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Sheikh's Ransom. ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Читать онлайн.Название Sheikh's Ransom
Год выпуска 0
isbn
Автор произведения ALEXANDRA SELLERS
Жанр Современные любовные романы
Издательство HarperCollins
“But why?” Caroline breathed.
Kaifar merely shook his head. “It is a matter of honour. As her guardian he may not take advantage of her.”
“Oh,” said Caroline. She wondered about her father’s honour, about David’s. The haunting song went on, with Kaifar’s deep gentle voice a counterpoint.
“She came to him, she came at his request.
Whatever he asked Marjan, it was her pleasure to obey.
She smiled, white teeth and rosebud lips.
‘What do you have to say to me?’ she asked her father’s dear friend.
‘Marjan, my daughter,’ he begins. ‘Marjan.’
‘Am I your daughter?’ Marjan asks,
Smiling with white teeth and rosebud lips.
Her hair is a bouquet of blackness, petal on petal, A night flower.
‘Am I your daughter, are you my father?’
He hears the hidden message and turns away.
She puts her white hand on his sleeve.
‘You are not my father, though I have loved you all my life.
Though I love you best.’
‘Marjan, your father must find a husband for you.
The time is right. I must find you a husband.’
The smile flees her rosebud lips.
‘What husband do I need when I have you? I wish for no husband.” ’
The singer broke off, and the music built to a crescendo and stopped. “It’s not swished?” Caroline whispered, hardly able to speak under the joint spell of her thoughts, his words, the singer’s voice and the music.
Kaifar sipped his wine. “No.” The woman set aside her instrument, rose to her feet and approached a nearby table. A man gave her money, they exchanged a few words and then she came to their table and Kaifar spoke with her and gave her money, too.
Caroline was able to smile at last. “If she is paid enough, she goes on with the story?” she joked gently.
“The storyteller’s art has always partly involved knowing how to build to moments of tension and then stop.”
Caroline smiled. “Scheherazade being the foremost exponent of the art?”
Kaifar nodded encouragingly.
The waiter brought them the first course, naan with fresh green herbs and white goat’s cheese and several other small dishes that were unfamiliar to her. She tore off some of the flat bread and, following Kaifar’s lead, took a delicate sprig of herb and rolled it in the bread. The freshness of the herb exploded in her mouth.
“Do you know the ending?” she asked after a moment. The singer was still moving from table to table.
“Everyone knows the ending. It is a famous story.”
“Tell me how it ends.”
Kaifar set down his naan and leaned forward on his elbows. He smiled, a warm smile; and she remembered the way he had spoken to her, looked at her earlier in her room. She drew back slightly, but Kaifar began speaking again in a low voice, and in spite of herself Caroline was drawn forward to put her ear closer to his mouth.
“Marjan tries to tell her father’s friend that she loves him as a husband and not a father, but he pretends not to understand. Then she begs him to wait, not to marry her off yet. But he chooses a handsome young man to be her husband, and believing that her love is hopeless, she marries the man he has chosen for her. Her father’s friend falls sick with unrequited love. Marjan visits him, but even on his deathbed he manages to keep his secret. When he dies, Marjan takes charge of the parrot that was, to the last, his companion. As she sits mourning the man she loved, the parrot recites the words it has heard so many times. ‘Marjan! I die for love of you!’ So Marjan discovers the truth.”
Caroline was suffocating. Tears burned her eyelids and she couldn’t speak, though it was stupid to be so affected by a story. “Why?” she whispered at last. “Why couldn’t he tell her?”
Kaifar watched her with eyes as shadowy as the night. “He believed in his duty, perhaps. People betray love for many reasons, some good, some bad.”
People betray love. Did he mean she was betraying love, marrying David? Was that why the story affected her so fiercely? David was her father’s friend, but he did not love her, nor she him. How could that be a betrayal of love? There was no man she loved now, even if one day there might be.
No, a part of her whispered. Not if you marry David. This seemed clear to her suddenly, sitting here with Kaifar’s eyes on her—eyes that saw everything, that showed her her own soul. Marriage to David would kill her heart, her ability to love deeply. How had she failed to see this? They were not asking merely for the sacrifice of a few years of her life. It might be the sacrifice of her heart’s future.
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