The Solitary Sheikh

“Baleh,” Omar replied to something the vizier said as he left. He hardly glanced at the photo before passing it to Jana.

With a little shiver of response at his clinical coldness in looking at a photograph of his daughters, Jana leaned forward to take the picture. In one of those slightly awkward moments of misjudgement, both she and Prince Omar moved a few inches more than either expected the other to do, and their hands brushed. She drew in her breath with a little shock.

Two young girls half smiled at the camera, their arms around each other. They were very pretty, and would probably be beautiful when they got older. Wide dark eyes, delicately shaped eyebrows, their father’s curving eyelids and full mouth. Beautiful, but lacking confidence, their gaze at the camera shy, their smiles tentative. Jana found herself feeling as protective towards them as she had for any of her schoolchildren from troubled homes. Wealth and position had never protected children against misery, she reminded herself, and these two had lost their mother, and, if His Serene Highness’s attitude was anything to go by, had never had a real father.

And yet, one was called Beloved. She wondered who had chosen that name.

“They are very lovely. You must be proud of them.”

“They are like their mother. She was considered a great beauty,” he said, as if he were discussing a database or import duty.

“What does Kamala mean?” she asked, looking up from the photograph to discover that he was watching her.

“It means perfect, Miss Stewart.” He paused, and they looked at each other. In the silence, they were abruptly aware that they were alone together in the room. Prince Omar lifted a long slender hand to his dark beard and stroked it, and she watched the motion of his fingers without being aware that she did so.

She could not think of anything to say. There were words, but they seemed caught in her throat. She stared at his mouth, full but held so firmly in check. His lips moved, and she caught her breath on a silent gasp.

“Your own name has a meaning in our language,” he said. “Jana.”

He lengthened the first a. Jahn-eh.

Jana swallowed. “What does it mean?”

“Soul,” he said. “Really, ‘the soul of’—it is incomplete. Jan-am means my soul, for example. What is your middle name?”

Jana shivered. His deep voice had softened on the words, and he was watching her as he said them, and her skin responded as if to a touch.

“Roxane.”

“This also is a Parvani word. Roshan means ‘light.’ Therefore your names together mean ‘light’s soul,’ or ‘a soul of light.”’

Jana swallowed and nodded. “I see,” she said. “Thank you.”

There was a pause while the prince considered the sheaf of papers in his hand. She recognized her resume and application, but the rest was written in the Arabic alphabet.

“You are descended from the royal family of Scotland.”

“We lost that battle many generations ago, Your Highness.”

“But you will have an understanding of royal life that the others did not have. This is always the problem, that the foreign teachers cannot understand the restrictions. You, I think, would understand.”

She thought, Oh, yes, I would understand. It’s just what I’ve always fought against, the restrictions. She looked down at the photo of those two questioning, uncertain little faces, and a well of pity washed up in her.

“Yes,” she said.

“And your work in the poorest schools tells me that you understand the nature of duty. The princesses must also understand their duty.”

Poor, poor little princesses. She looked again at the photo still in her hand. He was going to offer her the job. And in spite of everything, she realized, she still wanted it. Not entirely for the sake of the little lost-looking princesses. But for her own sake, too. However cold the sheikh was, however restricted the environment, it would only be for a year. If she ended up married to Peter...that sentence would last much longer.

She looked at Prince Omar and decided not to point out for him the significance of those ten formative years in Calgary. “I see.”

“This method you have for teaching children to read. You developed this yourself?”

“Only partly. It’s really a variation of the old phonetic system, which everyone over the age of forty in this country learned by. But it was thrown out and now they teach English as if it were Chinese—as though we had no alphabet, but only pictures depicting words. It’s a terrible waste of an alphabet.” She could feel the soapbox forming under her feet and forced herself to shut up.

“The princesses—” she noticed that he hadn’t yet said “my daughters” “—can speak English quite well. But they cannot read. They read Arabic and Parvani and French very well, they are intelligent, but they say they cannot understand English reading. Is this the reason?”

“Well, without knowing who my predecessors were...” She shrugged.

“These children you taught—their mother tongue was not English?”

Jana nodded.

“What language was it?”

“Nearly any language you care to name.” She smiled. “I can say very good in fourteen languages.”

“Khayli, khoub,” said Prince Omar.

Jana raised her eyebrows.

“That is how we say very good in Parvani, Miss Stewart. I hope you will have reason to say it to the princesses many times.”

Three

A week later the royal party filled almost the entire first-class cabin of the small Royal Barakat Air jet. Only half a dozen seats were empty, one of them beside Jana, and so she read, and ate, and contemplated the amazing step she had taken, in lonely luxury.

Her parents had remained nominally opposed to this career move, even while secretly impressed by the thought of the Barakat royal family. Their opposition had faded quickly in the face of her determination. And as for Peter’s —it had never materialized. Had he ever, Jana wondered, wanted to marry her? Or had it been, for him, the “thing to do”?

Someone slipped into the seat beside her, disturbing her train of thought, and she looked up from the book she had not been reading to see the old vizier.

She smiled a welcome, and they chatted about nothing in particular for a few minutes. Jana had been deeply impressed by the old man from the first time she met him. He had an air of humility that would make it very easy to underestimate him, she thought, and she was sure it would be a mistake to do so. Those calm black eyes saw into human motives, and she was a little afraid of him.

He chatted to her about her new charges, Masha and Kamala, and how tragically unnecessary their mother’s death two years ago had been. If she had been taken to the hospital—but Prince Omar had been away, and in his absence no one had dared to take the responsibility.

Jana frowned. “It can’t have been much of a decision to take a sick woman to a hospital!” she said.

“She did not want to go. No one had the authority to overrule her.”

“You mean, no one would take the risk of defying a sick queen to save her life?” she asked in disbelief.

“Would you have done so?”

“Well, I hope I would have! My God, is the place really that protocol bound? What was Prince Omar’s reaction when he got back? He must have been furious.”

“He was very distressed indeed. But it was impossible to blame anyone.”

Jana wondered why he was telling her this story. To help her understand the princesses...or the prince?