Sheikh's Ransom

“Darling, it’s not forever,” Louise had hastily assured her. She had talked fast, not giving Caroline time to express objections. “David won’t expect you to stay married to him for long. He knows better than that. You’ll be divorced by the time you’re thirty!”

Caroline shuddered. “And who will get custody of the children?”

“Darling, you’re looking for problems! David may not even want children. And at thirty, look where you’ll be. You’ll have serious money—you can trust your father to see to that—and you probably won’t look a day older than you do now. The cosmetic aids you’ll be able to afford! The massage, the clinics! Whereas I’m aging a little more with every day that passes.”

“Being eternally young isn’t really high on my list of priorities,” Caroline responded dryly, but her mother overrode her.

“Caroline, you’ll have money. Don’t underestimate it. Money is the power to do whatever you like. You will have total freedom, Caroline.” She emphasised each word of the last sentence.

Caroline had frowned as something whispered in the back of her mind that she would have total freedom now if she left her parents to the fate which their own foolish actions and constant living beyond their means had brought upon them.

And as though she sensed that, Louise had added quickly, with a pathetic catch to her voice, “We’ll have freedom, too, Caroline. You can purchase our freedom as no one else can. And think of Dara. She’ll be able to go to university, and I know you want her to be able to do that....”

But she would not have agreed to the engagement if she had not believed that David wanted to marry her because he loved her.

David had begun taking her to museums to introduce her to his way of life and her future, and one fine day he had introduced her to “herself”—a marble bust thought to be Alexander the Great. And that was when she discovered just what it was about his fiancée that David loved: Caroline looked like a Greek statue.

In profile her broad forehead sloped down into a finely carved nose with scarcely any change in angle; her slim eyebrows, set low, followed the line of her large, wide-spaced, grey eyes; her cheeks and jaw, though delicately moulded, curved with a fullness that was nothing like the fashionable gaunt hollowness of a Vogue model; her upper lip was slender and beautifully drawn, her lower lip full, curving up at the corners. And in addition there was the riot of curls over her well-shaped head and down the back of her neck. Her only flaw, if you were looking for physical perfection, was the slightly crooked front tooth.

The bust was, in fact, eerily like her. She was looking at her own death mask—or, she told herself, because the sculptor had been a great artist and the statue was certainly “alive,” herself frozen in the mirror of time.

David had insisted on buying her a wardrobe suited to her new position as his fiancée. Caroline by then had felt out of control of events; she had been unable to protest at the arrangement, let alone the way that David dictated her choices. She had some very smart, and rather original, ivory and cream outfits in her wardrobe now. And a gold upper arm bracelet and heavy gold necklace that had cost as much as her year’s salary.

When he had effected a certain amount of transformation, David threw a midsummer masquerade party to celebrate the public announcement of their engagement. For that he had designed Caroline’s costume himself. Or, had hired a designer to execute what he wanted.

And what he wanted was Caroline looking as much like a Greek statue as possible. Intricately pleated ivory silk toga with flowing folds, ivory leather sandals, a wreath of ivory-coloured leaves in her hair, her skin painted to look like marble...when she stood perfectly still, she really had almost looked like marble.

“Don’t smile with your teeth tonight, Caroline,” David had ordered, with no apology for his air of command. “It spoils the illusion. Serenity, my dear.” It was then that she had finally put all the pieces together. David did not love her. He didn’t even imagine that he did. What he wanted was to add her to his collection. He wanted to own her.

In that moment she wondered whether it would be possible to recover from the personality changes David would exact from her.

A steady voice in her head had whispered, Get out now. Tell him you’ve changed your mind tell him not to make the announcement tonight. But Caroline had stifled the thought. Her mother was right. A few years of sacrifice was not too much for her family to ask.

Of course, the couple’s photograph had illustrated the story of the engagement in the newspaper. David Percy Adds “The Jewel in the Crown” To His Private Collection was the headline.

When she had learned, while she was in the midst of packing her bags for this trip, that David would not be coming, Caroline had taken out of her case all the clothes he had bought her and packed instead her own clothes, bought at a discount where she worked. She would not have much chance to wear them once she was married.

Caroline liked colour. She was fairly sure the ancient Greeks had, too. Lots of the statues she had seen during her recent crash course in classical art under David’s tutelage had obviously once been painted in very bright, intense colours, and she had read somewhere that it was possible that even what David called “the elegant proportions of the Parthenon” had been covered in bright red and turquoise and gold leaf. And as for emotions, in the ancient legends the Greeks seemed anything but serene. Even their gods had been wildly passionate and overly emotional... but she did not put that point of view to David.

Caroline sighed and slipped into the present. David was not here now, and if the phone didn’t ring soon, she wouldn’t have to talk to him. She was suddenly wildly grateful that David had not come on this trip. He would have insisted on New York standards everywhere. She wanted to see, to experience the East, its beauty, its passion, its legendary contradictions.

“The woman is very much younger than he,” Nasir reported. “It is said that he paid her father a large amount of money for her.” He passed a faxed copy of a newspaper photograph to the two princes.

“ ‘The jewel in his crown!’ ” Karim read the caption headline.

“Ah, a Mona Lisa!” exclaimed Prince Rafi with interest.

Karim gazed at the photo. It showed a pale, grave-eyed young woman in costume half smiling at someone beyond the camera, beside a smooth-skinned man of middle age. He looked up and met the eyes of his secretary. “And this is what he thinks of this woman?” he asked, indicating the headline. The secretary only bowed his head. “He adds her to his collection?” Karim pursued.

“Allowances must of course be made for the inaccuracies of gossip and the liberties taken by the press,” the secretary offered diffidently.

Prince Karim nodded, his black eyes glittering. His face took on the harsh look of a desert tribesman riding to battle as he turned back to the photograph. “Excellent! It may be, then, that Mr. Percy would like to make an exchange.”

Nasir showed no surprise, but nothing ever did surprise him.

“The jewel of my collection for the jewel of his,” went on Prince Karim. “First, of course, we will have to gain possession of Mr. Percy’s jewel.”

When Kaifar appeared at her door, he was wearing a suit of white cotton trousers and shirt that was “neither of the East nor of the West” but looked as though it would be comfortable anywhere. But still, with his dark skin and black beard, he looked richly exotic to her eyes. On his strong bare feet he wore the kind of thong sandals that she had earlier noticed men and women in the city wearing.

They stood for a moment in the doorway, not speaking. Then Caroline dropped her gaze and said, “I’ll get my bag.” Her voice came out sounding weak, almost breathless. Leaving the door open, she turned and went back into the sitting room, where her scarf and evening bag lay on a chair.

The phone rang.

Kaifar stepped inside the room, closed the door, and picked up the receiver. For a moment he spoke in Arabic, then was silent, waiting.

Surprised at this autocratic action—had he given out her room number as a contact for himself?—Caroline frowned, but he smiled blandly at her and turned to speak into the mouthpiece. “Good evening, Mr. Percy! This is Kaifar speaking! We are very sorry that you are in New York and not here in our beautiful country.”

Caroline gasped. “Give me the phone!” In two quick steps she was beside him. He was tall; her eyes were on a level with the curling black beard that covered his chin. “Give it to—” she began again, but an imperious hand went up and in spite of herself she was silenced.

Suddenly his teeth flashed in a wide grin, and she involuntarily fell back a step, as if a wolf had smiled. But the smile was not meant for her. “My name is Kaifar, Mr. Percy,” he repeated with a curious emphasis. “Doubtless we shall speak again. In the meantime, here is Miss Langley.”

“Hello, David,” she said, taking the phone with a speaking look and then turning away as she pressed it to her ear.

“Caroline? Where are you, my dear?”

And she lied. When she should have said, In my hotel suite, out of a purely instinctive reaction she said instead, “In the lobby of the hotel, David.” She had simply no idea how David would react to the thought of a strange foreigner in her hotel room answering her phone, and she shrank from knowing.

“And who was that man? I understood they were putting me through—”

“Kaifar is the guide whose services I won as part of the prize.” There was a curious pause as the word “services” echoed slightly, and then David spoke again, as if he had decided to ignore whatever impact he had felt from her last statement.

“Did you have a good night?”

“Very comfortable.”

They chatted only a few moments, just long enough for David to ascertain that she had arrived safely. Caroline never had very much to say to David, but she would have kept him if she could. She was suddenly afraid of what would happen when she put the phone down. But there was no way to prevent David bidding her a calm goodbye and hanging up.

Caroline held on to the phone for a long moment afterwards, pretending to listen, but at last she said a feeble goodbye to the dial tone and hung up.

Then she lifted her head and met Kaifar’s eyes, knowing that the lie to David had been a terrible mistake.

He was staring at her. He said, “Your dress is the colour of the emeralds that come from the mines in the mountains of Noor. They are the most beautiful emeralds in the world.”

The words struck her like an unexpected wave, leaving her breathless. The lamp cast chiaroscuro light and shadow on him, his face and his hands richly toned, perfectly painted by the master, his eyes mysterious as they watched her, the rest of him shadowed. She felt that the whole universe was waiting for something; as if her whole future might be written in the next moment. Nothing outside the circle of light that embraced them had any relevance.

Something she could not name seemed to course between them. Her gaze moved from his shadowed eyes to his hands, and then, drawn by the magnet of his focus, back up to his eyes again. Her breasts rose and fell with her shallow breathing. There was another rhythm, too, under those of heart and breath and feeling: a deeper, mysterious rhythm as of life itself.

In the silence he stepped around her to pick up her scarf. It fell gracefully in his grasp, the gold threads glittering in lamplighted shadow. Caroline’s lips parted in a small, audible breath as he lifted his hands to drape it around her shoulders. His touch was sure but light. His hands did not pause to rest on her bare skin beneath the gauzy silk.