completely by surprise. It appeared she was not as proficient at learning from experience as she had imagined herself.
She gave herself a little shake. ‘However we feel, it doesn’t alter the fact that we have far too much to lose, to allow ourselves to be distracted, no matter how tempting. Now if you will excuse me, I will return to the duties which I have been appointed to carry out.’ It was cowardly of her, but Stephanie gave Rafiq no time to reply, heading for the sanctuary of the stables with necessary but most undignified speed.
Stephanie was struggling to continue reading in the gathering gloom. With a sigh, she untied the scarf which held her hair back and closed the covers of The Compleat Horse Doctor, which she had been perusing in the hope that she might have missed something of import. She had not, and her battered copy of Instructions for the Use of Farriers Attached to the British Cavalry and to the Royal Board of Ordnance proved as irksome as ever, with its outdated remedies and procedures more likely to kill than cure. Checking her copious notes, she was forced to accept that she had done all she could for now. The sensible thing would be to go to bed.
Lighting a lantern, she quit the little office space she had purloined, and headed into the main stable block, making her way down the row of boxes until she came to Sherifa’s stall. The mare snorted, taking the dates Stephanie offered with a haughty toss of her head. Two years ago, her mistress, Princess Elmira had died. ‘Do you still miss her?’ Stephanie whispered. Did Rafiq?
‘The past is not a place I care to visit,’ he had said yesterday. In that respect they were of like mind, though their motivations were very different. Rafiq’s past was tragic, whereas hers was simply sordid, her shame exacerbated by the knowledge that her downfall was entirely of her own making. She had allowed herself to be dazzled by the attentions of a handsome man. She had allowed herself to believe he meant his charming declarations of love. She had not allowed herself to reflect on the disparities in their situations. She had effectively let her heart rule her head, to disastrous effect. And now here she was again, dazzled by the attentions of an even more handsome man, whose station in life was so far above her own as to be risible.
She fed Sherifa another date. She had imagined herself in love with Rupert. She was under no such illusions when it came to Rafiq. It was as unthinkable as it was impossible. Rafiq was a man of honour and integrity. Despite the apparent similarities, the two men, the two situations could not be more different.
She smiled to herself. For the first time since she had fallen so catastrophically from grace, her loss of reputation struck her as strangely liberating. What’s more, looking at things from this fresh perspective, the fact that Rafiq was a prince was also a liberating factor, since he was so far beyond her reach as to inhabit another planet. She would never, ever be so foolish as to imagine that she could be anything to him other than his Royal Horse Surgeon. And that should, provided she always remembered it, make things both simpler and safer.
It was a comforting thought. Not that she had any intentions of acting on it. Quitting the stables, Stephanie was taking the long way back to the palace, enjoying the cool night air under the glittering discs of the desert stars, when a painful hacking cough emanating from the mules’ enclosure stopped her in her tracks.
* * *
When he was roused by his personal servant in the middle of the night, Rafiq knew it could mean only one thing. Another outbreak of the sickness.
‘I was reluctant to have you disturbed, sire,’ his man said, ‘for the case in question is not one of your thoroughbreds but a mere mule. However, your Royal Horse Surgeon was most insistent you be alerted.’
Were it not for his anxiety at this worrying new development, Rafiq would have smiled at that. Stephanie would not have insisted, she would have demanded. Quickly donning his riding clothes, he made his way through the silent and sleeping palace out through the courtyard to the stables, sick at heart at this new proof of the plague’s persistence. It would be wrong to expect too much from Stephanie’s first case. He could only hope she did not fail completely.
Flambeaux had been lit in the stable yard. Stephanie had had the distressed beast brought in to one of the enclosed stalls primarily set aside for mares in foal. As he approached the hushed huddle of his stable hands gathered outside the door, he could hear the ominously familiar sound of the animal’s laboured breathing punctuated with a hacking cough. Until now, the sickness had confined itself to the horses, but even before he entered the stall, Rafiq knew with heart-sinking certainty that it had spread to the pack animals.
Stephanie was at the mule’s head, trying to calm the animal. She looked up when he closed the door softly behind him. ‘Thank goodness. They said I should not disturb you because it was only a mule, but I knew you would want to be here, and besides, I need you to verify that the symptoms are the same.’
She wore a plain white tunic similar to his own, an abba of the same cotton. Her hair was down. It was shorter than he had imagined, falling just past her shoulders.
‘Rafiq? Can you see the swelling and redness around the eyes? The discharge from the nostrils and the fever? Though it is not so severe as you described it...’
‘The cough is the same. And the laboured breathing. There is no doubt that it is a case of the sickness. What course of action do you recommend?’
‘Do nothing,’ Stephanie said after a long, tense moment’s thought.
‘Nothing!’ Rafiq stared at her in consternation. ‘You don’t think bleeding, or a poultice or...’
‘Nothing,’ she said firmly. ‘Jasim has tried these treatments before, has he not?’
‘Yes, but you can’t mean to sit back and do nothing,’ Rafiq said incredulously. ‘What about an emetic, cautery—there must be something you can do, some course of treatment you can attempt?’
‘All the standard remedies have been tried by Jasim to no avail. He has been very thorough, but we are obviously dealing with something new here,’ she replied gently. ‘So we need to do something different. It strikes me the one thing that hasn’t been attempted is to let nature take its course without interference. Poor Batal here will need all his strength to fight the fever. In my experience all the remedies which you suggest will only serve to weaken him further.’
‘But to do nothing—!’
‘Is sometimes the very best course of action, when one has no certain knowledge of the cause. We can calm him. We can keep him cool, and we can keep him on his feet walking, fighting. Trust me.’ She turned her attention briefly from her patient to face him. ‘Rafiq. I will not dose him with powders or drain away his lifeblood just to demonstrate to you that I am well versed in traditional treatments. Perhaps Batal will live up to his name, prove himself a hero and survive. Perhaps he will not, but at the very least we will have ruled out this approach as a treatment option without having added to his suffering.’
She would not defer to him, nor would she lie to him. She gave him no false promises, but that in itself raised his hopes. Rafiq nodded his agreement. Stephanie’s satisfied smile was cut short when the mule gave a distressing hack and tried to escape her hold, bucking feebly and tossing his head.
‘Here, let me,’ Rafiq said, taking the rope. ‘Trust me,’ he added when she looked as if she would refuse, ‘I too know what I am doing.’
* * *
Stephanie
