Crossed Bones (35 page)

‘You did this?’

‘You needn’t sound so surprised.’

He smiled. ‘It’s just… well, I thought women like you were too busy, too modern, to spend time on such things. It’s the sort of thing my grandmother might embroider. You must show her when she comes back from her visit. She loves the feathers of this bird, the
paon
; she has some in a vase in her room.’

‘The peacock?’

‘Peacock, yes. Jeddah will be here tomorrow evening, or maybe the next day: Rachid is driving to fetch her.’

I frowned. ‘I’m not sure I’ll still be here then. If we can see your expert tomorrow and get his view on the book so that I know what I’m dealing with, I’ll probably take the train back to Casablanca immediately after and fly home the next day.’

An unreadable expression crossed his face. Then he said, ‘Wait here.’

He returned a short time later with something draped over his arm.

‘I thought tomorrow you might like to wear this, in case we pass your… Michael? in the street.’

It was a djellaba of midnight-blue, very plain, but of good-quality cotton, though the embroidered cuffs and hems were machine-stitched and unremarkable in style. With it came a length of white cotton to use as a hijab.

I laughed. ‘I’ll look like a nun if I wear that.’

He frowned. ‘A nun?’

‘Like a monk,
a frère
but a woman… a
sœur
?’

Now it was Idriss’s turn to laugh. ‘I do not think you could look like a
sœur
if you tried. Not with eyes like yours.’

I didn’t know what to say to this, so I said nothing. Seeing that he had embarrassed me, Idriss bowed his head. ‘I must go now and see my brother before he retires: there is something I would like my grandmother to bring with her from the mountains. I wish you good night, Julia.
Timinciwin
.
Ollah
.’ He covered his face with his hands, kissed the palms, then drew them down to his heart. ‘Sleep well.’ And he was gone.

I opened the shutters and sat on the little prayer mat to watch the moon sail over the rooftops of the medina. How long I sat there I do not know. The muezzin rang out, and the stars wheeled, and I thought about Michael and how life had brought us to such a strange pass that he should have pursued me across continents to take back the gift that symbolized the end of our liaison. After a time it occurred to me that I could not picture him any more. I could imagine his eyes, his mouth, the shape of his skull, but I couldn’t imagine them all together, couldn’t see his whole face, or a single expression. Just who was it I had been having a relationship with all this time? The harder I tried to think of Michael, the more he eluded me; and after a while I began to believe that this in itself was significant, that I had spent the last seven years living inside my own fantasies, acting out a role with a man who came and went only when it suited him.

With all this playing through my head, I went to bed. It felt odd to be lying in a single bed for the first time since I was a teenager, odd but somehow comforting to be so constrained. Even so, I tossed and turned, my sleep interrupted by fragments of imagery from a day spent walking around Rabat and Salé, filled with veiled and hooded figures who chased me through narrow streets where I became lost in a maze of alleyways, or trapped in dead ends past doors that wouldn’t open.

In the middle of the night I suddenly became convinced that someone had followed me all the way to Idriss’s home, that they had come into the house and entered the very bedroom in which I slept. I sat up, sweat running between my breasts and my pulse racing. There was no one there. Of course there wasn’t. I lay back down with my heart hammering and willed myself to relax, but, try as I might, sleep would not come.

At last I swung my legs out of bed, padded across the room and lit the candle. The sky showing through the slats of the shutter was a deep, rich black: dawn was still a long way off. I decided that I would read some more of Catherine’s journal, and perhaps that would help me sleep again. I positioned the candle on the bedside table so that it would provide a pool of light in which I might hold the book, then pulled my bag towards me and reached inside. My fingers felt blindly around among the contents: wallet, passport, mobile phone, hairbrush, make-up bag, tissues, chewing gum. In the second compartment I found only my embroidery, a notebook and pen.

But of
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
there was no trace.

I went cold all over. My immediate thought was that my dream had been no dream. But that was surely crazy. I got out, smoothing the blanket in case I had suffered a failure of memory and left it on the bed before falling asleep. Of course, it wasn’t there. Neither was it on the floor, the chair or the bookcase. Given the sparsity of the room, there really was nowhere else to look, and I was left with no explanation other than that someone – Michael? – had indeed come into this room and stolen it while I slept.

I threw the djellaba over the T-shirt and knickers in which I had slept and made my way downstairs through the still, dark house. Anger carried me down two flights of stairs; but by the time I reached the third it was giving way to uncertainty. As I reached the ground floor, something made my heart skip a beat. Flickering light danced across the tiled corridor and threw sinister shadows against the wall, making me think, unwillingly, of the tales of the djinn I had come upon in the
Arabian Nights
, spirits formed of subtle fire, bent on torment and destruction, or leading astray the unwary and the foolish. I took a deep breath, pushed down my superstitious fears and approached the source of the light.

It came from the open door of the salon, wherein a single candle burned, casting a golden circle over the head of a figure hunched over a book. My book: Catherine’s book.

As preternaturally aware as a drowsing cat, Idriss turned just as I stepped over the threshold. We both spoke at once.

‘What are you – ’

‘I am sorry – ’

We stopped and gazed at one another, each mirroring the other’s dismay. Idriss beckoned me in. ‘Come, sit with me, and listen to this.’ And he showed me the page he read from.

They covered her in a dark robe from head to foot and took her by mule from the marketplace through the streets of Old Salé. With only her eyes exposed, none could look upon her; she moved through the crowds, an anonymous woman on a starved mule led by a silent man. The silent man had a hard, fierce face and a bald head which gleamed with sweat in the sullen afternoon light. His hands were burned almost black by the sun, and he wore a dirty white robe tucked up between his legs and looped over his belt. When she asked him who had bought her and where they were going, he did not so much as turn his head. Had it not been for the chafing of the mule’s sharp bones against her own, she would have felt as insubstantial as a ghost.

She looked to left and right, but what was the sense in seeking an escape? There was nowhere to run to, no one to help her. The thought of being sold into the hands of some stranger was terrible to her, but what was the alternative? To run through a strange city, only to be captured by a vengeful mob whose language she could neither speak nor understand? Or to throw herself off the city walls into the sea? She shivered. She had no wish to die yet.

They left the medina and came at last to the wide river’s bank, where a boat waited, the oarsman leaning on his pole, silhouetted against the sombre waters of the Father of Reflection. As Cat stepped into the boat, she thought of the tales Lady Harris had told her of Charon, who ferried the souls of the ancient dead across the black river into Hades, a passage marking the relinquishing of their old life and the beginning of a new, grim existence. All she lacked was the coin in her mouth, Cat thought; that, and the loss of her memories. As the ferryman poled the boat away from the bank of Slâ el-Bali, Cat gazed into the water that spooled away behind them and thought of her old life at Kenegie, with its easy duties among people whom she might not always have liked but largely understood. She thought of the easy green and gold landscape of Cornwall, the grass and trees and gorse, the soft rain and hazy sunshine. She thought about her lost family: her dead father, her dead nephews, her mother stripped grey and naked. Turning her thoughts sharply from that painful image, she thought instead of her cousin Robert Bolitho, whose heart she had spurned, and wondered if she could ever have reconciled herself to the little life he had promised her. It was, she thought bitterly, a question she need never ask herself now, for that was her old life, and ahead lay another, which was the way of things. Better be like the dead and accept one’s crossing over and not torture oneself with a future that could never be. Cat set her jaw and turned to watch the walls of Slâ el-Djedid looming before her.

On the water’s edge waited another man holding the reins of another beast; but these two were quite different from the pair she had left on the river bank of Old Salé. This man was tall and garbed in a long red robe trimmed with gold; a scarlet turban covered his head and most of his face. From a gilded bandolier across his body hung a jewelled dagger, and silver bracelets clattered on his wrist as he raised his hand to greet the ferryman. Beside him stood a tall horse, its head small-boned, its legs long and delicate: a pure-bred horse that would show a clean pair of hooves to the hunters in Kenegie’s stable. Its crimson saddle cloth was worked with gold, as were the bright tassels of its harness. If this man and horse belonged to her buyer, Cat reflected, he must be a man of great wealth, and one who wished that others knew it.

As the ferryman drew the boat up on to the shore, the horse stamped and tossed its head, but the turbaned man laid a hand on its muzzle, and it quieted. He stepped forward and pressed a coin into the boatman’s waiting hand.

Ah
, thought Cat humourlessly;
there it is
:
the payment for my soul
.

Then the man turned to her, picked her up as if she were no heavier than a child and set her on the horse’s back. As wordless as his counterpart on the other side of the river, he led her through the streets of New Salé, beneath a great arched gate and into the Kasbah Andalus.

They made their way through a maze of narrow streets which wound up a steep hill, and the sound of the horse’s hooves rang on the stone and echoed off the walls on either side until it sounded as if a small army were ascending. At last they arrived at a long blank wall broken only by a tall wooden door. Here the man came to a halt and, without knocking or otherwise announcing his presence, pushed open the door and led the horse inside. The dry and dusty outside suddenly gave way to verdant life: palm trees, fruit trees, earthenware pots overflowing with bright flowers. A boy as black as ink came running over, bowed to the man in scarlet and held the horse’s reins as he helped Cat down. Two women emerged from a side door of a tall house and they too bowed to the man. Words passed among the three, guttural and harsh to Cat’s ears, and then the women took hold of Cat, not unkindly, bearing her away with them into the cool shade.

The next few hours passed as in a dream. She was bathed in a room thick with steam and rinsed in another chamber lined with cold white tile, where she was rubbed with perfumed ointments; her hair was washed, and a sweet-smelling oil was applied to it by careful hands. Someone brought her a silk shift, which felt so cool and smooth against her skin that she almost wept. Over this, they placed an embroidered robe. Her wet hair was wrapped in a headscarf, and they gave her a pair of soft, red-leather babouches for her feet. Then she was taken to a tall-ceilinged room with a canopied bed. Here, spreading their hands as if to say ‘this is for you’, they left her, closing the door quietly behind them.

What now, Cat wondered. She had been so cleansed and seasoned with perfume that she felt like meat that had been prepared for a rich man’s table. Was that what she was to become now, a rich man’s plaything, a creature of the bedchamber? She shuddered, and waited.

No one came. After a time she got up and opened the tall carved armoire against the left wall and found therein neatly folded cotton shifts, head cloths, three more robes in rich fabrics and another pair of leather shoes. She closed it again, frowning. Was she in some other woman’s room? She wandered to the window. Through the curlicues of its wrought-iron grille she could look down into a courtyard bright with marble and trees. Its geometrical design was soothing to the mind: a fountain in the centre sat within an eight-pointed reservoir from which four channels carried water to the corners and around the edges of the courtyard. Pots extravagant with blue and white flowers sat at counterpoint to the fountain, and at the outer corners, in raised square beds, stood four orange trees, their fruits glowing among the gleaming dark foliage. Its design reminded her of the courtyard at the house across the river where she had been taken to write the ransom demand, but this house was larger and finer by far.

Her mind again returned to the question of what manner of man had bought her. That he was wealthy seemed evident; but she knew the sort of enterprise that made men rich here, and probably the world over; being rich was clearly not commensurate with goodness or decency. But the house spoke of moderation and taste, of style and elegance. Everywhere she gazed there was evidence of the work of master craftsmen. Every possible surface and substance was decorated: the carved plasterwork which marked the transition between the gleaming walls and the high, coffered cedarwood ceiling; the walls were tiled to half-height with stylized starbursts, a motif which was echoed in the carving of the door, the tiles on the floor, the brass top of the table and the decorated glasses set upon it. It was, she had to admit, a pretty prison. But surely a prison all the same.