Ran Away (3 page)

‘She says she sent the other women away to the cottage at the far end of the garden,’ explained Ayasha at last. ‘There are three other concubines and their maids. Ra’eesa – the maidservant – says that the Lady Utba is there too now.’

January turned to Ra’eesa and said – a little hesitantly – ‘
’afak zheeblee lma
 . . .’ When the maid went out into the other room and returned bearing the copper water-pitcher that January remembered seeing on the low table there, he said to Jamilla, ‘Not the water in the other room. Fresh water, clean, from the kitchen.’

It was clear to him that the elder wife knew at once what he meant, for her eyes widened with shocked enlightenment. She took the ewer from Ra’eesa and gave her a quick instruction, and realization flared in the older woman’s face as well. When the servant left, Jamilla handed January the pitcher and gave Ayasha a rapid and urgent explanation.

‘She says they have given Shamira water twice from this pitcher today,’ Ayasha translated. ‘It is many steps down to the kitchen, you understand  . . .’

‘Oh, I understand.’ January sniffed the water and tasted it. Beneath the sugar and the attar of roses, a familiar bitterness. ‘That’s exactly what someone was counting on. Chinchona,’ he explained to Jamilla. ‘Peruvian bark. An abortifacient, but it can easily kill. We must induce vomiting once again, with charcoal this time –’ he took a packet of it from his satchel – ‘and then I will give Mademoiselle Shamira something to strengthen her heart.’

Ayasha explained hesitantly, half in French, partly in Arabic, partly in signs, while the servant woman returned, panting, with a jar of water from the kitchen. She also carried – January was delighted to see she had that much sense – a clean, empty jar. He performed the gastric lavage on the semi-conscious girl – touching her as little as he could and ordering the servant to do most of the lifting – then mixed a tiny pinch of a foxglove compound, barely enough to strengthen the heart, and administered it as well.

‘
Sitt
Jamilla says you are wise in the ways that women are wise,
Mâlik
.’

‘You may tell
Sitt
Jamilla that my sister is a wise woman, and that she and I both learned from an old Auntie in our village when we were tiny, about herbs and how to use them.’ The faint, dry scent of the foxglove brought before him the face of old Auntie Jeanne, fat and toothless and covered with wrinkles and ‘country marks’ – tribal scarring  . . .  He and his sister Olympe had been furiously jealous of one another over the old woman’s herb lore, each wanting to know more than the other, and Olympe, even at six years old, spitefully triumphant because she was a girl and as such had a greater share of the woman’s teaching.

And that old slave mambo, probably dead for a dozen years, had handed him the key that would save the life of a young girl in a land Auntie Jeanne had never set foot in; a girl who for all her silk cushions and beaded veils was just as much a slave as the cane hands in the quarters on Bellefleur.

And Olympe  . . . 

It had been years since January had even thought of his sister.

He returned his attention to the girl Shamira. Her veil was now soaked with water and dabbled with vomit, but the maid kept readjusting it, to keep it in place. She had replaced the veil over the girl’s hair, too: thick black hair, curling.

Weakly, Shamira disengaged her hand from his and pressed it to her belly. She had not wept since those few tears she’d shed when she’d whispered in French, ‘I’m sorry  . . .’

Now her face transformed with relief and joy, and her body shook with sobs. ‘Lord of Hosts,’ she whispered, ‘oh, God of Abraham and my fathers, thank you  . . .  Thank you. I felt him move,’ she added, looking up into January’s face. ‘He lives. My son lives.’

January fought back his first impulse to lay his own hand against her side, knowing that it made no difference. With that much quinine in her system, abortion almost certainly would commence before nightfall.

‘The Lady Utba is with child as well.’ Ayasha translated another spate of Osmanli from Jamilla. ‘The fortune teller said that her child would be a girl, and that Shamira would bear a son.’

‘Oh, that must have set the cat amongst the pigeons.’

‘My lord
only
son.’ Jamilla spoke up, picking her words carefully. ‘Shamira have all she want: sweet, necklace, this room her own.’ She gestured around them at the comfortable little chamber, the cushioned divans and embroidered hangings of pink and green. ‘Lady Utba also still delight the heart of my lord.’ She pressed her hands to her heart, miming a man in a swoon of love, then put her hands over her eyes.

January said, ‘I see.’ He turned to have Ayasha explain – because he wanted there to be no mistake – but she had gone into the larger outer room, to investigate the platter of sweets on the low table there. He called out after her, ‘Don’t touch those!’

She called back, ‘Do I look like an idiot,
Mâlik
?’

To Jamilla, he said, ‘Can you keep Shamira from the others, until your lord comes home? Separate food, separate drink?’

‘Not easy.’ The chief wife frowned. ‘Girls eat from one dish. Yet, I say her disease still catching.’

‘Good.’ January had to restrain himself from taking this woman’s hand in thanks, or patting her on the shoulder as a gesture of comfort, such as he would do to the wife or girlfriend of one of his friends. ‘Tell them this is the command of the doctor.’ He glanced toward Shamira, who had drifted off to sleep, and lowered his voice. ‘I am afraid there is a good chance she will lose her child,’ he said softly. ‘I’ll leave you medicines, to strengthen her in case  . . .’

‘It is not first time,’ said Jamilla, and sadness filled her eyes, ‘that woman in this house lose child. This, I can help. I can do.’

‘Thank you. If there are any complications, or any more of this sickness, send for me—’

‘
Ibn al-harîm
!’ Ayasha swore – practically the only Arabic January knew – sprang down from the window seat in the outer room and dashed to the door of Shamira’s chamber. ‘People on their way across the stable yard. Two women – and six guards.’

TWO

J
anuary reached the window just in time to see the foreshortened figures of women and guards disappear past the corner of the house. They’d be climbing the servants’ stair in literally seconds. ‘Can you get us—?’

Jamilla caught his hand. ‘No time. Come!’

She drew him to the backstairs in a striding billow of pink and topaz silk and threw open its door, and though he knew there was no way he could avoid meeting the oncoming guards halfway down he followed. She was right, there was no time for a second’s hesitation: he must trust this woman, or fight his way out against long odds with the certainty that Jamilla, Shamira, the maidservant Ra’eesa and quite probably Ayasha as well would die in the aftermath of Hüseyin Pasha’s vengeance.

Which, he reflected sourly, was the Lady Utba’s goal.

At the floor below, Jamilla pushed open the servants’ door and thrust January out into the hall. Even as she closed the discreet portal behind her, he heard in the echoing stair a door open below and booted footfalls pounding. At the same moment voices rang in the grand staircase that lay at the other end of the hôtel’s long central hall. Without hesitation, Jamilla opened the nearest chamber door and pulled him inside.

‘Ayasha—’

‘Safe.’ The woman touched his lips with her hennaed fingers. The room, he saw with alarm, was obviously her own chamber, stripped of whatever Western furnishings it had once contained and refurbished with hangings and divans. ‘No harm woman.’

Which was more than could be said of what the Pasha’s guards would do to him if they caught him on this floor, much less in the bedchamber of Number One Wife  . . .  or even her dressing room, through which she next hustled him. Given the diplomatic understandings between France’s King and the Sultan, it wasn’t likely that the death of an intruder into the Assistant Plenipotentiary’s
maison
would even be reported, much less investigated. He could easily imagine the bored shrugs of the police inspectors, should an enraged young Berber woman storm into the local prefecture with the demand that a prominent Turkish diplomat be arrested for having his guards kill a man who broke into his house  . . . 

For that matter, he reflected, with a glance at the woman beside him, if the guards caught him up here, Jamilla’s only protection would be screams and an accusation of rape.

Sweat chilled his face. But Jamilla led him straight through into the next room – a library furnished in the Turkish style, with low tables and the ubiquitous divan covered in enormous cushions, and a great hanging of crimson and indigo: stylized mountains and stars. She pushed him down on to the divan and began covering him with cushions. January comprehended – Jamilla had clearly forgotten whatever French she knew – and stretched and squashed himself as flat as he could to assist matters. Before she put the last big pouffes over his face she gestured with both hands –
stay
– and he nodded.

‘
Eeyeh
,’ he said, hoping that was
yes
in Osmanli as well as in the Mahgribi that Ayasha spoke. ‘
Fhemt
.’

Jamilla looked absolutely baffled.

‘I understand.’

She put the last pillow in place, and he felt, rather than heard, her dart back across the library to the dressing room, curly-toed golden slippers soundless on the piled carpets.

Soft boots thudded in the hall. The door opened, long enough for the guards to glance around the room. Then it closed.

He heard the bedroom door beyond opened likewise, and for no longer a span of time.

Not enough guards – or, anyway, not enough eunuch guards – to thoroughly search the house at the first sweep. They’d be back.

Women’s voices in the hall, a shrill chatter, like birds. He could almost hear the words. Protesting, denying, demanding how they could think such a thing.

Allah pity the guard who tries to question Ayasha about the large black gentleman who accompanied her . . . 

Slippers whispered on the rugs.
Sitt
Jamilla yanked the cushions off him, took his hand. ‘Man in yard.’ She led him back through the dressing room, through her chamber, and to the backstairs again, a faint perfume rustling from the folds of her veils. ‘Watches. Look in kitchen, look in room of – of
keten
. You stay.’

Above the edge of her veil, her eyes held his.
Seeking what? Courage and resolution? The nerve to stay in hiding, possibly for hours, until the guard walks away?
Maybe only seeking a sign of trust. If he did not trust – if he panicked, tried to flee or to fight – they would all be doomed.

‘I stay.’

The dark eyes shut for a moment in relief, and her hands tightened on his, the way he would have slapped a friend on the arm and said:
Good man
.

She tugged him down the backstairs, through the pantry, into the kitchen. Beyond the wide kitchen window he glimpsed the man in the yard, squat and formidable in a rough combination of French jacket and Turkish trousers, his head shaved. In addition to a curved Turkish sword and a dagger the man bore a very businesslike rifle.

Not a man to argue with about what you were doing in the house.

A small door led from the kitchen into the linen room, long and brick-floored and lined with cupboards, and smelling of cedar and scorched sheets. From her belt Jamilla took a key, opened the big armoire at the far end of the room. It was a close fit, but January unhesitatingly curled his six-foot three-inch height on to the lowest shelf – four feet long and some two feet deep – and Jamilla closed the doors on him at once. He heard the lock click. So still were these rooms at the back of the house that he heard the pat of her slippers retreat across the brick floor to the kitchen.

It had all been as neatly accomplished as a military campaign:
well, a military campaign by a general who knew what he was doing – Caesar or Alexander or Frederick the Great
. The one military campaign which January actually witnessed – at the age of nineteen, crouched behind redoubts made of cotton bales at the top of an embankment, while a British army three times the size of the defenders attempted like idiots to charge uphill at them into a wall of rifle fire – would have had any proper general tearing his hair.

For a moment he smelled the fog again, heard the steady beat of the British drums, invisible in the cinder-colored darkness, and the sneeze of a man somewhere down the line to his left. After the battle, working in the infirmary tent among the captured wounded, he had felt such pity for them as they were carried in, soaked in blood and mud and begging for water – men he’d shot himself, or bayoneted: ‘You can’t think about it,’ one of the surgeons had advised him, a Scot from one of the British regiments who’d permitted himself to be captured, so that he could look after the prisoners. ‘When you start to think about the battle, just imagine yourself closing a door on it, so you’ll be able to work.’

The Lady Jamilla, January felt sure, would never have ordered a stupid charge like that.

He smiled.

You’d have thought she was sneaking very large men in and out of her lord’s harem all her life
.

A childhood in slavery had given January plenty of experience in hiding, so he knew prolonged stillness would very quickly result in agonizing cramps. Michie Simon, the owner of Bellefleur Plantation, had been a drunkard who thought nothing of rawhiding a six-year-old. What to the white children of the parish were merely the finer arts of hide and seek had been to January and his sister almost literally life-or-death skills. He knew how to ignore the cramps, keep still and wait.

He knew how to listen, too.

Voices of the guards in the yard, little chips of sound. (
And what language is it THEY speak?
) Ayasha’s voice, raised in angry imprecation as she passed through the kitchen and went on outside without pausing. For her to linger would have been as good as an announcement that she still had an accomplice in the house – the groom in the yard would remember an immense broad-shouldered black man in a brown corduroy jacket. For Ayasha to flounce through the stable gates and down the lane without a backward glance was the best corroboration that could be offered to the statement: ‘Who, Benjamin? He left an hour ago,
muti
 . . .’