“I do not,” she answered, turning away.
A wave of colour suffused the swarthy face of Sakr-el-Bahr. A moment his eyes followed her as she moved away a step or two, then they turned their blazing light of anger upon Lionel. He strode silently across to him, his mien so menacing that Lionel shrank back in fresh terror.
Sakr-el-Bahr caught his brother’s wrist in a grip that was as that of a steel manacle. “We’ll have the truth this night if we have to tear it from you with red-hot pincers,” he said between his teeth.
He dragged him forward to the middle of the terrace and held him there before Rosamund, forcing him down upon his knees into a cowering attitude by the violence of that grip upon his wrist.
“Do you know aught of the ingenuity of Moorish torture?” he asked him. “You may have heard of the rack and the wheel and the thumbscrew at home. They are instruments of voluptuous delight compared with the contrivances of Barbary to loosen stubborn tongues.”
White and tense, her hands clenched, Rosamund seemed to stiffen before him.
“You coward! You cur! You craven renegade dog!” she branded him.
Oliver released his brother’s wrist and beat his hands together. Without heeding Rosamund he looked down upon Lionel, who cowered shuddering at his feet.
“What do you say to a match between your fingers? Or do you think a pair of bracelets of living fire would answer better, to begin with?”
A squat, sandy-bearded, turbaned fellow, rolling slightly in his gait, came—as had been prearranged—to answer the corsair’s summons.