by Jane Johnson
I always knew I was going to have to kill Hamza, but to see him dispatched so efficiently before my eyes shocks me silent. At last I manage to blurt out, ‘Why?’
Mustapha regards me inscrutably for a long moment, then he shrugs. ‘I’d already left the theatre to come after you: I met the boy running back. He said there was a bad man trying to kill you.’
Momo hugs me hard around the legs. ‘I bit him, Nus-Nus, did you see?’
‘I saw.’ I hug him back, then look up again. ‘I don’t know what to say. Thank you seems very inadequate. But I give you thanks, Mustapha, from my heart.’
‘Please, call me Addo. It is my tribal name.’
‘King of the Road.’ I nod. It is exactly what he looks like standing there in the gathering gloom in his cloak and turban with his eyes gleaming. ‘My true name is Akuji.’
‘Dead, Yet Awake. Very apt. Certainly better than Nus-Nus.’ He gives me a crooked smile, his teeth very white in the shadow of his face. Then he becomes serious. ‘They’ll be looking for you. Or, rather, they’ll be looking for two blackamoors. But I think three of us are likely to cause a riot, and I should get back to Hortense before I’m missed.’
‘Don’t worry about us, I know where we can go. Thank you, Addo.’ We clasp arms briefly, and then he strides away into the darkness.
*
I take Momo to Nathaniel Draycott’s house, which, I realize belatedly, is but two streets away. The rain is still coming down hard; there is no one around, which is as well. By the time we reach his door, Momo is half white again.
Nathaniel, to give him credit, merely raises an eyebrow at our appearance and waves us inside. He stares at Momo. ‘Great heavens, nigredo becomes albedo! What strange alchemy is this?’ Momo giggles delightedly.
‘Mr Draycott, I fear I must ask for your help,’ Quickly, I sketch the situation for him. ‘I am very sorry to involve you in such an unsavoury business, and I will not blame you at all if you want to call out the constables. However, hear me out, for I have a proposition for you.’An hour later, clean, with my wounds bound and with a handshake on my proposition, I climb into the sedan chair that Mr Draycott has summoned for us, enveloped in a borrowed cloak, with a tricorn hat pulled down low over my face. The sedan-bearers huff and puff their way back to White Hall. ‘Lord lumme,’ one of them says as I emerge at the other end with Momo riding my hip beneath the cloak. ‘Beg pardon, sir, but you weigh as much as an ‘orse.’ I apologize and give him my last remaining gold piece, which shuts him up.
*
That evening, after the king’s couchée, I run with Momo down unlit corridors, along rarely used galleries and back stairs: all those unfrequented parts of the huge palace that will gradually lead us, unchallenged, to the Privy Stairs. There, the doorkeeper, Mr Chiffinch, ushers us in to the royal presence.
We find the king tucking into a private supper, and upon the sight of food Momo falls upon the leavings like a wild beast. The king, having been divested of his daily garb, lounges in an Indian robe, like an oriental potentate; perhaps (I am being generous) this is why Momo feels so at home as to fall to eating without a word of entreaty or permission. More likely, he is simply famished; and that is my fault. I rebuke him sharply and apologize for his lack of manners, but his majesty pays me no attention. Instead, a curious, soft expression steals over his face as he watches the boy cramming pie into his maw. After a while he looks up at me. ‘Did you know they called me Black Boy when I was his age? My complexion was a good deal darker than this little chap’s, and my eyes were never blue. His mother must be very fair.’
‘Her skin is very white, her hair like spun gold.’ It has been nearly four months since last I saw her. I am beginning to forget the precise configuration of Alys’s face, just hypnotic details: the shadow cast by her fair lashes upon her cheek in bright sunlight; the nest of fine lines around her mouth as she raises her lips to mine…
The king nods thoughtfully, then beckons to Momo. ‘Come here, young fellow.’
Momo, having finished the pie, except for what is left crumbled and smeared about his face, obeys. ‘You must bow,’ I prompt. ‘This is the King of England.’
But Momo is too fascinated for bowing. Instead he asks, ‘Where are your jewels?’, which makes the king roar with laughter. Composing himself, he replies, ‘Kings do not need jewels to make them royal, young man.’
Momo considers this for a long moment, then takes off Mrs Herbert’s diamond collar, which in my agitation to get him here unscathed I have quite forgotten about, and solemnly hands it over to the sovereign. ‘I don’t need this, then,’ he pronounces regally. He then proceeds to empty the pockets of his lace suit, extracting from them a pearl brooch, a pair of diamond earrings and a fine gold chain bearing a crucifix.
I am mortified. ‘Oh, Momo…’
Charles raises a heavy black brow. ‘Well now, this is quite a haul. Do you know what we do with robbers in my kingdom?’
Momo shakes his head, perplexed. ‘Oh, I did not rob them,’ he says airily. ‘I am just taking care of them. But I don’t need to any more because you are the king and so they must belong to you. In Morocco, the sultan owns everything in the kingdom.’
‘Does he now?’
‘Yes, papa was always telling me: “Everything you see, Momo, belongs to me: every person and everything they have is mine.” That is how it is when you are king.’
The king smiles wryly. ‘Od’s fish, your great-grandfather would have loved you dearly.’
I frown. ‘His great-grandfather?’
‘My father, King Charles the First.’
Still I am stumbling stupidly. ‘The boy’s great-grandfather is, I fear, long dead in The Hague, in Holland.’
‘My father never, to my knowledge, visited that city, and it has been a long time since I was in exile there. Over thirty years: time’s winged chariot, and all that.’ Charles regards me curiously before understanding dawns on him. ‘You did not know?’
‘I am afraid, sire, that I am quite lost.’
He gets up and crosses the room to an enamelled chest and from it extracts Alys’s embroidered scroll. This, he unfurls in front of me and on it I read:
Sire, forgive the presumption of your unfortunate subject.
I ask nothing for myself but beg only that you will provide for my son, your little grandson Charles, known also as Mohammed, son of Ismail, Sultan of Morocco, who keeps me as a wife here in the city of Meknes.
In shame and desperation, your daughter Alys
(born to Mary Swann in The Hague, October 1649)
The world spins. I collapse into a chair and close my eyes, and it is some moments before I am myself again. When I open my eyes, it is to see that the king, now bald as an egg, is draping Momo in his vast black periwig.
‘See, how do you think you will like having to wear such a monstrosity, young man? You will have to if you grow to be a man here, you know, even though the wretched things are most damnably hot and itchy.’
‘I will start a new fashion,’ Momo declares, shaking off the offending wig. ‘Everyone shall shave their heads like you and Nus-Nus and wear a hat when it is cold.’
‘What a sensible little fellow you are.’ The king looks across at me. ‘I will reward you, of course, for bringing him to me. I shall take him to Nelly’s house: she will love him dearly, and I will visit often. He will have a capital time there.’
‘I want no reward,’ I say hoarsely. Alys has asked nothing for herself, not even to be ransomed. She has given up her son for ever. I curse myself for not slitting open the damned scroll and stitching in the addition myself. Well, too late for that. ‘And what is to be done about his mother, sire? She is held captive through no fault of her own, taken by corsairs from a ship bound for England.’
I watch his face cloud over. ‘Well, now, that is rather a different matter: the lady now belongs to the sultan and by all accounts he is a very contrary man. As it is, I gather the Tangier discussions are not going well.’
I have to bite my tongue. The Tangier discussions have not been progressing not only because of the king’s ministers’ own intransigence and because Ismail has clearly instructed ben Hadou to be evasive, but also, I now realize, because our esteemed ambassador has taken up with the maid (no longer), Kate, and is spinning out our time here for his own pleasure. ‘But, sire, if the request were to come from you direct, from one monarch to another, perhaps a ransom could be arranged?’
The king holds up a hand. ‘My dear chap, the kingdom is almost bankrupt as it is, and ransoms are an expensive business. If we cannot come to terms even on the matter of a ransom for the poor fellows taken at Tangier, I cannot see much hope of arranging the release of so expensive a person as the sultan’s wife.’
‘But Alys is your own daughter!’ The idea of it still seems impossible to me.
‘If I were to go around interfering in the marriages of all my offspring, my life would be difficult indeed. And I cannot officially recognize her as my own: it would be much too complicated. Besides, I imagine the lady must have turned Turk, since she has borne the sultan a child?’
I nod unhappily. ‘But under the greatest duress, sire.’ Duress; ahd, oh Nus-Nus, persuasion.
‘Well, there is no hope for it, then. I cannot intervene. But if the sultan will release her willingly, I swear I will do what I can for her. There now, that is the best I can say. But, as for you, Nus-Nus, you are always welcome to return here. I hope you know that.’
And then he makes me a kind offer, but since it is unlikely anything will ever come of this, I just thank him gravely and shortly after take painful leave of Momo, who does not appear to have grasped the enormity of what has transpired. Indeed, at such a tender age how could he? I make my slow way back to my room, my heart, which mere hours ago had been as hot and light as pure alchemical gold, returned abruptly to dead, cold lead.
37
The Tangier treaty is eventually signed at the end of March, neither side having much satisfaction in the terms. But still ben Hadou delays our return to Morocco, first on the pretext of investigating the disappearance of the renegade Hamza, whose death is eventually put down, due to lack of any evidence, to random cut-throats; then there is the order for the cannon Ismail charged him with bringing back, a commission that will take at least two months. In the midst of all this, he interests himself in the matter of aiding Samir Rafik in tracking down the printer of the English translation of the Qur’an, in order to carry out the sultan’s fatwa on the man. This, to his great annoyance, proves to be easily resolved: the corpse of Alexander Ross has been rotting away these past twenty-eight years in a churchyard in Hampshire, but even so Rafik is dispatched to disinter the body: the sultan has demanded the man’s head, and his head he shall have. This nonsensical quest buys yet more time in which the Tinker may dally with his pretty kitchen-maid. And so we continue to accept invitations from the great and good of London, to travel beyond the capital: to the Oxford colleges, where we are much feted and presented with a number of valuable books in Arabic to take back to Morocco; to the university at Cambridge; to the king’s residence at Windsor; and to the races at Newmarket. We are in London for the anniversary of the coronation and for the king’s birthday celebrations at the end of May. And to ben Hadou’s great delight, he has his portrait painted not once but twice; is elected an honorary member of the Royal Society, and at last presented with a replacement magnifying glass. Mr Ashmole takes the Moorish spurs to install in his new museum in Oxford.
At least the delay enables me to visit Momo often at Eleanor Gwynne’s house on Pall Mall and see him settled there. He has a little dog of his own – a spaniel puppy from one of the royal litters – and he and Nelly have formed a happy bond. It has been decided, for Momo’s safety, and that of his mother, that his identity is to be obscured. He has been presented as a by-blow of Nelly’s own dead son, and no one appears any the wiser. I have to admit that the sight of him has become bittersweet: a painful reminder that Alys remains a lonely prisoner in the Meknes palace. Every time I see the lad he seems to have grown up a little more, to have become a little more English, a little more like his mother and less like his father, though he retains his father’s magpie eye. (I warn Nelly to keep an eye on her jewels, but she just laughs: ‘Ah, bless him: let him have his fun. I’m a better pickpocket than Charlie will ever be: I just steal ’em back again when he’s not looking.’)
My heart yearns for Morocco – for Alys – even though it means returning to my servitude.
*
At last, in July, and laden with gifts for Ismail – including a fine French coach and six horses, twelve hundred barrels of the best gunpowder and two thousand muskets – we take ship from Deal.
We return to a country in triumph: the Spanish have at last been driven from their foothold, the port of Mamora. Kaid Omar is much praised, for it was by his wiles that the enemy were finally removed. Having overrun a small garrison post on the outskirts of the Spanish colony, he granted unexpected mercy to the defeated men, who went straightway to the Governor of Mamora to report that a huge Moroccan force was on its way to storm the town, but led by a man of utmost chivalry, and it would be best to surrender, their own safe passage bearing testament to Kaid Omar’s benevolence. After much deliberation, the Spanish governor decided it was probably the wisest course and sued for peace, negotiating freedom for himself and half a dozen of the highest-ranking families. Of course, the citizenry were all taken captive, and even now are probably festering in the matamores of Sale and Meknes, awaiting their unlikely redemption. Always it is the small folk who suffer in war.
As a result of this glorious victory, Ismail is rather less intent on discussing the terms of the treaty we have agreed with the English concerning Tangier, and we find ourselves able to undertake the journey from Sale at a more leisurely pace than expected, even allowing for a brief stop in the city of Fez, for ben Hadou to settle some outstanding business affairs. There, he settles the alchemist, Mr Draycott, into one of his many houses, while we continue on to Meknes. I want to make sure Nathaniel will be well received by the empress before introducing him to her. As I have explained to him, there are immense rewards to be won in her service; but there are also immense dangers. He did not seem overly disconcerted by this dichotomy, being too delighted by the concept of becoming Morocco’s Alchemist Royal; but then he has yet to meet Zidana. The kaid, in the meantime, seems most delighted to have a man of science dependent on his generosity; it enhances his sense of his standing in the world. It is curious to note, however, that he has not brought his new wife, Kate, back to Morocco with him, perhaps treading as carefully with the sultan as I must tread with Zidana; but he has installed new servants at the house in Fez where Mr Draycott currently resides, and there is a great deal of coming and going from the haberdasher’s and the furniture-makers, which suggests to me he means to send for her as soon as he feels the time to be right. Seeing all this nesting makes my heart burn for Alys. I am so close to her here in Fez, and yet so far away I might as well still be in England. Having stoically borne these past months of delay to our return, since there was nothing I could do to influence the decision, I am now reduced to a furious impatience in which I can find satisfaction in nothing, and my days in the world’s greatest city drag by in a cloud of barely suppressed loathing for everything and everyone.
We enter Meknes a week later, and find the palace and grounds in their usual disarray; indeed we get lost on our way to the imperial quarters, since a number of pavilions and courtyards have been demolished and rebuilt elsewhere to make way for a new set of barracks. After sending word of our return, we receive the message that the sultan will see us later, but is currently drilling the troops. Ben Hadou raises an eyebrow. ‘So, Nus-Nus, it seems we will have a few hours’ grace before we make our report.’ He looks me in the eye. ‘You have been an excellent deputy during this embassy: I shall be sure to make that clear to the emperor.’ He holds my regard for a long moment, and
in his expression I read a certain nervousness.
‘Be assured I shall speak of nothing that might reflect badly on our visit.’
He grins and claps me on the back, then walks quickly away. And at last I am free to visit the harem, on the pretext of an appointment with Zidana, to present to her a flask of the precious elixir she ordered from England. The harem quarters alone seem entirely unchanged, as if hardly a day has passed since I was last here, and I am assailed by a sudden terror that I will round a corner and find Alys in her courtyard, with Momo playing at her feet. But, though I scrutinize every pavilion and garden I pass, there is no sign of her, and after a while a cold dread begins to seize me.
I do find Zidana, however. She looks me up and down. ‘London agrees with you, Nus-Nus. I have never seen you looking so well.’
I cannot say the same for the empress. These seven months have not been kind to her: there are shadows beneath her eyes, the whites of which are yellowed and bloodshot, and she moves more slowly than she used to, the skull-headed staff appearing more of a necessity now than an adornment. She takes the flask of Primum Ens Melissae and sniffs it suspiciously. ‘All I can smell is lemon balm and alcohol,’ she accuses.
‘The alchemist who perfected the recipe makes considerable claims for its efficacy.’ I proceed to reiterate all that Nathaniel and Elias have told me of the stuff.
‘Makarim!’ The maid slinks into view a moment later, looking curiously between me and her mistress. ‘Take some of this,’ Zidana orders the girl, holding out the flask. Makarim goes pale. As well she might, knowing the sort of medicines that the empress usually dispenses. Her hand is shaking as she pours a measure of the golden fluid, and, though she hesitates, at last gulps it down, no doubt reasoning that the mere possibility of poisoning is a better prospect than having her head caved in by the staff. Zidana watches her swallow, her black eyes reduced to slits in the folds of her face. Of course, nothing happens, immediately or outwardly.