Lady Emily's Exotic Journey (18 page)

“You miss it,” she said after a silence.

Another silence followed before he said, “Yes, I suppose I do. It has been so long. My mother would take me there sometimes to visit, to stay for a few days, a week, but I have not truly lived there since I was a boy of six.” Looking down he saw her look of surprise and explained, “That was when we went to live with my grandfather at La Boulaye.”

“And that was not good.”

“No, that was not good. My mother was accustomed to her own household, but my grandmother was mistress of La Boulaye. My father was accustomed to running his own life, making his own decisions. My grandfather expected total obedience. My father thought improvements should be made to the estate, new vineyards planted, more modern methods used. My grandfather would spend only on display, on carriages, on grand parties, on presentations at court. And so they fought all the time, and my aunts and uncles stood by and whispered and my grandmother wailed. It was not a happy house.”

“Then it is just as well that we will not need to live there. We shall live in your house of gray stone with the oak tree outside the window, and it will be a happy house. I insist upon it.”

He hugged her to him even more tightly and dropped a kiss on her head. They rode along contentedly.

After perhaps an hour, the rescue party appeared. Her father and Irmak rode in front, followed by a carriage—an exceedingly impressive carriage, high and square, painted bright yellow with red wheels and a red roof fringed with silver. Irmak's troopers rode in a column on either side, and red pennants flew from their lances.

Her father's shout when he saw her brought her mother half out the carriage window, and Lord Penworth spurred his horse into a gallop. Lucien brought his horse to a halt and tightened his grip on Emily as they waited. She was glad to see them. Of course she was. But she could not help but regret the end of this interlude with Lucien. She did not want to leave the circle of his arms. And the way his arm tightened around her, he did not want to let her go either.

The next few minutes were a chaotic mix of cries and questions and assurances as Emily tried to convince first her father and then her mother that she was indeed safe and well. Even Irmak was hovering over her, trying to see that she truly was uninjured.

It was their distress that brought home to her how serious her situation had been on the raft. Lucien had appeared so soon after she recovered consciousness that she had not had time to be properly frightened. Well, she had been frightened by the pirates, but by then she had Lucien with her. And once he was there, her attention had been so completely focused on him that nothing else, not even the pirates, had seemed of much importance.

Now, she was horrified to see tears running down her mother's cheeks. They were tears of relief, but still, her unflappable mother, who did not turn a hair at an attack by lunatic Kurds, her mother in tears? That resigned her to leaving the circle of Lucien's arms, though he seemed loath to let her go. His arm tightened around her when her father first reached up for her, but he too looked at her mother's face and bowed to necessity.

Her father lifted her down gently, as if she were still a small child, carried her to the carriage, and settled her carefully inside. She tried to point out that she was really quite all right, but no one seemed to be paying any attention. Her mother and father were both thanking Lucien, with hugs from her mother and claps on the back from her father and not quite coherent speeches from both of them. Lucien kept leaning over to look at her, so she looked out the window to smile at him. That seemed to reassure him somewhat, and when her mother climbed into the coach, he joined the other men on horseback. At a signal from Irmak, the whole party turned to head back toward Mosul.

As the ungainly carriage made its awkward turn, Emily, still cocooned in her blanket, found herself bouncing from side to side. She had to laugh at her awkward state as she tried to unwrap herself without falling.

“My dear, are you all right?” Lady Penworth caught her daughter to keep her from tumbling off the seat.

“Quite all right. I just hadn't realized how thoroughly Lucien had bundled me up.”

“But you are not injured?” Not waiting for an answer, her mother unwrapped Emily's arms and lifted them to make sure there were no broken bones.

“No, really, the only thing that hurts is my feet.”

Pulling the blanket from Emily's legs produced silence in the carriage. Finally, Lady Penworth said, “You are almost naked.”

Emily looked down. She was wearing her drawers, and while they were a bit dirty, they were intact. More or less. But she was barefoot, and barelegged from the knees down. “We had to swim,” she said.

“Swim?”

Emily nodded. This was going to be awkward. She didn't want to make her mother even more distressed than she already was, but she had to explain her near-nakedness. And there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. She just needed to make it sound reasonable. “You see, the crew on the raft thought I was a ghost because of the blood on my face, so they jumped overboard. But I didn't know how to steer it. Then Lucien came, and he swam out to the raft, but the pirates attacked, so we had to jump back into the river. I couldn't swim to shore in my skirt, so I had to take it off.” She looked at her mother with wide, innocent eyes. “You do see, don't you?”

Lady Penworth took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Blood on your face?”

“From the cut on my head. But it all washed off when we swam to shore. So really, there's nothing to worry about.”

A sound halfway between a gasp and a laugh escaped from Lady Penworth. “Oh, my dear child, you seem to have escaped from your ordeal with far less stress than the rest of us.”

Emily considered that. “I expect that's because I was unconscious for much of it, and then there wasn't really time to think.”

It had not been difficult for David to find information about Hadad and Karif. They were well known in the poorest quarter of Mosul, where they were neither liked nor trusted. Useful information was something else. No one sought to protect them, but even a few coins brought little information of use.

They had tried to hire a pair of camels or, failing that, a pair of horses, but to no avail. They lacked the money in hand, and those who possessed such beasts simply laughed at their promise of future payment. All knew them well enough to be certain that should they ever come into the vast sums they claimed they would soon possess, none of that wealth would ever be used to pay their debts.

However, a pair of donkeys had disappeared. They were elderly beasts, possessed of very little strength, but they had an owner, a peddler of even greater age and less strength. The peddler had taken a nap, certain that his donkeys would never expend the energy to stray. Alas, when he awakened, his donkeys had not only gone but managed to unburden themselves of the peddler's packs. This added insult to the theft. An honorable thief would have at least pretended to covet the peddler's goods.

The general opinion was that only Hadad and Karif were foolish enough to steal such worthless beasts. Unfortunately, no one had noticed them taking or, more importantly, departing with the donkeys. Many offered theories about where they might have gone, but none had any knowledge.

As for the location of a slave caravan, all claimed they knew nothing of any such thing, and neither persuasion nor bribes nor threats could bring forth any information. Aside from the fears engendered by the slave traders themselves, there was the fear of the sultan's wrath. All knew that the Europeans were urging the sultan to end the slave trade. Not only was Oliphant a European, but he had arrived in Mosul accompanied by the sultan's troopers. These were matters in which a sensible man did not involve himself.

There was more than one route across the desert to Damascus, and no way to know which one had been chosen by the slavers. David needed to find information quickly. There was only one place he could go for help, one person he could turn to.

It was still early afternoon when he pulled up his horse before the tent of Sheik Rashad. Within, the sheik, robed in pure white, was seated on a glorious carpet in rich tones of blue and red. Along the sides of the tent, the sheik's followers sat in less elegant comfort. They were far enough away to allow the sheik to conduct conversations in private, but every gesture and expression would be observed. Forcing himself to act calmly, while every muscle in his body was coiled to spring, David observed the necessary formalities. He managed, just barely, to restrain himself as coffee was offered and accepted, but, even so, it did not take long for him to pour out his tale once his grandfather had indicated his willingness to listen.

The sheik sat silent for several minutes, his eye on his grandson. David remained immobile under the scrutiny, never flinching. To show distress would be unmanly. He forced himself to be stoic.

“This woman,” said Rashad finally, “she is the one you brought here?”

“She is.”

“Why did you bring her? Did you wish my approval or hers?”

“Both. I would wish for you to respect and honor my wife, as I would wish my wife to respect and honor my family.”

The sheik dipped his head in a brief nod that might have indicated approval of David's answer. After a pause he said, “Your grandmother and aunts found her pleasing and respectful.”

David's brief nod might have indicated that their approval was welcome.

The sheik paused once more to observe his grandson. “And if we do not find her?”

“I will find her,” David said. There was no question in his mind.

The sheik nodded. “If you do not find her before she has been disposed of in Damascus?”

“I will find her,” David repeated, his voice cold. “It is for her sake that I wish to find her quickly, to spare her pain and humiliation.”

The sheik raised his brows at that, but did not argue. He glanced over at one of the men at the side of the tent who immediately leaped to his feet and hurried to bend an ear to the sheik's quiet instructions. Once he had left, David and his grandfather sat in silence, sipping their coffee. Only the tight line of his jaw and the stiffness of his shoulders betrayed David's tension.

Abdul entered in a flurry of draperies and with a beaming smile. “You are in luck, cousin. We have had watchers keeping an eye on the slavers, just in case they cast an eye on our horses, so we know precisely where they are. If your villains plan to join them, it will not be difficult to find them.”

David could not manage a smile, but he stood to clasp Abdul's arm. “Thank you, cousin.” He was grateful for the information and assurances, but even more for the understanding he saw in Abdul's face.

* * *

Rashad, with David and Abdul on either side of him, rode at the head of the small troop of half a dozen men. All were dressed in dark blue robes and rode dark horses, making them almost invisible now that the sun had set. A scout had met them and pinpointed the location of the kidnappers.

The sheik held up a hand to halt the riders at the edge of a small ridge. He beckoned David to follow him, and they proceeded to the edge of the ridge on foot until they could peer over the edge. The kidnappers had made their camp beside a small stream, and Julia and the donkeys were tied to a lone palm tree. The donkeys were drooping with weariness, but Julia was standing straight, imperious as a queen.

The shorter of the two men—Karif, from the description David had been given—came over to her and said something in a voice too low to be heard on the ridge. Julia's response, however, was perfectly clear, pronounced slowly in execrably accented Arabic: “Thy mother committed adultery with a monkey. Thou art a creature as low and dirty as a shoe, thou wretched grandson of a plucked vulture, great-grandson of a stinking jackal!”

It was not clear whose gasp was loudest, David's or his grandfather's, but the choked laughter was the sheik's. Had Karif not reacted with such fury, he would certainly have heard them. David was about to charge to the rescue, when the kidnapper was stopped by his colleague. “Don't be a fool,” the second kidnapper—Hadad—said, seizing a handful of ragged robe to drag Karif back from striking Julia. “You know her value is in her beauty. Striking her will leave scars and bruises.” When Karif stopped struggling, Hadad continued in soothing tones, as if to a fractious child. “We will give her no food for a few days. That will punish her for her insolence and perhaps make her more docile when we get to the slave market.”

Throughout this exchange, Julia had never flinched. She regarded her captors with a contemptuous sneer that seemed to cause Karif's hand to twitch as if he longed to strike her anyway. Greed conquered pride, enforced by the pull of his partner's hand, and he turned away and left her.

David realized that his grandfather was still chuckling.

“She has the courage of a lion, that one,” the old man said.

David smiled. “And the eyes of a gazelle.”

“Admirable in a queen, no doubt. But for a wife, should not a man seek a submissive, obedient woman?” Rashad asked.

“That is not what I seek.”

Rashad nodded, in what seemed to David to be approval. “So be it. She will give you fine, brave sons.” He then waved his followers to circle around to the other side of the camp.

It was over almost instantly. Ludicrously simple, after the anguish that had gone before.

Hadad and Karif were sitting beside a small fire, intent on their meal. A slight sound made Hadad glance up and freeze, the bread halfway to his mouth. Karif noticed Hadad's immobility first, and then the reason for it.

Half a dozen figures, barely visible in the darkness, surrounded them. Their silence made them no less terrifying, for while their faces were almost covered by the folds of their head scarves, the firelight glinted ominously on the rifles and scimitars that they carried. Abdul stepped forward.

That was enough to loosen Karif's tongue, and he began to babble. “Take the woman, oh master of the desert. Take her as our gift. She will be worth hundreds in the slave market in Damascus. Or keep her for yourself. Take her and spare your miserable servants.” He bowed his head to the ground, and Hadad did the same.

Abdul put his foot on Karif's head to grind his face into the dirt and rested the point of his scimitar on Hadad's neck. The others shared in his laughter.

Meanwhile, David used his dagger to slash through the rope binding Julia to the tree. She stood in silent terror, looking wide-eyed about her at the dark figures who had taken over the small camp. It wasn't until she looked into David's eyes that she recognized him and, with a cry, fainted into his arms.

He held her gently, caressing her tenderly. All the while he murmured soft endearments in a mixture of Arabic and English, “
Habibi
, my love, you are safe, my heart, you are my life.”

When she came to her senses, she still could not speak, but clung to him, trembling, in the circle of his arms.

Abdul swaggered up, grinning broadly. “A dramatic rescue, cousin. Now it only remains to determine what should be done with these curs. It will be as you decide. Shall we chop off their heads or merely their hands?”

David's hand clenched. He would like nothing more than to chop them to bits himself, but then Julia raised her head and looked at Abdul in confusion. Despite her recent efforts, she spoke far too little Arabic to understand what he had said, fortunately. David was torn. He had no intention of exposing her to more violence—she was still white with terror—but these vermin could not be allowed to go unpunished.

He thought for a moment, and then smiled. “They wished to deprive my lady of food and drink. Very well. Take them out to the desert and leave them there, with no food or water, to make their way back to Mosul, or anyplace they prefer, as best they can.”

A disappointed look crossed Abdul's face, but he said, “As you will.”

Sheik Rashad, on the other hand, gave an approving grunt. “We will return to the camp where your grandmother and aunts can care for her. Bloodshed would have been inauspicious before the wedding.”

Wedding?
David had no objection to a prompt wedding, but he suspected that Julia might prefer to have some say about it. He looked down. Her eyes were shadowed and face was drawn. She was in no condition to speak, no less make decisions. He needed to get her away from here to a place of safety. Tomorrow would be time enough for talk.