lovingly from a pillowcase in the small houses with gardens, where the children played who had parents to care for them.
There was a fairly wide stream running through the grounds, and because the weather was extra cold that winter it had iced over. Margie, one of the more daring youngsters in Janna's charge (Janna, then being thirteen, was a sort of prefect) noticed a lovely bunch of holly at the other side of the stream and darting away from the other children she slid across the ice and reached for her red glow of the berries, so warm and inviting on such a chilly day.
Suddenly there was a hiss and a crack. The ice had not yet set hard, and with a frightened scream Margie plunged
into the icy water, a small orphan child quite unable to swim, her terrified eyes beseeching help of someone as the dark water closed over her pixie hood.
Janna had not known how to swim, but that had not stopped her from leaping in after the small girl and grabbing hold of her just as their teacher appeared. In the nightmare that followed Janna had nearly drowned as the teacher had got Margie to the bank of the stream, and then herself, half-choked by the freezing water, and later blamed for the incident because she was older than the children in her charge and she should have kept them from going near the iced-over stream.
Janna had cried herself to sleep that night, aware that if she had thought only about herself when Margie had fallen through the ice, the little girl might have drowned before their teacher heard the cries of the other children and came hurrying to the scene of the accident. Margie, with her pretty, mischievous face, was the one who was fussed over, and Janna had never forgotten being blamed.
Now in her dream it all came back, the terror, the feeling of being dragged under, the cries of Margie, and her own tears when it was all over and she was packed off to bed.
`It wasn't my fault ... she was in the water before I'd finished tying Tony's bootlace when it came undone ... please, I don't want to go to bed. Let me listen to the carols ...'
She was sobbing all over again, feeling the injustice of it all, and so hurt because they wouldn't let her listen to the carol singers from the village. 'I'll run away,' she sobbed. `I can't stay here ... no one cares about me ... all I'm good for is to be a s-servant
`Janna.' Hands gripped her, shook her, and she awoke with a cry, tears all over her face. She gazed up blankly at someone who was unfamiliar to her for several seconds. Her dream still gripped her, and she was a child again, alone in a dormitory where a single lamp burned low.
`Janna, you were crying out so pitifully ... something about running away.'
Then, with a thump of her heart, she knew who spoke to her, who held her, who looked down at her with such dark eyes in the lamplight. `I—I was dreaming,' she murmured.
`Having a nightmare is more likely.' He sat down on the side of the bed, and his hands still pressed warmly into her shoulders. 'You have been crying, so it must have been a very unhappy dream indeed. Tell me, why do you want to run away? Because you feel guilty about posing as another girl?'
She shook her head, her hair tousled and damp like a child's. She raised a hand and wiped away her tears. 'It's something I remember in my sleep, every so often. Something that happened when I was a child at the orphanage.'
Did they lock you in the broom cupboard for being disobedient?'
`N-nothing quite so drastic.' She gave a husky laugh. `Silly of me to cry over the past.'
`Not at all.' His eyes held hers, the pupils enlarged and merging into the irises that were almost black. Wonderful eyes, in which she felt she was drowning. 'I used to have bad dreams when I was a child, and the Princess would come to me and hold me, and rock me off to sleep again.'
He smiled and Janna tensed as he drew her suddenly against him and cradled her in the hard hollow of his shoulder, covered by the black silk of his pyjama jacket.
`No ... please.' She struggled and was subdued and told not to be a little ninny.
`I'm not going to seduce you,' he mocked. 'I know what it is to feel desperately unhappy, and when this happens to us when we are young it is all the harder to bear. Now relax, don't think of me as a man, don't think of anything but falling off to sleep and having a good dream. The Princess used to say to me, "Think of your favourite book, chico, and in your dreams you will be the hero and able to overcome all your dragons." I say the same to you, Janna.
Be the heroine of your dreams, not the victim. If they shut you in the broom cupboard again, then just laugh and talk to the mops.'
This was kind, crazy, dangerous pillow talk. It made her want to cuddle close and let the world be well lost for love of him. Oh, what was she thinking, what was she feeling? This was the middle of the night, when everything took on a strange unreality, but it would be all too real in the morning if a little kindness from him led her to lose her head, and her heart.
`I—I think I shall sleep now,' she said faintly. 'I'm tired out.'
`Good.' With an unrevealing face he laid her back against the pillows, rearranged the silk coverlet, and rose to his feet. The lamplight slanted upwards and there was a hint of a smile in his eyes. 'What is your favourite book, Janna?'
`I just can't think—I've read so many.' Her smile was touched by mischi
ef. 'Not one of Mildred's, anyway. More likely one of Scott Fitzgerald's.'
`Trying to pretend you are a sophisticate?' he mocked her, but not unkindly. 'Forget the old hurts, chica. Put them out of your mind and just remember you are here, far away from the orphanage and from Madam Noyes. Whatever sort of man I am, I don't think I am quite so terrible as that vain, noisy woman.'
Janna's toes curled together in the large bed ... he made her feel uncertain, but never inferior. He teased her innocence, but he didn't say things to make her feel small. If this were a dream and she had to awake to face Mildred again . . . she shrank physically from the thought, and saw his eyes take on a glitter as he looked down at her.
`Am I so terrible, then?' he demanded.
`No,' she quickly denied. 'I'm grateful to you for not minding that I cried out and woke you with my nightmare.'
`I can be kind,' he drawled. 'Have you made up your mind to come with me to El Amara?'
She nodded.
`But you are still a little afraid, eh?'
`Haven't I reason to be?'
`Perhaps.' He walked to the door that stood ajar between
their rooms. 'But we have a saying, don't count the bruised
fruit before the harvest . . . don't hate or love blindly.'
`Some things are easier said than done, Don Raul.'
`You refer to the fruit . . . or the love?'
`I'm a stranger to love, senor. You said so yourself.'
`So I did.' He gave a sardonic laugh. 'But you will not remain a stranger to it. We love, or we become like hollow trees where the hornets build their stinging traps. Goodnight, Miss Smith. Forget yesterday and dream of tomorrow.'
The door closed behind him. She was alone, his words lingering with her, and she was more than ever certain that as the pretence ward of the Princess she was in for a complicated time at El Amara. She sensed that the Princess and her grandson were alike in their ways and their passions. She would be involved with the two of them, and she wondered if her nerve was up to it.
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