The Desert Castle

by Isobel Chace

He put his fingers under her chin and raised her face to his.

  ‘Very pretty,’ he commented. ‘You may be small, but your proportions must be nearly perfect, yet you’re not a vain person, are you?’

  There was no answer to that. She pulled away from him, unable to bear his touch a moment longer. ‘I can’t help being small,’ she said. ‘It has all sorts of disadvantages.’

  ‘Does it?’ His eyes flickered over her and he smiled. ‘It has its attractions too. Can I trust you to share your room with Lucasta on this expedition to Petra? She and Gaston may well try to talk you into some other arrangement.’ He saw her outraged expression and laughed at her, giving her an affectionate pat on the behind. ‘Oh, Marion, what a delight you are! As if you would permit Lucasta out of your sight while she’s in your care! But, like Bo-Peep’s sheep, you don’t have to worry about that niece of mine, Leave her alone, and she’ll come home, bringing young Gaston behind her. Forget all about her and see all you can of Petra while you’re there!’ And he bent his head and kissed her gently where the dimple came and went in her cheek. ‘You’ll like Petra,’ he said. ‘But look after yourself!’

  ‘Well, well,’ Lucasta murmured, ‘now we see him, now we don’t! What did you do to him, Marion?’

  Marion looked blank. She had been as surprised as anyone when Jean-Pierre had marched across to Denise’s tiny Piper and had swung himself on board. She thought she had been in the Frenchman’s pocket every waking moment since she had wrested herself away from Gregory’s study and the dangerous delight of his undivided attention on herself.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she denied.

  ‘No,’ said Gaston, ‘she did not. He told me he would be leaving today. Some of the people who are going to be at Denise’s party are friends of his people in France. They have daughters—’ He cast an apologetic look at Marion. ‘His family approve of them, you understand? Jean-Pierre’s family are like that. It is an old family, and most of the old families of France only know each other.’

  ‘And Marion isn’t suitable?’ Lucasta demanded, bristling with indignation.

  Gaston shrugged. ‘There is no title,’ he said simply.

  Lucasta looked really angry. ‘There’s no title in my family either,’ she informed him. ‘Perhaps I should have told you sooner!’

  Gaston gave her a quick hug, smoothing the cross lines from her face with his lips. ‘It means nothing, ma mie. There is no title in my family either. But Jean-Pierre’s family is very different. Even the Napoleonic titles are too nouveaux for them. It is not his fault.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it? Well, he may be an aristocrat, but I don’t think much of his manners!’ Lucasta rounded on him. ‘I had no idea the French are like that!’

  ‘They’re not,’ Marion put in peaceably. ‘Your uncle thought it better if Jean-Pierre went to Beirut—’

  ‘What?’

  Marion wished she had kept quiet as the other two stared at her with a mixtures of curiosity and disbelief.

  ‘What happened?’ Lucasta asked, quivering with inquisitive interest. ‘Did he catch him making a pass at you, or what?’

  ‘Certainly not!’ Marion said indignantly.

  Gaston gave Lucasta a little shake. ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘You must not question Marion any more. How would she know why your uncle does anything?’

  ‘Do you?’ Lucasta insisted.

  Marion shook her head, crossing her fingers surreptitiously. It wasn’t quite a lie because she didn’t know why he had done it, nor was she absolutely certain that he had. It was just possible that Jean-Pierre had decided to go without any help from anyone.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ Lucasta exclaimed. ‘I saw Gregory watching you at lunchtime yesterday and he didn’t look at all pleased—’

  ‘He often looks disapproving,’ Marion said. ‘He can’t help it.’

  ‘Well, I still think something’s going on! Was Jean-Pierre making a nuisance of himself?’

  ‘Lucasta, that is not a proper question,’ Gaston rebuked her.

  ‘Marion doesn’t mind, do you? It must have been that! Gregory never interferes with anyone but if he thought Marion was having a raw deal, he might easily come the perfect host and do something about it. Why should he bother otherwise?’

  There was no other reason. Marion admitted it, forcing herself to meet the truth head-on. Illusions could only hurt her more in the end.

  Then Gaston laughed, and the illusions came rushing back to mock her. ‘I too have seen the way Mr. Randall looks at our little Marion,’ he teased her. ‘He wished to remove the opposition, no?’

  ‘No,’ Marion sighed. ‘He says himself he doesn’t like me.’ And, when Gaston went on laughing, she wondered what could possibly be so funny about that. She might have summoned up her courage and asked him, but she was afraid of the answer. There were some things it was much better not to know.

  Gaston’s car was a huge American Dodge. The cavernous boot swallowed up their few bits of luggage and Marion, with the whole of the back seat to herself, could have lain down full length with the greatest of ease. She wouldn’t even have had to cheat by bending her knees.

  ‘Did you buy it here?’ she marvelled.

  ‘I bought it from a fellow on the site. He brought it over from the States with him. It’s just the job for getting about on these long, straight roads, but no good for your English lanes.’ He nodded wisely. ‘When I was in an English school in Kent I learned all about your narrow roads. We fell in a ditch and it took us the rest of the night to get ourselves out. Me, I thought we would be sent back to France, but my landlady never told the school I had been out all night. She told me she liked to be known as a brick—Why do you laugh?’ he asked Lucasta, offended.

  ‘I love you,’ she said.

  ‘You must learn to say it in French,’ he encouraged her. ‘Je t’aime—’

  Marion stopped listening to them, realising incredulously that they had forgotten all about her. She turned her attention to the road, wishing that Gregory were there to tell her about the desert. Nothing was quite as interesting when he wasn’t there, but she wouldn’t let it matter to her. She had managed quite well without him before he had gate-crashed her evening class, and she would manage perfectly well without him in the future.

  They followed the same road as the one to Madaba until it divided into the ancient King’s Highway, the way the caravans of old had taken, and the modern Desert Highway that now meant one could drive all the way from Amman to Aqaba in a matter of a few hours.

  ‘We must go the short way,’ Gaston told them. ‘If we went the old way it would be dark before we arrived at Petra.’

  The two girls were quite content to leave all such decisions to him. Lucasta didn’t mind where she was going as long as she was with him, and Marion was happy that her childhood’s dream was coming true and she was on her way to Petra.

  It was hard to tell exactly where the desert began. There were odd patches of agriculture beside the road quite a long way south of Amman and, even after the soil had become too barren to support any crops, there were still clumps of green to be seen, as surprising to Marion as were the modern, straight-lined Government-sponsored villages that had been built in the middle of nowhere. The box-like houses had an unfinished look as the metal cords that strengthened the concrete pillars had been left sticking out at the top of most of the dwellings. Some of the buildings were painted and some were not. A strident greeny-blue was a favourite colour, and it did look better under a hot sun than it would have done in the cooler clime of Britain. Colour was obviously more important in the monochrome world of the Moab desert.

  Gaston turned his head, still keeping his eyes on the road ahead of him. ‘We are turning off for you to see one of the old Crusader castles,’ he told Marion. ‘Mr. Randall said you wished to see one.’

  ‘He’s writing a book about the times of the Crusades,’ she answered, as if that explained her interest in itself.

  ‘This one was captured
by Saladin.’

  ‘How?’ Lucasta asked. ‘It must have taken a lot of courage to besiege a castle sitting up on an impregnable hill.’

  ‘He bombed it with large stones and it fell down,’ Gaston grinned at her. ‘He bombed it with giant-sized catapults.’

  When they came to the castle, they could see that the Saracen leader had made a good job of destroying small oasis where people still lived and farmed their the fortress. The castle had been built high above a little plots of land. The walls were crumbled rubble and few of the rooms had a roof over them.

  Gaston drove right up to it and hastened his passengers out to walk round what was left of the Christian fortress. It was hard work climbing up to the battlements, but the view from the top was more than worth it After the Saracens had taken the castle, they must have used it themselves for a while, for there were traces of the church having been transformed into a mosque with a mihrab, the niche in the wall that points out the direction of Mecca, hollowed out of the already insecure stones.

  Lucasta sat on a handy rock and supported her chin in her hand.

  ‘Tired?’ Marion asked her.

  She shook her head, patting another flat-topped rock beside her. ‘No, I was thinking, that’s all. To tell you the truth I was wishing Gregory had come with us instead of going to Beirut. Denise looked like the cat who’s swallowed the cream, and he—well, he looked kind of sad. I wish he was here with us!’

  Marion sat down heavily beside her. Oh my, she thought, but she could say that again! And how! But she was learning the hard way that it didn’t do to indulge her dreams.

  CHAPTER VIII

  They arrived at Petra in time for a late lunch. The road went through the small township of Wadi Moussa, one of the more likely sites where Moses was supposed to have struck the rock with his staff and started a spring of water at which the local people have quenched their thirst ever since.

  The Rest House was backed against a cliff, the bedrooms out to one side, grouped above one another and reached by a series of staircases and verandahs.

  ‘I hope they haven’t put you too far away,’ Lucasta said to Gaston. ‘I’m glad I haven’t got to have a room on my own.’

  ‘What could possibly happen to you here?’ Gaston retorted.

  ‘I don’t know—but something might!’

  ‘The trouble with you is that you have too much imagination. It’s a good thing Marion doesn’t panic easily. You’d both have a terrible night if she did!’

  Lucasta made a face at him and watched him load himself up with their luggage without making any move to help him. It was left to Marion to gather up the bits and pieces and to lead the way along the path to the main building. Trees had been planted round the Rest House to make it cooler in summer and the sharp smell of eucalyptus followed them through the swing doors into the reception area and lounge.

  A jovial-looking man came slowly across the dim interior and took up his position behind the desk. He checked their passports with infinite care, had them sign their names in the visitors’ book, and allotted them their rooms, snapping his fingers for a young man dressed in clothes several sizes too big to take them up to their rooms.

  ‘Your lunch will be ready for you when you come downstairs,’ he told them heartily. ‘In twenty minutes will be convenient for a very nice lunch!’

  To Lucasta’s relief, their two rooms had adjoining doors and she had only to knock on the wall for Gaston to knock back. This arrangement suited her very well and she began at once to work out a complicated code that would tell him if she was warm and comfortable, if she needed his help to light the Calor gas that heated the bath-water, or if he was needed urgently because of some as yet unspecified emergency.

  ‘Is this going on all night?’ he asked wearily from their open door. ‘Marion and I will want to deep, cherie, not play at Morse code!’

  ‘Oh, but, Gaston, I only wanted to make sure that you’d come if we needed you.’

  He grinned at her, his annoyance changing to warm affection. ‘I shall always come,’ he assured her. ‘I’ll teach you a proper code this afternoon and then you can be sure that I’ll understand what it is you are wanting.’

  Lucasta’s face lit up. ‘You know what I’m wanting,’ she smiled back at him. ‘I’d tell you, only I don’t want to shock Marion. I wish—’

  Marion stopped taking her nightdress out of her bag and gave the younger girl a meaning look. ‘You can go on wishing!’ she warned her.

  ‘I know,’ Lucasta sighed. ‘I’m only seventeen!’

  ‘Sweet seventeen!’ Gaston mocked her. ‘You cannot say you have never been kissed, ma mie. Be content with that and be a good girl. It is not very old, and now that I have found you, I shall not easily let you go.’

  ‘You haven’t met my parents,’ Lucasta said bitterly.

  ‘There is time for that too,’ he comforted her. He looked completely confident that he would come out of any such meeting unscathed. To Lucasta, who had seldom won any of the brushes she had had with her mother in the past, it was a toss-up as to whether she thought him more brave or foolhardy. ‘You may change your mind,’ he added, his young face tightening at the thought. ‘We have to allow for that.’

  Lucasta shook her head. ‘Gregory says I’m like him in that I never change my mind. I’ll wait until I’m eighteen, because you say I must, but I shan’t wait a minute longer than that!’

  Marion believed her. She rather hoped that Lucasta would not be in her charge when she turned eighteen and achieved her majority. Gregory might dismiss her anxieties about the younger girl as being of no account, but Marion thought she was right to be worried. Lucasta had never had to control her emotions before and she showed few signs of wanting to control them now. Perhaps a few words of warning as to how difficult she was making things for Gaston might be in order, but it was more probable that Lucasta would only be delighted in her new powers over the young Frenchman. She didn’t mean to be cruel, but at seventeen she was still very, very young and not entirely responsible.

  Marion took her opportunity when she walked down the steps with Gaston, leaving Lucasta to put the finishing touches to her appearance.

  ‘Nobody has ever said no to her,’ she told him. ‘She was left alone in that house in London with only the servants to look after her. She doesn’t realise what she’s doing.’

  Gaston shrugged his shoulders. ‘You see her as a little girl, but she is not that to me. I will look after her, Marion, and see she behaves as she ought but I think she can look after herself very well. She has always had to look after herself and she has seen much of the bad side of life. Lucasta is nobody’s fool. She will be very careful before she finally gives her heart.’ He didn’t have to add that he intended that she should give her heart to him. Marion knew that already. She looked at the young man with a new respect, realising that he had summed up his beloved’s life far more accurately than she had herself. Lucasta did have the robustness of a young weed, and the native caution of the neglected child who had to bring herself up as best she could.

  ‘I’m glad she has you,’ she said aloud. She smiled at him, glad to lay her burden of care squarely on his shoulders. ‘I’m fond of her, disruptive as she can be in any classroom. She’s like her uncle in some ways, isn’t she?’

  She wondered at his amused glance, but ignored it as of being of no importance. It had been a perfectly ordinary thing to say.

  ‘Why didn’t you wait for Mr. Randall to bring you here?’ Gaston asked her.

  She was tongue-tied, with a lump in her throat the size of a tennis ball ‘He said he wouldn’t. He said nothing would induce him to bring me here!’ He hadn’t actually said that, but he had certainly implied it.

  ‘He could have told you all about it,’ Gaston persevered in the face of her obvious misery.

  ‘They have guides to do that,’ she answered.

  The restaurant led out of the lounge. It had no windows and was lit by oriental lights hanging from the ceiling,
their multi-coloured glass fragmenting the light against the plum-coloured walls. It was only when they were seated at their table that Marion realised they were inside a cave of sorts. The straight walls and ceiling had confused her when she had first looked round the room, but now she could see clearly the marks of the chisels as they had dressed the inside of the soft stone. Had this been one of the dwellings the Nabateans had carved out of the sides of the hills? Was this what she could expect Petra itself to be like?

  Lucasta refused to be excited by her discovery. ‘Tourist bait,’ she scoffed. She put her head on one side, smiling across the table at Marion. ‘You’re so naive!’ she decided. ‘Isn’t she, Gaston?’

  ‘Elle est charmante,’ he commented approvingly, but Marion could see that he agreed with Lucasta that she was easily impressed.

  ‘Why shouldn’t it be genuine?’ she demanded.

  ‘Maybe it is,’ Gaston said. ‘The interesting thing is the formation of the roof. Can you see the different colours swirling into one another? It is pretty, no? And it tells much about the rock here. Did you know that Edom means red, that is how the Edomites got their name. Only afterwards did it become Petra, from the Latin word for a rock—’

  ‘Oh, Gaston, don’t you start! I don’t want to know about rocks and things like that! I want to know about the people who lived here. What do you know about them?’ Lucasta interrupted him.

  Gaston grinned at her. ‘What should I know but what your uncle told me last night? He said that both the Edomites and the Nabateans claimed direct descent from Ishmad, the first sons of Abraham. He had two daughters, Bashemath and Nabaioth. Bashemath was one of the three wives of Esau, whom sly Jacob tricked out of his inheritance. The Edomites claimed descent from her, and the Nabateans from her sister. They must have been named after her.’