City of Jasmine (13 page)

He pointed out the location of the main jewels with his fingertip and I groaned.

“You’ve taken the jewels.”

“Not the jewels,” he said quickly.

“What then? The Cross is only valuable because of the jewels and the—” I gave a little shriek of horror. “You didn’t! Oh, Gabriel, how could you?”

“The crystal heart holding the wood from the Holy Cross is the most valuable part of the thing,” he protested. “When I found the Cross I couldn’t very well leave it where it was, but I couldn’t come into the camp with a stinking great bit of gold, either. You’ve seen the camp—it’s as busy as Victoria Station and there are few secrets. The best I could do was separate the two parts and stash the gold in the well at the dry oasis.”

“What did you do with the crystal?”

“Put it in a safe place,” he assured me. “It is still a tremendous find.”

“But not nearly as significant as it would be with the gold of the original Cross of Acre surrounding it.”

His eyes narrowed. “I know what you’re thinking. The answer is no.”

“Gabriel, I realise the crystal centrepiece is a find, possibly a significant one, but in order to be truly meaningful, it must be reunited with the Cross. They are two halves of the same coin.”

“Evie—”

I knew he wanted me to let him off the hook, to say I understood it was too dangerous, to give it all up and go back to Damascus and leave the adventure when it had only just begun. And something within me rebelled at the thought of surrendering, of letting go of what we had started. But even more than that, I knew if I let him go now, he would never buckle down and see anything through in his life. It was time, once and for all, for him to seize the chance to do the right thing and give up his adolescent ideas.

I fixed him with a scathing look. “We cannot give up on it, particularly now that the Thurzós have it. They’ll sell it to a private collector and it will disappear. No one will dare exhibit it outright, and that piece of history will be lost. It belongs in a museum and honestly, I don’t see why you’re making such a fuss about going after it.”

He spluttered in disbelief. “A fuss? Have you forgot they made you shoot me?”

I flapped a hand. “It all turned out fine. You weren’t actually hurt, after all.”

He gave me a wounded look. “It is bruising spectacularly, I’ll have you know. And they won’t be half so cordial the next time, I promise you.”

“Ah, but the next time will be on our terms,” I assured him. “Just wait and see.”

Once more we argued at length, and once more Gabriel gave in with bad grace and a good deal of very fluent profanity. He shoved some food and water at me, and we ate and drank a sparse meal before we gathered up our things. He had roughed a map of the desert onto the cave floor and we discussed the best route for intercepting the Thurzós. We had assumed they would head straight for Damascus, but I raised the point they might just as easily be making for Baghdad to the east.

“But Baghdad means crossing into British Mesopotamia, and I’m not sure they’d want their presence noted at the border,” he mused. “If they were smart, they would indeed head straight for Damascus as we’d anticipated and then out again as quickly as possible.”

“Wouldn’t they want to stay in Damascus to find a buyer?” I questioned.

“Not with you still on the loose.” He smiled thinly. “They would have to hedge their bets that you might just possibly survive to make your own way to Damascus. Far safer for them to head to Beirut and then Europe and get rid of the Cross there, most likely to an unscrupulous private buyer.”

“Would they know how to find one?”

He shrugged. “Probably. The countess mentioned the complexities of securing a buyer, but it’s rather easy for an archaeologist to find a collector who is avaricious without being terribly concerned with provenance. They won’t get as much for it, of course, as if they’d been able to put it up at auction and let the great museums fight it out at the bidding, but it would still be enough to make it worth their while—if they get out of the desert alive.”

I blinked at him. “What are you talking about?”

“I didn’t much like the look of their friends. Daoud’s nothing to write home about, but the others with them were from the south, renegade Bedouins who have been cast out of their own tribes for any variety of offences. They’ve got damned little to lose, and the Thurzós aren’t exactly hardened criminals. A bit of mutiny in the ranks wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

“Do you think this is the first time they’ve turned their hand to serious crime?”

“I should say so. Oh, I’ve no doubt they did a few unsavoury things in the war—most of us did. But they made several crucial mistakes for real criminals.”

“You ought to know,” I muttered. He carried on as if I hadn’t spoken.

“They didn’t inspect the Cross when they took it. They didn’t make sure you’d killed me. They didn’t even take your water away from you to ensure you’d die of thirst. Mark my words, this won’t end well for them unless they have bloody good beginners’ luck. They’re soft, and softness is a liability in this sort of game. If one intends to have any success as a criminal, one must harden oneself up. I don’t approve of bloodshed, but those two will have to learn to like it if they mean to make anything of themselves as villains.”

He left me to meditate on that while he packed up our meagre gear. I slung my goatskin on my back and followed him out the mouth of the cave.

The first shot at us went wide, chipping stone off the edge of the rock. Before the echoes had even died away, I was flung to the ground with Gabriel on top of me. A sharp pain throbbed in my back, and Gabriel’s dead weight did nothing to improve it.

I shoved hard at his shoulder. “Gabriel, are you hit?”

He lifted his head, shaking it slowly. “No. Now lie still.” He lifted himself onto his forearms, his face inches from mine, his blue eyes bright even in the dim light of the cave. He turned his head sharply and tossed a rock out the cave. Immediately a pair of shots answered, and he turned back to me.

“Bloody buggering bollocking hell,” he muttered. He levered himself up and put out his hand. I reached for it and fell back, wincing. “Evie? What’s wrong?” He did not wait for a reply. He reached down and flipped me onto my stomach, yanking my shirt free from my trousers to bare my back.

“Thank Christ,” he said. “It’s just a bruise. You landed on a rock.” He released me and I stuffed my shirttail back into my trousers.

“How you manage to make that sound like my fault when you’re the one who threw me onto the ground—” I began.

“For God’s sake, not
now,
” he ordered. “Get out your pistol and get to the back of the cave. You might like the option of using one of those last bullets on yourself if things go awry.”

“Oh, don’t be so grim, Gabriel. There has to be something we can do.”

“In case you missed the point, we have a villain out there ready and willing to make us very permanently dead. We have one small pistol of extremely dubious use.”

“It’s maddening when you insist upon seeing the worst in a situation.”

“What exactly do you suggest we do?”

I shrugged. “You’re the criminal genius. I leave it to you to think of something. In the meantime, I’m going to finish the dried apricots. I rather like them, after all.”

I sat on the floor of the cave and took the remaining apricots out of my pocket, lining them up on my leg. I ate them slowly, savouring each one. He finally threw up his hands and settled in next to me.

“I presume you have formulated a plan?” I asked pleasantly.

He sighed and reached for an apricot. “It isn’t much. But I think I ought to give myself up. If you keep very quiet and hide here, they might not realise we’re still together. I can try to engage them.”

“Oh, you are an ass. That’s a daft plan. First, of course they know we’re together. If it is Herr Doktor, he saw us come into these hills together. You might persuade him I’ve done a runner for about two minutes but that won’t do either of us much good. And they’ll simply shoot you and take me, so I don’t know what you think that will accomplish. And if it’s the Thurzós, they don’t yet know you’re still alive.”

“It would be a nasty surprise,” he said mildly. “But I prefer the tactic of evasion.”

“How, exactly?”

“I will keep an eye on the front, you go inspect those webby, dark corners of the cave and see if you can find a back way out.”

“That plan does not much appeal to me,” I assured him. “I don’t like spiders and I’m even less enthusiastic about bats.”

He gave a bored shrug. “You may change your mind when the water’s run out. You realise they don’t have to come up here. They only have to wait us out.”

“Then we wait,” I said grimly. “Something will happen, I’m sure of it.”

And so we waited. It was hours, but nothing happened apart from a few stray shots being fired at the mouth of the cave. I didn’t know if they did it to frighten us or to annoy us, but Gabriel retaliated by singing a selection of truly filthy songs in a variety of languages at the top of his voice.

“For a man with such a keen appreciation of music, you are truly tone-deaf to your own talents,” I told him.

He shrugged. “It’s not meant to be pretty. It’s meant to show them I’m not cowed.” He grinned again, and I stared at him.

“I can’t make you out at all,” I told him finally. “I thought I understood you when I married you, but I was wrong. And now I find I know you even less.”

He gave a light laugh. “Good God, Evie, you didn’t even know my middle name when we married. I don’t think two people have ever rushed into matrimony so swiftly or on such a flimsy basis as we did.”

“I think we had reason enough, at least I did then,” I said in a still, small voice.

“I suppose an appreciation of Elgar and some rather heated kissing is enough,” he answered with a shrug. “Certainly enough for marriage these days with everyone and their little dog getting hitched and unhitched in the blink of an eye.”

“It wasn’t like that,” I told him. “We married each other because we were in love,
desperately
in love.”

His eyes were cool and a tiny smile played about his lips.

“Were we?”

“Yes, we were, damn you! I loved you, and you loved me, too, or at least I thought you did. You made me believe it and even when we went to China and you changed and turned so cold and distant and pushed me away, I loved you then, too.”

He rose slowly, and his expression was carefully neutral, giving nothing away.

“I know I hurt you terribly, Evie. It was never my intention.”

“Of course it wasn’t your intention,” I thundered at him as I rose to stand toe-to-toe. “If it had been your intention it would have made you a monster. But it doesn’t alter the fact that you
did
hurt me. I’ve pretended for years that it didn’t matter, that because I was the first one to say the word
divorce
I could keep my pride and tell myself I left you. But we know the truth, don’t we, Gabriel? We both know if you’d given me the slightest indication that you still loved me—a word, a glance,
anything—
I’d have come crawling back to you, on my knees, over broken glass if you asked it. But you never did. And I may like to believe I’m a bigger person, that I could forgive you, but I’m not sure I ever did, not because you left me but because you took him away, too.”

“Him?”

“The man I fell in love with. I didn’t much care when
you
left,” I raged. “You were so strange and cold by then it was a relief to be done with you. But you wrecked my memories of that dashing, impossibly wonderful boy I fell in love with when you went. You might have at least left me that.”

He swallowed hard, and when he spoke, his voice was flat and calm. “I had no idea.”

“Yes, well, why should you?” I demanded. “It isn’t the sort of thing a man would think about, but that’s how a woman feels. I wondered for the longest time if I were half-mad, did you know that? I wondered if somehow I had made him up, the Gabriel Starke I married. But I didn’t. I married a
sterling
man and somehow I woke up a month later with a stranger I didn’t recognise. I don’t know why or how you changed, and it doesn’t matter anymore. It cannot matter. But you were wrong to take him from me, and I wanted you to know that.”

He handed me a handkerchief and I wiped my eyes and blew my nose.

I moved to hand the handkerchief back and he waved me off with a single elegant gesture. He had drawn himself up, his chin high, his expression inscrutable.

“There are too many sins on my account to number,” he said softly, “but I think that must be the most terrible.”

I said nothing and he cleared his throat, adopting his post of cool detachment again. “Now we know where we stand with one another, I am confident it won’t trouble you too much if something should go amiss with me. It’s almost dark and the shifting light will make it quite difficult for a marksman to hit us. I will go and have a squint outside and see how things stand. You really ought to have a look ’round the back for an exit. If we can creep out that way it will simplify matters immensely.”

I nodded mutely, all the fight suddenly extinguished. I felt lighter, suddenly, as if a burden I’d been carrying for years had been plucked off my shoulders. It had been awful to tell him those things; jaggy, prickly, thorny things I had said in the hopes of hurting him. But it was heavenly to speak my mind. No matter what happened now, I had held him to account for what he had done, and the exchange left us both a little shaken. He was quiet when he gave me a few matches from his little tin box and turned away. I did not look at him as he made his way to the front of the cave. I struck one of the matches and groped my way to the back, feeling each crevice and niche for something more.

Gabriel’s hunch had been right; there was more to the cave than met the eye and there
were
bats. I stepped carefully to avoid disturbing them, holding the match low and moving cautiously. It took ages to make my way around the twists and turns, but just when I was about to give up, the flame of the last match flickered and went out.