“For instance, however much you may know of the circumstances, however I may explain them to you, you will always think of me as a woman from the Sultan’s harem – an odalisque – waiting to catch the eye of her Turkish Master.”

Lord Castleford smiled.

“I thought when you walked across the room just now that you looked as if you had stepped straight from a fifteenth-century Persian mosaic or perhaps from one of the Persian paintings on ivory that are so exquisite and so valuable that the Shah in Teheran has them specially guarded.”

“I am flattered!”

“Looking as you do, how could you possibly have got yourself into such a situation that you are alone in the world without a family, parents, even a husband to take care of you?” Lord Castleford asked.

“It is just something that happened unavoidably,” Yamina answered, “and that is why I am at this moment grateful that, whether you were willing to do so or not, you are taking care of me.”

She gave a little shiver, half real, half pretence, before she added,

“I am on enemy soil having tea with an enemy of my country and yet it is not half so frightening as being in a Turkish harem looking over my shoulder for the approach of the Black Eunuch!”

Chapter Six

Yamina awoke with a sudden start and then remembered with a sense of relief that she was no longer in the harem.

Instead she was now on The Himalaya, being carried away from all that was frightening in Turkey to an unknown and uncharted future that might be even more terrifying.

Nevertheless, she told herself in that strange state between waking and sleeping that for the moment she was safe.

Then she realised that she was not alone in the cabin and that Lord Castleford was lying on the floor on the pile of cushions that Jenkins had made him up a bed with.

It was, Yamina felt sure, quite comfortable and, while he looked at it somewhat disparagingly, she was certain it was more because he was determined to find fault than that he had any genuine grievance.

Now listening to the whir of the engines and feeling the soft swell of the sea, she thought how strange it was that divided only by the mosquito net that covered her bed she was in fact sleeping in the same room as a strange man who hated her as she hated him.

Then she asked herself if this was really true.

When Lord Castleford had come from the bathroom after changing for dinner, she thought it would be hard to find a man who looked more elegant and more distinguished than he did in his evening clothes.

Jenkins had laid the table and the sea being calm, he had set a candelabra in the centre of it containing three candles.