A gasp escaped Diana—she could not help it. ‘Your Highness!’ she heard herself exclaim, with open astonishment and incredulity in her voice.
‘My dear Mrs Tramontes!’
Princess Fatima greeted Diana warmly. Then she turned to another woman, who had now emerged from the huge dark-windowed car, saying something to her in rapid Arabic. The other woman—chaperon, maid, lady-in-waiting? Diana wondered wildly—glided up to the front door, pressed it open, and then stood aside to admit the Princess.
Helplessly Diana followed suit, wondering what the bodyguards—as she now realised these men must be—would do. Her attention was all on the Princess, who was now addressing her again.
‘I hope you will not mind my unexpected arrival, my dear Mrs Tramontes,’ Princess Fatima was saying, ‘but I could not resist paying you an afternoon call!’
Diana gathered her manners. Seeing the Princess again was overwhelming—releasing a storm of memories and emotions. With an effort she made herself say what had to be said, while inside her head everything seemed to be falling into a million pieces.
‘I’m honoured and delighted, Your Highness,’ she said mechanically, forcing a welcoming smile to her lips. Then she shook her head. ‘But, alas, I am quite unprepared—you will find my hospitality very poor.’
The Princess waved an airy hand, dismissing her apology. ‘The fault is mine for not giving you notice,’ she said.
She was looking around, gazing up at the marble staircase, the walls lined with paintings, the cavernous hall fireplace.
‘Your house is as beautiful as you told me it was,’ she said, her voice warm. ‘I am eager to see it all.’
‘Of course, Your Highness,’ Diana assented faintly.
‘But first, would it be too much to hope that I might partake of afternoon tea with you?’
Immediately calling on all her training to behave impeccably, whatever tumult was inside her, Diana assured her it would not be too much to hope at all, and ushered the Princess into the drawing room. Hudson was hovering in the doorway and Diana instructed that tea must to be served by Mrs Hudson, and, please, she was to bake fresh scones.
Back in the drawing room, Princess Fatima was settling down on a sofa. The other woman was standing by the windows looking out, almost as if on guard.
The Princess turned to Diana. ‘How very good it is to be here,’ she said warmly. ‘Please do be seated,’ she invited.
Diana sat down on the sofa opposite, her limbs nerveless, and Princess Fatima launched into an enthusiastic panegyric of the charms of Greymont, then graciously accepted the arrival of Mrs Hudson with the tea tray.
‘Ah, scones. Delicious!’ she exclaimed enthusiastically, and Diana murmured her thanks to the housekeeper for having baked them in record time.
The Princess ate as enthusiastically as she praised, chattering all the while—to Diana’s abject relief, for she felt utterly unequal to conversing. She told Diana about the progress being made on the English country house that her brother the Sheikh had bought for her, and expressed absolute delight in the gift Diana had made to her of a historic costume—a mid-eighteenth-century heavily embroidered silk gown with wide panniers—that she planned to display in her private sitting room.
As she expressed her delight shadows fleeted across the polite expression on Diana’s face. Memory as vivid as poison stung through her, of she and Nikos discussing what gift she should make the Princess as they returned from the royal palace.
Pain twisted inside her. It was hard, brutally hard to see the Princess again, to be reminded with bitter acid in her veins of the wedding gift she and Nikos had been given. The gift of the Sheikh’s desert love-nest.
More memory seared inside her—unbearable yet indelible.
Had the Princess caught that fleeting shadow? All Diana knew was that as they finished their repast the Princess gave a brief instruction to the veiled woman—servant, lady-in-waiting, chaperone, female bodyguard?—and the woman bowed and left the room.
Only then did the Princess turn to Diana and, in a voice quite different from her gay chatter, asked, ‘My dear, what is wrong?’
Diana tensed. ‘Wrong, Your Highness?’ She tried to make her voice equable, as it had been during their social chit-chat just now.
But Princess Fatima held up an imperious hand, her rings and bracelets flashing in the afternoon sunlight. ‘There is a sadness in your face that should not be there. It was not there when we first met. What has put it there?’
Her dark eyes held Diana’s grey ones, would not let them go.
‘Tell me,’ she said. It was half an invitation—half a command. ‘I insist.’
And Diana, to her horror and mortification, burst into tears.
* * *
Nikos’s expression closed like a stone as he stared down at the gilt-edged card in his hand, read the name on it.