The Tenth Gift (34 page)

There and then, with Idriss looking on, I made a phone call and set up a meeting.

“ANNA?”

“Julia? Good grief, is that really you?”

My hand flew up to the hijab. I grinned. “Yes, it’s really me. And this is my friend Idriss.”

I saw her eyes widen as Idriss stepped forward and bent his head
to kiss her hand.
“Ravi de faire votre connaissance. Bienvenue à Rabat, madame,”
he said, then turned to me. “I’ll wait for you in the bar, shall I?” And with a flourish of his robe he swept through this modern hotel lobby, exchanging friendly Arabic greetings with the staff, looking for all the world like a medieval camel trader. I shook my head, grinning. Did he know everyone in Rabat?

Anna ordered some tea to be sent up to the room. “English tea,” she told the man at the front desk firmly. “
Thé anglais
—not the mint stuff. Twinings English Breakfast if you’ve got it.” Then she took me by the arm and led me upstairs. I had half-expected to find Michael waiting there, but the room was empty, which was a relief.

“That chap you were with,” Anna said, closing the door. “Incredibly handsome. Amazing profile—like a male Nefertiti. Wherever did you find him?”

“He found me,” I replied evasively. An awkward silence fell. I forced myself to break it. “Anna, look, I have to say this. I am so, so sorry. I know it’s a completely inadequate thing to say after what I’ve done, and for all this time, but I do mean it.”

“It’s not really something you can say sorry for, is it?”

“No. I’ve got no excuses, none at all. I know it has destroyed our friendship.”

“To say nothing of my marriage.”

I hung my head.

“Julia, I’ve been through it all with Michael and I really don’t want to go over it all again. It’s over now, isn’t it?” I nodded, tight-lipped.

“Then there’s very little point in raking over the ashes. I think I knew it, right from the start. In fact, when I persuaded him to marry me, I felt weirdly guilty, as if I’d taken him away from you. Left alone, you’d probably have made each other a lot happier than Michael and I have made one another.” She gave a bitter little laugh. “Which wouldn’t be difficult. But in the end I’ve managed to salvage something positive out of the situation.”

“Fresh start?”

She nodded. “You could say that. I’m not sure I’d go that far. But after all this time I’m finally pregnant. It’s made me wretchedly ill, but I really want this baby, have wanted it for a long time.”

I remembered her now on the platform at Penzance Station looking pale and grim. Pregnant. With Michael’s child. And of course he, the eternal coward, had not had the guts to tell me that part of the story. I almost laughed. Michael hated children—the noise, the mess, the endless need for attention. He was obsessive about birth control with me, always checking condoms for defects, and had once marched me to the pharmacist after we’d broken one and demanded a morning-after pill. A wicked little voice inside me whispered,
Serves you right.
Anna, with her trademark determination, had got her way in the end.

“Congratulations, Anna. That’s wonderful news.” And I actually meant it.

“I’m giving up the job, going freelance. I’ve got a year’s contract from the magazine, and after that who knows? Michael’s in a frightful state about it all.”

“Money,” I said succinctly.

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “To a large extent, yes.”

“So that’s why you want the book. I expect it’s worth a small fortune if you know the right people.”

“No, no, it’s not that—” She was interrupted by a knock at the door and got up to open it. “Oh … it’s you.” She sounded surprised. “Thank you, how very kind …”

“It is no trouble,” Idriss said, bringing the tea tray in. He looked across at me. “I just wanted to be sure everything was all right.”

I smiled at him, so tall and grave in his turban and robe. Under other circumstances I would have hugged him. It was probably just as well Anna was there. “Everything is fine.”

He set the tray down. “Lipton’s, I’m afraid,” he said to Anna, “though they’d probably have told you it was Twinings.” He gave me a barely perceptible wink, then bowed and swept out of the room.

Anna watched him go. “Does he work here?” she asked, puzzled.

“No.” I grinned.

“He seems concerned about you.” “He’s a very … good man.”

“Do be careful, Julia. You hear dreadful stories about women getting involved with Moroccans who are just after a British passport and their money.”

“It’s not always about money, Anna.”

She gave me a quick, nervous smile. “I know. Sorry. Look, let’s allow the tea to steep a little. I want to show you something.”

She got up and crossed the room to where a smart Mulberry carry-on lay on a valise stand against the wall. This, she opened, then unzipped the inner compartment and brought out a small parcel wrapped in white tissue paper, which she laid upon the bed.

“When Alison told us about the mention of a Tree of Knowledge design in the book Michael gave you, I remembered the family heirloom my great-aunt left me along with the Suffolk house. She said that it had been commissioned for the church at Framlingham, St. Michael’s, but that it was never finished and never used. Something about the Puritans not favoring figurative art, or any kind of decoration that might distract attention during prayer. So I went up to fetch it….”

She opened the tissue to reveal a long piece of white linen, yellowing from age, touched here and there with muted autumn colors.

My heart was suddenly in my throat: I could not speak. I reached across her and touched it reverently, unfolding the final part until Catherine’s Tree of Knowledge lay before us, ancient and incongruous against the bright synthetic of the hotel bedspread. Only part of the embroidery was completed—the intricate border of interwoven leaves and flowers, a rabbit, a couple of doves, and an apple, all beautifully and realistically delineated, and above these the tree itself, wreathed in leaves, with the serpent winding down its trunk toward the figure of Eve, her long hair covering her slim white nakedness.

Adam was outlined faintly on the other side of her, but his features were blank and blurred, and the rest remained unfinished. Even so, it was magnificent. I sank to my knees, overcome.

“The Countess of Salisbury’s altar frontal,” I said at last.

“Is it? Are you sure?”

I dug in my handbag and brought out Catherine’s book, turned to the sketch she had made and held it out alongside the cloth.

Anna looked from one to the other, delighted. Her fingers traced the outline of Eve in Cat’s sketch, then on the fabric. “Fantastic. How incredible. It really is, then. The Countess of Salisbury’s altar frontal. A genuine seventeenth-century tapestry.”

“It’s embroidery, not tapestry,” I corrected her. “And I can’t believe you flew to Morocco with such a valuable thing in your hand luggage!”

She shrugged. “I knew I had to persuade you to do something for me, and that it would be hard to do that with just a photo. Besides, all this has come together through so many bizarre circumstances that I have to believe fate has a hand in it.”

I looked at her. “What is it you want me to do?”

“You have the book, and that’s the proof.”

“Proof?”

“Proof of provenance. For the V&A. It’s what Great-Aunt Sappho would have wanted. I have a friend who works in the publications department there and she knows someone in Textiles—they’re very keen to see it. I was hoping you’d come with me to show them, and talk about it.”

“I thought you wanted to sell the book,” I said slowly. “Michael seemed desperate to get his hands on it. He searched my London flat, you know; then he followed me to Cornwall, telling me he’d given it to me in error, then chased me all the way to Morocco and left me a threatening message at my riad—”

“I didn’t know. I am sorry, Julia.” She pursed her lips. “How charming of him.
Given to you in error.
Like himself, no doubt.
Michael is under the impression we’ll get a lot of money for the altar piece once we can prove what it is, and I haven’t disabused him of the idea. In fact, if it’s proved to be the real deal, I’ve promised it to the V&A for free as long as they exhibit it with its full family history. Michael will be absolutely furious when he finds out.” She giggled. It occurred to me suddenly that the balance of their relationship had suddenly shifted in her favor, and that she was enjoying every minute of her newfound power.

Something else occurred to me then. I looked at her intently. “Anna, I’ve always known your family were quite well off, but, well … the altar cloth, it was given to Lady William Cecil, the Countess of Salisbury….”

She laughed. “Lady William Cecil, né e Catherine Howard. Mother’s a Howard, you see.”

I gaped at her. “You’re one of the Howard family?
The
Howard family, as in Catherine Howard and the Duke of Norfolk and all?”

“Yes, but it’s all a bit diluted now. Very grand in our time, but we don’t own half of East Anglia anymore. All I inherited was Aunt Sappho’s Suffolk house, and some funds and the cottage. I do believe the family owned St. Michael’s Mount for a short time before selling it in the Civil War. Pity—could quite fancy living on an island.”

“So you’re rich?”

She shrugged uncomfortably at my crassness. “Well, I wouldn’t go as far as that. Comfortable, maybe.”

“Then why is Michael always so desperate for money?”

She gave me an embarrassed smile. “It isn’t really done to talk about such things in our family. Rather vulgar, I think. Michael doesn’t know much about my assets.”

He’d been married to an heiress and fretting all this time. I laughed out loud. “He said you were short of cash.”

Now it was Anna’s turn to laugh. “Michael’s convinced having a baby will bleed us dry.” She shrugged. “I told him if he was that desperate, he could sell the flat in Soho. He was very shocked—he didn’t
even realize I knew about it. But I’ve known for years. I saw you together, going in, coming out, a dozen times. At the beginning it made me very miserable and a bit crazy. I used to follow him, spy on him, if you like.”

I closed my eyes, appalled. “And you never confronted him or me.”

She shook her head.

“You could have left him, married someone else, someone worth having.”

She went very still. “Yes, he is a bastard, isn’t he? But I love him, Julia. I really love him, always have, always will. Can’t help it—he’s my Achilles’ heel, and you can’t help who you love, can you?”

I smiled. “No.”

I brushed my hand over Catherine’s work again. It was simply beautiful, the more so for being unfinished. It remained an enigma, a mystery: Its absences preyed on the mind, and wasn’t that what love was all about? Even so, there was still one mystery I had to resolve. I lifted my eyes to Anna again. “I really need to know what happened to Catherine,” I said.

D
OWNSTAIRS IN THE
bar, Anna ordered drinks—a glass of white wine for her and for me. Idriss surprised me by asking for a beer.

“Another transgression,” I teased him as she went up to the bar, but he looked pained.

“It
is
Friday. Perhaps I should have water instead….”

Michael chose this moment to stride into the bar. Great patches of sweat had darkened the seersucker shirt: He looked hot and annoyed. His glance slid past the two foreigners seated at the table in front of him and fixed instead on his wife. “Scotch, and better make it a double!” he demanded, seeing her at the bar, and the bartender— obviously recognizing a man in desperate need—put aside the beer bottle in his hand, grabbed a bottle of whiskey, and immediately poured out a large measure. “My feet are killing me. I’ve been to
every bloody hotel in Rabat looking for the damned woman, and she’s not at any—”

“Hello, Michael.”

He spun around so fast that half the liquid in the tumbler he had just been handed splashed onto his shoes.

“Good for your blisters,” I said childishly, and Anna stifled a laugh.

He stared at me, then at Idriss, and a nasty, knowing look dawned slowly on his face. “You didn’t waste any time going native, did you?” he said unpleasantly.

Idriss rose from his seat, the turban adding inches to his already considerable height.

“Sit down, Michael, and stop making an exhibition,” Anna said severely. I could imagine her talking to a junior employee in such a tone, but it was a surprise to hear her take it with Michael. “This gentleman is Idriss, an expert on the city and its history.”

“Idriss el-Kharkouri,” Idriss supplied sonorously.
“La bes.”
He inclined his head, then touched his palm to his heart.

Michael regarded him suspiciously, then rudely turned his back on him. “Where’s the book, Julia? I’ve come a long way to get it.”

“Julia and I have come to an arrangement,” Anna said smoothly. She passed a glass of wine to me and the beer to Idriss, who took it with a
“Shokran bezef,”
playing the Berber guide for all he was worth.

Michael narrowed his eyes at her. “What do you mean, ‘an arrangement’?”

“Where are Robert Bolitho’s letters, Michael? I can’t find them.”

“You didn’t think I’d leave them lying around the room for any thieving Arab to steal, did you? They’re in the hotel safe with instructions for no one to remove them but me.”

This was a different Michael from the one I had thought I’d known, a nastier, more anxious version. Seeing me with Idriss had certainly stung him, and the thought gave me a certain small and unworthy satisfaction.

“Well, run along and get them,” Anna said, taking his whiskey from him and wiping the base of the glass with a napkin as she might dripping milk from a child’s bottle. “Go on.” She waited until he had gone, then leaned across the table to me. “Here’s my promise. I’ll give you the letters if you’ll let me take the book, for now. Our flight back is tomorrow, but I don’t think Michael will set foot on the plane without the book. However, I promise you—and Idriss can be my witness—that it remains your property to do with as you wish, and we’ll exchange the letters and the book when you get back, as long as you’ll come to the V&A with me to authenticate the altar cloth. Is that a deal?” She held out a hand.