Tawny Sands

by Violet Winspear

  `Your eyes are sad.' Ahmed sat looking at her with a kind and questioning smile. 'A woman is supposed to be content after being fed upon the fruits of El Amara.'

  `I am considering your offer, Ahmed. I think I should like to go away quickly and quietly—if you will help me?'

  `Ah, then my guess was a correct one—you are afraid of a forced marriage with Raul. You wish to leave El Amara without him knowing?'

  `Yes—it would be for the best,' she said quietly, her gaze bent to her coffee cup. 'Could you arrange it for me?'

  `I could do better than that, Janna. I could take you.' `Really?' Her eyes met his. 'If Raul found out, he would be very angry.'

  `I expect he will guess that I am the culprit, but in both of us there is a dash of the devil and we have had fights before.'

  `Over a girl?' She half smiled.

  He laughed. 'More often over a horse we both favoured, and once when I shot a gazelle by mistake. Upon that occasion he almost broke my jaw.'

  `He may be equally angry if you conduct me across the desert to Benikesh, where I can take the train. Are you prepared for that?'

  `I admire you, Janna.'

  `It seems hardly worth the risk, for a girl you have known only a week.'

  `Some people we know better in a week than in a year. I know what sort of a girl you are—you want those you are fond of to be happy, and you can see no happiness in a marriage of reluctance. Tell me frankly, are you running away from a man you fear, or a man you love?'

  `I would hardly run away if I—loved Raul.'

  `I think you are the sort of girl who would run away for exactly that reason. You would not marry just to have security and a good home. There is a saying that the cool night harbours a warm day, here in the desert. The white flower often has a golden heart.'

  `Meaning?' Her lips trembled against the rim of her coffee cup.

  `You would no more be content with a cool and polite marriage than Raul himself. Won't you tell him to his face that you wish to go away?'

  `I could—but he can be persuasive.'

  `You are afraid you might give in to him, as you gave in when he met you in France and talked you into coming here —in place of Joyosa?'

  `Yes.'

  `Then you must be very fond of him, if you are afraid of yourself rather than of him.'

  `I—I don't want to discuss my feelings, Ahmed I just want to have arranged as soon as possible a way of—escape. It sounds melodramatic, I know, but if you are willing to take me, then I should be deeply grateful. There is no one else I can ask. No one else I dare to ask. I don't want him to find out that I plan to leave. I just want to make the break as swiftly and finally as possible.'

  'Then I suggest the evening of our grandmother's birthday party, when most of his attention will be upon her. We could drive away in my car to Dafni, a town about forty miles from here where I can arrange for a private plane to take you all the way to Casablanca.'

  `I—I haven't a great deal of money, Ahmed.'

  `It would be my pleasure to pay your passage.'

  `Why do you wish to help me? What is your real reason?' `I don't like to see you unhappy.'

  `No, there is more to it than that. I wonder if you don't like Raul and would like to pay him out for something.'

  Ahmed slowly shook his head as he lit a cheroot and puffed smoke at a hovering wasp. 'The truth is that I admire Raul very much. He is the man destined to take charge of things here—already he is the nominal head of El Amara—and I feel that he must have a contented home life if he is to be the governor of vision and enterprise which we need in order to expand and develop into a really progressive province. I know that Raul has many new schemes up his sleeve, but there is a side to him which needs the close companionship, the love and devotion of a wife of his heart. If Raul has this, then there is nothing he will not accomplish for El Amara. We live, Janna, in an age of political upheaval and rebellion, and Raul will hold the loyalty and love of our people if his own personal happiness is centred here, for him to return to at the end of each day.'

  `To the woman he loves,' Janna said quietly. 'To the one on whom he has set his heart.'

  `Exactly. Raul is unlike me. I am a romantic man of the East and I find my happiness more easily. He has a strong sense of responsibility, and with the right woman by his side he will be perfect for El Amara.'

  `You love El Amara more than any woman, Ahmed?'

  `It is in my blood, Janna, the love of the land, but I lack Raul's power of administration. He is born to be our governor.'

  She smiled wistfully at Ahmed. 'So your motive in helping me to run away from him is that you don't think I am right for him?'

  `You could be right for me, Janna.'

  The word broke from her. 'No, just help me to leave him—as soon as the time is right.'

  `The night of the party, I promise you.' He reached across the table and patted her hand. 'In the meantime I will contact my friend at Dafni and arrange to have a private plane standing by. It should not take more than an hour for us to reach the airfield in my car, and you should be on your way before Raul notices you are gone.'

  She went cold in the sunshine at the prospect of never seeing Raul again . . . Raul who would hardly notice when she slipped away from the party. It was to be more than a family occasion. Everyone else in El Amara would celebrate the birthday of the Princess. There was to be a riding fantasia, gifts for the children, a feast, and a firework display. It wasn't every day that the 'mother' of El Amara became seventy years young, and Janna could imagine how easy it would be that night for her to slip away with Ahmed.

  `You are right,' she said to him. 'A man in authority can be lonely, unless he has at the centre of his life the woman born to be his companion and his contentment. I am not the one for Raul. I have known it since the first day I saw him.'

  `And where was that?' Ahmed's velvety dark eyes could look very sympathetic, and Janna was sure it was no idle rumour that he had a couple of pretty sweethearts. His sister

  Leila was always teasing him about being fond of the girls and much more of a flirt than Raul. If Janna had ever thought Raul a raffish man-about-the-world, she was learning that at El Amara he was very much a man of purpose.

  Ahmed could find happiness more easily than Raul, but he was ambitious for El Amara and he knew that his cousin must find his deeper, more profound contentment if this lovely desert province was to continue in peace, and to flourish in the future. Don Raul was the man for the job, but he would strive all the harder if he married the right woman.

  `We met in a hotel garden.' Janna smiled with nostalgia. `He was with Doña Rachael Corleza at the time.'

  `Ah yes, Rachael. She is a charming person. Raul has always been very fond of her and her children.'

  Janna played with a pellet of bread and kept her eyes lowered. Ahmed understated it. Raul was more than fond of his Latin Madonna, with huge eyes filled with tears. Tears because he promised she would be secure. Tears because he had to leave her for a while.

  `Everything has fallen so quiet,' she said to Ahmed. 'I'm not attuned yet to the siesta time, and still remember how alive and noisy London is at this hour.'

  `You speak like one who is homesick.'

  Not really.' She looked about her; the other people at the café tables had drifted away, and the sun was hot on the blue tiles of the mosque with its fretted minarets and those little latticed balconies. She and Raul had stood upon one at Benikesh, and there she had realised that he was invading her heart. Would her heart ever be free of him) She doubted it. Only once in a lifetime did a girl meet someone like Raul Cesar Bey, and only once did a girl run away from the chance of marrying such a man

  If it were right, if it were meant to be, then she would stay and hope to be of some joy to him. But she had seen that lovely Latin, and she had felt, especially when alone with him, that he was a man on a leash, held back from

  reaching out for what he longed for.

  `I'm half in love with
El Amara,' she said quietly, 'but I know in my heart that I must leave. Perhaps in a way I am like Don Raul. I want all of a person's love, or none of it.'

  `You have much courage for such a pretty little thing.' Ahmed spoke sincerely, without that flirting note in his voice.

  `In comparison to someone like Doña Rachael I'm quite ordinary.' She smiled and touched the Romanos emerald. `This is a Latin stone, meant for a Latin girl. Don Raul told me the legend of it, that it brings sadness if worn by the wrong person. I do prefer a blue jewel to something as splendid as this. It never looked right on me.'

  `I think you are too modest.' Ahmed studied her slender young face. 'You have lovely eyes, and your skin is soft as a flower. I think Raul is not so aloof that he would not notice the charm about you. The cool-looking English charm.'

  `I'm sure he has noticed,' she said drily. 'I know he finds me amusing to tease, but he teases Leila's baby in much the same way.'

  `He looks upon you as only a child?'

  `Yes.' She tinkled the charms on her wrist-chain, to which she had added a little golden frog, found for her by Leila in her trinket box.

  `Then my cousin Raul must have his mind on other things! Though you are young and unsophisticated, you are far from being a child.' Ahmed laughed and shook his head at such a notion. 'Leila has fallen beneath your spell, and I have noticed the way the Princess looks at you. You intrigue her.'

  `I know—and that is why I dare not stay very much longer at El Amara.'

  `You think she is on the verge of suggesting to Raul that he give her a birthday gift she would really cherish?'

  `Yes—and I've seen from his face that he's as tense as I am. This morning when I popped into the office to ask if I might wander around the market place he gave his consent

  without a single objection. At Benikesh he was furious with me for going into the souk unattended. But I noticed how he looked at me today, as if I tried his nerves by being in his office at all. He spilled some ink on a ledger and I hastened out again. I think I am in his way . . . a hindrance rather than a help—'

  There she broke off. 'Ahmed, perhaps we should go home now?'

  He agreed, and while paying the waiter he asked for a fiacre so they wouldn't have to walk up the hill in the afternoon heat. A fiacre was found, and after some grumbling because they disturbed his siesta the driver agreed to drive them home. It was pleasant, the hoof beats of the horse in the quiet wending a slow way up the incline to the House of the Pomegranate.

  The palm trees stood as if entranced, and the houses looked even more enclosed, with bougainvillea splashing its bright weaving of petals over the white walls that concealed the family courtyards. Ibises snoozed on their ragged nests, and the sky was hotly blue, so that when they jogged along the rim of the groves it was restful to gaze upon so much greenery. Bunches of fruits could be seen ripening on the branches, and now and then a bird hopped and pecked at something sweet.

  It was amazing that here in the desert this great oasis flourished . . . a garden of Eden had been Raul's name for it. He loved and cherished every fertile tree, every acre won from the desert, and she felt hurt again by that look of his this morning . . . as if she disturbed his work and his presence of mind.

  Hurt, and a little angry, she had wanted to cry out : 'You asked me to come to El Amara. You insisted. You almost abducted me . . . now you seem impatient to be rid of me. You should have known from the start that the trap I was meant to spring could trap us together, the girl from an orphanage with the grandson of a Princess. Why couldn't I see the danger? Why did you ignore it? Love isn't some-

  thing to play about with. My love for you . . . yours for Rachael . . . and that of the Princess for El Amara.'

  Janna shielded the tears in her eyes beneath the brim of her hat. If Ahmed noticed she could always blame them on the dazzle of the sun as they drove into the forecourt of the house. The door of the inner courtyard was flung open and there was a clatter of hooves on the tiles. As the fiacre came to a halt, a red-brown horse came prancing out into the sunlight, jingling his harness and tossing his mane In the saddle sat Raul, and as Ahmed assisted Janna from the fiacre, he passed them with a few rapid words in Arabic. Janna caught the flash of his eyes, then the breadth of his shoulders as he galloped away.

  `There has been an accident down in the groves,' said Ahmed. 'Raul is off to attend to the victim. Were you aware that he took training as a doctor?'

  `Yes, he told me.'

  `He is a surprising man, eh? He looks as if nature intended him to love women, but he prefers his work, and wants only one woman in his life.'

  Janna nodded and walked away into the coolness of the cloisters. Here she paused and remembered how Raul had tossed her over his shoulder as if she were no more than a child to tease.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  JANNA went to her room to change into something loose and cool, and she was wandering restlessly about her patio when the girl Farima came to tell her that the Princess wished to speak with her.

  `Oh, but I'm so untidy—my hair !' Janna hastened to the

  dressing-table, picked up a comb, and dropped it nervously.

  `Please?' Farima smiled and indicated that Janna sit down

  on the stool while Farima tidied her hair. She took up the comb and put into Janna's hand the silver mirror whose handle was a naked goddess. Janna submitted to the girl's gentle touch, and when she looked in the mirror she found that her hair was silky and groomed, and that a light application of cream and powder concealed the marks of tears beneath her eyes.

  She smiled her gratitude and Farima looked pleased and fetched from the carved cupboard a frock of softly flowered material and a pair of slippers with slightly tilted toes. Janna allowed herself to be dressed, and she had to admit that it was rather nice to be waited upon by this young girl who was so gentle and soothing. No wonder the men of the East had their harems. Their girls had a gift for creating harmony and relaxation, and Janna needed to feel in a calm mood. This was the first time the Princess had summoned her, and she knew that certain questions would be asked, which she must answer with a cool head.

  She touched a hand to her throat and felt the beat of her pulse. The emerald gleamed against her pale skin, and her eyes looked huge and worried. Whatever would she do and say if the Princess asked outright if she loved Raul? She was not a very good actress, and she knew that it was harder to hide a secret from another woman than from a man. The Princess Yamila was shrewd; she would know instinctively that a girl as alone in the world as Janna would be almost certain to fall in love with so attractive a man, whose protective qualities were Latin, whose arrogance was often assumed like armour to guard his feelings.

  Farima touched her arm, and Janna forced a smile and they left her room together and made their way to the apartment of the Princess. Their babouches made a whispering sound on the tiled floor, for indoors shoes were always discarded in favour of the dove-soft Eastern slippers. The sun through the scrolled ironwork of the window arches made lacy patterns, and they passed a fountain smothered in gold cassia.

  At last they paused outside a doorway with a Koranic inscription carved above it in deep black letters. The door stood open, an indication that the Princess was waiting to receive her guest. Janna entered the room as nervously as a kitten, and found beneath her feet the deep softness of an Eastern carpet. To her nostrils there stole the scents of orange-flower and rosewater; overhead there was the purr of a ceiling fan, its revolving shadow on the ivory walls, a cool breath of air in this salon that was richly furnished with divans, little pearl-inlaid tables, screens of cedarwood, lamps of intricate design, and painted miniatures of hunters in the desert, and lovers beside lotus pools.

  This room was as exotic as the Princess, who wore a baracan of soft lotus-gold silk. Heavy silver earrings intensified her look of fragility, but from her Raul had inherited his fine eyes; so alive, so very dark, and with a gleam of hidden fires.

  The Princess held out a hand, the flash
of her rings as imperious as the demand that Janna sit down beside her. Janna obeyed, and found herself at the mercy of those dark eyes so like Raul's, searching her out, taking keen notice of her fair hair, her tense young face, her hands clasped nervously in her lap.

  `You are not afraid of me, I hope?' That deep voice came always as a surprise from a woman so frail.

  `I am nervous, Princess,' Janna had to admit. Don Raul has told you about me, so you know that all this, being a guest here, meeting you, has me at a disadvantage. I am not sure how to behave.'

  `You are behaving very well, my child—except in one respect, and I wish to discuss that with you. But first you must have some refreshment. Would you like a glass of mint tea, or a glass of lemonade? Perhaps even some almond milk?'

  `Lemonade, please.'

  The Princess smiled, as if expecting this request, and clapped her hands. Farima appeared almost at once, carry-

  ing a tray of carved copper, which was made to fit over the top of the table that stood in front of the divan. On the tray stood a carafe of lemonade with a filter of ice, slender glasses in silver holders, and a silver jug of what looked like cream.

  This was almond milk, which Farima poured into a glass and handed to the Princess. She then poured cool lemonade for Janna, and withdrew as quietly as she had entered, a slim figure in silken trousers, who had looked at her mistress with devoted eyes, and who gave a clue to the kindly nature lurking beneath the autocracy and the command. The Princess was not so alarming . . . it was of falling a victim to her charm that alarmed Janna. She must be on her guard, or she would find herself admitting her love for Raul and the Princess might think this a sufficient reason for him to marry her. As a Moroccan woman she no doubt believed that it was the wife's place to love and submit, and that if Raul had these he would be content.