Palace of the Pomegranate: The noble yet savage palm tree

And now the thrilling finale! Sadly, this is (I feel) not one of Winspear’s best romances and it actually ends quite abruptly.  But let’s go back to where we left off…

Grace is pointing a gun at Kharim, threatening to shoot him unless he gives her an escort out of the desert and back to Reza Shahr. “She would be unafraid to use it, for she was Grace Tillerton Wilde, and the derring-do and ruthless will of Jonas were in the marrow of her shapely bones” (112).  The derring-do of a toffee baron, that is.

Kharim tries to talk her out of it, but ultimately he takes her by surprise and disarms her. Grace tries to run away, but he catches her. He puts her to bed and then she reveals that she was never 'intimate', shall we say, with her husband. Once Kharim hears this, he refers to her as “now mon enfant rather than ma belle” (120). As I suggested previously, Grace’s virginity marks her as not a ‘woman’, despite her age. Now she’s even been downgraded from attractive male youth to ‘my child’. 

After this, nothing much seems to change. Grace and Kharim argue. Kharim gives her a beautiful brooch. Kharim compares Grace to a thoroughbred. Grace thinks about the cruel, cruel desert. And she learns that they’re on their way to Kharim’s palace: the titular Palace of the Pomegranate. She’s also taken to calling Kharim ‘seigneur’ (which harkens back to The Sheik’s monseigneur). So now she calls him seigneur and he calls her mon enfant. 

One day, when they are almost at the palace, Grace and Kharim are riding and arguing and she has finally had enough. She whips her horse into running into the desert. But her escape attempt is not successful. Very strikingly, Winspear writes:

“Her confidence billowed like her windswept cloak…and then came sudden and shocking deflation as Beauty [her horse], in his wild free motion, stumbled upon one of the sandstone rocks half buried in the sand” (143). 

Beauty breaks his leg and Grace has to simply wait there until Kharim finds her. As in The Sheik, it is the horse that suffers, as Kharim has to shoot it. I wonder if there’s something to the fact that in both novels horses are compared to women and then bear the brunt of women’s efforts to escape patriarchal power. Psychoanalytic speculation welcome!

And then this incident is capped with Grace riding back to camp in Kharim’s arms “like a child” (150).

At last the tribe has reached their encampment outside of Kharim’s palace.  This is the occasion of Shalena’s wedding to Achmed. Grace dresses up and thinks that she looks “almost as if she had stepped out of the canvas of an Ingres painting” (155) – another reference to past representations of the Orient. Kharim, she thinks, is “as noble and savagely graceful as the tall palm trees” (159). I’m not sure I think of palm trees as ‘savage’, but that could just be me.

Anyway, the wedding goes well, Shalena is very excited and Achmed is happy. When Achmed carries her out of the tent, “Grace saw Shalena suddenly tighten her arms about Achmed’s neck. Love for him had overcome her moment of terror, as love was meant to do” (167). Grace begins to wonder what her own feelings about Kharim are, exactly. And just as Grace is wondering, she feels like Kharim is planning to get rid of her. He has said that he will take her back to Reza Shahr after all. Good old push and pull! 

The palace is beautiful, as we might have expected.  Sheik’s palaces in sheik romances are never ill-kept, moldering heaps.  Grace thinks that “she had surely found Sheba’s garden at last, only to know that one day soon she would be turned out of it” (174). She believes that Kharim could never love a woman “not of his own heritage” (174), although he’s never said anything of the kind. 

But then she has a conversation with a second Eastern woman with a speaking part! This is an older woman, Hathaya, who is Kharim’s housekeeper. She reveals that Kharim’s mother was one lady Rachel. 

Vindicated! My ability to predict plots is pretty good, if I do say so myself. Kharim’s mother is indeed Rachel Leah Bourne, the well-known travel writer, whose books inspired Grace to travel into the desert . 

Rachel and Kharim’s father had met and married, but he died in a military skirmish while she was pregnant. She returned to the Palace and raised Kharim under the guardianship of his grandfather, the old khan. Hathaya speculates that because of his mother’s Englishness, “it is inevitable that [Kharim] will have eyes for an English woman” (183).

This gives Grace hope. She dresses for dinner in a Persian-style outfit: trousers and shift and veil. And Kharim comes to dinner dressed in a European dress-suit. It’s like Grease, when Sandy and Danny try to fit in with what they think the other wants by dressing in tight tight pants and a cardigan, respectively! Sadly, no singing follows.

Instead, they go to the roof. They stand there and stare into each other’s eyes and without anyone saying anything, everything is apparently resolved: “like a star bursting into stunning silver pieces the truth struck at them” (190). They kiss and Grace thinks that “he had been born of an English mother, but in his heart and his bones he was a Persian, of a different creed and culture…yet Grace knew as he held her that they were one heart, one soul, mingling forever in their two bodies” (190). The End.

This was an interesting book, if emotion-wise a bit all over the place. It didn’t feel like a book set in the 1970s (despite the cover’s '70s aesthetic) – it really felt like it could have been set at the same time as Hull’s The Sheik. The hero does turn out to be ‘actually’ Persian, while still having the ‘not really’ of an English mother. I’m looking forward to seeing how the next book deals with this...

Next up: a 1920s magazine post! I feel like I haven’t done one in forever!