LITMIR.BIZ

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She hardly knew the man, although she was aware that he was a friend of her father’s, an antiques dealer and collector who had sold Thom Langley a few things in the old days. They had met only once or twice. She believed then that he had fallen in love with her from a distance, and she had been ready to laugh with her father over David’s middle-aged foolishness.

      Then she had seen that her father wanted her to marry David Percy. And when her mother came in, Louise had made no effort to pretend her husband had not already informed her of the great news. “Oh, Caroline, isn’t it a miracle! Who would have thought that a man like David Percy would want you!” she had burst out with such relief and gratitude in her tone that Caroline understood that for both of them David Percy’s offer represented a salvation worth any sacrifice. Even a daughter’s happiness.

      “But Mother, he’s so—” Caroline stopped, because she couldn’t find the words to describe the awful coldness that she felt from David. Worse, much worse, than her own father’s.

      Thomas Langley had always disapproved of his elder daughter’s “emotional extremes,” her capacity for deep feeling and unguarded responses, so unlike his own nature or even that of his wife’s. Whether she was touched by the plight of a stray cat in a Caribbean resort, or moved to tears by a painting in an Italian church, her father frowned. Caroline had grown up under the constant pressure to contain her laughter, restrain her tears, to walk sedately and talk quietly.

      “Darling, it’s not forever,” Louise had hastily assured her. She had talked fast, not giving Caroline time to express objections. “David won’t expect you to stay married to him for long. He knows better than that. You’ll be divorced by the time you’re thirty!”

      Caroline shuddered. “And who will get custody of the children?”

      “Darling, you’re looking for problems! David may not even want children. And at thirty, look where you’ll be. You’ll have serious money—you can trust your father to see to that—and you probably won’t look a day older than you do now. The cosmetic aids you’ll be able to afford! The massage, the clinics! Whereas I’m aging a little more with every day that passes.”

      “Being eternally young isn’t really high on my list of priorities,” Caroline responded dryly, but her mother overrode her.

      “Caroline, you’ll have money. Don’t underestimate it. Money is the power to do whatever you like. You will have total freedom, Caroline.” She emphasised each word of the last sentence.

      Caroline had frowned as something whispered in the back of her mind that she would have total freedom now if she left her parents to the fate which their own foolish actions and constant living beyond their means had brought upon them.

      And as though she sensed that, Louise had added quickly, with a pathetic catch to her voice, “We’ll have freedom, too, Caroline. You can purchase our freedom as no one else can. And think of Dara. She’ll be able to go to university, and I know you want her to be able to do that....”

      But she would not have agreed to the engagement if she had not believed that David wanted to marry her because he loved her.

      David had begun taking her to museums to introduce her to his way of life and her future, and one fine day he had introduced her to “herself”—a marble bust thought to be Alexander the Great. And that was when she discovered just what it was about his fiancée that David loved: Caroline looked like a Greek statue.

      In profile her broad forehead sloped down into a finely carved nose with scarcely any change in angle; her slim eyebrows, set low, followed the line of her large, wide-spaced, grey eyes; her cheeks and jaw, though delicately moulded, curved with a fullness that was nothing like the fashionable gaunt hollowness of a Vogue model; her upper lip was slender and beautifully drawn, her lower lip full, curving up at the corners. And in addition there was the riot of curls over her well-shaped head and down the back of her neck. Her only flaw, if you were looking for physical perfection, was the slightly crooked front tooth.

      The bust was, in fact, eerily like her. She was looking at her own death mask—or, she told herself, because the sculptor had been a great artist and the statue was certainly “alive,” herself frozen in the mirror of time.

      David had insisted on buying her a wardrobe suited to her new position as his fiancée. Caroline by then had felt out of control of events; she had been unable to protest at the arrangement, let alone the way that David dictated her choices. She had some very smart, and rather original, ivory and cream outfits in her wardrobe now. And a gold upper arm bracelet and heavy gold necklace that had cost as much as her year’s salary.

      When he had effected a certain amount of transformation, David threw a midsummer masquerade party to celebrate the public announcement of their engagement. For that he had designed Caroline’s costume himself. Or, had hired a designer to execute what he wanted.

      And what he wanted was Caroline looking as much like a Greek statue as possible. Intricately pleated ivory silk toga with flowing folds, ivory leather sandals, a wreath of ivory-coloured leaves in her hair, her skin painted to look like marble...when she stood perfectly still, she really had almost looked like marble.

      “Don’t smile with your teeth tonight, Caroline,” David had ordered, with no apology for his air of command. “It spoils the illusion. Serenity, my dear.” It was then that she had finally put all the pieces together. David did not love her. He didn’t even imagine that he did. What he wanted was to add her to his collection. He wanted to own her.

      In that moment she wondered whether it would be possible to recover from the personality changes David would exact from her.

      A steady voice in her head had whispered, Get out now. Tell him you’ve changed your mind tell him not to make the announcement tonight. But Caroline had stifled the thought. Her mother was right. A few years of sacrifice was not too much for her family to ask.

      Of course, the couple’s photograph had illustrated the story of the engagement in the newspaper. David Percy Adds “The Jewel in the Crown” To His Private Collection was the headline.

      When she had learned, while she was in the midst of packing her bags for this trip, that David would not be coming, Caroline had taken out of her case all the clothes he had bought her and packed instead her own clothes, bought at a discount where she worked. She would not have much chance to wear them once she was married.

      Caroline liked colour. She was fairly sure the ancient Greeks had, too. Lots of the statues she had seen during her recent crash course in classical art under David’s tutelage had obviously once been painted in very bright, intense colours, and she had read somewhere that it was possible that even what David called “the elegant proportions of the Parthenon” had been covered in bright red and turquoise and gold leaf. And as for emotions, in the ancient legends the Greeks seemed anything but serene. Even their gods had been wildly passionate and overly emotional... but she did not put that point of view to David.

      Caroline sighed and slipped into the present. David was not here now, and if the phone didn’t ring soon, she wouldn’t have to talk to him. She was suddenly wildly grateful that David had not come on this trip. He would have insisted on New York standards everywhere. She wanted to see, to experience the East, its beauty, its passion, its legendary contradictions.

      

      “The woman is very much younger than he,” Nasir reported. “It is said that he paid her father a large amount of money for her.” He passed a faxed copy of a newspaper photograph to the two princes.

      “ ‘The jewel in his crown!’ ” Karim read the caption headline.

      “Ah, a Mona Lisa!” exclaimed Prince Rafi with interest.

      Karim gazed at the photo. It showed a pale, grave-eyed young woman in costume half smiling at someone beyond the camera, beside a smooth-skinned man of middle age. He looked up and met the eyes of his secretary. “And this is what he thinks of this woman?” he asked, indicating the headline. The secretary only bowed his head. “He adds her to his collection?” Karim pursued.

      “Allowances

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