Phyllida was making sure that the curtains at the cabin portholes were closely drawn. ‘He likes his comforts, doesn’t he?’ She fingered the soft black velvet, then stopped to listen to shouting outside.
‘What are they saying, Phyllida?’
‘What you’d expect. The Turks began by asking if we’d been seen. Mr. Renshaw’s doing it well, to give the devil his due. He’s playing for time. First he pretended not to hear, then not to understand. Now he’s telling them he’s seen no one. They sound very near. No! Don’t look, Aunt. I just hope Captain Barlow really had got steam up. I wish I knew more about these steam boats. The ones on the Hudson work well enough, I know, but whether the English can manage them—’
‘What is it now?’ Her aunt had seen the change in her face.
‘The Turks want to come on board and search. They were bound to, I suppose. In case we have stowed away. That’s how they put it. Clever of them: it gives him a way out, if he wants to take it.’
‘Phyl! He wouldn’t?’ But it was a question.
‘We must hope not. He’d be crazy of course. The state the Turks are in tonight, they won’t care two cents for the chance of an international incident. If they find us, they’ll kill everyone on board, and call it a regrettable mistake afterwards. I just hope Mr. Renshaw has the sense to realise that. No use hiding, if they do come. Would you say the engine was making a different noise?’
‘Yes. Is that good, do you think?’
‘We might as well hope so.’ She came back from Brett’s cabin with a silver-mounted pistol. ‘Loaded,’ she said. ‘Obliging of him. You won’t mind, Aunt?’
‘Of course I shall mind,’ said Cassandra Knight. ‘Who wants to be dead? But, yes please, Phyl.’
‘That’s settled then. But not till the last moment. He’s not doing so badly up there. He’s asking them why in the world he should let them on board after what he’s seen and heard today. How does he know, he says, that they’re not fugitive Janissaries themselves, who will take over the ship the moment they get aboard. He’s a true friend of Sultan Mahmoud’s. He must have proof that they really are his officers. I don’t know how they are going to set about proving it out there in the dark.’
‘I don’t suppose they’ll try,’ said Cassandra. ‘They sound awfully angry, Phyl.’
‘Yes. They’re insisting on coming on board. They’ll show him their credentials then, they say.’
‘Are there many of them?’
‘Hard to tell. But if it should come to a fight, we’re lost anyway. It will alert the harbour guard. We’ll never get past the Point alive. I’m sorry, Aunt. It’s all my fault. I should never have brought you.’
‘Dear Phyl, you know perfectly well you had no choice. I told your father I’d look after you, and I shall. Besides, I love you, child. You’re all the family I’ll ever have, and if you’re going to die, I want to be right here along with you. What’s that? Are they coming aboard?’
‘No, I don’t think so. Aunt Cass, I rather think it was the anchor coming up. My God, I believe we’re moving!’
‘Phyllida,’ said her aunt, ‘I don’t like to hear you take your Maker’s name in vain.’
Chapter 2
Half an hour later, Brett Renshaw was irritated to find himself knocking tentatively on the door of his own saloon. It opened at once. ‘Congratulations,’ said Phyllida Vannick.
‘Thank you. Yes. We’re well out into the Bosphorus by now. Our troubles are over—at least until we reach the Dardanelles.’ And then, to Cassandra Knight who was hovering anxiously in the background. ‘There’s no wind. They can’t follow by sea. With luck, they won’t try by land.’
‘No?’ Phyllida sounded unconvinced.
‘How well do you know the Turks, Miss Vannick? For them, failure in the service of the Sultan means death. So, if they fail, they are apt not to admit it. I’ll be surprised if the officers who tried to stop us don’t report that we left the harbour before your escape. Don’t you see? That way they are safe.’
‘And so are we.’
‘Precisely. Though of course we’ll take no chances at the Dardanelles. I’m glad, by the way, to see that you have contrived to find yourself some dry clothes.’
Phyllida was wearing the sumptuous frogged dressing-gown he had had made for his honeymoon. It made him sick to see it, and yet he could not keep his eyes off her. She had belted the fine crimson alpaca tightly round her slim waist, and tied a black silk scarf as a cravat at the neck. Above it, her face looked ivory white, her short hair, drying in curls, blacker than the scarf. Her eyes, dark too, had huge violet circles round them and the mobile lips showed pale above the red robe.
How could he help remembering Helena? That deep red was to have been the foil for her blonde, ethereal beauty. He wrenched his eyes away to Miss Knight whose question had hung anxiously in the air. ‘You don’t mind?’ she had asked, apologetically.
‘Mind? Why should I?’ She had confined herself, he saw, to purloining a pair of his Turkish slippers in exchange for her own wet shoes. Her voluminous black skirts, which had been kilted to her knees when she came on board, were in place once more round her ankles; her mouse-coloured hair was neatly braided about her head; she was every inch a maiden aunt.
‘You looked so angry,’ she said.
It was the last straw. Bad enough to have to act host to this pair of unwelcome women, but if he must suit even his looks to their pleasure … He drew a deep breath.
‘Don’t,’ said Phyllida Vannick. And then, to Miss Knight. ‘You can hardly expect Mr. Renshaw to welcome us with open arms, Aunt Cass. But, I promise you sir, we won’t trespass on your hospitality a day longer than we must.’
‘No?’ He did not try to keep the scepticism out of his voice. There she stood, penniless, a fugitive, wearing his dressing-gown, beholden to him for her life, and dared to look him in the eye and speak to him as an equal.
‘No. We owe you more than we can repay already. But may I ask where we are headed after the Dardanelles?’
‘Wherever you please, Miss Vannick.’ What else could he say?
‘Generous!’ Could there really be a hint of laughter in those unfathomable dark eyes? ‘Suppose I should say, “New York?”’
He had asked for it. ‘I should give the order to Captain Barlow.’
‘More than generous. But I won’t put your ship—or your hospitality—to such a test. You’re cruising here for pleasure, I take it?’
For pleasure! ‘Naturally,’ he said. The knowledge that if she had, in fact taken him up on his rash offer, he probably could not have afforded to take her so far as New York merely added to his rage.
‘Then you wouldn’t mind taking us to Zante?’
‘Why not?’ He had meant to go there anyway. There should be letters there that would confirm—or, please God, deny—the bad news he had received at Constantinople. ‘Then, with your permission,’ he went on, ‘I’ll suggest that Captain Barlow dine with us as soon as he thinks it safe to come below. He’ll know whether we can make the trip without stopping, or, if not, where we can most safely stop.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Vannick. ‘I was wondering about that. But you took on coal at Constantinople, did you not? I watched from the palace garden. It gave me my first glimmer of hope for six months. Tell me, Mr. Renshaw, what does she do to the ton, this remarkable yacht of yours?’
‘Well over a hundred miles.’ He would not let himself show surprise at the knowledgeable question.
‘That’s better than our Hudson River steamboats—but then of course they’re larger. I expect your Helena is faster too.’
‘You really were in the Sultan’s harem?’ He shocked himself by the abruptness of the question.
‘Why, yes, I told you so.’ And then, taking pity on him. ‘I expect you do not rightly understand what it means, Mr. Renshaw. But you speak Turkish?’
‘My father was here in the diplomatic service when I was a boy. But as to the harem’—how could she speak about
it so casually?—‘I don’t suppose any European knows much about that.’
‘No.’ She had seated herself at the saloon table and stared down thoughtfully at her thin white hands. ‘Will it make you feel happier, Mr. Renshaw, to know that I was merely in training for the Sultan’s favours? I was really beginning to hope that I was, simply, too old for him.’
‘Nothing of the kind,’ said Cassandra Knight. ‘Remember what happened last week, when the golden bell rang. If it hadn’t been for the Janissaries you’d be a Guzdeh by now.’
‘Darling Cass! You wouldn’t want me to take second place even in the harem! But poor Mr. Renshaw is looking more perplexed than ever. It’s all Greek to him. You should explain—if you really wish to trumpet my success—that the ladies of the Sultan’s harem are as strictly regimented as the soldiers in his army—more successfully so, you might say, than those wretched Janissaries. We had our ranks, with their duties and privileges—’ The savage irony of her tone belied the word. ‘First the Odalisque, trained by her preceptors in a thousand arts of seduction to please her royal master.’ Her laugh was harsh. ‘Don’t look so alarmed, Mr. Renshaw. I won’t go into details, nor was I at all an apt pupil. Mere bad luck made me catch the Sultan’s eye on his latest visit to the harem. I thought I’d be safe if I only looked sullen enough while the others sighed and ogled. It worked just the other way. When I was summoned out of that twittering crowd and met the royal eye for the first time I knew my mistake. Sullen himself, Sultan Mahmoud was bored with his bevy of adoring houris. It was to me that he threw the handkerchief. I was to be a Guzdeh—marked for his pleasure. I knew then that I must escape or die.’ She laughed again, showing perfect white teeth. ‘I had pretended toothache off and on ever since I reached Constantinople. They are lavish with their opium in the harem: I had enough saved to dispose of half my furious rivals let alone the two of us. But the air was already full of rumours about trouble with the Janissaries. I was not much enamoured of death. Time enough for that when the summons came. I had made friends with a Kadine, the mother of one of the Sultan’s sons—in so far as friendship was possible in that place. Of course she wanted me out of the way—but she risked her life to help me. She knew, you see, that the Sultan intended to make an end of the Janissaries next time they beat their kettle-drums and went on the rampage. That would be our chance, she said. In the general chaos. She was right. And when I saw the Helena come steaming into the Golden Horn last week, it seemed like a direct intervention of Providence. Have you ever thought of yourself as the answer to prayer, Mr. Renshaw?’
‘Hardly.’ It jolted him extraordinarily to hear her talk, so casually, of the suicide’s death he had planned for himself. Had planned? Nothing was changed. It was merely to wait until he had got rid of these two women. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said now, ‘is how it happened. How in the world did you come to find yourselves in the Sultan’s power?’
‘Algerian pirates.’ Her hands, so still before, writhed for a moment on the table. ‘They boarded us at night—just this side of the Straits of Gibraltar. We hadn’t a chance—a merchant ship—taken unawares. If father had been captain instead of merely a passenger it would have been another story. As it was’—a long shudder shook her—‘he was cut down, in front of our cabin door. I don’t know what happened to the others. Aunt Cass and I were set apart, right from the beginning. We were lucky, I suppose. Flattering, wasn’t it? A gift from the Dey of Algiers to his master the Sultan. And never a chance of escape, till today. Oh, they treated us well enough—they wanted me in looks!’ She rose, suddenly, furiously, to her feet and prowled across the room to the gold-framed looking-glass Brett had hung for Helena. ‘How I hate this white face, these useless—hands—’ She turned them over. ‘I actually blistered them rowing out here.’
‘Good gracious, so you did.’ Her aunt was on her feet in a flash.
‘Oh, don’t fuss, Aunt Cass.’ And then, as the door opened to reveal a servant with a loaded tray: ‘Look, food! Real western food, and forks to eat it with. Will it shock you, Mr. Renshaw, if I admit to being most vulgarly famished?’
‘Of course not.’ But it did shock him. Even at the best of times frail Helena had been above such mundane pleasures as food. He remembered her so well, sitting, gracefully drooped, like a snowdrop, a lily, through course after course of a London dinner, taking only a bite or two, here and there, of some specially favoured dish. He remembered, too, how he had studied her tastes in those happy weeks before their marriage, and urged the Helena’s chef to lay in ample supplies of the fragile delicacies she liked best. Merely to have heard a story like Miss Vannick’s would have brought on one of Helena’s nervous spasms. And here was this extraordinary young woman proclaiming herself ‘vulgarly famished’.
He welcomed Captain Barlow’s appearance with heartfelt relief and began at once to question him about the voyage to Zante.
‘One thing at a time.’ Barlow was a hard man to hurry. ‘Let’s get clear of the Dardanelles first. I wish I knew what kind of a posting system the Turks have along the shore. If any word of this affair gets to the narrows before we do, we’re as good as dead, the lot of us. I’ve been thinking about it up there on deck. On engines alone, we should get there tomorrow evening some time. I mean to see to it that we don’t enter the straits until after dark. You remember the nine days’ wonder we were coming up? This time, with your permission, sir, I propose to burn enough kitchen waste on the boiler to give an even greater volume of smoke than usual. If they think we’re on fire, they won’t want to stop us. They’re terrified of fire, the Turks.’ He turned to explain this to Miss Vannick. ‘That’s how the Greeks have managed to keep their fleet at bay—they send in fireships and panic them.’
Phyllida Vannick leaned forward eagerly. ‘What is the news of the Greek war? It didn’t sound good: what we heard in the harem. Are the Turks really winning again?’
‘Why should they not?’ Brett Renshaw broke in angrily. ‘I suppose it’s understandable that you, Miss Vannick, as an American, may find yourself in sympathy with the Greek rebels, but it’s more than I do. They’re murderers, truce-breakers, pirates … why, they can’t even agree among themselves. Was it two governments or three they had going at once, Barlow, when we were there? It’s no wonder if they’ve lost Missolonghi at last. I’m just surprised they managed to hold it for so long.’
‘Lost Missolonghi?’ If possible, Phyllida was whiter than ever, and her hand clutched convulsively on the stem of her wine glass. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I wouldn’t say so otherwise. We stopped for water at Nauplia two weeks ago. They’d just had the news. As bad as it could be: the whole town was in mourning. Just like the Greeks; cut each other’s throat one day; celebrate the funeral with pomp and circumstance the next. If their sailors had stood to their post, the Egyptian, Ibrahim Pasha, would never have been able to join the siege.’
‘He was there too?’
‘Yes. By all reports he’s pretty well subdued the Morea. I suppose he thought he’d share the glory of Missolonghi with Reshid Pasha. The defenders saw the writing on the wall when he got there. They planned a breakout, the whole lot of them, women, children and all. Let me give you some more wine, Miss Vannick.’
‘But what happened?’
‘They were betrayed. By a Bulgarian, it’s said. It might just as well have been a Greek. You can’t trust them farther than you can see them. Look what happened to that leader of theirs, Odysseus. “Killed trying to escape.” I fancy I’ve heard that one before.’
‘Mr. Renshaw!’ Was he pleased to detect a tremor in her voice? ‘Will you please tell me just what happened at Missolonghi?’
‘But I did. They planned a breakout, and were betrayed. The Turks were waiting for them. And that was that. Lucky for Lord Byron he didn’t live to see that day.’
‘They were all killed?’
‘Of course they were. After all, they set the style. Look what happened to the Turkish garrisons at the beginn
ing of the rebellion when they surrendered under promise of “safety”. And here there was no question of a surrender. A terrible business, of course.’ It was a belated acknowledgment of her white, still attention. ‘The women and children … Mr Meyer who edited the Missolonghi Chronicle … and I don’t know how many Philhellenes, poor crazy fools.’
‘Crazy?’ She had given up any pretence at eating. ‘Mr. Renshaw, you have not asked me why we came to the Mediterranean, my father, Aunt Cass and I.’
‘No. I thought it no affair of mine.’
‘Nor is it. But I shall tell you just the same. We came to look for my younger brother, who ran away from home four years ago. A “crazy Philhellene”, Mr Renshaw, and the last news we had of him was from Missolonghi.’
‘But that was a year ago, Phyl.’ Miss Knight leaned forward to break the shocked silence. ‘He may have left long since.’
‘A year of siege and danger. Can you imagine that Peter would have considered leaving at such a time? Of deserting his friends?’
‘Miss Vannick.’ This was Captain Barlow. ‘Mr. Renshaw’s not quite right, you know. I don’t want to raise false hopes, but a few of the defenders did manage to escape and join the brigand leader Karaiskakis in the mountains. But only a very few, mind.’
‘Oh, thank you! No—I’ll try not to hope too much, but how can I hope…’ She turned to Brett. ‘Mr. Renshaw, would it be too much to ask? Do you think we could stop at Nauplia and find out if there is any more news? They’ll know there, won’t they, if anywhere?’
‘I suppose we could.’ It sounded grudging, even to him.
‘We’ll have to stop somewhere for water,’ said Barlow. ‘And to scour out the boilers. I’d thought of Smyrna, but with things as they are, I think we’d do well to keep right away from the Turks. And that reminds me: I’m afraid you and your aunt had best keep below decks tomorrow, Miss Vannick. We don’t want to set tongues on shore wagging by the sight of women on board, and we’ll be close in to land most of the day.’
Greek Wedding Page 2