‘Friends.’ She said the word aloud, as if tasting it, and again, this time more assertively. They could not be anything else. She did not wish it. He did not think of it. At least …
Sometimes, when they were alone in the desert, she caught him looking at her. Sometimes, she looked at him just like that, she suspected. Hungrily. Imagining. Trying not to imagine. Remembering. Trying not to remember. When their hands met accidentally, something akin to a shock surged through her, making her awkward, aware of something not right, something too right. She thought about that kiss in those moments. His lips on hers. His arms around her. She thought about it, then she banished it.
She banished it now, forcing her mind to focus on her one other concern. Though she and Jamil might be friends, Jamil and Linah were not. Though his attitude towards his daughter had softened, and he showed a real interest in her progress, Jamil seemed to be incapable of showing her any sign of affection. He spoke to his daughter as to an adult. He was a perfectionist, and there was nothing at all wrong with that, save that he praised so rarely and criticised so frequently. Could he not see that the child worshipped the ground he walked on? That one sign of affection would make an enormous difference to her confidence? Tough as his own upbringing must have been, from the very little he had let fall about it, surely there must have been some tender moments for him to recall?
Casting aside her sewing, a sampler she had been making for Linah, Cassie got to her feet. It was mid-afternoon, the hottest part of the day, when everyone took respite in the cool of their rooms, but she was restless. The Scheherazade courtyard was eerily quiet. Looking for a distraction, she remembered that Linah had once mentioned gardens on the eastern side of the palace, old gardens gone to ruin. The idea of a secret wilderness, a neglected and forgotten hideaway, appealed strongly to the romantic side of Cassie’s nature. Opening the huge door that led to the corridor, nodding in a friendly way to the guards, she set off in search of it.
***
Jamil could not concentrate on the papers before him. The complicated series of commercial transactions began with the trading of Daar-el-Abbah’s diamonds upon the lucrative Dutch market and ended with the import of some of the new spinning equipment from the British cotton mills. Bills of lading, interest calculations, net costs, gross costs, profit and conversions from one currency to another danced before his eyes. The end result was positive. It always was.
Jamil rolled his shoulders in an attempt to ease the tension there. This morning he and Cassie had ridden out to a nearby oasis with Linah, his daughter permitted for the first time to handle her pony without the leading string. She’d done well, sitting straight-backed and riding light-handed, in an excellent imitation of her teacher. He’d been proud of her, but though he formed the words of praise, he could not speak them. Cassie had been unable to hide her disappointment; he saw it in the downturn of her mouth, in the tiny frown instantly smoothed between her fair brows.
Jamil cursed softly under his breath. He would not let this woman’s disapproval dictate his actions. He had learned the hard way just how important it was not to let anyone know what he was feeling—that he even had feelings—for feelings could be exploited. They were a weakness. For her own good, Linah should be taught the same lesson.
But, increasingly, he found it hard not to show just the sort of weakness his father had been so keen to eradicate. It had been easier, when Linah was not so often in his company. Now, with his daughter’s endearing personality imprinting itself upon him every day, thanks to Cassie, it was proving difficult to maintain the barriers that had been so hard built. Sometimes he felt as if Cassie was determined to remove them brick by brick. To expose him. Sometimes he appalled himself by wanting to help her.
Abandoning his papers, Jamil got to his feet and wandered out into the courtyard. The heat was stifling. Even the ever-industrious Halim had retired for the afternoon. In search of distraction, he found himself wandering in the direction of the schoolroom, only to be informed by the guards that Cassie had left, half an hour before. It was not like her to go off unchaperoned like that. Slightly concerned, Jamil set off in search, tracing her meandering path through the endless corridors of the palace by way of the various sets of guards she had passed.
The trail went cold at the entrance to the east wing, where he paused, his frown deepening. The large oak door with its heavy iron grille was closed. There was no reason to think she would have opened it, save the fact that he knew there was no other way for her to have gone without being noticed. No guard stood at this door. No one, to Jamil’s knowledge, had passed beyond the door for years. Eight years. Eight years, six months and three days to be precise. Since the day Jamil had come to the throne of Daar-el-Abbah, exactly one week after his father had died.
Just looking at the implacable door made Jamil’s heart pound as if his blood were thick and heavy. There was no reason for Cassie to have entered the courtyard. No reason for him to have expressly forbidden it, either. He had locked the memories away long since. But now, looking through the grille to the dusty ante-room beyond, he knew that was exactly what she had done.
He didn’t want to go in there. He really, really didn’t want to. But he didn’t want Cassie there, either. His palms sweating, his fingers shaking, Jamil opened the door and stepped in, back, over the threshold of his adulthood into the dark recesses of his childhood.
She’d found the door after following many false trails and dead ends. She’d known it must be the one, from the rusty look of the key. That there had been a key in the lock at all surprised her. That it turned, gratingly and reluctantly, had excited her, but then she stepped inside and the overpowering air of melancholy descended like a thick black cloak.
It was a beautiful place, a completely circular courtyard with a dried-up fountain, the marble cracked and stained, the ubiquitous lemon trees grown huge and wild, jasmine and something that looked very like clematis, but could not be, flowering with wild abandon around the courtyard’s colonnaded terrace. Dried leaves covered the mosaic floor. She heard the unmistakable scuttling of small creatures as she crossed it slowly. The fountain’s centrepiece, which she had at first thought to be a lion cub, she now realised must be a baby panther. She had not seen the panther fountain in Jamil’s private courtyard, but he had once described it to her, mockingly. This must be its counterpart, which meant that this must be the rooms of the young Crown Prince Jamil, shut up and left to crumble into ruin, as if he had turned his back not only on his childhood, but his past.
Cassie shuddered. The stark contrast of the dull tiles, the weeds that grew between the cracks in the floor, the general air of sullen neglect, with the rest of the pristinely cared for palace, was unbearable. Sensitive as she was to ambiance, she could almost taste the ache of unhappiness in the air. Wandering over to another solid-looking door, she peered through the grille and caught a glimpse of the secret garden. Far from the pretty wilderness she had imagined, this one was barren, arid, with skeletal trees, the bark shed in layers like skin, with thickets of some barbarous thorny shrub covering the entire ground area, like a spiky, mottled carpet.
She should not be here. It was too private a place, too redolent with intimate memories. Instinctively, she knew that Jamil would be mortified by her presence. Yet instinctively, too, she felt that here lay the key to his relationship—or lack of it—with his daughter. If she could find it—if she could understand—then surely …
Holding the hem of her gown clear of the detritus that covered the courtyard floor, Cassie picked her way carefully to the doorway of the apartments. Like all the palace suites, they followed the shape of the courtyard, a series of rooms opening out, one on to the other. The divans had been abandoned, their rich coverings simply left to rot. Lace, velvet, silk and organdie lay in tatters. The mirrored tiles of the bathing room were blistered, the huge white bath, sunk into the floor, yellowed and cracked. She found a silver samovar with a handle in the shape of an asp, tarnished and bent. A notebook, the pages filled with a neat, tiny hand in Arabic, which stopped abruptly half-way down one page. When she picked it up, the spine cracked, the cover page separated.
Careless now of her gown, overcome with the melancholy of the place, Cassie wandered into the last room. A sleeping divan, the curtains