‘The woman you have brought is in an ill state from your journey. But scratches and sunburns soon heal and beneath them I discern a haughty beauty which pleases me. I have, too, never owned a woman of such astonishing fairness. Owing to that you no doubt had to pay a high price for her and I do not wish to rob you. But I can provide you with a good choice of darker beauties, and I would have this one for my harem. How much will you take for her?’
For a moment Roger was silent. His heart seemed to have stopped beating; but it started again with a violent thump. His lips had suddenly gone dry and he moistened them with the tip of his tongue. Then he made the only reply that he could think of; and, even in that tense moment, it struck him as a bitter mockery by Fate that it had needed their being brought to such a desperate pass for him to claim a thing that he might never now enjoy.
‘Illustrious One,’ he said, a little hoarsely, ‘Allah, who is witness to the good deeds and the bad deeds of every man—praise be on His name and that of His Prophet—has placed us in your power. Should you demand it of me, I must give her to you. But I cannot sell her; for that would bring upon me eternal shame. She is my wife.’
13
A Bolt from the Blue
Clarissa lay upon a broad low divan. She was waiting for her lover to come to her and she gave a heavy sigh.
Her long slim legs were easily discernible through the filmy muslin of the balloon-like trousers worn by Mohammedan ladies; above, she had on a short sleeveless jacket of a blue to match her eyes, heavily worked with an intricate pattern in gold thread. Her only other garment was a diaphanous veil, caught by a jewel to her left ear, and having a clip by which she could hook it to a jewel in the other; but now it hung down beside her leaving her fair face fully revealed. The skin of her stomach, arms, hands and feet were an even deeper shade of golden brown than they had been when the Minerva went down, and by contrast her hair seemed an even paler glory of fine spun golden tinted silk. Upon her skin, too, there was not a single blemish; for perfumed unguents had soon charmed away the bruises, burns and scratches that she had come by on the raft and during her journey through the jungle.
The divan on which she lay, propped up on cushions, was situated in a one-storeyed pavilion. Its front wall was composed only of lattice woodwork over which curtains of silk could be drawn for privacy, or at night. Centrally opposite the divan was an open archway through which she could look out onto a small court. In its centre a fountain tinkled into a circular basin that held brightly coloured fish. At intervals round the sides of the court were set tubs containing flowering shrubs or planted with exotic blossoms. They gave off a heady scent which mingled with that from the perfume burner beside the divan, and the all-pervading spicy odour wafted from the clove plantations.
The heat of the day was past and soon now she would know if she was to be allowed to remain there like a Princess in an Eastern fairy-tale, or if she was to be cast out of this earthly paradise. Lazily stretching out a hand to a silver filigree dish on a nearby table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, she picked up a piece of Rahat Lacoum. The sugar powdered jelly had pistachio nuts in it, and as she munched them she wondered how much longer Roger would be. At that moment she heard on the marble flags outside the swift padding of the soft leather boots he now always wore.
He, too, was dressed in Eastern fashion, and his face was now so bronzed that in his rich robe, with its crimson cummerbund and the dagger inlaid with gold thrust through it, any casual observer would have taken him for a Moorish nobleman. Coming quickly through the archway to the divan he bent and kissed Clarissa on the half-open mouth she held up to him.
Her arm curled round his neck and she closed her eyes, but she was too anxious to hear his news to wish to be made love to now; so, after a moment, she pulled her mouth away and asked:
‘Well? Has His Highness agreed?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. We leave tomorrow morning.’
She sighed. ‘Oh, Roger! Why did you have to do this? We have been so deliriously happy here.’
That was true. Roger’s ready wit had enabled him to make the best possible use of all he could recall of his talks with Droopy Ned about Mohammedan customs. Abdul ben Mazuri had admired his spirit and been favourably impressed by the way in which, although an Infidel, he spoke with knowledge and respect of the ‘true religion’. For so powerful a Prince there could be no middle course; this Roumi who claimed to be a lord in his own distant land and, despite his rags, had the bearing of one, must either be accounted an enemy and enslaved, or treated as an honoured guest. The gift of the diamond brooch had made it impossible to enslave him, and his invocation of Allah as a witness to all that passed between them would have made it a flagrant sin to rob him of his wife. Refreshments had been brought; they had ceremoniously broken bread and eaten salt together. His Highness had then ordered the old grey-bearded man, who was his Vizier, to see to it that his guests lacked for nothing. Roger and Clarissa had been installed in the pavilion, where they now were, that night, and the following day they had been provided with slaves and every sort of lovely raiment.
During the three weeks that had since elapsed their existence had been idyllic. It would have been impossible to find more delightful surroundings in which to give full expression to those feelings for one another that they had so long repressed and, during the warm starlit nights in the pavilion that they shared, their caresses had been mingled with a thousand murmured endearments coming truly from the hearts of both. Yet there was no danger of their becoming cloyed with a surfeit of passionate embraces from having no other thoughts to occupy their minds.
Every day Roger spent several hours with Abdul ben Mazuri, discussing military matters, geography, and the innumerable differences between their two civilisations; and Roger was fascinated to find that in many respects the Mohammedan culture was in advance of the European, particularly where cleanliness, medicine and knowledge of ancient civilisations were concerned.
Clarissa spent those hours in the Vali’s harem. His beautiful favourite, Dár-el-Nairn—Dwelling of Delight—had shown the greatest friendliness, introduced her to all the other inmates of the harem, and soon taught her a few score words in Arabic which, eked out with gestures, were enough for simple conversation. The whole life of an Eastern beauty being love. Dár-el-Naim had also taught Clarissa certain things about love-making that she would never have dreamed of for herself, and several secrets of the toilette by which she might make herself even more beautiful and desirable. Then in the evenings they attended the Vali’s court to dine off fabulous delicacies and witness entertainments by jugglers, dancing girls and conjurors.
It was, therefore, not to be wondered at that Clarissa was most reluctant to have this lotus-eating existence brought to an end. Yet Roger, on learning that an Arab merchant was shortly leaving in his ship for India, had insisted on asking Abdul ben Mazuri’s permission for them to sail in it. Smiling down at her he said:
‘My sweet, I truly grieve that my decision should be so displeasing to you; but we have discussed the matter ad nauseam already, and you know my reasons for it.’
‘But I don’t agree with them,’ she protested. ‘His Highness dotes upon you, and would never allow anyone to harm a hair of our heads.’
‘He does at present. I had the greatest difficulty in persuading him to let us go. And, believe me, I too am most distressed to have to make this break. I have become greatly attached to him; and, as far as we are concerned, you have made this pavilion heaven for me.’
‘Then why leave it? Why allow your morbid suspicions to play the part of a serpent in our Eden? I’ll vow they are unfounded.’
He sat down on the edge of the divan, took her hand, kissed it, ran his lips up her bare arm and kissed her again below the ear. Then he replied, ‘Alas, they are not. Khunsa Bajazet has never forgiven us that for having concealed our arrival Abdul ben Mazuri had him given ten strokes on the soles of his feet with the bastinado, and the old Vizier has become bitterly jealous of me
. The Imam, too, protests as much as he dares at His Highness’s showing favour to an Infidel. These and others are intriguing against us, and Eastern potentates are said to be fickle in their affections. Should these enemies of ours bring against us some trumped up charge and produce enough bribed witnesses to support it, we might well find ourselves dragged from this scene of our delights to rot in separate dungeons. And I’ll not risk that. Loving you as I do, I’d be mad did I not insist on sacrificing our present comfort in order to secure our future safety.’
Unhappy as his decision made Clarissa, she knew that he would not have taken it had he not had good grounds for his fears; so she argued no further. Together they went into the tiled bathroom next door, in which they were in turn massaged by expert slaves each morning. Stripping off their clothes they both clambered into the great stone bath fed from a marble lion’s head with constantly flowing water and, having refreshed themselves, banged the little gong that brought their slaves hurrying to help them with their toilettes for the evening.
Early the following morning, porters came for the hampers of clothes and many other presents they had been given, then they took a sad farewell of Abdul ben Mazuri, of the beautiful Dár-el-Naim and of the other friends that they had made during their stay in the palace. As a last courtesy the Vali ordered his Captain of the Guard to escort them and Bill Bodkin—who was as loath as Clarissa to give up the life of ease and plenty he had been leading—down to the harbour. There the Arab merchant, Selim Zamurrud, welcomed them most politely and took them aboard his ship.
She was very different from the Minerva and, like most Arab ships of the period, built upon the two-hundred-year-old pattern of a Spanish galleon; but they were the only passengers and were given both clean and ample accommodation in her stern-castle.
For an hour the Arab sailors sweated at long sweeps, rowing the ship northward till she passed the promontory that sheltered the harbour. Once round the point, her sails caught the breeze and she started on her tricky passage south through the many coral atolls in the channel. By mid-afternoon they were rounding the southern end of the fifty-mile long island where, nearly a month before, they had been washed ashore. A mile or more out, in a line running parallel with the coast for as far as the eye could see, huge waves were breaking in cascades of white foam. Zamurrud told them that the line marked the barrier reef, which almost encircled the island, and that when their raft was swept through a gap in it they had been extraordinarily lucky, as otherwise they would certainly have been dashed to pieces on the coral. As night fell they were heading north-east out in the open ocean.
The Arab trader was bound for Goa, the Portuguese settlement on the west coast of India some two hundred and sixty miles south of Bombay. The direct run to it from Zanzibar was well over two thousand miles and, as they had to make the best use of the winds, the actual mileage covered was far greater. But they were lucky with the weather and had a following wind for a good part of the voyage; so they made the passage in eighteen days, which was highly satisfactory. They had lost touch with the Christian calendar and now learned on landing that it was November 21st.
Zamurrud went ashore with them and introduced Roger to an Indian banker who gave him a fair rate in sicca rupees for one of the Bills of Exchange on London that his fish-skin wallet had preserved from serious damage by sea water. After paying the Arab the passage money agreed on, they set about finding another ship, but those of the Company called at Goa only in exceptional circumstances and no large ship was due to sail from the port in the near future other than one bound for Europe.
She was expected to reach Lisbon towards the middle of March and they toyed with the idea of returning in her, then spending the spring in Portugal; but, having actually arrived in India, it seemed foolish to forgo seeing the most interesting part of that country just because to reach Calcutta would entail a month or so spent mainly in small, not very comfortable, vessels. Later Roger was most bitterly to regret the decision to go on there; but no sense of foreboding suggested to either of them at the time that they might be heading towards tragedy, and on the 23rd they set out on the first part of their new journey in a Portuguese coaster that was trading down to Colombo.
Although the accommodation and food left much to be desired, the ten days that followed were the most pleasant of any they had spent at sea. The weather was still good, and the little ship did the six-hundred miles in leisurely fashion, calling at Mangalore, Calicut on the Malabar coast, Cochin, and Trivandrum, the capital of Travancore; so they saw much beautiful tropical scenery, several different Indian races, a number of splendid oriental palaces and four fascinating bazaars.
They reached Colombo on December 3rd, and would have liked to stay there for a while to see something of Ceylon; but on the afternoon of their landing they met a Captain Jarvis of the Frigate Amazon who, it transpired, had served under Roger’s father, Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Brook. The Amazon had met with bad weather and put into Colombo for repairs. She was sailing again the following day for Madras and when Captain Jarvis offered them a passage in her they felt it too good a chance proceeding with a maximum of speed and safety to be refused.
As Amazon had come out direct from England, Captain Jarvis was able to give them news of the principal happenings in Europe during the late summer and early autumn. In the last days of July the Austrian General, Würmser, had in turn defeated the best French troops in the Army of Italy, under Masséna and Augereau, and very nearly succeeded in cutting its communications. But its Commander in Chief, General Buonaparte, had shown great resolution in this crisis. Ruthlessly abandoning all but essentials, he had raised the siege of Mantua and ordered Serurier to throw his siege artillery into the river Mincio rather than allow it to be captured. He had then succeeded in manoeuvring himself into a position between the two main bodies of the Austrians and a week later heavily defeated them at Solferino.
In a further series of smaller battles, things had gone badly for the Austrians, and these had culminated in mid-September in a further heavy defeat. Würmser’s original army of 41,000 men had been whittled down to a fragment. To save that, he had been forced to throw it into Mantua, and the French had resumed the siege of that key fortress.
Despite these many Austrian reverses, Roger felt that the campaign might have gone far worse. Although Moreau and Jourdan had crossed the Rhine, the Archduke Charles had prevented their making any serious advance; so there was no question of their coming south to Buonaparte’s assistance, and he was still bogged down before Mantua. Owing to a lagoon and much marshy ground outside its walls, the fortress was in any case a very difficult one to take. Würmser had at least succeeded in revictualling and reinforcing it, and the Corsican had lost his siege train; so there was every prospect that he would be held up there for the rest of the year’s serious fighting. In any case, he had been thwarted in his grand design of joining up with the Army of the Rhine and advancing through the Tyrol on Vienna; and it was that which really mattered.
On the other hand, Roger learned with a cynicism that gave him no satisfaction that his predictions to Mr. Pitt about Buonaparte treating Italy as the Treasure Chest of Europe, to be robbed at will, had duly come to pass. While keeping his eagle eye on the main conflict Buonaparte had detached an expedition to strike south which had crossed the Po and seized Bologna in the Papal States. The terrified Cardinals had at once signed an armistice, closing their territories to the English, agreeing to yield up one hundred classic works of Art, to accept a French garrison in the important port of Ancona, and to pay in specie and kind an indemnity amounting to many millions of francs. Further, on the excuse that by allowing English ships to use Leghorn the Grand Duke of Tuscany was not observing strict neutrality, Buonaparte had sent another expedition to seize the port, and had himself gone down to the Tuscan capital. Although technically on a visit, he had entered Florence like a conqueror, browbeaten the Senate into accepting his orders regarding their future foreign policy, and extorted from them many w
orks of art and a huge indemnity in ‘compensation’ for having ‘had to’ occupy Leghorn.
The worst news that Captain Jarvis gave them was that Spain had gone over to the enemy. On August 19th she had signed the treaty of San Idlefonso, allying herself with France and, when calling to deliver mails at Gibraltar, he had learned that Spain had declared war on England on October 5th.
From Colombo, Amazon made a swift passage round to Madras, arriving off the Company’s headquarters in the Carnatic on December 8th. Next morning, Roger and Clarissa went ashore with Captain Jarvis in a Masulah boat. These were a type of long, very broad punt, the flat boards of which were held together only by coconut fibre. They had been evolved as the best means of passing the three distinct barriers of surf, each separated by over a hundred yards, which made landing on this coast a matter of no small danger. So dangerous, in fact, was it considered that each Masulah boat was accompanied by several hollowed-out tree trunks, called Catamarans, to act as life-boats should the larger craft capsize. The natives who manned the Mazulah and Catamarans were all naked, except for a small piece of rag attached to a string round their middles, and so violent was the sea that those in the Catamarans were frequently thrown into it; but they swam like fish and soon clambered back into their tree trunks. Captain Jarvis’s party reached the shore safely but, as was usual, they had all been soaked to the skin by the blinding sheets of spray, and poor Clarissa presented a sadly bedraggled sight.
They had left Bill Bodkin aboard the Amazon, and before going ashore said good-bye to him with mixed feelings. Like all ships in the Royal Navy, the Amazon was always short of hands; so, although protected from being ‘pressed’ by travelling as Roger’s servant, Bodkin had, during the short voyage from Colombo, volunteered to serve in a watch. Finding him a firstclass seaman, Captain Jarvis had offered to make him a petty-officer if he would sign on permanently instead of returning to the service of the Company. Bodkin had agreed so Roger had made him a handsome present of money and, after having wished him luck, that was the last they saw of him.
The Rape of Venice Page 22