The Tenth Gift (32 page)

The next night they slipped past Salé in the dark and ran some way up the coast till all the lights of human habitation were passed. Then the ship dropped anchor and Marshall came and shook Rob awake in his berth. “Rub this on your face, wrap your great, pale head in this turban cloth, and keep your sword in its scabbard,” he advised, passing Rob a pot of some acrid-smelling stuff. “We need no glint of light betraying us. The area we go into is alive with desperadoes. Take only the barest essentials in a pack you can carry on your back. We will move fast and light.”

And with that he was gone, leaving Rob to do as he was told, his stomach tight. The ash-paste felt gritty as he rubbed it into his skin, and the length of turban cloth was stubbornly uncooperative in his clumsy hands, but at last he made his way up onto the deck. The first mate and another hand awaited them there and accompanied them in the skiff they lowered, rowing as hard as they could toward a long line of surf running onto a flat black shore; Rob could sense their fear at sculling in toward a land full of devils.

Marshall’s teeth were white in the moonlight as he grimaced at Rob. “Putting in is always the worst thing. I hate to get wet.”

The keel crunched on pebbles then and they were out and running, the water shockingly cold as it penetrated every layer of clothing. Glancing over his shoulder a moment later, Rob saw that the sailors had already turned the skiff hard about and were pulling swiftly away toward the black outline of the ship. There was no going
back now. He looked toward the shore of Morocco, a fabled land he had heard of only in the drunken tales of broken-down old sailors in the Penzance inns, who spat and cursed and talked of pirates and heathens.

Marshall was a good distance ahead now, plowing through the rolling breakers with his head down, his breath soughing as loudly as a pole-axed bull’s. Rob plowed after him through the white water, blundering from thigh-deep to knee-deep until it turned to harmless rills that barely covered his boots, and then he was on dry land and crunching up the pebble beach behind Marshall, every step a loud advertisement to any murderous fiend who might be waiting for them, just out of sight, among the rocks or distant trees.

A long bar of stones gave way suddenly again to water. “God’s body!” Marshall swore. “They’ve put us down on the wrong bloody side of the river! This wretched coastline all looks the same from the sea, not that any of those want-wits could read a chart if they tried. Now we’re as like to bloody drown inland as if they’d thrown us overboard.”

The lagoon, however, was shallow; they waded across without further mishap. On the other side it gave way to marsh and reed-beds where a chorus of outraged frogs and a pair of disturbed plovers broke the night silence with a lively racket. Now the Londoner was apoplectic. “That’s right,” he growled, “tell everyone we’re here. Christ’s blood, I hate these natural places! Fill ’em up with sand and brick ’em over, I say. What use is God’s good land if a man can’t even walk upon it without filling his damn boots and having a legion of foul, inedible beasts complain of his presence?”

Rob had spent much of his childhood exploring the reed-beds and marshes just outside Market-Jew. He knew there were worse environments—the back alleys of Westminster, for one. He availed himself of a stave of driftwood, and prodding ahead with this makeshift staff, he led them through the marsh onto ground that alternated between stinking algae-filled pools with spongy stands of
vegetation and reed thickets. Some while later a small, sharp pain announced itself in his calf; minutes later another on the back of his thigh. He knew at once their cause: leeches. He thought longingly of the flint he had so carefully stowed in his pack. They would have to be burned off, but not here in the open. After that with every step he imagined a plague of them fastening their little jaws in his flesh.

For an hour or more they toiled through this hellish landscape, and then stomped across a dreary salt-flat, which finally gave way to rock and scrub and a steep incline just as the first rays of dawn lanced red as a burst boil over the sea.

“God’s bollocks!” Marshall swore. “We’d better be in the shelter of those trees before sunup or we’re sitting ducks. Marmora Forest is swarming with outcasts and escaped slaves who’d slit your throat as soon as look at you.”

Uphill they staggered, thighs and calves protesting at this rough treatment after weeks of doing very little on the rolling sea. Rob could feel how his muscles had wasted from lack of nutriment and use in the few short weeks of the passage. Marshall began to pull away from him, and so Rob shut his mind to his pain, to the pack heavy on his back and the unaccustomed sword banging the backs of his legs, and struggled after him, for if he lost Marshall, every chance of life—let alone success—was gone. Soon he found a child’s verse going around and around in his head, until his feet were pounding the rocks and scrub to its rhythms:

Its grim rhymes drove him up the rise. It was only much later, sitting with his back to a tree as Marshall scanned the oilcloth paper of his rudimentary map, after he had removed his leeches (seven: for
luck) and his boots (emptied of water, weed, and one crushed frog), that he realized whence the verse had come: a sampler Cat had sewn as a girl, reveling in its macabre tone. It now hung in the dark corridor outside her door in the servants’ quarters at Kenegie. How many times had he stood there, gazing blindly at its childish stitching, as he gathered his thoughts before knocking at that door? The scene was so painfully clear in his head that he almost wept.

“Might I ask what our business is with these people?” he asked Marshall at last.

“No,” the other said shortly. “The details of that matter lie between the company and our trading partners and have nothing to do with you.”

“Am I not now a part of that company, given that my task is to guard you and the papers you carry?”

“You are neither one thing nor another, lad. Quite why John thought I needed a lumpen oaf as a bodyguard, I cannot for the life of me imagine. As far as I am concerned, you are here on sufferance, and if you keep on asking me damn fool questions, I will skewer you myself and save the brigands the trouble.”

Rob sat there, watching his boots steam as the sun hit them. At last he could bear it no longer. “Then perhaps I might ask just one more question: How will we leave Sallee, if we ever arrive in one piece?”

Marshall sighed. “In five days
The Rose
will be off Sallee awaiting my sign. Once they receive it, they’ll sail in as close as they may to take us off.”

And Rob had to be satisfied with this very little piece of information. At last Marshall folded the map away in his sack and told him to get his boots on.

“We’ll have to move quietly through this wretched forest—no talking. And watch your feet. There are trips and holes and spikes and all manner of traps for the unwary. Unsavory folk inhabit this region. Some live here, some take refuge here, and some, like us, are just
passing through. But they all have a reason for hiding themselves here, and that reason has generally a criminal root: There’s no law in the forest, except the law of survival.”

“It seems to me,” Rob said, taking this in, “that we’d still have been better off sailing into the port under full sail and with our guns at the ready, factions or no factions.”

“You are an extremely naive young man, Robert Bolitho. I will spell it out for you. We could not be seen to enter the pirates’ nest for a variety of reasons, but the most important reason of all is that if anyone carries word back to England of our dealings—and there are many in that place who come and go as they please and have a host of connections all across Europe—we are all likely to hang. Is that reason enough for you?”

Rob stared at him. “My God,” he said at last. “What have I stepped into here?”

“As I have said before, you should have left well alone and stayed at home.”

“Well, I am here now and damned,” Rob said grimly.

“I
WONDER WHO HE WROTE THIS FOR
,” I
SAID AT LAST, FOLD
ing the paper and putting it aside among the debris of our breakfast things. We were sitting out on the roof terrace at a rickety old table Idriss had set up there, a huge faded parasol stuck into a concrete block keeping the worst of the midmorning rays off my pale English skin.

“It’s not a journal?”

“It looks more like part of a letter. See how the photocopy shows the ragged edges all the way around? There’s no sign of a gutter, or any deformation of the words, as there would be if Michael had photocopied a book. Strange. It’s on a different sort of paper than the other one, too, the letter to Sir Arthur Harris, and the writing looks different, too, smaller and neater.”

“Maybe he wrote the letter to his employer in a hurry.”

“Or as a young man …” I bit my lip. “So you think Robert Bolitho really came all the way to Morocco to save Catherine from slavery?”

“It was certainly his intention, and he must have succeeded, or the book would never have made it back to England.”

I sighed. “It’s a very romantic story. Perhaps it was a fairy tale, after all.”

Idriss made a face. “If he succeeded, though, I do not know why he thinks he is damned. Perhaps he married her and she turned out to be a bad wife who made him unhappy. Perhaps she was unfaithful, or cruel, or ran away. There is more to the story than we yet know.”

“Mmm,” I replied noncommittally, unwilling to confront the implications of this.

Catherine’s journal had come to a sudden end in a rather unsatisfactory manner amid a welter of domestic detail. I read that “everie daie the women of the kasba come to the howse to sitte with mee & sew. Wee worke in silkes of everie color known to Man. I have never seene such glorious hues except in the flowers of Lady Harrys garden at Kenegy.” She explained how “Hasna has taut mee the makyng of the dish they calle the decorated face,” whatever that might be. I read of a robe she had sewn and how she had prepared her own kohl from a substance bought in the souq, which she spelled “sook”; how she was learning a few words of their language. All this was fascinating information in terms of a historical document, but to me, I am ashamed to admit, it was deeply frustrating. She sounded, I thought, picking through this minutiae, which was peppered with words I did not recognize, rather to be enjoying her time as a Salé slave, if that was indeed what she was, for teaching embroidery in a rather grand-sounding house with no more-onerous duties to perform certainly did not fit my picture of the life I would have foreseen for a woman in her situation. Most annoying of all, it did not relate what had happened when Rob miraculously appeared to whisk her back to Cornwall.

“It seems to me,” Idriss pressed, “that your Michael holds the other part of this puzzle.”

It seemed that way to me, too, and the idea made me feel deeply uncomfortable. The photocopies had been bait: He wanted the book and he was using Rob’s letters to lure me to him. I did not want to give him the book, but I did desperately want to know the other side to the story. Even so, I was not yet prepared to face Michael.

Instead, I asked, “What time do we meet your friend Khaled?”

“He will meet us at two at a café near the station.”

I looked at my watch. It was just coming up to eleven-thirty. “And what shall we do till then?”

“Let me show you the souqs Catherine would have visited, and where I grew up.”

I
PUT ON
over my jeans the dark blue djellaba he had brought me the evening before, but the white head scarf foxed me completely: I simply had too much hair for it to contain. I tried to wear it down my back inside the robe, but whatever I did with my hair, the cloth kept slipping off my head. Eventually I ended up with it screwed up into a knot, and with my hair all over the place.

“Damn!” I grumbled furiously, and turned suddenly to find a stranger in a gray robe and a blue turban leaning up against the door-jamb, watching me silently. It took me a good three seconds to realize that this exotic creature was in fact Idriss.

“Here,” he said, taking the scarf from me. “Let me. With several sisters I have had some practice.”

His fingers brushed my neck and I couldn’t tell whether or not it was accidental; then the soft cotton followed, and moments later the fabric had been wound neatly around my head, and I was wearing the veil.

Thus disguised, we went out into the world.

The medina was bustling with traffic—a bizarre mix of human, animal, and machine. Just as you thought you had entered a pedestrian area, a man on a scooter would come roaring around the corner, hand pressed exigently to his horn, and everyone would flatten themselves against the narrow walls. Quite how the donkeys coped with such indignities, I had no idea, but they seemed philosophical about it, standing patiently in their traces or tethered to their posts while ever greater burdens were added to their carts or backs.

The Moroccans in the souq did not appear to share this pacific philosophy. We passed one woman screeching in fury at a man who had just cut a length of pale blue cotton from a bolt of fabric. It looked as if she might set upon him with the bale, for her hands were flailing everywhere and he was ducking away from her as if from a physical assault. Idriss caught me staring. “A disagreement about the price,” he chuckled. “A classic ploy, to complain about it only when the cloth has been cut and then blame the merchant. My aunt used to do it all the time. Then she’d walk off in a fury, leaving the poor man with his head in his hands, only to return a few minutes later and graciously offer him half the price for it.”

“And he’d let her take it?” I was appalled.

“Of course. He’d already quoted her twice the price he expected to get for it, so they parted satisfied.”

I shook my head. It seemed a very stressful way of doing business, but it summed up something about the national character, for Morocco seemed to be all about social interaction in a way that England was largely about avoiding it. No one was self-conscious about showing their feelings here. I saw men kissing each other in greeting and walking together hand in hand. “They are good friends,” Idriss explained, “and not in the euphemistic way Europeans use that phrase. Here friendship is to be prized, and when people ask how you are, they really want to know, not just hear a stock phrase which keeps them at bay.”

I smiled. “So, how are you today, Idriss el-Kharkouri?”

He stopped still there in the street and turned to look at me. “Before you ask me a question like that, Julia Lovat, you had better be sure you want to hear the answer.”

Color flooded my cheeks. I could not help myself: I looked away.

For a while after that, we walked in near silence through the medina, passing stall after stall of produce and kitchen goods, patisseries and café s. We turned a corner and came upon an old man with his wares spread out on a black sheet in front of him. A crowd of men
had gathered to listen to his patter, their faces rapt. I craned for a better view and one of the men turned, saw me, and glared. Several of his companions followed suit until Idriss drew me away.

“Why did they stare at me like that? They seemed so hostile.”

“They didn’t want a woman penetrating their male mysteries.”

“What was he selling?” I demanded angrily. “I want to know.”

“Impotency cures, aphrodisiacs, substances for prolonging … the experience.” He laughed.
“La merde de la baleine.”

“What?”

“Whale shit. Whales are reputed to have enormous … parts. It’s sympathetic magic.”

“But how on
earth
would you gather whale shit—Oh, I see. He’s a con artist.”

“It’s probably some harmless clay. Anyway, he seemed to be doing a good trade. Good luck to him.
Al hamdulillah”

“Out in the open, in public, too. I thought sex was a taboo subject.”

“You do have some odd ideas. The Qu’ran says it is important for a man to satisfy his wife.”

“It does? What an excellent religion.”

After that, we walked in greater ease, with Idriss pointing out unusual items to me—silver hands of Fatima to ward off the evil eye, rosewater sprinklers, musk, and ambergris. At one stall he bought me a small dark blue lump of rock, with an odd metallic sheen to it, which the old woman wrapped carefully in a piece of torn newspaper. “It’s kohl,” he explained. “The same as Catherine would have bought here. My sister can show you how to use it.”

He showed me the colorful pottery made at Safi, farther down the coast, and exchanged greetings with the ancient, toothless merchant. As we walked away he told me, “Every Saturday I came here first thing in the morning before he set up his stall and he let me unwrap the plates.”

“You loved the pottery so much?”

He grinned. “No. Some of them came wrapped in sheets torn out of old comic books—
bandes dessiné es
—which my father wouldn’t let me have at home. He was a very strict man, my father. Only the Qu’ran was considered suitable reading material for a boy of six. He certainly wouldn’t have approved of the decadent adventures of Rodeo Rick or Pif or Asterix and Obelix. I used to sit at the back of the stall, lost in all these marvelous fragments of story, while my brothers chanted out their verses at home.”

On the Rue des Consuls we found the ubiquitous carpet sellers, their Aladdin’s caves hung with fabulous lanterns and gorgeous color. I watched one of the merchants flourishing rugs at a pair of tourists who had foolishly stopped to admire the display and were now helplessly trapped. No one had tried to sell me anything, which at first I thought was due to the forbidding presence of Idriss but soon realized was because of the robe and hijab I wore, so that I moved camouflaged and untargeted through the bazaar. Feeling smug, I watched the two Europeans—she in her expensively cut dress and Prada sandals; he, slightly paunchy in chinos and blue seersucker shirt—wriggle like hooked fish under the carpet seller’s assiduous attentions. Now another man had joined in, flinging carpets dramatically to the floor in front of them. At least a dozen carpets had thus been unfurled: How could they possibly refuse to buy after such a display? One of the carpets came down on top of the woman’s foot and I saw her jump back and steady herself on her husband’s arm, her face turned up to him in an expression of dismay.

It was Anna.

Or rather it wasn’t. It was Anna
and
Michael, joined together like some symbiotic, two-headed creature, rearing away from attack. Michael had his arm around her, possessive and protective, although he looked just as powerless as she did to ward off the relentless sales pitch.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe. Then, instinctively, I caught Idriss’s arm, my fingers closing on his hard biceps. “Quickly, we have to go quickly!”

I turned and dragged him away past the wrought-iron sellers and the goatskin lamp stalls until we were out of the medina by the side of the ring road with traffic roaring past.

“What’s the matter with you?”

I must have looked as if I was about to faint, for he took me by the elbow and ushered me along the road and into an open doorway that seemed to lead to an unattended reception area for a tiny hotel. Idriss marched to the door at the back, opened it, and shouted a name. Seconds later a young man in jeans and a Manchester United shirt appeared and the pair embraced.

“This is one of my other brothers, Sadiq.” Idriss grinned. “And this is Julia Lovat. She needs tea, plenty of sugar—see what you can do.”

Sadiq gazed at me, awestruck, said something unintelligible to Idriss, and promptly disappeared.

“He says you have eyes like Lady Diana,” Idriss told me, steering me around the corner to a dimly lit area of sofas and low tables.

I snorted. “How ridiculous. He just means they’re blue.”

He regarded me solemnly for a moment. “No,” he said. “It’s your Englishness. It is very … exotic.”

Exotic.
That was how I thought of him. It was disorienting to realize that the converse might be true. “Such shameless flattery.” I wagged a finger at him. “You should be selling snake oil and whale shit alongside that old charlatan in the bazaar.”

His eyes gleamed. “Another string to my bow.”

Sadiq came and went with a tray of tea things. I watched Idriss pour out the golden liquid from a deliberately showy height so that it crashed into the little glass like a miniature waterfall, and drank it down without complaining about the diabetes-inducing quantity of sugar it contained.

“Now, tell me why you ran away.” I must have looked as uncomfortable as I felt, for he paused and his eyes narrowed. “Oh, I am an idiot. Of course—you saw Michael.”

I bent my head. “Yes.”

He frowned. “But I was keeping watch for him—I cannot believe I missed him.”

“He was in one of the carpet sellers’ booths.”

“There was someone, a couple … the woman was small, dark, very chic.”

“That was Anna. His wife.” I watched my hands, held loosely in my lap, begin to tremble, and told myself the sugar must be taking its effect.

Idriss reached across the table and tilted my chin up. “Julia, I think you had better tell me your story—all of it. It strikes me that there is a lot more to it than just the possession of an antique book.”

And so, staring fixedly at the tabletop, I let it all spill out: my friendship with Anna, my furtive relationship with her husband, my terrors of being discovered, my fear that he would leave me, the way it had shaped the last seven years of my life—a long catalog of betrayal and moral cowardice. Not once did I raise my head to look him in the eye—I could not—for to make things worse came the sudden realization that it mattered desperately what Idriss thought of me. How and when had that happened? And this first realization was immediately followed by the sickening certainty that by telling him, he would surely henceforth regard me with disgust.

When at last I had finished spewing out my confession, silence fell between us like a thick glass screen. When an eternity of several seconds had elapsed, I risked a glance upward, but he was not looking at me. His gaze, cool and distant, was fixed on the colored glass of the window behind me, as if he wished himself out in the hot, clean sea air beyond, rather than here in the stifling gloom with a woman who had betrayed everyone of importance in her life, and in the process had lost everything, including her self-respect. What must he think of me, this man whose life was so simple and straightforward, who had sacrificed his own selfish wants—those things that any man in my own country would have regarded as his basic rights: a career, a salary to do with as he pleased, a wife and children—in order to support his widowed mother and his younger siblings? He had so little
by the standards of the culture that had raised me, but in all the ways that mattered, he had so much.