Freedom's Banner

by Freedom's Banner (retail) (epub)

  ‘Harry. Harry – what is it? What’s distressing you so?’

  He flung himself from her, fiercely. She saw the unmistakable gleam of tears on his face in the lantern light before the turn of his head hid them.

  ‘Can’t you tell me?’ she asked, gently. ‘Might – might it not help a little? To speak of it?’

  Harry struggled for a moment in silence. Then, suddenly and savagely calmly, ‘I can’t speak of it,’ he said, ‘because I don’t understand it myself. Had you asked me yesterday – this evening, even – what my reaction to such news might have been I would have said – would have believed – laughter! I don’t understand myself why I’m so bitterly angry. So – so murderously – angry –’ He ground the words out. Hannah saw the grim line of his jaw, the clenching of his muscles, and knew that he did not exaggerate. Helplessly she reached a hand towards his arm, but, half-afraid, hesitated and withdrew it before she touched him. He stood in rigid silence.

  ‘It’s – to do with your mother and her marriage,’ she said finally, tentatively.

  ‘Yes. It’s to do with that.’

  She shook her head helplessly. ‘But Harry – why? Why are you so angry? What has your mother done that you find it so hard to wish her well?’

  There was another long moment of struggle. ‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, his voice almost inaudible, and then again, his head flung back as if in pain, ‘I can’t tell you!’

  Hannah was appalled and at the same time all but overcome with compassion at the anguished emotion. This was not the careless, carefree Harry Sherwood she had observed in Cairo and then come, as she thought, to know on the slow drift of the river in these past weeks. For the first time it occurred to her that he no less than she was not entirely the person he appeared to be. She stood irresolute, watching him. After his outburst he had quietened, taking a long breath, straightening his shoulders. His profile was flawlessly outlined by the pale light of the lantern behind it. As she stood watching him, studying the line of cheek and jaw, she was astonished to find that an almost painful surge of emotion – an emotion she was afraid to identify – had sharpened her heartbeat and caught her breath unevenly in her throat. Battling it fiercely, ‘I hate to see you so unhappy,’ she said softly, and hoped he did not hear, or at least would not understand, the sudden uncontrollable tremor in her voice.

  He turned at last. ‘I wish I could tell you. I wish I could explain.’ He was in command of himself again. His voice was quiet; there was an edge of something close to longing in it that disturbed her further.

  ‘Couldn’t you? Couldn’t you try?’

  There was only the smallest moment of hesitation before he shook his head a little, sharply. ‘No. No, Hannah. It isn’t possible. I’m sorry. Believe me – if I could tell anyone –’ He stopped. He had bent his head and was studying her in the dim light, his lean face all at once intent. They were standing very close together, almost touching.

  A tide of warmth, of sheer physical excitement, was rising in her; she had to exert all her willpower to resist an intemperate urge to reach a hand to his face. ‘But – you will write to her? Send her your congratulations?’ She was suddenly aware that beneath the silk robe she was naked. The fire crept from the pale, thin skin of her throat into her cheeks.

  ‘Yes. I’ll write.’ His quiet voice was oddly abstracted. His dark eyes were still attentive upon her face, serious, oddly questing, as if he were discovering there something he had never seen before.

  ‘I think it – quite charming – that she should have –’ Hannah stopped, completely losing the fragile thread of her thought. As if drawn by a magnet, she took a step towards him. The music from the steamer had stopped, the distant talk and laughter had died. The strings of lanterns had been doused, and one by one the other lights were going out. The Nile night reclaimed its own; only the moon shimmered an enchanted path upon the moving waters. She stood utterly still as he reached for her, drew her to him, kissed her very gently. His lips were warm and dry and tasted not unpleasantly of brandy, his grip by contrast was rough, almost painful, upon her shoulders. For a moment she felt nothing, nothing but the surprise and pleasure that might be occasioned by an unexpected compliment or an unlooked-for gift. She stood within his hands like a child, docile, uncertain, her face turned up to his. Then, his lips still upon hers, he moved a little, stepping around her, so that she stood with her back to the rails, and felt the length of his body pressed against hers.

  It was as if the world had exploded and disintegrated around her; all that was left was Harry, his hands upon her body, his lips upon hers. Hannah curled her arms about his neck, buried her fingers in the thick black hair, pressed her body against his, feeling the roughness of his clothes upon breasts and belly, the fine silk of her robe neither protection nor covering; she might as well have been naked. In that moment, quite unashamedly, she wished that she were. His arms tightened like a vice around her. The kiss was no longer gentle. Then, moments later, he let her go, very abruptly, and stepped back. They were both breathing heavily. ‘Hannah! Oh, God, Hannah – I’m sorry!’

  She shook her head. ‘Don’t be.’ Her mouth felt bruised. Her gown had all but slipped from one shoulder. ‘Harry, don’t be.’

  ‘I didn’t mean – Hannah, I can’t imagine what came over me.’ It was no less than the simple truth. To Harry Sherwood, for the most part, the seduction of women came as easily and naturally as breathing; yet in these past days and weeks, as friendship had grown between them, it had never once occurred to him to think of Hannah in such a way. Tonight, however, angry and emotional, his senses blurred by brandy, by the velvet, exotic night and by the sudden discovery of an unexpected and eccentric beauty in that pale, spare-boned face with its wide clear eyes and impossible cloud of hair, it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to kiss her so. God in heaven, how had it come to this? Wasn’t he in enough trouble already? ‘Can you bring yourself to forgive me?’

  Hannah’s good sense had reasserted itself as smoothly as if it had never deserted her. She straightened her gown, tightening the belt, tying a neat knot. ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’ She smiled a little, and again he wondered that he had never seen before the attraction of that vivid, intelligent face. ‘It wasn’t the most unpleasant thing to have happened to me by a long chalk.’ The smile widened. ‘And I did get the distinct impression that I kissed you back.’

  Harry smiled at that, and her heart lurched. Firmly she resisted the urge to experiment further.

  He reached for her hands. ‘Hannah Standish, I truly believe I’ve never met another woman like you.’

  ‘I most certainly hope not.’ Gently she disentangled her hands, aware that until she composed herself – and despite appearances, she was far from being composed – every moment in his company was dangerous in the extreme. These alarming and newly awakened feelings notwithstanding, she had no intention in the world of becoming another scalp at Harry Sherwood’s belt; the thought lifted her chin and stiffened her back a little. ‘It’s very late,’ she said, ‘and we’ve an early start in the morning.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry you were upset. I hope you feel a little better?’

  ‘Yes.’ Surprisingly, it was true.

  She could not – absolutely could not — resist touching him one last time. Serenely she lifted her hands to his shoulders, raised herself a little onto her bare toes and kissed his cheek, very softly. ‘Goodnight, Harry.’

  ‘Goodnight.’ Helplessly confused, he watched her walk into the darkness. She neither turned to look back, nor did she employ any wanton trick in her walk as so many women might have under the circumstances. She simply strode, as she always strode, away from him and disappeared down the stairs to the lower deck.

  Once in her room Hannah stood for a moment leaning against the closed door, head tilted back, the fingers of one hand resting lightly upon her mouth. In thirty years of life she had never once behaved as she had tonight. In thirty years of life s
he had never once experienced that almost primeval surge of excitement, never glimpsed the fearful possibilities of fierce sexual attraction. For the briefest of moments she had understood as she never had before why women so often abandoned their pride and their prudence and gave themselves unconditionally into the perilous bondage of love – or, worse, of infatuation. She trembled still, half from the remembered excitement of that moment, half from pure terror at what might have happened; of how much of herself she might have surrendered.

  One thing was absolutely certain; nothing must come of it. The very thought was absurd to the point of embarrassment. A combination of circumstances had arisen; it was well within her capabilities to ensure that such a thing never happened again.

  She would have been relieved to know, as she slipped once more into her bunk to lie, restless and exasperatingly sleepless, staring into the glimmering darkness, that Harry on deck above her had come to the selfsame conclusion and, if anything, even more firmly.

  * * *

  It was ten days before Harry had the chance to follow up the information he had so unexpectedly picked up from Sheldon Rainsford, ten days of fair winds and exhilarating sailing, ten days in which the great river offered them vistas that ranged from green and Babylonic gardens along the eastern bank above Osyut to the strange angular ramparts of the desert mountains further south; from verdant, fertile fields and huddled mud-built villages that swarmed with life to vast and empty stretches of barren mud and rock and shimmering, sifting sand. In some places the river was encaged by sheer cliffs, their sunlit faces scarred by the dark, shadowy pockmarks of ancient rock tombs. In others the landscape stretched, flat and incandescent with heat, towards Arabia on the one side and Libya on the other, land and sky merging in the molten, metallic colours of a furnace. As they beat south the weather got hotter; days were spent for the most part on the cool, breezy deck or resting in cabins shaded by drawn blinds. The nights, however, were enchanting – warm as an English summer’s day, lit by a moon that was indeed a cool, silver sister to the blazing sun, and that illuminated the exotic landscape in a pale glory of which Hannah, for one, never tired. She had made no fixed plans for this part of the journey, apart from a night spent in the small town of Girgeh, with its picturesque fallen mosque about which each year the changing floodwaters lapped and sucked, bringing it further to ruin, and a visit, much anticipated, to the great temple of Denderah. Two days beyond Denderah was Luxor – Thebes – the jewel of the Nile, where lay what must surely be the best-known and greatest tombs and ruins of the ancient world, and where they were planning to stay for most of the week.

  Both Hannah and Harry kept to their own private resolutions. Neither by word nor by glance did either of them indicate that anything untoward had happened between them. Sometimes, Hannah found herself actually doubting her own memory; the incident had happened so quickly and in such a charged atmosphere that it had taken on something of the unreal quality of a dream. And yet for all their efforts something, undeniably, had changed. A certain comradeship had been growing between them for some time; now it was as if each had seen something in the other which until now had been hidden, and, far from making for embarrassment and awkwardness, as Hannah had at first feared, it had actually strengthened the friendship. They spent long hours together in easy silence upon the shaded passenger deck, Hannah drawing or painting, Harry sprawled upon a chair, sucking at his pipe, watching the ever-changing panorama of the riverbanks. They talked of the things they saw, and of some of the things they had done. Harry told of tiger shoots in India and of living with the proud desert dwellers of Morocco, Hannah of the wonders of Venice and Florence and of the six months she had spent in an apartment overlooking that artists’ river, the Seine, in Paris. She spoke of her conventional parents and her understanding of their bemused and disapproving disappointment in their oddity of a daughter, of Leo and his kindness, of the years spent studying and later nursing under the redoubtable Miss Nightingale. Harry said nothing of his family and little of his personal past, and neither of them mentioned Mattie’s letter or his reaction to it.

  Another pleasure was their shared if inconsequential affection for the pretty, mercurial Laila. The child was for most of the time enchanting, her laughter as ready as a bird’s song. She would swoop from one to the other, teasing and chattering, small and delicate hands moving expressively, blue eyes brilliant against the olive of her smooth skin. That she treated both the nurse who was utterly devoted to her and the crew who were openly in awe of her with less than care or courtesy was a fault for which her background was entirely to blame. By nature she was warm-hearted and impulsive, though her temper was capricious and she could be extremely autocratic. Brought up by a doting father to believe that the world about her existed almost entirely for her amusement and gratification, it said much for her strength of character that she remained a graceful, entertaining and likeable child, though when crossed she could be a termagant. When Harry went riding early one morning without her, she greeted his return with a torrent of furiously tearful reproaches and a well-aimed flower vase. An hour later she was all smiles and happy to help Hannah wind a skein of wool. For either of them to admire an item in a bazaar was for her to buy it on the spot and present it to them; yet when a button was lost from one of her favourite dresses she stormed about the dahabeeyah accusing any member of the crew she came across of having stolen it and threatening the most bloodthirsty of punishments. She treated Harry, to his amusement, as if she owned him, and admired and in some ways emulated Hannah, whilst clearly considering her an elderly lady of no physical charms. Laila was, after all, just fifteen years old, half Hannah’s age, and had been beautiful from the moment of her birth. She had known from the age of three the effect her beauty could have on men of all ages. She had known, too, from the same age, how to get her own way. She had discovered, as Colonel Standish had suspected, before Hannah had ever known it that Harry had been chosen to accompany the Horus and had made her plans accordingly. She had not been in the least surprised that fate had fallen in so very conveniently with her own designs; it was to be expected. What neither Harry nor Hannah suspected was the depth of those designs.

  Laila had first seen Harry Sherwood on her father’s fortieth birthday. A picnic had been arranged with camel- and horse-racing. Harry, despite his damaged leg, had ridden for the garrison, mounted upon a stallion black as his own hair, fleet as the wind and vicious and unpredictable as a striking cobra. He had been in his element, and had won the admiration even of the reckless Bedouin against whom he rode. And Laila, wayward, headstrong, and of an age to fall headlong in love with as unsuitable a man as possible, had marked him for her own. Nothing that had happened since had made her change her mind; on the contrary, these past weeks had further confirmed it. That his attentions to her were light-hearted in the extreme, the courtesies of any man to a lovely and desirable girl, she could not see. She was used to the respect, in some cases the fear, accorded to her father by any man who came near her; of course Harry would be circumspect. He was a soldier, a man of no great means. It would not occur to him that he could approach the daughter of Ayman el Akad as a suitor. She lay in her bunk at night and dreamed of his gratitude and pleasure when they reached the Winter House and her father granted, as he was bound to grant, her dearest wish. It struck her as not in the least bizarre to think so; there had never been anything she had wanted that her father had not provided – why not this? She had long since determined to marry a European, as her father had – it was unthinkable to contemplate the thought of losing her freedom to an Egyptian husband who would expect her to adopt the veil and the all-concealing habarah – and had half expected to find herself parcelled off into one of the great merchant houses of London or Paris. But that was before Harry. Her father had enough money, he did not need more. And she wanted Harry as she had never wanted anything before, as he, quite obviously, wanted her. Nothing could be simpler. Her brother Mohammed, at present at school in England, would be requi
red to make a dynastic marriage; such was the payment for the reward of an empire that would one day be bestowed upon him. But Laila saw no such restrictions upon herself. Harry loved her; even the woman that Hannah had dubbed ‘Madam Mischief’ had seen that, Laila was certain, remembering with smug satisfaction the venomous looks Fenella had directed at her. Her father would give her her heart’s desire. He always had. And so she chattered and laughed and flirted and hugged her secret to herself, delighting in her beloved’s ignorance of the bliss that lay ahead of them. Laila, in short, was a most dangerous of combinations: a child, naïve, charming and greedy, and a woman, determined, blinded by infatuation and believing herself loved.

  And Harry, watching for danger in one direction, entirely failed to perceive it creeping up upon him from another.

  * * *

  They sailed into Luxor, built picturesquely amongst the temples and the standing columns and pylons of the ancient city of Thebes, late in the afternoon, to the accompaniment of their own crew’s enthusiastic drumming and singing. On the western bank two great sitting Colossi watched their coming with ravaged, mutilated faces. Their arrival was welcomed by the dipping flags and saluting guns of the dahabeeyahs already anchored along the bank – including, Hannah saw with pleasure, the Ra – and a long signal from the steam whistle of a less welcome sight, the steamer they had last seen at Osyut. It was with some small difficulty that she avoided looking at Harry to see his reaction, and with even more that she smothered an amused smile.

  The first to come aboard the Horus – indeed he gave the impression of having been waiting eagerly upon the quay since dawn – was Ayman el Akad’s representative in the town, a small, moustachioed man, dapper in the embroidered cloth coat called a gubbeh and a tasselled tarbush. His name was Ali abd Ela, he was honoured and delighted to welcome them to the wonders of Luxor and Thebes, and he bore with him a gift and a loving message for Laila from her father, and a large basket of fruit for the voyagers from himself and his staff. He also had an invitation to a reception to be held in two days’ time in the House of the Waterbirds, on the west bank, owned by an English trader in antiquities, a Mr Charles Mansfield and his wife, who much enjoyed the company of their compatriots as they passed through the city. Many interesting people would be there, he assured them; even the Cook boat had delayed its departure so that its more important passengers might attend.