Desert Queen (68 page)

A
fter what now seemed a very short time—only five weeks of preparation—the coronation would take place. At the Cairo Conference it had been decided that Faisal’s election would be held by the Constitutional Assembly; but fearing it would take at least three months to convene, and that the Kurdish provinces might vote against him, at Cox’s will the Arab Cabinet of Ministers swifly passed a unanimous resolution declaring Faisal to be King. Nonetheless, to show that this was a “free and fair election,” a general referendum had been sent to the public. The question was asked: “Do you want Faisal to reign over you?” The answer was nearly certain.

The installation of Faisal was an event of momentous importance. Gertrude wanted him to understand not only the immensity of the occasion but its historical significance, its profundity of meaning. She had already spread before him maps of Iraq to give him lessons about the tribes. Now, like an eager teacher with her favorite pupil, she yearned to show the future King the greatness of his past. Much of her life had been spent among the ancient ruins of Mesopotamia, and she invited Faisal to join her for a visit to Ctesiphon. The grand palace, built in the sixth century
A.D.
by the Persian Sassanids for their leader Khosroes, was seized by the Arabs one hundred years later, its stones used to build the city of Baghdad.

On Tuesday, the second of August, Gertrude organized an early morning ride. Faisal, two of his aides de camp and Mr. Cornwallis joined her in their motor cars, and they set off before five
A.M.
, stopping to breakfast along the way. Carpets were spread by the servants, china laid out for a picnic of eggs, tongues, sardines and melons, and they settled down, she in a silk dress and straw hat, Faisal in his army uniform. An hour’s drive more, and they spotted the great arch of Ctesiphon; for nearly fifteen hundred years it had marked the site. Leading Faisal around the ruins, speaking to him in Arabic (as she almost always did), Gertrude expounded on the structure and how it was built, the rounded yellow brick vault still standing and, beside it, the massive brick arch. Vividly, she reconstructed the palace and showed him the figure of Khosroes sitting on the throne. She took Faisal to where the high windows that once existed faced the south and, pointing out the Tigris, told him the legendary story of the Arab conquest: legions of Muslim soldiers marching from Mecca to Iraq. “It was the tale of his own people,” she wrote home. “You can imagine what it was like reciting it to him. I don’t know which of us was the more thrilled.” We shall make Iraq as great as its past, she promised the future King.

Almost deliriously, she continued in her letter: “Faisal has promised me a regiment of the Arab Army—‘the Khatun’s Own.’ I shall presently ask you to have their colours embroidered. Nuri proposed that I should have an Army Corps! Oh Father, isn’t it wonderful. I sometimes think I must be in a dream.”

Nuri Said, Jafar Pasha’s brother-in-law, had arrived a few months before. Although Jafar Pasha was likable, Gertrude had written, “he lacks force. He is naturally easy going, colossally fat, with a beaming smile. He responds at once to friendliness and sympathy, and at once gives you his confidence. The wonder is that a man of his mental and physical characteristics should be so ardent in his political convictions. But he doesn’t carry over the footlights.” Nuri Said was different. Noticeably slender and lithe, with keen gray eyes, he was quieter than Jafar, more percipient, a man of deep understanding and insight. She recognized instantly that he was “a strong and supple force.”

The only disturbance now was Ibn Saud, who threatened Faisal’s claim over the nomadic Iraqi tribes. He had sent a message to Fahad Bey, demanding the loyalty of the Anazeh, but the note had only angered the Paramount Chief. In the well-known way of the Middle East, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” Ibn Saud had relied on tacties that forged an unexpected bond between Fahad Bey and Faisal.

At dinner a few nights later, Faisal turned to Gertrude: “I take witness in God, if we don’t stop Ibn Saud, in three months’ time there will be another battle at Ctesiphon like that which you described to me.” Gertrude felt confident that Ibn Saud could be staunched. “We shall stop him,” she said determinedly; “his claims are absolutely inadmissible.” For the time being she could claim success; but the feud between the families would soon intensify. Indeed, it still surfaces in the tense relationship between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, where upon occasion King Hussein has referred to himself as “Sharif,” and the monarchy of Saudi Arabia, which has sometimes treated him with disdain.

By August 14, the referendum had been completed. Although some would argue that the negative votes were simply ignored and not counted, Gertrude felt vindicated. Faisal had won almost unanimously. As soon as the numbers were in, she dashed off a note to the Van Esses. “Faisal will romp on our shoulders!” she rejoiced.

The following week, after a round of calls with the towering Mr. Cornwallis, Gertrude left the office in the early evening to take some exercise. Riding along the river bank, she passed the new house being readied for the future King and spotted his car out front. She stopped and handed the reins of her pony to one of Faisal’s slaves. The Emir was on the roof, she discovered, escaping the heat with some of his aides-de-camp. In the glow of the sunset, she looked out from the top of the house and could see the curves of the rocks just below, the groves of palm trees surrounding the town, the pink desert just beyond them. Faisal welcomed her warmly and she sat with the men and talked.

“
Enti
,” Faisal said. “
Enti Iraqiyah, enti Badawiyah
.” He paid her the greatest compliment. The Englishwoman who doted on flowery hats and fancy dresses, who gardened every morning and took tea every afternoon, who wore the honorary letters of C.B.E. and would inherit the title of Lady, who bore her heritage with regal carriage and had risked her life for the Empire, wanted more than anything to be accepted by this Arab Emir. Her own people had cast her aside; her personal life had shriveled into spinsterhood; her professional life had proved a lonely path. Most of the British men refused to see her as an equal, and the British wives returned her contempt in kind. But the Arabs had made her one of their own. “You’re an Iraqi,” Faisal had just told her lovingly. “You’re a Bedouin.”

The next evening Gertrude agreed to meet with Lady Cox and others to take a river launch to their favorite spot, near Faisal’s new house. But when she arrived at the Residency, she found poor Lady Cox in a twitter. Sir Percy’s mania for animals had gone too far. He was making a collection of Mesopotamian birds and his latest catch was an eagle. It wasn’t the bird that upset Lady Cox; it was the food that it ate. The huge fowl existed on live bats and liked to eat them in the morning. Since the bats could be caught only in the dark, they were kept overnight in the kitchen icebox. When Lady Cox opened the icebox door, she found the faces staring at her.

Calming her down, Gertrude and the others set off with her on the river. As their boat landed, Gertrude noticed several people across the way: Jafar Pasha, looking fatter than ever in his Arab clothes; some aides-de-camp; and Faisal, regal and handsome, trailing his robes in the sand. With no room on the launch to change out of her swimsuit, Gertrude reported, she went to a “familiar dressing room in the willows above the sand.” Walking back to the boat, her hair wet, her feet bare, she was “hailed to Faisal’s dinner.” She sat with the Arab men and talked until it was time to go back to her English dinner.

She added a fillip of gossip. “This is a secret,” she scrawled; “there’s a breeze on. The Colonial Office has sent us a most red-tapy cable saying that Faisal in his coronation speech must announce that the ultimate authority in the land is the High Commissioner. Faisal refuses and he is quite right. We are going—as you know—to drop the Mandate and enter into treaty relations with Mesopotamia.”

N
othing was as dreamlike as the day that thirty-six-year-old Faisal was crowned King. It was eleven years since Gertrude had attended a coronation, and from a seat in Westminster Abbey had watched in awe as the crown was placed on the head of George V. It was only a few months later, in the spring of 1913, that Gertrude had lost herself to the lusty Dick Doughty-Wylie. How many lifetimes ago that decade seemed. How different her life might have been if she had never gone to tea in the garden of his consular house in Anatolia, if she had never shared with him her secret ambitions to penetrate the East. But she had relished every moment, even quivering at the sight of his words on the written page. The pain of his death would never heal completely; it would remain a dull throbbing in her heart. If other men came into her life, they would never blind her with such a lightning charge. Yet as she sat now, in the front row of a coronation that she had orchestrated, another romance was slowly beginning to blossom. And even before that, like a schoolgirl with a crush, she was losing her heart to the King.

On Tuesday, August 23, 1921, at six
A.M.
, when the air was not yet scorched by the burning sun, a crowd of fifteen hundred dignitaries—British and Arabs, Jews and Christians, townsmen and tribesmen, holy men and politicians—gathered in the courtyard of the riverfront Serai. Faisal stood in the distance, a somber commander in his khaki uniform and spiked helmet. Behind him stood High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox, tall and lean in his white diplomatic uniform bedecked with ribbons and stars; General Sir Aylmer Haldane dressed in his officer’s whites; Faisal’s Adviser, the towering Kinahan Cornwallis; and a phalanx of aides-de-camp. The procession marched down the steps of the splendid Ottoman building, parading along a path of Persian carpets spread on the ground, past the Dorset honor guard, and on to the dais in the center of the courtyard. The crowd rose as the honored group arrived, and once the royal entourage had reached their places, all the others took their seats. “Faisal looked very dignified but much strung up,” Gertrude observed sympathetically. She was his mentor, he, her protégé. “It was an agitating moment. He looked along the front row and caught my eye and I gave him a tiny salute.”

Sir Percy’s proclamation, read in Arabic, announced that Faisal had been elected King by ninety-six percent of the people of Mesopotamia. “Long live the King!” the orator cried. Gertrude rose again with the crowd, and now, playing the role of subject, she grandly saluted her new master. The new national flag was hoisted beside him, and, with no anthem yet composed, the band played “God Save the King,” followed by a twenty-one-gun salute. “It was an amazing thing to see all Iraq, from North to South, gathered together,” she extolled. “It is the first time it has happened in history.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-
TWO

The King

A
n extraordinary few weeks followed in the wake of Faisal’s coronation. Like corks bobbing in on a sea of champagne, delegations organized by Gertrude pervaded the town. Only moments after the crowning ceremony, she returned to the Residency to find the corridors swarming with turbaned men, some of whom she had never met before, others who had never been to Baghdad. From the Qadir Agha of Shush, huge and fat in his baggy striped trousers, to the ten-year-old Archbishop of the Nestorians, wearing a huge gold cross around his neck, to the religious leader of the devil worshippers, they thronged her chamber, eager to devour information about the new King. “Fun isn’t it?” she asked her father, basking in the glow of her own success.

On Saturday of that first week, Faisal summoned Gertrude to a private tea. She spent “a happy hour” that day at the now-completed palace, a modest, two-story house close to the edge of the Tigris, where she and the King discussed a range of matters, from Ibn Saud’s worrisome raids to the west and south of Iraq, to the new national flag of the country, to the personal flag of the King. “We arranged provisionally this,” she wrote to Hugh, drawing a sketch on her note; “the Hejaz flag with a gold crown on the red triangle.… Do for heaven’s sake tell me whether the Hejaz flag is heraldically right.… Also whether you have a better suggestion for Faisal’s standard.”