Pirate King (27 page)

Twenty women squealed and clutched each other. They stared, goggle-eyed, at me, sitting at the base of the wall. I stared goggle-eyed back at them, standing in a knot.

“Er,” I said when I found my voice. “I’d say our neighbour doesn’t wish us to look over that wall.”

“Someone
shot
at you!” half a dozen of them exclaimed.

“If he’d been shooting
at
me, he’d have taken a big chunk out of the wall. I’d say it was intended as a warning.”

The mothers gathered their chicks together and clucked their way to the stairs. Annie looked at the high wall, at the bench, and at me.

“Our neighbour has a shotgun?”

“A Purdy, by the look of it.”

She blinked. “You had time to see the make of gun?”

“I do a bit of shooting.” No point in telling her I’d had a Purdy pointed at me before. No point in telling myself that, either—only time quiets a racing heart, not logic and reassurance. I brushed myself off, and dragged the bench back to where I’d found it.

Still, the fellow’s presence confirmed my suspicions: The men’s prison was adjoining our own, and care was being taken to ensure we remained apart.

Not enough care, of course—but just as our earlier decision to delay rebellion was tied to the presence of innocents, so now was my ultimate freedom of movement linked to my fellow prisoners. And although the indomitable Mrs Hatley might wrestle her length over one of these walls to be lowered by rope, the more buxom mothers of Isabel and Fannie would never make it.

In the high chamber of his highest tower

Sate Conrad, fetter’d in the Pacha’s power
.

The first muezzin began his sunset call to prayer from a nearby minaret. Fettered in the pirates’ power, I propped my arms and chin on the southern wall, listening as other voices joined in from both sides of the river, drowned out regularly by the boom of waves. This was a quiet, snug little town around my feet. Salé marked the farthest reaches of the Roman empire—
Sala Colonia
—long before the pirates established their republic. The present rulers, the French, lived mostly in the modern European community, across the river in Rabat. Although Salé’s former violent xenophobia had been suppressed by the French, and manacled Christian slaves no longer worked in the gardens and fields, this town kept to itself, thinking its own thoughts behind its pale walls.

There would be no helmeted police constable strolling past on the street below.

This meant that I should have to cultivate an Irregular force from within.

I followed my nose, down the stairs, past the courtyard (tea had been laid out—Moroccan tea, steaming glasses stuffed with mint that instantly transported me back to a goat tent in Palestine—along with trays of sugar cakes and nuts and fruit and crescent-shaped biscuits) and through a sitting-room followed by a dim, heavily draped dining room with a table big enough for us all, past a small office space (no telephone—I would have been astonished to find one) and to a swinging door.

The kitchen was occupied by one woman in simple green Moroccan dress, two young girls similarly robed, and our resident snoop, Annie. Other than Annie’s anachronistic frock and uncovered hair, they might have been occupants of a Medieval alchemical laboratory, furnished with retorts and alembics. The woman disappeared in an explosion of fragrant steam; the girls took one look at my trousers and short hair and covered their mouths to giggle; Annie gave me a grin.

“Doesn’t this smell absolutely fabulous? I’ve been trying to get them to tell me what it is, but we don’t seem to have a language in common.”

The odour spilling out of the pots was, truly, intoxicating. My very soul opened to the spice-laden air, and I found I had moved closer to the cook, to stand within the penumbra of steam. I smiled, to show that I meant no harm.

“Are we to have dinner, then?”

Of course she did not understand, so I handed out another of my miser’s stash of Arabic:
“Dinner soon?”

It took no pretence to stare blankly at the flood of heavily accented Arabic that washed over me, but it seemed to be positive, and I began to leaf through my other languages to ask,
“When?”

French, of course—although the cook, who had understood the question, spoke little of the tongue, and that mostly monosyllabic. But she got across the answer, which was that dinner would be served in two hours.

Then she made a gesture that clearly invited us to take ourselves away.

Outside, Annie said, “Well, it’s good to know that we don’t have to produce our own meals in that kitchen.”

“It is a bit primitive,” I agreed.

“I didn’t know you spoke—Arabic, is it?”

“I know about ten words, picked up on a trip to the Holy Land.
Bazaar, dinner, bread, please, thank you
, ma’alesh—which is sort of like,
oh well
—and
How much is it?
I’ll need to arrange for a Moroccan Mr Pessoa, to help with trips into the bazaar.”

“Oh good,” she said. “They’ve left us some tea. Ooh—mint?”

I drank my syrupy tea and checked on the arrangements for beds. When the door opened an hour later and our trunks and cases were unceremoniously tossed inside, I said nothing to draw attention to the sound that followed: the door being wedged shut from without. When dinner came—magnificent heaps of exotic foods that the cook told us were
couscous
and
tagine
(a rice-like dish, and lamb with dried apricots cooked in a massive low crockery bowl topped by a sort of Chinese hat) with shredded salads and plates of pickles and relishes that had the mothers making dubious noises even as they helped themselves to second servings—I said nothing to dispel their easy assumption that the following evening we would share such foods with the men. And when yawns began to creep in and the women creep away to their richly furnished beds, I wished them sweet dreams, and said not a word about the guards on the door.

Permit them a night’s peace, before anxiety moved in.

The room I had claimed as my own was small and dark and although it was clean, it had no decoration on its whitewashed walls. A servant’s room, conveniently placed for a shouted summons from one of the ornate bedrooms nearby. A servant’s room, with little but a mat and blankets for sleeping. A servant’s room, with a window too narrow for most European frames.

All the windows in the house were firmly shuttered, either by decorative wood latticework or, in two of the lower rooms, workaday iron bars installed so recently the black paint was still tacky. This, too, went with the Moslem architecture, and the others did not even question it, since the inner walls were so patently free and open to the lightest breeze.

I dozed, waiting for the household to succumb to sleep before rising from my servant’s cot and turning my attentions to the window.

Being on the upper floor, this was a window not formerly barred. The mortar holding the bars was thoroughly set, but not as deep as it might have been on a real window.

And being women, no one had given us, or our possessions, a more than cursory search.

I divested myself of the hardware I had worn about my person all that day, ending by loosing my trousers and unwinding the length of silk rope that had saved my life more than once over the years (although it did have a way of making me look rather stout). I held a small looking-glass out between the bars to be certain that the street below was empty, then unfolded my pocket-knife to the blade used for prising stones from a horse’s hoof, and set to.

By three in the morning, the bars were down.

By five minutes after three, I was dressed head to toe in garments borrowed earlier from the house’s lumber-room, my spectacles tucked into a pocket, my face and hands darkened with dust from the window-sill.

By ten after three, I was on the street.

It is one of my favourite sensations, that of stepping out of doors without leave. The very air smells sweeter—as every child knows and most adults forget—whether in London or Morocco. I paused to savour that aroma of freedom. And also to orientate myself in relation to the muted sound of a violin that had begun to play some hours before.

In my borrowed
djellaba
, spectacles off and blonde hair covered, scuffing along in run-down and overly large sandals and with a moon too small and street-lamps too sporadic to give me away, I was taken for a local boy. As I went past our two guards, who spent their night pacing up and down the exposed sides of our prison, I greeted them in an Arabic onto which I had fastened something resembling the local accent. I did the same when I came to the guards outside the men’s prison.

“Good evening,”
I mumbled politely.

“
What are you doing out at this hour?
” the shorter man demanded.

“My mother needs something from her sister.”
A speech I had prepared earlier, in case.

“The boy’s running errands for his mother,”
he called to the taller guard.

“Must you listen to that noise all night?”
I asked, with a gesture upwards: Holmes, too, had managed a room over the street, although his window was so narrow as to be impassable.

The man answered with a gutter curse, a new one to me.
“When I go in tomorrow morning, I’m going to put my foot through the accursed thing.”

“You will do a service to us all,”
I noted sweetly, and went my way. When the violin came to the end of its song, the music did not resume.

For two hours, I quartered the compact walled city, locating the gates, committing to memory the thoroughfares (some of which were wide enough for a motorcar) and the lanes (in which anything but a motorcycle would stick fast). The odours and débris underfoot told me which streets held leather-workers and which sold vegetables, which stalls were coffee-houses and which belonged to barbers. The pound of the sea was the loudest noise I heard, apart from one yowling cat, the clatter of dropped pans from a baker’s shop, and a vicious-sounding argument from an upper room between two women in a language I did not know.

Almost the entire time was spent on paving stones where the buildings came near to touching overhead, or where the sky was kept out by reed thatching. At half past five, with the sky growing light and my heart pounding with the conviction that I would not find the correct house in this mole’s maze, I succeeded in retracing my steps to my lane, to my rope, and to my window-sill. Inside the servant’s cell, I scrubbed off the dirt with a cloth I had wet earlier for that purpose, and set the bars and mortar back into place.

I fell into bed just as the day’s first call to prayer rang out, well pleased with my outing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

GIRLS
: At such a time of night as this, so very incompletely dressed …

F
ORTUNATELY, A HOUSE
full of young women does not wake early. I managed a solid three hours of sleep before the sound of voices roused me, and I dressed—wearing a skirt today—to go downstairs.

A banquet of breads, fruit, various spreads, and boiled eggs had been laid out in the courtyard. The air smelt of baking, of oranges, and of fresh-watered soil. The fountain was playing, the small birds dipping in and out.

My companions noticed none of it; clearly, one of them had attempted to leave, and met the same treatment I had the previous afternoon.

I came across the blue-and-white tiles—Miss Mary Russell, the firm’s fix-it girl—and they pounced on me, all talking at once.

“We’re being held prisoner!”

“Annie felt like going for a walk and—”

“—wanted to see the medina—”

“—see the river—”

“—the market—”

“—tried to go out and these
rude
individuals at the door—”

“—terribly rude, they positively
bullied
her—”

“I’ll admit, I did feel more than a little threatened.”

“—no English, of course—”

“What
was
Captain La Rocha thinking, to give us—”

“—none of the servants speaks a
bit
of—”

“—surely someone in this town—”

“—she tried to insist—”

“
—pushed
her, just put his hand—”

“Imagine!”

“—native person, acting like—”

“—really
most
threatening—”

“Miss Russell, you must—”

“—we insist—”

“Please, tell us you’ll—”

“
—have
to talk to Mr Fflytte—”

“—have to
do
something—”

I raised one hand. Like a conductor with his orchestra, the chorus of outrage went discordant and trailed away.

“Thank you,” I said. “I hope you slept well?” The chorus threatened to break out again, so I waved my outstretched palm, and continued, “I personally did not sleep very well, I suppose the lack of a ship’s soothing motion seemed odd, so I should like some coffee before the day gets much further along. However, yes, I am aware that we are not being encouraged to leave here just at present. I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Mr Fflytte chose to film these portions of the movie in Salé rather than Rabat, for the sake of realism. Had it been Rabat, which has a large European community, you should have been quite secure walking about at all hours. However, Salé is a small town with a high degree of suspicion regarding outsiders. I imagine that Captain La Rocha did not wish us to be made uncomfortable by the attentions and curiosity of the inhabitants. I’m sure that when we go out, he will provide us with bodyguards. In the meantime, you’ll have to admit that we are most comfortable here. Now, can anyone tell me, is this coffee as good as it smells?”

My phlegmatic attitude, more than my words, gave my fellow prisoners pause for thought. Twenty pairs of eyes followed me to the richly laden table; twenty pairs of ears heard the ting of silver on porcelain as I stirred in the cream; twenty stomachs decided that they might deign to try one of those croissants and some of that pale butter.

Annie seemed to have got over her affront at being ill-treated by the guards. She loaded a plate and filled a cup with tea, then brought them over to where I was sitting, on the wide, decorated edge of the fountain.

“I’m sorry you were frightened,” I told her.

“I was more angry than anything else,” she said. “And it’s frustrating, to not be able to speak to anyone. Even the maid and cooks just stare at one blankly when one asks for another bath-towel.”

“I’d have thought an actress would be skilled at making herself understood.”

“True, but some things are a touch embarrassing. And more complicated forms of communication, such as asking
why
one is not permitted to leave a door, can be difficult.”

“Yes, I’m sure we’ll find that this is all merely an oversight on Mr Fflytte’s part. Just as he overlooked the problems of arriving on the eve of the Moslem Sabbath.”

“Do you think so?”

I can turn a bland face on anyone short of the Holmes brothers and have it believed. “What else could it be?” I asked mildly. Before she could answer, I went on. “I for one intend to make the most of our paid holiday here, and gather the sun’s rays on the rooftop. And perhaps I ought to take a glance at those French novels in the sitting-room, before the younger girls spot them.”

I abandoned my empty cup and plate to do as I had announced—and did in the end notice one or two books that might be inappropriate for young girls, although I should have to read them to be certain. I carried them to the rooftop and made a show of setting up for a leisurely day of relaxing in the sun. The others, after some hesitation and grumbling, decided to throw over their complaints and take my lead.

By mid-day, we had a ladies’ salon going atop the house. In one corner, Bonnie and Harriet were taking turns translating one of the more innocent French novels aloud to an audience. Some of the mothers had uncovered a supply of embroidery floss and were teaching two of the girls (who in the normal course of events would have nothing to do with needlework) to pick out a design, an experience that became more enticing when I descended to the kitchen, figured out (using gestures and raised eyebrows) which of the inhabitants had been responsible for some of the towelwork, and dragged her up to demonstrate Moroccan designs. Celeste and Ginger were to be in a stage-play when we returned to England and were helping each other with their lines; Edith was teaching Kate and June how to whittle; and Fannie and Linda, looking like a pair of schoolgirls, were playing a cut-throat game of
chemin de fer
.

Several times during the day I wandered down to the kitchen, hoping, if not to find fodder for a band of Irregulars, at least to forge some kind of relationship with the ladies there. Each time, either Annie was already in residence (scrubbing vegetables and stirring pots and laughing merrily at the impossibility of communication while creating a language of hand gestures and facial expressions) or she would appear a few minutes later. In the end, I abandoned the kitchen to her. Which was probably for the best, since she seemed less likely than I to burn down the house or be the cause of an epidemic of food-poisoning.

Lunch was brought to the rooftop, served to us like a picnic without the champagne or the ants. Afterwards, Doris excused herself to go wash her hair, and when she came back up, she carried the looking-glass from her bedroom wall, that she might better primp and admire the fall of her thick, wavy locks. One glance, and six of the others rushed for the stairs; soon, our tiled picnic grounds more resembled a boudoir.

When the two kitchen girls climbed the stairs with a tray of mint tea, shortly after the mid-afternoon chorus of muezzins, they lingered, glancing disapprovingly at the cigarettes but frankly gawping at the sea of yellow hair. Doris spotted the two girls and waved for them to come over. Soon, she had them brushing her hair and giggling behind their hands at the way it sprang back under the comb.

They left, heads together and talking far too quickly for me to follow their exclamations, then returned a few minutes later with a basket full of paraphernalia, followed by the cook.

The cook searched the rooftop of Europeans at play until she spotted me. I did not understand most of her words, but using a handful of French and grabbing my hand for a demonstration, she managed to get across the gist of her message. I explained to the others.

“They’re offering to do henna painting on us. See that goo that looks like mud? That’s pure henna. When you trickle it onto the skin and let it dry there, it stains intricate patterns. It’s not permanent, one scrubs it away after a few days. I’ve seen it before, done for weddings and such. It’s pretty. Anyone interested?”

June jumped forward, but her mother said she could not; as they were arguing over the child’s right to be a canvas, Linda stepped up, and Bonnie.

We kept the three ladies of Salé busy for a couple of hours, trickling arabesques of mud onto hands, arms, and ankles. When the trio descended below to their labours, leaving a bevy of Europeans oohing and aahing over the orange-brown tendrils woven over their pale skin, I looked around and was hit by a startling thought: I was in a harem.

And if I stayed here much longer, I should die of boredom.

The weather stayed remarkably warm, considering it was nearly December. The wind died away, permitting us to take our evening meal down in the open courtyard, and if some of the girls and all of the mothers grumbled at the food, which again was spiced and coloured and possessing unrecognisable components from the soup to the dessert, some of us enjoyed it immensely. I polished my plate and sat back, replete.

The courtyard was lit by small lamps, above the table and in the trees; the earlier brilliant crimson sky had given way to a panoply of stars.

“Shall we take our tea on the roof?” someone suggested: I was surprised to find it had been I.

The cook-housekeeper studied our charades of climbing stairs and sipping cups, and nodded her agreement. We gathered armfuls of cushions, and carried them up, and up again, covering every surface with padding. We lay there with tea and coffee, the lamps shut down, and counted stars.

A short time later, the violin started up, clear despite the distance.

This time, the melancholy squealing was replaced by a lively tune. Twenty-one British women heard the tune; half of them shot upright and exclaimed, “The Major-General’s song!”

And so it was, the proud proclamation of the father of thirteen blonde daughters, declaring his knowledge of matters vegetable, animal, and mineral. The jaunty tune rang out over the dusty pirate town, hushing its inhabitants and its prisoners alike, and when it was finished, the instrument started in on Mabel’s song to Frederic, “Poor Wandering One.” To my astonishment, a woman’s clear soprano rang out in accompaniment, and we looked around to see Bibi singing to the heavens. I hadn’t known the woman could sing a note, much less knew the score of the comic opera.

After that, those who knew the words followed Holmes’ violin into a variety of the chorus numbers, and although I neither joined in nor appreciated the musicality, I did enjoy the sensation of hearts meeting across the rooftops.

There came a pause, while Holmes took a drink or tightened his strings—or silently fought off irate guards, for all I could tell—and Annie sighed. “One might wish for a number of strong men to bring up that piano from the sitting room.”

Again, I spoke without thought: “Who needs men?”

Of course, once the idea was out in the open, the others fell on it, and although I tried to withdraw the possibility of hauling the thing up the stairs, nothing would do but we all trooped down to examine the possibility. And, in fact, the instrument had legs that could be detached, so with a series of mattresses to turn the stairs into a ramp (a bump-filled ramp, true) and a quick transformation of bed-sheets into hauling ropes, the project was on.

It was heavier than it had looked, but not so massive that we couldn’t shift it. The turns in the stairs meant several great gouges out of the plasterwork, and I had a bad moment when I (on the downhill side, steadying it with a shoulder) felt the load wobble and gather itself for a rush towards the ground floor—one of the bed-sheets had slipped. But the weight did not crush me, and the other ties held, and in the end, we made it all the way to the top. There we reattached the legs, and set the instrument with its back to the opening over the courtyard, so that the sky-light’s canvas tarpaulin could be extended to protect it against the night mist.

The piano’s arrival on the rooftop brought a great outburst of feminine triumph that silenced the violin, and no doubt made for a number of puzzled male expressions behind barred windows. Annie pulled up a stool, and began to play.