Ayasha slipped from the dairy, glanced through the door of the kitchen, then motioned January to follow her. The kitchen – considerably larger than their room on the Rue de l’Aube – was redolent of saffron and cinnamon, and of the straw-packing of broken-open boxes in which, presumably, the master’s favorite spices had been shipped. They passed swiftly through and went up two steps into a pantry scented with coffee. So far, only the aroma of spices hinted that the house was occupied by other than some French noble and his family. The dishes on the white-painted shelves were Limoges, the glassware Bavarian crystal. When Ayasha pushed open the door at the far end of the long, narrow room, January caught a perfectly French glimpse of pale-green boiseries and an oil portrait of a disconsolate-looking gentleman in a powdered wig.
But from the table beneath the portrait a woman sprang to her feet, dark eyes above the edge of her veil flooded with relief. ‘You have come!’ Her French was heavily accented.
‘Did I not promise?’ The woman followed Ayasha back into the pantry, and January bowed. ‘Sitt Jamilla, this is my husband, Benjamin, al-hakîm.’
Her eyes touched his, then fleeted aside. ‘This way, please come.’ Her voice was a beautiful alto. ‘It go bad for her. Fear . . .’ She gestured, as if trying to summon from air words that she was too shaken to recall; long slim fingers, polished nails stained with henna. Then she gathered her veils about her and led the way to the backstairs. As he followed her up the narrow treads the drift of her perfume whispered back to him, French and expensive.
In French he asked, ‘Is she poisoned?’
‘I think.’ She touched her finger to her lips as they passed the door on the premier étage – what they would call the second floor back in Louisiana, the main level of salons and reception rooms – and ascended to the private apartments above. Frankincense pervaded these upper reaches, penetrating even the confines of the enclosed stair. January had already guessed the Pasha kept his concubines on one of the upper floors of the house, but the ascent filled him with the sensation of being cut off from escape. One could leap from the windows of a salon on the premier étage and risk no more than a sprained ankle. A drop from one of the dormers on the roof would be a serious matter.
‘Vomit—’ In the thin light that came from the stair’s few small windows, the Lady Jamilla’s slim hands conjured the meaning, in case she had the word wrong. ‘Bleed in womb, little . . .’ Her fingers measured half a thimble-full. ‘Fall down. Hear noise.’ Then she pressed her hand to her chest, drew two or three gasping breaths.
January nodded his understanding. ‘She has not lost the child yet?’
The Lady shook her head, reiterated the gesture: only half a thimble-full. ‘Yet so afraid. All afraid.’
All except the equally-pregnant Lady Utba, I’ll bet . . .
At the top of the backstairs the Lady paused to listen at the door. The smell of incense was stronger here, even through the shut door, but could not cover the stink of sickness. She opened it, led him through into what had probably once been a servants’ hall, now converted to the usages of the harîm. A low divan and a scattering of floor pillows touched January’s consciousness even as he crossed toward the single door that stood open, his boots sinking into four or five layers of carpet, in the Eastern fashion. A huge brass brazier radiated gentle heat from the center of the room; a second, much smaller than the first, stood in the smaller chamber to which Jamilla led him.
A skinny maidservant in black knelt beside the divan that had been built around three sides of the little chamber. The pillows that heaped such low benches during daylight hours were still piled at both sides, and a young girl lay among the sheets and quilts of the longer central section. Jamilla said something to the maidservant, who sat back on her heels and shook her head. Between the hijab that concealed her hair and the niqaab that veiled her face – both businesslike black cotton – dark eyes stitched with wrinkles wore a look of grief and defiance; she responded in something that might have been peasant Turkish, but the disobedience was as clear as if she had spoken French.
Jamilla waved toward the door and repeated her order, and the maid shook her head violently. The girl on the divan, January saw, had been dressed in a long gown that covered her from throat to ankles, a servant’s camisa, he guessed: black, substantial, and all-encompassing. She was veiled, even her hair. The room stank of vomit and sickness, the sheets were stained and wet, but the garments and veils were dry and clean.
Do they really think I’ll be overwhelmed with lust at the sight of a poor girl spewing her guts out as she aborts her baby? Anger swept through him, at the insanities of traditions that branded every woman as nine times more passionate than the poor men whose lusts they commanded; that cautioned that all Africans were animalistically lascivious – as the educated and philosophical third President of the United States had so tastefully put it.
Or were Jamilla and the maid simply doing what they could to maintain their innocence, should word of all this reach Hüseyin Pasha? The girl was never unveiled before the Unbeliever, and never left alone with him . . .
He wondered if that would save them, or the girl.
And God only knows, he reflected, what the girl herself thinks, or feels . . . or what language she speaks, even. If the Pasha bought her only a year ago, how much Turkish would she have learned to speak to the servants? Or with her master . . . if he considered conversation with his bed-mates a part of their duties.
January knew most American masters didn’t. ‘Does she speak French?’ he whispered, and again the Lady made the little half-a-thimble-full gesture with her fingers.
‘Only little. Egypt – Cairo. Family is Jew.’
He knelt beside the divan. ‘Mademoiselle, can you hear me? You’re going to be all right.’
The fatigue-blackened eyelids stirred. In broken French she whispered, ‘I’m sorry—’
‘It’s all right.’
‘My Lady . . .’ Jamilla knelt beside January, took Shamira’s hand. Her reply was gentle, as if she spoke to a younger sister.
Shamira whispered something else – an apology? Perhaps, because Jamilla gripped her hand encouragingly, stroked the girl’s hair, dislodging the veil, and said something else, in which January heard the words farangi – a Frank, a European – and hakîm.
The girl whispered, in a voice hoarse from vomiting, ‘My baby?’
January guessed from the symptoms that the girl had been poisoned with quinine and guessed too that quantities enough to do this to her would trigger an abortion within hours. ‘Do not worry about this now, Mademoiselle. First it is your life which must be saved.’ He turned to Jamilla. ‘When was she sick? When did this start?’
‘Night. End of night. Before first prayers.’
He felt the girl’s hands – the servant looked horrified – and found them icy, and her pulse, thready and weak. ‘Is no one else sick?’
Jamilla repeated the question to the servant, then translated the reply. ‘Ra’eesa say, all well. Others—’ She turned to Ayasha to translate, but it was scarcely easier. The Osmanli tongue spoken by the upper classes in Constantinople was an elaborate combination of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, only half-comprehensible to a young woman who’d grown up speaking the mix of Arabic and Tamazight common to the Mahgrib.
‘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
January 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. Ja
nuary 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.
Ran Away Page 2