by Wilbur Smith
During the day Amber and Penrod worked together in the card room, editing David Benbrook’s journal. Amber exercised her new-found writing talent, and Penrod provided military and historical background. Amber suggested he write his own account of the battle of Abu Klea, his subsequent capture by Osman Atalan and their escape from the captivity of the Dervish. They would combine this with the writings of David and Rebecca. The further they advanced into the project, the greater their enthusiasm for it became. By the time the Singapore anchored in Alexandria harbour they had made great progress in expanding and correcting the text. It could now be published as an inspiring true adventure, and they had the remainder of the voyage home to complete it.
Penrod went ashore in Alexandria, and hired a horse. He rode the thirty miles to Cairo, and went directly to the British Agency. Sir Evelyn Baring kept him waiting only twenty minutes before he sent his secretary to summon him into his office. He had the thirty-page letter that Penrod had sent from Entoto spread like a fan on the desk in front of him. On it were many cryptic notations written in red ink in the margins. Baring maintained his usual cold, enigmatic manner and expression during the interview, which lasted almost two hours. At the end he rose to dismiss Penrod without making any comment, expressing any opinion, or offering either censure or approval. ‘Colonel Samuel Adams at Army headquarters in Giza is anxious to speak to you,’ he told Penrod, at the door.
‘Colonel?’ Penrod asked.
‘Promotion,’ Baring replied. ‘He will explain everything to you.’
Sam Adams limped only slightly and he no longer used a cane as he came round his desk to greet Penrod warmly. He looked fit and suntanned, although there were a few grey hairs in his moustache.
‘Congratulations on the colonel’s pips, sir.’ Penrod saluted.
Adams was without a cap so he could not return the salute, but he seized Penrod’s hand and shook it warmly. ‘Delighted to have you back, Ballantyne. Much has happened while you have been away. There is a great deal we must talk about. Shall we go for lunch at the club?’
He had reserved a table in the corner of the dining room at the Gheziera Club. He ordered a bottle of Krug, then waited until the glasses were filled and they had placed their order with the waiter, in red fez and white galabiyya, before he got down to business. ‘After the disaster of Khartoum, and the murder of that idiot Gordon, there were many unpleasant repercussions. The press at home were looking for scapegoats and fastened on Sir Charles Wilson’s delay in pressing on to the relief of Gordon after the victory at Abu Klea. Wilson sought to defend himself by placing the blame on his subordinates. Unfortunately you were one of those to suffer, Ballantyne. He has brought charges of subordination and desertion against you. Now that you have come back from limbo, you will almost certainly be court-martialled. Capital offence, if you’re found guilty. Firing squad, don’t you know?’
Penrod blanched under his suntan and stared at Adams in horror.
He went on hurriedly: ‘You have friends here. Everyone knows your worth. Victoria Cross, derring-do, heroic escapes and all that. However, you will have to resign your commission in the Hussars.’
‘Resign my commission?’ Penrod exclaimed. ‘I will let them shoot me first.’
‘It might come to that. But hear me out.’ Adams reached across the table and laid his hand on Penrod’s arm to prevent him leaping to his feet. ‘Drink your champagne and listen to me. Damn fine vintage, by the way. Don’t waste it.’ Penrod subsided, and Adams went on,
‘First, I must give you some other background information. Egypt now belongs to us in all but name. Baring calls it the Veiled Protectorate, but it’s a bloody colony for all the pretty words. The decision has been taken by London to rebuild the Egyptian army from a disorganized rabble into a first-rate fighting corps. The new sirdar is Horatio Herbert Kitchener. Do you know him?’
‘I cannot say that I do,’ Penrod said. The sirdar was the commander-in-chief of the Egyptian army.
‘Cross between a tiger and a dragon. Absolute bloody fire-eater. He desperately needs first-class officers for the new army, men who know the desert and the lingo. I mentioned your name. He knows of you. He wants you. If you join him he’ll quash all Wilson’s charges against you. Kitchener is going up the ladder to the top and will take his people with him. You will start at your equivalent rank of captain, but I can almost guarantee you a battalion within a year, your own regiment within five. For you the choice is between ruin and high rank. What do you say?’
Penrod smoothed his whiskers thoughtfully – on board ship Amber had trimmed his sideburns and moustache for him and once again they were luxuriant. He had learnt never to jump at the first offer.
‘Camel Corps.’ Adams tossed in another plum. ‘Plenty of desert fighting.’
‘When can I meet the gentleman?’
‘Tomorrow. Nine hundred hours sharp at the new army headquarters. If you love life, don’t be late.’
Kitchener was a muscular man of middling height and moved like a gladiator. He had a full head of hair and a cast in one eye, not unlike Yakub’s. This made Penrod incline towards him. His jaw had been shot half away in a fight with the Dervish at Suakin when he had been governor of that insalubrious and dangerous corner of Africa. The bone was distorted and the keloid scar was pale pink against his darkly tanned skin. His handshake was iron hard and his manner harsh and unyielding.
‘You speak Arabic?’ he asked, in that language. He spoke it well, but with an accent that would never allow him to pass him as a native.
‘Sirdar effendi! May all your days be perfumed with jasmine.’ Penrod made the gesture of respect. ‘In truth, I speak the language of the One True God and His Prophet.’
Kitchener blinked. It was perfect. ‘When can you come on strength?’
‘I need to be in England until Christmas. I have been out of contact with civilization for some time. I must settle my personal affairs, and I shall have to resign my commission with my present regiment.’
‘You have until the middle of January next year and then I want you here in Cairo. Adams will go over the details with you. You are dismissed.’ His uneven gaze dropped back to the papers on the desk in front of him.
As he and Adams went down the steps of the headquarters building to where the grooms were holding their horses, Penrod said, ‘He wastes little time.’
‘Not a second,’ Adams agreed. ‘Not a single bloody second.’
Before he rode back to Alexandria to rejoin the Singapore, Penrod went to the telegraph office and sent a wire to Sebastian Hardy, David Benbrook’s lawyer, at his chambers in Lincolns Inn Fields. It was a lengthy message and cost Penrod two pounds, nine shillings and fourpence.
Hardy came from London by train to meet the ship when she docked at Southampton. In appearance he reminded Penrod and Amber of Charles Dickens’s Mr Pickwick. However, behind his pince-nez he had a shrewd and calculating eye. He travelled back to London with them.
‘The press has got wind of your escape from Omdurman, and your arrival in this country,’ he told them. ‘They are agog. I have no doubt they will be waiting at Waterloo station to pounce upon you.’
‘How can they know what train we will arrive on?’ Amber asked.
‘I dropped a little hint,’ Hardy admitted. ‘What I would refer to as pre-baiting the waters. Now, may I read this manuscript?’
Amber looked to Penrod for guidance, and he nodded. ‘I think you should trust Mr Hardy. Your father did.’
Hardy skimmed through the thick sheaf of papers so rapidly that Amber doubted he was reading it. She voiced her concern, and Hardy answered, without looking up, ‘Trained eye, my dear young lady.’
As the carriage ran in through the suburbs he shuffled the papers together. ‘I think we have something here. Will you allow me to keep this for a week? I know a man in Bloomsbury who would like to read it.’
Five journalists were waiting on the platform, including one from The Times and another from the Telegraph
. When they saw the handsome, highly decorated hero of El Obeid and Abu Klea, with the young beauty on his arm, they knew they had a story that would electrify the whole country. They barked hysterically as a pack of mongrels who had chased a squirrel up a tree. Hardy gave them a tantalizing statement about the horrifying ordeal the couple had survived, mentioning Gordon, the Mahdi and Khartoum more than once, all evocative names. Then he sent the press away and led the couple out to a cab he had waiting at the station entrance.
The cabbie whipped up his horse and they clattered through the foggy city to the hotel in Charles Street where Hardy had booked a room for Amber. Once she was installed they went on to the hotel in Dover Street where Penrod would stay.
‘Never do for the two of you to frequent the same lodging. From now on you will be under a magnifying lens.’
Four days later Sebastian Hardy summoned them to his office. He was beaming pinkly through his pince-nez. ‘Macmillan and Company want to publish. You know they did Sir Samuel White Baker’s book on the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia? Your book is caviar and champagne to them.’
‘What can the Benbrook sisters expect to receive? You know that Miss Amber wishes any proceeds to be shared equally between them, following the example their father set in his will?’
Hardy sobered and looked apologetic. He removed his reading glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt. ‘I pressed them as hard as I could, but they would not budge beyond ten thousand pounds.’
‘Ten thousand pounds!’ Amber shrieked. ‘I did not know there was that much money outside the Bank of England.’
‘You will also receive twelve and a half per cent of the profits. I doubt this will amount to much more than seventy-five thousand pounds.’
They gaped at him in silence. Placed in consols, irredeemable government treasury bonds, that sum would bring in almost three and a half thousand pounds per annum in perpetuity. They would never have to worry about money.
In the event, Hardy’s estimate erred on the side of caution. Months before Christmas Slaves of the Mahdi was all the rage. Hatchard’s in Piccadilly was unable to keep copies on its shelves for more than an hour. Irate customers vied with each other to snatch them and carry them triumphantly to the till.
In the House of Commons the opposition seized on the book as a weapon with which to belabour the government. The whole sorry business of Mr Gladstone abandoning Chinese Gordon to his fate was resuscitated. Saffron Benbrook’s harrowing painting depicting the death of the general, to which she had been an eye-witness, formed the book’s frontispiece. It was reported in a leading article in The Times that women wept and strong men raged as they looked at it. The British people had tried to forget the humiliation and loss of prestige they had suffered at the hands of the Mad Mahdi, but now the half-healed wound was ripped wide open. A popular campaign for the reoccupation of the Sudan swept the country. The book sold and sold.
Amber and Penrod were invited to all the great houses, and were surrounded by admirers wherever they went. London cabbies greeted them by name, and strangers accosted them in Piccadilly and Hyde Park. Hundreds of letters from readers were forwarded to them by the publishers. There was even a short note of congratulation from the sirdar, Kitchener, in Cairo.
‘That will do my new career no harm at all,’ Penrod told Amber, as they rode together down Rotten Row, acknowledging waves.
The book sold a quarter of a million copies in the first six weeks, and the printing presses roared night and day churning out fresh copies. They were unable to keep up with the demand. Putnam’s of 70 Fifth Avenue, New York, brought out an American edition, which piqued the interest of readers who had never heard of the Sudan. Slaves of the Mahdi outsold Mr Stanley’s account of his search for Dr Livingstone by three to one.
The French, true to the national character, added their own fanciful illustrations to the Paris edition. Rebecca Benbrook was depicted with her bodice torn open by the evil Mahdi as he prepared to ravish her as she courageously sheltered her beautiful, terrified little sister Amber. The indomitable thrust of her bare bosom declared her defiance in the face of a fate worse than death. Copies were smuggled across the Channel and sold at a premium on stalls in the streets of Soho. Even after the payment of income tax at sixpence in the pound, by Christmas the book had earned royalties little short of two hundred thousand pounds. Amber, at the suggestion of Penrod Ballantyne, instructed Mr Hardy to place this in a trust fund for the three sisters.
Amber and Penrod celebrated Christmas at Clercastle. They walked and rode together every day. When the house-party went out to shoot Sir Peter’s high-flying pheasant, Amber stood in the line of guns beside Penrod and, thanks to her father’s training, acquitted herself so gracefully and skilfully that the head keeper came to her after the last drive, tugged at the peak of his cap and mumbled, ‘It was a joy to watch you shoot, Miss Amber.’
January came too soon. Penrod had to take up his post in Cairo. Amber, chaperoned by Penrod’s sister-in-law Jane, went to see him off from Waterloo station on the boat train. With Jane’s assistance, Amber had spent the previous week shopping for the correct attire at such a momentous parting. Of course, price was now of little consequence.
She settled on a dove-grey jacket, trimmed with sable fur, worn over ankle-length skirts and a fashionable bustle. Her high-heeled boots buckled up the sides and peeped out from under the sweeping skirts. The artful cut of the material emphasized her tiny waist. Her wide-brimmed hat was crowned with a wave of ostrich feathers. She wore the amber necklace and earrings that he had given her on the road outside Gallabat.
‘When will we see each other again?’ Amber was trying desperately but unsuccessfully to hold back her tears until after the train had departed.
‘That I cannot say.’ Penrod had determined never to lie to her, unless it was absolutely necessary. The tears broke over Amber’s lower lids. She tried to sniff them back, and Penrod hurried on: ‘Perhaps you and Jane could come out to Cairo to spend your sixteenth birthday at Shepheard’s Hotel. Jane has never been there and you might show her the pyramids.’
‘Oh, can we do that, Jane? Please?’
‘I will speak to my husband,’ Jane promised. She was about the same age as Rebecca, and in the few weeks that Amber had lived at Clercastle they had become as close as sisters. ‘I can see no possible reason why Peter should object. It will be the height of the grouse-shooting season and he will be much occupied elsewhere. He will hardly miss us.’
Sam Adams came down from Cairo to meet Penrod when his ship docked in Alexandria. Almost his first words were ‘We have all read the book. The sirdar is as pleased as a cat with a saucer of cream. London was starting to have second thoughts about rebuilding the army. Gladstone and those other idiots were dithering with the idea of using the money to build a bloody great dam on the Nile instead of giving it to us. Miss Benbrook’s book created such a rumpus in the House that they changed their dim minds sharpish. Kitchener has another million pounds, and to the devil with the dam. Now we will certainly have new Maxim guns. As for myself, well, we desperately need a good number two if we’re to have any chance of retaining the Nile Cup this year.’
‘After my brief meeting with the sirdar, I estimate that he is not likely to set aside much time for polo.’
Adams’s wife had found and rented a comfortable house for Penrod on the bank of the river, close to army headquarters and the Gheziera Club. When Penrod climbed the steps to the shady veranda, a figure in a plain white jibba and turban rose from his seat beside the front door and made a deep salaam.
‘Effendi, the heart of the faithful Yakub has pined for you as the night awaits the dawn.’
The next morning Penrod found out what Kitchener and Adams had in store for him. He was to recruit and train three companies of camel cavalry to travel far and fast, and fight hard. ‘I want men from the desert tribes,’ he told Adams. ‘They make the best soldiers. Abdullahi has driven many of the Ashraf out of Sudan, emirs of the
Jaalin and the Hadendowa. I want to go after them. Hatred makes a man fight harder. I believe I shall be able to turn them against their former masters.’
‘Find them,’ Adams ordered.
Penrod and Yakub took the steamer to Aswan. Here they waited thirty-six hours for the sailing of another boat that would carry them up beyond the first cataract, as far as Wadi Halfa. Penrod left Yakub at the dock to guard the baggage, and went alone to the gate at the end of the narrow, winding alley. When old Liala heard his voice she flung open the gate and collapsed in a heap of faded robes and veils, wailing pitifully. ‘Effendi, why have you come back? You should have spared my mistress. You should never have returned here.’
Penrod lifted her to her feet. ‘Take me to her.’
‘She will not see you, Effendi.’
‘She must tell me that herself. Go to her, Liala. Tell her I am here.’ Sobbing pitifully, the old woman left him beside the fountain in the courtyard and tottered into the back quarters. She was gone a long time. Penrod picked tiny green flies from the flowering fuchsias and dropped them into the pool. The perch rose to the surface and gulped them down.
Liala returned at last. She had stopped weeping. ‘She will see you.’ She led him to the bead screen. ‘Go in.’
Bakhita sat on a silk rug on the far side of the well-remembered room. He knew it was her by her perfume. She was heavily veiled. ‘My heart fills with joy to see you safe and well, my lord.’
Her soft, sweet voice tugged at his heart. ‘Without you, Bakhita, that would not have been possible. Yakub has told me of the part you played in bringing me to safety. I have come to thank you.’