Garment of Shadows (17 page)

The patient servant, having stopped me first from walking into the fountain and then from tumbling over a charcoal brazier, finally led me to one of the intricately painted doors off to one side.

It would originally have been a salon, but was now the library. The room was larger than it seemed from the courtyard, incorporating the corner space as well, and it was clearly a working room, not merely a collection of decorative leather spines among which the ladies took tea and the men their cognac and cigars.

For one thing, there was a much-hammered type-writing machine on a desk against the wall. For another, a gentleman’s gathering would have been considerably inconvenienced by the large wooden table that dominated the centre of the library. Lamps were spaced down the table’s surface; wide, shallow drawers slid out from its top; comfortable work chairs stretched down its sides.

The room was silent. It smelt of books and ink. I felt my muscles relax, as if the odour had the power to transport me to my faraway home. I turned my back on Youssef, lest he see my face, and thanked him. The fade of the splashing fountain was the only sound as he shut the door.

I made a circuit of the room, running my eyes over the shelves, sliding open a few of the drawers under the long table—the wider ones in the middle held maps; those on the ends held stationery, envelopes, notepads, writing implements.

Lyautey had lived here for a dozen years now, and appeared to have every book on Morocco ever published, from the report on a 1721 ransom expedition to Mequinez to a war-time Edith Wharton travelogue (of which there were eleven copies—explained by its dedication to the Resident General and his wife). I put one of those onto the table, then a volume on Old Morocco, and half a dozen others. I was leafing through an unbound box-file of Victorian photographs when the door startled me by rattling open.

The young man in the doorway looked as nonplussed as I—dark hair and eyes, but not Moroccan, his hair parted in the middle, a thin moustache that might have been pencilled onto his upper lip. He was dressed in a handsome suit of Italian wool. His eyes darted into the room, pausing on the table, before returning to me.

His French was impeccably Parisian. “Pardon, Monsieur. I did not realise anyone was here.”

“I was merely looking for some reading material,” I told him.

His gaze sharpened, rising from my men’s clothing to the sticking plaster on my scalp. “You are perhaps
Madame
Russell?”

“More or less,” I said, which rather confused him.

He crossed the room with his hand out. “François Dulac, at your service. I am Mme Lyautey’s secretary.”

His grip was light but pleasantly dry, and held not a hint of Gaulish flirtation.

“Good morning, M. Dulac. I have been ordered to pass a quiet day, so I thought I’d read up on the history of this country.”

“Very good idea. Ah, I see you have chosen Madame Wharton’s book. And Monsieur Andrews’. Perhaps you might be interested in this? And perhaps M. O’Connor?”

“Yes, thank you. You seem to have read a fair number of these.”

“It only seemed sensible, when I came here, to see what others had to say about the country.”

“How long have you been here?”

“I came with Mme Lyautey a year or so after the Maréchal arrived. He did not care to bring her at the beginning, of course, when the country was in turmoil.”

“Of course.”

“Her being here presents more of a … balanced face than that of a military leader alone.”

“A good idea.”

“What do you think of this one?” He held out a book for me.

As I paged through it, I asked him, “What are your responsibilities here? That is to say, does Mme Lyautey perform official functions? I haven’t met her.”

“She is in Casablanca at present, visiting friends. I assist in her appointments and correspondence, much of which might be termed ‘official.’ And of course, I make myself available to the Maréchal.”

“Yes, these look fine to begin with. And might I borrow a map?”

“A map?”

“Of Morocco.”

“But of course, Madame; the maps are in this drawer. However, the Maréchal makes use of them with some regularity, so it is requested that you not remove them from the room.”

The idea of my absconding with the cartography seemed to make him uncomfortable, so I assured him I was quite happy to leave them in place, which was especially true since so many of them were awkward sizes. Few of the maps were commercially printed, and those that were had been corrected by hand. Others were entirely hand-drawn, showing patches of close cartographic detail set against large areas of vagueness. South of Fez and to the coastline, details were good, but to the north, beyond the Werghal River, it might as well have been labelled
Here be monsters
.

“Mapping the country is a work in progress, I see.”

“Indeed, Madame.”

“Well, the books should keep me occupied.”

He insisted on helping me, exchanging a greeting with a Moroccan as we crossed the tiled courtyard, following me up the guesthouse stairway with the books in his arms, carrying on the kind of light and charming conversation that is part of the personal secretary’s profession. Were he a touch more handsome, I might have speculated about his services to Mme Lyautey, but by the time we reached my room, I had dismissed from my mind the possibility of a French liaison.

Dulac placed the books on the table, arranged some pieces of charcoal in the brazier, and said he would send Youssef up with tea. This time, I accepted.

I opened the Wharton book. Around me, I was dimly aware of activity, and after a bit I heard the dull clang of a small European-style church-bell. I stopped reading to listen. After a few minutes, the sounds of Dar Mnehbi slowed. Sunday morning: Somewhere on the grounds was a chapel.

My own reading was less spiritually refreshing. Considerably less. Every chapter seemed a reminder that I was a Jew and a woman in a land firmly rooted in Mediaeval Islam. The pirates of Salé and that town’s ongoing simmering xenophobia. The sacking of Fez’s Jewish quarter, twelve years before. A dance of fanatical self-mutilation in the nearby town of Moulay Idriss. The jaw-dropping brutality with which a pretender to the throne was dispatched—and not in some distant and barbaric age, but here in Fez, a mere fifteen years before. The palaces of Mequinez, an African Versailles built by Sultan Moulay Ismaïl, a contemporary of Louis XIV and the very image of what happens when a mad ruler has no checks on his power and no end to his resources. Ismaïl solidified the hand of the Alaouite dynasty—still in power, two and a half centuries later—with a Black Guard of some 150,000 Africans, brought in from the other side of the Sahara. Ismaïl drove the English from Tangiers, forced peace onto the land, fathered hundreds of children, and built a vast and magnificent city, using tens of thousands of slaves captured by the far-ranging Salé Rovers, many of them Christians whose families were too poor for ransom. The slaves—forty thousand? sixty thousand?—were kept in a vast underground prison beneath Mequinez called
Habs Qara
, whence they were brought out to work on the mad sultan’s projects. When a man died, he was simply walled up by his fellows, and the building continued—only to have much of Mequinez flattened in the massive earthquake of 1755. After that, the Alaouite dynasty shifted its centre to Fez. To a palace one mile from where I sat.

The reading was not conducive to the rest Holmes had assigned. I’m sure it did my blood pressure no good.

In the end, I carried the books back down to the library and searched for something less troubling. I hesitated at the title of the latest volume by M. Proust—
Le Prisonnière
—but decided that the coincidence was unlikely to extend to its subject matter. And indeed, the fictional tribulations of Albertine and her tedious companions proved the ideal soporific. I spent the remainder of the afternoon under the influence of that balm of hurt minds, sleep.

I woke just long enough before Holmes and the boy returned, to splash my face to wakefulness, but not long enough for my anxiety to build. When they came in, the lad was dragging, and even Holmes sagged a bit around the edges. They had spent a long and fruitless day scouring the narrow streets of the medina, trying without result to prise further information from the owner of the
funduq
, venturing into the burgeoning suburbs outside the walls, even making their way through the Mellah, the Jewish quarter tucked against the shelter of the Sultan’s palace. They had asked shopkeepers and donkey-men, soldiers and
madrassa
students, but had found no trace of Mahmoud.

Who would have imagined that it would be a simple matter for a ducal Bedouin/English spy/arms dealer to vanish into thin air?

C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN

B
efore dawn on Monday, Holmes and I joined Lyautey in the silent Dar Mnehbi courtyard. The Maréchal was wearing civilian riding clothes—jodhpurs and knee-high boots—and carrying a robe. His head was bare, the close-cropped white hair gleaming in the light of the single burning lamp.

He greeted us politely, then said, “A response came to my enquiry about the soldiers at Nurse Taylor’s door. It seems that the police did not summon them. I have ordered my assistant to continue the enquiry—the possibility that criminals might be impersonating soldiers is disturbing. But, Madame, how do you feel today?”

I did not meet Holmes’ eyes. It had taken a while, the previous evening, to persuade him that a physical reminder of my emotional centre might assist the restoration of my intellectual faculties … but I was not about to go into that, even with a Frenchman.

“Very well, thank you,” I said demurely.

My headache persisted and my bruised hip and shoulders were stiff, but I told myself that exercise would help.

He nodded, and said to Holmes, “I have a
djellaba
and burnoose, as you suggested, but I won’t put them on until we leave the city. Wouldn’t you two prefer proper riding boots?”

“We’ll be fine,” Holmes said.

The Maréchal led us out of the palace, startling the drowsing guard. Equally surprised were the soldiers at Bab Bou Jeloud, which was still closed for the night. But none of the men made protest: Clearly, the Resident General was well accustomed to going his own way, despite attempts on his life.

Holmes had told me that Lyautey often walked the streets accompanied only by an interpreter. He had also told me that today, that rôle was mine. I was not entirely clear why he or Ali could not perform the function, but I did not argue, since the other option seemed to be remaining behind with Idir.

The Maréchal’s habit made things easier at the stables, when he simply walked into a box and led out a horse. Before he had the saddle-cloth smoothed, a pair of sleep-rumpled grooms were there to assist; by the time we rode out, half a dozen soldiers marked our exit, and although their sergeant offered armed accompaniment, they were not taken aback when the Maréchal refused.

The horses he had chosen were by no means the handsomest in the stables; all had long manes and the heavy coats of winter. Similarly, the saddles were not the highly polished trappings of cavalry officers, nor were the bridles of European style.

Something told me that the French were not unfamiliar with the business of looking like Moroccans. Strictly speaking, the horses were too well fed, well groomed, and well shod for native stock, but they would pass.

My cob was the roughest-looking of the three and had a mouth to match, but its gait was a surprise, smooth enough to preserve my tender skull from too much jostling. My body did not recall riding in a saddle quite this shape before, high fore and aft and with wide, flat stirrup hooks. The saddle would hold a corpse upright; coupled with its sturdy breastplate, I thought that my mount could climb mountains without tipping me off.

And it appeared that mountains might indeed be involved.

Away from the city walls, with the morning sun glowing behind the eastern hills, we stopped for Lyautey to don his Moroccan garb, and for Holmes and me to make adjustments to the unfamiliar saddles. Lyautey wore the garments in much the way he spoke Arabic, with more confidence than was fully justified. He looked like what he was: gentry in exotic costume.

All three of us carried revolvers.