ALEXANDRA SELLERS - The Solitary Sheikh

“The princesses are sick, Miss Stewart,” Salimah offered, her eyes on the beautiful glazed tile floor. “They are in bed.”

“That’s all right, take me to them in bed.”

“La, la!” shouted the old woman, waving both her twisted hands as Salimah made the suggestion, and shouted at Salimah.

“She says it is very...easy for someone else to get it,” Salimah translated.

“Contagious,” Jana supplied automatically. “That’s all right.” She had gotten the picture long ago, but she still wasn’t sure how to deal with this hostile old woman. “I never get bugs, I’m not worried. Take me to them.”

Again urgent shouts and waving hands greeted Salimah’s words “They are too sick to be seen by anyone, Miss.”

Jana felt her blood starting to boil. “Well, in that case,” she said carefully, taking a shot in the dark, “I must call Prince Omar immediately on his mobile phone and urge him to return to the palace instantly. He is on urgent business, but he would not like to be absent at such a dangerous time. I will call him now.”

If the old woman called this bluff, what could she do, Jana wondered? She didn’t even know if Prince Omar had a mobile phone, let alone the number. But she saw Umm Hamzah’s jaw clench and her eyes widen in alarm as she spoke, and knew she had won. Jana wondered how much impact this old woman had had on her queen’s decision not to go to the hospital when she was so ill, and how frightened she was of Omar’s displeasure.

Half an hour later the princesses, healthy, clean and neat, were brought to her apartment by a servant. The two pretty little faces gazed at her in fascinated alarm as the introductions were made, and as soon as they were alone, Jana asked, “What is it?”

“Are you the devil’s handmaid?” asked Masha, her eyes wide.

Four

Jana kept her calm. “No,” she said, “I’m not. Did someone tell you I was?”

Masha, her eyes dark, nodded speechlessly. She was the elder by only about eighteen months, Jana knew, and except for a little difference in height, the two perfect little faces could almost have been twins.

Jana was pretty sure she knew who the someone was. “She made a mistake,” she told them calmly. “Don’t you know what my name means? My full name is Jahn-eh Roshan,” she prompted, pronouncing it as Prince Omar had done.

They both frowned in thought “Soul of light!” shouted Masha, and Kamala repeated the words in childish excitement, as if she had discovered them herself.

“That’s right. So how could I be the devil’s handmaid?”

It wasn’t all that convincing, as logic goes, but it seemed to impress the princesses, who stood there nodding, relieved smiles on their faces. “But your name is Parvani,” Masha told her gravely after a moment. “Nana doesn’t speak Parvani, only Arabic.”

Nana was Umm Hamzah.

“Oh, well, that’s how she made the mistake, then,” Jana said pityingly. “Poor Umm Hamzah. She just didn’t know.”

They were satisfied with that, and Jana decided to leave it there. But she understood that Umm Hamzah had declared war, and she intended to keep her guard up.

Over the next few days, Jana spent time getting to know the princesses. Umm Hamzah went on making efforts to restrict Jana’s access to them, but with Salimah interpreting Jana simply said that it was Prince Omar’s command, and would allow no excuse to get in her way.

She soon became as determined to get the girls away from their grim nurse as the nurse was to keep them away from the foreign devil. Umm Hamzah was a superstitious, uneducated, illiterate woman, and some of the stories that Kamala and Masha relayed to Jana made the hair lift on her scalp. She was sure the old woman’s preoccupation with sin, death and the devil was not good for them, and she did her best, in a mild, unconfrontational way, to counteract Umm Hamzah’s influence.

Both the little princesses already spoke good basic English, and so, although she gave them formal lessons in reading, almost anything she did with them could be considered an English lesson. So they played games, and went for walks, and fed the sheikh’s horses apples, and watched the desert tribeswomen washing clothes in the river, and swam in the palace swimming pool.

“This water is not so...good the water at my father’s special place,” Kamala, searching for the words, said nostalgically the first time they swam. Jana was a good swimmer, and she was already devising water games that would teach them English and how to swim at the same time.

“Not as nice as the water at your father’s special place?” she repeated. “Where is that?”

Both girls sighed longingly. “In the mountains,” Masha told her. “The mountains of Noor,” she explained further. She pointed, and Jana turned to look at the mountains in the distance. She saw a stretch of desert, and then the tan-and-pink-coloured foothills, and above, those snow-capped, beautifully inhospitable peaks.

There must be a kind of country residence up there, and why not? Summer down here on the desert would have been close to unbearable on some days without the cooling system in the palace. Jana’s skin was already a warm shade of tan after only a few days in the sun.

“Do you go there every summer?”

Both princesses shook their solemn little heads at her. “No,” Masha said, sighing again. “Two times we go there. It is very beautiful, Jana. Very beautiful. We had such lovely time.”

“We saw our father every day. It was not like here at the palace. Here we do not see Baba.”

“He spoke to us and took us riding and showed us many things.”

“He did not go away and leave us during the whole time.”

They were so pathetically eager to tell her about it, so sad at the loss of their joy. Her heart ached for them. Poor little princesses, who never had their father to themselves.

“Perhaps your father will take you there again,” Jana suggested, wanting to comfort them.

The girls smiled, lifted their shoulders and sighed. By which she understood that they had given up hope of such happiness.

“Is the house still there?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Baba is there now,” said Masha.

Jana was startled. “Is he?”

“We saw the halikuptar. When he goes in the halikuptar, he goes to the lake,” Masha said, as if it were a fact of nature. “But we do not go.”

“Shall I ask him about it?” Jana asked. She was curious about the place, and about why there was apparently to be no repetition of holidays that the children remembered with such pleasure.

They stared at her as if she had transmogrified into a magician as they watched. “Can you?” Kamala breathed.

“Oh, Jana!” Masha said.

“I can try. I’ll mention it, first chance I get,” she promised.

From that moment on, she could do no wrong. Devil’s handmaid? They knew from first-hand experience that Jana was an angel.

Prince Omar returned two days later, a fact she learned because the sound of the helicopter drew her out onto a terrace that had a vantage point over the helipad. She saw him disembark, and her heart kicked with satisfaction. For her as for his daughters, it seemed, the palace was incomplete without their father.

She remembered their conversation on the plane, and waited to be summoned to Prince Omar’s presence. But the hours and days followed one another and she got no summons.

Then one hot evening, after the princesses were in bed, Jana went to the pool for a late swim as was her custom and found Prince Omar there, alone, swimming up and down the length of the pool in a fast, strong crawl. After a momentary hesitation, Jana stripped off her robe and dived in.

When she had done a few more leisurely lengths she stopped at the deep end, and found that he was sitting on the edge not far away. The water was still streaming down his skin, so she guessed he had only just pulled himself out of the water. Maybe he hadn’t realized till now that she was even in the pool.