The Jewelled Caftan
Margaret Pargeter
Although Rosalind Lindsay had agreed slightly reluctantly to go on holiday to Morocco with her brother and his friends, she certainly hadn't known what she was letting herself in for. From the moment they set off nothing seemed to go right, and the whole thing ended with them falling into the hands of a decidedly sinister bunch of desert nomads. Ross managed to get herself rescued—but then discovered that she had only tumbled out of the frying pan into the fire, for her 'rescuer' was no better than her other captors—the mysterious, and menacing, Sidi Armel ben Yussef.
Mills & Boon
1978
CHAPTER ONE
Ross, short for Rosalind, Lindsay, lay on her side on the harsh, sandy floor of a tent in the heart of the desert. At least, she supposed drearily, it must be somewhere pretty isolated, miles from civilisation—some unknown outpost on the wild Moroccan border? The floor of the tent seemed to be swarming with legions of lice which crawled feather-like over her sensitive skin, their bites setting up a burning irritation. With only one hand it was impossible to ward them off!
Both her ankles were bound to a hastily driven stake with a thin piece of rope, her left arm being tied securely behind her back in much the same way. Her captors had left her right hand free only that she might stop the infiltrating dust from choking her. The longer she lay the more fervently did she wish they had not done so, as the thought of death was beginning to seem quite pleasant compared to the discomfort of this!
Since noon yesterday and all through the night she had lain here. Now the sun was high again, so they must be well into another day. Feverishly she wondered how much longer she was expected to bear it? Her head ached so badly she was having some difficulty in focusing, and the last few drops of water she had been given had done nothing but add to the torture she had already endured.
Outside, at this hour of day, there would be no sun, just the glare of white-hot sky that shrivelled the eyes and skin, burning everything it touched. Not that this appeared to affect the desert men, the dark-skinned nomads who held Ross and her companions. Hazily she pondered which barbaric tribe they might belong to. From here she could hear their shouts of wild laughter, the incomprehensible curses which chilled the blood—if anything could in this unbe-
Iievable oven ! On a gasp of helpless, half hysterical protest Ross twisted and turned until again she collapsed, exhausted. She tried unsuccessfully, for what seemed to be almost the hundredth time to escape the cruel thongs which held her, knowing, for about the first time in her short life, what true fear really was.
Eventually her mind blacked out—not in sleep, for she could still dimly hear the noise around the tent, but in a kind of merciful oblivion. Vaguely she became aware that the three boys who had been travelling with her and who were likewise tied had begun whispering to each other. It was as if something had alerted them, but as she happened to be on the opposite side of the large tent she was unable to make out what they were saying. Nor could she arouse herself sufficiently to ask. Their voices were necessarily low as they had soon, and painfully, discovered that their captors did not like them talking even among themselves !
Whatever it was about, the mumble went on, but when one of the older men hissed her name it only fell on deaf ears. Ross, floating temporarily in the arms of a peculiar delirium, felt like a sleepwalker, in no great hurry to return from the beguilingly cool depth of her imagination.
She was home again in England, at Springfield, a place she had never cared for greatly but which now seemed the most desirable place on earth. What a perfect fool she had been to leave it! How the relative she had lived with and worked for would laugh if she could see her now. No, that might not be strictly true! Cynthia might be worried out of her head if she knew of her predicament, which was one good reason to be thankful she did not! She might not be surprised, though, as hadn't she always considered Ross too impulsive for her own good? She imagined Ross was spending three quiet weeks in Cornwall with Freddy's cousin Avis!
A low moan of despair escaped Ross's half-conscious lips. If only , she had known what she was letting herself in for ! Yet didn't other people do much the same sort of thing without anything going wrong? Part of her mistake, she realised, lay in choosing the wrong company. If she had consulted one of the many reliable travel agents and gone for a properly organised tour, how much wiser she might have been today!
Painfully her mind wandered, crazed more than a little by thirst. Trying to hold on to her last dregs of sanity, she forced her thoughts back to Springfield, the large, shabby old house on the edge of the sprawling industrial town where she had lived with Cynthia for the past two years. Freddy, too, when he had been at home.
Why did she have to think of it in the past tense when it would still be there? Suppressing another moan, she thought of it as it would be around this time of day, brooding and quiet, waiting for Cynthia coming home for lunch. If Ross hadn't been so discontented with her lot she might have been there with her, although she was generally forced through pressure of work to make do with a sandwich in the office. Cynthia would never hear of her having a holiday abroad— and perhaps she had been proved right. Ross had wanted to travel, see something of the world, but she could see now that this was no excuse for the sheer irresponsibility of her behaviour! She was young, it wouldn't have done her any harm to have waited a little longer.
Stirring again, Ross sighed deeply, her slender body tormented by heat. It was her father who had been indirectly responsible for this urge to travel, having, years ago, filled her childish ears with stories of his adventures. He had been a foreign correspondent and, when he was still alive, she had used to hang breathlessly on to his every word. His trips around the world, the people he had met, the tight corners he had been in. She could still remember.
He had talked a lot about the Middle East, especially of the desert. This seemed always to have been his great love. She could recall his saying as if it had been yesterday: 'The Sahara is a big place, my darlings, the largest desert in the world. It's so vast a man could lose himself and never be seen again.' It had mostly been for Freddy's benefit, of course, as he was older, but Ross had been the more absorbed.
Occasionally he had taken their mother there on holiday, but always left Ross and Freddy with Cynthia, who ap- peared to be the only relative' they had. Freddy was Ross's half-brother, her mother having already been married once before she had met John Lindsay. Freddy was the child of her first marriage.
Then there had been that terrible time when their parents had both been killed returning from Morocco. She and Freddy had been sent to an orphanage—in care, Cynthia had preferred to put it. She couldn't take them personally as she had a large business to run, but she had kept a distant eye on them. Freddy, because of his age, had only been there a short while but Ross had spent years there. Afterwards she had trained as a secretary and worked for Cynthia ever since.
Ross didn't particularly like this relative who was so distantly removed as to scarcely be a relative at all, but she knew she should be grateful for what Cynthia had done for them, and she did try to do her best. As well as the office she helped in the house, which she didn't really care for either as it was so big and old and cold, but the fields outside were another thing. At weekends, when Cynthia often lunched and dined with friends and clients, Ross spent hours in the fields and cool summer woods with her sketch pad. At this she excelled—not that she got much encouragement. Cynthia was always telling her there was no future in it. Not her kind of art, anyway.
The trouble was, Cynthia never did see talent of any sort in Ross at all, although she had proved more than satisfactory in the office. It never ceased to puzzle Ross that Cyn
thia was much more tolerant of Freddy, who never seemed to succeed at anything and certainly never put himself out to please her. He had been a bright but lazy teenager and Cynthia had paid out of her own pocket for him to go to a good school. Here he had done very little, but even when he had been sent down from university, she had still made excuses for him. Now he spent most of his time in London, only coming home when he was broke. Often for months Ross never saw him, yet she could never forget he was her half-brother.
The wind, or sirocco, as it was called in Morocco, whined hotly around the tent. Numbly Ross tried to lick her cracked lips with a partly swollen tongue, but was aware of no relief, only pain. Inside the morale she was wearing sweat ran in rivulets down her tender skin, soaking the cotton in dark patches, but she dared not unzip it as the nomads had not yet discovered she was a girl. When they were first captured Freddy had assured lier hastily that it was much safer that they should think of her as an impracticably slender boy.
One thing puzzled her greatly. While Freddy and the other two men, although bound as she was, had been given moderate amounts of food and water, she had been offered nothing. If it hadn't been for the young serving lad who had furtively wetted her mouth, as if feeling sorry for her, she doubted if she could have survived.
Her mind, as if wholly concentrated on water, wandered tenaciously back to Springfield, to a small deep well she had found one day in the woods, fed by a clear, crystal spring. What wouldn't she give for just one cupful of it! Water was something she had never actively appreciated before, along with other things. Ruefully she wondered why she had ever wanted to leave Cynthia, why she had ever listened to Freddy.
It was he who had persuaded Ross to join this supposedly exciting trip across North Africa. He had seemed so flatteringly keen to have her company. She had not known then that he was financially bereft again.
Ross was due for a holiday, she hadn't in fact had one since she had started work. 'If you cash the few hundred Dad left you,' Freddy had urged, 'we could be there and back within three weeks.'
Freddy had already explained that two of his friends were leaving by truck from London, but to make it an economical proposition they needed two more. If Ross would oblige them by coming as cook it would solve a lot of problems. She and Freddy could fly out and join them, which would cut down considerably on the time they need be away.
'Leave everything to me,' he had told her, when eventually he talked her into agreeing. 'I'll deal with old Cynthia !'
From then on Freddy had taken over. He hit on the bright idea of telling Cynthia that they would tour, probably stay- ing in Cornwall where, on his father's side, he did have a cousin. Ross had never met this cousin, nor had Cynthia, but Freddy said she was a lot like him.
'I'll see to it, and she can be relied on to send the odd postcard, just to keep Cynthia happy,' he had said, craftily eyeing Ross's doubtful face. 'Otherwise, old girl, you're going to get nowhere.'
'I just don't care for the idea of deceiving anyone, least of all Cynthia,' Ross had replied dubiously.
Freddy's discontented face had twisted. 'You don't deceive someone who works you to death for a pittance,' he retorted sarcastically, 'and who has scarcely a kind word to say to you—or of you,' he had added frankly.
It was only too true! Unhappily, Ross had realised. Cynthia did seem to enjoy treating her like a kind of inferior servant, forever telling her she was a nuisance and a liability and that one day, if Ross worked hard, she might just manage to get out of her debt. Ross wasn't altogether without spirit and often felt she could easily have left. Sometimes she thought she stayed only because Cynthia seemed to be getting old and she had done so much for Freddy. And, after years in an orphanage, a home was a home, whatever else it might be lacking.
'You really think I should, then?' Ross had still hesitated, until the last moment, in spite of Cynthia's harshness, curiously reluctant to defy her, to enter such a complication of conspiracy even for something she had always longed to do.
'Of course!' Seeing Ross weaken visibly, Freddy had hastened to assure her that what they contemplated was neither wicked or hurtful. 'I doubt if Cynthia will so much as ask if you've enjoyed yourself, when you come back,' he had said cynically, 'so I shouldn't worry about that. Don't think about it any more,' he'd advised. 'Just go. Otherwise you'll get cold feet and might never get another opportunity.'
So Ross, against her better.judgment, had allowed herself to be persuaded. Having drawn her only few hundred pounds from the bank, she handed it over to Freddy, who promised to use it with care. If it hadn't been accomplished all too quickly she doubted if her nerve would have held. To be involved with Freddy, she soon discovered, was like going downhill on a huge roller—once started it seemed impossible to stop ! Not that she had ever been able to decide if she really wanted to stop. In her head had raged a perpetual tug-of-war, but after Freddy had completed all the necessary arrangements she didn't see how she could back out, even had she wanted to.
Before she quite realised they were off in Freddy's old Mini, bound ostensibly for Cornwall, in reality Gatwick. From there they would fly to Casablanca. Cynthia had been too busy grumbling to ask many questions. She was only about sixty and her tongue had not yet lost its sharpness. She had agreed waspishly to allow Ross a short holiday, but warned her that if she wasn't back on time she need not bother to come at all. Also she had refused to pay her for the time she would be away and, although it would only have been a few pounds, Ross had been counting on it. Having to do without it had meant not being able to buy any new clothes, as Freddy had taken almost all her savings. However, he had convinced her she would only need a pair or two of old jeans and that they couldn't take much on the plane anyway.
The flight itself had not been momentous. Ross, keyed up with a rising excitement which had melted away the last of her regrets, had been surprised to find how quickly it had passed. With Freddy by her side, comfortingly familiar, she had felt completely safe. Too soon they were landing at the airport at Casablanca and she caught her first sight and sound of the mysterious East which she had wanted to visit for so long.
Ross knew, despite everything, that she would never- forget her first glimpse of it. Even as they left the plane the impact of a thousand tantalising impressions hit her, an inexplicable assault on already quivering emotions. For a long moment she had stood hesitantly, not knowing how best to cope with such an intensity of feeling. There had been within her some indescribable desire to respond to some paganlike element in the air around her, and yet another agonising impression that the gods were already laughing at her because, in her innocence, she didn't know how !
Freddy had stared frowning at her suddenly rapt face and made a sharply trite remark to break the spell. 'Come on, small sister,' he had said. 'You don't have to stand here like some moonstruck gazelle! Come and meet the boys. I want them to imagine you're practical, not a dreamer. They wouldn't thank me for one of those.'
It was then that Ross had known her first shock of unease. Freddy's friends, Lance and Denis, hadn't been at all as she had pictured them. Freddy, although they didn't really have a lot in common, was family, and fair, like herself. They both shared their mother's pale gold colouring which made them look much younger than they actually were. Freddy, of course, was much taller and heavier, but he did have an engagingly innocent appearance, if, in his case, it was oddly deceptive. One only had to look a little closer at Freddy to see that, at twenty-six, lines of dissipation were already forming on his attractive face.
Ross didn't notice. If she had done so she did not have the experience to judge the degree of such things. All she knew was what she felt instinctively about his friends. Even then it was merely a kind of dawning apprehension, not anything she might have put into words. They didn't appear to take a great deal of notice of her at first, but she soon became conscious of their too intimate glances, their low-voiced suggestive remarks, all of which seemed to confirm her first doubtful reactions.
&nbs
p; When, on the second day, she had complained with some embarrassment to Freddy, he had told the erring pair quite frankly to knock it off. 'Though you can't blame them too much, Ross,' he pointed out later. 'I guess I tend to forget you're growing up!'
Lance and Denis, like him, were in their middle twenties, and, to Ross's dismay, she quickly realised they belonged to entirely different worlds. Their crudeness and cynicism amazed and startled her. They might have been years older than they actually were! Overhearing a lot of conversation which was probably not meant for her ears, she got the impression there was not one place they hadn't exploited in their drifting, idle lives. Not one experience they hadn't sampled. If it occurred to Ross that Freddy was greatly at fault by bringing her anywhere near such men she could see, at this stage, there was little to be gained by airing such views. In spite of his half-hearted protests, they didn't stop to spare her blushes, seeming to derive a great delight from the often shocked expressions that chased across Ross's vividly expressive young face.
'How did you ever come to know them?' she had asked in a fierce aside to Freddy one evening after supper, which she had cooked to a battery of blatant remarks. 'I think they're positively beastly, and you must have known I'd never have come if I'd realised that they were like this. I don't know how you ever came to have such friends!' she had choked.
'Oh, come off it, Ross!' Too aware of his niggling conscience, he sounded frankly fed up. 'They aren't all that bad. It's just their manner, which I admit occasionally leaves a bit to be desired. But you can't go round with your head in the sand much longer, if you'll forgive the pun, seeing how we're sitting on tons of the stuff. Isn't it about time you grew up?'
'It's more than overdue, I would say!' Lance, having caught Freddy's last few words, leered suggestively, and the way in which his eyes had gone over her thin but well curved figure had brought a hot blush to Ross's pale cheeks.
'Well, you haven't come to any harm yet, have you!' Freddy had intervened swiftly, before Ross could reply. He was pouring what she supposed was meant to be oil on troubled waters, but she suspected with sudden and frightening intuition that he was secretly rather nervous of his friends himself!
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