Both turned as the doors slammed open, and the two grooms with Sabid started toward January and Abu.
‘Not another step!’ shouted January, and he leveled the pistol on Sabid.
Fifty feet separated them, a dusty, cobwebbed aisle of ancient barrels, dry bottle-racks, the broken debris of disused tables and chairs. In Captain Rory’s Gallery of Self-Defense – where January practiced both boxing and target practice twice a week when he had money – he could hit a playing card at that distance every time.
With a pistol that he knew.
In good lighting.
Without the one person he loved most in the mortal world held with a knife at her throat an inch from his target.
The knife moved a glinting millimeter, and as if someone had said it in his ear, January thought: If he cuts her and drops her, he knows I’ll stay behind with her rather than pursue him . . .
Abu stepped from behind him and called out something in Arabic, from which January only picked out the word imrât – woman.
Sabid answered in the same tongue, his cold, clear voice mocking. Behind him, the two scar-faced grooms kept their own weapons pointed – rifles of some kind, though it was almost impossible to see in the shadows. From his jacket, Abu drew a folded piece of paper, clotted all over with broken sealing-wax.
Silence fell in the cellar, save for the hiss of the flame within the lantern carried by Abu’s henchman still behind him. January could see nothing but the thin edge of metal laid on Ayasha’s brown throat.
Then Sabid spoke, quietly. Abu answered, at some length, and Sabid’s mouth curled in a scornful smile.
Without knowing Arabic, January heard, in al-Muzaffar’s reply, triumph and contempt.
‘He says you are to carry this to him.’ Abu held out the letter to January. ‘Stand back from him, and hold the paper up so that he can see it, but not touch it.’ In the lantern light, January saw bitterness, weariness, defeat on his ugly face. ‘Then when I tell you to, give it him, but only after he has returned your wife to you. If he harms her, run with the paper back to me, and I promise you that, by it, he will suffer vengeance. It will not bring her back,’ he went on softly. ‘But some vengeance is always better than none. Will you do this?’
January handed him the pistol he held. The other half of the pair was already in Abu’s hand. ‘This is the letter, of which Sitt Jamilla spoke?’ And that being so, he knew, too, the true name of the man before him.
Abu nodded. ‘It is a letter in Sabid’s hand to the directors of the British Black Sea and Anatolia Company, promising concessions of territory from the Sultan in exchange for a hundred thousand pounds to be deposited in Sabid’s account in the Bank of England.’
Under the heavy brow, the Turk’s face was sad. ‘I traveled to London to find Mr Willard Polders of the Black Sea and Anatolia Company, and to purchase this letter of him, since the Sultan made other disposal of those concessions last year. It is not only my hatred of Sabid for an apostate that made me undertake the voyage, you understand. I love the Sultan, who is like a brother to me, and I love the land of my birth. This man –’ he nodded toward al-Muzaffar, sleek and handsome in his Western evening-dress, his pomaded dark hair – ‘would enslave the one and transform the other into what I saw in England. A world of uncaring machines, of smoke and steel, a world that knows not God nor the silence of God in man’s heart.
‘But I understand,’ he went on, ‘that if he takes your lady away with him, he will have Shamira’s whereabouts from her sooner or later. And then I will be where I am now. Only you, who have tried to help the mother of my son for no profit that I can see, would be bereft, to no purpose.’ He handed January the paper. ‘So it might as well be now.’
‘You are Hüseyin Pasha, then?’
The man who had called himself Abu nodded. ‘Servant of Mahmud the Defender of our Faith – and of Allah the All-Merciful, the All-Compassionate One.’
Sabid snapped something, short and angry, and Hüseyin Pasha said softly, ‘Go. But watch him. He is a viper, and he has in the past killed for only the pleasure of doing so.’
January took the paper, walked the length of the cellar, taking care never to step into the line of fire between Hüseyin’s pistol and Sabid. Ayasha called out to him, ‘Mâlik, don’t trust him! He is a son of serpents!’ He saw bruises on her face and felt his whole body grow hot with rage.
‘It will all be well, zahar.’ He felt dizzy as he walked, and strange, as if he had a high fever or walked in a dream.
He stopped a dozen feet from Sabid. Unfolding the paper, he held it up in the light of the lantern held by the taller of Sabid’s grooms; the man moved the light closer, to show it up. From the far end of the room, Abu called out something, probably asking: Did Sabid recognize the paper as his?
‘Lay the paper down, African,’ said Sabid. ‘And step back one step from it.’
‘Do so,’ affirmed Hüseyin. ‘But do not get between my pistol and that son of dogs.’
January stooped and laid the letter on the ground. As he straightened up Ayasha made a move, and she gasped as Sabid twisted her arm. Sabid snarled something through his teeth, an instruction to one of his grooms.
With shocking suddenness, the Arab shoved Ayasha at January with a violence that made her stumble. As January caught her in his arms the taller groom dashed the lantern to the stone floor; from the corner of his eye January glimpsed the other groom as the man dove to snatch up the paper. In blackness and confusion it was hard to be sure. In any case, his main concern was to drag Ayasha back away from Sabid as swiftly as he could. He heard retreating boots, the clatter of a door, and Hüseyin yelled, ‘Run!’
January didn’t ask questions. Just caught Ayasha’s hand, and ran.
Hüseyin waited for them by the door at the far end of the cellar – January guessed that Sabid would rally his guards and kill them all if he could, letter or no letter. They fled up the ramp, across the stable yard, stumbling on the old uneven cobblestones. January boosted Ayasha to the rope and scrambled up it behind her, slithered between the top of the gate and the arch of the gateway. As they dropped to the ground shots rang in the woods behind them. He grabbed Ayasha’s hand again, and they fled toward the river, where the first of the boats from the countryside were bringing in coal and wine, wood and vegetables through the wet darkness to Paris.
Daybreak found them in the Café l’Elephant on the Place de la Bastille, consuming coffee, milk and bread among a mixed crowd of bargees, furniture-makers, sleepy whores and carters. ‘Was Arnoux de Longuechasse behind Shamira’s escape?’ asked January, and daubed jam on the bread. His head throbbed with weariness, and now that the heat of fear was gone from his blood he felt he could have curled up under the table and slept for a week.
‘He was.’ Ayasha wolfed down her fourth slice and licked the butter from her fingers. He’d wrapped his coat over her torn black robe, for the morning was freezing cold, and together with January’s much-scuffed evening-dress they made a grimily dissolute-looking pair. On the other side of the table, Poucet, Chatoine, and their little band of infant criminals shared their meal in silence, trying not to appear as shaken as January guessed they really were. He wondered a little if, when they returned to the Rue de l’Aube, he’d find his music satchel safe, and decided if he didn’t, it was a small price to pay. It would be a nuisance to replace, but whoever found it and pawned it would probably need the money more than he did.
He was aware that God had been very good to him that night.
‘I take it she had no intention of converting?’
Ayasha regarded him, puzzled, and shook her head. ‘Did you see her?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘No. But if a girl in a Muslim household cries out in her extremity to the God of Abraham,’ said January reasonably, ‘I would be a little surprised to hear of her going over to the Blessed Virgin two days later. And yet, someone like the Abbess of St Theresa’s would be more able than anyone else to organize an escape. And she’d n
eed no convincing of the girl’s sincerity: what Jew would not fall at Christ’s feet with cries of joy, once she was shown the light?’
Ayasha sniffed. ‘And every one of those laundresses and grocers and women who sell eggs would fall all over themselves to deliver messages, and never the same one twice. How not, when to do so would save their own souls and strike confusion to the Filthy Infidel?’
‘It was an excellent plan.’ January held out his handkerchief to her, to tie up her tumbled hair in some echo of respectability. ‘And well thought out. Did she set it in motion when she was in Constantinople?’
‘It would be hard not to think of it, with l’Abbé de Longuechasse sitting there in front of the ladies of the Sultan’s harîm just shining with Christian fortitude.’ Ayasha consumed another slice of bread and jam in two gulps. ‘Of course such a man would have connections in the Church, whether or not he spoke of them. And even in the Ottoman lands, the Church has power. She would have known from the synagogues at her home, and the families of the Jews, what can be done when people will do what they’re told without questions. She had just learned that she was with child, and she had reason to fear the Lady Utba – and also, that Hüseyin Pasha would soon take them all to France. She smuggled word to de Longuechasse that she wished to learn more of Christ, and soon after that, that she had seen the Light, and would he help her, for the glory of God and the Catholic Church? What good son of the Church would refuse?’
Ayasha held her hands over the steam from her coffee cup. On the other side of the table, Poucet and his little tribe had slipped into an exhausted doze in the unaccustomed warmth, like dirty puppies slumped in their chairs. January seriously considered doing the same.
At length Ayasha said, ‘When her father died, her mother needed money that Shamira’s brother might go to university . . . and so, of course, become a man capable of supporting his mother in comfort.’
January said nothing. Ayasha had told him once that when she was fourteen, she had run away from her father’s house with a French soldier, needing a protector, she had said, to get her to France. She never spoke of the man, and January sometimes wondered about those months of her life: what it had cost her to run away.
After a little time he asked, ‘And how much of that did she tell Mother Marie-Doloreuse?’
‘Well, if she’d told her the truth,’ said Ayasha practically, ‘the Mother Abbess would have given her back over to Hüseyin Pasha. He is not a bad man,’ she added. ‘Even if he is ugly as Shaitan’s pig.’
‘He saved your life,’ pointed out January. ‘At the cost of leaving himself in danger from his mortal enemy.’
‘Was that the letter Sitt Jamilla spoke of? That paper?’
‘It was. By the sound of it, it could have gotten Sabid hanged if he’d gone back to Constantinople . . .’
‘They don’t hang them,’ corrected Ayasha. ‘If the Sultan is in a good mood, one who displeases him will be beheaded. If he isn’t in so good a mood, the man will be sewn in a sack with a couple of cannonballs and dropped into the Bosphorus, or maybe strapped up in an iron cage, so that he cannot move, and hung up for the ravens to devour while he starves. Mahmud has often spoken of getting la guillotine – Sabid tried to convince him that it was modern and scientific. But at least malefactors are no longer boiled in molten lead.’ She licked another smear of jam from her finger. ‘Sometimes they’ll boil a cauldron of asphalt and stick a funnel . . . Did you learn where she had gone?’
January asked gently, ‘Did you?’
Ayasha looked aside. ‘You would not make her go back?’
‘He saved your life,’ repeated January.
‘That’s no reason to send her back to a man she doesn’t want to lie with.’
‘Is he bad to her?’
Ayasha shook her head. Her voice was quiet. ‘He is a good man, she says. Kind, and with great sympathy for her plight. Yet, she said, as his concubine, he has the right to use her body – however gently. But it is not what she wants. And she said that, as a woman in his household, if she said no, then where would she be? And he is not of her faith. Both his faith, and hers, and even yours, Mâlik, count a woman’s soul as weaker than a man’s, and more likely to be excused by God for faithlessness that she cannot help – yet Shamira dreamed still of being the wife of a man of her own people, with honor and dignity. Is this not a dream that any woman might have?’
They returned to the Rue de l’Aube and slept – January retrieved his music satchel untouched. Had any of their neighbors seen it, there behind St Peter’s feet, they would have recognized it and left it alone.
January assumed that eventually Hüseyin Pasha would track them down. Either Jamilla would tell him where they could be found, or the Turk would ask at the embassy where he might reach the big African who played piano upon so many occasions at the Embassy balls. January had no doubt that Hüseyin Pasha was not a man who ever forgot a face.
Before he did – and indeed, January hoped, before he had to be at the Opera that night – he wanted to know, at least, what he was to say to the man who had saved Ayasha’s life.
So before retiring to bed that morning, he had written a short note in simple French (‘Yallah, Mâlik, you don’t think anyone ever bothered to teach her to read Arabic? Or Hebrew, for that matter?’), and dispatched it – via the helpful Poucet – to an address in the district of St-Germaine. When he awoke, just after two, it was to find two notes under the door.
One was from Hüseyin Pasha, requesting that January present himself, at his earliest convenience, at his residence on the Rue St-Honoré.
The other, in a strong, elegant hand on good-quality notepaper, said:
M’sieu,
Many thanks for your note. Deeply sensible of the debt that she owes to you and to your wife, my niece agrees to meet with you this afternoon at four, at this address. On her behalf, I add my entreaties, not to speak of your meeting, or my niece’s whereabouts, to anyone, until you have spoken to her.
My most sincere thanks,
Jacob L’Ecolier
ELEVEN
The town house of the banker L’Ecolier stood on a small place off the Rue des Tuileries, not far from the Luxembourg Palace. An elderly servant showed January and Ayasha upstairs, to a small salon at the rear of the premier étage. Two women looked up as the man ushered the visitors in. One was the inevitable thirty-ish female relative so frequently found in well-off households, either unmarriageable or widowed: the latter, in this case, January guessed, for she was clothed in unrelieved black and, to January’s experienced eye, just beginning the fifth month of pregnancy.
The other was the girl he had last seen in the attic of the house of Hüseyin Pasha, the girl whose face he’d barely been allowed to glimpse.
She was still thin from her sickness, and very pale. Her face – unveiled now and framed in neat thick curls the color of café noir – was delicately beautiful, slightly aquiline, and illuminated by enormous brown eyes of singular beauty and intelligence. At the sight of Ayasha their watchfulness faded, and she sprang to her feet. ‘God be praised!’ Her French was thickly accented. ‘You got away!’
The two women clasped hands, Shamira’s face tight with emotion. ‘I feared for you—’
‘I was taken.’
The girl’s eyes widened: guilt, shock, fear. And dread, at what recompense might be asked of her, for honor’s sake.
‘Hüseyin Pasha paid a price for my release. I do not know,’ Ayasha added, as January bowed, ‘if you remember my husband?’
‘I do.’ Color briefly stained Shamira’s ivory cheeks, that he had seen her sweating and vomiting in her sickness. ‘I – thank you, sir . . .’
January bowed deeply over her hand. ‘Are you well, Mademoiselle L’Ecolier?’
She glanced across at her chaperone, put a hand protectively to her belly, as women with child the world over are wont to do. ‘Yes. Very well.’ Her eyes went to Ayasha again. ‘Hüseyin Pasha send you?’
Aya
sha shook her head. ‘We had a note from him this morning, but we have sent him no reply. Still, he gave up the only hold he had over his enemy Sabid – the only protection he had against him – in order to save me from pain, only because I was taken in trying to help you. He does not know we are here, or that we know where you are. Yet I think you owe it to him to speak with him. Will your kinsman M’sieu L’Ecolier stand by you?’
January saw her eyes flicker again to the black-clothed chaperone, who through the whole of this dialog had merely sat tatting an antimacassar. From the lack of expression on her round, impassive face, it was for a moment impossible to tell whether she was being tactful, disapproving, sly, or whether she truly took no interest in this lovely young kinswoman’s exotic affairs. Even when, for a moment, she raised her dark eyes to meet Shamira’s, the look which passed between them was swift and secret. Then the whole of her soul seemed to return to her needle, flickering silver in the window’s pale twilight.
Her face now flushed again with shame, and her dark eyes shining with tears, Shamira replied in a steady voice, ‘M’sieu L’Ecolier know everything of Hüseyin Pasha and myself.’ Her hand stole briefly to touch her belly again. ‘He will stand by me. He say, by laws of France, I not sent back to Hüseyin Pasha, not by King himself.’
‘But the laws of France – and of God,’ said January, and he watched her face as he said it – ‘will give a father some claim on the upbringing of his child, whom he begot lawfully upon a woman of his own household. He was willing to put himself into grave danger, that you and your child might be safe.’
The girl’s fingers darted to her eye to catch a tear before any could see it. ‘Even so.’ She added then, in a small voice, ‘He is good man. Please understand he is good man. He was good to me. Kind. Only I . . .’ She looked to Ayasha, as if to see in her eyes the words she needed to say, and Ayasha said something in Arabic that January knew in his heart was: I understand.
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