The Desert Castle

by Isobel Chace

  ‘Confess it, Marion, you’re not quite as indifferent as you pretend, are you?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she answered. Indifferent! No, she would never be indifferent again, but how could she be sure that he would ever feel the same way?

  He gave her a warning tap. ‘One of these days I’ll shake the truth out of you! Shy you may be, but you’ll have to get it together sooner or later, and I mean to be there when you do!’

  He swung her down on to her own feet and jumped down beside her, turning his horse over to the waiting Bedouin owner, searching in his pocket for a few coins to pay for his ride.

  Marion blinked as the rain began to come down again. Her knees trembled as she tried to walk up the slope towards the Rest House, rushing away from Gregory’s potent presence as fast as she could go.

  ‘Marion, where have you been?’ Lucasta’s voice accosted her from the entrance to the reception rooms. ‘Whatever made you go anywhere in this rain?’

  ‘I was looking for you,’ Marion remembered. It seemed a long time since her panic over the younger girl’s disappearance.

  ‘With Gregory?’ Lucasta’s eyes danced with curiosity. ‘Does he fancy you, do you think?’

  Marion sniffed, holding her hands tightly together.

  ‘Why do you ask?’ she enquired. She stood absolutely still as she did in class when she was afraid that it was getting away from her. ‘Does it look like it?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Lucasta admitted, disappointed. ‘But I was hoping that Denise might have reason to think so. She wants Gregory to get in touch with her at once! I don’t think she appreciated his walking out on her, and she’s waiting for him at the castle. Stand by to watch the fur fly when we get there! Gaston says she’s got a very nasty temper, and if he were Gregory, he wouldn’t go home at all! She shrugged her shoulders, half in awe and half in admiration for her uncle. ‘But it takes an awful lot to face Gregory. If anyone can cope with her, he will!’ She put a friendly hand on Marion’s arm, gasping as she felt that her sweater was wringing wet. ‘Wouldn’t it be great if he sent Denise packing once and for all?’

  CHAPTER XI

  Marion was to remember that drive back to Amman and on to Gregory’s castle for as long as she lived. She was surprised to discover that Gregory was not driving the Land Cruiser as he usually did, but a brand new Mercedes that in normal circumstances would have made short work of any distance.

  ‘I’d prefer to travel with Gaston and Lucasta,’ she had said as they had sorted themselves out on the parking lot in front of the Rest House. She had gone on to mutter about pressures and, getting more flustered by the minute, that Lucasta was still only seventeen—

  ‘Get in, Marion,’ Gregory had ordered her with a touch of grimness that had set her heart working over-time again.

  ‘But I don’t want to go in your car!’

  His patience had exploded into real anger. ‘For heaven’s sake get in the car! You’ll have to manage without hiding behind Lucasta’s skirts sooner or later, and it can’t be soon enough for me!’

  She had looked at him from beneath her lashes, feeling gauche and insecure. ‘I’m only trying to do my job,’ she had declared. ‘Lucasta is seeing far too much of Gaston, in my opinion.’

  ‘Indeed?’ He had opened the front door of the car and had gestured for her to get in, and truth to tell, she had been too frightened not to obey him.

  ‘I’ll drip all over the seat!’ she had warned him with gloomy satisfaction.

  ‘Too bad,’ he had answered. And he had got in beside her without another word, slamming the door behind him, and had driven off without so much as a backward glance to see what the others were doing.

  Marion had taken refuge in silence. Half turning her back on him she had stared out of the window at the unrecognisable scenery outside and had given herself up to misery.

  It had been Gaston who had told Gregory that Denise had been trying to get in touch with him. ‘She sounds—distressed,’ he had said delicately. ‘She flew down to the Qasr el Biyara to be with you and she was frightened about what had happened to you when she found you were not there.’

  It had been impossible to tell what Gregory’s reaction to that had been, or so Marion had thought at the time. He had made a telephone call of his own, presumably to reassure Denise that he was on his way home, and had paid their bill at the desk despite her own and Gaston’s half-hearted objections. And then he had ordered her into his car with as much ceremony as if she had been a naughty child, and had paid no attention to her since, concentrating on the streaming road ahead of him.

  What had Denise said to him? Something to bring him running back to her as though every moment saved on the way was a bonus to be gained with joy.

  ‘You’re going too fast,’ Marion told him, feeling the wheels slide beneath her.

  If looks could kill, she would have fallen down dead on the spot. ‘Do you want to drive?’ he asked her with commendable calm.

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Marion, do me a favour and don’t say it!’

  ‘The roads are wet,’ she finished stubbornly. All right, what if she was stating the obvious? It was her life too he was dicing with if he left the road and crashed the car.

  ‘So are you!’ he retorted. ‘The sooner I get you back and into some dry clothes the better. Put the heater on and it may warm you up a bit.’

  She did so, marvelling at the array of gadgets that the car possessed. ‘What have you done with the Land Cruiser?’ she asked.

  ‘I left it in Beirut. I can travel faster in this one, and I needed to travel fast last night.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  ‘Meaning?’

  She avoided meeting his eyes by the simple expedient of fiddling with the knobs on the dashboard. ‘You must be tired, and I was wondering when you last had a meal. Shouldn’t we have stayed at the Rest House for lunch?’

  He navigated a tricky piece of road that was completely under water and stepped on the brake once or twice to make sure it had dried out.

  ‘Still not trusting me, Marion?’

  The last knob she touched turned on the radio and the car was filled with rhythmic whine of one of the latest Arab pop songs.

  ‘Everyone has to eat,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll stop for something on the way,’ he promised. He took his right hand off the wheel and took hers away from the dashboard, giving it a little squeeze as it trembled in his. ‘You don’t have to worry. I shan’t crash you. Lean back and relax, and try to learn to trust me enough to see you safely home. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ she agreed. Was she so lacking in trust? she wondered. If so, it was only because he was hurrying back to Denise as fast he could go. If she were loved by him, she would have trusted him with her whole world and everything in it, but she wasn’t the kind of girl who allowed herself to rely on someone else’s man. She had far too much pride for that!

  The desert had taken on the appearance of a swamp. Here and there scrubby tussocks stuck up out of the water, bowing before the strength of the wind and the lashing rain. It was hard to believe that the day before it had been the perfect backdrop for a caravan of camels to pass that way. Now, what animals there were, the black goats and the white sheep, and the occasional herd of camels, looked lost and forlorn, as did the men who looked after them as they sloshed their way along behind their beasts.

  Marion wasn’t much better off. As the water drained out of her clothes she found she was sitting in a puddle and there was another one at her feet into which her trousers dripped leaving cold trickles down her legs. It would be at least three hours before they reached Amman and another hour after that. Perhaps Gregory had reason to want to cover the distance as quickly as he could.

  She was almost asleep when Gregory pulled off the road and came to a stop outside a small cafe-cum-restaurant. She jerked herself upright and looked about her, surprised by his choice. It looked clean but very little else, and it was raining harder than ev
er.

  ‘Must we get out here?’ she pleaded with him. ‘If you’re hungry, I don’t mind waiting in the car.’

  He pushed open the door. ‘You’d better get out on this side,’ he told her. ‘There’s nothing but running mud on your side.’

  She forced her limbs to move, bracing herself against the wind and the rain. ‘I’m cold!’ she complained.

  ‘I know you are,’ he said with scant sympathy. ‘You’re probably stiff after coming off your horse too. Will you have tea or coffee?’

  She chose to have tea, hoping that it would warm her. It came in a tall glass, without any milk, and she was only just in time to dissuade the man who had brought it from adding several spoonfuls of sugar. It was certainly hot. The first sip she took burned the back of her throat, but she didn’t mind at all. She could feel the warmth of it seeping through her and melting the ice that had formed about her heart.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Gregory. ‘You’re losing that miserable waif-like look and are beginning to look more like yourself.’

  ‘Am I?’ She raised a smile. ‘I didn’t want to stop, but I’m glad we did. I find I’m quite hungry too.’

  ‘Good,’ he said.

  He left her at the table and wandered into the kitchen area, choosing a tomato here, an onion there, a few eggs for an omelette and a side-dish of ground up chick-peas with olive oil. He came back with several folded crepes of bread which he put down on the table beside her.

  ‘A new kind of bread for you,’ he smiled at her. ‘Will you be able to manage without any cutlery?’

  ‘I’m getting quite good at it,’ she claimed.

  She was. When the food arrived, she tore off a piece of bread and dipped it into the various dishes, taking a little bit of everything. But she was careful to see that he had the major share, for she thought he looked very tired. There were little lines round his eyes that had nothing to do with laughter and which had not been there before. Had Denise cut up rough and, if so, how dared she make him look like that?

  ‘You might have known she’d be angry,’ she said at last, watching him sop up the remains of the omelette with his bread. ‘I know you were worried about us, and that I was in a state over Lucasta, but we would have sorted it out by ourselves in the end. It wasn’t worth making her angry.’

  He sat back in his chair, surveying her gravely through his fantastic lashes. ‘You’ve never liked her, have you?’

  She blushed. ‘That isn’t the point! I think she might have waited until you got back, but it isn’t any of my business if you allow her to run you ragged. It must be from choice, because you could buy and sell her any time you chose!’

  ‘She has powerful friends,’ he excused himself.

  ‘Papa Dain? But you don’t need him, surely?’

  He looked amused. ‘No, I don’t need him.’

  ‘Well then?’ she prompted him.

  ‘Denise has other friends,’ he told her, ‘even if you refused the honour. I thought then that it might have been because you were jealous of her. Are you?’

  Marion opened her eyes very wide. ‘I don’t want her money—or her friends,’ she asserted.

  ‘My sister Felicity wouldn’t be able to do enough for you if you were a friend of the Dains.’ The cynical twist to his mouth dismayed Marion almost as much as his words.

  ‘Why should that matter to me?’ she demanded.

  ‘Did you know Judith is Denise’s cousin?’ he murmured. ‘Their mothers are sisters, and they all have shares in the family business, under Papa Dain’s direction, of course. His is the star to which they’ve all hitched their wagons!’

  ‘Including you?’

  He moved restively. ‘I have a certain amount of family feeling. I play along with them. Up to now it hasn’t cost me anything to keep the old man sweet. It wasn’t likely that anyone would get hurt. My family is not noted for holding their hands when it comes to using other people. Moral outrage is not a feeling that comes their way often, especially not when it comes to their own actions. We haven’t got your integrity, little Marion.’

  She digested this in silence, testing the truth of what he had told her. She could well believe that the Hartleys were everything he said they were, but Gregory himself? That she could not believe. She thought of the books of his she had read so eagerly in London and she knew why she didn’t believe it. His books had a lot of himself in them. She had discovered that bit by bit, living under the same roof with him.

  ‘Does your sister owe the Dains a great deal of money?’ she asked finally.

  ‘A great deal,’ he concurred. ‘The kind of life she and my brother-in-law enjoy is very expensive to support. They are actually his paid employees, but they like to think they are important to him in their own right. They don’t like to think he is using them in their turn, yet when he cracks the whip they both jump to it, and when he ignores them for months together the debts mount up and they find themselves bound to him more closely than ever.’

  ‘But he doesn’t own you,’ Marion stated, knowing it for a fact. ‘He never will. Nor will Denise, will she?’ She was certain of that. Denise’s brand of ruthlessness came in a very pretty package, gift wrapped by her father.

  ‘Are you telling me that you trust me after all?’ he drawled. His perceptive eyes were hidden by his lashes, but she had no doubt that they were taking in every change of expression on her mobile face.

  ‘Yes, I trust you,’ she said. She schooled herself to sound as though it was a matter of indifference to her whether he sold out to the Dains or not. ‘I’ve read your books,’ she added.

  ‘Not very conclusive evidence,’ he commented.

  Yet she had begun to fall in love with him then, she thought. She hadn’t known it; she would have breathed scorn on any such idea; but he had lived in her mind ever since, as much a part of her as the spirit that formed her being.

  ‘I think you know all about moral outrage,’ she went on. ‘I’ve never doubted your integrity. I’d trust you anywhere!’

  ‘This is a new departure,’ he said wryly. ‘I was beginning to think you didn’t trust me as far as you could see me.’

  She shook her head. ‘I wanted to be friends,’ she reminded him. ‘It was you who didn’t want that. You wouldn’t be my friend. I knew you didn’t like me and I was afraid of—of imposing on you, but that didn’t mean I don’t trust you.’

  ‘Then you’ll trust me to do the right thing in the next few days?’ he challenged her.

  She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. She didn’t doubt that he would do what he thought was right. If he wanted Denise, he would take her, and she would have to learn to live with the knowledge that he was beyond her reach for ever. Other people had eked out their existence without the man of their choice—and they had survived. And so would she if she had to. What other choice did she have? If it had been anyone else but Denise! She would have to buckle down if Gregory made her his wife, but Marion didn’t believe that she would love him as he deserved. There was something essentially hard about Denise Dain.

  ‘And you won’t say another word about going back to England?’

  She hesitated. ‘I may have to go,’ she said.

  He gave her an intent look. ‘I’ll keep you here if I have to lock you up to do it,’ he said with a fierceness that made her breathless. ‘Whoever has to pay for my family’s extravagances, it isn’t going to be you!’

  She stared at him blankly, wishing that she understood him better, but she didn’t like to ask the questions that were forming in her mind. Others, less sensitive than herself, would have demanded an explanation without a second thought, but Marion’s shyness was apt to tie her tongue in knots, and being in love with Gregory didn’t make it any easier for her to gatecrash his privacy.

  ‘Do you want more tea to finish up with?’ he asked her.

  ‘I’d rather get home,’ she answered.

  His face softened dramatically. ‘Is the castle home to you, Marion?’

  ‘S
ometimes,’ she admitted. ‘Sometimes I feel I’ve known it all my life.’

  ‘You know what they say,’ he said, though he didn’t specify who said it, ‘that if you make an image of someone you steal a part of their soul. Your image has been in the castle for many, many years.’

  ‘Will I ever get my soul back?’ she wondered. It was only a silly superstition, but the sight of her own face looking back at her from the fresco in her room always disturbed her.

  ‘No, your soul is forfeit to the man who claims you,’ he said. ‘There are rules about these things, even in Paradise.’

  ‘Perhaps no man will claim me,’ she murmured, avoiding his glance. ‘What will I do then?’

  ‘Every houri is created for some man,’ he answered. ‘Even the shy ones!’

  She managed a laugh, but she was sad inside too. He might flirt with her—a little—but it didn’t mean anything to him. It wasn’t the sun, the moon, and the stars, as it was to a fool like her.

  Moving from the restaurant back to the car was enough to remind her of the damp discomfort of her clothes. She huddled herself into the corner of the seat, thankful that she was no longer actually dripping, tried to turn the heating up, only to find that it was already to a maximum.

  ‘Are you very tired?’ she asked him tentatively. ‘I can drive quite well, if you want me to?’