by Anne Gracie
She followed him, but she was slow; nobody made way for a scruffy young boy. The Englishman had already stepped out into the streets when Ayisha heard the crowd behind her stir.
She pressed toward the gate, not wanting to look.
But she could hear.
It was a female slave. Ayisha heard the stir of anticipation, heard the announcement, “A young Circassian woman, a certified virgin . . . , ” heard the ripple of appreciation.
Ayisha’s stomach jerked in reaction. She stumbled to the exit, wishing she’d got out when the Englishman had.
The man at the door laughed at her ashen face. “So much naked female beauty is too much for a boy, I see. The Greek did warn you. Still, that little Circassian beauty will sweeten our dreams, eh, boy?” He chuckled as he unbolted the door. “And now, every time you look at a woman in a yashmak, you will know exactly what that yashmak is hiding, yes?”
Ayisha pushed past him and ran. She ran and ran until her ribs were aching and her breath came in great sobbing gasps.
Two
She ran until she reached the Nile, that endless, flowing source of life. And of death. Being near the river always brought her some measure of comfort. And a reminder never to let her guard down, because there were always crocodiles . . .
In and out of the water.
She sat on the banks and hugged her knees to her chin, staring out over the water and remembered . . .
Remembered wood splitting under rough blows, locks being wrenched apart. Rough, deep voices. The robbers had come. They always knew when to strike.
The servants had all fled at the first sign of plague.
There was nobody here to stop them. Only Ayisha. With a dead father and a dying mother.
Mama had clutched Ayisha’s hand with feeble insistence. “Hide.” She pointed under the bed.
Ayisha slid under the bed in one quick movement. She lay as still as a mouse, hardly daring to breathe. Above her Mama breathed slowly in . . . out . . . in . . . out . . .
A pair of large, bare, dirty feet approached her mother’s bed cautiously. They halted a few feet away.
Ayisha held her breath. The nails of the man’s feet were twisted and horny and ingrained with filth.
“Dead,” the owner of the feet said after a moment.
Not Mama, she thought. Not yet. Mama was hiding, too.
“Any sign of the child?” another man asked.
“No, but she’ll be here.”
Here? She braced herself, sure that any moment he would haul her from her hiding place.
“Keep looking. A white child-virgin will bring us a fine sum in the slave market. More than all of this put together.” He shook a fistful of her mother’s jewelry so that it jangled.
And Mama had opened her eyes and cursed him . . . with her dying breath . . .
Ayisha shivered, hugged her knees, and stared at the river, the endless, eternal flow. The river had seen everything. Nothing shocked it, nothing worried it . . . Everything passed.
Her pounding heart slowed. The sick feeling passed.
It was pointless to dwell on things she could not change. Her goal was survival. It had been foolish to go to Zamil’s. So it made her sick with fear and revulsion. What did she expect?
She stood. It was late, and she’d wasted most of the day following the Englishman instead of earning her keep.
She’d earned only a few coins today. The least she could do was gather fuel for Laila’s ever-hungry oven.
She collected dried reeds, twigs and grasses, and dried camel dung. The familiar task soothed her. The first time she’d met Laila, Laila had fed her and Ayisha had paid for her supper with fuel. It had formed a bond between them.
How far she’d come since then, she thought. She was no longer that desperately hungry, frightened child. She was a woman, and she had choices. She just had to make them.
The sun was low in the sky as she trudged home with the fuel. She still paid for her supper with work, but Laila was like family now, like a mother. She’d taken first Ayisha under her wing, and later Ali. She would have taken them into her house if she could, but for Omar.
The two-room hovel and everything in it—including Laila—belonged to Omar, Laila’s brother.
Ayisha entered by the rear gate into the tiny backyard and placed the fuel in a neat pile beside the oven, ready for the morning.
Mmrrrow? Her cat, Tom, greeted her as he always did from the high wall that surrounded the yard. Tom liked to observe the world from on high.
Ayisha smiled as he stretched, then jumped down and wound himself lovingly around her ankles. Ayisha picked him up and cuddled him. He purred loudly and butted her head.
She glanced at the pallet under the bench where Ali slept. It was empty. “Where’s Ali?” she asked the cat. “He should be home by now.”
She knocked lightly on the back door. She and Ali rarely went inside the house. Omar didn’t allow it. If Laila wanted to take in dirty street beggars, it was her foolishness, but they would not come inside his house and he would not pay a penny to feed or clothe them.
So Ayisha and Ali slept at the back, under a bench on a pallet. It was not so bad. In winter when it got chilly, they slept next to the oven, which retained some warmth long after the fire had burned out, and Tom slept at Ayisha’s feet, keeping them warm. And in summer, it was cooler outside than in. It was infinitely better than sleeping in the streets.
Laila opened the door. Her lip was split and crusted with dried blood.
“What happened?” Ayisha asked. As if she didn’t know.
After fifteen years of marriage Laila’s husband had returned her to her brother Omar like an unwanted parcel. Divorced for barrenness. It was the end of all Laila’s dreams, for no one wanted a barren woman. Now she had to live with Omar, who was stupid and lazy and selfish.
Ayisha despised him. He treated Laila like the lowest servant, as if her barrenness made her less than human.
Laila shook her head. “It’s nothing. But . . . he took all the money for today. It was a good day’s takings, too.”
Ayisha glanced at the house. “Has he gone?”
“Oh yes, we won’t see him again until he’s spent it all in the brothels.” She gave Ayisha a hopeless look. “We will never get away, never.”
“Yes, we will,” Ayisha said briskly and began to work free the loose brick at the far corner of the oven. “He doesn’t know about this, does he? And even if he has stolen your money, I still have something to add.” She pulled the brick free and from the hollow inside pulled out a small leather bag. She added a small fistful of coins to the hoard and replaced it in the hollow. “So we are still better off than yesterday. One step closer to Alexandria.”
It was their dream to get enough money together to leave Cairo, telling no one. They would start afresh in Alexandria, and Omar would never find Laila, and no one would come searching for Ayisha. They would be free. They would rent a house and build an oven, as they had before. People in Alexandria would enjoy Laila’s pies just as much as in Cairo.
And without Omar to steal the profits, who knew what they could achieve? There might even be enough money to buy Ali an apprenticeship. Keep him off the streets and out of trouble.
“Laila, Laila, are you there?” a woman’s voice called. It was the neighbor.
They opened the door in the wall.
“Did you hear? Ali—he is taken! My son told me just now,” the neighbor said.
Beside her Laila made a small distressed sound.
“Taken by who? What happened?” Ayisha asked quickly. The neighbor had a tendency to dramatize everything.
“Ali tried to rob a foreigner,” the woman explained. “But the man caught him and took him away.”
“Oh God!” She knew at once which foreigner and what Ali had been trying to steal. “The little fool.”
“They will cut off his hand,” Laila whispered, ashen-faced. “He will become a cripple, a beggar.”
“If the pash
a’s men caught him, his fate would be sealed,” the neighbor agreed. “But the foreigner took him. Who knows what foreigners do with thieves?”
“It is good news,” Ayisha said, sounding more certain than she felt. “He might get a beating, but his hand will be safe. English people don’t cut off children’s hands,” she said, hoping it was true. She turned to the neighbor. “Where did the foreigner take Ali?”
“To the pink villa on the far side of the river. The one with the big sycamore tree.”
Ayisha’s old home. She hadn’t been there since . . . “I know the place,” she said. “I will go there and get Ali back.”
“But how?” Laila asked. “We have no money to pay and Omar will not—”
“I can get inside without the Englishman knowing. I will find Ali and steal him back.”
“But—” Laila cast a glance at the neighbor.
“It will be all right,” Ayisha told her. “There is still time before the gates are shut.”
Under the pasha’s rule, as a simultaneous measure against plague and crime, every quarter in Cairo was closed off by gates at each end of the street at the fall of night. People could move about the city at night only by asking the guards to unlock each gate. An additional law required anyone outside at night to carry a source of light—a torch or a lantern. The measures had cut crime, at least, dramatically. Plague was another matter.
“I will go now to the Englishman’s house and wait until darkness falls. Don’t worry, Laila, Ali and I will be home after dawn.”
From a hook in the courtyard wall she took a coiled length of rope and wrapped it around her waist.
She always carried a knife hidden under her top. Now she tied a thong around her calf and slipped another weapon, a thin dagger, between it and her skin. She hoped it wouldn’t come to knives.
Laila hugged her. “Allah keep you safe.”
Ayisha nodded. She’d never killed before, but she would kill the Englishman before she’d let him take her.
The trap was set. The boy was asleep. Rafe rose from the chair beside the bed and walked quietly out, closing the door behind him.
He stood at the open French doors, looking out into the velvet night, breathing deeply. A crescent moon gleamed through a gauzy waft of cloud, turning the river below to a ripple of silk. The night air was cool and moist. A faint breeze stirred the leaves of the big old sycamore by the wall, and he fancied he could smell the faint, spicy scent of the desert. Out here, the crowded, dirty, dusty town seemed a world away instead of half a mile.
By daylight Sir Henry Cleeve’s former home had a forlorn, shabby elegance: at night it became a place of beauty and enchantment. Cicadas shrilled outside in the lotus trees and the scent of Damascus roses wafted up from the courtyard below.
Almost a pity to have turned it into a trap. Almost. But someone had been following him all day, he could sense it, feel it in the rising hairs on the back of his neck.
And someone had sent that boy to steal the picture.
Interest had been stirred up by the picture and the gold, just as Baxter had said. And interest was a hopeful sign.
Rafe had secured the Cleeve house for just three weeks. He’d got it by a stroke of luck. On his first day in Cairo, he’d made a visit to Johnny Baxter, the cousin of a friend of his.
“Johnny is the man you need in Cairo,” his friend Bertie had told him. “Knows everything and everyone.”
Johnny Baxter, Bertie told Rafe, had been badly wounded in the Battle of the Nile and had elected to remain in Egypt, to die in sunshine instead of in the stink of a ship’s hold.
Not only had Baxter lived, he’d thrived. He survived Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt and had managed to keep his head low throughout the turmoil that followed. He loved Egypt and intended to live out his life there.
“Good thing, too,” Bertie told Rafe. “Went completely native. Married the woman who first took him in, wounded. She died last year, but it made no difference to Johnny. Still dresses like an Arab, jabbers away in the native lingo, made his fortune there, but no plans to come home. Never know to look at him he was an Englishman, let alone an Eton man—family have disowned him, of course. Embarrasin’, havin a chap go native.
“But Johnny’s a good egg, all the same. Thick as thieves with all the locals—from street beggars to the sultan or whatever y’call the top native fellow. If anyone can get you on the inside track, Johnny can.”
But when Rafe called on Baxter, he discovered something Bertie hadn’t mentioned: Baxter habitually shunned the society of Europeans.
He’d refused to see Rafe at first. He didn’t receive visitors from England, had left the world of polite morning calls behind him, his servant said.
But Rafe was not fobbed off so easily. His experience in the army had taught him that good local knowledge would save a lot of time and errors.
Rafe sent in his card for the second time, this time with a terse, handwritten message.
Baxter had greeted him in full Arab robes, gave a silent bow, and called in Arabic for coffee to be served. He waited in silence, cross-legged on a low divan, observing Rafe with a shrewd eye. He was about forty, his face weather-beaten and slightly scarred. Powder burns and shrapnel, Rafe decided.
Recognizing the tactics, Rafe made no attempt to fill the silence but sat back, relaxed, and waited. When the coffee arrived, a bitter brew of grainy mud that he frankly thought disgusting, he drank it down without a word.
The silence stretched.
Eventually Rafe yawned and said, “We used to play a game like this when I was at school, only then it was the first one to blink who lost. I usually won. I’m quite competitive, you see.”
“And yet you spoke first,” Baxter said softly.
Rafe shrugged. “I bore more easily these days. Besides, I’m tired of childish games.” He met Baxter’s gaze steadily.
After a moment, Baxter inclined his head in acknowledgment, and the atmosphere eased. He ordered more coffee.
Rafe held up his hand. “Not for me, I thank you.”
Baxter stiffened. “You don’t like my coffee?”
“No, it’s appalling,” Rafe said calmly.
There was a pause, then Baxter chuckled. “Few men would have dared tell me that, but you’re quite right. My cook and his family left unexpectedly yesterday to return to their village—a death in the family—and I’ve not yet replaced them. Would you believe it? Not one person in my employ can make decent coffee.”
He sat back and said in a much friendlier tone, “Now, tell me how you met Cousin Bertie—the only member of my family who speaks to me. You were both in the war, I gather.”
They spoke of the war, and Rafe gave him news of his cousin. Then the politenesses over, Rafe explained the errand he was on. “I was advised to seek assistance from the members of the English community here.”
“And yet you ignored that advice?”
Rafe shrugged. “It seems to me that if the English community knew anything about the girl, word would have filtered back long ago.”
Baxter snorted. “Absolutely right. Most of them here are ignorant snobs. Know nothing about the local people but find them wanting, all the same. I have as little to do with them as possible.”
Rafe nodded. “Bertie said you’d be the best man to advise me on the local situation.”
Baxter found the whole story of Sir Henry Cleeve’s missing daughter fascinating. He agreed with Rafe that since no news of the girl had come from the foreign community, he was better off setting the locals to find her. “Flash that picture around, spend a bit of gold—that’ll soon flush any information out.”
He told Rafe about the vacant Cleeve house and who to see to rent it. He advised Rafe to get the search over with as quickly as possible. “For plague can become a problem in the hotter months.”
“I will,” Rafe assured him. “I intend to be back in England well before then.”
“Good. I also recommend you visit Zamil, the slave trader. For
if the girl is alive and nothing’s been heard of her for six years, chances are she’s in a harem somewhere. Unspeakable, I know, and better to tell the old lady she’s dead, but a young white virgin would fetch a high price, and Zamil deals with only quality goods. Tell him Baxter sent you.”
And so he’d gone to Zamil’s.
Quality goods. Rafe’s jaw clenched. He hoped to God the little girl in the picture had not ended up in a place like that.
And all for nothing; Zamil had proved unhelpful.
Rafe sipped his brandy and waited, the tranquility of the night all the more perfect for the knowledge it would not last.
Showing the picture around and flashing gold had indeed stirred up some interest. Someone was sniffing around, and there had to be a reason for that.
It was extraordinary, that moment of awareness there in the marketplace. The knowledge, the feeling that someone was watching, watching him. With intense particularity.
The watcher had stood in the shadows of that narrow alley, and the instant Rafe was distracted, he’d moved. But the prickle between Rafe’s shoulder blades continued, throughout the day. He was being followed.
After the market, there was that street urchin who’d come racing around the house, seen him, turned, and bolted like a rabbit—a dead giveaway. He thought he’d spotted the same youth at Zamil’s but he couldn’t be sure. And then there was the boy, Ali, who’d tried to steal the picture.
The prickle between Rafe’s shoulder blades intensified. Someone was out there in the dark right now, watching.
A thief? An assassin? The person who’d sent a boy to do a man’s job? His pulse thrummed with anticipation.
He glanced at Ali sleeping, bound and gagged on the bed in the next room.
The imprisonment of small children—pickpocket or no—didn’t sit well with Rafe, particularly such a game little lad.
But the boy was the key to whoever had been following him all day, the first sign that Rafe hadn’t come all this way on what he’d been sure was a wild-goose chase. Until now.
A dead giveaway to go for the picture instead of his purse.