Taming Charlotte

by Linda Lael Miller

  She wanted to believe him—oh, she wanted it desperately—but Charlotte was no fool, and she knew the rules governing her life had changed significantly since the kidnapping.

  “Your family,” Patrick began seriously. “Would they want you back?”

  “Why wouldn’t they, for heaven’s sake?” Charlotte rested her hands on her hips. Although she wouldn’t have admitted the fact, she liked wearing breeches and wondered why women hadn’t adopted the fashion.

  He studied her face solemnly with those dark, dark blue eyes. “Even considering that the kidnapping wasn’t your fault—beyond the unquestionable idiocy of wandering without a male chaperon in the marketplace, of course—your reputation is not what it probably was before. There are people who wouldn’t receive you in their parlors, Charlotte, or acknowledge you on the street.”

  Patrick’s words were not only patently unfair, but true, and Charlotte’s fury was partly despair. “The ones who matter, my papa and my stepmother, my sister and brothers, my aunt and uncle and cousins and my friends, would not only accept me, they’d welcome me home!”

  He took her gently in his arms, pressed her to his chest, and she heard and felt his heart beating against her cheek. “Of course they will,” he agreed. “Of course. Now, let me get you something to eat.”

  Charlotte went to the porthole the moment Patrick had left the cabin and searched the dazzling horizon for some means of escape, but all she saw was sand, sea, the palace, and the merciless, sugar white desert beyond.

  Immediately she propped the desk chair under the door latch and made a quick search for a chamber pot. Finding no such article, she finally squatted over a spittoon, eyes clenched shut in embarrassment at the necessity and the telltale noise.

  She had just finished, hidden the spittoon to be emptied later, and removed the chair from in front of the door when Patrick returned. She washed her hands.

  He put a tray containing porridge, bread with butter and jam, and coffee on the desk, and Charlotte fell to eating with no hesitation at all.

  “I’d like to go out walking on the deck,” she said. If she was going to be on board a ship, against her will or otherwise, she reasoned, she might as well make an event of it and see what was there to be seen.

  “Some other time,” Patrick answered, busy rifling through a logbook he’d taken from the storage chest. “We’re expected at the palace, goddess, and my friend the sultan is not a man to behave graciously in the face of disappointment.”

  Charlotte’s hearty appetite immediately fled. Patrick had been relatively kind to her, except for a little teasing, and she’d shoved the possibility of his villainy to the back of her mind. Now it sprang out at her like a weasel stuffed behind the door of a flimsy cupboard.

  “Disappointment?” she asked, her voice thin as thread.

  Patrick looked up from his logbook, frowned pensively, and returned his gaze to the pages before him. He was holding the volume in the curve of one arm. “Khalif’s a sociable man,” he said.

  Charlotte swallowed the bile that rushed into the back of her throat and shoved away her half-finished breakfast. She looked down at her ungainly breeches and shirt and had a desperate inspiration. “I haven’t the proper clothes to go calling—especially not when the host is royalty.”

  Patrick closed the logbook, tucked it into a tight space on one of the few shelves. “Don’t worry,” he said, his mind clearly fixed on some other matter. “There are lots of women at the palace. They’ll be able to outfit you with something appropriate.”

  With that, he started toward the door.

  “Wait!” Charlotte barked.

  He turned slightly, looked back at her over one shoulder. “Yes?”

  “I don’t want to belong to some man’s harem, sultan or not!”

  Enlightenment shone in Patrick’s eyes; a sudden smile lit his face. “Oh. You thought I was going to sell you to Khalif, or present you as a gift. Well, goddess, you were wrong—I was only teasing before. This is merely a visit, and it would be a shame if you missed out on the exotic food and music.”

  The adventuress in Charlotte was stirring again, but she: was still suspicious. After all, her situation was most precarious. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  He raised one of those damnably magnificent shoulders in a shrug. “I guess you don’t.” With that, he went out and closed the door. Charlotte was already moving toward it when she heard a key turn in the lock.

  Having no other choice, and knowing she’d need her strength, Charlotte went back to her tray and began to eat again.

  Barely an hour later, a man came for her and she was escorted onto the familiar deck of the Enchantress. She’d dreamed of the ship so often, drawn so many sketches of its graceful masts and wind-billowed sails, that she almost felt at home aboard the vessel.

  Patrick was waiting for her at the rail, where a rope ladder had been tossed over the side. He grinned, surely thinking of the time fear had held her stuck in the very rigging swaying above their heads.

  “Shall I carry you down?” he asked, with politeness so elaborate, it could only be mockery.

  Charlotte was incensed. She and Millie had climbed many a tree, and she was no coward. She tossed Patrick a look full of acid and swung over the railing to find the first rung of rope with her bare feet.

  She was careful not to recognize the dark shapes moving with deadly grace under the surface of the clear, blue-green water, or to calculate the distance between the rail and that tiny dinghy down there, bobbing on the waves.

  Charlotte made the rest of the descent with her eyes firmly closed, and was relieved when she felt a man’s hands take her by the waist and set her in the boat. She watched Patrick’s deft climb with an expression of obdurate defiance.

  The line anchoring the smaller craft to the ship WAS disengaged and pulled up over the railing, and Patrick and the other man took up oars and began rowing. Charlotte watched the colorful fish navigating the bright coral reef beneath the surface of the water, wonder-struck. She’d wanted an adventure and she’d gotten one, which only went to prove Lydia’s old adage that a person had to watch what she wished for because she just might get it.

  The palace soon drew her gaze, and she studied its arched doorways and windows, its pillars and porticoes. Two people awaited them on the shore, wearing colorful robes and turbans.

  Charlotte moved a little closer to Patrick, since he had his back to her and wouldn’t see, and hoped she could trust him to keep his word and take her with him when he left the palace.

  “Just let them take care of you, and whatever you do, don’t talk back,” Patrick warned her when they reached the beach and the men in turbans came to pull the boat up onto the sand. “When it’s time to leave, I’ll come for you.”

  Patrick was greeted with great goodwill and ceremony, but when the taller of the two men took in Charlotte’s rolled-up trousers and sagging shirt, his dark face was pinched with disapproval. He clapped his hands together and shouted something, and two women swaddled in silk, with only their hands and eyes visible, rushed out to collect her like so much debris washed up on the beach.

  They shuffled Charlotte across a cobbled courtyard, surrounded by high walls and boasting a beautiful pink marble fountain at its center, and into the palace. Their dark eyes held wondering consternation as they hurried her along a hallway and under a great arch decorated with gold-painted carvings.

  One of them clapped her hands together, as officiously as the man on the beach had done, and all over the huge room, women rose from couches and mats to surround Charlotte. They stared at her trousers and bare feet and touched her tangled, dirty hair cautiously, as though expecting something to come scurrying out.

  Charlotte couldn’t remember a time when she’d been so insulted or so intrigued. She was scared, and with good reason by her reckoning, but she was also the only young woman in her circle of acquaintances to set foot inside a sultan’s palace. “Do any of you speak English?” she
asked, with all the dignity she could manage.

  The response was another burst of indecipherable chatter. Charlotte was taken in hand again, and firmly led to the edge of a large pool of water lined with painted tiles. In the next instant, she felt her borrowed clothes being removed, and though she had an impulse to fight, she knew it would be no use, for there were a dozen or more women surrounding her, and they were strong.

  3

  THE WATER IN THE LARGE, TILE-LINED POOL WAS DELICIOUSLY warm, and aromas of musk, cinnamon, rose, and gardenia scented the steamy air. Because Patrick had promised Charlotte she would be safe in the palace, she submitted quietly to the forced but not ungentle ablutions.

  Every inch of her skin, with the exception of her face, was scrubbed with pumice. Her hair was washed with egg yolk, rinsed, and washed again, and then Charlotte was half led and half carried from the pool, in a state of such intense relaxation that she nearly fell asleep on her feet.

  She was dried with soft towels, laid facedown on a low couch upholstered in cloud-soft red velvet. While someone carefully combed the snarls from her hair, another person began massaging fragrant oil into her skin. She sighed as the last tautness was kneaded from the muscles in her shoulders and back.

  Charlotte was as intoxicated as if she’d been given ardent spirits, and she uttered a soft sigh when she was covered with a blanket as light as an angel’s wing and left to sleep. After that, she drifted, hearing the tinkly music of strange instruments, the chatter of women, the splashing of the water in the pool.

  She dreamed she was back on board the Enchantress with Patrick, lying naked and perfumed on his bed. And he was touching her…

  “So pretty,” a speculative voice said. Someone smoothed Charlotte’s damp hair back from her forehead, as though she had fever. “So pretty and so far from home.”

  The fact that the words had been spoken in English finally penetrated Charlotte’s daze, and she slowly lifted her eyelids. A blue-eyed, blond woman, probably in her early thirties, smiled down at her.

  The woman’s hands were stained orange with henna, a custom Charlotte had read about. Her robes were of the finest blue silk, and a border of tiny birds and flowers trimmed the sleeves, bodice, and hem, each minute figure worked in silver thread. Her hair tumbled down her back, wavy and soft and just the color of a palomino’s mane.

  “I am Alev,” she told Charlotte. “I am a favorite of the sultan, and I will soon be a kadin. “

  Charlotte knew her eyes had gone wide, but she couldn’t help it. She and her friends at school in Paris had read every naughty harem novel they could get, and she knew that Alev aspired to be a wife.

  “You will be a favorite too, I think,” Alev went on, assessing Charlotte with troubled eyes. “Perhaps tonight you will dance for Khalif, and if you catch his fancy, you may also share his couch.”

  Charlotte sat bolt upright, forcing the other woman to draw back. She saw then that Alev was heavily pregnant.

  “I’m not sharing anybody’s couch,” Charlotte said fiercely. “I’m a friend of Captain Trevarren’s and I’ll be leaving with him when he sails.”

  Alev looked Charlotte over again, this time with a pitying expression. “You are very naive,” she said, “but you will learn the ways of men and of harems in time.”

  Charlotte blinked, covering herself as best she could with the blanket. It was made of some gossamer fabric, white and loosely woven, smooth against the skin. “I’m not staying,” she insisted.

  Alev patted her hair, which had curled in the humid air. “Whatever you say,” she agreed, with an indulgent sigh. “It’s very nice here, you know. We have every luxury, and Khalif is not a bad master.”

  “Who are you?” Charlotte asked, unable to believe she was in such a place, having such a conversation. She frowned at Alev’s fair hair. “You can’t have been born here, in Riz.”

  The other woman sighed and sat on a nearby couch, smoothing her skirts with elaborate care. “Once, I was called Olive. I was sailing from England to France as a girl, to attend a special boarding school, and our ship was overtaken by pirates.”

  Charlotte’s throat constricted with horrified sympathy. “How old were you?”

  “I was sixteen,” Alev answered, in a detached tone, as though such things happened every day. And maybe in that part of the world, Charlotte reasoned, they did.

  “You must have been terrified!” Charlotte couldn’t help taking one of Alev’s hennaed hands in her own. “Why didn’t the government do something?”

  Alev smiled contentedly. “Governments are not as eager to save individual citizens as we would hope. And yes, I was frightened, but I have since learned to enjoy my luxuries. I’m pampered here—I have a slave and apartments of my own. Khalif sees that I am given all the sweetmeats and chocolates I want, and he is…” She paused, blushing, and averted her eyes. “He is very handsome, and he knows how to make a woman happy.”

  Charlotte blushed, too. She knew about intimate relations between men and women, of course, because she’d grown up in the American West and attended school in Paris. Still, she’d never had what she and all her friends called the Experience, and there were definite mysteries attached. “Happy?” she squeaked, curious even though she knew it was rude to pry.

  “You will see,” Alev said, with a look of wicked mischief in her eyes. “When you lie with Khalif, he will show you what a glorious thing it is to be a woman.”

  Charlotte was hardly comforted by these words; no matter how appealing Khalif might be, she had no desire to “lie” with him. She’d never thought of any man in those terms, except, of course, for Patrick. She clenched her fingers tightly to her palms. Had the captain been untruthful in promising to take Charlotte with him when he sailed away from Riz?

  “You are hungry,” Alev observed, quite rightly. “Things will not seem so hopeless when your stomach has been filled.” At this, she clapped her hands together smartly, and a young, dark-eyed girl appeared.

  Alev spoke to the woman-child in rapid Arabic, and she scuttled off to obey the command. Like Alev and the other women Charlotte had seen, the servant wore simple, airy robes.

  “Pakize will bring refreshment,” said the future kadin. “Now, tell me—how did you come to be taken captive?”

  Charlotte swallowed a rush of protests at Alev’s choice of words; after all, she had been abducted in the marketplace that illfated day when she had so arrogantly chosen to ignore the warnings of her elders. Briefly, and with searing guilt, she thought of Bettina, and wondered how the poor creature was faring.

  Folding her hands on top of the blanket that still cosseted her otherwise naked person, Charlotte explained that she’d been on her way home from Paris, in the company of family friends, and that the Richardsons had decided on a side trip to Riz at the last moment. Shame-faced, she admitted that she’d all but dragged poor Bettina to the souk one morning, and there the two of them had been seized. Later—and just the memory of this was such an affront to Charlotte’s pride that it brought bile rushing into her throat—she’d either been sold or given to Patrick Trevarren like a cigar or a glass of wine.

  Alev barely reacted to the story; no doubt she had heard similar ones many times before. Her own history, after all, was no less dramatic. “You were an American, then,” she said. “I thought so, by your speech.”

  “I am an American,” Charlotte corrected. “I’m going back there, and when I get off the mail boat at Quade’s Harbor, I swear I’ll kiss the ground and never think of the place as boring and provincial again.”

  Alev simply patted Charlotte’s hand, as if to say it was a nice fantasy that would soon be discarded in favor of reality.

  The servant girl returned, carrying a brass tray loaded with sliced fruit, melons and bananas and a few things Charlotte didn’t recognize, along with an assortment of cheeses, a small bowl of olives, and a dish of sherbet made from some purple berry. Setting the food on a small table near Charlotte’s couch, Pakize took an ornate
ly decorated cup from the tray and extended it.

  “That is boza, “ Alev explained. “It’s made from barley, and it’s very sour—-deliciously so.”

  Reluctantly Charlotte accepted the chalice, nodded her thanks. The drink was cool enough that a mist had formed on the cup, and she smelled cinnamon as she lifted it to her lips. She took a cautious sip and found the tartness of the boza very refreshing.

  After her thirst had been satisfied—Pakize immediately refilled the chalice from a matching carafe—Charlotte consumed sherbet, fruit, and cheese with exuberance. Alev had been right; she was hungry. Once the nourishment began to reach her bloodstream, she was again certain that everything would turn out all right in the end. Patrick would not leave without her; indeed, he would see that she got home to Washington Territory.

  Once Charlotte had finished eating, a golden robe of the same delicate fabric the others wore was brought to her, along with wooden sandals Alev called clogs.

  Charlotte donned the robe gratefully, but she looked at the clogs with concern. The soles were four inches thick.

  “I’ll fall and break my neck if I wear these,” she said bluntly.

  Alev shrugged and sent Pakize away with the sandals. “Come then,” she said, clapping her hands at Charlotte now, though not in quite such an authoritative way as she had with the servant. “I will show you the seraglio.”

  Charlotte was still anxious, but she was interested, too. How many Americans—female or otherwise—got a first hand look at the inside of a harem, after all? Why, she could write a book about her experiences when she reached home, perhaps even go on the lecture circuit, like those women who had been taken captive by Indians and later released. She would be a person of notoriety and renown, inciting controversy everywhere she went.

  “These are the baths, of course,” Alev was saying, pointing out other pools, all sizable and all lined with richly painted tiles. There were couches everywhere, and thick cushions dotted the splendid marble floor, so cool and smooth under Charlotte’s bare feet. At least a dozen other women watched their passing with open curiosity.