Engaged To The Doctor Sheikh
‘Nalini lived at the palace because she was family, as you will, if you are family,’ he said firmly, as the door opened and a nod from the man beyond it told him they were ready to leave. ‘Come, there are more comfortable places where we can discuss this, and probably a better time. You must be weary after your journey, and should rest. Later, we will talk.’
He put out his hand to help her up from the low seat, but she refused it, standing up herself, very straight—defiant...
Tariq cursed himself. He’d handled this badly from the beginning. A long night searching bone-marrow donor registers had led to nothing, then the call from the airport, when what he’d really needed was a few hours’ sleep.
So, tired as he was, seeing the woman—a woman called Halliday who looked so like Nalini—had thrown him completely. He’d been thrust into the past and a time of tension, bitterness and even hatred in the palace.
Added to which, she was wearing the Ta’wiz, the most sacred of the objects that had gone missing at the time of Nalini’s disappearance. Customs and immigration officials had been on the lookout for all the jewellery for decades but the Ta’-wiz was the one they all knew best, for the hollowed-out crystal with the elaborate gold-and-silver casing around it was believed to carry the spirit of the people’s ancestor.
The immigration officer would not have needed to look closely at it, for he would have felt its power, as Tariq had the moment he’d entered the room, for this simple piece of jewellery was believed to have spiritual qualities—and the strongest of these was protection.
He waved her towards the door, and followed her, looming over her slight form like an evil jinn.
Lila, her name was Lila, he remembered, and right now he wanted to go back in time, to have been at the airport when the plane landed, not finishing a despairing computer search for the magic formula that might save his brother.
He could have greeted her properly, taken her to the hospital, maybe not even noticed the locket around her neck.
The scars on her fingertips told him she’d clung to it as her mother—as both her parents—had died in a flaming inferno. Apart from it being a last gift from her mother, it had protected her, of course she didn’t want to take it off.
Neither could he take it from her...
But perhaps with it safely back in the palace—even in the country—some of the uncertainties and ill-fortune of the last decades would diminish and peace could be restored.
He shook away such thoughts. His country had grown from a collection of nomadic villages to a world presence in a matter of decades and his concern was that it had happened too quickly for many people to adjust and the happiness everyone had expected to come with wealth had somehow eluded them.
* * *
Swept along in this surreal dream, Lila followed the man who had first taken her to the small room down more corridors and finally out onto a covered parking area.
A driver in striped trousers and a long striped tunic leapt from the only car parked there, a huge black vehicle, to open the back door, the tail of his turban dropping forward over his shoulder as he bowed towards her.
Uncertainty made Lila look back, but the large man—her new boss—was right behind her, sober-faced but nodding as if her getting into the car was the right thing to do.
Not that she had a choice unless she decided to run straight out into the blinding sunlight and just keep running.
To where?
Home and family, and the only safety she knew, were all a long way off. Besides, she’d come here to find out about her birth family—her parents—about their country! So she’d put up with the tall man’s bossy ways and just go with the flow.
For the moment!
She tightened her lips then smiled to herself as she imagined her sister Izzy’s reaction to such lip-tightening.
‘Beware, the quiet one is ready to erupt,’ Izzy would have said, and usually laughter would have followed, because Lila wouldn’t have erupted.
But Izzy wasn’t here to laugh her out of it. Izzy was thousands of miles away with a new husband and a new father for her daughter...
And she, Lila, was on her own.
Her fingers crept up to touch the locket, shaking it as if she might be able to hear the tiny grains of sand the kind young woman at the University International Day had put into it for her.
Though not pink sand...
She knew there’d been pink sand once...
The man, Dr—Sheikh—al Askeba, was in the vehicle with her now, not close, for the seat was wide enough for four people, but she could feel his presence as a vibrant energy in the air.
‘How did you know to come here? To Karuba? Had your parents told you of it?’ he asked, and Lila turned to stare at him—or at his strong profile for he looked not at her but straight ahead, as if someone else might have spoken.
She shook her head.
‘I just kept looking,’ she said quietly, remembering the dozens of times when something that had seemed like a lead had turned to nothing.
‘But with your parents dead how did you know what to look for?’
Now he turned to her, and she saw the question echoed in his eyes. Not an idle question then, not small talk. This man wanted to know, and she guessed that when he wanted something he usually got it.
‘I didn’t, not really, but sometimes I would hear a note or phrase of music and it would hurt me here.’ She pressed her fist against her chest. ‘Or I would see something, a design, a colour, that brought my mother’s face to mind. I grew up in a small country town so I had to wait until I went to the city to go to university before I could really start looking. But then, with studies and exams...’
‘So, it’s only recently you discovered something about Karuba?’
Lila smiled.
‘You could say that,’ she told him, remembering the joy of that particular day. ‘From time to time I gave up, then something would remind me and I’d be off again. Two days before I emailed to apply for a job at the hospital here, I heard about an International Student Day at a nearby university.’
‘And you went along, listening for a scrap of music, seeking a design, a pattern?’
‘You make it sound like a plan,’ she said, suddenly wanting him to understand. ‘But it was never that, just a—a search, I suppose, a first clue that might lead somewhere else. You see, when the accident happened, the police tried for many months to identify my parents—to find out who they were and where they were from, looking for family for me, I suppose. But all they found were dead ends.’
He nodded as if he understood, but all doctors could do the understanding nod so she didn’t put much stock in it.
But when he asked, ‘And this last time you looked?’ his voice was deepened by emotion, as if he actually understood.
Lila smiled with the sheer joy of remembering.
‘There were stalls everywhere, but I could hear the music and I followed it. And at one stall, beneath a big tree, I saw a small wooden box with a patterned silver inlay.’
She paused, emotion catching at her throat again.
‘Something in the pattern...I mean, I’d seen many boxes over the years but this one took me straight back to my mother, to the little box she had always kept close. Her sand box, she called it. I touched it and the girl—the student—handed it to me.’
‘So you asked where it was from?’
Lila nodded.
‘At first I couldn’t speak, I just held it, felt its warmth, felt my mother’s hand on it, my hand on hers. But then I realised that I had the name of the country where my mother might have been born. I had my first real clue.’
CHAPTER TWO
HE SHOULD HAVE let her go, seen her safely to the hospital and forgotten the Ta’wiz, pretended it was just a locket—such things were sold all over the world, like amulets and chains with women’s names written in Arabic, pretty tokens and jewellery, rather than sacred objects.
He should forget the laughing Nalini of his youth, and the problems of his people. He should let this woman do her job, serve her twelve months’ contract and depart.
From all he’d heard as he’d chased up her references, she was an excellent paediatrician—what more could he ask of her?
But glancing sideways at her as she sat, bolt upright, her head turned to look out the window, her shining dark hair in a loose plait down her back, he knew he could no more have pretended she was just a doctor than he could have walked naked through the shopping mall.
In fact, the second would probably have been easier, because he would have debased only himself, while ignoring this woman’s sudden presence in his country would have been...
Traitorous?
He wanted to talk to her, to ask her more, to hear that soft husky voice, but anger at her treatment—deserved anger—was emanating from that straight back.
Until they reached the wide, ceremonial road that led straight to the palace gates.
‘Oh, but they’re gum trees,’ she cried, turning back to look at him, her face alight with surprise and delight. ‘Eucalypts—from home!’
And several things clicked into place in Tariq’s head.
First was the confirmation that she was beautiful. Not blindingly attractive as Nalini had been, but with a quiet radiance that shone when she smiled.
And secondly, the trees!
Australia!
Two years after Nalini had disappeared, a gift of two hundred eucalypt seedlings had arrived at the palace, packed in boxes in a container, sender unknown. The only clue had been a picture of an avenue of such trees and his father had taken it that they were meant to be planted on the approach to the palace.
Had his father suspected they were a gift from the runaway that he had had the trees tended with more care than new-born babies?
Now they grew straight and tall, and had brought a smile to the face of the newcomer.
A smile so like her mother’s it touched something in his chest...
Should he explain—about the disappearance of Nalini, about the trees arriving?
No, it would be too much too soon, although living in the palace she’d hear the gossip soon enough, even if it was close to three decades old.
Although he could explain the trees.
‘They were a gift, sent unexpectedly to my father, and he planted them along here.’
That would do for now.
She smiled at him.
‘They look great. They obviously like it here. Where I grew up was on the coast and although we had sand, we had rain as well so the trees grew tall and strong. Can you smell them? Smell the scent of the oil? Sometimes at night it filled the air, and especially after being in the city it would tell me I was home.’
‘The desert air is like that,’ Tariq told her. ‘Cities seem to confuse our sense of smell, but once we’re out of them it comes back to us, familiar as the sound of the wind blowing sand across the dunes, or the feel of cold spring water in an oasis.’
Lila heard the words as poetry, and stared at the man who’d spoken them. He’d erupted into her life, caught her at a time when anyone would be vulnerable—new job, new country, new customs and language—then confused her with her mother’s name.
Seeing the familiar trees had strengthened her, and she decided to go along with whatever was happening, not that she’d had much choice up until now. But she’d come here to find out about her parents, and this man had known her mother.
Had suspected her mother was a thief?
So maybe she had to stay in the palace, if only to clear her mother’s name...
She turned away, catching a glimpse of a large building at the end of the avenue.
A very large building, not replete with domes and minarets but with solid, high stone walls, earth brown, and towers set into them at regular intervals.
Guard towers? For men with guns?
More a prison than a palace, surely?
Her mother had been a thief?
No, that last was impossible!
She was letting her imagination run away with her, but as they drew closer to the imposing façade, she shivered.
‘It is old, built as a fort, not a palace,’ her companion explained. ‘But inside you will see. It is a home.’
He said the words with the warmth of love and she smiled, remembering how forbidding her childhood home, an old nunnery, had looked from outside, yet how homelike it had been.
‘It’s the people inside that make a home,’ she said, and saw his surprise.
Then his smile.
And something changed...
Something inside her gave way, weakening her when she would have liked to be strong.
Needed to be strong...
* * *
Tariq glanced at his companion, aware of the complications he was undoubtedly bringing into his life by insisting she stay in the palace. She would be accommodated in the women’s house, which he knew, both from his early childhood within its confines and from sisters, aunts and cousins, was a hotbed of intrigue, gossip, innuendo and often scandal.
But if she was family this was where she belonged.
And if the Ta’wiz was genuine, and the thrill he’d felt as he’d touched it suggested it was, then this was where it, too, belonged.
She was looking all around her, taking in the forbidding walls, a small frown teasing her delicate eyebrows.
‘The gold on the walls?’ she said. ‘I took it to be decoration—a bit odd on a fortress but still.’
She paused and turned to look at him.
‘But it’s script, isn’t it? That lovely flowing Arabic script? What does it say?’
He could lie—tell her anything—tell her it said ‘Welcome’, but the memory of his father’s anger as he’d marched, often dragging his eight-year-old son, around the fortress walls, demanding the words be written faster, was imprinted in his mind.
As were the words!
He looked out at them now, as if to read them, although they were written on his heart.
‘They say,’ he explained slowly—reluctantly—“The head must rule the heart.”’
‘All the way round?’ the visitor asked, obviously astonished.
Tariq shrugged.
‘It is my father’s motto and there may be variations on the theme,’ he said, trying hard for casual while remembered anger tore at him. ‘Here and there he may have put, “The heart must follow the head,” but you get the gist of it.’
‘And he wrote it all the way around?’
The woman, Lila, was wide-eyed in disbelief.
‘‘And inside too,’ Tariq told her, finally summoning up a small smile as the silliness of the whole thing struck him. ‘He claimed it was an ancient ancestral ruling that had kept the tribe in power for so many generations. But in truth I think it was to annoy First Mother, who had the temerity to complain when he took a second wife.’
Ya lahwey, why was he telling this woman the story? Didn’t the British have a saying about washing dirty linen in public? Wasn’t that what he was doing?
But the pain he’d felt for his mother—First Mother—had imprinted that time like a fiery brand in his memory and still it burned when he remembered it.
Beside him he heard the visitor murmuring, and just made out the faintly spoken words—‘The head must rule the heart.’
‘Maybe,’ she finally said, loudly enough for him to hear, ‘it is a good rule to live by. Do you follow it?’
You don’t have to answer that, his ruling head told him, but as she’d asked...
‘For my sins, I do,’ he admitted, as they waited for the big gate to be opened. ‘My head told me that the country needed doctors more than it needed more princes, and children’s doctors in particular, to take health facilities to those who live far from the city.’
He paused.
He’d said enough.
But as the visitor gasped at the vision inside the palace walls—his father’s vision—he felt compelled to finish what he’d been saying.
‘It has caused a rift between us, my father and I.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly, but then she looked around and he had to smile at the astonishment on the woman’s beautiful face. The old walls of the fort might remain, but inside was an earthly paradise made possible by the unlikely combination of oil and water. Oil revenue paid for all the water in his land, paid to have it desalinated from the ocean, so once what had been desert could blossom with astonishing beauty.
‘But this is unbelievable,’ the woman, Lila, whispered, turning her head this way and that as she took in the formal gardens, the bloom-covered bowers, the fountains and hedges, and carefully laid-out mosaic paths.
‘It has been my father’s life work,’ Tariq told her, pride in his voice hiding the tug he felt in his heart as he thought of his father, ailing now, distanced from him, heart-sore over Khalil, a son from his second wife. Once he, Tariq, had chosen to do medicine Khalil had been brought up to be ruler, trained almost from birth. But now Khalil was ill with leukaemia his father was caught in a tussle over his choice of a successor should Khalil not survive.
Wanting Tariq to change his mind but too proud to beg...
Tariq shook away the exhaustion threatening to engulf him. He’d get his visitor settled, sleep for a few hours, then return to the hospital. He’d already assigned a staff member to act as guide and liaison for the new doctor but of course she was at the hospital, not here.
He’d get...he paused, his mind ranging through numerous sisters, half-sisters, female cousins and friends... Barirah.
Khalil’s oldest half-sister, faithful and devoted like her name. Looking after Dr Halliday would take her mind off her brother’s illness and her devastation that her own bone-marrow donation had failed to cure him.
The vehicle pulled up at the base of the shallow steps leading up to the covered loggia that surrounded the entire building. While the driver held the door for the newcomer, Tariq strode ahead, summoning a servant and sending her to find his half-sister.
Dr Halliday was following more slowly, turning as she came up each step to look back at the garden, as if fascinated by its extravagant beauty. On reaching the top, she glanced around at the array of shoes and sandals outside the front door, and he saw her smile as she slipped off the flat shoes she was wearing.
‘It’s like picture books I’ve seen,’ she said, turning the smile towards him. ‘All the shoes of different shapes and sizes, all the sandals, outside the door.’
It was only because he hadn’t slept that her smile caught at something in his chest, and he was relieved when Barirah appeared, pausing by his side to kiss his cheek, asking about her brother, already knowing there’d be no new news.
‘I need you to look after our guest,’ he told her. ‘She is coming to work at the hospital but I want her living here.’
Barirah raised her eyebrows, but Tariq found he couldn’t explain.
‘Come,’ he said, leading her to the edge of the paved area where the newcomer still gazed at the garden. ‘Dr Halliday, this is Barirah, my sister—’
‘One of his many sisters and only a half one at that,’ Barirah interrupted him. ‘And I’m sure you have a better name than Dr Halliday.’
The visitor smiled, and held out her hand.
‘I am Lila,’ she said, her smile fading, turning to a slight frown, as she looked more closely at Barirah.
And seeing them together, Barirah now wearing an almost identical expression, Tariq cursed under his breath, blaming his tiredness for not realising the full extent of the complications that would arise—had arisen, in fact—by bringing Lila Halliday to the palace. Better by far that she’d stayed at the hospital where she’d just have been another doctor in a white coat, rather than possibly a first cousin to a whole host of family, not to mention niece to Second Mother.
And wasn’t that going to open a can of worms!
‘Who is she?’ Barirah was demanding, moving from Lila to stand in front of Tariq, easing him back so she could speak privately.
‘She might be your cousin,’ was all Tariq could manage.
‘Nalini’s daughter? And you’ve brought her here? Are you mad? Can’t you imagine how Second Mother’s going to react to this? I might not remember much about that time but the tales of her reaction to Nalini’s disappearance have become modern legends. Second Mother burnt her clothes on a pyre in the garden and our father had to build a fountain because nothing would grow where they had burnt.’
Tariq touched his half-sister’s shoulder.
‘Lila came looking for her family and I think that might be us,’ he said gently. ‘Isn’t that enough reason for us to welcome her?’
Barirah rolled her eyes but turned back to look at the visitor, still standing at the edge of the loggia.
‘You’re right,’ she said, and heaved a deep, deep sigh. ‘She’s family so she’s welcome, but...’
She turned back to look at Tariq.
‘You’d better be around to protect her. Don’t you dare just dump her on me and expect me to run interference with Second Mother. I’m already a pariah in her eyes because I refuse to marry.’
Lila had guessed the conversation the Sheikh and the young woman who looked so like her had been about her, but what could she do?
Put on her shoes and leave the complex? Walk out through the beautiful gardens and the forbidding stone walls and—
Then what?
Besides, there was this nonsense about the Ta’wiz—about her mother being a thief.
Could she walk away from that?
Definitely not!
And being here in the palace, she might be able to find out what had happened way back then, learn things about her mother—and possibly her father too. And wasn’t that why she’d come to Karuba?
She turned as the pair came towards her.
The woman called Barirah smiled at her.
‘Tariq tells me we are probably cousins—that you are probably Nalini’s daughter,’ she said, in a softly modulated voice. ‘So, as family, you are more than welcome.’
She hesitated then leaned forward and kissed Lila on both cheeks.
The gesture brought tears to Lila’s eyes. Tiredness from the journey, she was sure, but Barirah must have seen them for she put her arms around Lila’s shoulders and drew her into a hug.
‘Come, I will find you a room and someone to look after you. Tariq, our guest might like some refreshment. She doesn’t need to face the whole family at the moment, so perhaps you could order some lunch for the two of you in the arbour outside the green guest room? I have appointments I can’t miss.’
Ignoring Tariq’s protest that he needed to get back to the hospital, Barirah put her arm around Lila’s shoulders to lead her into the house.
‘I will put you in the green room—it was Nalini’s room but has been redecorated. You might as well know now, because it’s the first bit of gossip that you’ll hear. My mother, who was Nalini’s sister, went mad when Nalini left and destroyed the room and all the belongings she’d left behind. My mother is still bitter, but at least my brother’s illness—he is battling leukaemia—is keeping her fully occupied at the moment.’
The flood of information rattled around in Lila’s head. Jet-lag, she decided. She’d think about it all later.
Think about why the man walking down the marble hall behind them was sending shivers up her spine as well.
It had to be jet-lag...
* * *
‘But it’s beautiful!’
Having led her down innumerable corridors, Barirah had finally opened a very tall, heavy, wooden door to reveal what a first glance seemed like an underwater grotto of some kind.
The ‘green’ used to describe the room was as pale as the shallowest of water running up on a beach on a still day—translucent, barely there, yet as welcoming as nature itself. It manifested itself in the silk on the walls and the slightly darker tone in the soft curtains, held back by ropes of woven gold thread.
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.