by Jane Johnson
Drying my tears, I took my courage in both hands, in the form of a scrap of paper. He knew enough now of my language to understand it, and to feel the rhythm and music behind the words. I went to find him. It wasn’t hard to do: he was at his desk with the architect, their heads bent together over a series of drawings that more resembled mathematical problems than house plans, and arrived just as Momo said, “…for me, beside the koubba for my mother and our ancestors.” So, they were talking about death again: the last resting place of the Nasrid dynasty, including his own tomb.
I waited for long minutes for the architect to be dismissed, feeling my courage turning to foolhardiness with each passing moment, taking in the changes in his outward form. He was not yet thirty-two: not even halfway through his life. But he looked a man thirty years older, his hair prematurely white, his face seamed with lines, his amber eyes sunken in pits. His face was as gaunt as a death’s head. There was no flesh on it, or any of the rest of him, due to the lack of food and the excess of nervous pacing and strange internal fires. The golden boy I had fallen in love with was long gone: but you don’t stop loving someone just because their looks are gone. If anything, you love them all the more.
I closed my eyes, preparing my words. No, they all sounded so absurd, so hollow. I would just give him the poem, let him read my desperate yearning, and the awful truth behind it. Then we would see if he could love me, or would know me as a monster.
Finally, the man left, with papers in his hand, a smile on his lips and satisfaction in his eyes, and I was struck by the yawning parallel: here sat I with a paper in my hands, a tiny paper rather than the great sheaf he carried, with dread on my face.
“So, Blessings, come and see what we’ve designed,” Momo said at last. “The Nasrid tombs will stand forever as a testament to the lost greatness of the kings of Granada. People will come from all over the Muslim world to wonder over them, and I hope offer their prayers for our souls.”
I approached the table, my heart leaping in my chest like a caught rabbit. With a boldness I no longer felt, I put my scrap of poetry down, right in the middle of the drawings in front of him. All my life hung on that moment, on the few words I had so carefully inked there. And then cried over—I saw the last line was blotched.
I watched his hand move as if time itself had slowed. I saw his fingers brush the paper. I closed my eyes and waited for my fate.
There was silence, at least inside the room. Outside, life went on as normal: I could hear the cries of swallows over the noise of the workmen. I could hear the blood ringing in my ears, my own breath: his breath, slow and steady…
I opened my eyes. The poem lay half on, half off the edge of the desk, suspended in mid-air. He had brushed it away from his wretched plans, and was once more engrossed in them. I felt such anger then, such reckless fury. I reached out and took back the poem: he did not deserve it. Then I said, “I’m going away.”
He looked up, though I’m not sure he saw me: for there were soaring pillars and vaults and decorations in his eyes. “What did you say, Blessings?”
I made a momentous decision that instant. “I’m going away, to sail the oceans. With the adventurer, Cristoforo Colombo.”
He appeared puzzled. “Do I know him? I don’t recall the name.”
Had he actually heard what I’d said and understood what it meant? I wanted to reach across the table and grab him by the ears. But of course I didn’t. I reminded him, as patiently as I could, about the man I’d met in Córdoba and then again in Santa Fe, the man who had been interested in how my people navigate across the Great Desert by the stars.
Momo nodded distractedly. “I do dimly recollect some mention of that. Well, that will be interesting for both of you.”
I stared at him. “I don’t know how long I’ll be away, or whether I’ll ever come back.”
He looked pained, then faintly annoyed. “Don’t say that, Blessings. Of course you’ll come back. It is written.”
It was written. On the paper I held in my hand. I closed my fingers over it. I closed my heart. “I’ll pack my things and go this very day.”
“Go with God, my friend. My friendship goes with you, no matter how far.”
Was that a tear I saw in his eye? I don’t know: he bowed his head and went back to his drawings. There seemed nothing more I could say. We hugged briefly, but it was as if I hugged a walking corpse.
Friendship is a fine thing. But it is not enough to keep a heart from withering.
I went to my room and sat there for a long time, staring into space, feeling bereaved. Then I stuffed the poem savagely down into my false foot and started to pack my things.
32
Kate
GRANADA
NOW
Kate held Luke close as the footsteps sounded on the stone stairs up from the crypt. Was there time for her and Luke to run for the door? They could try, but the entrance to the crypt stood between them and the exit, and Luke was head down and grizzling; she would have to pick him up and run: she didn’t think she’d be fast enough. She looked around for a weapon, anything: but of course in such a place there was nothing she could use. Her hands ached from being balled into tight fists. I will fight him, she thought. I won’t let him terrify me, and I won’t let him hurt Luke. With a terrible cold dread she watched the pillar that hid the entrance.
The footsteps stopped echoing and became softer. There was a pause in the sound; then a dark shape ghosted around the pillar. It was not James.
He came toward her quickly, shedding his robe on the way. It lay on the tiles like a dead crow.
“Abdou—but how—?”
“I followed you. Are you all right? He didn’t hurt you or Luke, did he?”
Kate, lost for words, shook her head.
Abdou dropped to one knee to put himself on a level with the toddler. “Hello, Luke. My name’s Abdou, and I’m a friend of your mum.” He paused, letting the boy take this in. Then he said, “Do you like chocolate?”
Luke gazed up at him in a sort of tear-stained wonder, then slowly nodded. Solemnly, Abdou held out his empty hand, and a small bar of Valor slid from out of his sleeve and appeared miraculously in his palm. Luke’s eyes became round and a huge smile appeared on his face at this piece of magic. He grabbed the brightly wrapped bar, examined it for an opening and, failing to find one, tore into the foil with his teeth and started munching. The chocolate seemed to be all it took—for the time being—to restore a child’s equilibrium. If only the rest of life could be so simple, thought Kate.
“Yes, I know you said not to follow you, but how could I not? When I realized he’d locked the doors, I called Saïd. His girlfriend, Pilar, works in the cathedral: there’s a secret entrance into the crypt from that side. She got me a robe from one of the old chests in the vestry, let me in through the back door.”
Abdou straightened up and Kate saw for the first time that he had a bruise on his jaw and a rip in his shirt. She reached out and touched his face, and watched him manfully suppress a flinch. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes, of course it hurts.” He grinned. “But you should see him.”
Instinctively, she looked over his shoulder. “What did you do to him?”
“I hit him with the crucifix that was on the wall down there. He’s out cold, lying in state between the coffins of his wretched Catholic Monarchs. Better call the police before he comes around.”
Eerily, at that moment Kate’s mobile went off.
The next few days were among the strangest of Kate’s life. A scant time after Jess phoned her, she found herself back at the Granada main police station with her sister, a woman called Michelle Englefield, a diffident man in his forties who looked like an English professor but was actually from the National Crime Agency, and a smiling man with a greying beard and a Welsh accent, who introduced himself as Detective Inspector Alun Williams. James now languished in the police cells, awaiting the possible issue of an official Interpol Red Notice to extradite him to the UK.
Everyone had given statements, through official interpreters, to ensure there were no linguistic errors that might later cause problems in court.
James had been charged with one count of bigamy (with a second count pending), and with the abduction of and actual bodily harm to Jess. The police had taken a DNA swab from him to check against the hair and skin sample removed from beneath the nails of a woman who had fallen to her death over ten years ago onto rocks in West Wales, a woman who had been unidentified at the time and remained so. “There had clearly been a struggle,” DI Williams told Kate later. “But we couldn’t identify the body, and the material under the dead woman’s fingernails didn’t match anyone we had in the database, so she went down as a cold case. But when we ran the results of the DNA under Jess’s fingernails, it matched the evidence we’d found under the nails of the woman on the rocks; and Interpol has come back to us with a possible name for the dead woman: Isabel Villalobos, a Spanish national who’d been working in London before going missing. Her brother emailed us photos of her, and he’s providing his DNA to police in Madrid as we speak. If everything matches up, James could be facing a murder charge as well.”
It turned out that James Foxley had been born James Hyde, but it was as James Foxley that he had married Michelle Englefield, whom Jess had tracked down after Kate’s tipoff message: she had been delighted to come to Spain with Jess to see James get his comeuppance, and “for closure.” He had reluctantly allowed her to keep her maiden name after the marriage, she’d explained, seduced by the long and bloody history of the Catholic Englefield family. They’d had a child together, she added: a daughter called Catherine. “James was furious it wasn’t a boy. He went almost black in the face with anger. Everything changed after that: he became so cold and cruel; but it was only after he hit Catherine that I left him and went home to my parents. I should never have married him in the first place.”
“So clearly, he changed his name from Hyde to Foxley before he married you, since the Catholic faith doesn’t allow divorce,” Jess said to Michelle.
“And no doubt to distance himself from the murder of poor Isabel Villalobos, the bastard,” Michelle said with relish. “Just in case anyone found and identified her.”
“He must have expected she would fall into the sea, not onto rocks,” Kate added, remembering that strange third date with James when he’d told her the story, with crucial details—like the location, and the name of his victim—changed.
The Spanish police had noted how alike all four women looked: Jess and Kate, Michelle and the dead Isabel. “He certainly has a type, doesn’t he?” DI Williams said.
Michelle caught the train back to Seville to fly home the next day. Kate and Jess walked back through the Albayzín to Kate’s apartment, where Abdou had taken Luke after he had given his own statement to the local police and been allowed to leave. “Are you sure?” Jess had asked, reluctant to be parted from her beloved nephew.
“Yes,” said Kate. “There’s no one I trust more in the world.” It came out before she’d even thought the words, but she realized that what she’d said was true.
Jess looked remarkably chipper, Kate thought, for someone who had been through such a harrowing experience, including emergency dentistry (“Look—I have a temporary denture!” She grinned with glee at Kate’s horrified expression as she waggled the false plate unnervingly). All the way through the old city, she’d stopped to exclaim over the prettily shabby doors (“Now, that’s what I call the distressed look”), the tumbles of bright hibiscus and bougainvillea against rough whitewashed walls and over wrought-iron balconies; sighed over the picturesque vista of the great old Nasrid fortress on the hill opposite, backed by the distant snow-capped mountains of the Sierra Nevada. “What a place, Kate. I can see why you love it here.”
At last they turned into the Calle Guinea. On the bare wall opposite her apartment Kate noticed that someone, apparently overnight, had spray-painted the words Stop Machismo. Though perhaps she hadn’t noticed the graffito before amid all the drama. She stared at the words for a long moment. There were so many ways of being a man in this modern world, so many different definitions and expressions of masculinity. The balance between masculine pride and dangerous aggression had, she supposed, always been delicate: but you had to teach your boys the difference early in life, and explain that how they treated girls, then women, was a measure of their own worth.
She opened the door, to find Abdou lying flat out on the living room floor with Luke, playing jigsaw with dozens of pieces of multicoloured zellij. Their creation was not a pattern of unsurpassed beauty and symmetry like those in the palace, but at that moment Kate thought it was one of loveliest things she had ever seen.
After dinner that night—a tagine of chicken with olives and preserved lemon that Abdou had managed to throw together as the sisters talked and talked—Jess took Kate’s passport out of her bag and slid it across the table to her twin.
Kate pushed it back.
Jess raised an eyebrow.
“Keep it,” Kate said. “For now, anyway. Take Luke home. I’ll follow in a while.” Across the table, Abdou’s face went very still and miserable. She reached out and put her hand over his. “There’s a thing called a Special Guardianship Order. It’s a law made under the Children Act to provide for children who can’t live with their birth parents for whatever reason. It’s a sort of adoption order, but it doesn’t end the legal relationship between the child and its parents. I’ll always be Luke’s mum, but I’d like you to be his special guardian.”
Jess said nothing for a long time, but she couldn’t help looking at Luke, now fast asleep on the sofa, wrapped in a white cotton blanket, drugged by a surfeit of sun, chocolate and Spanish fruit. Kate had over the past few days watched the lines on her sister’s face soften every time she gazed at her son; had noted how Luke ran instinctively to Jess rather to her, no matter how alike the pair of them might appear.
“Are you sure?” Jess said at last.
Kate nodded. “I’ve seen how the two of you are together, and it only seems right to me.”
Jess grinned. She looked at Abdou, then Kate. “I’ve seen how the two of you are together too. And that seems right to me.” She leaned in. “So, have you swived him yet?”
Kate snorted out her wine. Then both sisters started to giggle like children, leaving Abdou staring, puzzled, from one to the other. At last Jess regained enough composure to say, “I love how you’ve been brought together by the poems you found.”
“If they were poems,” Kate said.
Abdou smacked his forehead. “I’m an idiot. Mother heard back from her expert in Rabat.”
“Was he able to make any sense of them?” Kate asked, still pink in the face.
He grinned. “Of a sort.” He got up, walked to the other side of the room and fished in his coat pocket, and came back to the table with a notebook, from between the pages of which he extracted photocopies of the two scraps of paper they had respectively found.
“This one—” He touched the photocopy of the fragment Kate had discovered in the garden wall. “This one says—” he peered at the notebook “—something along the lines of:
Save, oh spirits my beloved
From every harm to his body
I my blood give as pledge
My body against his.
Tears sprang into Kate’s eyes. “Oh, how lovely. Is it a spell, do you think?”
Abdou shrugged. “If you believe in magic.”
“And what about the second one, the one you found in the Tower of the Captive?”
“That one was much simpler, and written in walnut ink.”
“What was the first written in?”
“They’re not sure yet. They’re testing it. But listen—this is what yours says:
He rides to war
I go at his side
Let not the enemy
Take his life.
“To war,” Kate echoed. She looked up at Abdou, suddenly intent. She felt as
if every hair on her body had stood on end. “My God, do you think this was written during the fall of Granada?”
He grinned at her. “Don’t leap to such grand conclusions. Mother says they will try to date the paper and ink. That’s why all I’ve got is the photocopies: the originals have to remain in Rabat for testing.”
Kate gazed tenderly at the photocopies. “This is so special, so…wonderful. Imagine, loving someone and fearing for the person so much. Can’t you just feel that love, arcing across the centuries toward us? I can.” She shivered. “This place. It’s…” There were no words. “You’ve got to see it, Jess. There’s nowhere so beautiful on earth as the Alhambra. We’ll go tomorrow, perhaps for the evening tour. It’s so lovely by night.” Then she remembered Luke. “Oh. Far too late for him. I really am a hopeless mother, aren’t I?”
But Jess wasn’t paying attention to what her twin was saying. Instead, she had reached across the table and pulled the photocopies toward her and was staring at them with a curious expression on her face. Then she suddenly pushed her chair back with a frantic scrape and got up. She came back with her handbag. Then she took something out of it and placed it carefully down in front of Kate and Abdou.
“Sarah found this,” she said quietly, “when she was refurbishing that old wooden foot you gave me. It was jammed down in the toes…”
The three of them looked from the photocopied fragments to this new scrap of paper, which was much larger, and more clearly a poem, though some of the words had been erased by time, by folding and by what might have been water damage. All three pieces shared the same language and, surely, the same hand.
Kate gasped. Abdou put an arm around her waist and drew her close.
“Perhaps there is magic in the world,” he said.