by S. W. Perry
It does not surprise Nicholas to learn that he was followed to the church in the Aduana. Cecil’s watchers in London do it to foreigners all the time. He falls back upon the fiction he told Hadir.
‘I was asked by someone in England to bring them news of him – a friend of Master Sykes. I would hardly call that spying.’
‘I do not believe you,’ says the kufiya.
‘It is the truth.’
‘I think you have come to replace him.’
‘Why should you think that? I’m not a member of the Barbary Company, I’m a physician. I don’t know the first thing about wool, other than how to darn a hole in it.’
The body of his questioner tilts towards him, as if a great confidence is about to be revealed.
‘The infidel Sykes was spy. He sent intelligence to the English queen. You have been sent to continue his work.’
‘He was just a merchant,’ says Nicholas. ‘If he was sending anything to England, it was probably information about trade. That’s not sedition. All merchants do it.’
Another long pause, while the kufiya considers this.
You’re feeding me rope to hang myself, thinks Nicholas. He wonders how long he can keep his head out of the noose. Or his breast away from the knife.
‘What is in the letter to our sultan? Have you read it?’
‘Yes – in England, before it was sealed.’
‘And its contents?’
‘An expression of greetings and continued goodwill. And a line or two commending me to His Majesty the sultan. I know Her Grace is eager to maintain the friendship between our realms, and to assist His Majesty in defending Morocco against the Spanish king. If you don’t believe me, it’s in the chest in my chamber. Read it. But you’ll have to explain to your sultan why someone else had first sight of a privy letter.’
The kufiya leans forward again. Nicholas thinks he sees the first flicker of uncertainty in those anonymous eyes.
‘What do you know of the death of Adolfo Sykes, Physician?’
‘Nothing. I was told it was an accident. Why do you keep asking me about Sykes? I’ve never even met him.’
‘This friend in England who asks after the infidel Sykes – what is his name?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘The name of this friend.’
The kufiya’s hand rests gently on the hilt of the curved dagger he wears at his belt. Nicholas has another awful vision of Hadir’s blood soaking into the plaster of the roof terrace, long ribbons of flesh stripped from his young chest.
He reasons that if al-Annuri already knows that Sykes was Robert Cecil’s agent, then telling his interrogator it was Cecil who sent him could prove as fatal to a physician as it could to a factor of the Barbary Company. So he pulls out of the air a convenient name from his past, one that will suit his professed reason for visiting Marrakech.
‘Fulke Vaesy,’ he says.
‘Who is this Vaesy?’
‘He was a medical man. I studied under him some years ago. He was learned in anatomy – at least, he thought he was.’
‘And how does this Vaesy in England come to know Adolfo Sykes in Marrakech?’
‘I haven’t the slightest notion. I was just asked to pass on his remembrances, that’s all. It’s not a crime. And it’s certainly not spying.’
The kufiya holds a brisk impromptu discussion with the men standing in the shadows behind him. Nicholas guesses that whoever their master is, he is not in the chamber with them.
‘What is your relationship with Minister Cey-cill?’
Nicholas’s heart sinks.
‘I am physician to Sir Robert’s son.’
‘And his father, Lord Burg-ley?’
‘I have no relationship with Lord Burghley. I’m simply carrying a letter of remembrance from him to Minister al-Seddik. They met in London.’
Another brief discussion, more hesitant than the first. It occurs to Nicholas that these men have been schooled in what to ask. Faced with answers they did not expect, they are uncertain how to proceed. Nicholas seizes his opportunity.
‘His Majesty al-Mansur will not look kindly upon those who harm an envoy from his trusted friend, Queen Elizabeth. In my realm it is customary to flay those who dishonour an emissary from an allied nation. Then we behead them. I suggest you tell His Excellency al-Annuri that.’
The kufiya studies him intently for a moment, as though trying to reach a conclusion.
‘How long do you intend to remain in our land, Physician?’
Nicholas feels brave enough now to step up the bluster. ‘After this outrage, for as short a time as possible!’
The kufiya gets to his feet. ‘That would be most wise.’ He walks over. Nicholas braces himself for a brutal kick in the ribs.
It doesn’t come.
‘Sultan al-Mansur is a busy man,’ the kufiya says. ‘He does not have the time to ensure the safety of every infidel who comes into our realm, not even those who are envoys of the English queen. Take my advice: go home at the earliest opportunity. You would not be the first man who has come here only to disappear into the slave market.’
They leave him sitting against the wall. When they close the door, he hears the sound of a key turning in the lock. As their voices fade away, Nicholas’s legs begin to tremble. He slides himself into the patch of light, hoping that the heat of the dying sun will thaw the cold tentacles of fear writhing in his stomach.
When Hadir unlocks the door and enters the storeroom there are tears in his eyes. ‘Thanks be to Allāh, the most merciful, the most compassionate – you are alive!’ he cries. ‘I thought you dead, like Sayidi Sy-kess.’
‘Where is everyone? Are they safe?’
‘All safe. But these men who came here, they said if we did not leave the house and stay away until after the al-maghrib prayers, they would kill us all. Starting with grandmother Tiziri.’
For a moment Nicholas wonders who Hadir is talking about. Then it dawns on him: he has no idea of the names of his Berber servants. But he is immeasurably relieved they are alive.
‘They claimed they were al-Annuri’s men,’ Nicholas says. ‘They wanted to know if I was a spy. I suppose, after Minister al-Seddik chased away his watchers, he decided to forgo diplomacy. Are they enemies, al-Annuri and al-Seddik?’
‘To Muhammed al-Annuri, all men are enemies. Except his master the sultan.’
Hadir fetches a knife and cuts through the bindings around Nicholas’s wrists and ankles. As he follows Nicholas out of the storeroom he says plaintively, ‘Half a ducat a week – it is not suitable for work such as this.’
That evening grandmother Tiziri the Methuselah woman, Gwata the boy who fetches the water, and his sister Lalla who does the washing do not hide themselves away. They eat with Nicholas on the roof terrace. Hadir explains that tomorrow a holy month of fasting begins, and the meal must be savoured; Nicholas, as an unbeliever, may eat and take water between sunrise and sunset if he wishes, but only grandmother Tiziri may take sustenance, because of her great age.
The Berbers listen wide-eyed as Hadir translates vignettes of life in England. There is much laughter when Lalla announces that she will be the second Queen of Morocco, after grandmother Tiziri has tired of the luxury.
The good companionship is dented only by Nicholas’s deep-seated fear: that Adolfo Sykes unearthed something in this city that cost him his life. And that someone suspects Nicholas has come here to finish what he began.
After the dishes are cleared away, he goes down to the courtyard and lingers awhile, savouring the coolness of the evening air and the scent of orange blossom while he tries to make sense of the day’s events. He sees again Surgeon Wadoud at work and stores away what he has learned, though he’s sure if he ever attempts the same procedure back in England the College of Physicians will very likely impeach him. He remembers the gelded slave Marcu, and the pink, rapturously optimistic face of Fra Cyprien – who may, or may not, negotiate a captive’s return to his family for somewhere approac
hing fifteen hundred marks. He thinks of the kufiya’s warning about how a man may disappear into the galleys without trace, if he doesn’t take sensible advice and go home at the earliest opportunity. And of Adolfo Sykes, a man he has never met, but to whom he feels he owes the duty of commemoration.
And he yearns to be back in England, making love to Bianca Merton, and not here on the Barbary shore where beauty and butchery wear interchangeable faces.
The square of sky above the courtyard is a luminous mauve, the first stars emerging tentatively from the haze left by the heat of the day.
‘Sit with me a while, Hadir,’ Nicholas says, sinking down against the trunk of an old pomegranate tree. He has known this moment was inescapable from the time he first put his trust in the young Moor. ‘I have to be honest with you. While I am a physician, and I have come to Morocco to learn about your people’s physic, I have also been sent here to find out what happened to your friend, Adolfo Sykes.’
Hadir, squatting down beside him, seems to sag like a man freed from a heavy load. ‘I know this since you ask me questions by the Bab Doukkala. I think then that this berraniyin who has come from England is more than he says.’
‘Well then, this berraniyin doesn’t believe your friend died of an accident and was then mauled by wild beasts, any more than you do.’
Hadir nods miserably.
‘How long have you suspected?’
‘Since my friend Sy-kess decided he must hide the letters he was planning to send to England,’ Hadir says, pointing across the courtyard.
Set into the wall of the opposite cloister is something Nicholas has not noticed before: a talisman to ward off ill fortune and evil spirits. A talisman in the shape of a plaster hand, the fingers pointing downwards. Just like the one beside the door of Solomon Mandel’s house on Bankside.
32
The dimpled wall of the little cloister is bathed in soft evening light. Nicholas studies the talisman in which both Adolfo Sykes and Solomon Mandel had so misguidedly placed their trust. The stone hand seems firmly cemented to the masonry, its fingers pointing downwards towards the tiled floor.
‘Let me, Sayidi,’ says Hadir. ‘My friend Sy-kess show me how.’
Hadir cups the talisman with both hands, curling his slender fingers over the stone to get purchase. In Nicholas’s mind, it is the hand of Adolfo Sykes he clasps, greeting his mentor after a hard day spent trading in the Aduana.
After a moment’s careful manipulation, Hadir slowly pulls the talisman away from the wall. It makes a rasping sound as it slides out, revealing the slug of stone that held it in place. Triumphantly Hadir lifts it away, revealing a dark recess some three inches square.
Nicholas squats down and tries to see into the hole, but the fading light and the ceiling of the cloister make it impossible. He is about to put his fingers in when Hadir stops him.
‘Sometime scorpion make his home in a place like this. Is not good to touch.’
An oil lamp is obtained from grandmother Tiziri. By its light, Nicholas peers again into the cavity. There is no scorpion. But nor are there any letters. The space is empty.
‘Perhaps Sayidi Sy-kess already send the letters to England,’ Hadir says with a shrug.
‘But why did he need a hiding place? Who was he hiding them from?’
‘I do not know, Sayidi.’
‘Did he tell anyone other than you about this hiding place?’
‘He made me swear an oath not to speak of it. And I did not.’
‘Did Master Sykes have many visitors here? Could someone else have found the niche?’
‘Sayidi al-Seddik, he comes sometimes. And Day-Lyal, too. Also many merchants from the Aduana. But my friend Sy-kess, he would not want anyone to know of this place. I am sure of that.’
Nicholas returns to the pomegranate tree and sits down in the shadows, leaning back against the gnarled trunk. Hugging his thoughts to his body, he discovers tiny fragments of grit from the floor of the storeroom still stuck to his elbows. He hears the scraping of masonry as Hadir replaces the talisman in the wall. It sounds to him like a tomb being sealed up.
Imagining himself their judge, he pictures the faces of the three men most likely to want to decipher and read the messages from Robert Cecil’s agent in Marrakech. First amongst the guilty is Muhammed al-Annuri, with his assassin’s smile. Even though his master the sultan is England’s ally, the minister himself has already proved he’s not above putting her envoy under harsh questioning. Then there are the two Frenchmen: Arnoult de Lisle and Fra Cyprien, Catholics both. Perhaps they are all guilty – a triumvirate of conspiracy.
He breathes in the scent of orange blossom, watches the birds flitting in and out of the courtyard, darting along the upper gallery. The sparrows have made way for the swifts that come with the evening. They wheel and swoop, diving so fast they seem about to dash themselves to oblivion against the walls, yet break away at the last moment to go soaring back into the darkening sky.
When it hits him, the answer is so obvious that he wonders why he hadn’t realized it before. Adolfo Sykes didn’t send the final letter of his life on this earth to Robert Cecil. He sent it to Solomon Mandel.
Seals can be broken and artfully replaced. Letters can be read by those for whom they are not intended – even encrypted ones, if you’re clever enough. Which means that Adolfo Sykes did not trust Cathal Connell to carry his last dispatch to England.
‘Hadir, did any other English ships depart around the time the Righteous, the Marion and the Luke of Bristol last left Safi?’
From the cloister Hadir replies, ‘No, Sayidi. None that I know of.’
Nicholas allows himself a tight grin of satisfaction as the realization hits him: You didn’t send the letter, did you? They thought you did, but it’s still here. You’ve hidden it somewhere else, because in the end you didn’t even trust the talisman to protect it. The only question is: did you keep your secret when they began to carve the skin off your chest?
Nicholas climbs to his feet and walks back towards the hand-shaped talisman, trying to force order upon his racing thoughts. Hadir watches in bemusement, as though the new occupant of the house on the Street of the Weavers is engaged in some unfathomable ritual that only infidels of questionable sanity might practise.
As he steps onto the tiled floor of the cloister Nicholas feels something give way beneath his feet. He looks down. Just enough light remains for him to see that where he has placed his foot, a tile has cracked neatly in two.
But he’s sure it didn’t break when he stepped on it. There had been no sound. The tile hadn’t snapped, it had yielded. It must already have been broken.
He retreats a pace, kneels and lifts the two halves of the tile, hoping to uncover a second hiding place. He finds nothing beneath but compacted earth.
Only when he returns the two pieces of tile, rises and looks again at the talisman on the wall does Nicholas see that they are in perfect alignment. The fracture is aimed directly at the downward-pointing middle finger of the stone hand.
Coincidence? Or something else – a sign?
Nicholas steps back onto the tiled surface of the cloister. He turns his back to the stone hand, and in his imagination extends the line of the fracture out into the courtyard.
He sees nothing out of place. There is no second talisman set into the opposite wall, no matching broken tile. But he cannot shake off the conviction that the ghost of Adolfo Sykes is standing beside him in the fragrant dusk, encouraging him, willing him not to stumble off the path he has laid for him.
What have I missed, Master Adolfo? Nicholas asks himself, his mouth mutely forming the words. He is quite unaware of Hadir staring at him, or of grandmother Tiziri in the kitchen doorway watching with bemusement the strangeness of the berraniyin.
He lets his gaze lift to the upper floor.
Running along the rough plaster wall, just below the line of little windows, is a fine wooden frieze, carved and painted with intricate arabesque symbols. Made of
individual pieces a couple of yards long, it extends right around the courtyard.
Nicholas stands directly over the broken tile. He raises the index finger of his right hand and holds it out before his eyes, as though it were an arrow he was about to loose from a bow. Squinting down the imaginary shaft, he sees that it’s aimed directly at a spot where two sections of frieze join, about a foot and a half to one side of his chamber window.
And as he stares into the gathering dusk, a single swift emerges from behind the carved decoration. It tilts its head in his direction, as though seeking his approval, and sails out into the approaching night.
33
On Bankside, in the same dusk, Bianca Merton reflects upon a day that brought news of two departures from the city, both – in their own way – troubling.
The queen has moved her court from Whitehall to the relative safety of Windsor. Mere coincidence, says the official line; nothing unusual. Elizabeth has simply decided to commence her summer progress through her realm a little early.
But ordinary folk know better. A summer progress does not require a guard set on the Windsor road, turning back all who have recently dwelt in pestilential London.
On Bankside, where hurried departures – prompted by the anticipated arrival of bailiffs, creditors or vengeful husbands – are commonplace, the news has been greeted with little more than passing comment. Today, the talk has been mostly about that golden roaring-boy Kit Marlowe: slain two days ago in a brawl in Deptford.
It was an argument over lewd and forbidden love between men.
He was killed because he was a secret papist.
He was stabbed because he was a spy… because he was a heretic… because he hadn’t paid his share of the reckoning at Widow Bull’s lodging house… because he’d got into an argument with an aficionado of the playhouse who said he ought to stop writing such leaden prose and make way for that new fellow, Shakespeare…