Crossed Bones (39 page)

The lagoon, however, was shallow, and they waded across without further mishap. On the other side it gave way to marsh and reed beds, where a chorus of outraged frogs and a pair of disturbed plovers broke the night silence with a lively racket. Now the Londoner was apoplectic. ‘That’s right,’ he growled, ‘tell everyone we’re here. Christ’s blood, I hate these natural places! Fill ’em up with sand and brick ’em over, I say. What use is God’s good land if a man can’t even walk upon it without filling his damn boots and having a legion of foul, inedible beasts complain of his presence?’

Rob had spent much of his childhood exploring the reed beds and marshes just outside Market-Jew. He knew there were worse environments – the back alleys of Westminster, for one. He availed himself of a stave of driftwood and, prodding ahead with this makeshift staff, led them through the marsh on to ground that alternated between stinking algae-filled pools with spongy stands of vegetation and reed thickets. Some while later a small, sharp pain announced itself in his calf; minutes later another on the back of his thigh. He knew at once their cause: leeches. He thought longingly of the flint he had so carefully stowed in his pack. They would have to be burned off, but not here in the open. After that with every step he imagined a plague of them fastening their little jaws in his flesh.

For an hour or more they toiled through this hellish landscape, and then stomped across a dreary salt flat, which finally gave way to rock and scrub and a steep incline just as the first rays of dawn lanced red as a burst boil over the sea.

‘God’s bollocks!’ Marshall swore. ‘We’d better be in the shelter of those trees before sun-up or we’re sitting ducks. Marmora Forest is swarming with outcasts and escaped slaves who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you.’

Uphill they staggered, thighs and calves protesting at this rough treatment after weeks of doing very little on the rolling sea. Rob could feel how his muscles had wasted from lack of nutriment and use in the few short weeks of the passage. Marshall began to pull away from him, and so Rob shut his mind to his pain, to the pack heavy on his back and the unaccustomed sword banging the backs of his legs, and struggled after him, for if he lost Marshall every chance of life – let alone success – was gone. Soon he found a child’s verse going round and round in his head, until his feet were pounding the rocks and scrub to its rhythms:

Its grim rhymes drove him up the rise. It was only much later, sitting with his back to a tree as Marshall scanned the oil-cloth paper of his rudimentary map, after he had removed his leeches (seven: for luck) and his boots (emptied of water, weed and one crushed frog), that he realized whence the verse had come: a sampler Cat had sewn as a girl, revelling in its macabre tone. It now hung in the dark corridor outside her door in the servants’ quarters at Kenegie. How many times had he stood there, gazing blindly at its childish stitching, as he gathered his thoughts before knocking at that door? The scene was so painfully clear in his head that he almost wept.

‘Might I ask what our business is with these people?’ he asked Marshall at last.

‘No,’ the other said shortly. ‘The details of that matter lie between the company and our trading partners, and have nothing to do with you.’

‘Am I not now a part of that company, given that my task is to guard you and the papers you carry?’

‘You are neither one thing nor the other, lad. Quite why John thought I needed a lumpen oaf as a bodyguard, I cannot for the life of me imagine. As far as I am concerned, you are here on sufferance, and if you keep on asking me damnfool questions, I will skewer you myself and save the brigands the trouble.’

Rob sat there, watching his boots steam as the sun hit them. At last he could bear it no longer. ‘Then perhaps I might ask just one more question: how will we leave Salé, if we ever arrive in one piece?’

Marshall sighed. ‘In five days the
Rose
will be off Salé awaiting my sign. Once they receive it they’ll sail in as close as they may to take us off.’

And Rob had to be satisfied with this very little piece of information. At last Marshall folded the map away in his sack and told him to get his boots on.

‘We’ll have to move quietly through this wretched forest. No talking: and watch your feet. There are trips and holes and spikes and all manner of traps for the unwary. Unsavoury folk inhabit this region. Some live here, some take refuge here, and some, like us, are just passing through. But they all have a reason for hiding themselves, and that reason generally has a criminal root: there’s no law in the forest, except the law of survival.’

‘It seems to me’, Rob said, taking this in, ‘that we’d still have been better off sailing into the port under full sail and with our guns at the ready, factions or no factions.’

‘You are an extremely naive young man, Robert Bolitho. I will spell it out for you. We could not be seen to enter the pirates’ nest for a variety of reasons, but the most important reason of all is that if anyone carries word back to England of our dealings – and there are many in that place who come and go as they please and have a host of connections all across Europe – we are all likely to hang. Is that reason enough for you?’

Rob stared at him. ‘My God,’ he said at last. ‘What have I stepped into here?’

‘As I have said before, you should have left well alone and stayed at home.’

‘Well, I am here now and damned,’ Rob said grimly.

‘I wonder who he wrote this for,’ I said at last, folding the paper and putting it aside among the debris of our breakfast things. We were sitting out on the roof terrace at a rickety old table Idriss had set up there, a huge faded parasol stuck into a concrete block keeping the worst of the mid-morning rays off my pale English skin.

‘It’s not a journal?’

‘It looks more like part of a letter. See how the photocopy shows the ragged edges all the way around? There’s no sign of a gutter, or any deformation of the words as there would be if Michael had photocopied a book. Strange. It’s on a different sort of paper to the other one too, the letter to Sir Arthur Harris, and the writing looks different, smaller and neater.’

‘Maybe he wrote the letter to his employer in a hurry.’

‘Or as a young man…’ I bit my lip. ‘So you think Robert Bolitho really came all the way to Morocco to save Catherine from slavery?’

‘It was certainly his intention: and he must have succeeded, or the book would never have made it back to England.’

I sighed. ‘It’s a very romantic story. Perhaps it was a fairytale, after all.’

Idriss made a face. ‘If he succeeded, though, I do not know why he thinks he is damned. Perhaps he married her, and she turned out to be a bad wife who made him unhappy. Perhaps she was unfaithful, or cruel, or ran away. There is more to the story than we yet know.’

‘Mmm,’ I replied non-committally, unwilling to confront the implications of this.

Catherine’s journal had come to a sudden end in a rather unsatisfactory manner amid a welter of domestic detail. I read that
everie daie the women of the kasbah come to the howse to sitte with mee & sew
.
Wee worke in silkes of everie color known to Man
.
I have never seene such glorious hues except in the flowers of Lady Harrys garden at Kenegy
. She explained how
Hasna has taut mee the makyng of the dish they calle the decorated face
, whatever that might be. I read of a robe she had sewn; how she had prepared her own kohl from a substance bought in the souk, which she spelled ‘sook’; how she was learning a few words of their language. All this was fascinating information in terms of a historical document; but to me, I am ashamed to admit, it was deeply frustrating. She sounded, I thought, picking through this minutiae peppered with words I did not recognize, rather to be enjoying her time as a Salé slave, if that was indeed what she was: for teaching embroidery in a rather grand-sounding house with no more onerous duties to perform certainly did not fit my picture of the life I would have foreseen for a woman in her situation. Most annoying of all, it did not relate what had happened when Rob miraculously appeared to whisk her back to Cornwall.

‘It seems to me,’ Idriss pressed, ‘that your Michael holds the other part of this puzzle.’

It seemed that way to me too, and the idea made me feel deeply uncomfortable. The photocopies had been bait: he wanted the book and he was using Rob’s letters to lure me to him. I did not want to give him the book, but I did desperately want to know the other side to the story. Even so, I was not yet prepared to face Michael.

Instead, I asked, ‘What time do we meet your friend Khaled?’

‘He will meet us at two at a café near the station.’

I looked at my watch. It was just coming up to eleven thirty. ‘And what shall we do till then?’

‘Let me show you the souks Catherine would have visited, and where I grew up.’

∗

I put on the dark-blue djellaba he had brought me the evening before over my jeans; but the white headscarf foxed me completely: it simply couldn’t contain my abundance of hair. I tried to wear it down my back inside the robe, but whatever I did with my hair, the cloth kept slipping off my head. Eventually I ended up with it screwed up into a knot, and with my hair all over the place.

‘Damn!’ I grumbled furiously, and turned suddenly to find a stranger in a grey robe and a blue turban leaning up against the door jamb, watching me silently. It took me a good three seconds to realize that this exotic creature was in fact Idriss.

‘Here,’ he said, taking the scarf from me. ‘Let me. With several sisters I have had some practice.’

His fingers brushed my neck, and I couldn’t tell whether or not it was accidental; then the soft cotton followed, and moments later the fabric had been wound neatly around my head, and I was wearing the veil.

Thus disguised, we went out into the world.

The medina was bustling with traffic: a bizarre mix of human, animal and machine. Just as you thought you had entered a pedestrianized area, a man on a scooter would come roaring around the corner, hand pressed exigently to his horn, and everyone would flatten themselves against the narrow walls. Quite how the donkeys coped with such indignities, I had no idea, but they seemed philosophical about it, standing patiently in their traces or tethered to their posts while ever greater burdens were added to their carts or backs.

The Moroccans in the souk did not appear to share this pacific philosophy. We passed one woman screeching in fury at a man who had just cut a length of pale-blue cotton from a bolt of fabric. It looked as if she might set about him with the bale, for her hands were flailing everywhere, and he was ducking away from her as if from a physical assault. Idriss caught me staring. ‘A disagreement about the price,’ he chuckled. ‘A classic ploy, to complain about it only when the cloth has been cut and then blame the merchant. My aunt used to do it all the time. Then she’d walk off in a fury, leaving the poor man with his head in his hands, only to return a few minutes later and graciously offer him half the price for it.’

‘And he’d let her take it?’ I was appalled.

‘Of course: he’d already quoted her twice the price he expected to get for it, so they parted satisfied.’

I shook my head. It seemed a very stressful way of doing business, yet it summed up something about the national character: Morocco appeared to be all about social interaction, while Britain was largely about avoiding it. No one was self-conscious about showing their feelings here. I saw men kissing one another in greeting and walking together hand in hand. ‘They are good friends,’ Idriss explained, ‘and not in the euphemistic way Europeans use that phrase. Here, friendship is to be prized, and when people ask how you are they really want to know, not just hear a stock phrase which keeps them at bay.’

I smiled. ‘So, how are you today, Idriss el-Kharkouri?’

He stopped still there in the street and turned to look at me. ‘Before you ask me a question like that, Julia Lovat, you had better be sure you want to hear the answer.’

Colour flooded my cheeks. I could not help myself: I looked away.

For a while after that, we walked in near silence through the medina, passing stall after stall of produce and kitchen goods, patisseries and cafés. We turned a corner and came upon an old man with his wares spread out on a black sheet in front of him. A crowd of men had gathered to listen to his patter, their faces rapt. I craned for a better view, and one of the men turned, saw me and glared. Several of his companions followed suit, until Idriss drew me away.

‘Why did they stare at me like that? They seemed so hostile.’

‘They didn’t want a woman penetrating their male mysteries.’

‘What was he selling?’ I demanded angrily. ‘I want to know.’

‘Impotency cures, aphrodisiacs, substances for prolonging… the experience.’ He laughed. ‘
La merde de la baleine
.’

‘What?’

‘Whale shit. Whales are reputed to have enormous… parts. It’s sympathetic magic.’

‘But how on
earth
would you gather whale shit… oh, I see. He’s a con artist.’

‘It’s probably some harmless clay. Anyway, he seemed to be doing a good trade. Good luck to him.
Al-hamdulillah
.’

‘Out in the open, in public, too. I thought sex was a taboo subject.’

‘You do have some odd ideas. The Qur’an says it is important for a man to satisfy his wife.’

‘It does? What an excellent religion.’

After that, we walked in greater ease, with Idriss pointing out unusual items to me: silver hands of Fatima to ward off the evil eye, rose-water sprinklers, musk and ambergris. At one stall he bought me a small dark-blue lump of rock with an odd metallic sheen to it which the old woman wrapped carefully in a piece of torn newspaper. ‘It’s kohl,’ he explained. ‘The same as Catherine would have bought here. My sister can show you how to use it.’