The Solitary Sheikh

Prince Omar stayed in his seat at the front of the cabin throughout the flight. People came and went around him, bowing over his chair, kissing his hand, handing him papers, staying to talk. Jana got up once to go to the toilet, which was at the front of the cabin. She passed by Omar’s seat at a moment when he was sitting alone, going over some papers. He must have noticed her pass, because when she came out of the toilet, he looked up and called her name.

She obediently stopped in front of him. “Your Highness,” she murmured.

It was the first time she had seen him since their interview at the Dorchester. She had been ruffled and irritated then, but now she was cooler, and behind the coldness in his eyes she saw a bleak look that she had not seen before. Or perhaps it was just because of what Hadi al Hatim had told her about the queen’s death.

“I have only been out of England three hours and already I hear no English spoken,” he said. “Sit and speak to me.”

She thought how much more pleasant the command would have been if he had troubled to smile while issuing it, but the man looked grim enough for a hanging judge. She sat in the seat beside him, still uncertain about what was the protocol for such near contact with the monarch.

“Why should you hear English spoken?” she asked.

Looking a little surprised at the question, he said, “It is a language I have always wished to speak well.”

“You sound pretty fluent to me.”

Prince Omar shook his head. “No. Compared to my...my brothers, I have only a poor grasp of English.”

“Then your brothers must be native speakers,” Jana said with a smile.

There was no response. “One studied at a university in the United States, the other in France. In both places they had the opportunity to perfect their English.”

“While you learned Russian?” she guessed, remembering what he had told her about his time in that country.

“Yes, I learned Russian. It was my father’s thought that a small country should be able to. communicate with the leaders of powerful nations in their own language and understand their culture.”

“And I guess you can’t really blame him for not knowing what would happen to the Soviet Union.” True enough, but she supposed it wasn’t much consolation.

“I do not blame my father in any case. But it was not—”

He broke off suddenly, and blinked at her, as though wondering why he was speaking to her so personally. “Well, it is not important.”

“Where did you learn your English?” Jana asked quickly, and the impersonal question seemed to put him at ease.

“From my father’s first wife. He married a foreigner. She learned to speak Arabic after she married my father, but she said that English was a useful language and she spoke to us only in English. It was my father’s wish that we spend time with her.”

“No wonder you speak so fluently.”

His eyelids dropped in a brief negative. “When several people are speaking, I find it hard to follow. Very hard sometimes.”

He was such a closed man it was hard to accept that the purpose of this conversation was really what it seemed on the surface, but Jana said it anyway.

“If all you need is practice—” she shrugged “—I’d be quite happy to provide conversational English whenever you wish.”

She was prepared for a rebuff, but instead he fixed her with a look of surprise. “Will you have time?”

They had agreed that, as well as teaching the princesses to read English in formal lessons, she would supervise them at certain other times, so that they would learn spoken English as a part of their daily lives. But it still didn’t amount to a full working schedule. “I suppose it depends on when you’re free. We would have to organize it for times when the princesses are at other lessons or something.”

“Yes,” Prince Omar said slowly. “Yes, this is an idea I shall consider. Thank you.”

“Didn’t you have such an arrangement with previous English teachers?” Jana asked in surprise.

“No.”

He was looking stiff and kingly all of a sudden, but she had seen behind that facade, however briefly, and she wouldn’t let it put her off so easily “Do you mean they refused?”

“The subject was never mentioned.” He paused. “Only with you.”

In the curious way that sometimes happens, the words rang with significance. The silence was broken only by the droning of the plane’s engines as they looked at each other. Jana’s heart pounded in her ears. “I see,” she said at last, for something to say.

Just then Ashraf Durran came up to the prince, and a minute later Jana was back in her own seat, trying to figure out what, if anything, had just happened between her and Prince Omar.

At the airport in Barakat al Barakat, the party was met at the aircraft by limousines. Everyone stood around calling and shouting for a few moments, organizing the stowing of a mountain of baggage, and as Jana stood waiting by the car she had been directed to, she noticed that Prince Omar slipped away from the group and went striding across the tarmac alone. She watched him for a moment, until he arrived at a helicopter parked some distance away and began to check it over in a very professional manner.

As the convoy of cars pulled away, she heard the beating of metal wings, and watched out the window as the helicopter slid by above their heads and headed out over the desert.

The palace looked as though a genie had just responded to her wish for a magic castle. Arches, minarets, terraces, domes—all in white, blue and terra cotta—seemed to cascade down the sides of the rocky rise on which it sat, brooding over the city. The late sun was throwing a golden mantle over the whole horizon, and the desert glowed.

Behind, palace and city were encircled by the magnificent snow-peaked mountains that, in the distance, curled around the broad desert plain from north to east.

Jana rubbed her eyes and looked again. It hardly seemed possible that this would be her home for the next year—or more. She had spent ten years in the shadow of the Canadian Rockies, but this scenery was harsher and far more rugged. Not so picture-postcard scenic, but every bit as stunning to the senses.

She saw a helicopter landing pad as they swept up the curving drive to stop at the palace, but no sign of the black helicopter. Ashraf Durran came over and asked her to identify her bags, and a few minutes later, as they followed the servant leading them to her room, she took the opportunity to say as casually as she could, “Prince Omar did not return to the palace?”

“Ah, no. He had.. other business to attend to. He will be away a matter of a few days, perhaps.”

So he had not troubled to stay and introduce the new English teacher to his daughters. It was ridiculous to feel disappointed, and of course she didn’t. But she found herself wondering where he had gone.

Her “room” turned out to be a beautiful apartment with a wide terrace looking east out over the desert. On her left, far away, the mountain range curved protectively around the desert; on the right she had a glimpse of the city and of a long, rushing, sparkling river.

The rooms were full of what seemed to Jana magnificent pieces of Oriental art: carpets and bronze jugs and miniature paintings and beautifully carved furniture and openwork shutters. Ashraf Durran introduced her to the woman waiting there.

“This is your personal servant, Salimah. She speaks English. Salimah, this is Miss Stewart.”

“Hi,” said Jana, as Salimah bowed and murmured more formal greetings.

“Salimah will help you unpack. Is there anything else I can do for you at the moment?”

“I would like to meet the princesses,” Jana said. She would not meet the other tutors for several weeks. The princesses normally had a long summer holiday while the tutors returned to their homes.

He lifted one hand and smiled. “Salimah also will arrange that. If you wish, she will show you around the palace. But first, perhaps, you would like a cup of tea or coffee or other refreshments. I leave you in good hands, Miss Stewart.”

With that, he bowed and was gone, his air an indescribable mixture of formality, humility, and arrogant nobility that left her breathless.

When the door closed behind him, Salimah smiled. “Shall I help you unpack?” she asked, leading a resistless Jana through a broad doorway into the bedroom, where a huge double four-poster bed was draped with beautiful greens and blues, and a magnificent wardrobe was covered in the tiniest mosaic work Jana had ever seen.

An hour later, having unpacked, showered and drunk a deliciously cool fruit drink, Jana told Salimah, “I would like to meet Masha and Kamala now.”

Salimah bowed. “Yes, Miss. I will take you to their nurse.”

She led Jana through such a series of halls and rooms that Jana thought she would never find her way unguided. She noticed the curious fact that, like the stately homes of so many of her parents’ friends, there were discoloured rectangles on the walls. Several of the glass-fronted cabinets that mostly held antiques and treasures were empty, too, or had empty spaces where something had once lain.

In Britain the cause was always the same—death duties that forced the sale of family heirlooms. She wondered what had put Prince Omar under financial pressure.

“But where are the princesses’. rooms?” she asked, as they turned yet another corner.

“They are beside their nurse’s room, of course.”

Beside the nurse’s, but a mile from the English teacher’s. Jana raised her eyebrows over the arrangement, but Salimah was not the person to argue the matter with.

Umm Hamzah, the old woman who, Salimah explained, had been the personal servant of the princesses’ mother and was now their “nurse,” was a short, stocky, dark-skinned woman with thick, grizzled grey hair hanging in a braid down her back, a wide unsmiling face, and dark suspicious eyes. She had about half her teeth remaining, and her wrinkled face had seen the burning sun of many, many summers.

She greeted Jana in Arabic, and then explained through Salimah why it was not possible just at this moment for her to meet the princesses. Later it would certainly be more convenient.

Jana nodded. “Where are the princesses now?”

“I think they are having a bath, Miss,” said Salimah uncomfortably.

Jana smiled at Umm Hamzah and asked exactly when she should return.

“Someone will bring the princesses to your room later, Miss,” Salimah translated.

But no one brought the princesses to her room later. Jana was served a delicious dinner in her apartment, watched the sun’s rays fade and the sky darken, watched the lights of the city come on, watched the fat, heavy moon rise and sparkle on the dark river, and went to bed with a book.

For two more days it was not “convenient” for Jana to meet the princesses. Salimah grew more abashed and embarrassed with each-explanation, and the old nurse less voluble, as if victory in this senseless battle made her less and less polite.

“The princesses are sick, Miss Stewart,” Salimah offered, her eyes on the beautiful glazed tile floor. “They are in bed.”

“That’s all right, take me to them in bed.”

“La, la!” shouted the old woman, waving both her twisted hands as Salimah made the suggestion, and shouted at Salimah.

“She says it is very...easy for someone else to get it,” Salimah translated.

“Contagious,” Jana supplied automatically. “That’s all right.” She had gotten the picture long ago, but she still wasn’t sure how to deal with this hostile old woman. “I never get bugs, I’m not worried. Take me to them.”

Again urgent shouts and waving hands greeted Salimah’s words “They are too sick to be seen by anyone, Miss.”

Jana felt her blood starting to boil. “Well, in that case,” she said carefully, taking a shot in the dark, “I must call Prince Omar immediately on his mobile phone and urge him to return to the palace instantly. He is on urgent business, but he would not like to be absent at such a dangerous time. I will call him now.”

If the old woman called this bluff, what could she do, Jana wondered? She didn’t even know if Prince Omar had a mobile phone, let alone the number. But she saw Umm Hamzah’s jaw clench and her eyes widen in alarm as she spoke, and knew she had won. Jana wondered how much impact this old woman had had on her queen’s decision not to go to the hospital when she was so ill, and how frightened she was of Omar’s displeasure.

Half an hour later the princesses, healthy, clean and neat, were brought to her apartment by a servant. The two pretty little faces gazed at her in fascinated alarm as the introductions were made, and as soon as they were alone, Jana asked, “What is it?”

“Are you the devil’s handmaid?” asked Masha, her eyes wide.

Four

Jana kept her calm. “No,” she said, “I’m not. Did someone tell you I was?”

Masha, her eyes dark, nodded speechlessly. She was the elder by only about eighteen months, Jana knew, and except for a little difference in height, the two perfect little faces could almost have been twins.

Jana was pretty sure she knew who the someone was. “She made a mistake,” she told them calmly. “Don’t you know what my name means? My full name is Jahn-eh Roshan,” she prompted, pronouncing it as Prince Omar had done.

They both frowned in thought “Soul of light!” shouted Masha, and Kamala repeated the words in childish excitement, as if she had discovered them herself.

“That’s right. So how could I be the devil’s handmaid?”

It wasn’t all that convincing, as logic goes, but it seemed to impress the princesses, who stood there nodding, relieved smiles on their faces. “But your name is Parvani,” Masha told her gravely after a moment. “Nana doesn’t speak Parvani, only Arabic.”

Nana was Umm Hamzah.

“Oh, well, that’s how she made the mistake, then,” Jana said pityingly. “Poor Umm Hamzah. She just didn’t know.”

They were satisfied with that, and Jana decided to leave it there. But she understood that Umm Hamzah had declared war, and she intended to keep her guard up.

Over the next few days, Jana spent time getting to know the princesses. Umm Hamzah went on making efforts to restrict Jana’s access to them, but with Salimah interpreting Jana simply said that it was Prince Omar’s command, and would allow no excuse to get in her way.

She soon became as determined to get the girls away from their grim nurse as the nurse was to keep them away from the foreign devil. Umm Hamzah was a superstitious, uneducated, illiterate woman, and some of the stories that Kamala and Masha relayed to Jana made the hair lift on her scalp. She was sure the old woman’s preoccupation with sin, death and the devil was not good for them, and she did her best, in a mild, unconfrontational way, to counteract Umm Hamzah’s influence.

Both the little princesses already spoke good basic English, and so, although she gave them formal lessons in reading, almost anything she did with them could be considered an English lesson. So they played games, and went for walks, and fed the sheikh’s horses apples, and watched the desert tribeswomen washing clothes in the river, and swam in the palace swimming pool.

“This water is not so...good the water at my father’s special place,” Kamala, searching for the words, said nostalgically the first time they swam. Jana was a good swimmer, and she was already devising water games that would teach them English and how to swim at the same time.

“Not as nice as the water at your father’s special place?” she repeated. “Where is that?”

Both girls sighed longingly. “In the mountains,” Masha told her. “The mountains of Noor,” she explained further. She pointed, and Jana turned to look at the mountains in the distance. She saw a stretch of desert, and then the tan-and-pink-coloured foothills, and above, those snow-capped, beautifully inhospitable peaks.

There must be a kind of country residence up there, and why not? Summer down here on the desert would have been close to unbearable on some days without the cooling system in the palace. Jana’s skin was already a warm shade of tan after only a few days in the sun.

“Do you go there every summer?”

Both princesses shook their solemn little heads at her. “No,” Masha said, sighing again. “Two times we go there. It is very beautiful, Jana. Very beautiful. We had such lovely time.”

“We saw our father every day. It was not like here at the palace. Here we do not see Baba.”

“He spoke to us and took us riding and showed us many things.”

“He did not go away and leave us during the whole time.”

They were so pathetically eager to tell her about it, so sad at the loss of their joy. Her heart ached for them. Poor little princesses, who never had their father to themselves.

“Perhaps your father will take you there again,” Jana suggested, wanting to comfort them.

The girls smiled, lifted their shoulders and sighed. By which she understood that they had given up hope of such happiness.

“Is the house still there?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Baba is there now,” said Masha.

Jana was startled. “Is he?”

“We saw the halikuptar. When he goes in the halikuptar, he goes to the lake,” Masha said, as if it were a fact of nature. “But we do not go.”

“Shall I ask him about it?” Jana asked. She was curious about the place, and about why there was apparently to be no repetition of holidays that the children remembered with such pleasure.

They stared at her as if she had transmogrified into a magician as they watched. “Can you?” Kamala breathed.

“Oh, Jana!” Masha said.

“I can try. I’ll mention it, first chance I get,” she promised.

From that moment on, she could do no wrong. Devil’s handmaid? They knew from first-hand experience that Jana was an angel.

Prince Omar returned two days later, a fact she learned because the sound of the helicopter drew her out onto a terrace that had a vantage point over the helipad. She saw him disembark, and her heart kicked with satisfaction. For her as for his daughters, it seemed, the palace was incomplete without their father.

She remembered their conversation on the plane, and waited to be summoned to Prince Omar’s presence. But the hours and days followed one another and she got no summons.

Then one hot evening, after the princesses were in bed, Jana went to the pool for a late swim as was her custom and found Prince Omar there, alone, swimming up and down the length of the pool in a fast, strong crawl. After a momentary hesitation, Jana stripped off her robe and dived in.

When she had done a few more leisurely lengths she stopped at the deep end, and found that he was sitting on the edge not far away. The water was still streaming down his skin, so she guessed he had only just pulled himself out of the water. Maybe he hadn’t realized till now that she was even in the pool.

“Good evening, Your Highness,” she said, blinking water from her eyes.

“Good evening, Miss Stewart.”

“I hope you don’t mind me breaking in on your solitary use of the pool. I often swim here in the evening, and no one told me—”

“It is quite all right. I told no one of my intentions.”

His voice was remote, and she thought he did mind. Since he was the sheikh and could have whatever he commanded, she wondered why he didn’t just tell her to go.

In the next moment, he had agilely leapt to his feet. He was clearly going to leave.

“Your Highness,” she called softly, but her voice had an urgency on the hot desert air.

He stopped and turned to her. “Yes?” he asked, as graciously condescending as any fairy-tale monarch in his throne room.

He had a fabulous body, she noticed by the light of the moon. Slim muscular thighs, strong arms and chest, tall and lean. There were one or two scars. His hips were narrow, his swimsuit small and snug, a racing suit, and she couldn’t help noticing, since he was practically standing over her, how generously he filled out the fabric between his thighs.

It wasn’t really like her to stare at a man’s sexual equipment. Jana dragged her eyes up to his. “You’ve been in the palace for several days, but you haven’t asked me for any English conversation.”

“Oh!” he said, and frowned. “Yes, I had...forgotten.”

She was sure that he had not forgotten, that he had changed his mind for some reason, and a curious kind of panic overtook her. “Well, if you’re free now, I have time. Maybe you’d like...”

She faded out. She pulled herself out of the water and stood dripping before him, and they stood staring at each other, without recognizing how much time passed.

Her figure was graceful and supple, and very sexy, with long smooth lines at shoulder, waist and hip, and beautifully delicate ankles. She was wearing a plain white onepiece that cupped her full breasts like a pair of masculine hands, and her nipples pressed against the thin wet fabric, visible even in the near darkness.

Omar thought of his ancient ancestor, who had been so proud of his wife’s beauty that he hid his best friend in a closet so that he could see her as she disrobed and know how fortunate was the king in his wife. He had always thought that ancestor a fool, rightly deserving his wife’s wrath when she discovered the ruse. But now he found himself wondering if his ancestress had perhaps been as beautiful as this. If so, no wonder her poor fool of a husband had been so besotted.

But he had no intention of trying to bed-his daughters’ English tutor, he reminded himself, no matter how lovely she was. Omar did not allow sex to complicate his life. He chose his sexual partners carefully and made sure they knew exactly what they could expect if they submitted to his proposals. This woman was much more valuable—be cause rarer—as English tutor to the princesses than she could possibly be as mistress, a role that many women could fill.

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