City of Jasmine (15 page)

The smile deepened. “Indeed. In fact, it was my experience with the perfidious ways of Europeans which enabled me to understand what the Thurzós were planning. Naturally, they did not think to guard themselves against immoderate speech when they were in the presence of a native with a reputation for idiocy. You’re quite right—it was a most useful pose. Now, I must thank you for the enormously entertaining interlude, Madame Starke, but I think it is time for me to leave you. I would like a little sleep before we set off tomorrow.”

He motioned for two of his men to tie us up—back to back, which was just as well. Gabriel was smirking and I would have struck him if I’d had my hands free. They left us, taking the lamp with them, and when the tent flap dropped, we were in darkness.

“Don’t say it,” I told him, my teeth gritted.

Behind me, I felt his body shaking with silent laughter. I dug my elbow into his ribs, but that didn’t stop him.

“What’s the matter, Evie? I’m sure we’ll get out of this just fine. Why don’t you call on Allah the merciful and compassionate to give us a hand?”

“At least I tried,” I returned hotly. “Some criminal genius you are! You just sat there like a bloody great lump saying nothing and letting me prattle on—” I carried on abusing him for a full minute before I realised he was busy fumbling with our bound hands. “What are you doing?”

“Cutting the ropes,” he replied in a cheerful tone.

“Gabriel! You have a knife? How absolutely
brilliant.
”

“A moment ago I was a bloody great lump.”

“I don’t remember saying anything of the kind. Oh, do be careful with that thing! You nearly nicked an artery.”

He sighed. “You don’t have arteries there, my daft little duck. Now shut up and let me concentrate. It’s bad enough I can’t see.”

I fell silent as he worked on the ropes, sawing carefully. At last I felt a pop and one of them loosened. But we were still tightly bound, and I realised it was going to take a very long time for Gabriel to free us. I felt my arms begin to shake a little from the strain and the long night without rest. I occupied myself by reciting poetry in my head.
“This is the forest primeval,”
I thought.

“Are you thinking of ‘Evangeline’?” Gabriel asked suddenly.

“How on earth did you know that?”

I felt him shrug in the darkness. “You always do it when you’re anxious.”

“I forgot I ever told you that. Yes, I was. ‘Ye who believe in affection that hopes, and endures, and is patient, Ye who believe in the beauty and strength of woman’s devotion, List to the mournful tradition still sung by the pines of the forest; List to a Tale of Love in Acadie, home of the happy.’”

Gabriel groaned. “Not aloud, I beg you.”

“It’s a perfectly splendid poem, I’ll have you know.”

“You only think that because your father named you after it, for which I believe he ought to have been horsewhipped. No one should be named after a Longfellow poem.”

“Longfellow was a brilliant poet.”

He snorted. “Brilliant? He was bloody useless, as bad as Wordsworth and his daffodils with all that talk of primeval forests and happy trees. If you want proper poetry, you want Marvell.”

“Marvell? You call that proper poetry? It’s
rubbish.
” I cudgelled up a few lines from memory. “‘Ye living lamps, by whose dear light the nightingale does sit so late.’ It’s a poem about
glowworms,
for heaven’s sake. As I said, rubbish.”

“Rubbish, and yet you can recite it,” he countered smugly.

“Because you used to prattle on about them until I wanted to scream blue murder,” I told him. “And I never understood how someone with such a keen appreciation of baroque music could find pleasure in the foulness of Donne. He wrote a poem romanticising a flea.”

“It was a metaphor.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but suddenly he gave a heave and the ropes snapped free.

“Done,” he said with a darkly satisfied note.

“Now what?”

“Now we wait.”

If I could have seen him clearly, I would have punched him. “What do you mean we wait? We’re free!”

“Not so loud unless you’d like Daoud and his chums to come back and take care of that,” he hissed. “I’ve got us free, but they’ve only just turned in. We need to give them a chance to nod off properly before we try to get out of here. Stretch your legs a bit, but don’t make any noise. I’m going to see if I can loosen a tent peg on the backside for us to slip out.”

I did as he instructed, moving my legs and arms to get the blood moving freely again. I felt surprisingly exhilarated in spite of my exhaustion. A good sparring match with Gabriel had always had that effect, I reminded myself. Although why he should pick a fight over something as stupid as poetry at just that moment...

After a long while he slid back to my side. “I’ve loosened enough we should be able to slip under. There’s a guard, but he doesn’t seem much interested in actually guarding anything. He keeps wandering off.”

“How long do you intend to wait?”

“I’ll let you know,” he said shortly. I huffed a sigh and began to recite
Evangeline
again in my head. I had reached a particularly poignant line—“So came the autumn, and passed, and the winter—yet Gabriel came not”—when I had had about as much as I could stand. I got up and went to where Gabriel had loosened the tent pegs. Without so much as a “by-your-leave” I lifted the tent fabric a few inches, peered into the starry darkness and rolled myself out into the cold air of freedom. Gabriel was right behind me, not swearing because neither of us dared to speak, but I could feel the rage vibrating in him as we scurried through the sand and over the little rise behind the tents. We gained it without incident, and then the next, and finally, when we were some distance away and well out of sight, he turned on me.

“That was the bloody stupidest thing—” he began. He was raging quietly, for sound carried easily in the desert at night, but I knew he was building up a good head of steam and I flapped a hand at him.

“Gabriel,
hush.
It’s done and fussing at me isn’t going to change that. And if you thought it was such a poor idea, you didn’t have to follow me, you know.”

“What was I going to do? Let you stumble around the desert on your own and get killed for your pains? Or worse, let them take their fury at you out on me?” How he managed to sound injured when I had just effected an escape eluded me.

“I
think
I just got us out of a rather sticky situation, so let’s not get too high and mighty about my helplessness, shall we?”

“Then would you like me to keep quiet about the fact that you’re heading the wrong way?” His tone was icily polite, which, frankly speaking, wasn’t much of an improvement on his raging, but I’d take what I could get.

I followed meekly as he turned us northeast and began to trot. We covered some ground before he stopped with a groan. “This is damned pointless. We ought to just go back to Daoud.”

I shook my head as if to clear it. “I’m afraid the desert air seems to have damaged my hearing. I thought I heard you suggest going back to Daoud.”

He sighed, and for the first time in our little adventure, he looked defeated. The posing and posturing was gone, and the expression in his eyes was solemn. “Evie, we’re a good forty miles from Palmyra and we’ve no water. We’re in a part of the desert I’m not particularly familiar with. We’ve got Countess Thurzó running off with the Cross, we’ve got Herr Doktor skulking around for God only knows what reason, we’ve got Daoud, who will, I hope you realise, be after our heads once he finds us missing.”

“All the more reason to move quickly,” I said.

He opened his mouth then snapped it shut again. He lowered his head a moment, and when he lifted it, his mask of insouciance was firmly back in place. He drew himself up as if steeling himself for an ordeal.

“Come on, then,” he said briskly. “First one to water gets the cleanest drink.”

As we walked, we speculated on the whereabouts of Countess Thurzó and the Cross. “She ought to be in Damascus by now enjoying a hot bath and a nice meal,” I said, feeling my stomach rumble at the thought of a nice savoury steak.

“Perhaps,” he said, drawing out the word slowly.

I stared at him. “What are you thinking? Why on earth would she hang around the desert when she has the Cross?”

He shrugged, his expression evasive. “I don’t know. She could have a buyer here in the Badiyat ash-Sham.”

I considered this. It was vaguely possible, I supposed. There was money in some of the desert tribes. Some of them, like Daoud’s people, were poor as church mice. Others were rumoured to be quite prosperous—usually through charging enormous fees to safely escort trading caravans and travellers through the desert.

“But who?” I asked.

He stroked his thick grimy beard. “I can think of a few Bedouin who would be absolutely delighted to hang one of Saladin’s trophies on the walls of a city house and who have the funds to pay through the nose for it.”

“City house?”

“The richest Bedu have houses in Damascus. Some of them split their time between the city and the desert. Best of both worlds, really.”

“Like Jane Digby,” I mused. The lady’s romantic amours had scandalised Europe for the better part of the nineteenth century. A daughter of one of England’s oldest families, she had taken to the Continent when she fell pregnant with her lover’s child, and a series of
mésalliances
had followed. She’d had a string of noteworthy lovers, from rebel lords to crowned heads, but the most notorious had been her Bedouin prince, her last husband and by all accounts the love of her life. She’d happily spent almost thirty years dividing her time between their Damascene mansion and his desert tribe. In the city life was not terribly dissimilar to the one she’d known back in England with social calls and entertaining and shopping taking up much of her time, but the rest was wild desert raids and modest warfare, where she was often to be found riding her Arabian mount and handling a rifle as competently as any man. I was just imagining myself astride a horse, leading a charge with rifle blazing, when Gabriel’s voice cut into my reverie.

“You’d hate it.”

“I beg your pardon?” I blinked rapidly. “Hate what?”

“Life as a Bedouin woman. Even if you did marry a prince. You’re far too uppity to take to life under a veil.”

“How on earth—” I bit off the question. “I was thinking no such thing.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, don’t lie. I can read you as clearly as the morning newspaper. You were thinking how dashing it would be to live that life, swanning about Damascus half the time and leading desert raids the rest.”

“It does sound tempting,” I admitted.

“And you would hate it,” he repeated. “It seems like adventure but it’s an endless cycle of sun and barren land and camels—as repetitive as life in an English village if you think about it. Only rather more tribal skirmishes and fewer village fêtes. Now, if you’re quite through wool-gathering, we were in the middle of a discussion. I’d very much like some food and water, and you look so exhausted, I’m beginning to wonder if it mightn’t be a very great kindness just to shoot you here.” I stared at him, aghast, and instantly his expression softened. “Never mind. It’s all right, Evie. We’ll manage.”

“Not if you keep underestimating me, you great ass,” I said, giving him a hard shove. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the packets of bread and dates I had managed to secure. From inside my shirt I took the small goatskin full of water and waved it at him. “Now, we have food. We have water. And we have a plan—we are moving on towards Palmyra. There are people there and at least a dozen oases between here and there. If we’re lucky we’ll stumble on one. If not, the desert is crawling with Bedouin and some of them are bound to be friendlier than Daoud, particularly if we offer to pay them. When we get to Palmyra, we’re going to eat until we can’t hold another bite and we’re going to drink our own body weight in water. Then we’re going to bathe because, my
God,
you smell like something three days past death, and then we are going to organise an expedition to get that Cross back. What we are not going to do is go back, not for one single minute.”

His jaw went slack and he opened his mouth to speak, but I stepped forward, poking him hard in the chest. “I mean it, Gabriel. I spent the whole of our blessedly short marriage doing what you wanted. I said ‘Yes, Gabriel’ and ‘No, Gabriel’ and you despised me for it, and well you should have. I wasn’t myself with you. I was so desperately afraid of losing you that I acted like some sort of jellyfish. Do you know what sort of wife I was, Gabriel? I was
invertebrate.
I had no backbone with you. And you needed my backbone and so did I. You needed someone to bring you down to earth and make you act like a responsible grown-up for once. It was the worst mistake I ever made, rolling over and letting you walk all over me with your great filthy boots. I let you have your way about everything and where did it get me? Standing on the deck of a steamer in Shanghai watching you walk away without a care in the world while I broke my heart over you. Well, I’m not that girl. I never was, I was just too in love with you and too frightened of losing you to show you who I really was. Here I am, Gabriel—the girl you should have married but didn’t. I smoke cigars and I barnstorm and I wear red lipstick and I do as I damned well please. And when this is all over and I have that Cross, I am going to divorce
you
and we won’t ever have to see each other again. But at least you’ll know what you were missing. Now, point me in the direction of Palmyra because that is where we’re going.”

Without a word, he reached out and pulled me into his arms, and before I could take a breath his mouth was on mine. It wasn’t gentle and it wasn’t sweet, and if he’d ever kissed me like that before, just once, we wouldn’t have been headed for divorce court. When he set me on my feet again I pulled back my arm and slapped him for the third time in a week.

He rubbed his hairy chin. “We really must give some thought to breaking you of the habit of physical violence.”