Rapture of the Desert: Half Russian prince, half man of the desert

I’m back with a fabulous new (that is, new to me) Violet Winspear novel, Rapture of the Desert, a Harlequin Romance from 1972.  Violet Winspear (who you may remember as the creator of the fabulous toffee baron heiress ) does not disappoint in this one.  

It’s interesting that the two covers (linked from Fictiondb because my picture uploading is not working right now) are both desert-y, but vary in their dress for the hero: djellabah versus suit. But nothing that says Russian to me…

Our heroine, Chrys Devrel (short for Chrysanthemum), is a young ballet dancer who has recently danced in Russia at the Bolshoi Theatre (this will become relevant soon). She is passionate and single-minded about dance. Unfortunately, she’s also very unlucky. Chrys fell down some steps in London (my perpetual fear about any metro stairs), seriously injuring herself. She’s recovering, but she’s been told that she must not dance for the next year if she wants a full recovery.

Chrys is not very enthusiastic about this, given that a year away from dance could permanently stall her career. Her doctor gives her some advice that would annoy me if given to me by my doctor and not, say, my mother: “You have, perhaps, never tried to love anything else because to dance was all-sufficing.  Now you have to face an alternative. Now you have time and leisure…” (6). Chrys counters with the fact that her operation has taken most of her savings, so in fact she will not have leisure, she will have to work.

Anyway, Chrys has a sister, Dove (their parents were very poetic with their name choices), who is the complete opposite of her. Dove “took life as it came and had never bothered about a career.  Dove had wanted only to marry” and she’s about to get her wish, as she’s engaged to a young executive (7).  

 

Dove and Chrys have tea and cream cakes together at a hotel after Chrys’ appointment with the specialist and Chrys debriefs her about the situation. Dove, like pretty much all of the other characters in the book so far, predicts that one of these days Chrys is going to fall in love. Everyone is sure of this.  It’s like Chrys’s cool interest in nothing but dance is a challenge.  And of course, it’s a challenge to us the readers as well, since we know that as a heroine in a romance novel she cannot avoid falling in love, despite her statements to the contrary:

“I just love to dance, and can’t believe that any man could offer me the delight I feel when I spin across a stage and stretch my body to the very limits of its endurance.” (10)

But Dove does have some more helpful suggestions going beyond 'find a man', which is that her fiancee’s aunt needs a travelling companion. She’s travelling to ‘the East’ and her usual companion has bailed. The aunt, to be frank, sounds like more fun that Chrys: "she once wrote a thriller about the tomb of that Egyptian boy king – king of the moon, wasn’t he? It was a best-seller, I believe.  And she knows lots of interesting people, and helpd to get refugees out of India not so long ago” (11).

Chrys is reluctant, and uses the opportunity to make a vaguely homophobic remark about a choreographer, a “butch with bobbed hair,” who made a pass at her and who held a grudge against her after she was rejected.  She mentions this because she wouldn’t want to work for someone like that. Or what she calls a “fluffy type of employer” (12). Lesbians are usually completely absent from (straight) romance novels of this period, so this is an interesting reference, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

But now we meet our hero, sitting across the hotel lounge staring at them.  He is well-dressed, handsome, and intriguing: “the very perfection of the dark grey suit he wore made him seem illimitably foreign” (13), meaning, I suppose, that British men are not well-dressed? Dove knows who he is, as he was written up in the paper the day before, as someone who “only cares about horses, cards, and fine living” (13).  He is Prince Anton de Casenove and he has “Russian royal blood in him, and they say he attracts women like a magnet” (14).  Casanova!

A marathon staring session follows. Chrys doesn’t have a good impression of Prince Anton (she thinks he’s interested in harems and card-sharping), but she really is quite attracted to him, although she denies it. I think we can all see where this is going. Anyway, Chrys and Dove scurry out of the hotel and Chrys hopes to never see Prince Anton again.

But will she? I predict she will take that job with the aunt and she'll run into Prince Anton somehow due to that...