The Halliday Family

The bed stood four-square in the middle of the room, the tall wooden posts holding a canopy of the same material as the curtains, while the bedcover had delicate embroidery, vines and flowers picked out in gold and silver thread.

‘It’s unbelievable!’ Lila whispered, walking across to a small chest of drawers to trace her fingers along the silver filigree design set into the wood. ‘Is this design traditional?’

Barirah smiled.

‘It is the most common motif in our decoration although by no means the only one. It shows the vine that grows over the dunes after rain, and see here...’ delicate fingers traced the pattern ‘...the moonflower.’

It was the palest pink, perhaps more mauve in tone, open like a full moon, a half-open bud beside it, and seeing it pain speared through Lila’s heart and she fell to her knees, her hands reaching out to touch the flowers, to grasp the material and bring it to her face, feeling it against her skin, smelling it...

Barirah knelt beside her, held her, while she cried, then dried her eyes with a clean white tissue.

Lila turned to face her.

‘My mother had a shawl—she wore it over her head and around her shoulders. It was this pattern! Why didn’t I remember? How could I have forgotten that?’

Tariq, in the arbour outside the doors that opened into the garden, had heard the words, heard the anguish in the woman’s voice, and wondered just how hard it must have been for a four-year-old to have lost not only her parents but the world as she had known it.

Barirah was helping Lila to her feet, comforting her with soft words and soothing noises, and he stepped back, showing the servants where to leave the food, then waiting for the two women to appear.

He sat, resting his tired eyes behind closed lids, dozed perhaps, aware he should be seeing his father, telling him of this development but not wanting to put further stresses on their guest.

Had he been less tired, he realised now—too late—he’d have taken her to the hospital, let her get on with her work. Officials could have confiscated the Ta’wiz, verified it, and it could have been returned to the palace, without her.

But even as these thoughts rambled through his exhausted brain, an image of the woman, Nalini’s suspected daughter, hovered behind his eyelids, her dark almond eyes sparking with anger at him, her fingers clinging to the pendant—a last gift from her mother.

No way would she have given it up.

‘He’s been working far too hard.’

Barirah’s voice woke him from the half-dream, woke him as his memories of Lila’s angry eyes had shifted to an image of her soft lips—woke him just in time, really...

The two women joined him in the arbour, Barirah making her apologies for having to leave.

‘But Tariq will take good care of you and, when you are rested, take you to the hospital to show you around.’

She gave Lila a brief kiss on the cheek and departed on silent feet, leaving Tariq to wonder again just how big a mistake he’d made in bringing the woman here.

His guest was eyeing the array of food with almost childlike delight.

‘But what is it all? You must tell me,’ she said, moving around the table to see each dish more clearly. ‘Olives I know, although the pink ones are different. And the little white balls—cheeses? Hallie, my foster mother, made labneh—cheese from yoghurt—but it was a little dull.’

But there was tension beneath the flow of words, and Tariq realised that the young woman had been hit by so much information and so many new and emotional experiences in the few hours since she’d arrived that she was running on adrenalin.

‘Sit,’ he ordered, and tired as he was he stood up, selected a brightly patterned plate and began to place an array of small delicacies on it.

He handed it to her, laid a napkin on her knee and said, ‘Try a little of each. You’ll soon learn what you like and what you don’t. And I’m sure you’ll recognise tastes you’re familiar with, though they may be delivered differently.’

She took the plate from him and looked up into his face.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, simply, her dark eyes smiling now, the lips he’d seen behind his eyelids curving slightly.

He definitely should have taken her to the apartment at the hospital!

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