‘Oh, how awful. Why, no wonder she is a bit of a rebel.’
Celia laughed. ‘There, you see, that is exactly what I have just cautioned you about. You must not allow your heart to rule your head, and you must wait until you understand the whole situation before leaping in with opinions and judgements. Prince Jamil is not a man to get on the wrong side of, and I am absolutely certain that should you do so he would have no hesitation in trampling you underfoot. The point of this exercise is to restore your confidence, not have it for ever shattered.’
‘You need have no fear, I will be a model governess,’ Cassie declared, her flagging spirits fortified by the touching nature of the challenge that lay ahead of her. She, who had resolved never to love again, would reunite this little family by showing Linah and her father how to love each other. It would be her sacred mission, her vocation. ‘I promise you,’ Cassandra said with a fervour that lit her eyes and flushed her cheeks and made Celia question her judgement in having ever suggested her sister as a sober, level-headed governess, ‘I promise you, Celia, that Prince Jamil will be so delighted with my efforts that it will reflect well on both you and Ramiz.’
‘I take it, then,’ Celia said wryly, ‘that you are not having second thoughts or falling prey to doubts?’
Cassie got to her feet, shook out her dress and tossed back her head. Her eyes shone with excitement. She looked, Celia could not help thinking, magnificent and quite beautiful, all the more so for being completely unaware of her appearance. Cassie had many faults, but vanity was not one of them. Celia felt a momentary pang of doubt. How much did she really know of Jamil al-Nazarri the man, as opposed to the prince? Cassie was so very lovely, and she would be very much alone and therefore potentially vulnerable. She stood up, placing a restraining hand on her sister’s arm. ‘Maybe it is best that you should take a little more time, stay here for a few more days before committing yourself.’
‘I have decided. And in any case, it is all arranged. You are worried that Prince Jamil may have designs on me, I can see it in your face, but you need not, I assure you. Even if he did—which seems to me most unlikely, for though in England I pass for a beauty, here in Arabia they admire a very different kind of woman—it would come to nothing. I told you, I am done with men, and I am done for ever with love.’
‘Then I must be done with trying to persuade you to reconsider,’ Celia said lightly, realising that further protestations on her part would only unsettle Cassie further. ‘Come then, let me help you pack, for the caravan must leave at first light.’
At dawn the next day, Cassie bade Celia a rather tearful goodbye and set off, following closely behind Prince Ramiz, who led the caravan through the dark and empty streets of Balyrma and out into the desert. She wore the royal blue linen riding habit she’d had Papa’s tailor make up especially for this trip, which she fervently hoped would not prove too stifling in the arid heat of the desert. The skirt was wide enough to ensure she could sit astride a camel with perfect modesty. The little jacket was cut in military style, with a high collar and a double row of buttons, but was otherwise quite plain, relying on the severity of the masculine cut to emphasise the femininity of the form beneath it. By the time the caravan began to make its way through the first mountain pass, however, the sun was rising and Cassie was wishing that a less clinging style was currently more fashionable. Though she wore only a thin chemise under her corset, and no other petticoats, she was already frightfully hot.
The first two days’ travel took a toll on both her appearance and spirits. The heat seared her face through her veil so that her skin felt as if it were being baked in a bread oven. Her throat ached from the dust and constant thirst, and the unfamiliar sheen of perspiration made her chemise cling like an unpleasant second skin that had her longing to cast both stays and stockings to the winds.
The excitement of the journey was at first more than compensation for these discomforts. The dramatically shifting scenery of ochre-red mountains and undulating golden dunes, the small grey-green patches that marked the location of oases, the ever-changing blue of the sky and the complete otherness of the landscape all fascinated Cassie, appealing at an elemental level to her romantic heart.
Until, that is, she started to lose sensation in the lower half of her body. The camel’s saddle, a high-backed wooden affair with a padded velvet seat that gave it a quite misleading air of comfort, began, on the second day, to feel like an instrument of torture. Renowned horsewoman that she was, Cassie was used to the relative comfort of a leather saddle with the security of a pommel, ridden for pleasure rather than used as a mode of long-distance transport. Six hours was the longest she’d ever spent on horseback. Counting up the time since she’d left Celia at the royal palace, she reckoned she’d been aboard the plodding camel for all but eight hours out of the last thirty-six. What had begun as a pleasant swaying motion when they had first started out, now felt more like a side-to-side lurching. Her bottom was numb and her legs ached. What’s more, she was covered from head to toe in dust and sand, her lashes gritty with it, her mouth and nose equally so, for she had been forced to put up her veil in order to see her way as dusk fell and Ramiz urged his entourage on, anxious to make the pre-arranged meeting point by nightfall.
Sway left, sway right, sway forward. Sway left, sway right, sway forward, Cassie said over to herself, her exhausted and battered body automatically moving in the tortuous wooden saddle as she bid it. Sway left, sway right, sway—‘Oh!’
The lights that she’d vaguely noticed twinkling in the distance now coalesced into a recognisable form. A camp had been set up around a large oasis. A line of flaming torches snaked out towards them, forming a pathway at the start of which Ramiz bid his own entourage to halt. Her aches and pains temporarily forgotten, Cassie dismounted stiffly from her camel, horribly conscious of her bedraggled state, even more conscious of her mounting excitement as she caught a glimpse of the regal-looking figure who awaited them at the end of the line of braziers. Prince Jamil al-Nazarri. It could only be him. Her heart began to pound as she made a futile attempt to shake the dust from her riding habit and, at Ramiz’s bidding, communicated by a stern look and a flash of those intense eyes that had so beguiled her sister, put her veil firmly back in place.
Following a few paces behind her brother-in-law, Cassie saw Prince Jamil’s camp take shape before her, making her desperate to lift her veil for just a few moments in order to admire it properly. She had never seen anything so magical—it looked exactly like a scene from One Thousand and One Nights.
The oasis itself was large, almost the size of a small lake, bordered by clumps of palm trees and the usual low shrubs. The water glittered, dark blue and utterly tempting. She longed to immerse her aching body in it. On the further reaches of the shore was a collection of small tents, typical of the ones she had slept in on her overland journey from the Red Sea to Balyrma. They were simple structures made of wool and goatskin blankets held up with two wooden poles and a series of guy ropes. The bleating of camels and the braying of mules carried on the soft night air. The scent of cooking also, the mouth-watering smell of meat roasting on an open spit, of fresh-baked flat bread and a delicious mixture of spices she couldn’t begin to name. Two much larger tents stood slightly apart from the others, their perimeter lit by oil lamps. Their walls were constructed from what looked to Cassie like woven tapestries or carpets, topped by a pleated green-damask roof bordered with scalloped edges trimmed with gold and silver.
‘Like little tent palaces,’ she said to Ramiz, momentarily forgetting