ALEXANDRA SELLERS - The Solitary Sheikh

She looked at Prince Omar and decided not to point out for him the significance of those ten formative years in Calgary. “I see.”

“This method you have for teaching children to read. You developed this yourself?”

“Only partly. It’s really a variation of the old phonetic system, which everyone over the age of forty in this country learned by. But it was thrown out and now they teach English as if it were Chinese—as though we had no alphabet, but only pictures depicting words. It’s a terrible waste of an alphabet.” She could feel the soapbox forming under her feet and forced herself to shut up.

“The princesses—” she noticed that he hadn’t yet said “my daughters” “—can speak English quite well. But they cannot read. They read Arabic and Parvani and French very well, they are intelligent, but they say they cannot understand English reading. Is this the reason?”

“Well, without knowing who my predecessors were...” She shrugged.

“These children you taught—their mother tongue was not English?”

Jana nodded.

“What language was it?”

“Nearly any language you care to name.” She smiled. “I can say very good in fourteen languages.”

“Khayli, khoub,” said Prince Omar.

Jana raised her eyebrows.

“That is how we say very good in Parvani, Miss Stewart. I hope you will have reason to say it to the princesses many times.”

Three

A week later the royal party filled almost the entire first-class cabin of the small Royal Barakat Air jet. Only half a dozen seats were empty, one of them beside Jana, and so she read, and ate, and contemplated the amazing step she had taken, in lonely luxury.

Her parents had remained nominally opposed to this career move, even while secretly impressed by the thought of the Barakat royal family. Their opposition had faded quickly in the face of her determination. And as for Peter’s —it had never materialized. Had he ever, Jana wondered, wanted to marry her? Or had it been, for him, the “thing to do”?

Someone slipped into the seat beside her, disturbing her train of thought, and she looked up from the book she had not been reading to see the old vizier.

She smiled a welcome, and they chatted about nothing in particular for a few minutes. Jana had been deeply impressed by the old man from the first time she met him. He had an air of humility that would make it very easy to underestimate him, she thought, and she was sure it would be a mistake to do so. Those calm black eyes saw into human motives, and she was a little afraid of him.

He chatted to her about her new charges, Masha and Kamala, and how tragically unnecessary their mother’s death two years ago had been. If she had been taken to the hospital—but Prince Omar had been away, and in his absence no one had dared to take the responsibility.

Jana frowned. “It can’t have been much of a decision to take a sick woman to a hospital!” she said.

“She did not want to go. No one had the authority to overrule her.”

“You mean, no one would take the risk of defying a sick queen to save her life?” she asked in disbelief.

“Would you have done so?”

“Well, I hope I would have! My God, is the place really that protocol bound? What was Prince Omar’s reaction when he got back? He must have been furious.”

“He was very distressed indeed. But it was impossible to blame anyone.”

Jana wondered why he was telling her this story. To help her understand the princesses...or the prince?

She said tentatively, “Was...was Prince Omar very much in love with his wife?”

The vizier smiled and lifted his hands. “Who can look into the hearts of men in such a matter?” he asked rhetorically, and Jana thought, You probably do it all the time. “He has said that he will not marry again.”

Jana stared at him. “Are you—?” she began, but Hadi al Hatim was already slipping out of the seat, and with a friendly nod moved on up the aisle.

She puzzled over his motives for a few minutes. She had almost said, “Are you warning me off?” but it was ridiculous to think that anyone could imagine she had her eye on Prince Omar! He was as cold as—but then, what was his motive for telling her? She had too much respect for the vizier’s capacities to think that he had spoken at random.

It was a minute or two before she thought to ask herself why she had asked the question. It was no business of hers if Prince Omar’s heart had died with his wife.

Prince Omar stayed in his seat at the front of the cabin throughout the flight. People came and went around him, bowing over his chair, kissing his hand, handing him papers, staying to talk. Jana got up once to go to the toilet, which was at the front of the cabin. She passed by Omar’s seat at a moment when he was sitting alone, going over some papers. He must have noticed her pass, because when she came out of the toilet, he looked up and called her name.

She obediently stopped in front of him. “Your Highness,” she murmured.

It was the first time she had seen him since their interview at the Dorchester. She had been ruffled and irritated then, but now she was cooler, and behind the coldness in his eyes she saw a bleak look that she had not seen before. Or perhaps it was just because of what Hadi al Hatim had told her about the queen’s death.

“I have only been out of England three hours and already I hear no English spoken,” he said. “Sit and speak to me.”

She thought how much more pleasant the command would have been if he had troubled to smile while issuing it, but the man looked grim enough for a hanging judge. She sat in the seat beside him, still uncertain about what was the protocol for such near contact with the monarch.

“Why should you hear English spoken?” she asked.

Looking a little surprised at the question, he said, “It is a language I have always wished to speak well.”

“You sound pretty fluent to me.”

Prince Omar shook his head. “No. Compared to my...my brothers, I have only a poor grasp of English.”

“Then your brothers must be native speakers,” Jana said with a smile.

There was no response. “One studied at a university in the United States, the other in France. In both places they had the opportunity to perfect their English.”

“While you learned Russian?” she guessed, remembering what he had told her about his time in that country.

“Yes, I learned Russian. It was my father’s thought that a small country should be able to. communicate with the leaders of powerful nations in their own language and understand their culture.”

“And I guess you can’t really blame him for not knowing what would happen to the Soviet Union.” True enough, but she supposed it wasn’t much consolation.

“I do not blame my father in any case. But it was not—”

He broke off suddenly, and blinked at her, as though wondering why he was speaking to her so personally. “Well, it is not important.”

“Where did you learn your English?” Jana asked quickly, and the impersonal question seemed to put him at ease.

“From my father’s first wife. He married a foreigner. She learned to speak Arabic after she married my father, but she said that English was a useful language and she spoke to us only in English. It was my father’s wish that we spend time with her.”

“No wonder you speak so fluently.”

His eyelids dropped in a brief negative. “When several people are speaking, I find it hard to follow. Very hard sometimes.”

He was such a closed man it was hard to accept that the purpose of this conversation was really what it seemed on the surface, but Jana said it anyway.

“If all you need is practice—” she shrugged “—I’d be quite happy to provide conversational English whenever you wish.”