The Sycamore Song Read online

  “But, ya sett, what if the Sidi doesn’t wish to take you with him?”

  “I’m going, and that’s that!” she declared.

  The Egyptian shrugged. “I will find another camel for you,” he agreed reluctantly. “Insh’allah, if Allah wills it.” It was obvious that he meant if Tariq willed it too, and Victoria knew that there would be no camel waiting for her unless Tariq himself ordered Abdul to find her one.

  After breakfast, Jim Kerr made no secret of the fact that he was going over to the mastaba. Victoria’s spirits took a dive as she watched him walk across the sand towards the tomb. It was too early for him to go there! The police couldn’t possibly be in position yet. There was no sign of anyone, not so much as a car - and Tariq was still asleep in his bed!

  She tore across to the tent she shared with him and found it empty.. Perhaps it was not too early after all. She made their two beds, mechanically, pushing the bedclothes into place as quickly as she could. When she came out of the tent again, she saw Tariq coming across to her, and waited for him with a nonchalant air.

  His face relaxed into a smile as he came up to her. “You did a good job,” he congratulated her. “I heard most of it through the canvas.”

  “I thought you were asleep,” she said demurely.

  His smile widened. “Oh no! I wouldn’t have missed seeing you kick him in the shins for anything!”

  What else had he heard? she wondered. “It was he who pushed me in Unas’ Pyramid,” she remembered, incensed all over again. “He admitted it!”

  “All the more reason for you to keep a low profile this morning,” he warned her. “I have your promise about that, haven’t I, Victoria?”

  “Yes, you have,” she agreed. “I don’t want to get in the way of justice catching up with Jim Kerr. Not only for me, but for my father too!”

  Tariq touched her face. “I have an interest in seeing him nailed myself,” he told her. “He won’t ever touch you again, I promise you that. Don’t fret, love!”

  But of course that was easier said than done. She took up her post by the communal tent, trying to see what was happening, but more than an hour later, nothing had happened at all. Later still, a police van drew up, and Tariq came out to greet the occupants, but that was absolutely all.

  Disappointed, Victoria turned her attention to Abdul’s camel, trying to make the beast look smaller in her mind’s eye. The camel turned and stared back at her, chewing its cud, its extraordinary lip protruding in first one direction and then the other, insolently defying her to talk herself into finding the courage to get up on its back.

  Then she heard her name being yelled across the sand and she was up and away, running towards the mastaba as fast as she could go, her heart pounding in her ears. She had almost reached it when the police emerged, half carrying Jim Kerr between them, his torn shirt flapping against his ribs. Victoria ignored them, one and all, and ran straight into Tariq’s open arms.

  “Oh, Tariq,” she cried out, “is it all over?”

  He kissed her lips. “They caught him red-handed.” He ruffled her hair with his hand. “I wish your father could have known.”

  She kissed him back, smiling. “Perhaps he does know,” she said.

  Victoria eyed Abdul’s camel with dislike. She planned to be already mounted when Tariq came out of the communal tent. Feeling slightly sick, she grasped the wooden pommel of the saddle and eased her leg over the camel’s back, taking a last, desperate leap into the air to get properly astride. Long before she was ready for it, the camel lurched backwards, came to her knees, and practically flung Victoria over her head as she straightened out her back legs. Another uneasy lurch and she was up. Victoria shut her eyes tightly against the receding ground and hung on for dear life, petrified that the camel might move and she wouldn’t be able to stop it.

  “Where are you going?” Tariq asked her.

  She opened her eyes briefly and shut them again. “With you!” she informed him through clenched teeth.

  The camel began to lower herself to her knees again, and Victoria gave a gasp of terror. “Do something!” she shrieked at Tariq.

  His hands clasped her round the waist, steadying her for the next lurch. “Move up a bit, my sweet. I’m coming up behind you!”

  “There isn’t room!” she protested.

  “Of course there is.” His voice was warm and soothing. “There now, isn’t that better?”

  With his arm holding her tightly against him, she thought perhaps it was, but she had no breath to talk and she was still trembling with fright.

  “I told you you’d enjoy it if you were with me,” Tariq mocked her, as the camel lurched to her feet again. “Relax, darling, I won’t let you fall.” He settled his arm more comfortably about her. “Try and feel the rhythm and then you might even open your eyes and see how lovely the desert is!” He chuckled. “You must be feeling brave enough for anything if you dared get on a camel by yourself!”

  She opened her eyes at last and even dared to relax her hold on the wooden pommel in front of her. “I didn’t want to be left behind again,” she confessed. She leaned back against him and sighed heavily. “I don’t want to be divorced either,” she said under her breath.

  She crossed her feet in front of the saddle as she had seen the Egyptians do and felt very daring. The rocking movement of the camel was better than she had expected and the silence all about them enveloped her in a sense of peace that soothed her ruffled spirits.

  He buried his face in her hair, kissing the nape of her neck. “I thought you understood,” he said thickly. “I don’t want to hurry you into something you may regret. You have to be free of this legal entanglement before I can woo you as you deserve to be wooed. I want to give you the best, habibi. Go home to your mother for three months and give yourself time to be sure that you want to tie yourself up to someone like me.”

  She sat very still. Three months without him would be an eternity.

  “I don’t want time,” she said. “I want you!”

  “I want you too! But this is different, Victoria. I want you as my wife, not as I’ve wanted other women. I owe it to you to let you see me in your home surroundings, with your mother there to advise you, and let you make up your mind calmly, without any physical pressures on you. Because there will be no going back once we’re married. If you marry me, you’ll go where I go, sharing my work, my bed, my whole life! Suppose you’re more like your mother than you think and find you want to live in England after all?”

  She turned to look at him and very nearly lost her balance. She clutched at his shirt, and felt his heart thumping quite as wildly as her own was against his hand.

  “Tariq, don’t you know yet I love you? I loved you yesterday, and I love you today, and I’ll love you just as much tomorrow. There’ll never be anyone else for me. There never could be.”

  His hand tightened against her. “You didn’t like it when I took Juliette out last night,” he reminded her.

  “No,” She smiled putting her hand on his. Omm Beshir was right after all, she thought. Juliette didn’t matter, had never mattered, and nor would anyone else like her. “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand,” she added. “I should have known you wanted your freedom to have as many Juliettes as you like. But I won’t tie you down, habipi. All I want is for you to come back to me when you’ve had enough of the particular Juliette of the moment. I love you, as you are, not as you might try to change yourself to please me—”

  She felt his anger and was glad of it. “Victoria, if I thought you were serious—” He barked out a harsh command to the camel that brought her to a halt and then, protesting, to her knees. “I want to see more of you than your back while we continue this discussion, ya sett!” He lifted her out of the saddle and deposited her none too gently on the side of a sand-dune, sitting down beside her, his face flushed with temper. “I don’t want a complacent wife, my girl, and I won’t have you - Oh, Victoria!” he groaned. “I love you too, far too much to want anyo
ne else!”

  “Then why do I have to go back to England?” she opened her eyes very wide, presenting him with an innocent face. “If it isn’t women you want, is it because you want to have all the fun of finishing my father’s excavation by yourself? And my tomb too, I daresay!” A thought struck her and her pose fell away from her. “What are you going to do without my father’s money?” she demanded.

  “The Department has offered to pay—”

  Her navy-blue eyes met his accusingly. “Tariq, you couldn’t send me to England while you dug out my tomb?”

  His face creased into a smile. “No, I’m beginning to think I can’t, so you needn’t go on about my ‘women’ any longer.” There was a gleam of amusement in his eyes. “Someone should have told you that reformed rakes make the strictest husbands,” he went on sternly. He touched her rosy face with a thoughtful finger. “Are you absolutely sure, my love?”

  “I was quite sure when I first saw you beside the Virgin’s Tree,” she said simply.

  “I know. You were like a little shy, unbroken foal, wondering if you were going to take to the bridle.”

  She was shocked that he should have read her first reaction to him so accurately. But then why should she be surprised? His knowledge of her sex was probably much greater than even she had guessed.

  “I liked the way you use your hands when you talk, and your falcon’s eyes that made me feel like a mouse you’d picked out for breakfast. I can’t wait three months for you, Tariq!”

  He bent over her, kissing her cheek, her eyes, and then finally her mouth, his lips hardening into a passionate demand that took her breath away and sent the wonder of it spinning through her veins. After a few minutes he moved away from her, brushing away some grains of sand that had clung to the back of her hand.

  “Three months is far too long,” he agreed. “But I mean to marry you first, Victoria. Will you stay with Omm Beshir while I fix up some kind of a ceremony for us? Would you object to a Coptic wedding?”

  “I’d love it!” she said. “I’ll marry you as often as you like! I’d even like to have our marriage blessed by the vicar at home before my mother and every one of my friends and acquaintances So that they can see how lucky I am!”

  He flushed absurdly. “They might not think so,” he murmured.

  She laughed. “Oh, Tariq! You know they will!”

  “Then you’ll go to Omm Beshir?”

  She shook her head. “I thought I was legally married to you now,” she said. “You’ve only divorced me once, and that doesn’t count, so why do we have to wait? I want to be with you now, darling. ‘Fruit I will gather for your delight, Bread I will break and pour out wine. I’ll bring you the perfumed flow’rs and bright. On this festal day divine.’ ”

  His eyes lit with love for her. “You must have read the Sycamore Song often to be able to recite it at will?”

  “I learned it by heart last night,” she told him with a smile. “While you were with Juliette. It was the only thing of yours I had to hold on to.”

  “You had more than that! I didn’t want to leave you on your own, habibi, not then or later. I love you very much!” He reached across and kissed her lightly on the nose. “All right, my darling wife, if you want to bring down the curtain straight away, who am I to object to that?”

  He sprang to his feet and called the camel to him, helping her to her feet. “Do you care to mount, Mrs. Fletcher, or will you walk?”

  Victoria allowed herself to be put up on the saddle and waited for him to climb up behind her, trembling against him as he put his arm around her.

  “Love me?” he asked her.

  She leaned back against him more comfortably, completely unperturbed by anything the camel might do. She had never been more happy in her life.

  “Oh yes!” she gasped.

  He hugged her more closely to him and began to sing at the top of his voice, with an infectious exuberance that brought a smile to her lips. It was nice to know that he was happy too.

  “Joshua won the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho,

  Joshua won the battle of Jericho–

  And the walls came tumbling down!”