‘I will deal with this…’ and another more familiar voice intervened, cutting across the row going on between Hayat and Akram with commanding force.
Trembling, Saffy focused on Zahir where he stood like a bronzed statue in the centre of the light, airy reception room, coldly surveying his squabbling siblings. He spoke in his own language at length to Akram and Hayat backed off, dropping her head apologetically. Whatever Zahir told his brother, Akram turned his head in consternation to stare back at Saffy with frowning disbelief. He took a half-step towards her and muttered uncomfortably, ‘I am very sorry. It seems I got everything wrong.’
‘Yes, Zahir divorced me,’ Saffy pointed out ruefully.
‘Even so, I should never have spoken to you in that way or approached you in a temper. It was not my business,’ Akram mumbled, his face very flushed, his discomfiture in Zahir’s thunderous presence pronounced. ‘Over the years it seems I reached the wrong conclusions and, as my brother has reminded me, I was never party to the true facts of what happened between you.’
An uneasy silence fell. Zahir was still glaring angrily at his kid brother.
‘No harm done,’ Saffy said awkwardly, keen to dispel the tension. ‘I assume that Zahir has told you what really happened and that you no longer think so badly of me. Now, if you would all excuse me…’
‘Where are you going?’ Zahir demanded.
‘Only for a walk. I’d like to be alone for a while,’ she muttered tightly.
‘I will accompany you,’ Zahir pronounced.
‘No…I only want a minute alone,’ Saffy whispered pleadingly, because she was thinking about what Akram had hurled at her and reaching the worst possible conclusions. Zahir had been punished by his father for defying him by marrying her? Why had that possibility never occurred to her before? Why had she been so wrapped up in her own misery that it had never occurred to her that Zahir might be dealing with bad things too? But, imprisoned, tortured, beaten…surely not? Was that possible? Would his father have subjected his son to such brutal intimidation? According to his reputation, King Fareed had been responsible for many atrocities. She thought of Zahir’s appallingly scarred back and a sense of cold fear of the unknown and of such cruelty infiltrated her. But if Zahir had suffered like that, why hadn’t he told her?
When Saffy actually focused enough to recognise where her wandering feet had carried her, she realised that she was back in the old part of the palace where she had once lived. She walked down a dim corridor and cast open the door of the room that had once been theirs. It shook her that it was still furnished the same, untouched by time or alteration, and she walked in with a compulsive shiver of remembrance of the past.
A thousand images engulfed her all at once and she reeled from memories of Zahir watching her with wary eyes, his silences, sudden absences and his refusal to answer questions. Had he been hiding stuff from her that she should have guessed? Was Akram telling the truth? She couldn’t bear that suspicion, wasn’t sure she could ever live with any discovery that painful…
‘I should have had this place cleared…’ Zahir murmured from behind her. ‘But I used to come here to think about you.’
Saffy turned round, her face pale as milk, her eyes nakedly vulnerable. ‘When? After the divorce? I think you need to start talking, Zahir…and maybe I do too,’ she acknowledged unevenly.
‘After I married you, my brother Omar asked me if I was insane to challenge our father to that extent,’ Zahir admitted with curt reluctance. ‘But at first I genuinely had no idea what I was dealing with: Omar had protected me too much. He kept a lot of secrets. I was the younger son, the junior army officer, and I wasn’t part of the inner circle of people who knew what a monster my father had become on a diet of unfettered power.’
‘So, you must have regretted marrying me rather quickly,’ Saffy assumed, searching the lean strong features she loved for every passing nuance of expression and sinking down on the edge of the bed where she had often cried her heart out with loneliness.
His handsome mouth hardened. ‘I only ever regretted the unnatural lifestyle which our marriage inflicted on you. I had no regrets on my own behalf.’
‘That’s a kind thing to say but it can’t be the way you really felt.’
‘I loved you more than life,’ Zahir breathed starkly. ‘My mistake was in rebelling against my father and bringing you back here to become the equivalent of a hostage. I should have married you and left you in London where you would be safe, but I was too selfish to do that.’
Loved you more than life. The declaration rippled through her like an unexpected benediction, steadying her nerves. ‘I loved you too. You weren’t selfish. I wouldn’t have agreed to being left behind in London.’
‘But you didn’t know what you were getting into here any more than I did.’ Face grave, Zahir compressed his lips. ‘Omar had been married five years and he still had no child. Our father was impatient to see the next generation in the family born.’
‘That must have put a lot of pressure on Omar and Azel.’
‘More on Omar for the lack of fertility was his, not hers but I didn’t learn that until shortly before Omar…died.’ He spoke that last word with curious emphasis. ‘My older brother’s secret was that he had discovered he was unable to father a child and he was afraid to tell our father lest he was passed over in the succession stakes in favour of me. Omar was always the ambitious one,’ Zahir told her heavily. ‘Unfortunately for him, our father had run out of patience. He demanded that Omar either set Azel aside or take a second wife.’
Saffy was shocked. ‘And that was the background to our marriage?’
‘Our father was doubly enraged when I married you without permission because my marriage to a suitable woman would have been the next step on his agenda.’
‘And of course I got in the way of his plans,’ Saffy completed. ‘Yet you thought he would eventually accept me.’
‘I was wrong,’ Zahir admitted grittily. ‘I was much more naïve than I thought I was about what our father was really like. I never dreamt he would be as vicious with his sons as he was to some of our people. How adolescent was such innocence in a grown man?’
‘Everybody wants to think the best of their parents,’ Saffy told him with rueful understanding. ‘I don’t blame you for getting it wrong.’
‘The year we were married was the year my father went over the edge. Although I was unaware of it, he had become a regular drug user and suffered from violent rages. From the first day you arrived he wanted me to divorce you…and the sensible act would have been to surrender to greater force, but I was never sensible about you.’
Her heart was beating in what felt uncomfortably like the foot of her throat. ‘Greater force?’ she queried suspiciously. ‘If even half of what Akram suggested happened to you, I have the right to know about it. Were you imprisoned? Tortured? Beaten?’
Zahir stared levelly back at her, not a muscle moving on his bronzed handsome face, his mouth an unsmiling line. ‘I could curse Akram, though he spoke out of ignorance. This is a conversation I never wanted to have with you…’
Saffy was trembling. ‘You’re telling me that
