Ran Away (2 page)

To take a wife, a man needed more money than could be got as a surgeon in a clinic.

As a musician, he didn’t make a great deal – not enough to purchase a new waistcoat for everyday wear. But the room in the Rue de l’Aube was only a few doors from Ayasha’s shop, and times – January hoped – would improve.

Provided he didn’t get himself beheaded by the Pasha’s guards for breaking into a harem in the Rue St-Honoré.

‘What’s the girl’s name?’ he asked as they descended four flights of narrow stairs – seventy-two steps in all – to the street. On the landing of the
deuxième étage
– back home the Americans would have called it the
third floor
– the door of the upholsterer Paillole’s chamber stood open and Madame Paillole could be heard berating her eldest son for Heaven only knew what transgression. With Jacques-Ange it could be anything. On the
premier étage
the wives of both Renan the baker and Barronde the lawyer, who despised one another, stood listening intently, and they leaped apart at the appearance of January and Ayasha. Madame Barronde vanished into her husband’s apartment – which occupied the whole of the
premier étage
and was the most elegant in the building – and Madame Renan (‘Such a woman would not have been called
Madame
in
my
day,’ Madame Barronde was rather too fond of saying) went downstairs to her husband’s shop.

‘Her name is Shamira,’ Ayasha replied. They crossed the tiny yard behind the bakery, where moss grew on grimy cobbles amid smells of bakeshop and privies, circumvented the pump, ducked under the laundry of the students who occupied the attic, and followed the damp little passway out to the street. ‘She is the youngest in the harîm, only seventeen. Hüseyin Pasha bought her only a few months before he left Constantinople for Paris, just after the New Year. He has brought the whole of his harîm, and both his wives  . . .’

‘And a platoon of scimitar-wielding guards?’

‘Only ten, Lady Jamilla says.’ Ayasha’s blithe tone indicated that she considered her husband more than a match for ten scimitar-wielding Turks any day of the week. ‘
Alors, copain
,’ she added, in slangy street-French, and waved to old Grouzier who ran the Café l’Empereur on the other side of the narrow street. ‘And anyway, he has taken four of them to London with him,’ she went on, as if this improved matters. ‘And two of those who remain are eunuchs. There are four other eunuchs in the household: two to serve in the harem, and one each for the Lady Jamilla and the Lady Utba, who is also with child.’

She ticked off these facts on her strong brown fingers: short, like a child’s, though her small square palms were as wrinkled as an old lady’s. ‘Hüseyin Pasha is a great friend of the Sultan – so great that His Highness merely sent him to Paris when he spoke out against the Sultan bringing in men of the West to train the Army and teach young men science and medicine. He is a great hater of all things of the West and says they foul the hearts of the true followers of God’s Law  . . .  Is it true that the Sultan’s mother was French?’

‘Not
French
French.’ January smiled, with a trace of pride. ‘Creole French, from the sugar islands. She was kidnapped by pirates in the Mediterranean on her way to a convent and sold to the Sultan’s father back before the Revolution. I’ve heard she was a cousin of the Empress Josephine, but that’s always sounded to me like the kind of story someone would make up.’

‘I’ll bet her father sold her himself for two centimes.’ Ayasha adjusted the ribbons of her bonnet. In the raven cloud of curls her earrings glinted, gold cut in the primitive spiral patterns of the desert where she’d been born, like the flicker of a pagan smile. ‘He won’t let them leave the grounds – Hüseyin Pasha won’t let his wives leave, I mean – and has forbidden them to wear Western clothing:
For whom does a woman wear these garments
, he has asked,
save for her husband, who hates the sight of these immodest shapes
? It’s why I was called upon today, while he’s away—’

‘To make the Lady Jamilla a Turkish
entari
of Lyon’s silk?’

‘
Sahîf
.’ She poked him with her elbow. ‘That’s what the Lady Utba thinks – and what
she’s
having me do. But the Lady Jamilla looks ahead to the time when the Sultan will summon them back and
make
Hüseyin Pasha dress his wives in the style of the West. She plans to have the fashions of Paris all ready, to shine down every woman of the court. Which she cannot do,’ she added encouragingly, ‘if she lets harm befall
you
.’

‘That sound you hear,’ responded January politely, ‘is my sob of relief at the assurance that all will be well.’

The hôtel rented by Hüseyin Pasha stood amid handsome gardens on the Rue St Honoré, near the city’s northern customs barrier. It was an area that still boasted market gardens and drying grounds among the small cottages of artisans; garden beds lay fallow in the chill flash of cloud and sunlight, and there was a strong smell of backyard poultry and cows. A lane flanked by a yellow sandstone wall ended in a stable gate. ‘We’re here to see Bellarmé about the milk,’ Ayasha casually informed the single groom they met as they crossed the stable court toward the kitchen.

January raised his eyebrows. ‘You told Madame already that we’d be coming?’

‘I knew you would not turn your back on a girl who is in trouble and afraid, far from home.’

‘When I get sewn in a sack and thrown in the river I’ll take comfort in the thought of my virtue.’

‘
Mâlik
 . . .’ She looked up at him – compact and voluptuous, she stood almost a foot shorter than his towering six-foot-three – with the expression of an adult being patient with a child’s fears of the platt-eye devil beneath the bed at night. ‘The guards are as lazy as other men. With the Pasha gone, they scarce even trouble to patrol—’

And immediately gave the lie to her words by yanking him through the doorway of the stone-flagged dairy beside the kitchen to let a servant pass: a black man whose slim build and sharp features marked him, to January’s eye, as of the Fulani tribe. Hüseyin Pasha’s ordinance about proper dress seemed to extend to his servants: the man wore billowy Turkish pantaloons –
salvars
– and a long tunic of bright orange wool, his shaved head covered by a scarlet cap. January wondered if this man had consented to come to this chilly Infidel country, or if, like the girl Shamira, his master had simply ordered him to pack.

Ayasha slipped from the dairy, glanced through the door of the kitchen, then motioned January to follow her. The kitchen – considerably larger than their room on the Rue de l’Aube – was redolent of saffron and cinnamon, and of the straw-packing of broken-open boxes in which, presumably, the master’s favorite spices had been shipped. They passed swiftly through and went up two steps into a pantry scented with coffee. So far, only the aroma of spices hinted that the house was occupied by other than some French noble and his family. The dishes on the white-painted shelves were Limoges, the glassware Bavarian crystal. When Ayasha pushed open the door at the far end of the long, narrow room, January caught a perfectly French glimpse of pale-green boiseries and an oil portrait of a disconsolate-looking gentleman in a powdered wig.

But from the table beneath the portrait a woman sprang to her feet, dark eyes above the edge of her veil flooded with relief. ‘You have come!’ Her French was heavily accented.

‘Did I not promise?’ The woman followed Ayasha back into the pantry, and January bowed. ‘
Sitt
Jamilla, this is my husband, Benjamin,
al-hakîm
.’

Her eyes touched his, then fleeted aside. ‘This way, please come.’ Her voice was a beautiful alto. ‘It go bad for her. Fear  . . .’ She gestured, as if trying to summon from air words that she was too shaken to recall; long slim fingers, polished nails stained with henna. Then she gathered her veils about her and led the way to the backstairs. As he followed her up the narrow treads the drift of her perfume whispered back to him, French and expensive.

In French he asked, ‘Is she poisoned?’

‘I think.’ She touched her finger to her lips as they passed the door on the
premier étage
– what they would call the
second floor
back in Louisiana, the main level of salons and reception rooms – and ascended to the private apartments above. Frankincense pervaded these upper reaches, penetrating even the confines of the enclosed stair. January had already guessed the Pasha kept his concubines on one of the upper floors of the house, but the ascent filled him with the sensation of being cut off from escape. One could leap from the windows of a salon on the
premier étage
and risk no more than a sprained ankle. A drop from one of the dormers on the roof would be a serious matter.

‘Vomit—’ In the thin light that came from the stair’s few small windows, the Lady Jamilla’s slim hands conjured the meaning, in case she had the word wrong. ‘Bleed in womb, little  . . .’ Her fingers measured half a thimble-full. ‘Fall down. Hear noise.’ Then she pressed her hand to her chest, drew two or three gasping breaths.

January nodded his understanding. ‘She has not lost the child yet?’

The Lady shook her head, reiterated the gesture:
only half a thimble-full
. ‘Yet so afraid. All afraid.’

All except the equally-pregnant Lady Utba, I’ll bet
 . . . 

At the top of the backstairs the Lady paused to listen at the door. The smell of incense was stronger here, even through the shut door, but could not cover the stink of sickness. She opened it, led him through into what had probably once been a servants’ hall, now converted to the usages of the harîm. A low divan and a scattering of floor pillows touched January’s consciousness even as he crossed toward the single door that stood open, his boots sinking into four or five layers of carpet, in the Eastern fashion. A huge brass brazier radiated gentle heat from the center of the room; a second, much smaller than the first, stood in the smaller chamber to which Jamilla led him.

A skinny maidservant in black knelt beside the divan that had been built around three sides of the little chamber. The pillows that heaped such low benches during daylight hours were still piled at both sides, and a young girl lay among the sheets and quilts of the longer central section. Jamilla said something to the maidservant, who sat back on her heels and shook her head. Between the
hijab
that concealed her hair and the
niqaab
that veiled her face – both businesslike black cotton – dark eyes stitched with wrinkles wore a look of grief and defiance; she responded in something that might have been peasant Turkish, but the disobedience was as clear as if she had spoken French.

Jamilla waved toward the door and repeated her order, and the maid shook her head violently. The girl on the divan, January saw, had been dressed in a long gown that covered her from throat to ankles, a servant’s
camisa
, he guessed: black, substantial, and all-encompassing. She was veiled, even her hair. The room stank of vomit and sickness, the sheets were stained and wet, but the garments and veils were dry and clean.

Do they really think I’ll be overwhelmed with lust at the sight of a poor girl spewing her guts out as she aborts her baby?
Anger swept through him, at the insanities of traditions that branded every woman as nine times more passionate than the poor men whose lusts they commanded; that cautioned that all Africans were animalistically lascivious – as the educated and philosophical third President of the United States had so tastefully put it.

Or were Jamilla and the maid simply doing what they could to maintain their innocence, should word of all this reach Hüseyin Pasha?
The girl was never unveiled before the Unbeliever, and never left alone with him
 . . . 

He wondered if that would save them, or the girl.

And God only knows
, he reflected,
what the girl herself thinks, or feels  . . .  or what language she speaks, even
. If the Pasha bought her only a year ago, how much Turkish would she have learned to speak to the servants? Or with her master  . . .  if he considered conversation with his bed-mates a part of their duties.

January knew most American masters didn’t. ‘Does she speak French?’ he whispered, and again the Lady made the little half-a-thimble-full gesture with her fingers.

‘Only little. Egypt – Cairo. Family is Jew.’

He knelt beside the divan. ‘Mademoiselle, can you hear me? You’re going to be all right.’

The fatigue-blackened eyelids stirred. In broken French she whispered, ‘I’m sorry—’

‘It’s all right.’

‘My Lady  . . .’ Jamilla knelt beside January, took Shamira’s hand. Her reply was gentle, as if she spoke to a younger sister.

Shamira whispered something else – an apology? Perhaps, because Jamilla gripped her hand encouragingly, stroked the girl’s hair, dislodging the veil, and said something else, in which January heard the words
farangi
– a Frank, a European – and
hakîm
.

The girl whispered, in a voice hoarse from vomiting, ‘My baby?’

January guessed from the symptoms that the girl had been poisoned with quinine and guessed too that quantities enough to do this to her would trigger an abortion within hours. ‘Do not worry about this now, Mademoiselle. First it is your life which must be saved.’ He turned to Jamilla. ‘When was she sick? When did this start?’

‘Night. End of night. Before first prayers.’

He felt the girl’s hands – the servant looked horrified – and found them icy, and her pulse, thready and weak. ‘Is no one else sick?’

Jamilla repeated the question to the servant, then translated the reply. ‘Ra’eesa say, all well. Others—’ She turned to Ayasha to translate, but it was scarcely easier. The Osmanli tongue spoken by the upper classes in Constantinople was an elaborate combination of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, only half-comprehensible to a young woman who’d grown up speaking the mix of Arabic and Tamazight common to the Mahgrib.