Sultan's Wife (39 page)

Amadou, sighting the treats, chatters at me and paws my robe. Rather than have him wake the boy, I take out some dates and peanuts and put
them on the windowsill. He capers after them and leaps up to squat upon the sill, and applies all his concentration to shelling the nuts. This reminds me that I have not eaten since dawn. Locking the door, I go to find something to eat.

Downstairs, the public rooms are much grander than our apartments, with high corniced ceilings, and walls covered with colourful tapestries and paintings of great men and women and scenes from stories – another strangeness to the members of our embassy, since the depiction of the world in any terms other than abstract ones is forbidden under Islam. Distracted from my purpose, I find myself drawn to an immense portrait, Italian Renaissance, vivid with colour. I am standing rapt beneath its ornate golden frame, taking in the glorious hues, the face of the Virgin translucently pale, gentle in repose, her blue eyes fixed adoringly on the child in her lap, and thinking of Alys and the child sleeping in my locked chamber upstairs, when a voice behind me says, ‘Beautiful, isn't it?'

Without thinking, my thought pours out, ‘She is so sad: she knows already she is destined to lose her son.'

‘Od's fish, sir: that's a distinctly gloomy interpretation of such a pretty scene.'

I turn to find a tall, saturnine man behind me regarding the painting with a lugubrious expression on his heavy face. He is well advanced into his middle years, but his hair is as black as night, his moustache too. Too dark to be an Englishman, I think: Spanish, perhaps, or Italian? He is dressed in a simple suit of burgundy cloth with a plain linen shirt beneath and is attended by two small red-and-white dogs and three young ladies garbed in a most becoming, if immodest, fashion, the swell of their round white breasts provocatively displayed.

Tearing my eyes away from this distraction, I return to the painting. ‘See the downward turn of her mouth,' I find myself saying. ‘And look at the angle of her eye, gazing away past the child into the distance. She's looking into the future and seeing his death.'

He laughs, a deep baritone, rich and warm. ‘You mean, unlike any usual new mother, who has eyes only for the babe in her arms and gives not a fig for the rest of the world, let alone her poor man?'

One of the women raps him lightly on the arm with her fan. ‘Oh, Rowley, I never turned you away once, and you know it.' She comes closer to look up at the portrait. ‘Don't she look sad? I never really looked close up before. Perhaps Mr Cross should have painted me as the Blessed Virgin, rather than as silly Cupid. My poor little Charlie, he was only twenty-seven when he passed on last year; even Christ got six more years than that.'

Scandalized, the other women tut and shush her, but all this seems to achieve is to goad her further, for she turns to me and peers at me lasciviously. ‘Od's fish, but you're a big 'un!' she declares, mimicking the man's deep tones. Her gaze is as sly as a cat's, and she is clearly not as young as I had first thought. ‘And as black as ink. Tell me, sir, are you that same colour all over?'

Her companions titter loudly and flutter their fans.

‘Now, then, Nelly,' the man chides her. ‘Leave the poor chap alone: he is here to spend a quiet, appreciative moment in the company of the sacred Madonna, not to be the butt of your profane and teasing ways.'

She drops a mocking curtsey. ‘Begging pardon, my lord.'

My lord? The man raises a sardonic eyebrow. His eyes – large and liquid and as dark as onyx – take me in from my white turban to my yellow Fassi slippers, and whatever he sees seems to amuse him mightily.

‘Forgive me, Lord … Rowley.' As I would in the Moroccan court when in the presence of one far more exalted than this slave, I prostrate myself with as much grace as I can muster, and at once one of the dogs comes and snuffles at me curiously, its bulbous brown eyes slick with light, its nose wet against my face. It has been eating something so pungently unpleasant that I am forced to hold my breath.

The women break out into peals of laughter now, and I wonder if it is because of the dog, or me, or some other unrelated thing.

‘Come away, Rufus!' the man calls, and the beast retreats. There follows a long, profound silence in which all I can hear is my own blood beating in my ears, then the sound of heels clacking away over a stone floor. I raise my head, just an inch, and turn enough to see the company walking away on the other side of the room. I push myself slowly up on to my knees and watch them disappear, chattering merrily. How rude, I think. But maybe I
have given offence in some way: it is true, as ben Hadou said, that we do not understand the customs of the court here.

Feeling rather cross, I go in search of food and resolve to keep to my room until I know better how to comport myself in this strange place.

The next day the embassy is to be formally introduced to the king at a reception at the Banqueting-house. Ben Hadou frets when informed that he cannot bring the lions and ostriches and other gifts with him; these may be presented at a private audience only, since today is a day of formal ceremony. And so, it seems, all his plans for a grand entrance are thwarted; again, he is thrown into a black humour and keeps us all waiting as he pays extra attention to his costume for the event, and certainly when he eventually makes his appearance – heralded by a fragrant cloud of frankincense – he does look most splendid, in a robe of rich crimson silk, embroidered in gold at sleeves and hem and neck, with a white woollen burnous thrown over the top, and a red turban wound around with pearls. At his side he wears his scimitar of damascened steel in a scabbard of leather and gold thread; on his feet kidskin babouches glittering with jewels. We have all done the best we can with our djellabas and whatever jewellery and perfumes we own, but he puts the rest of us to shame. Which, I am sure, knowing the Tinker's pride, is his intent.

Carriages arrive to deliver us there in style, but we have no sooner boarded them and travelled a short distance than they come to a halt and we are at our destination. As we arrive, I understand why it would have been impossible to walk the short distance up the King's Street from our palace apartments to the impressive, pillared façade of the Banqueting-house. Huge crowds have gathered, filling the wide thoroughfare to the Holbein Gate and beyond, all craning their necks and surging forward, curious to see the exotic foreigners from far Barbary, the monsters who have all these years been abducting their countrymen to use as slaves, who have had the temerity to bombard the Tangier colony and kill their soldiers by the hundreds. When the carriages draw up, the mob presses forward, threatening to overwhelm the scarlet-coated ceremonial guards with their gleaming halberds. The smell of the mob – which permeates even the Tinker's strong
frankincense – impresses itself on me almost as much as the imprecations they cry. Does no one wash in this city? The combination of the stench and the noise is overpowering, frightening.

‘Black bastards!' I hear, and ‘Heathen savages!'

‘Murderers!'

‘Rapists!'

‘Barbary devils!'

I turn to Hamza and shout over the tumult, ‘They are baying like hounds! I believe they would tear us to pieces if they were able. Do they really hate us so? And can you imagine Ismail standing for such behaviour?'

He grins wolfishly. ‘As well that Ismail does not rule here. The English cut the head off their last king – outside this very building.'

He pushes past me and I am left staring after him in shock, wondering what a sort of country we have come to that could enact such popular savagery. It must be a most unstable place indeed. And then I think of Ismail's own words: ‘My subjects are like rats in a basket, and if I do not keep shaking the basket they will gnaw their way through.'

Protected by the yeomen guards, we are led into a vast hall teeming with people dressed in flamboyant clothing: men in the main chamber, women leaning down over the galleried balconies to peer at us with no less curiosity, but rather more manners, than the populace outside. I had thought the Ambassadors' Hall at Meknes a grand venue, but this outdoes it a dozen times over. I gaze around at opulent tapestries adorning the walls; the dozens of tall, fluted pillars; the blaze thrown off by thousands of sconces and candles, the glitter of jewels on hands and ears and throats. The ceiling is divided into lozenges of riotous colour wherein some giant has painted vast scenes of heroic figures girded with flowing draperies, crowned kings and naked cherubs, all garlanded about with gilt flourishes and festoons. I look down again, feeling giddy, just as a hush falls across the chamber. The doors to either side of a great canopied dais now open, and out of them issue from one side a small, mousy woman whose teeth stick out at a most unfortunate angle and from the other a tall, magnificent gentleman. The man walks to the front of the dais and, taking the little woman by the hand, leads her to the two thrones set there, beneath a crimson canopy. She sits down in one
and he in the other, and I begin to feel a little sick, a little faint, as I take in those lugubrious dark features, the black hair and moustaches of the man I encountered the previous day. It cannot be, surely? The man I saw yesterday was most plainly dressed, rather than in this extraordinary effusion of silks and frills, and without doubt this kind-faced lady with the rabbit teeth was not amongst the women who were with him, chattering so gaily and flaunting their soft white bosoms. I stare and stare, but there can be no mistake. The man with whom I traded words yesterday as with an equal is the king of England himself. And there, by his side, the queen, his wife, once Infanta of Portugal, Catarina of Braganza, by whose dowry Tangier came to be in English hands.

I am torn out of my appalled reverie by the sudden appearance of a court official in front of me. ‘Who is the translator here?' he demands.

Hamza and I both claim the role at the same moment, then glare at one another. Ben Hadou raises his voice. ‘I am the ambassador: I speak good enough English.'

‘Excellent. Then you may inform your retinue that for the insult shown to Sir James Leslie in Morocco by your king, they are to divest themselves of their hats and footwear and approach the throne bare-headed and shoeless.' And with that terse instruction, he turns on his heel and marches back into the chamber.

I look at the bands of pearls threaded with such care through the crimson folds of ben Hadou's turban before my gaze drops to his darkening face. Suppressed fury emanates off him in waves as he unwinds his elaborate headwrap; when we are ushered through into the receiving chamber, he stalks all the way to the throne straight-backed and haughty, and neither bows nor makes any sort of reverence, which causes the English king to raise a thick black brow.

To be truthful, I can hardly remember what passes during the ceremony, so overcome am I not only by my horrible misstep of the day before, but also by a nagging terror that, having squandered the perfect opportunity to pass Alys's message into the sovereign's hands, I will probably never be afforded another chance. All I know is that during the Kaid Mohammed ben Hadou's extremely long peroration – greetings from His Majesty Sultan Abul Nasir
Moulay Ismail as-Samin ben Sharif, Emperor of Morocco and the ancient kingdoms of the Tafilalt, Fez, the Sus and Taroudant, to the exalted King of England; wishes for the extended good health of his body and his soul (including a detailed comparison by the sultan himself of those points in the Muslim religion and that of the Protestant English in which the two faiths share some correlation, thus making them superior to the beliefs of our shared enemy, the Catholics) … and on and on – King Charles's bored gaze slides past ben Hadou and connects with my own and I feel as if a small lightning bolt has passed right through my eye socket and is rooting me to the ground. His lips quirk, then one of those heavy lids droops in what might have been seen by others as no more than a twitch, but which looks remarkably to me like a wink.

Days pass in which we see neither skin nor hair of the English king, but only a succession of dull court officials, sent to take statements of intent regarding the matter of the Tangier garrison and its proposed rights and safeguards; then others to discuss the fate and possible redemption of certain named prisoners they claim are held by the sultan, none of whom either ben Hadou or I have encountered and are likely either to be dead or gone missing, or perhaps to have apostasized and adopted Muslim names.

When we do next see King Charles it will be at a private audience in his own state apartments. Is this to be my chance, I wonder? I tuck the embroidered scroll into the pocket of my robe in case a quiet moment presents itself. Ben Hadou preens anxiously in front of the mirror, concerned to make the best impression. He is a well-looking man, I will admit: fine-boned and fair of complexion (compared to me), with a good carriage and bright, intelligent eyes. He has trimmed his beard and moustache very close, the better to show his long jaw and full mouth; already I have noticed the ladies of the court paying attention to him, and I doubt not that he has noticed them too. This is his moment to present the gifts we have brought. These sundry items have been assembled in the vestibule below and are being brought up the long flights of stairs with great difficulty and, in the case of the livestock, with no little mess. The lions, at least, are safely left
outside in a garden for the monarch to peruse at his leisure, otherwise I suspect there might be carnage.

‘Private' turns out to mean a vast chamber stuffed with courtiers, including dozens of ladies crammed around the edges to watch the Moroccan contingent with avid eyes. First, we present the traditional gifts of spices, salt and sugar; the silks and brass sconces, perforated iron lanterns and hand-woven rugs from the Middle Atlas rendered up to the sultan as tribute by the Berber tribes. The king accepts all these with genuine gratitude and compliments the fine handiwork of the tribeswomen. I can see the Tinker's chest swelling with pride but I cannot help but feel a niggling worry. Other than the king's own little dogs, I have seen no animals wandering this elegant palace with its liveried servants, gilded chairs and expensive carpets …