The Tenth Gift (39 page)

“It seems you are going to make me a great deal of money,” he announced, leaning against the doorjamb.

Cat put aside the book she had been studying and looked up. His pupils were dilated from the herb smoke he had taken with his guests. He dangled his prayer beads from one hand, swinging the cord up and catching them in his palm so that the little polished stones clicked against one another.

“The saddlecloth?” she asked, pleased. “Or the wedding tunics?”

He smiled. “Hossein Malouda has offered me small fortune. For you.”

She paled. “For me?”

“He say samples remarkable but that creator of them most remarkable of all. You certainly presented yourself as richly as your work.”

A pulse began to beat at her temple. She had made a foolish error, hoping to win his approval alone. And somehow in all of this she had forgotten that she was a chattel still, a thing to be bought and sold. “And what did you say?”

He flicked the prayer beads up and down again, then curled them in his hand and sequestered them in his robe. “I have not yet give him my answer.”

‘Why not?” It came out too fast, too anxious. She could feel her neck flushing, the blood beating in her face.

“Because I have not yet decide what to do with you. He is not only one to have offered good price for you.”

“Someone else has tried to buy me from you?”

“Someone came seeking to offer for you some months ago. Unfortunately, he not come direct to me but found the Sidi al-Ayyachi instead.”

“Unfortunately?”

“The Sidi decide to make different kind of deal with him.” “You all seem to think you can buy and sell me like … like a camel!”

He laughed then. “Ah, Cat’rin, in your scarlet robe and your silver: I have never seen a camel so fine. Although …” He rubbed his chin. “There was one I remember, with great dark eyes and a temper which struck fear into heart of any rider, she spit or bite at least provocation. You remind me of that camel. But she was tamed in the end.”

Cat glared at him. “You will never tame me. I am not an animal to be broken to your will, or that of any man.”

Red light from the setting sun glinted in his eye so that for a moment he looked as demonic as the djinn the women spoke of. Then he stepped backward out of the door and the red light slid away. As he walked out onto the balcony, he said softly, “And that is why I love you, Cat’rin Anne Tregenna.”

But a breeze caught his words and carried them into the twilight sky.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
she and Leila visited the souq to find the woman who made the tasseled braids they needed to trim the headpiece for a horse. Cat enjoyed these excursions considerably. It gave her the chance to view the world in which she now lived, to revel in its sights and scents and pretend that she was a free woman with money in her pocket to spend as she would. In her djellaba and veil she was paid no more attention than the next robed woman, except when someone had reason to glance at her pale hands, or into her blue eyes. Then they dipped their heads with a smile, though some gave her a stony look, and others refused to touch her. “Some of the older ones think we’re cursed,” Leila said. “Cursed with skin the color of a pig’s. They think we’re tainted, touched by the Devil. But you have blue eyes, and that’s a lucky color. Maybe that’ll save you in the end.” She did not explain what she meant by this.

They found the braid-maker at the back of her little stall near the heart of the medina, hunched over her tatting, which was not at all of the quality Cat had expected or been promised. They came away without a deal and without the necessary braid: Cat was not in the best of humors. The stall had been hot and airless and now she had a headache, so they took a shortcut to the fountain outside the little white koubba of one of the local saints and Cat sat there in the harsh sunlight mopping her face and hands with the end of her wetted veil. She was beginning to feel better when there was a loud cry and the sound of a whip whistled through the air again and again. In the road ahead a coffle of fettered prisoners was in disarray, with one man on his knees in the dirt and the overseer thrashing at his head and shoulders in a fury.

Cat was so intent on the fallen man that it was several moments before she noticed the captive next to him. She screwed her eyes against the sun.
It could not be …

She leapt to her feet, headache forgotten, but now a crowd had gathered to watch the fallen Christian being beaten and it was hard to confirm what she thought she had seen. Cat launched herself into the crowd, pushing and shoving with the rest, until someone grabbed her arm and dragged her back.

“What do you think you are doing?”

She had always thought that Leila accompanied her as a translator and guide, but now she realized she had been naive: The Dutchwoman was there as her guard.

Cat fought her arm free. “I know that man—the tall one, there—” But now the overseer had the fallen man on his feet again and the string of captives was on the move once more, offering Cat a glimpse of backs striped with weals and ribs showing through the skin like those of starved donkeys. Then they were gone. She stood there with her hands to her mouth as the crowd dispersed. She must be going mad. She had thought—just for a moment—that she had seen her cousin. But that was impossible, for Robert Bolitho was two thousand miles away in Cornwall.

But what if
, a small voice insinuated,
what if the corsairs made another raid?
She said as much to Leila, who laughed. “No one puts out of Salé at this time of the year. Strong winds blow in and make it impossible to reenter the port. There’ll be no more raids till May.”

Even so, Cat could not put the image from her head of a man who stood just like her cousin stood, with his head held just so, his wide shoulders half a foot higher than those of other men. Even though she had not properly seen his face, she grew increasingly convinced of what she had seen. The image of Rob shackled and beaten haunted her nights and her days.

A week later when the raïs came to the house again, Cat sought him out. “Might I speak with you?” she asked, keeping her gaze on the floor.

He led her into the salon and she told him what she had seen in the souq. When he said nothing, she had the sudden impression that he already knew what she was going to say. She looked up to find that his lips were pressed to a hard, flat line and his eyes were like flint. He looked once more like the man who had ordered a cross branded into Preacher Truran’s foot.

“I just wondered if you could find out for me,” she went on quickly before her courage deserted her, “if there is a captive by the name of Robert Bolitho among the English slaves.”

He was very still. At last he said slowly, “Why should I do this thing? What is he to you?”

“He is my cousin,” Cat said firmly.

The Sidi Qasem leaned back against the wall, his eyes as slitted as a drowsing cat’s. Then he waved his hand, dismissive. “I do not meddle in affairs of others.” He reached down and took up his chicha pipe and made a great to-do of cleaning and filling and lighting it.

“Please,” Cat said again. Her heart beat so hard she could hardly get the word out.

He would not even look at her, so at last she turned and left.

S
EVERAL DAYS PASSED
in a haze of work and chatter and the raïs did not return. Orders came, brought by one of his slaves from the house on the other side of the river. Cat had the sense the raïs was avoiding her, and was curt with the boy, sending him away again without refreshment. There was a handsome sleeveless tunic to be embellished from neck to floor, a once-gorgeous bed-hanging in need of refurbishment, and a commission for a wedding veil with instructions that only the finest lawn and silk be used for the purpose. Was it for his cousin Khadija? Cat wondered, and had to fight the memory of Leila’s words away.

She set three of her best students to the tunic, gave the bed-hanging to Habiba, Latifa, and Jasmina, and took the veil herself. Leila went to the souq to seek out a length of soft white lawn while Cat sat with Hasna and two of the older women and made sketches for the design. “Pomegranates,” suggested Hasna, her eyes shining. “Imagine, the gold and red against the white!”

But the widow Latifa clucked her tongue. “Pomegranates are for the first child—everyone knows that! Do you want the bride to go to her wedding covered in shame?”

Hasna blushed, but everyone laughed uproariously, and it was at that moment that the Sidi Qasem chose to enter the room, followed by another man. Cat had her back to the door, so it was only the sudden hush that fell and the way the women covered themselves with their veils that alerted her to the presence of visitors. She drew her own veil across her own face and turned.

R
OBERT
B
OLITHO STARED
at the scene before him: a dozen native women in the midst of some kind of sewing circle, all with their veils drawn up so that only their shining midnight eyes were visible. Except for one, whose pale hand dropped away to reveal the face he
had beheld in his dreams, the face that had compelled him across an ocean; the face he had conjured in his imagination to give himself the strength to survive the travails that had since befallen him. It was
her
face; and yet it was not. Those were her eyes, a pale and startling blue, but they were not the eyes of the girl he had left outside the church in Penzance all those months ago. It was not just the exotic black cosmetic outlining them that made her a stranger to him, but something deeper and more disturbing in their expression. All at once he was more afraid than he had ever been in his life.

C
AT GAZED AT
the ragged, bony figure that towered over the Sidi Qasem. The man’s face was gaunt and burned brown, his cheeks fallen in on themselves; his nose was oddly crooked and his shock of yellow hair was gone, leaving only a rough growth like the stubble of a wheat field once the crop has been taken in. But his eyes were the same cornflower blue they had always been, wide and guileless, the eyes of the boy around whom she had run such wicked circles in Cornwall.

“Rob, oh, Rob—what have they done to you?” She got to her feet. “Did they take you, too?”

He laughed then, bitterly. “Aye, you might say that, though it did not happen as you would imagine, for I was taken not there but here. I even raised a bit of money for your redemption—Mistress Harris gave me some, and the Countess bought your altar cloth, I am sorry to have given it to her, Cat, and it unfinished and all, but it was all I could think to do—but they took the money from me, and the ring, too—” His voice was cracked from lack of use.

The raïs cut in. “He speak true, Cat’rin. He made his way here on English ship to bargain for you, but was himself betrayed. The English are a faithless race.” His voice was harsh, toneless, the voice of a man holding his emotions hard in check. He paused, looking between the two of them. “I found him in slave pens, but he is slave
no longer. I have bought him his freedom, and I now make you gift of your own. You are slave—my slave—no more but free, free to leave with him if you wish. You must make choice.”

Cat felt his gaze burning into her but she could not look at him. It was all too much, too strange. She felt dizzy, displaced, as if she had suddenly been lifted out of herself and was staring down at the tableau from some other place in the room—the great corsair captain, so cruel and confident, reduced to tense silence; the raw-boned Englishman twisting his hands in that old, familiar way; the girl she had once been so cunningly disguised, outlandish in her foreign kaftan and kohl—the three bound together by fate’s invisible web.

She was no longer herself, no longer standing in the embroidery workroom, in this merchant’s house, in this fortress town, in this foreign country.

The Tree of Knowledge reared up before her then, its roots buried deep in the earth, its vast trunk blocking out the light, its boughs stretching to the heavens, where a crescent moon hung in its branches and constellations wheeled in stately harmony. She could not see them but she knew that Adam and Eve and the serpent were now part of this tableau, faceless, timeless, and infinitely mutable. She felt their presence, enormous and catastrophic, inside her and at the same time beyond her. She sensed in flashes flesh and blood and bark, heat and cold, the vast and the massive, the smooth and the sinuous, and soon she could not tell where she ended and the other began. Was she Eve, or Adam, the serpent, or the tree? She felt knowledge rising in her like a sap, a great rush of blood that set her heart thudding and her head pounding, and then she crashed to the floor, and the roar of noise inside her was abruptly stilled.

I
T WAS THE
corsair who moved first. He cried out in Arabic, a great oath or exclamation, then bore Cat’s prone body up and away. Habiba and Hasna went pattering in his wake, leaving Rob in a sea of
babbling women who snatched glances at him with their foreign eyes and laughed behind their veils. He looked away from them. On the floor where it had fallen lay an object he recognized. He bent and picked it up, remembering as he did so how it had felt in his hands the last time he held it, just before he gave it to Cat on her birthday last year.

He turned to the frontispiece and there, sure as life, was his inscription:
For my cozen Cat, 27
^th
Maie 1625.
Less than a year. It felt as if a century had passed since then. Tears pricked his eyes like hot needles. It must mean something that she had kept it with her through everything that had happened. He turned its pages, amazed to find Cat’s writing everywhere, and far neater and smaller than he would ever have expected from his headstrong, difficult cousin. He mused over the diagrams and sketches, turning the book this way and that, and here and there a phrase caught his eye, his name leaping out at him: “Rob has made mee sware to saie nothyng of Pyrats … trappd for ever here at Kenegy”… He read further and found “wed to my dull cozen Robert living in a hovel behynd the cow-sheds, large with childe year after year, rasyng a pack of brattes & dying in obscuritee. I can not beare to think about it. I must away from heere …” She could not mean it…. He began to sweat. “My mother ailes & there is no thyng I can do for her. We have no comforte of light or clene aire …” This at least seemed like more familiar ground, similar to his own experiences. He wondered if Jane Tregenna had survived, but found no other reference to her fate in the vicinity of the first quote. Then he came upon: “How I wishe I had took old Annie Badcock’s advyse & gone home with Rob to Kenegy …” At this his breathing slowed a little. It would be all right after all. Seeking for further reassurance, he flicked back a little, until he came upon: “I lye here … in the pyrat captaines cabin …”