The Sultan's Daughter (33 page)

‘Mon Général
. You know well that I would willingly go with you anywhere at any time. But should I collapse, I would only be a burden to you. During the past fourteen days I have had little sleep and in getting clear of the burning
L'Orient
my arm and side were bruised black and blue. One more day in the saddle and I fear I'd fall from it from sheer exhaustion.'

Bonaparte was already busy with some papers. He did not turn his head, but said, ‘I had temporarily forgotten what you have been through. Get to bed, then, and I'll see you on my return.'

Nearly overcome with relief, Roger thanked him and stumbled from the room. On leaving the headquarters he almost ran the short distance round to his little house. The door was standing open. Hurrying inside he noticed that, although the fountain was still playing in the small open court, the piles of cushions had been removed from the corners. Vaguely he wondered why. Running upstairs, he found the door of the principal bedroom also open. There was not a stick of furniture in it. Frantically, he yelled for Marbois. There came no reply. The house was empty, and Zanthé gone.

Scarcely able to believe his eyes, Roger stared about him. Empty of furniture, the room seemed larger than when he had last been in it. For an instant he thought that he might have entered the wrong house; but he had not. He recognised the intricate pattern of the lace-like woodwork of the enclosed balcony that protruded over the narrow street.

Swinging on his heel, he again yelled for Marbois, then for the Arab servants. The echo of his voice came back to him, but no other sound broke the stillness. Pounding down the stairs three at a time he rushed through to the kitchen quarters. There was no one there, the fire was out, the cooking pots had gone and the cupboards stood open. Only some decaying vegetables and a little spilled fat on a stone slab, both now black with flies, showed that the place had ever been occupied.

Still he could hardly credit that he was not suffering from an appalling nightmare. The mental pictures he had been conjuring up of his return to Zanthé were still so clear in his mind that it fought desperately against accepting the fact that he had lost her. After a few minutes he persuaded himself that she would not have fled from him deliberately, and that there must be some other explanation for her disappearance.

Although already subconsciously aware of it, the thought that Marbois had also disappeared suddenly became uppermost in his mind; and Marbois must know what had happened. Next moment Roger was out in the street and running hard in the direction of a Hamam in which his servant's Company had been quartered. On reaching it he controlled himself with an effort, broke into a swift walk and strode inside.

There, amid a splendour of Moorish arches, tiled walls
and bathing pools, some fifty soldiers were lounging, playing cards, polishing their equipment or simply dozing on straw-filled palliasses.

Marbois was among them. On seeing Roger enter, he stood up then, suddenly white-faced and apprehensive, came hesitantly towards him.

‘What are you doing here?' Roger demanded. ‘I ordered you to remain in the house until my return.'

‘I … I left it only because it was empty,
Monsieur le Colonel,'
stammered the young Provencal.

‘Empty!' cried Roger. ‘What the hell do you mean? Who emptied it? Explain yourself this instant!'

‘The people who owned the house,' replied the trembling Marbois. ‘They came back two days after you left Cairo. A father and three younger men that I took to be his sons. They talked for some time with the Arab servants, then went away. That night they came back with carts and carried all the furniture out to them. …'

‘And you let them?' Roger blazed: ‘You, a soldier of France, allowed these people to render my lodging uninhabitable and put you out into the gutter!'

‘Monsieur, I was one and they were many. They set on me and tied me up, then emptied the house and left me there. It was morning before I managed to free myself and report what had happened.'

‘To whom did you report?'

‘To the Commander of my Company, Captain Lestrange.'

‘Very well. Get back to the house. Beg, borrow or steal something for me to sleep on tonight and food for the morning.' Abruptly, Roger turned on his heel and, followed by the amused glances of a score of soldiers who had listened in silence to his outburst, stalked from the baths.

It took him an hour to run Lestrange to earth and when he did he received scant satisfaction. The Captain agreed that an assault on a French soldier was punishable by death, but pointed out that justice could not be done on the culprits when their identity was unknown.

Roger angrily demanded why he had neglected to find out the name of the owner of the house and have him searched for. Lestrange excused himself by saying that it was not as
though Marbois had been murdered; he had many other duties to attend to, and surely now that Roger had returned to Cairo he could easily find himself another comfortable lodging.

Roger did not care a fig about having been left with an empty house. It was the loss of Zanthé that was driving him almost berserk. But nothing could be gained by telling the Captain about her, and what had occurred was already clear to him. Like hundreds of other well-to-do citizens of Cairo, the owner of the house had fled owing to the riots that had followed the Battle of the Pyramids. Some days later, learning that Bonaparte had restored order in the city, he had returned to resume possession. Finding that it had been taken over by a French officer, and realising that he had no hope of turning him out, he had decided to make sure that he was at least not robbed of his belongings. So he had removed everything and had taken Zanthé with him.

Hurrying back to the house Roger questioned the people who lived on either side of it. At first they denied all knowledge of their neighbour, but eventually admitted that his name was Hassan ben-Jussif and that he was a dealer in precious stones. However, neither threats nor offers of money would induce them to give any information about his relatives, or suggest where he had gone.

By then it was dusk, but Roger would not yet give up. He spent another hour and a half seeking out the Provost Marshal. Having described what had taken place, he asked that an intensive search be set on foot for both Hassan ben-Jussif and Zanthé. But he had been able to secure only a very vague description of the former, and when he attempted to give a word picture of Zanthé that would make her identifiable he found it far from easy.

To his intense annoyance he now realised that he had not troubled to ask her full name or that of her dead husband. He could only say that she was about seventeen, of medium height, dark-haired but fair-skinned, had a well-developed figure and a beautiful face, with tawny eyes, eyebrows that turned up at the ends, a full mouth and gleaming white teeth.

The Provost Marshal shook his head and said, ‘I'll do what I can, my dear fellow, but I cannot hold out much hope
of tracing these people. Cairo has a population of near half a million and there are a thousand streets and alleys in it. As ten days have elapsed since this occurrence, any trail they may have left has gone cold by now. There are hundreds of places in which this man ben-Jussif might remain concealed for months without my police obtaining word of him. As for the girl, she will have been put in some harem or other and is unlikely to emerge again. Besides, the fact that you bought her from some soldiers for a hundred louis gives you not a jot of title to her under Mohammedan law. And you must know the orders that the General-in-Chief has given. He is so anxious to woo these people that it has been made a crime to molest them in any way. He allowed the troops a limited licence for those first few nights in Cairo, but now my instructions are that even the street women must be treated with reasonable decency.'

With this cold comfort, and now ready to drop with fatigue, Roger once more returned to the house. Marbois had, meanwhile, made him up a shake-down in the big bedroom. Gazing round its echoing emptiness with lack-lustre eyes, he thought bitterly of the scene that during the past few days he had so consistently envisaged as taking place there; then he threw off his clothes and, almost crying with distress, fell asleep.

Next morning he gave Marbois money to buy new pots and pans and told him to engage a houseman and a cook. Then he went out himself and bought divans, cushions, hand-woven rugs and other items, sufficient to furnish about one-third of the house, which was all he intended to occupy. Having completed his purchases he went to headquarters and sought out Bourrienne, in order to learn from him what had been taking place recently in Cairo.

Industrious as the
Chef de Cabinet
was by nature, his master's departure from Cairo had eased the pressure of business; so he was pleased to see and talk with his one-time assistant. He said that during the fortnight that the General-in-Chief had spent in the Egyptian capital he had displayed more than ever his extraordinary ability to tackle scores of problems with sound judgment and despatch.

General Bon, with his Division, had been permanently installed
in the great Citadel outside the city, to overawe such groups of malcontents as remained in it, and, as a warning to possible trouble-makers, Bonaparte still had the heads of half a dozen men who were guilty of small offences cut off publicly in the streets every evening. On the other hand, he had been greatly impressed with the bravery of the Mamelukes, so was now forming those taken prisoner into Companies, to be incorporated into the French Army, and as a mark of his confidence in them he had taken two, Roustan and Ibrahim, into his personal service.

Without waiting a day he had appointed nine prominent Sheiks to form a Divan, invested with authority to keep order in the city. Two days later he established four similar Divans in the provinces of Alexandria, Rosetta, Ghizeh and Kelyoub. Thus he gave the inhabitants the illusion that they were to be governed by men of their own race, while in reality he kept local control himself and vested it in the provinces in Kléber, Menou, Belliard and Murat. He had also appointed Intendants, to collect for him all taxes formerly paid to the Mamelukes, had done much by a series of proclamations to get the wheels of commerce turning normally again and had given an order that wherever the victorious Tricolour of France was flown, the Crescent of Islam should be hoisted to fly beside it.

He had, too, lost no time in informing the Directory of his immediate needs to convert Egypt into a pleasant and thriving French colony, and Bourrienne showed Roger a copy of the list he had sent. It read: a company of actors, a company of dancers, four marionette shows, a hundred Frenchwomen, the wives of all the married men in the Army, twenty surgeons, thirty apothecaries, ten physicians, some founders, some distillers and dealers in liquor, fifty gardeners and their families and seeds of every kind of vegetable, a hundred thousand litres of brandy, thirty thousand ells of blue and scarlet cloth and a supply of soap and oil.

Roger thought the priorities somewhat strange but, as he handed the list back, his only comment was, ‘I fear it will be a long time now before we see either the marionettes or the whores.'

Bourrienne gave a wry smile. ‘Yes. This, of course, was
sent off before we heard about the destruction of our Fleet. That is a terrible blow to us. When I received the despatch our little man was out in the desert, and I sent it on to him. Temporarily, I think, he was quite shattered, but he has remarkable resilience. In no time, he was going about saying such things as, “This is the moment when characters of a superior order assert themselves. The English have compelled us to do greater things than we expected” and “We must now die in this country or come out of it as great as the Ancients”.'

‘The last sums up our situation in a nut-shell,' remarked Roger gloomily.

‘But think of the countries we shall see, if we survive. Having secured our rear by conquering Syria, we shall descend the Red Sea, invade and subdue India, turn northwest through Persia, overrun Turkey and arrive home by way of a crushed Austro-Hungary.'

‘Heavens above! Can you mean this?'

‘Not seriously,' Bourrienne smiled, ‘but at times that is the way our master talks. Personally, I think the duration of our ordeals in the East depends upon events in France. Although he fancies himself in the role of another Alexander, it is upon France that his eyes are really fixed. By leaving the stage there he has given the Directors enough rope to hang themselves, and as soon as they are ripe to swing he will somehow manage to return.'

‘What! And leave us in some damned jungle to be eaten by cannibals?'

Bourrienne laughed. ‘I don't think he would leave me, but he would have to leave a lot of other people and, perhaps, you would be among them.'

‘Enough!' Roger cried, standing up. ‘I've ample to depress me without listening to prognostications of so black a future.' And, leaving his friend, he went back to his lodging to superintend the installation of the new furniture he had bought.

During Bonaparte's absence the gallant Desaix had been left in command in Cairo. Roger, in an attempt to take his mind off the loss of Xanthé, attached himself temporarily to him. As Desaix had his own aides-de-camp, Rapp and Savary, Roger was given no special tasks, but he attended the General on an interesting inspection of the Citadel. There
was a magnificent collection of armour in it, taken from the Crusaders. Some of the helmets hung outside one of the great interior gates of the fortress and, although they had been there for six hundred years, owing to the dry climate of Egypt they showed little sign of deterioration.

He also rode out with Desaix and some hundred others to the Pyramids. There they marvelled at those vast monuments formed from great blocks of stone, so perfectly aligned that one could not put even the blade of a dagger between them. With a dozen or so of the younger officers, Savary and Roger climbed to the top of the Great Pyramid. It was a most exhausting exploit; but when they reached the summit they found that the apex of marble casing had been torn away, so there was plenty of room to sit down and enjoy the stupendous view.