Laura Kinsale (17 page)

The other soldier, hot and bedraggled, guided by a somber Bedui, caught up at midday. In a landscape of white sand and low black mountains, as stark as the moon, Zenia squinted and stared to see the oncoming party through the heat haze.

There were only two men. They had one of the baggage camels with them. As they came close, she could see a dark stain on the pack, and blood crusted on the animal’s hair.

Zenia stared at it. She looked up at the weary Egyptian with dread.

“He was already fallen to them, my aga,” the man said, with a brief bow and salute to his commander. “Shot from off this camel. They held the entrance—we could not come into the ravine to save him.”

“El-Saud?”

“Pure white dress, my aga, and rags of cotton on their heads.”

“Wahhabis for certain! God curse you! The Saudis will execute him, if he is not dead already.”

The soldier bent his head in shame. “It was no simple
ghrazzu,
my aga. They tracked us from Hayil.”

The Egyptian officer sat silent for a moment. Then he turned his camel toward the west. “As God wills,” he murmured, and slapped the beast with his stick, pushing on hard.

CHAPTER TEN

Zenia sat in the Alexandria office of the Peninsular Steam Navigation Company, her hands folded in her lap to keep them from visibly shaking. She wore black still, a black veil and dress, but now it was Frankish dress, with shoes that were agony on her feet and layers of hot petticoats.

She felt that the other passengers must be staring at her. She knew they were. In Suez, amid the silent bedlam of the bazaar, she had simply walked away from her Egyptian captors, mingling with a passing group of women, all dressed precisely as she was, all covered toe to head with black.

She had heard the shouts behind her when they realized she was gone. But in an alley she had thrown off the women’s garments and become Selim again—then found a scoundrel of the sort her mother had often made her pet, an Algerian merchant, a rogue with friends in every crevice and no love for the local pasha. She’d paid for shelter and secrecy while the pasha’s men and the soldiers scoured the town and cursed the women of the harems for hiding her. Once, they had come so close that she had taken up a broken copper pot and banged ruthlessly on it, pretending to mend the thing, while the pasha’s agent shouted at the Algerian above the noise.

“Lord Winter?” the clerk of the Peninsular Company looked up inquiringly, his long Greek mustachios bobbing.

Zenia stood. She felt wildly conspicuous—the black dress had been the only Frankish lady’s attire to be procured in all of Suez, pulled wrinkled and musty out of an unclaimed trunk off some long departed Bombay packet. It was made for someone so much larger about the waist that it hung in loose folds around hers. She was thankful for the net veil that drooped over her eyes, obscuring the upper half of her face, and the black gloves that covered her dirty fingernails.

As she walked forward to the desk, the clerk rose. He held Lord Winter’s passport for a steamer ticket, cut from inside the seam of the viscount’s shaving kit in one of the many nights Zenia had slept isolated behind a curtain in the Egyptian officer’s tent. She had ten gold coins in her purse from the same place.

It was hers, she had thought as she stole it. He had promised to take her to England. He would have done it.

It was as much hers as Mohammed Ali’s, anyway.

“Lord Winter, he is not with you, madam?” the clerk asked.

She stood there, looking through her veil at the Greek clerk. This was the only ship for a month; this was her single chance—if they would not let her exercise Lord Winter’s open passport for a return passage, she had not enough money to pay.

“No,” she said. Her voice was hoarse and grave, half-broken with fear. “Lord Winter is not coming.”

The clerk hesitated a moment, and then his face took on a strange look, a sort of grimace of solemn agony. “Ah! I be so sympathy, Lady Winter!” He looked down at his manifest. ‘The ship is booked, but you wish return your family, yes? So you must! We will contrive!”

Zenia bit her lip. She could feel the eyes of the other English people who waited, the passengers who had disembarked at Suez and come overland with the mail to Alexandria. None of them were alone as she was; even the ladies who traveled without their husbands had maids and children with them.

The clerk was consulting the passport letter. “There is a horse to embark, Lady Winter?”

“No,” she said. And for no reason, her eyes suddenly blurred and she felt hot tears slide down her cheeks. She swallowed. “There is no horse. None.”

“Please sit,” the clerk said. “I must speak captain.”

Zenia sat down. She bent her head, willing the tears to cease, but they just kept falling, making dark marks on her dirty black gloves. She felt ill and dizzy.

For many weeks she had not wept; she did not know why now, in front of English people, that she could not stop. The humid heat of Alexandria seemed to press in upon her until she thought she could not find her breath. She had never felt so hot, even in the desert. Her feet felt as if they were locked in burning vises, and her head floated in stifling vapor.

She thought that she must go outside for a moment, and pushed herself up. But her vision seemed to fall in upon her. Blackness poured in from all sides. She heard voices, distant, and then everything seemed to come back, and her nose hurt, and she was on the floor with faces and excited voices all about her.

“Well, there is hardly anything to loosen,” a man’s voice was saying irritably. “This dress appears several sizes too large for the poor girl.”

Zenia blinked. A young British officer in a naval blue jacket was leaning over her. He pulled out a pair of spectacles and set them on his nose, peering down owlishly.

“I’m all right,” she said, trying hastily to rise.

“Indeed, you must lie still a moment, madam,” he said firmly. “Just rest, and be calm. Here, the captain says that you have a cabin.” He dabbed at her nose with a handkerchief and looked up at someone Zenia could not see. “It might be best to take her aboard directly, sir. It’s cooler. I believe she may be—well—” His neck turned red. “You know what I mean, sir?”

“I’ll help her, poor babe!” A woman knelt beside Zenia, all pink skirts and fresh powdery scent. “Come to Iris, my poor dear! Come along.”

Zenia rose, with the woman’s arm about her waist. “I’m all right—truly—”

“Nonsense. I’ve had four, all in Bombay! I know what this heat will do. It will kill you and the child both, if you don’t take care. Come, just a gentle step—these gentlemen are going to show us the way. Baggage? I don’t—”
 
The lady’s dark head turned. “Where is your maid, my love, and your boxes?”

“Oh!” Zenia lifted her hand, pointing at the battered trunk she had made sure to buy, to seem as if she were not entirely without possessions. It was empty but for enough sand to make it seem as if it had clothing inside.

“But your maid? She has not gone off and left you alone in your condition?”

Zenia felt her lip quivering. She shook her head hard, and began to cry again. The lady named Iris held her about the shoulders and patted her arm. “Never mind! You shall tell us all about it later. Come, my love. Poor little thing—you’re skin and bones. Why, I could carry you myself!”

Zenia found herself aboard the steamer
Edward Rule,
sharing a cabin with Mrs. Iris Smith, whose maid had been unceremoniously displaced. The coolness of the sea air did not surmount the rocking of the first boat she had ever set foot on, and Zenia spent the four days to Malta in such a misery of confused illness that she could hardly speak. She was vaguely aware that Mrs. Smith nursed her heroically, but even thanks were beyond her.

It was not until the ship lay anchored at Malta for coaling that Zenia gathered enough of her reason to sit up and speak with weepy gratitude to Mrs. Smith. This imperturbable lady, who declared herself an Anglo-Indian
par excellence,
and by no means stymied by a little seasickness, merely urged Zenia to look to her soup.

“For it’s very likely you’re eating for two, aren’t you, my love?” Mrs. Smith gazed at her keenly. “You know it, don’t you?”

Zenia sat on the berth, her face turned down to her lap. She did not answer, but only kneaded her hands together.

Mrs. Smith put her cool hand on Zenia’s forehead, stroking back her damp hair. Zenia began to weep again. “I’m sorry!” she said helplessly. “I’m sorry to be this way!”

“It is very difficult, I know. It is so difficult.” Mrs. Smith began to weep a little too. “I lost my first husband when I was eighteen, and all alone in India, and in just your condition. Who are your people, my dear?”

Zenia swallowed, wiping at her eyes. “Mr. Michael Bruce is my father.”

She was in dread that Mrs. Smith would ask more, but the lady only said, “Here, take another spoonful of soup. And we have an excellent melon. There are some compensations in the tropics, aren’t there? That’s a good girl.” She waited until Zenia had forced herself to finish, and then rose. “The mails are leaving tonight, and I want to put a note in. It should arrive ahead of us,” she said. “Do you feel up to going ashore? I’ve bespoken a room and a shampooer, and we can both have a nice bath. Much needed, on my part. There is nothing like a cool bath and an Eastern shampoo; one feels utterly refreshed.”

Mrs. Smith’s brother met her in Gibraltar. He looked a little oddly at Zenia. Piecemeal, she had told Iris Smith how she had come to be traveling home alone to England, leaving Lord Winter in the desert. She never said that she was Lady Winter—they had all begun calling her that from the start. She never said that she was his widow—they just looked at the black dress and veil and expressed their sympathies. And she thought wearily,
What difference does it make?

He was taking her home. He had promised that he would.

“Iris,” she overheard Mr. Harrow say softly to his sister one night, “do you know who she is?”

Zenia paused, gripping the stair rail while the ship rolled gently on the heaving swell of the Atlantic.

“That Stanhope woman, yes, I know,” Mrs. Smith said. “Even in India we heard of that affair, Robert! But I’m not going to be a gorgon about it.”

“Yes, but—”