Secret of the Sands

by Sara Sheridan

  Inside, he is shown into a cool, tiled courtyard by a young slave boy in a robe as yellow as a canary, his eyelashes so long that they could dust the ceilings of their cobwebs. The boy offers Wellsted a copper bowl of cool water and rose petals in which to make his ablutions. He does so noticing how much better he feels only a little way out of the oppressive heat. Then, courteously, the slave ushers him upstairs and Ibn Mudar welcomes the young lieutenant into his office on the first floor. The slatted wooden shutters keep the room shady and warmed by the sun, and also give out a pleasant aroma of sandalwood. Between the slats and cut-out stars there are glimpses of an impressive view over the bay. To one side there is a large, cedarwood desk with scrolls of accounts and ledgers stored behind it on a series of intricately carved, wooden shelves and burr cubby holes. On the other side there is a comfortable seating area with low, embroidered cushions and goatskin throws. This is not the agent’s home, however. That is far grander and much higher up the hill. He prefers to keep his working life separate, always has.

  As the man smiles and rises to greet his visitor, Wellsted quickly notes that Ibn Mudar’s plain jubbah is made of very fine cotton – curiously unshowy given that the main part of his income comes from a textile business. The lieutenant considers mentioning his own family’s background in the same trade but deems it inappropriate. Instead, he sizes up the Navy’s agent silently. Ibn Mudar, with a greying beard, in his mid-fifties, is only slightly overweight and his eyes seem to take in everything and give nothing away. He clears his throat to make his salaams, but he does not invoke Allah. The custom in this office is the same as it would be in Liverpool or Southampton so the Navy’s representative reaches out to shake Wellsted firmly by the hand and smiles.

  ‘How do you do? I was to send to the ship shortly, you know. Would you partake of a coffee, Lieutenant?’

  Wellsted does not laugh, though not to do so is an effort. The man’s accent is as thick as treacle. He might as well be from Cork. ‘Thank you. I would enjoy a coffee.’

  The agent waves a hand and his slave disappears to fetch what is needed as the men sit down together on the pile of cushions on the floor. Wellsted likes him immediately. There is something cut and dried about this man and competent too. Our Dear Mickey feels like an apt moniker.

  ‘You have come for your letter from London, have you?’ Mickey says.

  Wellsted starts. He has, in his whole time in the service, never received a personal letter. It is an amazement that such an item has found him here.

  ‘From London?’ he repeats, the shock showing in his voice.

  His heart races with the realisation that this could be a momentous turn of events – is it possible that Murray has already responded to his manuscript? Surely it will take longer than this, but then who knows the ways of the famous publisher? It has, he counts the weeks, probably been long enough. With surprise, he notes that his palm feels suddenly sticky and his stomach flutters nervously.

  Mickey reaches into a large, burnished box beside his cushion and passes a folded envelope franked in Mayfair. Wellsted breaks the small, red seal. Inside, the handwriting is haphazard – not what he would expect from a man of Murray’s education and renown. Wellsted takes a deep breath, comprehending that this missive is even more momentous than one that might contain John Murray’s comments on his account of the Socotra trip. This letter has emanated from his family home in Molyneux Street and is dated in May – two months ago.

  Dear Brother,

  I regret to inform you that after some months of suffering our grandfather has died. We buried him at the parish church a week past. Apart from this sad news all is well here. Edward has taken the oath to be a customs man at Greenwich. Please when you write now, address yourself to our father.

  Most sincerely,

  Your brother,

  Thomas Wellsted Jnr

  James turns the paper over. It seems unnecessarily brief. He remembers young Thomas as an infant only just out of his nappies and rosy-cheeked, learning to climb out of the cot – a child as he had been in the year James Wellsted left home. For a moment James indulges himself, wondering what the boy looks like now or if, indeed, there might be more infants that followed his departure and he has nameless brothers and sisters growing up in his parents’ home. A Charles perhaps. Even an Emily or Elizabeth.

  Mickey allows a pause long enough for Wellsted to take in his news, whatever it may be. ‘All is well in London, I hope,’ the agent says gently.

  ‘News of home, that is all,’ Wellsted dismisses the letter briskly, pushing it into his pocket. He has no time for personal matters or at least he never makes any. ‘I did not come for the letter,’ he admits. ‘I am here on another more serious matter. We have two officers gone missing in the interior. They were led across the jabel and into the desert by Dhofari guides to visit the Bedu several weeks ago. Dr Jessop who was our ship’s surgeon and First Lieutenant Jones. They missed their rendezvous and have not been heard of since. We docked at every decent-sized port along the coast but have found out very little, though outside Aden I encountered a group of Bedu. I heard the men were prisoners of the emir – that they had offended him in some way and were being held in his caravan. The description the Bedu gave was consistent with the appearance of the men though the captain – Captain Haines, that is – believes them dead. When we made rendezvous with the Benares however, Captain Moresby was of the view that we must be sure.’

  Mickey scratches his cheek with a long, carefully manicured finger, which sports a thick ring of yellow gold with a red stone embedded on the face. He takes a sip of his strong coffee.

  ‘Captured by an emir’s caravan and held there? Now that’s not good. I will make enquiries,’ he says. ‘Leave it with me, Lieutenant Wellsted, and I will see what I can find out.’

  ‘It is a matter of some urgency, sir.’

  Ibn Mudar bows. ‘Of course. Immediately.’

  With the efficiency of a man who is used to getting a great deal done, Ibn Mudar calls his slave boy.

  ‘Bring me Rashid,’ he snaps. The yellow-robed child immediately disappears to find the chief clerk, who is stationed at Mickey’s warehouse, a few streets away.

  Wellsted’s cup is refilled and the agent asks polite questions.

  ‘And your work? How goes the survey?’

  ‘Slow but sure,’ Wellsted grins. ‘The reefs are all but impossible but the charts are coming along.’

  ‘Any French vessels?’

  This is of interest to any trader with ships on the nearby seas.

  ‘Only very close to the Egyptian coastline. Where you would expect, really.’

  ‘It will be good to have maps,’ Mickey points out and Wellsted says nothing in reply, only downs the rest of his coffee.

  ‘Do you think they might still be alive?’ he asks.

  The agent’s face does not alter its expression one iota. ‘My brothers would say it is in Allah’s hands,’ he says. ‘Let me see if I can find out what Allah has in mind. I will send Rashid the moment he comes. He is the man for this job. Leave it to me.’

  The men shake hands and Mickey sees the lieutenant to the door of his office.

  While he waits, Mickey strokes his thick, salt-and-pepper beard and retreats back onto the comfortable cushions in the corner of the room to consider matters. The British survey interests him tremendously, for if it is successful there will be a far greater volume of English ships in the Red Sea and he will be contracted to see to their needs. He is determined to do his job well for the English. Mickey is inclined to do everything well – he is careful and fastidious in all his dealings. He will apply this to the search for Jessop and Jones – which potentially, he realises, is one of the most dangerous situations with which he has been asked to help. Men die all the time, but kidnap is a different matter.

  Watch out, he says to himself. God knows what they are up to, the tricky bastards. And now there are two of them missing.

  When Mickey thinks of the English, th
e voice in his head is always that of his Irish wife, Farida, who maintains that without question the English are untrustworthy. Her tribe, it seems, are perpetually at war with the lily-skinned sailors, though they share the same tongue. Mickey trusts Farida’s judgement. He was young when he bought her at auction after she had been captured on a shipwreck. He was a brash, young buck of a merchant of twenty who had made his fortune quickly. He wanted to show the world that he was cosmopolitan and he knew an exotic, white-skinned beauty in his harim would make his name as much as any bale of fine silk ever had. There was no question of love. When he met her, however, he realised just how much he had focussed all his attention on his business and how little he knew of the world beyond it. At first he expected she resented being captured and sold, but she told him frankly after only a fortnight, that his house was a hundred times the size of the cottage in Rowgaranne, County Cork, where she was brought up, that she had spent much of her young life there hungry, cold and in want and that she would gladly stay in his beautiful harim, especially as his wife.

  The land of white men still seems to Mickey like a fairy-tale kingdom. The landscape Farida describes is undoubtedly accurate and yet it is so outlandish. She swears on her life that Cork is so rainy that much of the land is bog, and so cold that sometimes when it rains the drops freeze solid. He finds this particularly difficult to imagine – Mickey, for all that he is a trader, has never left the south of the Arabian Peninsula and the thought of freezing, squelching mud flats is almost incomprehensible to him. That the people who live in such a place should subsist on potatoes and that spice is almost unheard of is bizarre. In fact, he finds the lack of camels and gazelles in the stories his wife tells of her homeland profoundly eerie. And the infidels have such strange names – Macgregor, McLean and O’Donnell.

  ‘Why, you are silly,’ Farida laughs, dismissing him with a wave of her elegant, snow-white hand. ‘That’s only your Ibn. Macgregor is the son of Gregor (that is the name of the man who taught me to read – our priest at home) and O’Donnell (which is my name, you know) is Son of Donnell. It’s exactly the same as yours – Ibn Mudar – the son of Mudar. Or Ibn Rashid is the son of Rashid. The word Ibn is only O or Mac in English, or rather in the Gaelic. We shan’t go into the Fitzes now, my dear. But it’s only a way of identifying your family – like all names. Don’t you see?’

  * * *

  At first Mickey can’t get used to it – European languages simply have too many consonants. He is certain that he’ll never become fully accustomed to the sound.

  ‘You Arabian lads,’ Farida continues, ‘have great swagger and no mistake. We only call our chief soldiers, our boxers and wrestlers The Knife or The Hurricane. Whereas you fellas have legions of names like that – serious fellas can be Al this or Al that. The Dog, The Thief, The Lion. Well, fair play to you, I say. You’re warriors one and all. You can be my Ali Ibn Mudar, Ali Al Malik – Ali the King. I am your possession now, after all, and you my master, like royalty.’

  Mickey kisses his wife hotly on the lips. She is a wonderful woman. She has taken to his household far more easily than could have ever been hoped and, better still, she is a boon in business. Farida has no qualms about Arabian manners or customs and her open-mindedness rubs off on her husband, who finds himself more and more intrigued by her tales. His world is opening up.

  The strangest thing of all though is that in Farida’s country, it seems, men only take one wife. Or, as she says with a characteristic giggle, ‘One wife at a time’. This shocks Mickey to the core – it seems such a barbaric practice.

  ‘But what happens to the other women the man desires?’ he says.

  ‘Exactly, my boy,’ Farida grins. ‘Now in these parts here you have what I would term a practicable system. I can see this working out very nicely indeed.’

  Over the years she has remained indescribably foreign for all her aptitudes and the whole-hearted fashion in which she has adopted her new, Arabian life. While his other brown-eyed beauties scent themselves interminably with exotic oils, coil their hair into glossy ringlets and dote on the nursery of children that they have produced, Farida or Fanny as she originally wished to be called, on her very first day demanded pen and ink to draw pictures of the plants in Mickey’s courtyard garden and write reams of descriptive prose and poetry. Within six months of her arrival, the Pearl, as he has come to call her, is speaking Arabic like a master at the university. She reads and mem -orises long portions of the Quran and fashions herself a set of silk garments from the harim’s stock of materials that prove to be deeply enticing to Mickey O’Mudar.

  ‘Never been without a bodice. Not going to feckin’ start now,’ she says.

  Mickey never can tell what she is going to do next, what she might read or what strange ideas she will voice. The thing he likes about her most, though, is the fact that she is clearly interested in pleasing herself as much as she pleases him – both in bed and out of it. This is an irresistible challenge after years of women bred to compliance. Farida is a matchless pearl indeed and, illuminated by the spark of independence that is so natural to her alongside her fierce intelligence, she stimulates him body and mind. It does not matter to him one jot that in all the years she has not borne him a child. In fact, it adds to her allure, her difference from his other wives. It is also probably the only reason why the other women in the harim accept the strange, pale-skinned foreigner. She is not – as far as they are concerned – competition, for she has no son to compete with their own. She is, they think, a mere dalliance to keep Mickey amused.

  ‘Do you mind?’ he asks her.

  ‘Well you can’t say we haven’t given it a good enough shot,’ she giggles.

  He loves her all the more for being so contented. Farida has the admirable ability of being able to adapt and he’d never be where he is today if it wasn’t for her. It was Farida after all who made the navy job possible. He might not have taken it had she not encouraged him.

  When he tells her of the opportunity that has presented itself, Farida makes no judgement on his lack of manliness in sharing his concerns – she takes it in her stride as easily as she has taken their habit of discussing literature and art (also, now he comes to think of it, unusual).

  ‘Well now,’ she sips a glass of rose-water and pomegranate juice and contemplates Mickey’s smooth, chestnut skin as he lies naked beside her on purple, satin sheets that she picked herself from the lavish stock of textiles available to all his women. ‘Into bed with the English is it, eh? Well, my advice, dear husband, is to take their money. They have acres of money, the English. Take their money and charge them plenty, treat them fair – true to yourself – but never trust them. Individually they are fine, I’m sure, but as a nation they’ll stab you in the back as soon as look at you. My father, God bless him, used to say there are four things you can never trust – a bull’s horn, a dog’s tooth, a horse’s hoof and an Englishman’s smile. And a man such as yourself, a fine man with brown skin, is worth even less to them than a penniless Catholic. Remember that, my darling, whatever happens, whatever friends you think you have made – you are a darkie to them and that’s all.’

  In what can only be described as ongoing training, his pale-skinned wife teaches Mickey a thing or two about matters European and briefs him in British manners and business customs as a matter of course, so that when he agrees to Allenby’s proposition and takes up the post of naval agent, the officers with whom he comes into contact feel instinctively that somehow he understands what the Navy needs. Quickly he is trusted and liked throughout the service.

  These days though well into her forties, and displaying with each passing year, were it possible, less interest in his household and domestic matters, it is still Farida who Mickey seeks out most regularly for company and advice. It is she he most desires when it comes time to retire. He has tried asking his other wives for their opinion but the conversations never go beyond what they think he wants them to say. Her delight these days, as always, is her frantic s
cribbling and reading any Arabic text that comes her way. She quotes poetry, whispering well-constructed if profane lines in her husband’s ear as she pulls him on top of her pale flesh. Most surprisingly of all for a woman, she has, as far as he can remember, never been wrong about anything.

  There is a clattering sound on the stairway to Mickey’s office as Rashid arrives from the warehouse. He has recently put henna in his hair but immediately decided against the resulting shock of colour, so he is wearing a long headdress to cover the luminous orange while it fades. The material sways behind him lending an unaccustomed elegance to his entrance.

  ‘Salaam aleikhum,’ the boy bows.

  He comes from a long line of Ibadi herdsmen and he learnt to read purely by chance, when he was taken ill and sent to Muscat to the house of a distant relative. Having discovered indispensable administrative skills, which have benefited Mickey’s business immeasurably, Rashid never returned to the shit-poor caravan where he spent the first ten years of his life. He is, however, a competent horseman and good with a camel. He knows how to survive on the sands.

  ‘I need you to come with me,’ Mickey says. ‘We will be gone for a few days. There are two Bedu I want to find on the jabel who can help me. Two white men are missing. We must find them. Though first some enquiries in town, I think.’

  Rashid hovers, hopping from foot to foot very lightly in a barely perceptible movement that Mickey completely understands.

  ‘Oh yes, Rashid. There will be bonuses if we find them. For you and for me. If they are still alive.’