The changing tide from the quarterdeck was most worrying of all.
Before leaving Lisbon, La Rocha’s attitude towards Fflytte and Hale had been condescending but amiable: Apart from the one uncomfortable outburst in the first hour, La Rocha had listened politely to the requests and demands of his English employer, albeit with the amused eyebrow of an expert faced with the enthusiasms of an amateur.
The farther south we went, however, the further Fflytte and Hale were demoted towards the ranks of the actors. Fflytte seemed to have forgot that La Rocha had come inches from killing him with the belaying pin. Instead, when not actively engaged in filming, our director either ignored the quarterdeck entirely, as if having that portion of the ship—his ship—forbidden to him was no more unusual or irritating than being barred from the parrot’s perch atop the mainmast, or else he approached that sanctum sanctorum with bows and scrapes, to ask our Captain’s thoughts on some twist of the picture’s plot, to enquire of Samuel what the function of that line there might be.
Holmes and I were not the only wooing being done on Harlequin, not by a long shot.
Hale approached the demotion of Englishmen by going quiet. He watched the Captain and his lieutenant as they came and went, studied their interactions with the crew, and rarely spoke directly to them. He stopped what he was doing whenever Fflytte approached the ship’s masters (which was rarely when they were on the quarterdeck), and frowned at his cousin’s subservient posturings.
He did not have to say aloud what he was thinking: Why is the ship’s owner given no say in the running of his vessel? One might imagine that La Rocha not only ran, but owned Harlequin.
The thought went far to explain Hale’s outburst during the night.
As we neared the coast of Africa, the attitude of the two pirates shifted from patronising to near-scornful. And not just La Rocha and Samuel—I noticed Adam turning away from Fflytte with a faint sneer; later that day, young Jack did the same.
It was worrying.
It would have been positively alarming had the pirates demonstrated the same low-grade aggression towards the girls. But towards all of us women, they held an air of distracted kindliness, as if we were pretty toys who were not to be played with too energetically. An attitude I found personally infuriating, but it was preferable to most of the alternatives.
That last afternoon at sea, Holmes and I managed another brief conversation without having to perch fifty feet in the air. The coast of Morocco was approaching, and all those not actively engaged in running the ship were gathered along the port-bow to watch. So long as we kept our voices low and our expressions those of two people murmuring sweet nothings at one another, we should be all right: there were no port-holes underneath us, and not even Samuel or Annie, between them omnipresent on board, could come upon us from seaward.
We sat shoulder to shoulder on the starboard rail; there was no need to feign my welcome of his physical proximity.
“They’re up to something,” I said, fluttering my eyelashes.
“La Rocha and Samuel, with Adam, Benjamin, and Earnest,” he replied with a smile.
“And Jack.”
“Adam’s younger brother.” He said it as if it were obvious, although he couldn’t have figured it out much before I had.
“Samuel’s sons, you think, rather than La Rocha’s?”
“Adam looks more like Samuel than Jack does, but they all have much the same accent. However, I agree, they’re probably both Samuel’s.”
“Gröhe must know as well. If it was so urgent they had to sneak him in under our noses, he has to have some purpose. But what?”
“Were I to venture a prediction,” he said calmly (heaven forbid he should be caught out in a guess), “I’d say we’re about to be kidnapped.”
A cold finger ran down my spine: Robinson Crusoe had it easy, when it came to piratic captivity. “There are some real horror stories about Moroccan prisons.”
“This is 1924, not 1624,” he said, without a trace of doubt in his voice. Which made me lean into him a touch more, in gratitude. “And although La Rocha is unstable and capricious, I’d say he lacks the mental pathology needed to put a collection of blonde girls into chains.”
“I’m not sure I’d say the same about Samuel.” I gave a shy duck of the head, for the sake of our onlookers—which, considering our topic of conversation, felt even more lunatic than usual.
“Were Samuel in charge, Russell, I should be worried indeed. But La Rocha will take care to leave us in cotton wool, for the time being. Don’t worry, holding captives for ransom is a common enough occupation here.”
“Is it?”
“Oh yes. Sir Harry Maclean, who later became the Sultan’s commander in chief, was held ransom for a time. Twenty thousand, I believe they got for him.”
“Francs?”
“Pounds.”
“Ouch. I can’t see anyone parting with that much for this lot in a hurry.” I thought of having to spend months locked up in the company of Bibi and Annie and Edith … “What do you think about taking the ship?”
He smiled—his own smile, not the smarm of the Major-General. “Have I mentioned recently, Russell, that I find your confidence anodyne to an old man’s doubts?”
I snorted. “The day you doubt yourself is the day I sprout wings and fly with Rosie. You and I could take the ship if we wanted.”
“Not by direct action.”
“We can’t put the others at risk, I agree, even though low cunning outdoes open warfare any day. Still, two against sixteen …”
“Three if—”
He bit off what he had been about to say, and I turned to him a face that, had anyone been nearby, would have cast our affectionate act into serious doubt. “Let me guess: You were going to tell me that Mycroft has a man on board.”
“I think he may.”
“So why didn’t he tell you?” I demanded.
“Kindly don’t look so murderous, Russell, we’re supposed to be love-making here. That’s better, if a trifle sickly. He didn’t tell me because I haven’t talked with him.”
“You haven’t—” I closed my mouth, pushed away from the railing, and stalked across to the other side, staring unseeing towards the brown line across the horizon. When I went back to him, land was a mile closer and things were somewhat clearer. “You didn’t actually say that you came to escape Mycroft. He never got to Sussex, did he? There were no builders in. Yet he made arrangements for you to come here?”
“My brother may not be aware that he made the arrangements. He kept sending messages to say he’d been delayed, that he would arrive the next day. I thought nothing of it—I’ve had sufficient experience with British builders to expect that any dealings with them will go awry—but when I received your letter on Wednesday and telephoned to his flat, there was no answer. The building’s concierge said he’d been gone for days. I don’t know where he is or what he’s up to, but I didn’t want to wait for him. I forged a document and commandeered his resources.”
How jolly: another warrant for our arrest.
“But you agree that he has a man here?” I asked.
“I’d say the machinations for your getting on board were too complex for Scotland Yard. They carry the aroma of Mycroft.”
“Well, his agent is unlikely to be one of the pirates, since La Rocha brought them. And the film crew have mostly been with Fflytte for a while. That leaves the constables, of whom Clarence and Donald are regulars. What about Alan? He has the watchful air of one of Mycroft’s men.”
“Even if all four of the remaining constables are with us, there are too many innocents standing in the way of harm.”
Plus, La Rocha and Samuel had no small degree of low cunning themselves. And more ruthlessness than either Holmes or I could summon.
“Are you suggesting that we let them continue with their kidnapping?”
“I think it would be more dangerous to move against them now, when they are clearly braced for challenge, than late
r when they feel secure at their success.”
“Holmes, I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“If nothing else,” he mused, “it will be a novel experience. I have been abducted before, but never within the setting of a Gilbert and Sullivan play.”
I considered our situation, and was hit by a thought that made me chuckle.
Holmes looked at me sideways. “I should be glad to hear any aspect of the situation that is merely humorous.”
“A moving picture based on a story of fictional pirates taken over by real ones, and the picture itself hires false pirates to play pirates, who turn out to be real? Fernando Pessoa would die with happiness.”
We, however, in the absence of our walking conundrum and translator, could only wait with interest for the announcement of our abduction to be made. The handful of pirates that we had decided were in on the plot became ever more tense as the coastline grew before us. The girls began to bubble with the thrill of the adventure. The rest of the pirates happily demonstrated their skills in the rigging to the girls below and to the other ships in the vicinity. The tan horizon line became a shaped coast with long white breakers and a tight collection of stone walls and flat rooftops.
No announcement was made.
We came within shelling range of the city, then rifle shot, then bow-shot, without being informed that we were prisoners.
Finally, the water curling back from our hull took on a tinge of brown, from the waters of the Bou Regreg river that divided bustling modern Rabat on the south from the enclosed and xenophobic Moslem Salé to the north. In its heyday, the river had provided a neat refuge for shallow pirate hulls, while keeping at a distance the deeper draughts of the royal navy. Over the generations, the river had silted up, permitting the passage of small fishing boats and ferries—until the French occupation began, and improvements were made.
The French and English governments would no doubt be thrilled to learn that their European modernisation schemes had enabled the latest generation of Salé pirates to bring thirty-four European prisoners up to the city gates in modesty and ease.
BOOK THREE
IN THE KINGDOM OF BOU REGREG
November 27–30, 1924
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
PIRATES: So stealthily the pirate creeps,
While all the household soundly sleeps.
MEANTIME, THE STEADY breeze serenely blew / And fast and falcon-like the vessel flew …
Morocco grew near. The girls grew more excited. Holmes and I grew tense with waiting. The odour of sea and ship changed to dust and donkeys, but no word was said of our change in status from film-crew to hostages.
The closest we came to a formal announcement was the look of hard triumph La Rocha shot towards Samuel when the Harlequin’s anchor rattled down.
That, and the cock-a-whoop yells of the two boys, both of them up in the rigging and thus temporarily clear of their father’s admonitory fist.
Anchor down, sails furled—and the whimsical pirate flag long stowed away—I wondered yet again if we were making a terrible mistake. Morocco had risen up against Christians, a dozen years earlier. Salé was the country’s most closed town, mistrusting of foreigners, with a long history of encouraging pirates.
It did not help that the view in front of us was dominated by a cemetery. Ochre city walls rose up on both banks of the blue-brown river, wrapping a town of pale buildings, domes, and minarets on the left—Salé—and of tawny colour—Rabat—on the right. Both were attractive enough on their own, pleasingly exotic, and girded by olive and fig trees. However, the ground between the Salé walls and the pounding Atlantic breakers was occupied by the dead, paved over with thousands of tombs and gravestones, pressed against each other like a gorget necklace of the dead around the town.
I seized myself by my own metaphorical collar. Oh for heaven’s sake, Russell, don’t be ridiculous. This is Gilbert and Sullivan, not Fritz Lang. “Weary Death” could surely have no place beneath this gorgeous sun and those white, curling waves.
Boats had already begun to approach, a veritable queue of brightly painted waterborne taxis coming to gather us away. Such efficiency was unexpected, but I refused to find it ominous. Holmes and I exchanged an eloquent glance, then I allowed myself to be shepherded with the rest of the women-folk, piled into the boats, and rowed ashore.
The girls were thrilled by the whole enterprise, and although some of the maternal chaperones seemed taken aback at their surroundings, none of them thought it odd that no European figures waited to greet us, just as once on terra firma, none remarked on the sensation of enclosure. I looked at the city gate, and saw a gaping mouth. They looked at the city beyond it, and saw a great adventure. The palm-trees were exciting, the donkeys charming, the men in night-shirts and turbans amusing. They even interpreted the large armed men at our sides as servants—although one had only to follow the direction of the men’s gazes to see that they were watching us, not watching out for us.
Every step, every turn, made me less pleased with our decision. But short of digging in my heels and forcing open confrontation here and now, it was too late. We were inside the city; soon, we were inside our prison.
I had thought my companions giddy as we were closely escorted through the narrow labyrinth of the town, zigging and zagging past weavers of mats and sellers of leather slippers, sidling around lengths of embroidery thread strung between a tailor and his child, admiring the heaps of red onions and trays of flat bread and buckets of glistening olives and heaps of fly-specked sweets, breathing in the odours of cardamom and chilli and leather and wet plaster and kif, ducking under the hairy goatskins of a watercarrier and exchanging curious glances with women covered head to toe in ash-coloured drapes, passing under the reed-thatching that turned the streets into mysteriously dim tunnels and by a hundred heavy nailed doors and house-fronts, their few windows high above street-level. The town struck me as relatively quiet, as bazaars go, but it thrilled the girls. However, their excitement as they walked, and the difficulty of keeping them from straying, was nothing compared to their reaction once they were ushered into the place that was to be our prison.
Their cries of astonishment would have drowned out Rosie.
Even I had to admit that as gaols went, it would be difficult to imagine one more comfortable. The word sumptuous came to mind.
Arabic architecture turns its back on the world, to create a cool and cloistered universe inside each set of walls. I was standing in a tiled garden. The house rose on three sides, layers of galleried passages that gave both a sense of intimacy and a plenitude of fresh air. Three levels up, a honeycomb of silvery wood turned the sky into blue tessellations, mirroring the fine blue-and-white designs beneath my feet.
The gallery railings were bleached by time, the complex amethyst and vermilion designs on the ceilings had sheltered generations of inhabitants, the gilding was a faded glory, all the more pleasing for its age. Over the intricately carved double doors leading into the house itself, mother-of-pearl inlays teased the eye inside.
The mosaic paving stones of the courtyard climbed up along the sides to form tiled benches scattered with rich cushions, and at the back into a splashing fountain surrounded by garden—this style of house, riyad, means “garden.” A pair of lemon trees were espaliered against the courtyard’s fourth wall, growing tall towards the sky-light; one could smell, if not see, the blossoms. Tiny birds that had been startled by the influx of noise now began to venture from the branches.
A head popped over the carved railing on the first floor, looking down at us: June, who cried, “The beds are so pretty!”
Above her, another head appeared—Kate, adding, “There’s a marble bath in here!”
And at the very top, her face visible through the holes of the wooden roofgrate, was (who else?) Edith: “There’s chairs! On the roof!”
At the thought of children on the rooftiles, all the mothers gave exclamations of dismay and scurried for the stairs, followed less urgentl
y by the others.
I remained in the courtyard. A bird’s chirp punctuated the voices of the innocent that were now ringing out from all the nooks and crannies of this open-sided house. Prison? Hah! Holmes and I were mad. We had drastically misread the intentions of La Rocha and his companions. The insane logic of W. S. Gilbert had infiltrated our brains and turned them to blancmange, making us see pretend pirates as real, fictional threats as actual.
It would appear that this entire affair was instead aimed at wringing every last possible franc, pound, and rial out of Fflytte Films: The cost of hiring the most luxurious available house in Salé; the cost of hiring large and probably unnecessary guards; the price of the luscious odours trickling from a kitchen somewhere in the hidden depths; the cost of the logs stacked high beside the burning fire and the price of the army of cleaning women who had recently got the house ready (carpets still slightly furled at one edge; the faint trace of cleaning fluid beneath the saffron and lemon blossom) and no doubt the repairs to plumbing, wiring, and roof that had been tacked onto the rent for our benefit, along with tuning the decorative French spinet piano and replacing the bed-coverings and sprucing up the wall-hangings and …
How long before the door-bell rang and the first in an endless stream of carpet-sellers and slipper-makers and kaftan-fitters and knick-knack vendors came to ply their wares to the unwary?
Only one way to find out.
I went back to the door and grasped the handle. It did not open. I rattled it a few times, in the event it was simply stuck, and was about to bend to examine the mechanism when it flew in towards me. I gave a wide smile to the two large men standing without, then made to step down into the street.
And they stopped me.