Almost, Thomas said, “Oh most disgusting of urchins, is it needful that you do that in my quarters?” But he remembered in what manner those chambers had come to be his quarters, and the memory checked him. Often it was like that. On the surface all was as it had been before that first evening in Cairo. But that small painful scene had left scars, and there was a shadow of constraint between them, at least on Thomas’s side, that had not been there before.
So now he merely stood and looked at the boy, straight brows raised a little, and waited to be told what had brought him there. He had not long to wait. Tussun looked up and grinned. “My mother is holding yet another of her receptions this evening, and I am the bearer of her invitation to it — Come.”
Thomas was tired from a long day in the saddle, trying to instil into Tussun’s cavalry the rudiments of a controlled charge; in which he was not helped by the fact that, natural horseman though he was, and trained now in Arab ways of riding and horse-management, his years in the British army had been served in a foot regiment. Also he was out at elbows with life for certain reasons of his own, and in no mood to go to a reception, especially at a moment’s notice. He played for time:
“The Vicereine does me too much honour, but I am in no state for a lady’s salon.”
“I can see that — and smell it,” Tussun agreed. “Your orderly has warm water in your sleeping quarters, and your feast-day clothes laid out. And it will take your mind off whatever it needs taking off. Go now and get clean and beautiful. I’ll wait.”
“Your mother cannot even know that I exist. This is all your idea, isn’t it?”
“No it is not! Oh I have spoken of you to her, but it is entirely her wish that you should attend this reception.” Tussun grinned. “My mother always likes to meet my friends, in case they are undesirable.”
Thomas checked in the act of slipping his bandoleer over his head. “What does she do if they are undesirable?”
“Nothing really, except to point it out to me. She tries to remember that I am a grown man and free to choose my companions. But at least she feels that she is forewarned.” Tussun wagged his head on his seventeen-year-old shoulders, as though he were a grey bearded philosopher, but his eyes were dancing slits. “Women … One must keep them happy. Hurry now, or we shall be late.”
8
Ever afterwards the Vicereine’s reception stuck in Thomas’s memory as having been held, somewhat uncomfortably, at the meeting point of two worlds. The chamber that formed its setting belonged to one world: a beautiful room where the interplay of lamplight and shadows made a fantasy of Moorish arches and slender columns and the delicate intricacy of window frets and the Damascus silken coverings of the cushion-piled divans around the walls; while the gilded curlicues of the French tables and occasional chairs, all acanthus scrolls and sphinxes, and the fragile bird-and-flower enamelled coffee china came from another world entirely. And everywhere Thomas, standing with Tussun just within the entrance, was aware of an uncomfortable clash between the two.
“Presents from the Ottoman ambassador in Paris,” Tussun whispered with delight. “Are they not horrible? The letters say that they are identical with the furniture in the Empress’s apartment at Malmaison; could this be true?”
Thomas shook his head. He had never been in the Empress’s apartments at Malmaison, but he found it hard to believe that there could be such ornate confections of ormolu and black onyx anywhere else in the world.
The room was already crowded, with Turks, Albanians and a few Mameluke officers and senior Egyptian officials, seated on the damask-cushioned divans, while on a chaise longue set on a low dais at the far end of the chamber the Vicereine reclined with her ladies about her, bright as a cluster of tropical birds.
The evening’s entertainment trickled by against a background of conversation kept artificially low and monotonous. The delicate china cups were replenished again and again by tall Nubian slaves, looking somewhat out of keeping with the peaceful occasion by reason of the great curved scimitars they wore. And every now and then someone among the guests would be summoned by a cat-footed official to approach the dais and speak for a few minutes with the Vicereine before, at a delicate movement of the head which probably, Thomas thought, went with a gracious smile behind her yashmak, he bowed and retreated to his place on one of the divans, while someone else took his place before the Vicereine.
In due course Thomas’s turn came, and Tussun swept him off to be presented. He found himself bowing a little stiffly before the graceful, indolent figure on the dais, careful not to come too close. (“Remember not to try to kiss her hand,” Tussun had said. “Our women are not curtain-hidden like the wives of the desert sheikhs, but it is not permitted that any man not their husband or close relatives should actually touch them.”)
“My Mother,” Tussun was saying, “allow that I present to you Ibrahim, my friend and the training officer to my regiments.”
The Vicereine wore only the half yashmak, leaving bare the upper part of her face and Thomas met the remarkably level gaze of a pair of eyes that were lion-tawny like her son’s. The gaze was disconcerting, it was so long since he had seen a woman who looked at him openly in that way; but the voice behind the thin silken veil was sweet and warmly throaty. “I am so glad to receive you, Ibrahim Effendi. I have heard so much of you from my son.”
“Madame, I am deeply honoured,” Thomas said.
“My son tells me that you are from Scotland.”
“Yes, Madame, from Edinburgh.”
“I have read of your beautiful and most unfortunate Queen, Marie Stuart, La Reine d’Ecosse did they not call her? And of your gallant Prince Charles Edouard, who defeated two English armies more than fifty years ago.”
“Before he himself was defeated in the end,” Thomas said. “My grandfather was out with — fought for — the Prince, and spent twenty years in exile in France after the defeat, forfeiting his own small family estate.” He noticed as he said it, with a wry inner amusement, that he was doing his best to assure the Lady Amina that he was a suitable friend for her son; and saw her eyes narrow in answering amusement, as though she perfectly understood this. They spoke together for a few moments more, Thomas becoming more and more aware as each moment passed, of the girl seated on a cushion at her feet. He guessed that she must be Tussun’s sister, the Lady Nayli; but he had not been presented to her, and so judged that it might be bad manners to look at her direct. Yet he was aware through every fibre of his being that she was looking at him, much as he had known sometimes in the desert that he was being watched by something or someone just out of sight.
“This must be such a strange world to you,” the Vicereine was saying. “May I hope that your life will be happy here among us. We shall look forward to talking with you again, and to hearing more about your Scotland — my own land is a mountain country too.”
Thomas bowed again, and turned away. As he did so his quickly passing glance was caught and held for an instant by the girl Nayli. He had an impression of black eyes, long-lashed and beautiful, under a forehead of milky velvet, and wings of smooth black hair springing from under a seed pearl embroidered cap. Only for an instant their sight-lines locked:, then she lowered kohl-painted lids, and he was free and walking back with Tussun to the place he had left.
But afterwards, looking back on his first taste of Egyptian polite society, it was not the Lady Nayli’s eyes he chiefly remembered, but the hot blue gaze of Aziz Bey, whom he had found watching him too often for comfort ever since their first meeting at El Jizzan.
“What did you think of my sister Nayli?” Tussun asked as, the reception over, they made their way across the palace forecourt.
“I took care scarcely to look at her,” Thomas said, watching the moths fluttering in the pool of light from a doorway lantern. “You did not present me to her, and I thought maybe it would be ill manners — against the custom.”
“She watched you,” Tussun said. “But then Nayli never did care for good
manners, or for the custom, or much else, except doing what best pleases her. Ah well, you will get a chance to look at her in a little while. I am to take you to supper, so it’s not worth your while to go back to your own quarters; you had best come back to mine for now.”
“This also is your doing, isn’t it,” Thomas said, as they turned in through the arched doorway under the lantern. “And I have no wish to be thrust upon the Lady Amina for your whim.” His tone made the words sound less harsh than they might otherwise have done.
“No such thing! It was arranged from the first that I was to bring you to supper after the reception if she approved of you. And she does, so I am. Besides, there’ll be an old friend of yours there.”
“Colonel D’Esurier?”
“Not this time. Too busy with his guns for the Sudan expedition. Oh Tho’mas, I wish —”
Thomas checked a moment at the foot of the stair. “Not Donald MacLeod?”
“Still in the Delta, so far as I know.” Clearly Tussun cared very little for the whereabouts of the other Scot, “No, your Captain Zeid ibn Hussein.”
“Zeid! What is he doing here?”
Tussun shrugged. “Ask my father. They seem to have been together, my brother Ibrahim also, most of the day.”
An hour later Thomas and Zeid came face to face before the threshold of the Vicereine’s private apartments, and embraced joyfully then stood back at arm’s length to gladden their eyes with the sight of each other.
“Zeid! I did not know that you were in Cairo until Tussun Bey told me one hour ago! How is it with the Bedouin Horse?”
“It is well with the Bedouin Horse. And with you? They tell me that the thing is done, and by the Grace of Allah you are of the Faith.”
“I am of the Faith, yes.”
“And how are you named?”
“I am called Ibrahim, and I begin to grow used to it, but it is strange to lose one’s own name.”
“To the few of us who were your friends in the time before, I think that you will always be Tho’mas,” Zeid said.
Each with a hand still on the other’s shoulder, the two of them followed Tussun past the guards on the doorway.
The supper party was a very small one. Apart from the Vicereine and her daughter and younger son, only Thomas and Zeid and a burly dark-faced man with a sabre scar slashing through one eyebrow who was captain of the Vicereine’s Albanian bodyguard; and the night being warm and humid, cushions and low tables had been carried out into the inner court of the old harem, which the Viceroy’s ladies had taken for their private apartments, though they were in no way restricted to them, as women of earlier times had been. Small lamps hanging among the branches of rose and laurel and oleander shed a soft light that stirred a little with every movement of the air, and gave to the scene a faint magic which it would not have possessed within doors.
Slaves brought basins and ewers of rosewater for them to rinse their hands, then brass trays of kebabs and vine-wrapped dolmas and sweet saffron-flavoured mutton, surrounding the soft brown mounds of rice.
Thomas, making small neat balls of rice with his right hand only, sent grateful thoughts across the table to Zeid ibn Hussein doing the same on the far side, who had taught him the table manners of his new world during those months in the desert.
He was still taking care not to look at the Lady Nayli with too much attention, but it seemed that it was permitted now to glance at her, and answer her when she spoke without looking away, for both the other guests as well as Tussun were including her easily in the conversation round the table, and little by little he began to do the same. Both ladies had laid aside their veils altogether, the Vicereine to reveal a strong face, full-blown rather than fleshy, broad boned and clear eyed, with a warmly generous mouth. The face of a woman who would rule her household so skilfully, the iron hand hidden in its velvet glove, that they would seldom realise that they were being ruled at all. Thomas remembered that she was reputedly the person who, of all those surrounding him, had the most influence over the Viceroy.
The first thing he noticed about Nayli with her face unveiled was how young she was. At the reception, with only her kohl-painted eyes to judge by, he had thought her older than himself. Now she looked to be little older than Tussun, a girl with a charming wilful face, an unformed childish mouth that showed little white teeth, almost like milk teeth when she laughed; and too much eye-paint on her lids.
The meal had ended with dates and dried figs and honeyed pastries, the coffee and the violet sherbet went round again; and when the men returned from the evening call to prayer, the little group in the lantern light melted into new shapes, leaning back for greater ease of digestion or forward in the eagerness of talk.
An argument which, so far as Thomas could make out, seemed to have something to do with the Turkish occupation of Yannina had broken out between the four Albanians. It had been conducted in French at first, like the rest of the conversation at the supper table; but as it grew more fiery it slipped more and more into their native tongue. Thomas and Zeid, feeling that they had no part to play in what seemed to be rapidly becoming a kind of enjoyable family quarrel, seized their chance and drew back a little, settling themselves under a pomegranate bush to talk more quietly of their own affairs. News of the desert and the city were exchanged, and inevitably before long the talk turned to the Sudan expedition, plans for which were now definitely taking shape.
“Your report has borne fruit, then,” Thomas said.
“Mine and a good few more.”
“It will give you your chance.” There was raw envy in Thomas’s voice for the unguarded moment.
“That is as Allah wills.” Zeid played gently with the amber-studded hilt of his dagger in the way he had when there was neither hawk nor saluki to caress. “Your chance also.”
“Oh no, not mine. I heard two days since — the Viceroy, as you will know, is taking a personal interest in the choice of all officers for the expedition, and it seems that I am to continue here as training officer for the new enlistment.”
“I wondered what the sorrow was,” Zeid said.
“Does it show so clearly?”
“Only to those who know you well. My friend, there will be need of good training officers.”
“It is a task for older men than I.”
“And it matters so deeply?”
“Yes,” Thomas said.
He was watching the four figures in the full glow of the lamplight, one in particular: Tussun, leaning forward into the heart of the light, bright eyed, flushed and fiery with argument, his hands flashing in expression of his thoughts.
Tussun was to go with the expedition; he and his two regiments, under the overall command of Ibrahim Pasha. Tussun looking at this moment younger than his not quite seventeen years, wearing his youth like a kind of bloom upon him; the sideways fall of the lantern light throwing up the strong vein at the side of his neck, where life and youth could so easily be spilled out.
“Remember he is older than he looks at this moment,” said Zeid’s voice at half breath beside him. “Old enough to be fathering sons; and has seen weapons used in anger before now.”
Thomas looked round to meet his friend’s faintly quizzical gaze.
“Oh I know, he can look after himself well enough.”
“But not so well as you could look after him? Thomas, my friend, your presence in the Sudan will not turn aside a tribesman’s bullet, nor will your absence let it fly more truly to its mark. All that is as Allah wills.”
“Blessed be the name of Allah, the All Merciful.” Thomas turned the conversation, which had strayed a little too near the quick for comfort. “It is not that alone. You will be going. All the men I have worked with. I shall be mewed up here, training new recruits not to drop their musket stocks on their toes. What chance is that?”
“There’ll still be need for good training officers. Let the glory wait for another day.”
Thomas was staring safely down at his own hands now, not rea
lly listening. “I have been wondering whether it might serve any purpose if I were to make a personal application to the Viceroy.”
“None at all, I should think,” Zeid said, “but there could be no harm in trying. Tomorrow’s audience after the war council would be as good a time as any.”
“My brother says he does not think that you can play the zither,” said a girl’s voice above him, and Thomas looked up to see the Lady Nayli standing over him, and got hurriedly to his feet. “Is that true?”
“I fear that it is true.”
“Then can you sing? We have worn the argument threadbare and now we are in the mood for a little music-making.”
“Truly — I have no skill —” Thomas protested.
“Everyone can sing if they try,” the Lady Nayli informed him, laughing. “Come back out of those unsociable shadows and sing for us now.”
“Nayli, do not tease him!” the Vicereine added her warm throaty voice to her daughter’s clear high one. “But truly — one of your own Scottish songs? Will you not try for our pleasure? You are among friends, and I can promise that you will not find us an over-critical audience.”
“Madame — if it is a command —”
“It is a request.”
And therefore the more difficult to refuse without appearing churlish. Thomas found himself drawn back into the central group, trying desperately to think which song out of the Edinburgh streets and parlours of his boyhood would please the Viceroy’s ladies. It had to be one that he could manage without making more of a fool of himself than need be.
Oddly, it was Nayli’s words that gave him the answer. “Come back out of these unsociable shadows.”
Come back — Come back …
“I will try,” he said. “This is a song that was made by a lady — Lady Nairne — for Prince Charles Edward, though indeed he was dead long since when she made it. It tells him how much his own folk long for him, and asks him to come back.”