The Jewelled Caftan

by Margaret Pargeter

  It was, in some ways, a small grain of comfort to know he was over-sensitive about his slight deformity, which seemed to have grown out of all proportion in his eyes. It amazed her that a man of such undeniable strength should have one , spot so vulnerable, should still be so sensitive about something that wasn't really noticeable. He hadn't spoken again, but she still felt the sting of his cruel words and she supposed he considered it was now up to her to break the uneasy silence? Her own temper still smouldering, she didn't feel inclined. It was.only a thought of Freddy, what Sidi Armel could do for him, that brought a few reluctant words to her lips.

  'I think you misjudge me. When you first touched my ankle I felt an unexpected pain. That was why I flinched.' Heaven forgive me for concealing the truth, she prayed, but as it. was a truth she could not have explained, even to herself, she did not know what else she could have said, why the firm touch of his fingers on the bone should affect her as it had done. 'I think my nerves are still frayed,' she added desperately, as his lips merely curled. 'They could be worse than my physical injuries.'

  Visibly he hardened. 'Your nerves indeed,' he muttered, * openly sneering as he dropped her foot, as if he found it suddenly distasteful. 'Nerves are the last thing I thought to hear you complain of. I should have thought you had more than enough, and in cast-iron condition!'

  While Ross marvelled bitterly as to how he could twist the simplest statement, he went on, inexorably, 'If you are quite finished with your fairy stories, you might find time to recall that we have much to discuss. And I warn you, I want the truth. None of your amazing flights of imagination will do now.'

  How she could hate him in this mood! And she hated to' think he had touched her bare foot, even that small part of her. There was a force within him she could only judge as destructive. If she disobeyed him she sensed he could derive a

  great pleasure from adding further bruises to her soft body! Never, now,, would she confess that his hands had been somehow exquisite, that while he had unconsciously massaged her ankles and sore skin she had not wanted him to stop. Her smouldering confusion too ready to flare, Ross stared at him with a new defiance. - 'There is nothing at all I'd be ashamed to discuss,' she declared rashly, 'but I don't see why you should really bother. You aren't going to help me, and your opinion of me couldn't be worse !'

  He actually smiled, if it was just a sardonic twist of his mouth, as he moved away from her to his own corner of the couch again, where he could watch her clearly. 'If we seem to be at cross-purposes most of the time then we must each take a share of the blame. I certainly intend trying to help you, although I have not yet decided in exacdy what way. My opinion of you, being based on the mental picture I carry of a girl prepared to strip herself naked in order to get her own way, could be prejudiced, but you have done nothing yet to alter it.'

  Ross took a deeply controlling breath, the effort to maintain an indifferent front almost more than she could manage—a fact vividly betrayed by the guilty flare of colour in her cheeks as she bit down hard on another wild denial. Why did he keep on about this so? He knew it wasn't true, but she would only be repeating herself if she were to go through the whole weary business of reciting the exact reasons behind her seemingly indecent behaviour again.

  'Good!' he jeered softly, his eyes mocking her apparent deflation. 'As you appear to be in a more acquiescent mood we can begin. I suggest you start at the beginning and I will listen.'

  Fine words, Ross decided scornfully, when scarcely a minute later he interrupted with a terse exclamation.

  'You mean to tell me that no one, not even your parents, knows you are here?'

  Painfully Ross swallowed. She still felt a curious reluctance to give any definite information regarding herself, anything that might lead to Cynthia discovering where she actually was. No matter what Armel ben Yussef might think she must continue to deceive him. 'No one knows where I am,' she mumbled. 'I didn't tell anyone as she—I mean they still think I'm too young to be allowed far on my own, even with Freddy.'

  He said curdy, 'And have they been proved wrong?'

  'Not exactly,' she felt forced to admit. 'You must remember, though, that accidents can happen to people on their very doorsteps.'

  'Even inside the home, I agree, but not of this kind, I'm thinking,' he rejoined dryly. 'They probably realised how extremely irresponsible you are.'

  'I don't see what this has to do with the fix my brother's in,' Ross hedged, resenting the way he could make her feel around ten years old. 'Surely I don't have to account for everything?'

  'If you want my help you do!' His voice contained an indisputable authority. 'So, to start with, no one has any idea where you are? Apart from the so admirable Freddy.'

  'Sometimes it's better that people don't know,' she cried crossly, because perversely she suspected he would enjoy putting the worst construction on anything she did, no matter how innocent. 'If you must know, I'm supposed to be in Cornwall with Freddy's cousin Avis.'

  'A deceitfulness planned to the last detail.' His cold tones expressed all he left unsaid. 'What, might I ask, did you use for money, as I believe you mentioned you are still living at home? If you have no occupation, did you borrow from someone who had perhaps no idea either what you were up to?'

  Ross hesitated, reluctant to give the true details of her job or to tell him about her savings, how Freddy had used them. It probably wouldn't sound right, and if he was to think the worst of Freddy he might never even consider helping him. 'No,' she admitted at last, 'we did have our own money.'

  'And the other two men with you?'

  'They came out here with the truck. They met Freddy and me at the airport.'

  'Had you ever seen either of them before?'

  'Why, no, but they're friends of Freddy's.'

  'Notorious ones,' he grunted, 'if my eyes didn't deceive me.'

  She gave a short jerky laugh. He might have expressed her own conclusions. ' Not that she would admit it! 'You couldn't know them?'

  His face closed up on her coldly. 'Indeed I could—but that is another matter. How did your half-brother persuade such men to take you along?'

  He didn't, she almost confessed, stopping herself just in time. Why should she feel forced to disclose that Freddy had only taken her along as she had provided the money? Why should this man know she was like a stray cat whom nobody particularly wanted? 'I was to be cook. In fact I did do the cooking,' she replied, her small chin tilting to his sceptically raised eyebrows.

  'You took your time about that. As if reluctant to state your true role!'

  'What do you mean?'

  'I mean—men like that don't have cooks. They do often have women along, but that was certainly never their original name.'

  'Why...!' Ross could have scratched her fingers down his scornfully ironic face! 'They never so much as tried anything—at least. .

  'At least. ..?' His eyes narrowed to points of steel. 'Do continue, Miss Lindsay. I detect scarcely the hint of a blush and you don't need to spare mine. You might find I'm almost as broad-minded as you are.'

  It infuriated Ross even more than he did to find her cheeks growing unnecessarily hotter. 'I hadn't anything more to say,' she burst out impetuously.

  A strange expression crossed his tanned face. 'What an insolent child you are! But at least when it comes to lying you aren't very adept. Don't you realise you're condemning yourself with nearly every other sentence?'

  'Because you choose to apply the wrong construction. I may well accuse you of having already judged and condemned me, on your own evidence, not mine !'

  'Very well,' his firm lips relaxed but just a fraction, as he

  agreed suavely, 'I am prepared to listen while you tell me what you were all doing so far into the desert. Your companions must have known that some of the frontiers are closed.'

  'They, I mean, Freddy told me . . .' Ross hesitated, never having felt so miserably mixed up. It couldn't be any offence to look for something someone else had abandoned.
Should she tell him? Well, why not? 'It was somebody's gold,' she began cautiously, 'that had been lost since the war. It was supposed to be in Tunisia or Libya, but Lance—he was the elder of the two other men—had a theory that it could be in some other place. Anyway, they were trying to find it. I didn't know about this until it was too late to turn back.'

  'Good God!' ben Yussef's face was incredulous. 'Not that . old story again I It's something people have been searching for for years!'

  'And never found?'

  'It probably doesn't exist, but gold* any gold, has always been a fever in man's blood, and these lands have had their fair share. When the lust for it gets hold of a man he will stop at nothing. Did you never consider this, little fool?'

  Ross trembled, though she didn't know why. She couldn't even find it within her to be mad at what he had just called her. 'I told you,' she whispered, 'I didn't know !'

  Resignedly he shrugged, as if this must suffice. 'When did you run into the—er—nomads?' he asked abruptly.

  She suspected he knew more about the identity of the men who had captured them than he admitted, but felt suddenly too weary to probe. Instead she said meekly, 'The day before you found us.'

  He frowned sharply. 'You were in a pretty bad shape. Yet your half-brother and his accomplices seemed fairly well?'

  'It was because they had been given something to eat and drink, and not bound so tightly. I was given nothing, although the boy who brought the meals seemed occasionally to take pity on me and wet my lips.'

  Ben Yussef's mouth clamped on a half uttered oath as she continued in a matter-of-fact way, 'They didn't know I was a girl, you see. Lance annoyed them and they immediately tied

  him up. Then they wanted the truck and insisted that Freddy and I got it going. When we didn't succeed they tied us up too. Lance said—or was it Freddy?—that he suspected they hoped I would die of natural causes as I was too thin and small to be of any use.'

  The eyes of the man beside her flicked the full curve of one profiled breast sardonically before he replied. 'You realise what could have happened to you if they'd known you were a girl? Many tribes roam these deserts. Even today many are barely civilised, at least not as we understand the word. They are usually extremely honourable, but often beyond the control of any government—if one could ever ascertain exactly which government they belong to. They slip over frontiers like shadows in the night, impossible to pin down, gone before morning. Their women are usually veiled and protected before strangers. This is probably why they didn't question your disguise, but you could have been taken and never seen again. Can you not imagine the anguish of any parents who know their daughter to be missing under such circumstances?'

  'I didn't intend to worry anyone,' Ross gulped, feeling the full lash of Armel ben Yussef's words. She felt so badly about it now, she could have wept. But not before this man. Never in front of him ! He was so without understanding he would more than likely just laugh at her tears. 'If you could only help me to find Freddy,' she hated even to plead, 'then I'll swear I'll go straight home 1'

  'But that you won't do,' he astonished her by exclaiming, his eyes still smouldering. 'I think it's quite time you were taught a sharp lesson—a well deserved one, I might add, one your parents are either unable or unwilling to provide. I should be little less than irresponsible should I let you go just yet. To come out of this unscathed with merely a sneer of youthful triumph on your lips !'

  'What . . .' Far from being triumphant, Ross shook so she could scarcely form a simple sentence. In this mood Armel ben Yussef scared her, terrified her, in fact, much more than even her previous captors had done! 'What,' she stammered, 'do you intend doing with me? Surely you must realise you can't keep me here? I wonder that you appear to consider yourself honourable!'

  Although she knew she had spoken unwisely she wasn't quite prepared for his fury.

  'Mon dieu!' For a moment he went completely still, like some lean marauder of the jungle ready to pounce, 'you amaze me, girl,' his eyes scorched her. 'You play noughts and crosses with every danger one can think of and expect to escape untouched! What will happen next time unless you have something to make you pause and think? I would be rejecting my duty to society to allow you to return exactly as you are!'

  She tried to fight back, filled with a fierce desire to battle wildly against walls which seemed to be closing in on her. But the weariness within was consuming her now, drowning her rising tide of anger. She could only whisper, 'You can't keep me here, a virtual prisoner! If you do then you will be no better than the nomads you saved me from !'

  'Just so long as you acknowledge I did save you, you can stop worrying about any stigma on my character.'

  Pausing, Ross attempted to move him with persuasion. 'With the men you must have, surely you could have dictated to those rogues?'

  His lips thinned, as if he shrewdly recognised her desire to deviate. 'I had three men with me that day. The nomad had not less than twenty—scarcely a number to be argued with, especially as I happened to be unarmed. He offered you—if I could repair the truck, and you, in turn, offered what I correctly assumed was yourself. Do you not then believe, as I asked you before, in keeping a bargain, girl?'

  'But that was simply your own construction! You know I only begged to be rescued. If I could have escaped another way, don't you think I would have done so? What you have in mind is clearly ridiculous !'

  His derisive smile mocked her. 'What exactly do you imagine I have in mind, girl? Is it not, perhaps, just what you desired for yourself when you first came to this part of the world? Were you not seeking a little light entertainment, a little romance to cheer an otherwise dull existence?'

  'My—my life wasn't dull. . .'

  'Ah, so at last you admit it!'

  'Please!' Hopelessly Ross turned away from the enigmatic satisfaction on his face. He twisted everything she said, always returning to the same conclusions. Why was he so determined she should suffer for a licentious life she had never led? Gazing at him again, she shuddered, wondering instinctively what kind of dangerous bitterness drove him. Could it be a sudden anger against a fate which left the fingers of an inferior person like herself Unblemished while choosing to rob him of a similar perfection? 'Please,' she repeated, as the tent in some crazy fashion began swinging around her, 'it doesn't seem to matter any more what happens to me. If you would only rescue my brother, you can do what you like. This I promise. You see, he is the one whom —er—someone at home really cares about. If anything should happen to him it could just about break her heart!'

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FOR the next two days Ross saw no sign of Armel ben Yussef and for the length of that time she fretted accordingly. He had gone quickly, without so much as bidding her farewell, when she might have had the opportunity of asking where he was off to. He had simply disappeared into the silence of a desert dawn while she had still been sleeping. It was only from Jamila that she had learnt that he was visiting a distant village, but any further information the girl had refused to divulge, either not knowing what he was up to or, just as probably, having received orders not to say.

  Jamila's was a curious kind of silence, shared, it seemed, by most of the tribesmen at the oasis where Armel ben Yussef pitched his tents. After a while Ross gave up trying to glean the information from them and settled down impatiently to wait for his return.

  She discovered, to her surprise, that Jamila was married to one of Armel's men and they already had one small child. Through her husband Ross suspected Jamila had learnt of her attempts to find out where Armel was, and it was obvious she did not approve.

  She said mildly that if he heard about it Sidi Armel might not be pleased. 'He will tell you everything in his own time, mademoiselleshe advised.

  Ross doubted it. She doubted it very much ! It stood out a mile that he was away on some extremely questionable business—probably robbing an innocent man of his hard-earned money, or conducting equally discreditable negotiations with those
possessed of slower wits than himself. Remembering how condemning he had been regarding her own character, Ross concluded tartly that he himself had not a single virtue to lift him above the level of a common thief.

  Then why, in those first few bewildering hours of loneliness, did she begin to almost hunger for the sight of him? It was merely, she tried to convince herself, that he alone held the key to her freedom, and in his absence she had contrived at least a dozen feasible arguments as to why he should return her immediately to civilisation.

  Not that his men, those he had obviously left to guard the encampment, ever stopped her from trying to escape. They only kept an eye on her and did not let her get too near the horses. Otherwise she was free to wander at will. Most probably on Armel's orders! He was a devil, she was made constantly aware of it. If he had tied her up again, bound her to her bed, she might not have known such an agony of frustration. To be so wonderfully free without being able to take advantage of it brought an agony of mind. Armel would know, as they all did, that with the rope burns at her ankles still hurting she would not get far across the limitless desert. Even if her legs had been completely healed she might have found it an impossible task as all she could see, whichever way she gazed, was hundreds of miles of burning white sands. Much as she wished to get away, she was not yet ready to commit suicide. Here, beneath the many palms and small trees which dotted the oasis, she must wait for Armel and hope he would be in a more sensible mood when he returned. She could only pray that his wanderings, a successful looting perhaps, might conceivably put him in a more generous frame of mind.

  It was to be remembered that he had promised nothing, that first night when, with her senses wearily swimming, he had picked her up as if she had been little more than a feather, and ruthlessly carried her back into the inner room of the tent.

  'You are still weak,' he had said, his eyes resting keenly on her waxen face. 'You aren't fit to travel even if I were to allow it. Rest and relax, girl, until I return. People of the West are too screwed up with inhibitions. Here in the desert, if you give yourself a chance, you can let the whole world, all the so important matters that hold you as tense as a little ramrod, slide by.'