The Bride Price (43 page)

“Al-Kibirah, are you there?”

“I am here,” she answered, hastily dropping the locket into an embroidered bag she wore on her belt. She wanted to examine the necklace further, but as she secreted it away, she felt guilty, as if she had been caught doing something she should not have done. Picking up Sharif’s
thobe,
she closed the lid of the chest and hurried out to meet the servant.

“I was just looking for this...I want to mend it,” she blurted before he could speak.

“I will summon a maid to take it to your apartment, my lady.” He flashed her a mostly toothless smile in approval. The lady Farha was a good wife for his master. “If we are to go to the souk, we must leave now. It’s getting late.”

They walked toward the souk at a leisurely pace, skirting the slave market. Bryna could not bear to walk on the long broad street, where men and women sat on banks of benches under a roof of matting, awaiting an uncertain future as servants and concubines.

As Bryna and Abu Ahmad wandered, she was moody at first, thinking of the locket in her bag, but she soon forgot it. There was too much to see. The streets were clogged with pilgrims, and she was content to be a sightseer. Occupied with listening to the many languages, seeing the costumes of countless nationalities, she could almost ignore the heat and filth and stench of closely packed humanity.

At the edge of a souk, where foodstuffs were sold, they came across a busy fruit stall.

“Look at those pomegranates, my lady,” the old man exclaimed, pointing a gnarled finger, “the best I have seen in years.”

“Perhaps you should buy some before the very best are gone, Abu Ahmad,” Bryna responded with a smile, handing him some coins. The servant hurried to do his mistress’s bidding, leaving her to wait in the shade of a stack of small casks.

While she waited, Bryna heard voices from nearby. Meccans were notoriously loud and foul-mouthed, but these voices spoke a language she dimly understood. Curiously she cocked an ear to a chink in the wall of barrels.

“I do not understand why we search the marketplace every day, Colonel. Even if we saw her, how would we know her under a veil? There must be a better way.” Derek and his companion stood on the bottom step of the stairs to their lodgings and watched the throng in discouragement.

“Do you still insist we should march into the sheik’s courtyard and demand her return?” Blaine asked dryly. “Ernst says this is the best place to start if we do not wish to lose our heads.”

“I know, I know. If we see her, if we recognize her...If, if, if,” the Englishman suddenly exploded.

Blaine scowled at him. “We have come a long way on ifs, lad, and don’t forget it.”

Unnoticed by Abu Ahmad, Bryna wandered to the end of the line of barrels and peeped around them. In the shadowy doorway stood two men. She scrutinized them from behind her cover of barrels. One was young and slender, the other a tall, older man. They looked to be Arab, but what tribe were they? What was their language?

While she pondered, she was distracted by a boy who ran through the bazaar with a fat merchant at his heels. The boy hugged a melon against his chest. Perched backward on his shoulder was a monkey that chattered and waved its spindly arms at their pursuer as if taunting him.

Made awkward by his burden, the child lurched against Bryna, then careened into the olive oil barrels behind her. As the monkey fought to maintain its balance, it grabbed at anything that might steady it. Its grasping paw ripped the
burqu
from Bryna’s face as she staggered against the tottering kegs. The unsteady stack of barrels collapsed with a deafening crash. Small casks rolled through the marketplace, bowling over pedestrians and crashing into stalls, bringing their canvas roofs down on merchants and shoppers alike.

In the pandemonium Bryna fell, knocked unconscious by a falling cask, nearly at the feet of the two men in the doorway. Blaine and Derek rushed to aid the injured woman. Kneeling beside her, they turned her black-clad figure over, and neither man could believe his eyes.

“Petite maîtresse,
” Blaine breathed in wonder.

“Bryna!” She was more beautiful than Derek had remembered. Her parted lips were painted red, and her closed eyes were shadowed and lined with kohl, enhancing her exotic appearance, but she was Bryna. How often had he dreamed of her in the past months. But he had known a girl, the girl he had planned to marry in Tangier. This Bryna was a woman.

“Bryna!” Blaine leaned over her urgently. “Speak to me. Are you all right?”

A moan was the only response. Derek looked around furtively. No one was watching them in the confusion. He peeped around what remained of the stack of barrels into the thoroughfare. No one paid the slightest attention to him.

“Hurry,” he instructed the other man briskly. “Get her inside before someone notices. We do not want a repeat of that fiasco in Riyadh—or worse.”

Blaine wasted no time, scooping his unconscious daughter into his arms and running upstairs.

Derek lingered on the steps, watching the dying furor in the market. Apparently the young thief had escaped, for the disgruntled merchant walked back to his own stall without his melon. Other vendors righted overturned baskets and repaired their damaged canopies. Derek watched a grizzled old man going anxiously from stall to stall, speaking to every merchant, urgently stopping passersby in the street to question them. But no one approached the Algerian who loitered beside the olive merchant’s shop.

Upstairs, Blaine carried Bryna’s limp form through the
majlis
to the bedchamber, where he laid her down and examined her injury with gentle hands. She would be all right, he realized with relief. She had a small lump on the back of her head, but no blood seeped through her hair.

He removed her aba and
ghata
against the heat. After the din in the souk, the heavy chain of coins she wore on her forehead clinked loudly in the silence of the room when he removed them. As he loosened her belt, the golden locket slipped from her bag and dropped onto the bed beside her.

Blaine picked it up, surprised she carried this reminder of her past. Had she remembered? Or was this proof that her memory was gone entirely? Worriedly he bathed her face with a damp cloth, heedlessly smearing her carefully applied cosmetics, but she did not awaken.

“Ah,
chère,
what you must have been through,” her father said regretfully. Brushing back her hair, he planted a light kiss on her forehead and sat down to wait for her to awaken in her own time.

After a few minutes the door opened softly and Derek peered inside. “How is she?” he whispered.

“Still unconscious,” Blaine answered in a low voice. “Is Mustafa out there?”

“No.”

“Then you must go find Ernst. We have to get out of Mecca as soon as possible.”

“But what if Bryna awakens before I return?” the young man objected.

“She will need some time. She may not recognize us at all.”

“Surely she will when she sees us face to face.”

“I don’t know,” the Irishman answered soberly, fingering the locket he held.

“She must remember me,” Derek muttered. “I must speak to her, must make her remember.”

“Don’t worry, lad. You’ll have your chance. We did not come all this way for nothing.”

The young Englishman tarried a moment longer in the doorway, then withdrew and closed the door.

In the outer room he paced, trying to collect himself before he departed on his errand. He grappled with the questions he had asked himself so many times since Riyadh. What would happen now that they had found Bryna? Would her memory return? Would she go with them, or would she prefer to stay with her sheik?

Now another, more urgent doubt plagued the proud young man. Even if she chose him, could he forget she had given herself to another man? Would the specter of Sharif Al Selim, her Arab husband, haunt him forever?

The room was dusky when Bryna stirred at last. Blaine sat very still, watching her, almost afraid to breathe. Her eyes opened and she stared at the ceiling, blinking at the ache of her head.

Where am I? she wondered dully. The last thing she remembered was pain as the small kegs tumbled down around her head. And now she was in a strange room. Sensing another person nearby, she lifted her head, causing a sharp pain to ricochet in her skull.

She lay back on the pillow with a groan. A powerful- looking man leaned over her. Lit from behind by light coming in from the windows and the glow of a lamp on the table, his face was in the shadows. Though she could tell his lips moved, she could not hear for the blood roaring in her temples.

Who was he? He seemed somehow familiar. Where had she seen him before? Sharif had killed her kidnappers in the desert. Suddenly she knew that. Was this man another abductor? Was he the reason Sharif had wanted her to be guarded?

Sitting up slowly, she watched the big man warily. He nodded in encouragement but made no move to touch her. Scooting over near the wall, she increased the distance between them.

Seemingly unperturbed, he crooned in the strangely familiar language, “It’s all right,
chère.
Don’t be afraid.”

“Who are you?” she demanded in Arabic. “What do you want?”

Blaine tried not to show the chagrin he felt in the face of her hostility. “Try to remember,” he implored softly in French. “Your name is Bryna. I am your father.” Carefully he reached to the table behind him and slid the lamp over so it lit his face.

Bryna’s puzzled gaze examined his bearded face. There was something familiar, she thought distractedly, chewing her lower lip. Then she gasped. His eyes were blue, like hers.

Belatedly Blaine remembered the turban he wore and raked it off his head. As if mesmerized, she stared at his auburn hair, glinting in the lamplight.

“I...I cannot remember,” she said in Arabic, shaking her head.

Wordlessly he handed her the open locket. She took it and looked down at two miniatures, one of a beautiful young woman, the other of a handsome man. She scrutinized each one. Then she looked up at the man who sat beside her breathlessly, then at the tiny portrait. At last her gaze searched his face with dawning recognition. Bryna felt as if she had awakened from a long dream to totter at the brink of memory.

“Père?”
The word came unbidden to her lips.

“
Thank
le bon Dieu,
you remember.” Blaine sighed in relief. He put his hand out as if he would touch her, then thought better of it. “I don’t want to frighten you. You do remember, don’t you, Bryna?”

“My name is not...Farha?” she asked uncertainly, her tongue stumbling over the long-unused French syllables.

“Non,
your name is Bryna Jean-Marie O’Toole. You are my daughter, and you were kidnapped from my home in Tangier.”

“I thought I would never see you again.” With a strangled sob, Bryna buried her face in her hands and began to cry.

“‘Tis all right now. I’ve come to take you home.” Her father took her gently in his powerful, protective arms while she wept. His deep, comforting voice murmuring in her ear brought a flood of lost memories that had nothing to do with him.

She did remember...Nejm, Suleiman, Pamela. Images of humiliation, suffering, and death raced through her mind. But there had been joys as well. And through most of it, there had been Sharif.

Sharif, Bryna thought with a sharp stab of pain. Why had he never told her the truth, not even her own name? He had allowed her to suffer months of torment, not knowing who she was. But the months had been filled with happiness as well, she admitted to herself. What was she to do?

“What is wrong,
chère?”
Blaine asked, feeling Bryna’s body stiffen in his embrace.

“So much has happened since I was taken. There are things you do not know...” She faltered, uncertain how to proceed.

“I know about your sheik, Bryna,” her father said gently.

“You do?” Her voice quavered, and she regarded him anxiously. “Then you understand? I do not know what to do. You are my father and I love you. But Sharif is good to me. He loves me. He saved my life. He took me in when I was all alone in the world. He risked everything to marry me. I do care for him, I cannot deny it. I don’t know what to do,” she repeated bleakly.

“And I can’t tell you,” Blaine said almost sadly.

“I came to take you home, but I will not insist you come out of a sense of duty. ‘Duty’ was the reason I left your mother, and I’ve regretted it every day since. Al Selim sounds like a good man, and I think he must love you very much. Do you love him?”

Yes, I mean, I believe so.” She looked at her father miserably, her face splotchy from crying. “I don’t know. I am so confused.”

“This is not going to be easy. Come here,” Blaine ordered gently. He led his daughter to a small basin of water and washed her face tenderly as if she were a child. “Bryna, there is someone else who loves you,” he said, “and you cannot dismiss him without hearing what he has come all this way to say.”

“Derek? He is here, isn’t he?” she asked apprehensively. She’d loved him once, or thought she did. Did she love him still?

“Yes.” He watched his daughter carefully. From Riyadh to Mecca, he had tried to prepare himself for this moment. He had suspected Bryna would have a choice to make when they found her, and he intended to see she had the freedom to make it.

He opened the door. Bryna could hear the Englishman’s cultured voice ask worriedly from the outer room, “Is she..is she ready to see me yet, Colonel?”

“Aye.” The wooden panel swung back to reveal the slender man. Even though she had expected to see him, Bryna’s breath caught. Under the beard and the turban and the shaggy brown hair was the same handsome young man who had haunted her dreams—Derek.

He poised in the doorway, his hazel eyes locked on Bryna’s. The instant he saw the recognition on her face, he uttered a choked cry of relief and strode into the room, taking her into his arms. Neither seemed to notice when Blaine left, closing the door behind him.

“Bryna, my love,” he murmured, his voice thick with emotion. “We’ve found you at last.” Before she could speak, he kissed her.