Secret of the Sands (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

Farida has been patient for weeks now but she can’t stop thinking about it. Mickey leaves the letter addressed to Lieutenant Wellsted on the low side table. The next day, she transfers the missive to the shelf of books by the window and there it sits ever since. She does not know if her husband has left the lieutenant’s correspondence in her care deliberately (for surely it belongs in his office) or if he has simply forgotten that the letter has arrived. What Farida does know is that it is his expectation that Wellsted will not return alive to Muscat and perhaps for that reason he has been careless with the fellow’s mail. Whatever his thinking, Farida is drawn to the sealed paper on a daily basis. She passes it through her fingers as if it is of the finest silk and turns it over again and again to read the enticing address of the sender. Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, London. The wax seal is slightly uneven when she runs her finger over its face and the edge of the paper beside it sports a small, tattered edge, which, most likely, has worsened with her repeated handling. Farida sniffs it tentatively and then slips the letter back onto the shelf again between two volumes that Mickey is unlikely to take down.
It is,
she thinks, as she slinks back across the cool, tiled floor,
like being sent a daydream.

Farida has never been to London. When she left Cork it was for Dublin and then the port of Liverpool. From there, she worked her way down the west coast of England and into Wales, coming to Bath, she remembers, on her nineteenth birthday. There, she and her friend Maria worked a particularly efficacious scam, posing as ladies. Dressed to the nines and apparently guileless they agreed, upon much coaxing, to ride in the carriage of one gentleman or another (the gentlemen being always married, of course, and invariably the worse for drink). The story was that they were sisters from the North of England and happened to be out in the park without a chaperone. Both Maria and Fanny were dab hands at making themselves sound like they were born and bred in Yorkshire rather than Galway and Rowgarrane respectively and that they were respectable, if somewhat naïve. Generally what ensued in the carriage, of course, was most improper. The next day, a ne’er-do-well called Edward Brand would call on the gentleman and make an unholy fuss about what the fellow had done with his sisters, taking the poor, innocent girls off like that and compromising them cruelly as if they were strumpets and harlots, by God, instead of good, clean English ladies too innocent for their own good and now ruined forever. Such is the traffic of gentlemen in Bath that it was clear that if they didn’t milk it dry, it was entirely possible for this glorious scam to work for months on end, if not years.

‘You’ve picked the wrong family, sir,’ Edward would spit, ‘and I can promise you, your wife will hear of what you have done, and her family too. Yes indeed. It is a disgrace, sir, a disgrace, and no compensation is possible. Our family may be poor but our silence cannot be bought.’

This last statement was, of course, untrue. Mr Brand wrought compensation every time for no man wishes to be unmasked to his parents-in-law and his wife.

‘It’s a doozy,’ Maria laughed. ‘Works every time.’

It worked almost every time, that is, until the last, when poor Edward got carried away in his role and foolishly duelled for his sisters’ honour. The gentleman who killed him had some title or other. Farida has forgotten his name now. After the funeral, the ladies moved to the south coast and it was there that Fanny bought a passage to India with the remainder of her monies. Leaving England was an easy decision.

‘And why not?’ she loses her temper when Maria said she wouldn’t want to go to any of them nasty, foreign places. ‘Is Portsmouth so lovely?’ Fanny gestures around the shabby room the women have taken for a tanner a week. ‘I’d as soon see the world as stay in this stinking hole.’

‘But, Fanny, we can go to London,’ Maria intones it like a Hail Mary. London is her holy grail.

‘London! London is the same as all the rest! And me getting no younger and you neither. London will eat us up, my girl. I’m for some adventure, Maria, and some heat on my bones. Won’t you come with me and try something different?’

Maria declines.

I wonder what happened to her?
Farida smiles. It has worked out very nicely indeed, in all possible manners. She never in her life thought she’d actually fall in love and with such a good man. Mickey is a treasure. ‘So,’ she wonders out loud, catching sight of the letter, ‘am I homesick or just a nosey old woman? What’s drawing me to you, like a postmistress with an undeliverable?’

It is a testament to Farida’s ability to defer pleasure that the letter lasts as long as it does – well over a month. In the end, she makes it till the air cools very slightly and the late summer sun does not rise quite so early or set quite so late. One Monday morning, she steams the wax seal carefully and flicks it open with tremendous satisfaction. The top of the paper is dated in June and Farida thinks it is a shame that Mr Murray had not roused himself to write earlier, for the letter missed the lieutenant by only a matter of hours. What seems nothing in London can make all the difference in the dominions.

‘Ah well,’ she sighs as she folds open the stiff paper and settles down with relish to read the letter on the leather seat by the window.

Guineas, eh?
Farida ponders. A guinea is a gentleman’s coin. Out of habit, she turns over the paper, as if to check that the money is not somehow attached. Still and all, two guineas is hardly overgenerous, she thinks, for a fellow who has written an entire book by hand and risked his life, most likely, in the process. She sniffs at the paper to see if she can catch a whiff of London town from the pages on the inside but there is nothing. Then she reads it again. He’s an interesting fellow this Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted. He’s not bad-looking, clearly very brave and a writer too. Farida laughs at herself for being such an old con woman. Even now, she can’t help looking for an angle when something unexpected falls in her lap. She reseals the letter very carefully, with a tiny stick of burning wood, and places it in clear view so that Mickey will come across it when he next visits her. He’ll probably take it away, of course, but that’s only fair.

I’d say a fellow like that will make it through the desert,
Farida ponders.
And if he does .
. . The notion trails. She has been thinking for the last while about writing a letter home – just to let her family know what happened.

They think I’m dead,
she says to herself with finality.

For a moment she considers the words she’d use in the letter – how to encapsulate everything into a few sentences that wouldn’t sound crass or crazy. Farida cannot quite form the words.

Feck it,
she dismisses the notion.
I’ll worry about it if Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted makes it back to Muscat, poor soul.

And Mickey Al Mudar’s favourite wife turns her attention to the climactic
kharja
of a poem she has been studying. It is written in Arabic but is clearly Spanish in its deri vation. The interplay of the Semitic and European is of interest to Farida for obvious reasons and it will, she thinks, take up most of her afternoon. Some of these Arabic verses are very racy, she murmurs with satisfaction as she draws close to the window and settles down for the afternoon.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

At home the weather eases in September, but the same cannot be said for the desert. It is a very long journey, Wellsted has come to understand, not simply on account of the time it takes as on account of the effort. The caravan slowly follows the emir’s trail across the baking wilderness from one oasis to the next for a month. It surprises Wellsted to find the traffic of men and animals so constant. The chance encounters with groups of
Bedu
following the trade routes slow progress but there is no question of not succumbing to the custom of brewing coffee with the strangers, for they can tell the party what is up ahead.

Wellsted takes notes. It seems that families and sometimes whole villages of nomads trail across the wilderness along the criss-cross of unmarked and unseen paths that from custom or sheer expediency are the routes all travellers follow. These family caravans are engaged on simple enough business. They are asserting their rights to the
falaj
– the water courses – or driving their camels and goats to market, wherever they believe they can make the best trade. Many are simply looking for some grazing – a scrap of land with small-leaved bushes or patches of sweet grass – somewhere they can settle for a few days. They are like cawing birds, wheeling seagulls that land to eat and swap their news before they carry on across the sands, a flash of white, crying their news as they go.

At first, whenever they meet another party, Wellsted’s appearance attracts attention. The leather-skinned
Bedu
eye the thin Turk and his straggly beard with curiosity. It is only natural, for in this environment, when presented with anything that is not sheer sand and sky a man will become fascinated by it. The first time they reach a thin oasis of a few, scattered palm trees, Wellsted thinks he has never seen anything like it. Still, the truth is that as soon as the
Bedu
hear the names of Kasim and Ibn Mohammed they are more interested in the slavers than the
effendi
and their faces split into wide grins. This action displays more often than not, a startling paucity of teeth and a range of expressions so interesting that the lieutenant wishes he had better skills as an artist than a cartographer.

Kasim finds it amusing that though he is known as a slaver the men they meet do not ask if he is here about his business. They have no fear that their wives and daughters will be borne away. In fact, there is a charming simplicity in the manner they express delight to have come across such distinguished company with whom to drink their coffee and swap news. Perhaps the customs of the desert are so ingrained here it is simply impossible for a
Bedu
to imagine anyone breaking faith.

After the third week, Wellsted senses that he is finally accepted. He settles into the persona he has been given and adopts the ways of his fellows as if they are second nature. Now, whatever caravan they meet, the
Bedu
no longer stare at the Turk to assess him. His accented Arabic is more easily understood and the second-hand clothes are as if his own. He is certain he has acquired a swagger, though without seeing himself in a glass (there is no reflective surface for hundreds of miles in any direction) he cannot decide whether his Arabic gait has arisen from prolonged periods of riding his camel or simply the more general change that has come over him, living on the sands. Whatever has made the difference, he is no longer acting a part when he bows, clasps his hand to his heart and says
salaam aleikhum
before introducing himself.

Keen for company, he keeps a weather eye to the horizon. Most of the caravans tell more or less the same tales and the main news is that of a wild sandstorm, a
simoom,
which hit the desert six months before. It raged to the south, near Niswa, the ancient capital – a deadly, wind-driven wall of sand almost a mile high as it moved across the Empty Quarter like a force of God.

‘You could not breathe, nor see the hand before your face,’ they swear.

Several families have not been seen since and the tribes are still taking stock, trying to clarify who survived as whole dunes shifted, smothering those caught in the direct path of the storm. If you were not lucky enough to find shelter, it is unlikely you came through.

‘We had only a few minutes,’ one old man shakes his head. He has the kind of face that makes it difficult to believe that he hasn’t seen everything in his time, but he swears the sandstorm took him completely by surprise. ‘There was hardly any warning at all, when we saw it coming towards us. We were lucky and were in a place we could hide, though my son’s eyes were damaged – a rip in the cloth he had used to cover his face. It pleases Allah now that he can only see with one eye. My brother, though, we have not seen my brother since the day before the storm hit. Do you know Hanif Ibn Mussaf? Have you seen him?’

It is a hopeless quest, of course, but you have to have sympathy with the asking. Many of the strangers are on the lookout for lost children or slaves who have gone astray either in the
simoom
or simply in the more general course of their travels. These people are abandoned with a stoic nonchalance that is curious to a naval man. Wellsted is reminded of how a cry of ‘Man overboard’ marshals an entire crew in the Navy and no one asks if the man in question is the cabin boy or the captain before they respond. Here, rank is more important to the prospects of rescue (for who would retrace their steps miles across the burning terrain for a mere slave boy?). In the main, it seems those who fall by the wayside are left to fend for themselves, especially if they are expendable and defenceless (poor, enslaved or simply very young). How anyone could survive alone without at least a camel to provide milk and find the way to a watering hole, Wellsted cannot see. But still, they ask about their lost ones. This is not because they believe that the lost souls are alive (though curiously, there are stories, myth-like in their lack of likelihood, of survival against the odds), but rather because they are hoping you have taken a passing interest in any tattered
jubbah
or pile of bleached bones that might have caught your eye. ‘His
jubbah
was blue,’ they insist. ‘Have you seen a blue
jubbah
?’ Or, ‘The child was only seven. The bones will be very small.’

These sombre enquiries naturally come first, after the serving of the coffee. With that out of the way, the conversation continues. Like the later pages of the
London Illustrated News
, the news that transpires after the headlines is more frivolous. There is, for example, the sheer tabloid scandal of the youngest son of one caliph, ‘A good boy, until now, but he has a fire in his blood and could not cool it when he argued with his father,’ all this explained with flashing of eyes and large hand gestures to signify the scale of the conflict. ‘So the boy took off with only his camel.’ A pause here for effect, for to leave by yourself and take only your camel is a feat of either legendary bravery or extreme foolishness, the judgement of which in this case, is as yet undecided. ‘Even as we speak,’ the old men (they are always old, for some reason) assure the rapt listeners, ‘he is travelling towards one of the seaports ruled by a rival family, where it is rumoured there is money to be made diving for pearls in the waters off Bahrain. Allah be with him.’ Here Allah is always invoked for the
Bedu
find this fact the most scandalous of all. ‘He will work for someone else,’ they breathe to make the boy’s intention absolutely plain. It transpires the
Bedu
, despite their poverty, are fiercely independent.

‘You cannot trust the pearl merchants,’ they tut, as if the life the boy has set off towards can possibly be harder than a nomadic existence fuelled by camel’s milk and coffee.

‘As if the earth would ever yield up her bounty so freely for the benefit of man,’ one old sage sighs at the foolish impossible expectations of youth. ‘Why would Allah be so kind?’

He is unaware, of course, (as are they all) that beneath his feet lies one of the world’s greatest oil reserves and that in time, every one of his great, great, great grandchildren will be millionaires. The only use the
Bedu
have for the
naft
is to harvest it where it rises to the surface and use the sticky fuel for their lamplight. In any case, even in the great metropolises of Western Europe there are, as yet, no machines that can make use of the Peninsula’s natural resources. Steam is the emerging power of the decade and that is fuelled by coal. For the time being, nature is holding her irony in reserve and the
Bedu
, like the sons of Al Saud, mostly go barefoot and, if not intimately acquainted with cold, they certainly know hunger very well.

Having listened to the gossip and added a few choice snippets of Muscat extravagance to spice the conversation, the slavers ask for directions.

‘North,’ the
Bedu
always gesture, the sleeves of their white and blue
jubbahs
swaying with the force of the movement, as if to demonstrate that the emir’s camp is not only northwards, but that it is also still a very long way off. ‘A day off Riyadh.’

Riyadh is practically the only town in the interior in this region and most directions are navigated by its location. From what Wellsted can gather, it is a small place of only a few thousand souls, living on a precarious supply of water that is only just sufficient to keep its population alive. The soil is good and there are both date palms and fruit orchards. In the desert that is miracle enough.

During such exchanges, with the men introduced to each other and the pecking order established, Zena sometimes arouses a little interest. Even obscured by her
burquah
it seems the men are transfixed by her shapely wrists and ankles, both of which are periodically on show as she goes about her chores.

‘A prize investment,’ Wellsted hears one say wistfully.

Several times, visitors try to barter the dark girl dressed in black for a camel or two though none of them formally ask who owns her, they simply seek to swap with whoever they think looks the easiest touch. Ibn Mohammed sees all and his stony gaze silences all negotiations. He does not care, of course, about Zena, but a pair of camels (even of good pedigree) are not worth a pretty Abyssinian female. Ibn Mohammed has never made a poor trade in his life and will not bring dishonour on his caravan by allowing anyone else to do so. As the would-be purchasers shrink, Ibn Mohammed nods to Wellsted as if to say, she is yours, do you want to barter her? He does not. As he has come to know the girl better, the idea horrifies him more and more.

Zena, for her part, ignores such exchanges and adopts a dignified air as she continues to serve coffee or prepare food while the men talk about her as if she is not there. If anyone were to look closely, they would see her stiffen slightly and her eyes land upon Wellsted at the next opportun ity, to check he is not tempted by the offer. It has happened so many times now that she no longer feels her stomach turn at the prospect, for she is coming to trust that her new, pale master will not barter her, whatever he ultimately intends (this has not yet been settled with any clarity and she does not feel she can ask him).

Once, when she is serving, a
Bedu
lays his hand lazily on her foot. Obscured by the crowded sitting mats, no one can see as he strokes her skin slowly, running one hand upwards past the ankle as he proffers his cup with the other. Zena lowers the scalding coffee pot as if to pour but instead she burns him quickly on the skin of his shoulder. The man jumps, but he says nothing, only pulls his hand away. If Wellsted did not watch her so closely, he’d never know.

Good girl,
he thinks, smiling.
I knew she had spirit.
Her tiny rebellions intrigue him as much as her beauty.

That night, Wellsted settles Zena to sleep beside him. The camp is settled and the desert is silent, except for the camels grunting. It is the only time of day they can talk without everyone else hearing and they have made a custom of whispering a while before going to sleep.

‘It rains almost every day in London,’ he says.

Zena cannot imagine that is true. His eyes are like sapphires, she decides, sheer, glassy blue. The fascination of watching him talk, move or sleep has not dissipated nor has the thunderclap that accompanies his occasional touch.

‘When we leave, I shall tell them about it here,’ he decides. ‘I shall talk at the Royal Society – I know it.’

That must be a good place to talk,
she thinks. Wellsted has mentioned the African Association and the Geographical Society many times. She imagines these places must be something akin to a gathering of men in the
souk.
Zena enjoys his stories though of course there are questions, which she has not as yet had the nerve to ask. For a start, if it is perpetually raining do they pitch tents in this London simply to keep dry? Are the streets canopied and does everyone wear turbans to keep off the weather? She thinks how lovely it must be for the strange, pale Londoners not to know thirst and, if the stories are true, she can see no downside to the master’s mythical home town. Wellsted has not properly explained to her that the rain is often accompanied by a biting coldness that in living memory has frozen the great river Thames to an icy, polluted standstill or that many of the capital’s citizens are starving to death, ravaged by disease and abandoned by their fellows. The idea of being frozen to death, a real danger in the winter months for many of the poor in Wellsted’s home parish, is beyond her. In Zena’s vocabulary, in either her own dialect or in Arabic, she knows no word that means ‘frozen’. She has never seen snow or ice or, indeed, heard of them. In any case, it is not something that Zena, for all her education, finds possible to envisage. All her life winter has been a more pleasant season than the summer. Thirst is her greatest enemy and she has only ever felt cold when once, as a child, she caught a fever and though her skin burned she felt chilled to the bone.

Wellsted takes a breath. He has decided to bring up the matter. ‘You burnt our guest today,’ he says.

‘I’m sorry, but he . . .’ She is not sure how to explain the liberty the man took. The thought of it still makes her furious, though there is no point in expressing her anger and instead she steels herself for the master’s rebuke. It does not come.