‘Abdo,’ Hannah said, very quietly, and briefly turned her head into Harry’s shoulder, eyes closed against the terrible sight of death, and against the tears.
Over her bowed head, sombrely, Harry watched the fight as it ebbed and flowed about the still, sprawled figure. Leaderless now, the tribesmen yet fought with a furious courage; but inch by inch, foot by disciplined foot the Lancers came on. And then, at last, the cavalry poured down the hillside, sweeping the last of resistance aside.
Hannah had pulled away from Harry, dashing the back of her hand briefly across her eyes. She looked pale and haggard, her face drawn, dirty and tearstained. Her skirts dragged in the dust and her hair was a bird’s nest. He resisted the foolhardy urge to reach for her, to hold her, to shelter her from a world which he knew all too well, but of which, until today, she had surely lived in tranquil ignorance.
She turned, gathered her torn skirt in her hand.
‘Where are you going?’
She hardly looked at him. ‘Where do you think? Laila’s down there somewhere. And Abdo –’ She stopped.
‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘Abdo is dead.’
‘I know,’ she said, undaunted. ‘But I still have to see for myself.’
The soldiers were disarming and rounding up those Dervishes left standing. The occasional shot still rang out as some put up a last desperate fight or tried to escape. A couple broke and ran for the cliff path, and were cut down before they could reach it. An officer sat on a small, sturdy horse, watching order being brought to chaos. Harry pulled a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket, stepped to the path’s edge, waving it in a sweep above his head. ‘Hello there!’ he called.
Several faces turned up towards them, in astonishment. Hannah stepped forward to join him.
The young officer shaded his eyes with his hand, then gestured. ‘Come on down.’ His words carried clearly in the hot air.
They scrambled down the stony track, aware of curiosity in the eyes that watched them. Once on the valley floor, Hannah walked directly to where Abdo’s body lay, dropped to one knee beside it, reaching to turn the handsome head with its wide, staring eyes. Flies buzzed with stomach-turning persistence. She brushed them away, gently drew down the lids over the vacant eyes, sat back upon her heels, head bowed. Harry had followed her, and stood beside her, looking down. ‘How did he know?’ he asked, very low.
The words for a moment made no sense. She shook her head, not looking at him. ‘Know what?’
‘“My brothers”, he said, “and yours.” How did he know?’ There was an agonized depth of uncertainty in his voice.
Hannah closed her tired, burning eyes, tilted her head wearily back. ‘Oh, Harry! You fool! He didn’t know – of course he didn’t know! And he wouldn’t have cared if he had. Any more than I do!’ Tears were running unchecked from the corners of her eyes, streaking her thin, dusty cheeks. ‘Won’t you ever understand? Must you always live in a cage of your own making?’ She opened her eyes suddenly, looking directly up at him. Others were moving about them; the officer’s horse stepped delicately around the bloodied heaps of bodies towards them. ‘Did he truly save your life?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he is dead.’ She watched him for a long moment, through tears. ‘But there is a way to repay the debt that you owe him, even now. Isn’t there?’
She saw in his face that he understood. Then he shook his head, fiercely. ‘I can’t. Hannah, I can’t.’
She bowed her head for a moment, looking at Abdo’s stiffening body. A tear dripped from her chin and marked her dusty blouse. ‘No, of course not,’ she said then, and stood, refusing his helping hand, her face steeled against him, her long mouth set. ‘Of course not.’
‘Hannah!’
‘Would you be Captain Harry Sherwood?’ The young officer’s voice was light and pleasant, a voice to be heard on a summer’s afternoon over the chink of tea cups in an English garden. They turned. The young man’s lean, fair face was burned to gold by the desert sun, his blond moustache was bleached almost to white.
Harry came to attention, saluted, extended a hand. ‘Of the Prince of Wales’ Own.’
The young man leaned down to shake the proffered hand. ‘Lieutenant Hubert Burrows, Sir. Of the Twenty-first. Glad to have found you in time.’ He turned sharp blue eyes upon Hannah. ‘Miss Hannah Standish?’
‘Yes.’ Hannah turned from Harry to the newcomer. ‘How did you know?’ Her voice was calm and crisp. Only her face showed the tell-tale traces of her tears.
‘You sent a message. To Captain Sherwood here. It was delivered after Captain Sherwood had left Aswan, to your Reis, Hassan. He appears to be a man of unusual good sense. When Captain Sherwood did not return he brought the note to the garrison.’
There was a moment’s silence. Every last vestige of blood appeared to have drained from Hannah’s face. Harry stepped towards her. She drew back from him. ‘My note?’ she asked at last. ‘That I sent with the child?’
‘Yes.’
She swayed, very slightly. Harry, seeing her face, knew better than to attempt to touch her.
‘Lieutenant, there is a child somewhere in the house – a girl.’ She spoke quite clearly. ‘Ayman el Akad’s daughter Laila. May I look for her?’
‘Not alone.’ The lieutenant gave quick orders. A couple of troopers fell in beside Hannah. ‘When you find her,’ the young man’s face was not unsympathetic, ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to tell her that her father is dead. We found his body.’ He jerked his head towards the compound.
‘I’ll tell her.’ Hannah spoke still with a cool control so at odds with her dishevelled appearance and haggard looks that Harry saw one trooper glance at another with raised brow and a rolling eye; a real schoolma’am we’ve got here, said the look.
‘I’ll come with you,’ he said.
She shook her head, not looking at him. ‘No. Laila won’t want to see you. Of all people.’ He could not believe the chill in her voice. She turned at last, and her face was a mask. ‘At least let me find Laila. At least let me salvage something from this vicious mess.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ he said.
‘It was my message,’ she said flatly. Her hands lifted to her earlobes, dropped to her side again. ‘They were my pretty earbobs.’ She smiled a small and bitter smile. ‘It is Abdo’s loss that I am not the kind of female that the world so admires. If I had collapsed in a suitably helpless heap and not made the pathetic attempt to save myself, he would have been with us still, would he not?’ She saw his expression begin to change and shook her head, sharply and decisively, her hands raised against him. ‘Don’t try to help me, Harry. And I won’t try to help you. That would seem the most sensible thing all round, don’t you agree?’ There was a small silence; when she spoke again her voice was softer, but no less clear. ‘The Spanish say that hell is paved with good intentions. Did you know that? I never until now realized what it meant.’
She turned and strode, limp skirts dragging in the dust, towards the Winter House, followed by her escort. The lieutenant’s horse moved a little, restlessly. He curbed it one-handed, looking after Hannah. ‘A rather remarkable woman, I suspect?’ There was the barest suggestion of a question in the words.
Harry did not reply.
Hannah found Laila huddled against a wall in a small room in the women’s quarters of the house. Her nurse stood guard over her, ready to rend with her bare hands anyone who came near. When she saw Hannah, however, she burst into ready tears. ‘It’s all right, Fatma,’ Hannah said, steadily, ‘it’s me. It’s all over.’ She approached the terrified child who, two days earlier, had been ready to see her sold into bondage. ‘Laila – come now, my dear. It’s me, Hannah.’
* * *
The Battle of Omdurman, in which some eight thousand British soldiers and seventeen thousand Egyptian and Sudanese troops faced over fifty thousand fanatical tribesmen in the blazingly hostile environment of the Sudanese desert, was fought on 2 September 1898, just seven months af
ter Harry took stiff and formal leave of Hannah to return to Cairo, Hannah having opted to stay in the south to care for Laila until arrangements could be made for her brother to return to Egypt. It was ironic that, in the end, it was Hannah who observed the battle, having volunteered her services to the always hard-pressed army surgeons, whilst Harry, his Commission resigned, made his way north to Alexandria to take passage to Europe. Hannah it was who saw wave after wave of Dervishes, armed with bows and arrows, spears and swords, throw themselves against the well-armed, well-organized wall of British firepower. Courage there was on both sides; but courage could stand for nothing given the inequality of arms, and the tribesmen, despite their advantage of numbers, faced with rifles, machine guns and howitzers, were slaughtered as Abdo had foreseen. Though the defeat was not without honour – no man in Kitchener’s army would forget the wild valour with which the Dervish forces, despite the odds, threw themselves over and again into the attack – in the end it was complete, and British pride and the British public were satisfied. Gordon and the defeat at Khartoum had at last been avenged. Hannah, labouring in the field hospital to help save the torn and bloodied bodies that were stretchered in, hour after hour, could only comfort herself with the knowledge that the single consignment of guns she had been unwittingly instrumental in preventing Abdo from capturing and delivering to his countrymen would certainly not have been enough to sway the battle, would simply, indeed, have been the cause of even more carnage; and that, had Abdo not died as he had, then he would almost certainly have been cut down here, just as uselessly, with his brothers.
She had had more than enough weary and lonely time since that awful day to remember, to grieve, to attempt to rationalize. And to regret.
She returned to Cairo a few days after the battle with a hospital train full of wounded. She busied herself for the whole of the trip, calm, cheerful and efficient, a popular figure with the injured men and officers for whom she so diligently cared. It was not too hard to ensure that she allowed herself scarcely a moment to gaze from the train windows at the moving vista of the Nile and its green, teeming banks, of the ancient sites and temples she had set out to visit with such excitement those long months before. Once or twice, despite herself, a scene caught her eye: a dahabeeyah, graceful sail belling, running carefree before the wind, a camel train winding its way across the vast sunlit spaces of the desert, the fallen columns of a great temple, the sand sifting about it. But each time she would turn away swiftly, distracting herself from her own pain by tending those about her whose sufferings were physical and could at least be eased.
Back in Cairo, and with her charges handed over to the military hospital, she made prompt arrangements to return to England. Harry had of course reported fully to her uncle the events in Aswan before leaving. There had been no question of his remaining; Fenella Hampshire made no idle threats. By the time Harry had returned to Cairo, the story of his parentage was common knowledge. His last days in the garrison, Hannah gathered, had been far from uneventful, several of his erstwhile friends and comrades taking it unkindly that such an outrageous deceit should have been practised upon them.
‘Landed young Archie Douglas in hospital with a broken arm and a face that looked as if it had been kicked by a camel!’ the colonel complained. ‘And Andy Carter fared no better – regimental boxing champion, and out of fighting for the next six months; that bounder Sherwood stamped on his hand! Always knew there was something wrong with that man – something not quite the thing, you know?’
‘I have no doubt that whatever happened to Carter he most thoroughly deserved it,’ Hannah said, caustically. ‘Did it occur to anyone to enquire what he was trying to do when Harry chose to stamp on his hand? Knowing the man, I’d say Carter’s lucky to have a hand left to mend. And if there’s anything wrong with Harry Sherwood –’ oh, the delight, the painful delight, simply in speaking the name aloud! ‘– and there is plenty wrong with him, I don’t deny that, it isn’t that his father was black, white or sky blue, nor that he was slave or free! It is rather that he accepts your terms and values instead of defying them and forging his own! In his own way he’s as bad as you are! You disgust me. All of you.’ It was said perfectly and blisteringly quietly, and it gave Hannah great pleasure to forbear from slamming the door behind her. But later, in the privacy of her room, it took the most stubborn marshalling of will not to scream, or to break something when she allowed herself to contemplate Harry’s last harsh days in Cairo, spent as an outcast within an institution of which he had believed himself to be an accepted and integral part and which had been substitute home and family for fifteen years. For the briefest of moments she allowed herself to think of him; to remember his voice, his laughter, the turn of his head, the feel of his lips on hers, and to wonder where he was, what he was doing, but such self-indulgence was necessarily brief. She had long ago realized the danger of such thoughts to her own fragile equilibrium, and had perfected to an art her ability to shut them off, to drive them away with physical activity and a determined mind. It was, she thought a little ruefully as she set about the practical business of list-making and packing to return to England, what romanticists might term her heart that, for the first time in her life, refused to be taken in by such nonsense. For a moment her busy hands stilled, and she saw, as she had seen so often, Harry’s face in the clear, harsh sunlight of a dusty, blood-drenched desert morning as he had stood looking down at Abdo’s body and recognized the debt and its payment; and had known, of course – why wouldn’t he? – so much better than she, exactly what she had been asking of him. ‘I can’t,’ he had said. ‘Hannah, I can’t!’
She closed her eyes against a sudden, strange spasm of almost physical pain. Then, briskly, she reached for pen and paper. If she did not make a list of the things she would not require on the voyage, then the packing would be chaos of quite the worst kind.
* * *
The SS Mauritius was to leave Alexandria on 12 November, heading for the ports of northern France via Italy, Portugal and Spain. With a Mary so relieved to be leaving Egypt that she checked the time anxiously every half an hour, as if willing the minutes to pass, Hannah found herself comfortably ensconced in a reasonably sized cabin on the upper deck. They boarded the ship two days before she was due to leave and settled themselves into their quarters very quickly. Hannah, leaning on the rail outside the cabin and watching the bustle of the quay below, found herself now as eager to leave as was her maid. For the best part of her adult life she had longed to visit Egypt. From the moment she had set foot on Egyptian soil she had been fascinated by the place; but now the charm was gone. Every sight, every sound, every smell brought back a memory she would rather be rid of. The sight of a tall, graceful Nubian walking through the crowded bazaar stopped her heart and brought tears to her eyes. The sound of the muezzin, echoing through the dove-grey light of dawn over the sleeping city, brought back with perfect clarity the gentle movement of the dahabeeyah as she lay moored in the reedbeds of the Nile, the slap of the water, the call of the egrets, the sound of Harry’s voice. No. The time for Egypt was done. Perhaps one day, when she was an old, old lady she would tell her wide-eyed grandchildren the improbable story of capture and imprisonment in a desert valley, of how a message entrusted to a small boy for the payment of a pretty pair of earbobs had prevented el Akad’s guns from reaching the Dervishes, and had caused the death of an enemy who had been a friend. Perhaps. For now she wanted nothing but to leave. The Mauritius was to stop at Brindisi, and at Lisbon. She had never visited Portugal. It would make a very nice change.
‘Miss Hannah?’ Mary, round, pretty face faintly puzzled, had appeared at her elbow. In her hand she held a small, square envelope. ‘I found this.’ She held it out to Hannah.
‘Found it? Found it where? What is it?’
‘In the cabin. It’s addressed to you.’
‘Ah.’ Hannah took it. ‘Thank goodness we leave in a couple of hours. This is undoubtedly from someone’s second cousin three times r
emoved who would be delighted if we’d –’ She stopped. There was a very long silence. The paper trembled very slightly between her fingers.
‘Miss Hannah? Is everything all right?’
‘What? Oh, yes.’ In a vague gesture Hannah put her fingertips to her forehead for a moment. ‘Yes, everything is perfectly all right. Has the other trunk turned up?’
‘Oh, yes, Miss – ’twas in the hold all the time.’
‘Good. Oh, good.’
Mary peered at her. ‘You sure you’re all right, Miss?’ she asked, perplexed.
‘I’m quite well, Mary. Thank you.’ Hannah stood for a long while after Mary had left, the note still in her hand. At last, with an effort far beyond that needed for such a simple movement, she pushed herself away from the rail, and turned towards the gangway that led down to the lower decks.
He was waiting where he had said he would be. He was shockingly thin, his skin yellowed, the lustrous dark eyes dull and deep-shadowed.
She joined him at the rail. This deck was much closer to the comings and goings of the quay. Men shouted, donkeys brayed, camels snorted, compulsively ill-natured, lines of patient porters trudged up and down the narrow gangplanks, loading supplies for the voyage.
‘Hannah,’ he said.
‘Harry.’
‘How are you?’
‘Well, thank you. And you?’ The stupid, stilted words echoed flatly in her brain.
He spread his long-fingered hands, smiled swiftly. Her heart turned. ‘As you see.’
‘You look,’ she said, with charitable understatement, ‘as if you haven’t slept in a month.’
He shrugged. Where and when he had slept in these past months was not, as it happened, a subject he was happy to dwell upon.
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