The candle suddenly danced; it was down to its final inch. “You’d say they’re not planning on freeing us, then?”
To my astonishment, she began quietly to sing, in a sweet contralto:
Here’s a first-rate opportunity,
To get married with impunity …
The smile on her shapely mouth contained no humour whatsoever. “After all, what is the Gilbert and Sullivan opera about, ultimately, if not the permanent abduction of young English women?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
GIRLS: We have missed our opportunity
Of escaping with impunity.
I GAPED AT Annie as if she’d begun to speak in Pashtu (while the ghost of Miss Sim whispered urgently in my ear: “Oh! burst the Haram—wrong not on your lives / one female form”). I hastily pulled together my thoughts. “I refuse to believe that La Rocha’s pirates are in fact English aristocrats fallen on hard times who wish to marry English wives.”
“That’s rather too much to hope for. And I wouldn’t count on a declaration of loyalty to the Crown to soften their hearts, either—I think Adam and Jack have already picked out me and Edith for their respective harems. As for the others, no doubt a bouquet of young yellow-haired English roses would fetch a high price on the open market. Some of the mothers perhaps not so much.”
“You’ve seen The Sheik too many times. Read too much Ethel Dell.”
“Perhaps. But can you honestly tell me that such things do not happen?”
In all honesty, I could not.
“And … the men?” I asked.
“If they’re out to re-establish the Pirate Republic of Bou Regreg, slaves are a necessary detail. Although they may simply decide that females are so much easier to move and to hide than men are.”
I took a deep breath, then another. The candle guttered, nearly spent. “So we can’t get just the women away.”
“That would not be the ideal solution.”
“How long do you suppose we have?”
“A few days. No more than that. The message will have to be delivered, a response given. If the European officials who receive the demand have any wits at all, they’ll require some proof that we are both here and alive. Perhaps La Rocha will free someone, to carry the word.”
A pleasanter thought than his sending the word with a corpse.
With that cheery notion, the candle went out. We sat, two women on a darkened rooftop, in a city of pirates, in a country where Europeans had the most tenuous of holds.
Oh, Holmes: What have you got me into now?
We went down to our beds a short time later, periodically illuminating our way by Annie’s matches. I do not know about her, but I slept little, feeling pressed around by responsibilities and ruthless men.
The next day, heavy in spirits and heavier from lack of sleep, I forced my feet to take me downstairs to break my fast with the others. I was grateful for the strength of the Moroccan coffee.
Mrs Hatley was the first to voice the uncomfortable question on every woman’s lips, as if placing a bowl on the table before us. “Are we still being kept in?”
Annie responded before I could, putting on an act of severe irritation that drowned the apprehension in the older woman’s voice and set the tone for the day. “Oh, isn’t it vexing?” she declared. “I mean to say, I adore Mr Fflytte and have nothing but respect for his work—and I’m hugely grateful for the job, of course—but one would think that he and Mr Hale might have made the arrangements for our filming in good time. Haven’t they filmed in France, for heaven’s sake? They should have known how mad the French are for bureaucracy. Forms for everything, passports if one wants to travel to the next ville, permission to paint one’s front door—I imagine he’s having to put up monetary assurance in case we chip the paint on some wreck of a building! Why, I remember—”
And as she picked over the croissants, rejecting several in dissatisfaction, she recounted a tale of bureaucratic excess encountered by a troupe of visiting players in the wilds of rural France. When Annie had finished her much-embroidered story, Edith’s mother chimed in with a similar complaint. Celeste contributed a pointless but impassioned history of a job she’d had in a French production, when the producer had withheld a portion of her pay due to a tax question.
Soon, the cold dish of impending prison had given way to a nicely heated stew of resentments. Then, before it could boil over into action, Annie rescued us again. “I say, I know just what we should do with this extra day we’ve been given! If we can’t rehearse with our pirates, why can’t we rehearse without them? We know their scenes as well as they do—half of us can dress as pirates, the rest of us can practice around them. What do you say?”
With the alternative being another day of polishing nails and reading aloud, the actresses welcomed the opportunity. And I was not in the least surprised when someone suggested—Annie again—that we might as well be in costume.
The house-keeper and her two maidservants were alarmed when we stormed the upstairs lumber-room and began to hurl garments into the air. In suitably fractured French and one or two words of Arabic, I made her to understand that we were making a stage-play, dressing up, non? And although I could see that the three of them were shocked by the sight of young women in the dress of native men, honestly, what could one expect from the English?
It did, however, mean that we should be prepared, were we to need to leave the house disguised as so many males.
I participated in the action, since having the mothers, the seamstress, the make-up girl, and me in the stead of pirates let more of the girls act their proper rôles. But after lunch, when the sun grew warm, most of us curled up on our sunny cushions and slept.
I came sharply awake just before three o’clock, hearing men’s voices. And not just men: Holmes. I sat upright, and saw the others doing the same.
June listened, then jumped to her feet and started to shout out a greeting to our neighbours—and three of us hushed her instantly: Annie, Edith, and me.
I hastened to explain. “They may not wish for us to talk to each other over the fence,” I told her. “Moslems, like the people whose house this is, are very fussy about keeping boys and girls separate.”
A ridiculous explanation, but one they seemed to accept. After all, who knew what sorts of rules heathens might have? So voices stayed down for a while, on both sides of the wall, until Annie (what a very useful associate!) sat down at the piano and began to play. The girls joined in, with that most English of Gilbertian odes, sung in the opera when propriety and sympathy conflict and the only option is to talk about the weather:
How beautifully blue the sky,
The glass is rising very high,
Continue fine I hope it may,
And yet it rained yesterday.
Annie continued on to various songs, concentrating on the girls’ choruses. When she ran out of those, she hesitated, but rather than repeat herself, she started one of the duets sung by Mabel and Frederic. Bibi’s voice rang out, strong and high, and after a time, we heard Daniel Marks from the other side of the wall, hesitantly, then more surely as the guards gave their tacit permission by not raising their guns or their fists.
It made for quite a cheerful matinee, Sullivan’s tunes and Gilbert’s words spilling over the scruffy and no doubt bewildered little town. Annie avoided the piratical songs, and the constables joined in with gusto on their song about the policeman’s lot—
When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling,
When the cut-throat isn’t occupied in crime,
He loves to hear the little brook a-gurgling,
And listen to the merry village chime.
—although I had to wonder if her playing did not hold just a touch of spite as she crashed into the chords of the policemen’s other song:
When the foeman bears his steel (Tarantara! tarantara!)
We uncomfortable feel (Tarantara!)
It may have been my imagination that heard a slight falter in Anni
e’s hands on the keys at the words Go to death, and go to slaughter.
The moment that song’s chorus of blood-thirsty supporters and highly reluctant police ended, a violin swirled into life, sawing madly through the double-time tune of the Sergeant-Major’s song. Annie didn’t even try to catch him up, and when Holmes started to sing at the end of the verse (his accurate if nondescript voice was suited to the song’s limited range), he delivered the words at a rate nearly as fast as the instrument’s playing. The audience on both sides of the wall listened intently to the feat, although a few smiles of appreciation gave way to faint frowns as some of the words seemed to go awry.
He ended the tune with another round from the violin, and applause broke out.
“Didn’t the words—?” Isabel’s mother began, but her next words were drowned out by Annie as she launched into one of the songs from Pinafore. Which, being English, they all knew as thoroughly as they knew those from Pirates.
I left the smile on my lips and continued my slightly off-the-beat nods of the head (were I to join the chorus, it might set the dogs to howling, and drive the more sensitive souls from the rooftop) as the matinee edged into soiree and the cool sea air began to move in. In the middle of a song (this one from Gondoliers, a heartfelt rendition of And if ever, ever, ever they get back to Spain, they will never, never, never cross the sea again, they will never, never, never, never, never, never, never—) the voices from next door broke off in a series of protests and then shouts.
The piano stopped, the women’s voices dribbled into silence, as we waited, hearts in throats—but there were no gunshots, no cries of pain, it was merely that the guards wanted their supper.
Being a more civilised household, we took afternoon tea instead, but the meal that followed soon afterwards was not spurned as being too early. A day of excitement and fresh air took its toll on the younger girls and on their mothers, and to my relief, Holmes’ added words to his rapid-fire recitation had been forgotten.
Except by Annie.
When the tagine had been polished off (chicken this time, with pistachios) and the mint tea drunk, when conversation had lagged, lamps had been shut down, and everyone had retreated to their beds with a selection (carefully vetted by the mothers) from the book-shelves, a faint tapping came at my door, and Annie stepped inside.
Her eyes went to the window, although she had to look closely to see how I had removed and replaced the mortar. She sat down on the stool and gathered her hands in her lap.
“The words in that song were for you?” she asked.
“Various code-words and references, yes. Which, being Holmes, means I’ve probably missed half of them and got the meaning wrong of others, but the general gist of it seems to be that Hale may not be in league with La Rocha and Samuel, that La Rocha is delivering the ransom demand this evening, that I need to be ready, and that I’m not to stir from my room tonight.”
“You got all that from a few words?”
“And the way they were sung. There’s a mathematical— Ooh, never mind, it would sound like lunacy, and probably what he meant to tell me was that they’re all hale and hearty, that they’re eating raisins, and do I have a pen he can borrow?”
“The communication of true minds, I see.”
“I take it you’ve never been married? If the ransom demand has been delivered, I shouldn’t imagine it will be long before the government’s machinery gets under way.”
And indeed, the government’s machinery presented itself in our drawing room—or the Moorish equivalent, the courtyard—bright and early the next morning, in the form of two diplomats in their full battle regalia of high collars and chest-medals.
Any plans we might have laid went over the edge seven minutes after they were shown in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
MABEL: Young Frederic was to have led you to death and glory.
POLICE: That is not a pleasant way of putting it.
“YOU’VE WHAT?” I cried in horror.
“Oh, good!” exclaimed the others, along with “Too right!” “That shows him!” “God save the King!” (for some reason), and even “Alan and Bert will rescue us!” (from one of the more excitable girls, momentarily forgetting that our police constables were fictional).
The two diplomatic persons had disturbed us at our breakfast, with half of us still in our dressing-gowns and the other half wearing various of the exotic dressing-up garments from the day before. However, such was the urgency of their mission, they merely cast their eyes away from our state of déshabillé and spoke in the direction of the lemon trees.
Clearly, the two had concluded their negotiations over who would speak first before they came here, because once the introductions had been concluded, the French gentleman cleared his throat (this being, after all, a country governed by France) and informed us that ransom had been asked for our safe return to the English community, and M. Dédain and Sir Morgan Brent-Williams had been dispatched (hastily, to judge by Sir Morgan’s poorly shaved chin) so as to bear witness that we were well. (In other words, that we hadn’t already been tipped into the sea.)
This was the first inkling the majority of the women present had that our prolonged presence within these four walls was not merely a side-effect of Randolph Fflytte’s inefficiency. Mrs Hatley set down her tea-cup with a clatter and said sharply, “Young man, don’t be absurd. We’re not being held here. We are—” but her admonishment was drowned in the voices of the others, shocked and eager and in the end acknowledging that, indeed, we had not been permitted to leave. I kept a close eye on young Edith, lest she blurt out that one of us anyway had gone a-wandring, but she had her lips mashed together so tightly, the words stayed in.
Sir Morgan then cleared his throat to request silence. His own speech repeated much of what M. Dédain had said, which suggested that his frown during M. Dédain’s monologue was not due to disagreement, but because he was hard of hearing. His audience was beginning to grow restless in its desire for originality when he drew a piece of paper from one breast pocket, a pair of reading spectacles from another, and began to read off our names, pausing after each to locate the respondent. The last name was Graziella Mazzo, and it took a while to convince him that she had left the crew under her own authority back in Lisbon. The news caused some consternation and shaking of heads, but it was finally admitted that neither English nor French citizens could expect to have any control over an Italian danseuse.
At the end, satisfied that we were all (with the regrettable exception of La Graziella) alive and present, he folded away his page and said, “I understand that the men of your party are being kept in separate quarters. We shall go there next. But rest assured, ladies, that we shall soon have you away from this foul and dreadful place.”
The songbird in the tree chose that moment to launch into a gentle ripple of notes, rather belying the keenness of our suffering, but the King’s representative went on, undeterred (or perhaps unhearing). “These rascals imagine that they can play fast and loose with British citizens, but we shall show them otherwise! We have already taken their chief into custody—a rough-looking type with a scar, can’t imagine how you ladies stood having him near.”
“You’ve what?” I cried in horror.
“Oh, good!” exclaimed the others, and our contrary opinions filled the courtyard. I stepped over the chorus of dissenting opinion to seize the man’s arm. “You mustn’t do that. If you arrest him, it will make the problem far, far worse!”
His stout expression wavered as his eyes drifted to his companion, and I was not surprised when he said, “Madam, I might have agreed with you, had it been my decision, but as M. Dédain explained to me, the French have their own way of dealing with such things.”
It was on the tip of my tongue to point out that “their own way of dealing with such things” might well duplicate the bloody Fez uprising of 1912, but voicing my apprehension risked plunging the gathering into the tedium of hysteria. Instead, I permitted him to go on with hi
s little speech, his awkward enquiry as to whether we had any … particular needs (to his patent relief, the needs expressed were no more intimate than fresh cow’s milk and a packet of English biscuits), and his promise to convey any letters we might wish to send home with utmost dispatch, ending with a heartfelt declaration that His Majesty’s Government—and that of France, but perhaps not that of Italy—would not rest until we were safely in the bosoms of our families again. And that he would be back on the morrow.
The women, naturally, erupted with questions.
“How much ransom are they demanding?”
“The picture will still go ahead, won’t it?”
“Will we be paid for our time here?”
“Mr Fflytte wants—”
“Mr Hale said—”
“My agent won’t—”
“My family will—”
“I can’t possibly go into—” Sir Morgan protested, blanching at the thought of discussing finances with ladies.
“I’m sure they’re asking more ransom for me,” Bibi said.
“You!” Mrs Hatley was outraged. “They’d throw you in for nothing.”
“Why, you—” Annie and three others dove in to separate the two furious divas, allowing the alarmed diplomats to beat a hasty retreat for the door, with me foremost among those in their wake.
I hated to do it—oh, how I hated to do it!—but with this many innocents being caught up in a well-meaning but potentially catastrophic process, I had to speak up. As Sir Morgan turned to pound on the door, I thrust forward to murmur as loudly as I could into his ear, “You need urgently to consult with Mr Mycroft Holmes in the Treasury Office. Urgently!”