Sweet Enchantress Read online

  “Yes, of course,” Zaria answered. “And I expect you’ll enjoy it.”

  “That’s just the point, I shan’t!” Miss Brown said.

  Zaria looked at her in surprise.

  “I am afraid I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what I’ve come along to tell you. When they telephoned me just before lunch, I wasn’t certain, you see, so I said all right I’d come and see you, because I still thought I was going. And then at lunch – well, to put it bluntly, my boyfriend popped the question. I’ve accepted him and we’re going to be married at the end of the week.”

  Zaria began to see daylight.

  “You mean that you are not going on the yacht with Mr. Virdon after all?”

  Doris Brown shook her head decidedly.

  “No, as a matter of fact I’m going up to Yorkshire tonight to meet my future in-laws. I’m awfully sorry and all that sort of thing.”

  “I’m afraid they will be very disappointed,” Zaria said. “I understand they had great difficulty in finding someone like you.”

  “Oh, well, there’s just as good fish in the sea as ever came out,” Doris Brown said, standing up. “They’ll get someone else, you’ll see. Goodbye, Miss Mansford. I wish you all the luck in the world owning a yacht. If you like the sea, I should take the trip yourself.”

  She walked across the room, turning at the door to wave.

  For a moment Zaria stared after Doris Brown and then she sat down in a chair and picked up the big envelope that Mr. Patterson had given her.

  ‘I must ring his secretary,’ Zaria thought and remembered with embarrassment that she did not know the girl’s name.

  Then she noticed that the envelope was not sealed, but that the flap was folded in. She pulled it up and emptied out the contents onto the small table beside her.

  There was a new passport with Doris Brown’s name on it, a book of tickets – Victoria to Dover, Dover to Calais, Calais to Marseilles – a small wad of franc notes and two letters.

  One was addressed to Mr. Cornelius Virdon and the other was from Patterson, Dellhouse and Patterson to Miss Brown, obviously giving her full instructions for her journey. This was not sealed either and out of curiosity Zaria opened it.

  Miss Brown was to catch the seven o’clock train from Victoria and, when she arrived at Marseilles, to go to the Hotel Britannia where a room had been engaged for her until the yacht should arrive in harbour.

  Then she was to report to the Captain and hand the enclosed letter to Mr. Virdon should he be aboard.

  It was all very straightforward and business-like. It would be impossible, Zaria thought, for anyone to make a mistake as to what they were to do.

  And then an idea took hold of her, so that she could only stare blindly at the passport she held in her hand.

  Why should she not take Doris Brown’s place as secretary to Cornelius Virdon? She really did know something about archaeology. She could speak Arabic even if it was a little rusty.

  It was such a stupendous idea that for a moment it seemed to her to come and go in her head like waves that she could not capture to hold still so that she could examine them. Then gradually everything cleared. It would be so easy.

  All she had to do was to obey the instructions that had been given for Doris Brown.

  The ticket was here in her lap as well as the money and the letter of introduction. No need to explain who she was. No need to say, ‘I am the owner of the yacht.’

  No, of course it was mad, crazy. She could not possibly do it. And yet, why not? And, when it came to that, what else was there for her to do?

  Zaria looked round the hotel room. She had already had not a dislike but a fear of it, because it was so impersonal, so luxurious, so unlike anything she had experienced before.

  She had had her luncheon sent upstairs because she was too frightened to go downstairs to the restaurant. She did not know what to order.

  She had thought wildly of asking for bacon and eggs, but the waiter had persuaded her into having a small omelette followed by a lightly done steak. She had been too frightened of him to refuse, even though the prices on the menu had nearly made her faint with horror until she remembered that she could afford it.

  And now she remembered that she could afford money for other things – clothes, a dress like the one Doris Brown was wearing, perhaps even better good shoes, a hair-do!

  Then she began to shake. It was no use – she could not do it. She did not know how to begin, where to go or what to buy.

  She tried to remember when she had last bought a dress.

  Had it been in Inverness? If so, it had been many years ago. Mostly she tried to make her own things, knitting from wool that she had obtained by undoing an old pullover of her father’s.

  Once she had even managed to make herself a skirt out of an old tweed suit of his. He would not give her a penny to spend on herself. It was an obsession with him.

  Once, a year ago, she had tried to run away, determined somehow to get a job, to escape from the miseries and privations of that horrible, dark little house on the moors.

  Her father had caught her before she reached the main road and, dragging her back, had thrashed her within an inch of her life.

  “You’ll stay here and work for me!” he had shouted. “If you think you’re going to go gadding about, you’re very much mistaken. It’s work I want from you and work I’m going to get. Get on with those manuscripts.”

  She had never tried to get away again, not even when he had left home and she had been alone except for Sarah, the old woman who had worked for her father and mother when they were first married.

  She had felt at times that her head would burst and yet she had gone on, too exhausted even to rebel and too undernourished even to turn away from the blows that her father aimed at her.

  ‘What can I do?’ Zaria asked herself now.

  Somehow the decision was harder to make than any she had in her life before.

  She rose from the chair and went to stand at the mantelpiece, looking in the big mirror that stood over it.

  She stared at her reflection. At the lank untidy hair she cut herself, at the hideous National Health spectacles with their steel frames, which her father had made her get when she said that she could not see the faded writing in some of the manuscripts he had given her to decipher.

  She pulled them off. Her eyes were red-rimmed and the lines beneath them almost black against the ash grey whiteness of her skin.

  Slowly the tears came into Zaria’s eyes – slow, difficult tears because, despite all she had suffered, it was years since she had really cried.

  ‘I am hideous,’ she told herself, ‘hideous and friendless and utterly alone. Oh, I wish I was dead!’

  She turned from the mirror and threw herself down on the sofa, hiding her face in the cushion.

  She had a wild impulse to run away and to go back to Scotland. Back to old Sarah, to the house with its damp walls and ugly Victorian furniture, with its tense atmosphere which always made her feel that her father was still there or was just coming into the room or was going to find fault or was going to curse her.

  That at least was familiar, but this was much more terrifying.

  She gave a little moan and sat up. Something fell to the floor. She looked down. It was Doris Brown’s passport. It had fallen open and she could see the photograph.

  She could not help staring at it. It was indecisive, just a face that might have been of any girl. Two eyes, a nose and a mouth, nondescript hair that might in real life have been any colour, but which was curled over her ears and swept back in the latest fashion above the forehead.

  “I could look like that,” Zaria whispered.

  She knew then that the die was cast. She would do it. She would take Doris Brown’s place simply and solely because if she did not there was nothing for her to do but to stay here in this frightening unknown hotel and wait for something to happen.

  She could not bear it. She could not bear the
terror of being alone and of having nothing to do.

  ‘I will go! I will go!’

  Zaria whispered the words to herself and then, with a resolution that she was far from feeling, she rang the bell.

  Even when she had done it, she sat trembling, her whole body tense and stiff as she waited.

  At last a chambermaid came, a rather smart, perky young woman. She looked as if she might resent being fetched in the middle of the afternoon.

  “You rang, madam?”

  “Please,” Zaria said, “I want you to help me.”

  “Yes, madam. What can I do?”

  “It’s – it’s this,” Zaria said breathlessly. “I have to go – abroad tonight. I have just come from Scotland without – any clothes. I need to have a coat and skirt, a blouse, some stockings and some shoes. I cannot – go without them. And, please I would like – my hair done and I need some make-up.”

  The chambermaid looked at her contemptuously.

  “Madam doesn’t understand, it’s Saturday,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, I know all the shops are shut. But could I not buy them from somebody else? Perhaps you have a suit you could sell me?”

  The chambermaid stared at her as if she had taken leave of her senses.

  “Please,” Zaria pleaded. “Please, it’s desperately important to me.”

  It was woman calling to woman on the one subject that inevitably binds the female race, whatever their stratum of life, whatever their creed, colour or nationality – clothes.

  “Well, madam, I’ll see what I can do,” the chambermaid said doubtfully.

  *

  Zaria stood at the window of the Hotel Britannia and watched the traffic move up and down the sunlit street below.

  From there Marseilles looked like an anthill of industry and accentuated her loneliness and sense of isolation.

  She had lain awake all night in the comfortable sleeper, wondering whether she was crazy to do what she was doing, wondering whether she would be wiser to return to London, wondering whether she should write to Mr. Patterson and tell him that she had taken Doris Brown’s place.

  And at the end she had come to no decision at all.

  She had done precisely nothing. She had just arrived in Marseilles and finding out that the hotel was not far from the Station, had walked there carrying her suitcase in her hand.

  Now she turned from the window and, as she did so, saw her own reflection in the several mirrors that ornamented the room.

  It was hard to believe it was herself. The suit that the chambermaids had found for her had certainly not been cut by a master tailor, but it was infinitely smarter and more becoming than the terrible old tweed coat and skirt that she had worn for years.

  The hair-do that one of the off-duty chambermaids had given her made her face seem much less drawn and haggard.

  “You are Doris Brown,” she said to her reflection in the mirror. Then she laughed because she felt how insulted the real Miss Doris Brown would have been if she could have seen her.

  She had also taken off her glasses and thrown them away. She could really see perfectly well without them and she told herself that, if the manuscripts that Mr. Virdon gave her were too difficult to read, she would buy some decent ones with tortoiseshell rims.

  Somehow those ugly steel framed ones would always remind her of her father and his bullying.

  “Tired! You can’t be tired! Come on, I want that transcription before tomorrow night. God knows why I’m cursed with a halfwit for a daughter. It’s perfectly simple. It only requires a little concentration.”

  “But I’m tired, Father. I have been working late every night this week. I have such a headache.”

  “You lazy little devil!” he had stormed. “What do you think you’re for except to do what I tell you? You get that manuscript finished by tomorrow night or I’ll break every bone in your body.”

  Zaria sometimes wondered if a dog would survive the treatment she herself had received. But there had been nothing she could do about it.

  But when finally her father died she had still not been able to get away. There was no money and there seemed to be no world outside that empty desolate little house. What was more important, her will had gone. She was too frightened to escape.

  Yet now she had done so.

  Now she was free – at least for the moment. She was here in Marseilles and there was no one to stop her going anywhere she wanted to go.

  With a sudden impulse of revolt she opened her bag, took out her lipstick and slashed it vividly onto her lips. Red for defiance, red for energy, red for animation and vitality and all the things that she had never had the courage to possess!

  Then, as she did so, the door suddenly opened. She had not heard anyone knock and she turned in surprise, remembering almost guiltily that the key had been left outside the door.

  With a sense of shock that was almost like a blow she saw a man come into the room.

  He entered swiftly and almost silently so that he was there before she had time to realise what was happening. The door closed behind him and he stood with his back against it.

  “What do you want?”

  Zaria spoke in English, forgetting, in her astonishment, where she was.

  He answered in the same language.

  “You are Miss Doris Brown?”

  “Y-yes,” Zaria said hesitantly.

  “Good! I thought I had come to the right room.”

  He spoke a little breathlessly as if he had been hurrying and now she saw that he carried a suitcase in his hand and a mackintosh over his arm. He had very dark hair against a tanned skin and he wore sunglasses.

  There was something about his accent, something that for the moment she could not place.

  Zaria rose to her feet.

  “I-I don’t understand. What do you want?” she asked. “Why did you not knock?”

  “There wasn’t time.”

  Again she had that impression that he was breathless. Perhaps he had run down the corridor or up the stairs. But why?

  She looked at helplessly, not knowing how to cope with this situation.

  Then, as if he sensed her uncertainty, he said in a quieter tone,

  “Please don’t be frightened. I heard that you were here and I wanted to see you.”

  “Heard it? But who from?” Zaria asked.

  “That doesn’t matter,” he replied. “What is important is that I need your help.”

  She realised now what was peculiar about his accent.

  He was an American. There was only a slight drawl but, nevertheless, an unmistakable one. He was a big man, broad-shouldered, and yet he could move quickly and with an agility that spoke of an athletic body.

  “May I sit down?”

  “Yes, I suppose so – I-I don’t know. Ought you to come – bursting into my room like this?”

  “Please, Miss Brown. I can explain everything if only you’ll listen to me.”

  He spoke quietly, then he turned swiftly. He opened the door, peeped into the corridor and shut the door again.

  “I just want to make quite certain that we are not overheard,” he said.

  He crossed the room and sat down in an armchair by the window.

  As he lowered himself, she noticed that he winced slightly as if in pain, and now she saw that there was a piece of plaster on his ear and a strange discoloured bruise over his left temple. He saw her glance and put his hands up to his forehead as if to hide the bruise.

  “I had a motor accident, he said, “and I am a bit battered as a result.”

  “I see, Zaria said.

  Because there seemed nothing else to do, she seated herself on the stool in front of the dressing table, turning so that she faced the stranger.

  “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “No, no, of course not.”

  “You are quite sure? I hate smoke in bedrooms, but I don’t think you will be sleeping here tonight. The yacht is in the harbour.”

  “Oh! They
have not let me know.”

  “It only arrived a short time ago. You will be hearing shortly and then you will go aboard.”

  “How do you know all this,” Zaria enquired.

  “A friend of yours told me that you were coming,” the American replied. “He asked me to look out for you.”

  Zaria digested this for a moment and then she said, because it seemed to be expected of her,

  “Wh-what is his name?”

  “I don’t believe you’d remember him,” the American replied. “But you met him in London and he learnt from some friends that you were going on this trip. He told me about it and that is why I am going to throw myself on your mercy.”

  “What do you want me to do?” Zaria enquired.

  “Take me with you,” was the answer.

  For a moment she thought that she could not have heard aright. She just stared at him – a strange man in dark glasses that somehow gave him an impersonality and made him seem completely unreal.

  “I-I don’t understand,” she said at length.

  “Listen, Miss Brown.” He bent forward in his chair, clasping his hands together. “It is imperative, absolutely imperative for me to get to Algiers. My mother is ill. I have to go there to see her.”

  “But there must be ships?”

  “I haven’t got any money.”

  “Oh!”

  This, to Zaria, was a perfectly reasonable explanation and yet, she thought quickly, he looks quite prosperous.

  “I am sorry,” she said gently. “I know what it is to be poor. But I don’t see that I can do anything.”

  “But you can, you must,” he replied. “You are a most important person on this voyage. My friend told me that. Mr. Virdon insisted on having a secretary who had a knowledge of archaeology and who could also speak Arabic. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that is true.”

  “Well, then. All you have to do is to say that you are bringing an assistant with you, that you realised that you couldn’t cope alone with all the work that was likely to be the result of this expedition.”

  “What would Mr. Virdon say? He would not believe me.”

  “He will believe you, I’m sure he will. He has to believe you. You’ve got to be convincing about it.”