Читать книгу Sleeping with the Sultan - ALEXANDRA SELLERS - Страница 9

For a moment she thought he was going to pass on by, but he stopped and faced her. His eyes bored into hers, but against a little shiver of feeling she couldn’t define, she managed to hold her gaze steady.

“Are you an optimist, Miss Golbahn, or a pessimist?” he asked in conversational tones.

Typical of a man like him to call her by her father’s, not her professional name. She was quite sure it was deliberately calculated.

“Don’t you mean, am I a dreamer or a realist?”

“No, I don’t mean that,” he replied, in a careful tone that infuriated her. His eyebrows moved expressively. “I mean, when you say that the restoration of the monarchy is impossible, do you speak from your wishes, or your fears?”

He had absolutely no right to challenge her about a conversation he had eavesdropped on in the first place. His arrogance made her grit her teeth—and tell a lie.

“I have no wishes one way or the other. I am simply calling it as I see it.”

“You have no wish to see a vicious dictator who destroys his country and his people swept from power,” he repeated, his face hardening.

She was damned if she would retract now.

“What good would my hopes do anyone?”

His burning gaze flicked down over her body, then back up to her face again. She suddenly felt what a disadvantage it was not to know whether she was naked or not. Had he just looked at her breasts?

“Do you feel you owe nothing to your father, Miss Golbahn?” he asked.

She stared at him in open-mouthed, indignant astonishment. Typical of a man like him to imagine a twenty-six-year-old woman should govern her actions according to her father’s pride!

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” she demanded, dimly realizing that heads were now turning in their direction.

“I—”

“My name is Morningstar,” she overrode him in her coldest voice. “And how accounts stand between me and my father is absolutely none of your business.”

His eyes narrowed at her, but if he expected her to be cowed, he could think again. She tilted her chin and gave him stare for stare. Her tone was no more insulting than his own had been, and she would be quite happy to point that out to him. But the man bowed his head a fraction.

“I apologize. I was given to understand that you were Colonel Golbahn’s daughter.”

“My father is Khaldun Golbahn. He is no longer a colonel, and the regiment he was colonel of hasn’t existed for over thirty years,” she returned through her teeth.

Before he could respond to this, a waiter appeared to pull out her chair, and Dana gratefully turned away and sank down to accept a napkin on her lap. Only a few people were still milling around, tying up their conversations before heading to separate tables. People were watching her more or less covertly, and she realized that her argument with the stranger had given them another reason to stare and whisper.

She could sense that he was still hovering behind her. She hoped he wasn’t intending to get in the last word. Dana picked up the printed menu card propped in front of her wineglass and wished he would disappear.

“Sheikh Durran!” a crusty old voice exclaimed with satisfaction.

“Sir John,” his voice replied, and she almost fainted with horror. Her eyes flew to the place card at the setting next to her. Sheikh Ashraf Durran.

Ya Allah, she would be sitting beside him for the next two hours!

The two men were shaking hands behind her, and she heard the clap of hand against shoulder. “I was hoping to see you.” The old man dropped his voice. “How did your brother manage? Can I assume your presence tonight means I am to congratulate you?”

Dana found she was holding her breath. There was an air of mystery over the conversation, suddenly, and it gripped her. She bent further over the menu card, but she wasn’t taking in one word of what was printed.

“He was successful, Sir John, in a manner of speaking—and flying by the seat of his pants, as usual.”

He spoke quietly. His voice now held a hint of humour that she hadn’t been privileged to hear when he spoke to her. It was deep and strong, as compelling as the man. A voice an actor would kill for.

“You have it safe, then?” The old man was whispering now.

“I do.”

“Tremendous! Well done, all of you! One might almost say, an omen.”

“Mash’Allah.”

The two men sat, one on either side of her. Dana stared fixedly at the menu. She had never felt so unnerved by a situation. She reminded herself how many times in the past she had made conversation with awkward, difficult strangers, more or less successfully. There was no reason to feel as though there was a chasm in front of her.

Waiters were already circulating with trays of starters and pouring wine. Onstage the tar was being played with a heartrending virtuosity that no other instrument, she thought, ever achieved.

“Asparagus or tabbouleh?” the waiter asked her.

Dana loved the food of Bagestan; she had been raised on it. At sixteen she had stopped eating it, as a rejection of her father and all he stood for. That time of rebellion was long past; she was twenty-six now. But she found herself thrown back into that old, combative mind-set now.

She wanted to let Sheikh Ashraf Durran know that she was not to be judged by any of his rules. As she had her father.

“Asparagus, thank you,” she said, and a plate of butter-soaked green spears was set before her. She took a sip of wine.

“Tabbouleh,” Sheikh Durran firmly requested a moment later. She noticed that there was no wine in his wineglass. Well, she could have guessed that.

In the loud buzz of conversation that was going up all around the ballroom, it seemed to her that the silence between the two of them must be as obvious to everyone as their earlier disagreement. She wondered if gossip about them would find its way into the tabloids. Journalists often needed no more. Find a button and sew a coat onto it was their motto.

Dana glanced around the table in the hopes of finding a conversation to join. Somehow she had got put in with the political crowd. She recognized an academic who was often called in to discuss Bagestani affairs on a BBC current events program, and a television journalist who had made her name covering the Parvan-Kaljuk War and whose career was now devoted to reporting from one Middle East hot spot or another. Dana thought she would have enjoyed talking to them. But they were directly across the table from her, chatting quietly together.

Sir John Cross, too, was engaged with the person on his other side.

“You have no desire to see your father restored to his command, Miss Morningstar?” Sheikh Durran clearly had no reservations about picking up where they had left off.

Dana picked up a stalk of asparagus and turned her head. Up close she recognized the Parvan flag on one of his medals. He was a veteran of the Parvan-Kaljuk War, then, but she was no closer to knowing who he was.

“I have no expectation of seeing it,” she returned, before biting into the tender, delicious tip.

“Why not?”

“My father is, after all, nearly sixty. Not very much younger than President Ghasib.” She said the name deliberately, for in expat circles it wasn’t the thing to give the dictator his title. Saying it on an occasion like this was tantamount to declaring herself on the Ghasib side.

She wasn’t on the Ghasib side and never had been, not even in her days of wildest rebellion. But no way was she going to fall meekly in line with the sheikh’s expectations.

She pushed the buttery stalk into her mouth. There was no change in the sheikh’s expression, but suddenly she felt the phallic symbolism of it, almost as if he had pointed it out to her. Dream on! she wanted to snap. She chewed, then licked the butter from her fingertips before deliberately reaching for her wine again.

Sheikh Durran seemed to take no notice. He picked up a small lettuce leaf and used it to pinch up some of his tabbouleh salad.

“Do you think the only thing that will remove Ghasib from power is death from old age?”

She chose another stalk. She opened her mouth, wondering if she could unnerve him by sucking the butter from the tip. Her eyes flicked to his. His look was dry and challenging, and without any warning, heat flamed in her cheeks.

“Even granting the unlikely proposition that there was an al Jawadi heir,” she said defiantly, “even granting that this mysterious person should at last reveal himself and, even more amazingly, make the risky attempt to take power, and then granting that he should be successful in restoring the monarchy in Bagestan—what are the odds that my father would be given his old job back by someone who wasn’t even born at the time he held it?”

His eyebrows went up, but he made no answer.

“But the truth, if people would stop being excited by newspaper reports as reliable as sightings of the Abominable Snowman, is that it’s a mirage. No prince is going to come riding in on his white horse and wave his magic wand to make Ghasib disappear.”

“You know this?”

“Look—I got that nostalgia stuff at my daddy’s knee. He talked of nothing else all through my childhood. When I was a kid, I believed it. I had a huge crush on the mysterious Crown Prince who was going to make it all happen. I wrote letters to him. I even had a dream that I was going to marry him when I grew up. But he never came, did he? Thirty years now.

“I paid my dues, Sheikh Durran. I believed the myth as firmly as I believed in Santa Claus. After my mother and father split Santa Claus never visited our house again, but I went on believing in him. And I went on believing in the al Jawadi restoration, too. But a dream like that only lasts so long. And then one day you wake up and realize—it’s a fairy tale.”

“And at what age did you wake up?”

Dana tensed and wished she hadn’t spoken so openly. She wasn’t sure why she had. “From the Santa Claus myth, eight. From the prince on a white horse fiction, sixteen,” she said shortly, and applied herself to her meal.

“Sixteen,” Sheikh Ashraf repeated consideringly. “That’s young to stop believing in justice.”

She supposed he was right. But she had had a very rude and sudden awakening.

Dana shrugged, demolished another spear of asparagus, and wiped her fingers on her napkin. He waited, and she felt forced to answer. She waved a hand at the room.

“What amazes me is the number of people who never wake up—who refuse to wake up.”

“What happened at sixteen that took the stars from your eyes?”

I discovered that the father I adored was a monster and nothing he said was to be believed.

She shrugged and lied again. “Nothing in particular.”

His gaze probed her for an uncomfortable moment, but to her relief he let it pass.

“And what happened to your letters?” he asked.

“What?” she asked blankly. She automatically leaned towards him as the waiter cleared her plate.

“The letters you wrote to the Crown Prince. What became of them?”

She really wished she hadn’t told him about that. It wasn’t a part of her past she confided very often. Something had knocked her off her centre tonight.

“I really don’t know.” Her tone said, don’t care.

“They were never sent?”

“Where to? My father told me Crown Prince Kamil had escaped from the palace as a baby, with his mother carrying him in a load of Ghasib’s dirty laundry. He said they got to Parvan, but no one knew any more than that, did they?”

He hesitated. “Some knew more.”

She wasn’t sure what made her ask, “Did you ever meet him?”

Again he hesitated. “Yes, I met him.”

“He died fighting in the Kaljuk War, didn’t he? Is that where you knew him?”

Sheikh Ashraf turned his head and lifted a hand as the waiter started to fill his glass with wine. “No, thank you.”

When he turned back he seemed to have forgotten her question. After a moment Dana nodded towards the row of medals on his chest.

“You were in the Kaljuk War?”

His eyelids came down as he nodded.

“Are you Parvani?” He didn’t sound it.

“I was born in Barakat,” he said. “I was in Prince Omar’s Company.”

The almost legendary Company of Cup Companions, led by Prince Omar of Central Barakat, who had gone to war on Prince Kavian’s side. She had followed their fortunes while still at drama school. All her friends had had crushes on the Cup Companions and had plagued Dana with questions, feeling sure that, because of her background, she knew more than they did.

And she had, a little. At least she knew what the term Cup Companion meant. “In the old days, it used to mean the guys the king went on the prowl with. The sons of the aristocracy. They weren’t supposed to know or care about politics or government, only wine and love and poetry.” Cue for sighs. “But nowadays it’s just the opposite. They’re the prince’s special advisors and stuff like that. By tradition he has twelve of them,” she had explained.

There had been many more than the twelve in the Company, of course. Others recruited had been made Honorary Companions. So it wasn’t foolish to ask, “Are you one of his Cup Companions?”

He replied with a little nod. She should have guessed before. But she’d forgotten until now that Cup Companions from Parvan and the Barakat Emirates were supposed to be attending tonight.

“What’s your interest in the al Jawadis?” she pressed.

He eyed her consideringly for a moment. “Prince Omar is related to the al Jawadi through the Durrani. I, too, am a Durrani.”

“And you want to help the al Jawadi back to the throne?”

His raised his eyebrows. “Tonight we are here to raise money not for the al Jawadi, but for the victims of the drought which Ghasib’s insane agricultural policies have created.”

“Maybe, on the surface, but you know and I know that tonight there are going to be lots of under-the-table donations to the al Jawadi campaign as well.”

“Do we?”

The waiter had refilled her wineglass and she took another sip. There was juice on the table for non-drinkers, but she noticed Sheikh Durran stuck to water. But refusing alcohol didn’t prove he was a good man. No doubt her father was doing the same.

“Born in Barakat, you said. Are you Bagestani by blood?” Not all the refugees from Ghasib’s regime had fled to England or Canada, by any means. More had gone to Parvan and Barakat.

“I am half Barakati, half Bagestani,” he said, after a pause in which he seemed to calculate.

“Ah! So you’re one of those who never stopped believing in the fairy tale?”

His lips twitched again. “You might say that. And you, Miss Morningstar—you do not believe anyone is capable of removing Ghasib from power?”

“Salmon or chicken?” the waiter interrupted, and quickly set down what she asked for.

She chose automatically and scarcely noticed the interruption.

“Well, there’s always the possibility that another ambitious nephew may one day be successful in some renewed assassination attempt, I suppose,” she allowed, helping herself to the beautifully cooked vegetables offered. “Or the Islamic militants may pull it off. But Ghasib does seem to deal with both those possibilities in a very convincing way, doesn’t he? I can’t help feeling that anyone with their eyes on power, even a prince, if there is one, might be content to wait until natural causes win the day for them.”

He concentrated on the vegetables for a moment. “You think the fear of death makes cowards of us all?”

His part of the conversation so far seemed to consist entirely of questions. “Maybe. It’s the undiscovered country, isn’t it? ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,’” she recited.

His mouth went up on one side. It was the first smile she had had from him. “And who said that?”

“Hamlet. Isn’t that who you were paraphrasing?”

This produced a small laugh. Humour transformed him, she found. The fire in his eyes turned to sparkle, and he suddenly seemed much younger. Now she would place him at well under thirty-five.

“I was not paraphrasing anyone.” The flow to the new conversation was seamless as he pursued, “You know the play well?”

“I starred in a school production.”

“Interesting—I thought the star part was Hamlet himself.”

“It is the star part.” She grinned, but still did not feel easy with him. “I was at a girls’ school.”

“And you were the tallest girl?”

It occurred to her suddenly that he did not know who she was. That was why he had called her by her father’s name. Well, no surprise if a man like him didn’t watch the soaps, and she hadn’t yet landed a major film part.

She laughed. What did it matter? “Yes, I was the tallest girl by a long way,” she said. “I was a natural for the part.”