How long before the door-bell rang and the first in an endless stream of carpet-sellers and slipper-makers and kaftan-fitters and knick-knack vendors came to ply their wares to the unwary?
Only one way to find out.
I went back to the door and grasped the handle. It did not open. I rattled it a few times, in the event it was simply stuck, and was about to bend to examine the mechanism when it flew in towards me. I gave a wide smile to the two large men standing without, then made to step down into the street.
And they stopped me.
I brushed away the large hand spread out before my face, but the other man moved in front of me as well. Which made for a lot of man in a little doorway.
“I need some items from the shops!” I said, assuming all the effrontery of an English lady. “Shops, you understand?” Clearly they did not. “Mercado? Bazaar? Suq?” They understood that last, it being Arabic. However, I did not care to reveal that my grasp of that tongue went beyond a handful of words. “What do you call it—the medina?” I leant forward, touching my fingers to my sternum and speaking as if to a deaf man or an idiot child. “I … need to go—” I directed my fingers in a walking motion, then pointed: “—to the medina.”
He shook his head and jabbed his own grubby finger towards the interior of the house. When I did not move, he pointed more emphatically; had I been a man, he would have given me a shove and slammed the door in my face.
Being a good Moslem, however, he hesitated to touch a strange female. That did not mean he was going to let me pass.
Then the marginally smaller of the two spoke up, in the same accented Arabic I had heard on the Harlequin. “You’re sure this is not a man?”
“He would not make that mistake.”
“If she were my sister, I would beat her for wearing those garments.”
“Don’t speak to me in that gibberish,” I snapped, offering up a mental apology to the two cousins who had taught me the glorious language of the Qur’an and of Ibn Kaldoun. “I demand you permit me outside.”
The first man loomed into the threshold, forcing me to move away, then dropped back again to the street and yanked the door shut. I slapped at its solid surface a couple of times for effect, but I had little need of further conversation with the two.
No: not the fevered imagination of a pair of detectives. We were prisoners, in a delicate-looking, highly effective, exotically beautiful, golden-cage of a cell.
What an interesting situation.
I spared a moment’s thought for Holmes and the others, hoping that the male prisoners would be treated with as much care.
But as things now stood, I was the sole protector of a score of British females, plus Edith.
The most urgent order of business, therefore, was to claim a bed before all the good ones were taken.
A closer look at the house suggested that it was—or, had been—the home of a wealthy Moslem Francophile. In an upstairs storage room were dusty tea-chests filled with the good china, the good linen, and an assortment of Moroccan galabiyyas, kaftans, wraps, and footwear sufficient for a small village, but underneath the top-dressing of French paintings, French piano, and French side-tables lay the furnishings of a traditional Arab home.
Once I had claimed a bedroom, I snooped through all the other rooms within the fortress-like outer walls. The timber grid covering the inner courtyard was, I was relieved to see, both closely built (its holes would permit the tiny birds to pass, but exclude neighbourhood cats) and sturdy enough to keep a small person—an Edith-sized person, say—from tumbling thirty feet to the tiles. There was even a canvas cover, furled out of the way, designed to exclude rain and keep in warmth. Around this weather-silvered sky-light was a veranda, open to the air and furnished, as Edith had said, with chairs and divans. The roof, too, was walled.
Three of these upper walls were chest high. Two of them looked down over sheer drops to the street, the third onto a heap of rubble where a house once stood, its stones now in the process of being pilfered down to its foundations. The fourth wall, to the west, was higher than my head. It suggested that something lay on the other side.
While the others enthused over the intricate mosaic of domes, minarets, laundry lines, palm-trees, and the pot-plants and divans of neighbouring rooftops, I dragged a bench over to the high wall, chinned myself on the wall-top to peep over—then fell with a squawk when a man on the rooftop twenty feet away snapped a shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.
Twenty women squealed and clutched each other. They stared, goggle-eyed, at me, sitting at the base of the wall. I stared goggle-eyed back at them, standing in a knot.
“Er,” I said when I found my voice. “I’d say our neighbour doesn’t wish us to look over that wall.”
“Someone shot at you!” half a dozen of them exclaimed.
“If he’d been shooting at me, he’d have taken a big chunk out of the wall. I’d say it was intended as a warning.”
The mothers gathered their chicks together and clucked their way to the stairs. Annie looked at the high wall, at the bench, and at me.
“Our neighbour has a shotgun?”
“A Purdy, by the look of it.”
She blinked. “You had time to see the make of gun?”
“I do a bit of shooting.” No point in telling her I’d had a Purdy pointed at me before. No point in telling myself that, either—only time quiets a racing heart, not logic and reassurance. I brushed myself off, and dragged the bench back to where I’d found it.
Still, the fellow’s presence confirmed my suspicions: The men’s prison was adjoining our own, and care was being taken to ensure we remained apart.
Not enough care, of course—but just as our earlier decision to delay rebellion was tied to the presence of innocents, so now was my ultimate freedom of movement linked to my fellow prisoners. And although the indomitable Mrs Hatley might wrestle her length over one of these walls to be lowered by rope, the more buxom mothers of Isabel and Fannie would never make it.
In the high chamber of his highest tower
Sate Conrad, fetter’d in the Pacha’s power.
The first muezzin began his sunset call to prayer from a nearby minaret. Fettered in the pirates’ power, I propped my arms and chin on the southern wall, listening as other voices joined in from both sides of the river, drowned out regularly by the boom of waves. This was a quiet, snug little town around my feet. Salé marked the farthest reaches of the Roman empire—Sala Colonia—long before the pirates established their republic. The present rulers, the French, lived mostly in the modern European community, across the river in Rabat. Although Salé’s former violent xenophobia had been suppressed by the French, and manacled Christian slaves no longer worked in the gardens and fields, this town kept to itself, thinking its own thoughts behind its pale walls.
There would be no helmeted police constable strolling past on the street below.
This meant that I should have to cultivate an Irregular force from within.
I followed my nose, down the stairs, past the courtyard (tea had been laid out—Moroccan tea, steaming glasses stuffed with mint that instantly transported me back to a goat tent in Palestine—along with trays of sugar cakes and nuts and fruit and crescent-shaped biscuits) and through a sitting-room followed by a dim, heavily draped dining room with a table big enough for us all, past a small office space (no telephone—I would have been astonished to find one) and to a swinging door.
The kitchen was occupied by one woman in simple green Moroccan dress, two young girls similarly robed, and our resident snoop, Annie. Other than Annie’s anachronistic frock and uncovered hair, they might have been occupants of a Medieval alchemical laboratory, furnished with retorts and alembics. The woman disappeared in an explosion of fragrant steam; the girls took one look at my trousers and short hair and covered their mouths to giggle; Annie gave me a grin.
“Doesn’t this smell absolutely fabulous? I’ve been trying to get them to tell me what it is, but
we don’t seem to have a language in common.”
The odour spilling out of the pots was, truly, intoxicating. My very soul opened to the spice-laden air, and I found I had moved closer to the cook, to stand within the penumbra of steam. I smiled, to show that I meant no harm.
“Are we to have dinner, then?”
Of course she did not understand, so I handed out another of my miser’s stash of Arabic: “Dinner soon?”
It took no pretence to stare blankly at the flood of heavily accented Arabic that washed over me, but it seemed to be positive, and I began to leaf through my other languages to ask, “When?”
French, of course—although the cook, who had understood the question, spoke little of the tongue, and that mostly monosyllabic. But she got across the answer, which was that dinner would be served in two hours.
Then she made a gesture that clearly invited us to take ourselves away.
Outside, Annie said, “Well, it’s good to know that we don’t have to produce our own meals in that kitchen.”
“It is a bit primitive,” I agreed.
“I didn’t know you spoke—Arabic, is it?”
“I know about ten words, picked up on a trip to the Holy Land. Bazaar, dinner, bread, please, thank you, ma’alesh—which is sort of like, oh well—and How much is it? I’ll need to arrange for a Moroccan Mr Pessoa, to help with trips into the bazaar.”
“Oh good,” she said. “They’ve left us some tea. Ooh—mint?”
I drank my syrupy tea and checked on the arrangements for beds. When the door opened an hour later and our trunks and cases were unceremoniously tossed inside, I said nothing to draw attention to the sound that followed: the door being wedged shut from without. When dinner came—magnificent heaps of exotic foods that the cook told us were couscous and tagine (a rice-like dish, and lamb with dried apricots cooked in a massive low crockery bowl topped by a sort of Chinese hat) with shredded salads and plates of pickles and relishes that had the mothers making dubious noises even as they helped themselves to second servings—I said nothing to dispel their easy assumption that the following evening we would share such foods with the men. And when yawns began to creep in and the women creep away to their richly furnished beds, I wished them sweet dreams, and said not a word about the guards on the door.
Permit them a night’s peace, before anxiety moved in.
The room I had claimed as my own was small and dark and although it was clean, it had no decoration on its whitewashed walls. A servant’s room, conveniently placed for a shouted summons from one of the ornate bedrooms nearby. A servant’s room, with little but a mat and blankets for sleeping. A servant’s room, with a window too narrow for most European frames.
All the windows in the house were firmly shuttered, either by decorative wood latticework or, in two of the lower rooms, workaday iron bars installed so recently the black paint was still tacky. This, too, went with the Moslem architecture, and the others did not even question it, since the inner walls were so patently free and open to the lightest breeze.
I dozed, waiting for the household to succumb to sleep before rising from my servant’s cot and turning my attentions to the window.
Being on the upper floor, this was a window not formerly barred. The mortar holding the bars was thoroughly set, but not as deep as it might have been on a real window.
And being women, no one had given us, or our possessions, a more than cursory search.
I divested myself of the hardware I had worn about my person all that day, ending by loosing my trousers and unwinding the length of silk rope that had saved my life more than once over the years (although it did have a way of making me look rather stout). I held a small looking-glass out between the bars to be certain that the street below was empty, then unfolded my pocket-knife to the blade used for prising stones from a horse’s hoof, and set to.
By three in the morning, the bars were down.
By five minutes after three, I was dressed head to toe in garments borrowed earlier from the house’s lumber-room, my spectacles tucked into a pocket, my face and hands darkened with dust from the window-sill.
By ten after three, I was on the street.
It is one of my favourite sensations, that of stepping out of doors without leave. The very air smells sweeter—as every child knows and most adults forget—whether in London or Morocco. I paused to savour that aroma of freedom. And also to orientate myself in relation to the muted sound of a violin that had begun to play some hours before.
In my borrowed djellaba, spectacles off and blonde hair covered, scuffing along in run-down and overly large sandals and with a moon too small and street-lamps too sporadic to give me away, I was taken for a local boy. As I went past our two guards, who spent their night pacing up and down the exposed sides of our prison, I greeted them in an Arabic onto which I had fastened something resembling the local accent. I did the same when I came to the guards outside the men’s prison.
“Good evening,” I mumbled politely.
“What are you doing out at this hour?” the shorter man demanded.
“My mother needs something from her sister.” A speech I had prepared earlier, in case.
“The boy’s running errands for his mother,” he called to the taller guard.
“Must you listen to that noise all night?” I asked, with a gesture upwards: Holmes, too, had managed a room over the street, although his window was so narrow as to be impassable.
The man answered with a gutter curse, a new one to me. “When I go in tomorrow morning, I’m going to put my foot through the accursed thing.”
“You will do a service to us all,” I noted sweetly, and went my way. When the violin came to the end of its song, the music did not resume.
For two hours, I quartered the compact walled city, locating the gates, committing to memory the thoroughfares (some of which were wide enough for a motorcar) and the lanes (in which anything but a motorcycle would stick fast). The odours and débris underfoot told me which streets held leather-workers and which sold vegetables, which stalls were coffee-houses and which belonged to barbers. The pound of the sea was the loudest noise I heard, apart from one yowling cat, the clatter of dropped pans from a baker’s shop, and a vicious-sounding argument from an upper room between two women in a language I did not know.
Almost the entire time was spent on paving stones where the buildings came near to touching overhead, or where the sky was kept out by reed thatching. At half past five, with the sky growing light and my heart pounding with the conviction that I would not find the correct house in this mole’s maze, I succeeded in retracing my steps to my lane, to my rope, and to my window-sill. Inside the servant’s cell, I scrubbed off the dirt with a cloth I had wet earlier for that purpose, and set the bars and mortar back into place.
I fell into bed just as the day’s first call to prayer rang out, well pleased with my outing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
GIRLS: At such a time of night as this, so very incompletely dressed …
FORTUNATELY, A HOUSE full of young women does not wake early. I managed a solid three hours of sleep before the sound of voices roused me, and I dressed—wearing a skirt today—to go downstairs.
A banquet of breads, fruit, various spreads, and boiled eggs had been laid out in the courtyard. The air smelt of baking, of oranges, and of fresh-watered soil. The fountain was playing, the small birds dipping in and out.
My companions noticed none of it; clearly, one of them had attempted to leave, and met the same treatment I had the previous afternoon.
I came across the blue-and-white tiles—Miss Mary Russell, the firm’s fix-it girl—and they pounced on me, all talking at once.
“We’re being held prisoner!”
“Annie felt like going for a walk and—”
“—wanted to see the medina—”
“—see the river—”
“—the market—”
“—tried to go out and these rude individuals at the door—
”
“—terribly rude, they positively bullied her—”
“I’ll admit, I did feel more than a little threatened.”
“—no English, of course—”
“What was Captain La Rocha thinking, to give us—”
“—none of the servants speaks a bit of—”
“—surely someone in this town—”
“—she tried to insist—”
“—pushed her, just put his hand—”
“Imagine!”
“—native person, acting like—”
“—really most threatening—”
“Miss Russell, you must—”
“—we insist—”
“Please, tell us you’ll—”
“—have to talk to Mr Fflytte—”
“—have to do something—”
I raised one hand. Like a conductor with his orchestra, the chorus of outrage went discordant and trailed away.
“Thank you,” I said. “I hope you slept well?” The chorus threatened to break out again, so I waved my outstretched palm, and continued, “I personally did not sleep very well, I suppose the lack of a ship’s soothing motion seemed odd, so I should like some coffee before the day gets much further along. However, yes, I am aware that we are not being encouraged to leave here just at present. I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Mr Fflytte chose to film these portions of the movie in Salé rather than Rabat, for the sake of realism. Had it been Rabat, which has a large European community, you should have been quite secure walking about at all hours. However, Salé is a small town with a high degree of suspicion regarding outsiders. I imagine that Captain La Rocha did not wish us to be made uncomfortable by the attentions and curiosity of the inhabitants. I’m sure that when we go out, he will provide us with bodyguards. In the meantime, you’ll have to admit that we are most comfortable here. Now, can anyone tell me, is this coffee as good as it smells?”
Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 24