No Place For a Lady

by Gill Paul

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, smiling and nodding.

  He put his hand on his chest and uttered the first word he had said since his arrival: ‘Emir.’

  ‘Emir,’ Lucy repeated, with a burst of pleasure. She had been starting to worry he’d been struck dumb by his injuries. Now she realised it wasn’t that; he had just been waiting until he was sure he was safe.

  The structure of Lucy’s days changed once she had a companion. Every morning Emir made bread for breakfast and they sat together at table, teaching each other words from their respective languages: ‘bread’ was ‘ekmek’; ‘table’ was ‘masa’; ‘garden’ was ‘bahçe’; pianoforte was ‘piyano’. Emir seemed determined to contribute to the household and found a fishing line with which he was very successful at catching fish (balık) from the rocks at the shoreline. He helped in the garden, took turns at scrubbing the laundry and he did his share of cleaning as well. Lucy was astonished at his resourcefulness; she hadn’t even noticed there was an oven in the kitchen before he arrived. She liked to watch him kneading the dough, just as Mrs Dunstan had, and loved eating the bread as soon as it had cooled enough not to burn the mouth.

  Murad was astonished when next he came to visit and they presented him with a proper meal of fish, vegetables and bread. Lucy guessed from the eagerness with which he wolfed it down that it was the first food he’d eaten for some time.

  ‘That was delicious. Thank you both,’ he said in English and then in Turkish. ‘It always does me good to come here and escape from the madness.’

  ‘What is happening in the war?’ Lucy wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but the question slipped out anyhow.

  ‘It’s the same old shelling and sniper fire across the lines. No progress either way. Sometimes I think we will be here for years, because each side has dug trenches and redoubts from which they cannot be budged.’ He seemed exhausted and careworn. ‘I came here to fight for my country, so that we will not be overrun by Russians trampling on our precious Ottoman heritage, but it is hard to keep sight of those aims now. Most men simply focus on staying alive.’

  ‘Tell me about your home town,’ she asked. ‘Smyrna, I think you called it?’

  ‘Yes. It is an ancient city on the Aegean coast where people of many different cultures live: Greeks, Turks, Jews, Mamluks, each in their own neighbourhoods. There is a large harbour, and surrounding the town in every direction there are orchards of fruit trees that are covered in blossom in spring.’

  ‘Is it hot there?’

  ‘In summer, yes; much hotter than here. Winter is pleasantly mild and there is still plenty of sunshine.’

  ‘It sounds wonderful.’ She smiled. Murad seemed happy talking of his home. Unlike her, he had a future to look forward to.

  Emir asked him something and after a brief exchange in Turkish, Murad told Lucy: ‘It’s Emir’s birthday today. He’s sixteen. He doesn’t look it, does he?’

  Lucy smiled and clapped her hands in congratulation. ‘What date is it?’ she asked. When Murad told her it was 20th March 1855 she realised that her own nineteenth birthday had passed without her noticing. It was over a year since she and Charlie had married, and eleven months since they had left British soil. Sadness descended as she thought back to the excitement of that day when they embraced in their tiny cabin and he told her that he was the happiest man in the world.

  Murad and Emir had another exchange in Turkish then Murad translated for Lucy: ‘Emir was asking if he should go back to his company now but I suggested he stay here to recuperate a while longer, if that’s acceptable to you.’

  ‘I would be happy for him to stay. He must remain longer, as he is teaching me Turkish.’ To demonstrate, she said, ‘Ismim Lucy’, meaning, ‘my name is Lucy.’

  When she went to the music room to play piano for them that evening, she chose Mozart’s piano sonata number 11 in A-minor, otherwise known as ‘The Turkish March’, and she could tell it lifted Murad’s spirits. Music could do that: it had always had a powerful influence on her own mood but it had never held as much importance for her as it did now in the dacha, where it was the medicine helping to heal her broken heart.

  A few nights later, Lucy awoke to the sound of men’s voices in the house. She heard them calling to each other and then there was a crash. For a moment, she froze, terrified: who could it be? Were they Russian soldiers, or the Tartar bands that she had been told roamed the countryside scavenging for food? She got up and pulled on the wool cloak, grabbed the pistol from beneath her bed, then opened the door to the landing. Her hand was shaking and she pointed the pistol downwards in case it should accidentally discharge. She soon realised Emir had gone ahead of her because she could hear him arguing with the intruders in the kitchen: that meant they must be Turkish. She continued softly down the stairs and Emir emerged to meet her.

  ‘Turkish,’ he said. ‘Hungry.’ He pointed to his mouth.

  ‘Give them some bread and soup,’ Lucy told him. ‘How many are there?’ She held up her fingers: two? Three?

  He held up four fingers. There wasn’t sufficient to feed four men but they could share what there was.

  ‘Sleep?’ Emir asked.

  It was the middle of the night, so it seemed churlish to ask the men to leave. Besides, they might well refuse. While they were eating in the kitchen, Lucy put the dustsheets back on the sofas in the drawing room and brought down some blankets so the men could sleep there. There were two spare bedrooms but she didn’t want them on the same floor as her, didn’t want them getting comfortable and deciding to stay longer than one night. She pushed the mahogany bureau in front of her bedroom door, but still she found it difficult to get back to sleep.

  Next morning she lay in bed listening as Emir spoke to them and then the door banged. She waited until she heard their horses galloping away before descending.

  ‘Why were they here?’ she asked. She had found that Emir understood simple sentences in English, which was more than she did in Turkish.

  ‘Army …’ he said then motioned running away. ‘Home.’

  They were deserters. She supposed they would try to make their way back to Turkey now. That was a relief because it meant they were unlikely to return, but still her sense of security in the remote dacha was shaken. If she had been on her own, without Emir to translate, anything could have happened. Probably they had not seen a woman for a long time. Maybe they would have treated her like one of those women for sale who hung around the edges of army camps looking for customers. They could even have killed her and taken over the dacha for themselves. Somehow Emir had handled the situation with a maturity beyond his years and everything had turned out well. She was very grateful.

  ‘You must stay here. I need you,’ she told him, using sign language to underline her meaning.

  He seemed pleased: ‘Yes.’

  The intrusion of the outside world had the effect of making Lucy start to think about what she would do once the war was over. The owners of the dacha would presumably return, so it was impossible for her to stay there, much as she would have liked to. In the end there would be nothing else to do but sail home to Britain, to Dorothea and her father. She hoped they would not repudiate her when she arrived on the doorstep. It was hard to understand how they could have forgotten her. Her father, her mother, her childhood, all were distant memories from a far-off place but she forced herself to look back and think about the history of the gulf that separated them.

  Of course, it was all rooted in her mother’s illness and Dorothea guarding the door to the sick room as if she alone were the rightful daughter. She had been the only one at their mother’s deathbed and had organised the funeral without consultation. It was Lucy’s misfortune to have been born to elderly parents, her mother in her thirties and her father in his forties when she arrived, so they were not able to care for her as younger parents might. That’s why Dorothea had stepped in, no doubt thinking she was acting for the best. If only she had married and had an independent life of her own, s
he might not have been so domineering.

  Suddenly Lucy thought of Mr Goodland, the barrister who used to visit every Sunday. Had he been a suitor? His conversation had been interminably dull, and physically he was unprepossessing, so the thought had never occurred to her. But why else did he visit so often? Was he planning to propose to Dorothea? What would her answer be? It occurred to Lucy how little she knew of her sister’s life. She’d always written her off as a dry old stick, without any of their mother’s charm, but perhaps she had secrets of her own.

  For the first time, Lucy wondered if something could have happened to her father or Dorothea to account for their silence. Had her father died and Dorothea had not wanted to send the news in a letter? Or had Dorothea married and was too busy with her new household to write? Perhaps they had both moved home and Lucy’s letters had not reached them. If she returned and they were not at the same address, how would she find them? It was less than a year since she and Charlie set sail on the Shooting Star, but everything had changed and she felt like a different person. She couldn’t go back to living in that dreary house in Russell Square as if she had never met Charlie, never been married or widowed, never been to war. But at the same time she couldn’t think of any alternatives.

  Next time Murad visited, she told him about the deserters who had come in the night, and how skilfully Emir had managed the situation. ‘Why would they desert?’ she asked. ‘Does your army not flog deserters?’

  ‘They are starving,’ he replied bluntly. ‘Our soldiers are lucky if they get one small meal a day and men cannot continue indefinitely on empty stomachs.’

  ‘I thought it was your job to find food for them?’

  ‘Precisely. Except there is none to be found. The British and French have adequate supplies but they will not share them with us, and our sultan expects us to live off the land.’

  He looked worn out and Lucy guessed he worked tirelessly to feed his men and felt the lack of sustenance as a personal failure. ‘Why won’t the British and the French share? You are our allies. We have a common cause.’

  ‘I was sure you would have heard: the Turkish soldiers are seen as cowards after they abandoned the redoubts at Balaklava. It’s most unfair as they were simply obeying orders to regroup, but the perception has become common. I think it is also because our skin is darker than yours, so we are not seen as equals. This combination of scornful treatment and starvation has led many hundreds to desert.’

  Lucy thought back to her naïve excitement on the way out East and realised how much she had changed since then. ‘It is a war that quickly stripped any illusions. We British thought our army invincible after the triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo but it seems no one in charge had the foresight to plan for this campaign. There were no hospitals, hardly any medical supplies and not enough food and fuel for the men. British soldiers became very disillusioned as winter set in … I …’ She found she wanted to tell him about Charlie’s death, but at the same time she didn’t want to be disloyal.

  Murad sensed she wanted to say something and waited while she wrestled with her conscience.

  ‘I think my husband’s … Charlie’s death was deliberate.’ Tears began to gather as she said the words out loud. ‘He halted his horse at a position where he had been told Russian guns were aimed. I don’t know how he could leave me …’ With that, she broke down. There was relief in having voiced her suspicion at last, but misery as well. Putting it into words made it real.

  Murad spoke gently. ‘You may be right and you may not. All I know is that last winter a lot of British soldiers took their own lives. The war reached stalemate after the horror of the first battles, and the cold and the lack of food eroded morale. I heard of dozens of men who killed themselves.’

  Suddenly Lucy remembered the dead soldier in the sea at Balaklava, whom the harbourmaster told her had probably fallen off the cliffs.

  Murad continued: ‘In the Ottoman ranks there are high rates of desertion because men are close enough to get home but I can understand why an Englishman would be overcome by despair and see death as the only way out. If this is what your husband did, it doesn’t mean he loved you any less. I can imagine he was trying to save you, thinking that you would never leave him and would only go home to safety if he were no longer around.’ He looked straight into her eyes. ‘Do not be angry with him. Think of all the happy memories from your marriage. That is what he would want.’

  Lucy had never met such a sensitive and understanding man before, and she stared at him gratefully. Their eyes remained locked for perhaps a little too long.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The warm spring weather brought new crops to the garden at the dacha: peas, asparagus and spinach, cherries and apricots. There was so much that Lucy was able to set some aside for Murad to take back to his starving men, and Emir always had several extra fish to send. Their stock of flour was running low but Emir found a coarser, darker grain in the stores, which he called çavdar, and he began making his bread from that. It was like the black bread they had eaten in Varna but Emir kneaded his dough on the kitchen table rather than the ground so at least it did not have grit in it.

  As April turned to May, Murad explained to Lucy that from the 18th of the month, he and Emir would be observing Ramadan. It meant that they could not eat or drink during the hours of daylight but would wait until the sun went down. ‘It is a special time of prayer and purification for all Muslims,’ he told her.

  Lucy knew they were both Muslim. She had become used to Emir quietly absenting himself to pray five times a day. He washed first then went to his own room from where she heard him murmuring the ritual words. But she hadn’t known about Ramadan or guessed that Murad was devout.

  ‘Is it not hard to work all day without breaking your fast? I am sure I should find it difficult.’

  ‘For me, the worst thing is the thirst. But it is a time that brings us closer to our God and that is worth far more than any physical discomfort.’

  Lucy was interested: ‘Your god is Muhammad, is he not?’

  ‘No, Allah is the only god. Muhammad, peace be upon him, was a prophet who came to earth to explain the teachings of Allah.’ He told her that the angel Jibril had appeared to Muhammad regularly and during these visitations transmitted to him the words that make up the holy book called the Qu’ran, a book intended to touch the human heart and explain the higher purpose behind everything in the universe. ‘Christians portray us as barbarous, superstitious heathens but in fact being a Muslim is about devoting your life to love and obedience to the will of Allah.’

  Murad described to her the glories of Islamic art and architecture, the learnedness of their scholars and doctors, their firmly held belief in looking after the poorest in society.

  ‘Why do your women wear veils?’ she asked. ‘It seems odd not to see the expressions on their faces.’

  ‘The Qu’ran tells us that women should lower their gaze and not display their beauty except to their closest male relatives. But I think you would find that the expressions are all too clear from the eyes alone. My mother can convey every thought in her head with a subtle inflection of the eyes.’ He laughed, but there was sadness in his expression.

  ‘You miss her.’

  ‘Yes, we are very close. She is a woman with a great spirit.’

  Lucy worried that he and Emir must secretly look down on her for her lack of modesty: to be alone in a house with two unmarried men would create a scandal in Victorian England and must be even more reprehensible under Islam.

  But Murad assured her that their religion instructed them not to judge others; only Allah had the right to pass judgement.

  The more she heard, the more she thought it sounded a very humane faith, with much in common with the Christianity on which she had been raised. It seemed to inspire more devotion than her religion, though. These men prayed five times a day without fail, while she had not prayed once, not properly, since she had been living in the dacha. Her faith had been shaken
by her experiences of late. The Christian church saw suicide as a mortal sin and she worried that Charlie might not be admitted to heaven. It was hard to love a god who condemned a man to hell simply because his burden was too heavy to carry on living. If Lucy were at home, she would have talked to their vicar about it but out here she simply didn’t dwell on it. It was too painful.

  At the beginning of June, Murad warned Lucy and Emir that a major offensive was planned and that he would not be able to return to the dacha for some time. The allies were planning to take Sevastopol at long last and drive the Russians out of Crimea. The Ottoman Empire would never be safe while they could launch battleships from Crimean ports. Emir asked if he should return to fight with his company. They had a rapid conversation in Turkish and Lucy gathered that Murad was asking him to stay there and look after her. She was grateful for his thoughtfulness. It would have been terrifying to be on her own during a battle.

  They knew when the onslaught had begun as the sky filled with smoke, blotting out the sun. In the garden she could sometimes detect the familiar smell of gunpowder and the distant booming of the shells. It made her very anxious. What if the Russians won and took them all prisoner? Even if the allies won, it would be disastrous for her as she would be forced to leave the serenity of the dacha for an uncertain future. And as the days went by, another fear began to grow: what if Murad was killed? Would his wits be sharp on the battlefield when he could not eat to keep his strength up during daylight hours?

  She used the pianoforte to calm her nerves, choosing tranquil melodies such as Schumann’s Kinderszehen and Chopin’s Nocturnes. Emir stuck close by and she guessed he was nervous too, although he did not admit it.

  Ramadan ended on the 16th June and still Murad had not returned. She counted the days since he had last been there: three weeks, nearly four. The shelling could no longer be heard and the smoke had cleared. Where was he, she asked Emir, and he replied, ‘Busy. Many things to do. He will come soon.’ But she could see the doubt in his eyes.