‘She called me a little half-breed!’ Laila had sobbed. ‘She said the most awful things! And she was smiling, smiling all the time.’ Hannah’s lips tightened again with an almost uncontrollable fury. Not for the first time that evening she wished for a few quiet moments alone with Fenella Hampshire.
‘Abusive?’ she could hear the puzzlement, the beginnings of anger in Harry’s tone. ‘How, abusive?’
It was not in Hannah’s nature to be anything but straightforward. ‘She told her that your interest in Laila was based entirely upon what she chose to describe as Laila’s “black blood”. She said you could not mate with a respectable white woman because –’ she took a breath, ‘– because, she said, by your own admission to her you yourself are half black. She said – she said your father was a Negro slave. She used, needless to say, the most offensive language possible.’ She turned to face his deadly silence. ‘I’m sorry. But I had to tell you. You had to know. Harry, she’s told Laila – she enjoyed telling her. She’ll tell others. It’s as certain as the day!’
He had not moved; seemed barely to be breathing. His face was blank with shock.
‘Harry?’ she asked, gently. ‘It’s true?’ She had long since drawn her own conclusion; not even Fenella would dare to spread such calumny had it been ill-based.
For a long moment he neither moved nor spoke, then he raised bleak eyes to hers. ‘That my father was a slave? Yes, it’s true. But that I would ever dream of misusing a child’s trust in such a way?’
‘No! Harry, of course not! I never for one moment believed that you would.’ For a second, faced with the terrible depth of his distress, her own hard-held control all but failed her. Yet she had learned in a hard school that to nurse a desperately wounded man one must keep a clear head and above all a cool and unemotional heart. ‘Laila has gone to her father’s agent’s house,’ she said, after a moment, when her voice once more was flawlessly calm. ‘She insisted, I could not prevent it. She says she will not come back aboard the Horus. One can’t blame her; she really is most terribly confused and distressed. She wants to leave Luxor tomorrow, overland for Aswan and the Winter House.’
He shook his head, blindly. ‘She surely doesn’t believe what that poisonous woman told her? She surely doesn’t think that I would –?’ He stopped, dropped his face into his hands.
‘She doesn’t know what to believe. Harry, she has no defences against a woman like Fenella Hampshire.’
‘I’ll talk to her. I’ll talk to her tomorrow –’
‘I doubt she’ll listen. If you have to tell her – and you do – that there was truth in what Fenella told her, then how is she to understand where to draw the line? She’s a child – and it has to be said, charming as she is, a spoiled and self-centred child. Listen.’ Hannah moved to him at last, dropped to one knee on the deck before him, took his hand. ‘Talk to her by all means, if she’ll allow it. But if not, let her go. I’ll go with her – she’s in my charge, and I cannot do anything but see her safe into her father’s care. We can take a couple of men from the crew, and anyway we’ll be perfectly safe travelling by train. And while I’m with her, I’ll talk to her; she’ll listen, in the end she’ll listen, I’m sure. And in the meanwhile –’ She paused.
‘And in the meanwhile,’ he said, bleakly smiling, taking his hand from hers and standing abruptly, ‘in the meanwhile my ghastly secret is out – or soon will be – and my career, such as it has been, in Her Britannic Majesty’s bastard army is over.’
She said nothing. They both knew it to be the simple truth.
‘Why?’ she asked after a moment, coming to her feet beside him. ‘Harry, in God’s name! Why did you tell her?’
‘I was drunk. And when I’m drunk I’m inclined to take risks. Haven’t you noticed?’ His voice was grimly self-derisive; he could not be blamed, she told herself, flinching, for the fact that another, more personal interpretation might be put on the words.
He walked to the rail, leaned on it. Again, painfully, she was reminded of that other night; and thinking of it, some small illumination suddenly lit the puzzle of Harry’s reaction to his mother’s letter. There were so many questions. So much she wanted to know.
‘You’ll take the dahabeeyah on to Aswan?’ she asked. ‘I can take Laila to her father’s house and meet you there.’
Harry nodded. His face was drawn, the wound stood out, black against the bleached skin. With quiet movements she busied herself for a moment, came to him with a small glass, half full. She proffered it. ‘Strictly medicinal.’
He took it without a word, tossed it back.
She walked back to the table, refilled the glass. Again he took it. Turned from her, looking into the night. The breeze fluttered the awning, lifted their hair, whispered in the rigging.
‘When she told me – my mother – I couldn’t – wouldn’t! – believe it. I was eighteen years old. I was in love. I was a normal, ordinary English boy, living a normal, ordinary English life. And then she told me.’
Hannah waited while he fought the battle for composure. ‘What? What did she tell you?’
‘That my father was a slave.’ Suddenly his head went back. The hand holding the glass shook. ‘Damn his soul to hell – my father was a slave!’
‘How?’ she asked, dismissing with calm practicality the desire to scream, to burst into useless tears. ‘How did it happen?’
‘What?’ He turned his head blindly.
Relentlessly patient, she repeated, ‘How did it happen?’ She remembered the letter, the clear, intelligent, sensitive letter. She had sensed a kindred spirit. So much now had become clearer, so much more obscure. ‘Harry – won’t you tell me?’
‘I don’t know. I – don’t remember.’ Mattie’s words of explanation he had heard through a merciless anger; he could barely recall them. He passed the back of his hand across his mouth. Each word was an effort. ‘It was during the war – the American war – the man was brother to my fa– to my mother’s husband. They were left alone – caught in Sherman’s march to the sea –’
‘So.’ Hannah considered that. ‘You’re saying – your mother wasn’t –’ Even for a woman as strong-minded as she, the subject was so indelicate she could not bring herself to finish the sentence.
‘Forced?’ Harry threw back his head and laughed. She steeled herself against the sound. ‘Oh no. Oh, absolutely not. She was at pains to point that out. She loved him, Hannah.’ His voice dropped so low she could barely hear it, but the venom in it turned her blood cold. ‘The bitch loved him,’ he said.
‘And why not?’ Sudden anger burned. ‘What are you saying? That the colour of a man’s skin should make him an outcast? That the blood of such a man through no fault of his own stains his character, makes him less than human? That it is some sort of crime for a woman to love such a man?’ Only then, looking into his face, did she realize what she was saying. Only then, in his face, did she see at last the barbarous pain he had suffered.
There was a very long moment’s silence. ‘No, Harry,’ she said then, quietly, ‘you’re wrong. Entirely wrong.’
His smile was savage. ‘You think so?’
‘I know so.’ Very deliberately she put her hands to his face, brought his lips to hers, kissed him as he, once, had kissed her. In that moment she cared nothing for what of herself she might be betraying; in that moment she would have given anything he asked.
He wrapped his arms about her, stood for a long while, head bowed, his cheek on her hair. When at last they stepped apart he was calmer. That she was not she took care to hide, taking refuge in short-term organization. ‘So it’s agreed?’ she asked, briskly. ‘I’ll take Laila to her father – you and Abdo sail the Horus on to Aswan, and I’ll meet you there.’
‘Yes.’ He had stepped away from her, self-absorbed, made no attempt to touch her, barely looked at her.
‘What will you do?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know. Resign my Commission, of course. Go back to the Legion, perhaps. No-one
cares who you are there.’
She swallowed sharp, perhaps even bitter words; thus far she would go, but no further. Would Harry Sherwood ever learn, she wondered, that he was not the only one in the world with pride? The thought, if nothing else, served to clear her head and edge her voice with a dispassionate clarity. ‘I still don’t understand. All these years – and now this. Why did you tell her? Fenella Hampshire of all people? Drunk or sober, you must have known what a risk you were taking? Sooner or later only harm could have come of it.’
Harry took a moment to answer. The wind had risen further. The water slapped choppily at the side of the boat, the Horus shifted on the swell. ‘I’ve known men go into battle for the first time, and discover terror,’ he said at last, ‘then again, and again, only to discover that the fear worsens, and the anticipation becomes even worse than the reality. It eats at them. The fear of death. The fear of mutilation. The fear of cowardice.’
She had stilled, was watching him, puzzled. ‘You’ve known such fear?’
He shook his head. ‘Not of battle, no. That isn’t my devil, thank God. We’re all made differently. Different things frighten us, do they not?’
She said nothing, beginning to understand.
‘I have known such men,’ he continued thoughtfully after a moment, as if she had not interrupted, ‘to throw themselves upon an enemy bayonet. To invite, at last, that which they most fear.’
The furled sail clapped above them. The pages of a magazine riffled open.
She was desperate to leave him; equally desperate to stay. ‘Go to bed, Hannah,’ he said. ‘There is nothing you can do.’
She left him at the rail, looking into the windy night. The tears she kept at bay until at last she was alone.
* * *
Laila would not speak to Harry; nothing would persuade her. She was a hurt child, and like any hurt child she wanted to go home. There was no swaying her. A fruitless day was wasted before Harry accepted the inevitable and agreed to Hannah’s plan. He still had a job to do, and now more than ever he wanted to do it well. With Hannah and Laila safely out of the way, he and Abdo would have a freer hand. Who knew, perhaps they would pick up the trail of the guns again; for certain he was, now, that guns had been stored in the slave warehouse. Sailing steadily and with no stops for sightseeing or socializing, they should reach Aswan in four or five days. Hannah would get there well before them; she would settle Laila in her father’s house, and meet them when they arrived. Whatever mischief the mendacious Mrs Hampshire planned could not harm him until he got back to Cairo. Willy nilly then he supposed he would have to resign his Commission – before rather than after such action was requested of him; he would think no further than that.
The cool, windy weather held. The Horus made excellent time up the river. Both Abdo and the Reis seemed to accept without question Hannah’s story that Laila was feeling unwell and had decided to take the quicker land route to the Winter House and the comforts and luxuries of home. For Harry these few days were far from unhappy; much as he had enjoyed the company of the women, there was something to be said for the Spartan male regime that now held sway on the dahabeeyah. There were no trips to temples and ruins, no polite tea-parties on the Ra, no requests for early stops and late starts, no endless demands upon his courtesy and his patience. He had time to think, time to come to terms with what had happened; time, even to convince himself that in the end all would be to the good. There were many places in the world where a man with Harry Sherwood’s skills and reputation could sell his strong arm and his sword with no questions asked; there were lands unexplored and adventures still to be experienced; gold to be earned, if a man were not too fastidious. In the meantime, with the ladies safely out of the way and time on his hands, he took Abdo up on his offer of knife-throwing lessons, and watched himself with strange dispassion as, at first, he steeled himself against flinching from the touch of the other man’s hand as he demonstrated the heft and hold of the knife, the closeness of his body as he stood behind him guiding his arm and his eye to the target. After two days he could send the blade whistling silently into a target a few inches wide; by the time Aswan hovered, shimmering, upon the horizon like a domed and minareted mirage, he could hit the exact spot almost every time. And meanwhile in those days an ease had grown between the two men that Harry would never have believed possible just a short time before. The shift in perception that he had to admit had begun with Hannah’s withering anger at his attitude to Abdo, and had been reinforced when Abdo had saved his life at obvious risk to his own, was completed as they worked together helping to sail the dahabeeyah or honing and perfecting their expertise with the deadly throwing knives. And, as can so often happen, with that change came others, as important, as one room may lead onto another once the key to the door has been discovered. Looking back, Harry found himself uncomfortable with the recollection of his reaction to his mother’s last letter; he would write, he told himself, not now, but soon, and wish her well. To his surprise the thought was a quite extraordinarily soothing one.
However, as he stood in the prow of the Horus beneath the graceful billow of sail, watching the city of Aswan move closer with each bend of the great river, five days after they had left Luxor, such domestic thoughts were far from his mind. For by then he had found the brooch, and an obstinate, unsettling unease made him glance up at the full sail, urging the dahabeeyah on, anxious to make landfall; anxious above all to see Hannah’s wide, calm smile, hear the crisp and confident voice – to know that the wild suspicions that assailed him were as laughable as his good sense told him they were; to know that she was safe.
Harry had found the brooch the day before, wedged between the polished floorboards of the upper deck when he had bent to pick up a book. The thing had glittered at him as the dahabeeyah came about and the sun swept the deck. Prising it up with his fingernail, he had recognized it as the jewelled trinket he had helped Laila to pin to her robe on the day they had arrived at Luxor. A scarab, in gold, with extended claws that entrapped a carved hieroglyph…
He had looked at it for a long time; then swiftly dropped it in his pocket, spun on his heels and ran down the stairs that led to the sleeping quarters.
Laila’s departure, as might be expected, had been chaotic. Many of her possessions were still in her small cabin, scattered like a child’s discarded toys. He picked up a chased silver mirror; the scarab and its small mysterious sign was set upon the back. A hairbrush too carried the mark, and a tiny box that held a silken powder puff. The mark of Ayman el Akad, Laila’s father.
The mark Harry had seen upon the broken lid of the box in the slave-pen at Luxor, where three men had tried to kill him.
Chapter Eighteen
Harry well knew how unlikely it was that Hannah could possibly be on the quayside at Aswan awaiting them. However, as the Horus was deftly manoeuvred through the reefs, sandbanks and the busy river traffic and slipped into her mooring, still he hoped, and was disappointed when she was not. Nor, he quickly discovered, when he went ashore to make enquiries and to put the Horus on the governor’s list to be taken up the cataracts two days hence, was she registered at either of the tourist hotels she had mentioned. No-one of their acquaintance, so far as Harry could see, had reached Aswan before them; the Ra was far behind and there were no other dahabeeyahs he recognized. Yet, he told himself, there was the possibility that she had met with old friends, or made some new acquaintance – or, he supposed, even more likely, that she had been invited to stay with Laila and her father at the Winter House for a couple of days. She could not have known exactly when the Horus would arrive. Wherever she was, sooner or later news would reach her, and she would come.
He got back to the Horus in the heat of mid-morning, finding to his surprise that Abdo meanwhile had gone ashore and not returned. With a patience that wore thinner with each hour and a growing concern that no attempt at rationalization could quell, he waited alone for Hannah, standing by the rail, watching the business of the thronge
d and noisy beach, upon which all sorts of commerce thrived, expecting at any moment to see the pale smiling face and the wiry red-gold mop coming towards him. But the morning wore on, and there was no sign. A camel train arrived to unload its bales onto a flat-bottomed cargo-boat, the usual swarms of donkey-boys and souvenir-sellers besieged the dahabeeyah, their wares different here from those he had seen further north. For Aswan was the gateway to Nubia, and the goods for sale here were of almost pagan workmanship: silver brooches and ivory bangles, great ostrich feathers, native spears, bows and arrows. He waved the eager, grasping hands away impatiently; and still there was neither sign nor news of Hannah.
Aswan was another baking stop for the crew of the dahabeeyah. Harry watched as the dragoman set off in search of flour, and the Reis hurried ashore to book a public oven. The day had begun overcast and uncomfortably hot. The lush green vegetation that edged the banks and clothed the great, bouldered Elephantine Island that here split the river into two channels before it plunged south into the cataracts hung limp and still. At last, in mid-afternoon, Harry could stand it no longer. On his exploration of the town that morning he had marked the existence of a stables behind the bazaar. He had also made enquiries as to the whereabouts of Ayman el Akad’s Winter House, and had had pointed out to him the wide, stony, well-used track that led the four or five miles upstream through the granite heights of the Arabian bank to the valley where the house was situated. He would wait no longer; the logical likelihood was that Hannah was at the Winter House, perfectly well and safe. He would ride out and let her know that the Horus had arrived, her passage up the First Cataract to Philae – an experience he knew Hannah to be anticipating with some excitement – booked for the day after next. At the mere thought of physical action he felt more cheerful. A desert ride after the past few days cooped up on the Horus would do him good, and once the niggling worry of Hannah’s whereabouts and safety had been settled, he could get back to the business of the guns and of his own future. The steamer on which Fenella was travelling had proceeded no further south than the barrier of Aswan and the cataracts, and had already turned back; it had passed them yesterday on its return voyage to Cairo. It would not be long before the woman Hannah had nicknamed so appropriately ‘Madam Mischief’ would be well placed to cause whatever mayhem she had decided upon. Oddly, he found the thought far less disturbing than he would previously have believed possible. The secret he had struggled for so long to conceal was out, and there was nothing he could do about it. In some ways it was a relief – a shadow whose fearful threat had been dispersed by facing it in sunlight. There were other places than Egypt, other armies than the British, other ways of measuring self-esteem than by blood.
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