Court of Veils

by Violet Winspear

  Roslyn must have gone white, for even as Tristan bowed over her hand with a welcoming smile, his eyes were concerned, his fingers pressing warm about hers. ‘Bienvenue, Roslyn’ he said. ‘You are now feeling quite well?’

  Like his grandmother he spoke excellent English, and Roslyn breathed a little sigh of relief. If she had in the past spoken a little French, it was now lost to her. Lost like everything that had happened before the crash. Lost like Armand ... the lover who might have had a voice like Tristan’s, and a touch that was warm and sympathetic.

  ‘My mind is still a blank,’ she said to him. ‘But apart from that I feel quite fit, thank you, monsieur.’

  ‘You must feel like a newborn infant.’ His smile showed a neat line of white teeth. ‘I think myself that it would be interesting to be reborn, fully adult and open to a brand new set of impressions and sensations.’

  ‘You, my handsome satyr,’ said his grandmother, ‘will proceed to have coffee brought in for this child and myself. I am parched after that long drive, and Roslyn has already soaked up more than enough impressions for one morning.’

  Tristan quirked an eyebrow at his elegant and lovely grandmother then he strolled to the central archway of the room and clapped his hands. A shape in white materialized, then vanished and Nanette sank with a sigh among the cushions of a divan.

  ‘Sit down, child,’ she ordered, and Roslyn perched herself on a tapestried hassock and again took shy stock of the room, the man and the black grand piano he had been playing. He lounged against it, regarding her without shyness and wearing a sand-coloured shirt outside black needlecord slacks. Roslyn’s gaze fell suddenly away from his dark Latin one to the soft Arab slippers on his feet.

  ‘What do you think of our desert domain?’ he asked. ‘Of being here in the land of the fatalists?’

  ‘I feel as though I have come from nowhere to a place I—’ and there Roslyn hesitated, for what she felt could only sound melodramatic put into words.

  ‘Do go on,’ Tristan murmured, a trifle wickedly. ‘I cannot bear to be left in suspense.’

  ‘Well,’ Roslyn saw the hint of wickedness in Tristan’s smile, but it encouraged her rather than put her off, ‘the strangeness of the desert doesn’t unnerve me. It’s as though I was meant to come here.’

  ‘A very natural feeling in the circumstances,’ Nanette put in dryly. ‘Armand was bringing you here, was he not? He must have talked to you about his desert family and though you cannot remember the things he said, you accept us because of them.’

  ‘What a very practical mind you have for a lovely woman, Nanette,’ Tristan mocked affectionately.

  Nanette smiled at her pearl-varnished fingernails and looked the coquette she must once have been. ‘It is the gift of the Frenchwoman, mon chéri,’ she said, ‘to be able to be practical without any loss of charm.’

  A silent-footed servant entered the room at that point, carrying a tray on which stood a steaming earthenware jug, large French coffee cups, and a plate of tasty-looking fruit tarts. The appetizing smell of freshly made coffee filled the room as Nanette poured out, and the trio were enjoying their coffee and cakes when sudden firm footfalls rang on the tiles beyond the central archway.

  Roslyn on her hassock glanced up and saw framed in the Moorish archway a man in a bush hat that was bent down at one side. He removed the hat lazily, and a shaft of sunlight fired the dark bronze of his hair.

  En garde! leapt into Roslyn’s mind. There was so keen a quality about the man’s tawny-green gaze that she felt a wild urge to shield herself from it. He was brown as rawhide from the desert sun, lean and hard and uncompromising as a lash that always found its mark.

  ‘You are just in time for coffee, mon garçon.’ Nanette said to him. She glanced at Roslyn as she lifted the earthenware jug. A smile lit her blue eyes. ‘Please not to look so apprehensive, child. This desert barbarian is my grandson Duane. Duane, meet the petite fille who was to have married our Armand.’

  He crossed the room with long strides and stood over her. She had to tilt her fair head to look at him, a towering, booted challenge of a man.

  ‘H - how do you do, Mr. Hunter?’ She held out a hand, but he didn’t take it. Thumbs in the slant pockets of his breeches, he stood quizzing her through the narrowed lids of a perpetual sun-dweller.

  ‘So you are Roslyn Brant?’ His voice matched his hard, brown looks. ‘Somehow I pictured you differently. Funny, eh?’

  His tone was like the jib of a spur and Roslyn leapt recklessly to answer him. ‘I pictured you exactly as you are, Mr. Hunter,’ she said, ‘and that isn’t funny.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘Touché!’ Tristan was chuckling as his cousin sat down beside their grandmother and took the cup of coffee she had poured out for him.

  ‘By the way, where is Isabela?’ Tristan added. ‘I under stood that she was going to ride with you on your round of inspection.’

  Duane emptied his cup of black coffee and held it out for more. ‘Your operatic guest should stick to her singing,’ he drawled. ‘Merci, Nanette, I’m dry as sand.’

  ‘Don’t tell me Isabela fell off her horse and you left her where she fell?’ Tristan was looking amused as he fired a cheroot.

  ‘Not quite.’ Duane stretched his long, booted legs across an oriental carpet and disposed of a fruit tart in two hungry bites. ‘I couldn’t take all day playing the leisurely planter, so she had to keep up with me, more or less. When we got back ten minutes ago, she called me an unfeeling brute in her charming Portuguese, then hobbled off to her room to wallow in a cologne bath. No doubt she will soon make an entrance in a delectable concoction called a dress.’

  ‘The girl is right, you are a brute, Duane.’ His grand mother laughed, but Roslyn caught the note of nostalgia in her voice. ‘If there is any tendresse in you, I swear you give it all to those ranks of date-palms with their crests in heaven and their roots in hell. Am I right, mon brave?’

  ‘Are you ever wrong?’ he drawled. And then very deliberately he glanced at Roslyn, not a smidgen of sympathy in his eyes only a glint that planted a swift dart of antagonism in her heart. Tristan was charming, but his cousin seemed to have little time or sympathy to spare for females ... least of all for a piece of stormdrift like herself. When his glance dropped to the ring flaming on her left hand, the fingers of her right hand covered the diamond almost before she realized what she was doing. Her unguarded action at once brought a steely glint to his eyes, intensifying his look of a hunting hawk about to pounce on its prey ...

  Roslyn didn’t realize that she was holding her breath until a woman’s voice floated across the salon and broke the tension. She turned her head and saw dark eyes sparkling above a lace fan, held so that it concealed the lower part of the newcomer’s face like a yashmak. The carved woodwork of the central archway was a perfect frame for her lovely figure, draped in a dress of silk the colour of sunlight.

  ‘What did I say about that entrance?’ Duane’s laughter was indulgently mocking as he climbed to his feet, his tawny-green eyes upon Isabela Fernao as she lowered the fan to reveal her vivid Latin face.

  ‘Madre de Deos!' She swept across to him and struck him none too lightly across his brown cheek with her folded fan. ‘Never again will I rise early from my bed to ride with you, you tyrant of a man.’

  ‘I didn’t ask you to ride with me.’ He grinned down at her, and though she was quite tall he made her look fragile. ‘It was your idea to come and keep me company Doña Sol.’

  ‘My name is Isabela.’ Her eyes flashed their seductive danger straight into his.

  ‘Doña Sol is the impression I get.’ His glance swept her figure in the golden dress, and self-assured as she was she must have felt a twinge of shyness, for she turned from him fluttering her fan and laughing breathlessly behind its shield. Dark glossy hair framed her large Latin eyes.

  Roslyn’s eyes of rain-grey, under a boyish cap of fair -hair, met and were held by those of Isabela Fernao. ‘Ah, you must be the af
fianced of poor Armand?’ she exclaimed. ‘The little English girl who was hurt in the head. How do you find yourself now, my dear?’

  Was the query meant to be kind, or did it hold a hint of condescension? Isabela’s brown eyes were flecked with gold, and pointed were the long fingernails that played with the fan she used so alluringly. Her body had a seductive grace which made Roslyn seem almost childish - even elfish - perched as she was on a hassock.

  ‘I find myself in a very interesting household, senhorita,’ Roslyn replied, with a tilt to her pointed chin.

  ‘Ah, the pixie out of an English dell speaks up for herself.’ Isabela sank down among the cushions of a divan and purred a laugh as she took stock of the ensemble which Madame Gerard had bought for Roslyn. The plain white dress emphasized her youthfulness, and her sandals revealed unvarnished toes which curled together as Latin eyes appraised her.

  ‘What will you have to drink, Isabela?’ Nanette was regarding the lovely Latin with amused eyes. ‘The coffee is still hot, or there is fruit cup.’

  ‘I would love a glass of heloua.’ Isabela shared a drowsy smile between the two men; it was Tristan who went to the table on which stood a pitcher of orange-juice with an ice-filled cylinder inside to cool the juice. He poured Isabela a glass and brought it to her. ‘Will you have a cake with it ?’ he asked.

  ‘A flan aux cerises, mon ami.’ Her lips were as cherry-ripe as the fruit in the flan, and she obviously revelled in male attention.

  ‘It must be very strange for you, not to have any recollection of yourself,’ she said to Roslyn. ‘Have you forgotten everything?’

  Roslyn, conscious of steel-green eyes through cheroot smoke, tightened her arms about her knees. ‘I can remember nothing that is personal to me,’ she said quietly. ‘The faces of people and the places I knew are like dreams I can’t recall. They elude me like ghosts. I - I grope after them, but they just won’t materialize.’

  ‘And will it always be like that for you?’ Like many people with artistic talent, Isabela was completely self-absorbed; the look in her eyes was one of avid curiosity rather than sympathy.

  Roslyn saw this and she gave a cold little shiver at the detachment of other people from one’s fears and heartaches. Nanette was kind, but even she had looked at Roslyn with tiny clouds of doubt in her eyes. Tristan was charming because that was his way, but with a look that was explicit without words, Duane Hunter had intimated that his cousin Armand could never have loved and wanted a girl like herself. His tawny-green eyes had flicked from her hair to her thin, sensitive face, down the slim arrow of a body that would feel lost in a man’s arms. ‘Somehow I pictured you differently,’ he had drawled.

  ‘Now you know what the doctor said.’ Nanette was regarding Roslyn with a frown between her delicately made-up eyebrows. ‘Forget that you have forgotten and let your memory reawaken when it will. It is not to be forced. It awaits the key that will unlock the spell.’

  ‘Like the Sleeping Beauty,’ drawled Duane Hunter.

  Isabela gave a giggle, as though Roslyn in the role of Sleeping Beauty was quite a joke. Her eyes met his, her glance appraised him, taking in the defiant virility of his brown throat, the shoulders that stretched free as the desert under the thin white shirt, the lean, whipcord length of him from his hips down to his dusty riding boots.

  He mashed out his cheroot in a tray and straightened up. ‘Well, I have some more work to do,’ he announced, strolling towards the archway that led out of the room. ‘Au r’voir.’

  ‘Duane,’ his grandmother’s voice made him pause and glance back into the room, his bush hat already at a rakish angle over his eyes, ‘do you really have to act all the time like a galley-slave tied to his oar?’ she demanded.

  His mouth pulled to one side in a sardonic smile. ‘Don’t you like the look of the accounts lately, chère madame?’ he asked, ‘I thought they were looking very robust.’

  ‘Will the same be said for you if you impair your vitalité?’ Nanette tapped a slender French heel against the carpet in her annoyance with him. ‘You do not take enough repos. Like a hungry wolf you are always on the prowl.’

  ‘Chère madame, que j’adore.’ He grinned wickedly and gave his grandmother a bow. Then he was gone, his footfalls ringing on the tiles of the Court of the Veils. Nanette sat looking exasperated for a minute or so, then she got to her feet and informed Roslyn that she would show her to the room that had been prepared for her.

  ‘What are you and I going to do, Tristan?’ Isabela was a tawny curve on her divan, a creamy arm resting upon the cushions.

  ‘We also are going to work, my diva.’ He strolled to his piano. ‘The cri du coeur of my operatic heroine is now ready and I wish to try out the song with you.’

  Isabela sat up, her veil of langour suddenly discarded to reveal the musical artiste who loved to sing. ‘You have completed Nakhla’s song of the hairline between hating and loving?’ she breathed. ‘Ah, you worked on it while I was out riding with Duane!’

  Tristan was busy turning over sheets of music. ‘Nakhla is like a gauzy moth who dreads flame, yet she cannot resist the pain to which she submits herself,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘That is how I see her, Isabela. How I wish you to interpret her for me.’

  ‘Your opera sounds like being an interesting one, Tristan.’ His grandmother closed a hand about Roslyn’s wrist.

  ‘To love is to be burned in the flames of passion and disillusion, grand’mère.’ He seated himself at the piano and shot her a smile.

  ‘Your cynicism almost matches Duane’s,’ Nanette said tartly. ‘Love can be a most enjoyable emotion, but you young people of today seem to regard it as a battle. I suppose we can all expect the finale of your opera to be a tragic one, chéri, though in all likelihood Nakhla was merely fascinated by her soldier admirer, and in love with her master. A woman cannot help laving her master.’

  ‘You are an incurable romantic, grand’mère,’ Tristan chuckled, and played a snatch from The Merry Widow. ‘But how can I deny Isabela a swan-song when she succumbs so beautifully on stage?’

  ‘Donnez-moi, maestro.’ Isabela was at the piano demanding her music as Roslyn followed Nanette out of the salon.

  The older woman gave Roslyn a side-glance of inquiry. ‘My grandsons are very dissimilar in appearance, do you not think?’

  ‘Tristan has the look of Armand,’ Roslyn replied quietly.

  Nanette drew in her breath. ‘You are recalling him?’ she asked.

  ‘I only wish - no, madame, I’m judging from the photograph you let me have of Armand.’ Roslyn glanced at his ring, the token of a love she tried in vain to remember. ‘I can hear the senhorita singing. She has a lovely voice.’

  'Life is most interesting for people who find a true vocation, that is why I have never discouraged Tristan in his pursuit after musical expression.’ Madame gave a tiny shrug and tucked a hand through Roslyn’s arm as they mounted a wrought-iron stairway to the second gallery of the house. ‘There are the demands of the plantation, of course, but I have Duane and he is fully capable of handling the various sides of the business. He was trained in such supervision by his father, a stern but very able man, and as I grow older I lose my interest in business, squabbles among the workers, one thing and another. You understand?’

  Roslyn gave her hostess a smile and thought her a wonder for her age. ‘I am sure you have earned the leisure which you now have, madame,’ she said.

  ‘You must call me Nanette, child. I like to hear my old theatrical name on people’s lips, for it is good to be able to recall the past - ah, forgive me, child! The trouble is that one can never feel the troubles and fears of another, unless that other is a much-loved husband or wife. Perhaps, who can tell, you will feel a sense of communication with Armand here in his home, eh? For here he was born. Here he grew into a youth. The house is permeated with his laughter, his gaiety and love of life—’

  Nanette broke off with a sigh, withdrew her hand from Roslyn’s arm and opened an oval-shaped, ve
rmilion-coloured door set in the corridor along which they had been walking.

  Roslyn’s room at Dar al Amra was white-walled, and beamed with cedar. The bed was low, with tall posts holding back yards of misty net as a safeguard against the intrusion of insects. Squares of oriental carpet covered the floor, and the windows were narrow harem-lattices covered with mesharabeyeh. There were deep window recesses beneath the lattices filled with cushions, a carved cupboard for her clothes, and a carved chest with mirror-stand upon it, and powder bowls on little embroidered mats.

  Roslyn absorbed the strange Eastern charm of the room, with its vermilion door and lattices contrasting with the whitewashed walls and dark-wood ceiling. She saw that sprays of pale oleander had been arranged in a copper pot on a low, palmwood table.

  ‘You think you will like sleeping here?’ Nanette inquired.

  ‘I love the room already,’ Roslyn assured her.

  ‘Here long ago a favourite of the harem was probably kept,’ Nanette pointed to the narrow windows, the deep recesses where the girl would have knelt to watch her lord and master down in the courtyard. ‘The days of female seclusion in the East, when the master of the house handed to his fancy of the moment a coloured veil to indicate that she was to be brought to him that night.’

  ‘What a catastrophe if the master wasn’t attractive.’ Roslyn knelt in one of the recesses and peered through the mesh of finely carved wood over the window. ‘I wonder if any of the girls ever refused the dubious honour of the harem veil?’

  ‘I doubt it, chérie,’ Nanette chuckled. ‘The Aga was said to be a fiercely handsome man, so there is every likelihood that the inmates of his harem fought to win a veil from him. These veils were added to their everyday wear. A particular favourite would probably be clad in little else.’

  Roslyn turned to regard Nanette with lit-up eyes. ‘I can understand why Tristan wishes to write an opera about Dar al Amra,’ she said. ‘There is a sort of magic in the air. A sense of the old intrigues plotted under the boughs of that wonderful old tree down in the courtyard.’