Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

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 …em›

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 urgently 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.

I brushed away the large hand spread out before my face, but the other man moved in front of me as well. Which made for a lot of man in a little doorway.

“I need some items from the shops!” I said, assuming all the effrontery of an English lady. “Shops, you understand?” Clearly they did not. “Mercado? Bazaar? Suq?” They understood that last, it being Arabic. However, I did not care to reveal that my grasp of that tongue went beyond a handful of words. “What do you call it – the medina?” I leant forward, touching my fingers to my sternum and speaking as if to a deaf man or an idiot child. “I … need to go-” I directed my fingers in a walking motion, then pointed: “-to the medina.”

He shook his head and jabbed his own grubby finger towards the interior of the house. When I did not move, he pointed more emphatically; had I been a man, he would have given me a shove and slammed the door in my face.

Being a good Moslem, however, he hesitated to touch a strange female. That did not mean he was going to let me pass.

Then the marginally smaller of the two spoke up, in the same accented Arabic I had heard on the Harlequin. “You’re sure this is not a man?”

“He would not make that mistake.”

“If she were my sister, I would beat her for wearing those garments.”

“Don’t speak to me in that gibberish,” I snapped, offering up a mental apology to the two cousins who had taught me the glorious language of the Qur’an and of Ibn Kaldoun. “I demand you permit me outside.”

The first man loomed into the threshold, forcing me to move away, then dropped back again to the street and yanked the door shut. I slapped at its solid surface a couple of times for effect, but I had little need of further conversation with the two.

No: not the fevered imagination of a pair of detectives. We were prisoners, in a delicate-looking, highly effective, exotically beautiful, golden-cage of a cell.

What an interesting situation.

I spared a moment’s thought for Holmes and the others, hoping that the male prisoners would be treated with as much care.

But as things now stood, I was the sole protector of a score of British females, plus Edith.

The most urgent order of business, therefore, was to claim a bed before all the good ones were taken.

* * *

A closer look at the house suggested that it was – or, had been – the home of a wealthy Moslem Francophile. In an upstairs storage room were dusty tea-chests filled with the good china, the good linen, and an assortment of Moroccan galabiyyas, kaftans, wraps, and footwear sufficient for a small village, but underneath the top-dressing of French paintings, French piano, and French side-tables lay the furnishings of a traditional Arab home.

Once I had claimed a bedroom, I snooped through all the other rooms within the fortress-like outer walls. The timber grid covering the inner courtyard was, I was relieved to see, both closely built (its holes would permit the tiny birds to pass, but exclude neighbourhood cats) and sturdy enough to keep a small person – an Edith-sized person, say – from tumbling thirty feet to the tiles. There was even a canvas cover, furled out of the way, designed to exclude rain and keep in warmth. Around this weather-silvered sky-light was a veranda, open to the air and furnished, as Edith had said, with chairs and divans. The roof, too, was walled.

Three of these upper walls were chest high. Two of them looked down over sheer drops to the street, the third onto a heap of rubble where a house once stood, its stones now in the process of being pilfered down to its foundations. The fourth wall, to the west, was higher than my head. It suggested that something lay on the other side.

While the others enthused over the intricate mosaic of domes, minarets, laundry lines, palm-trees, and the pot-plants and divans of neighbouring rooftops, I dragged a bench over to the high wall, chinned myself on the wall-top to peep over – then fell with a squawk when a man on the rooftop twenty feet away snapped a shotgun to his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

Twenty women squealed and clutched each other. They stared, goggle-eyed, at me, sitting at the base of the wall. I stared goggle-eyed back at them, standing in a knot.

“Er,” I said when I found my voice. “I’d say our neighbour doesn’t wish us to look over that wall.”

“Someone shot at you!” half a dozen of them exclaimed.

“If he’d been shooting at me, he’d have taken a big chunk out of the wall. I’d say it was intended as a warning.”

The mothers gathered their chicks together and clucked their way to the stairs. Annie looked at the high wall, at the bench, and at me.

“Our neighbour has a shotgun?”

“A Purdy, by the look of it.”

She blinked. “You had time to see the make of gun?”

“I do a bit of shooting.” No point in telling her I’d had a Purdy pointed at me before. No point in telling myself that, either – only time quiets a racing heart, not logic and reassurance. I brushed myself off, and dragged the bench back to where I’d found it.

Still, the fellow’s presence confirmed my suspicions: The men’s prison was adjoining our own, and care was being taken to ensure we remained apart.

Not enough care, of course – but just as our earlier decision to delay rebellion was tied to the presence of innocents, so now was my ultimate freedom of movement linked to my fellow prisoners. And although the indomitable Mrs Hatley might wrestle her length over one of these walls to be lowered by rope, the more buxom mothers of Isabel and Fannie would never make it.

In the high chamber of his highest tower

Sate Conrad, fetter’d in the Pacha’s power.

The first muezzin began his sunset call to prayer from a nearby minaret. Fettered in the pirates’ power, I propped my arms and chin on the southern wall, listening as other voices joined in from both sides of the river, drowned out regularly by the boom of waves. This was a quiet, snug little town around my feet. Salé marked the farthest reaches of the Roman empire-Sala Colonia-long before the pirates established their republic. The present rulers, the French, lived mostly in the modern European community, across the river in Rabat. Although Salé’s former violent xenophobia had been suppressed by the French, and manacled Christian slaves no longer worked in the gardens and fields, this town kept to itself, thinking its own thoughts behind its pale walls.

There would be no helmeted police constable strolling past on the street below.

This meant that I should have to cultivate an Irregular force from within.

I followed my nose, down the stairs, past the courtyard (tea had been laid out – Moroccan tea, steaming glasses stuffed with mint that instantly transported me back to a goat tent in Palestine – along with trays of sugar cakes and nuts and fruit and crescent-shaped biscuits) and through a sitting-room followed by a dim, heavily draped dining room with a table big enough for us all, past a small office space (no telephone – I would have been astonished to find one) and to a swinging door.

The kitchen was occupied by one woman in simple green Moroccan dress, two young girls similarly robed, and our resident snoop, Annie. Other than Annie’s anachronistic frock and uncovered hair, they might have been occupants of a Medieval alchemical laboratory, furnished with retorts and alembics. The woman disappeared in an explosion of fragrant steam; the girls took one look at my trousers and short hair and covered their mouths to giggle; Annie gave me a grin.

“Doesn’t this smell absolutely fabulous? I’ve been trying to get them to tell me what it is, but we don’t seem to have a language in common.”

The odour spilling out of the pots was, truly, intoxicating. My very soul opened to the spice-laden air, and I found I had moved closer to the cook, to stand within the penumbra of steam. I smiled, to show that I meant no harm.

“Are we to have dinner, then?”

Of course she did not understand, so I handed out another of my miser’s stash of Arabic: “Dinner soon?”

It took no pretence to stare blankly at the flood of heavily accented Arabic that washed over me, but it seemed to be positive, and I began to leaf through my other languages to ask, “When?”

French, of course – although the cook, who had understood the question, spoke little of the tongue, and that mostly monosyllabic. But she got across the answer, which was that dinner would be served in two hours.

Then she made a gesture that clearly invited us to take ourselves away.

Outside, Annie said, “Well, it’s good to know that we don’t have to produce our own meals in that kitchen.”

“It is a bit primitive,” I agreed.

“I didn’t know you spoke – Arabic, is it?”

“I know about ten words, picked up on a trip to the Holy Land. Bazaar, dinner, bread, please, thank you, ma’alesh – which is sort of like, oh well-and How much is it? I’ll need to arrange for a Moroccan Mr Pessoa, to help with trips into the bazaar.”

“Oh good,” she said. “They’ve left us some tea. Ooh – mint?”

I drank my syrupy tea and checked on the arrangements for beds. When the door opened an hour later and our trunks and cases were unceremoniously tossed inside, I said nothing to draw attention to the sound that followed: the door being wedged shut from without. When dinner came – magnificent heaps of exotic foods that the cook told us were couscous and tagine (a rice-like dish, and lamb with dried apricots cooked in a massive low crockery bowl topped by a sort of Chinese hat) with shredded salads and plates of pickles and relishes that had the mothers making dubious noises even as they helped themselves to second servings – I said nothing to dispel their easy assumption that the following evening we would share such foods with the men. And when yawns began to creep in and the women creep away to their richly furnished beds, I wished them sweet dreams, and said not a word about the guards on the door.

Permit them a night’s peace, before anxiety moved in.

* * *

The room I had claimed as my own was small and dark and although it was clean, it had no decoration on its whitewashed walls. A servant’s room, conveniently placed for a shouted summons from one of the ornate bedrooms nearby. A servant’s room, with little but a mat and blankets for sleeping. A servant’s room, with a window too narrow for most European frames.

All the windows in the house were firmly shuttered, either by decorative wood latticework or, in two of the lower rooms, workaday iron bars installed so recently the black paint was still tacky. This, too, went with the Moslem architecture, and the others did not even question it, since the inner walls were so patently free and open to the lightest breeze.

I dozed, waiting for the household to succumb to sleep before rising from my servant’s cot and turning my attentions to the window.

Being on the upper floor, this was a window not formerly barred. The mortar holding the bars was thoroughly set, but not as deep as it might have been on a real window.

And being women, no one had given us, or our possessions, a more than cursory search.

I divested myself of the hardware I had worn about my person all that day, ending by loosing my trousers and unwinding the length of silk rope that had saved my life more than once over the years (although it did have a way of making me look rather stout). I held a small looking-glass out between the bars to be certain that the street below was empty, then unfolded my pocket-knife to the blade used for prising stones from a horse’s hoof, and set to.

By three in the morning, the bars were down.

By five minutes after three, I was dressed head to toe in garments borrowed earlier from the house’s lumber-room, my spectacles tucked into a pocket, my face and hands darkened with dust from the window-sill.

By ten after three, I was on the street.

It is one of my favourite sensations, that of stepping out of doors without leave. The very air smells sweeter – as every child knows and most adults forget – whether in London or Morocco. I paused to savour that aroma of freedom. And also to orientate myself in relation to the muted sound of a violin that had begun to play some hours before.

In my borrowed djellaba, spectacles off and blonde hair covered, scuffing along in run-down and overly large sandals and with a moon too small and street-lamps too sporadic to give me away, I was taken for a local boy. As I went past our two guards, who spent their night pacing up and down the exposed sides of our prison, I greeted them in an Arabic onto which I had fastened something resembling the local accent. I did the same when I came to the guards outside the men’s prison.

“Good evening,” I mumbled politely.

“What are you doing out at this hour?” the shorter man demanded.

“My mother needs something from her sister.” A speech I had prepared earlier, in case.

“The boy’s running errands for his mother,” he called to the taller guard.

“Must you listen to that noise all night?” I asked, with a gesture upwards: Holmes, too, had managed a room over the street, although his window was so narrow as to be impassable.

The man answered with a gutter curse, a new one to me. “When I go in tomorrow morning, I’m going to put my foot through the accursed thing.”

“You will do a service to us all,” I noted sweetly, and went my way. When the violin came to the end of its song, the music did not resume.

For two hours, I quartered the compact walled city, locating the gates, committing to memory the thoroughfares (some of which were wide enough for a motorcar) and the lanes (in which anything but a motorcycle would stick fast). The odours and débris underfoot told me which streets held leather-workers and which sold vegetables, which stalls were coffee-houses and which belonged to barbers. The pound of the sea was the loudest noise I heard, apart from one yowling cat, the clatter of dropped pans from a baker’s shop, and a vicious-sounding argument from an upper room between two women in a language I did not know.

Almost the entire time was spent on paving stones where the buildings came near to touching overhead, or where the sky was kept out by reed thatching. At half past five, with the sky growing light and my heart pounding with the conviction that I would not find the correct house in this mole’s maze, I succeeded in retracing my steps to my lane, to my rope, and to my window-sill. Inside the servant’s cell, I scrubbed off the dirt with a cloth I had wet earlier for that purpose, and set the bars and mortar back into place.

I fell into bed just as the day’s first call to prayer rang out, well pleased with my outing.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

GIRLS: At such a time of night as this, so very incompletely dressed …

FORTUNATELY, A HOUSE full of young women does not wake early. I managed a solid three hours of sleep before the sound of voices roused me, and I dressed – wearing a skirt today – to go downstairs.

A banquet of breads, fruit, various spreads, and boiled eggs had been laid out in the courtyard. The air smelt of baking, of oranges, and of fresh-watered soil. The fountain was playing, the small birds dipping in and out.

My companions noticed none of it; clearly, one of them had attempted to leave, and met the same treatment I had the previous afternoon.

I came across the blue-and-white tiles – Miss Mary Russell, the firm’s fix-it girl – and they pounced on me, all talking at once.

“We’re being held prisoner!”

“Annie felt like going for a walk and-”

“-wanted to see the medina-”

“-see the river-”

“-the market-”

“-tried to go out and these rude individuals at the door-”

“-terribly rude, they positively bullied her-”

“I’ll admit, I did feel more than a little threatened.”

“-no English, of course-”

“What was Captain La Rocha thinking, to give us-”

“-none of the servants speaks a bit of-”

“-surely someone in this town-”

“-she tried to insist-”

“-pushed her, just put his hand-”

“Imagine!”

“-native person, acting like-”

“-really most threatening-”

“Miss Russell, you must-”

“-we insist-”

“Please, tell us you’ll-”

“-have to talk to Mr Fflytte-”

“-have to do something-”

I raised one hand. Like a conductor with his orchestra, the chorus of outrage went discordant and trailed away.

“Thank you,” I said. “I hope you slept well?” The chorus threatened to break out again, so I waved my outstretched palm, and continued, “I personally did not sleep very well, I suppose the lack of a ship’s soothing motion seemed odd, so I should like some coffee before the day gets much further along. However, yes, I am aware that we are not being encouraged to leave here just at present. I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Mr Fflytte chose to film these portions of the movie in Salé rather than Rabat, for the sake of realism. Had it been Rabat, which has a large European community, you should have been quite secure walking about at all hours. However, Salé is a small town with a high degree of suspicion regarding outsiders. I imagine that Captain La Rocha did not wish us to be made uncomfortable by the attentions and curiosity of the inhabitants. I’m sure that when we go out, he will provide us with bodyguards. In the meantime, you’ll have to admit that we are most comfortable here. Now, can anyone tell me, is this coffee as good as it smells?”

My phlegmatic attitude, more than my words, gave my fellow prisoners pause for thought. Twenty pairs of eyes followed me to the richly laden table; twenty pairs of ears heard the ting of silver on porcelain as I stirred in the cream; twenty stomachs decided that they might deign to try one of those croissants and some of that pale butter.

Annie seemed to have got over her affront at being ill-treated by the guards. She loaded a plate and filled a cup with tea, then brought them over to where I was sitting, on the wide, decorated edge of the fountain.

“I’m sorry you were frightened,” I told her.

“I was more angry than anything else,” she said. “And it’s frustrating, to not be able to speak to anyone. Even the maid and cooks just stare at one blankly when one asks for another bath-towel.”

“I’d have thought an actress would be skilled at making herself understood.”

“True, but some things are a touch embarrassing. And more complicated forms of communication, such as asking why one is not permitted to leave a door, can be difficult.”

“Yes, I’m sure we’ll find that this is all merely an oversight on Mr Fflytte’s part. Just as he overlooked the problems of arriving on the eve of the Moslem Sabbath.”

“Do you think so?”

I can turn a bland face on anyone short of the Holmes brothers and have it believed. “What else could it be?” I asked mildly. Before she could answer, I went on. “I for one intend to make the most of our paid holiday here, and gather the sun’s rays on the rooftop. And perhaps I ought to take a glance at those French novels in the sitting-room, before the younger girls spot them.”

I abandoned my empty cup and plate to do as I had announced – and did in the end notice one or two books that might be inappropriate for young girls, although I should have to read them to be certain. I carried them to the rooftop and made a show of setting up for a leisurely day of relaxing in the sun. The others, after some hesitation and grumbling, decided to throw over their complaints and take my lead.

By mid-day, we had a ladies’ salon going atop the house. In one corner, Bonnie and Harriet were taking turns translating one of the more innocent French novels aloud to an audience. Some of the mothers had uncovered a supply of embroidery floss and were teaching two of the girls (who in the normal course of events would have nothing to do with needlework) to pick out a design, an experience that became more enticing when I descended to the kitchen, figured out (using gestures and raised eyebrows) which of the inhabitants had been responsible for some of the towelwork, and dragged her up to demonstrate Moroccan designs. Celeste and Ginger were to be in a stage-play when we returned to England and were helping each other with their lines; Edith was teaching Kate and June how to whittle; and Fannie and Linda, looking like a pair of schoolgirls, were playing a cut-throat game of chemin de fer.

Several times during the day I wandered down to the kitchen, hoping, if not to find fodder for a band of Irregulars, at least to forge some kind of relationship with the ladies there. Each time, either Annie was already in residence (scrubbing vegetables and stirring pots and laughing merrily at the impossibility of communication while creating a language of hand gestures and facial expressions) or she would appear a few minutes later. In the end, I abandoned the kitchen to her. Which was probably for the best, since she seemed less likely than I to burn down the house or be the cause of an epidemic of food-poisoning.

Lunch was brought to the rooftop, served to us like a picnic without the champagne or the ants. Afterwards, Doris excused herself to go wash her hair, and when she came back up, she carried the looking-glass from her bedroom wall, that she might better primp and admire the fall of her thick, wavy locks. One glance, and six of the others rushed for the stairs; soon, our tiled picnic grounds more resembled a boudoir.

When the two kitchen girls climbed the stairs with a tray of mint tea, shortly after the mid-afternoon chorus of muezzins, they lingered, glancing disapprovingly at the cigarettes but frankly gawping at the sea of yellow hair. Doris spotted the two girls and waved for them to come over. Soon, she had them brushing her hair and giggling behind their hands at the way it sprang back under the comb.

They left, heads together and talking far too quickly for me to follow their exclamations, then returned a few minutes later with a basket full of paraphernalia, followed by the cook.

The cook searched the rooftop of Europeans at play until she spotted me. I did not understand most of her words, but using a handful of French and grabbing my hand for a demonstration, she managed to get across the gist of her message. I explained to the others.

“They’re offering to do henna painting on us. See that goo that looks like mud? That’s pure henna. When you trickle it onto the skin and let it dry there, it stains intricate patterns. It’s not permanent, one scrubs it away after a few days. I’ve seen it before, done for weddings and such. It’s pretty. Anyone interested?”

June jumped forward, but her mother said she could not; as they were arguing over the child’s right to be a canvas, Linda stepped up, and Bonnie.

We kept the three ladies of Salé busy for a couple of hours, trickling arabesques of mud onto hands, arms, and ankles. When the trio descended below to their labours, leaving a bevy of Europeans oohing and aahing over the orange-brown tendrils woven over their pale skin, I looked around and was hit by a startling thought: I was in a harem.

And if I stayed here much longer, I should die of boredom.

* * *

The weather stayed remarkably warm, considering it was nearly December. The wind died away, permitting us to take our evening meal down in the open courtyard, and if some of the girls and all of the mothers grumbled at the food, which again was spiced and coloured and possessing unrecognisable components from the soup to the dessert, some of us enjoyed it immensely. I polished my plate and sat back, replete.

The courtyard was lit by small lamps, above the table and in the trees; the earlier brilliant crimson sky had given way to a panoply of stars.

“Shall we take our tea on the roof?” someone suggested: I was surprised to find it had been I.

The cook-housekeeper studied our charades of climbing stairs and sipping cups, and nodded her agreement. We gathered armfuls of cushions, and carried them up, and up again, covering every surface with padding. We lay there with tea and coffee, the lamps shut down, and counted stars.

A short time later, the violin started up, clear despite the distance.

This time, the melancholy squealing was replaced by a lively tune. Twenty-one British women heard the tune; half of them shot upright and exclaimed, “The Major-General’s song!”

And so it was, the proud proclamation of the father of thirteen blonde daughters, declaring his knowledge of matters vegetable, animal, and mineral. The jaunty tune rang out over the dusty pirate town, hushing its inhabitants and its prisoners alike, and when it was finished, the instrument started in on Mabel’s song to Frederic, “Poor Wandering One.” To my astonishment, a woman’s clear soprano rang out in accompaniment, and we looked around to see Bibi singing to the heavens. I hadn’t known the woman could sing a note, much less knew the score of the comic opera.

After that, those who knew the words followed Holmes’ violin into a variety of the chorus numbers, and although I neither joined in nor appreciated the musicality, I did enjoy the sensation of hearts meeting across the rooftops.

There came a pause, while Holmes took a drink or tightened his strings – or silently fought off irate guards, for all I could tell – and Annie sighed. “One might wish for a number of strong men to bring up that piano from the sitting room.”

Again, I spoke without thought: “Who needs men?”

Of course, once the idea was out in the open, the others fell on it, and although I tried to withdraw the possibility of hauling the thing up the stairs, nothing would do but we all trooped down to examine the possibility. And, in fact, the instrument had legs that could be detached, so with a series of mattresses to turn the stairs into a ramp (a bump-filled ramp, true) and a quick transformation of bed-sheets into hauling ropes, the project was on.

It was heavier than it had looked, but not so massive that we couldn’t shift it. The turns in the stairs meant several great gouges out of the plasterwork, and I had a bad moment when I (on the downhill side, steadying it with a shoulder) felt the load wobble and gather itself for a rush towards the ground floor – one of the bed-sheets had slipped. But the weight did not crush me, and the other ties held, and in the end, we made it all the way to the top. There we reattached the legs, and set the instrument with its back to the opening over the courtyard, so that the sky-light’s canvas tarpaulin could be extended to protect it against the night mist.

The piano’s arrival on the rooftop brought a great outburst of feminine triumph that silenced the violin, and no doubt made for a number of puzzled male expressions behind barred windows. Annie pulled up a stool, and began to play.

Separated by walls and armed guards, the violin and the piano combined, joined by a chorus of women. I waited tensely for the guards to storm in and quiet us, but either they were lovers of music themselves, or their instructions had not covered what to do if the firengi women next door burst into song.

And then a little after ten o’clock, the violin stopped. The women valiantly kept going for a song or two, but in a pause, Mrs Hatley sighed and said that she was tired. Annie’s hands remained at rest in her lap, and within the quarter hour, the piano was shrouded, the pillows gone, the rooftop lay empty and silent as the city around us.

I could only hope that the silencing of our other half had not been too brutal. I needed to speak with Holmes, which would be difficult if he’d been knocked unconscious.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

SAMUEL: Your silent matches, your dark lantern seize,

Take your file and your skeletonic keys.

I HAD SPENT much of the day dozing in the sun, so as to be fresh for the evening’s activities. Holmes’ violin the night before had given me the location of his room; tonight, there was no need for the street. I waited impatiently for the house to grow still, then changed into my boy’s garments and eased open the door.

As I’d hoped, a cautious venture of my head over the high wall confirmed that the neighbouring rooftop was deserted, the guards safely indoors with their prisoners. I padded over to look at the door, finding to my irritation that it was bolted, not locked. It is difficult to pick a bolt. Fortunately, I had other means of reaching Holmes.

I looped my rope around a convenient sturdy lump – not as convenient as it might have been, unfortunately, placing me a good three feet to the side of where I wished – and walked backwards down the wall, as silent as I could be although the outside guard was nowhere in sight. As I came even with Holmes’ window, just ten feet down from the roof level, a pale hint of motion came from the side of the metal shutter: his waving fingers, confirming his presence.

I made myself as comfortable as one can be on a thin rope dangling twenty-five feet above cobblestones, and reached to slide my fingers through the narrow gap.

Two warm and oh, so welcome hands swarmed up to take possession of mine, and I felt happy for the first time in days. Well, perhaps happy is not the exact word, but I no longer felt quite so alone. I scooted over, searching in vain for an external anchor that would take some of my weight, and ended up stretched across the stones to hold my face to the window covering.

Before I could speak, a voice as much felt against my face as heard by my ear recited, “ ‘What is that form? if not a shape of air, Methinks, my jailor’s face shows wond’rous fair!’ ”em› Perhaps Holmes, too, had once laboured under a Miss Sim?

“Thank you, Holmes.” I, too, breathed the words into the blackness within.

“Good evening, Russell. I regret having to ask you to seek me out.”

“All in a night’s exercise, Holmes. I could see that your windows are considerably more secure than ours.”

“A number of the fittings of the house make me suspect that this was at one time the harem. And, as you no doubt could infer, the search of our bags was scrupulous.”

“Well, they seem to be concentrating on you men – we have no inside guards beyond the housekeeper and her two maids. It would appear that our pirates meet few females with a streak of independence.”

“And a climbing rope,” he added.

“Extraordinary, isn’t it? The only thing they removed from my bag was the revolver. They must have thought my pick-locks were a manicure set.”

“You have your pick-locks?”

“Indeed I do. Shall I-”

“That would be a great service.”

I worked the leather pouch of tools from my pocket without dropping it, thumbed out a tool by touch, and slid it through the metalwork. He thanked me, and got to work.

“I heard a shotgun yesterday,” he remarked.

“A warning shot, literally, to let us know we were not permitted to look over the wall that separates our house from yours. They seem to have decided that the lesson was well learnt, because there’s no one on your roof tonight. And you, are you all well?”

“Mr Fflytte is nursing a sore head after protesting against our confinement – not that the situation itself seems to trouble him, oddly enough, but he grew increasingly restive during the day, and when the guards finally opened his door he expressed his outrage, that our confinement will interfere with the making of his film.”

“That sounds like him. Do you have any- Aah.”

The lock mechanism gave its whisper of release, and I shifted so Holmes could push the shutter out. I studied the resultant hole.

“I believe I can get inside,” I told him.

“But the process will be slow, and I would not wish you trapped here.”

However, the open sill meant that I could transfer a portion of my weight onto the sill and off my hands.

“You were asking me if I had something?” he prompted, when I was settled again.

“Yes, do you have any of the pirate crew with you?”

“I think not, although our only communication has been brief tapping on the walls – someone knows Morse code, although three others only imagine they do, which rather confuses matters. La Rocha and Samuel were in the house earlier – my first inkling of their presence was a shriek that made my blood run cold until I realised it was that accursed bird. In any event, Hale was brought out to speak with them, for quite some time, but the conversation took place behind closed doors in a room on the ground floor. After the two men left, Hale’s voice shouted out that if we are obedient tomorrow, we shall be permitted to gather in the courtyard during the afternoon. That is the only thing I have heard from any of them.”

“Carrots and sticks.”

“Precisely. What have you learned?”

“The town is small and its walls and gates maintained. As you may have seen when you were brought here-”

“We saw nothing: Sacks were drawn over our heads. A certain amount could be discerned by hearing and by-”

“Holmes,” I interrupted happily, “I shall never again complain about men who believe in the incompetence of women. Thanks to my freedom, I can tell you that we are in the north-east quadrant of Salé, about a hundred metres in from the walls.” I described all I had found during the previous night’s wanderings: gates, walls, guards, the road out, the ferry; the layout of our house, the orientation of the adjoining streets, the heap of rubble to the side. I gave details of house and inhabitants, the distribution of the bedrooms.

Then I came to the more complicated part, which concerned the characters acting out their parts inside our tight little stage.

Four sentences into my analysis, however, Holmes stopped me. “Perhaps you had better go through that more slowly.”

The section of my body resting on narrow stone had lost sensation and my arms ached, but I could not bring myself to be impatient with him, since it had taken me hours with mental graph paper to map out the permutations of all that I had gathered on the rooftop harem that day.

“We knew on the Harlequin that Adam is smitten with Annie,” I began. “However, paying close attention to her concerns during the day, she responds to remarks concerning Bert-the-Constable with approximately the same ratio of interest as she does to remarks about Adam-the-Pirate, even though I’d have said that Bert was more intent on a friendship with Jack than on reciprocating Annie’s affections. Jack, on the other hand, would rather follow Edith about, being unaware that Edith is a boy.”

“Edith is a boy?”

I was pleased to find something he’d missed. “Didn’t I mention that? Yes, I found Mrs Nunnally plucking her child’s emergent beard. Beyond those specific links, various of the girls are interested in the young pirates and the young constables interchangeably – any young male will do – but I should say that Mrs Hatley-”

“Mother of June.”

“Right. Mrs Hatley appears to retain both affection and hope regarding Geoffrey Hale – although it could as easily be a sort of psychic contagion spilling over from her rôle as the pirate’s nursemaid, Ruth, since she also pets Daniel Marks, her Frederic, at any given opportunity.”

“And yet I should have said that if Geoffrey Hale is interested in anyone, it’s his cousin Fflytte.”

My numb hands jerked along the rope and nearly spilled me to the paving stones.

“Russell? Are you there?”

“Yes, Holmes, merely startled. You think …?”

“They would not be the first aristocratic cousins we have known in … that situation.”

“Except that Fflytte has a reputation as a womaniser. And is currently – well, not currently, but until Harlequin intervened – associated with the picture’s choreographer, Graziella Mazzo.”

“Which association appears to trouble Hale considerably.”

“But, Mrs Hatley, and June …?”

“A man’s tastes may change. Or they may be, shall we say, inclusive.”

I thought about that, about one or two times when I had found Hale studying his cousin with an expression difficult to analyse. “You could be right. But what about La Rocha and Samuel?”

“You suggest they may have a similar, er, affection?”

“No! I mean to say, I hadn’t thought of …”

“I should think more along the lines of the Barbarossa brothers,” he said firmly.

“The sixteenth-century pirates.”

“Aruj the elder – called Red Beard by Europeans – and his brother Kheir-ed-Din,” Holmes mused. “Aruj was a brutal fist of a man, and became the virtual ruler of Algiers. When he died, his brother took over, and consolidated their base of power. He was every bit as merciless as Aruj had been, but he was also a sophisticate, educated, capable of seeing beyond the reach of a pirate ship.”

“Holmes, the length of time I wish to linger out here is limited.”

“I suspect that we may be caught up in a re-establishment of the Barbarossa empire.”

“What, in this little place? The smallest gunship of the British Navy could flatten Salé in an afternoon.”

“With thirty-four European citizens within its walls?”

He had a point. “So how do we remove His Majesty’s citizens from harm?”

“Having had a plenitude of time in which to reflect, I believe I have identified Mycroft’s agent here.”

“You don’t sound terribly pleased.”

“It’s Bert.”

“Really? But that’s good, isn’t- Ooh. Bert, who may be fond of Samuel’s younger son. I could be wrong,” I offered.

“I, too, have seen reason to believe that there are emotional ties there, ties that could make Bert less than wholehearted in his support of an escape.”

“If he’s Mycroft’s man, he’d never side against his countrymen.”

“Not consciously, I agree, but a slip of the tongue? A moment’s hesitation?”

I dangled glumly and had to agree: Mycroft’s undercover agent had best be considered a broken reed, and should not be brought into any plans. “For my part, the only person on my side of the wall with a degree of native wit is Annie, and I consider her judgment clouded by affection for Adam. Certainly, she seems to have a suspect degree of curiosity about the actions of others – you saw how every time one turns around, there she is, blinking her pretty blue eyes.”

“It is true, beauty and reliability rarely go hand in hand.”

Which rather trod underfoot the compliment with which he had greeted me. “Thank you, Holmes,” I muttered.

“Beg your pardon?”

“I said, It looks as if it’s up to the two of us, yet again.”

I remained at his window for another ten minutes or so while we discussed options and signals, then reluctantly I told him that I had to go or risk falling. He ordered me to give him one hand, which he massaged back to life, then the other. Feeling restored, I dug out my pocket-knife and held it into the inner darkness, then set about climbing back up the wall to the rooftop. Behind me, the metal shutter swung shut on silent hinges, and I reflected that Holmes had contrived to grease them, probably with a pat of butter from his breakfast. That he had done so spoke of his confidence in me.

As I set my hands upon the rope, there came a melodramatic whisper:

“ ‘And noiseless as a lovely dream is gone. And was she here? and is he now alone?’ ”em›

I nearly fell off the rope laughing.

Warmed by his hands and his attitude, I walked up the wall to the rooftop. There I hung for a couple of minutes, peering over and waiting for motion, but the area was still deserted. I swung up and onto the rooftop, retrieved the rope and bound it around my waist, then clambered to the top of the high dividing wall to stretch my foot down for the bench, left against the wall.

Except that it was no longer there. Dangling, I craned to look over my shoulder, and saw two figures stand up from their seats on the bench, now ten feet distant.

They did not rush to seize me. After a moment’s thought, I let go and dropped to the roof, then turned to face my captors.

There came the scrape of a match, and a flame gave light to our tableau: Annie holding the flame to a candle, with at her side a smaller person. Oh, God: Edith.

All in all, I’d rather have confronted a pair of armed guards.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

SERGEANT: This is perplexing.

POLICE: We cannot understand it at all.

EDITH HAD DISCOVERED me missing first.

She, or he, had been lying awake in the room she shared – or, he shared … oh, dash it all, call the diabolical brat a female – in the room she shared with her mother, lingering over the day’s events and the basic dreadful pain of adolescence heaped high with the unutterable shame and anguish of being a boy in a dress, when she heard a faint whisper of sound from the hallway. By the time she dressed and figured out the person had been going up rather than down, I was no longer on the roof, and she was too short to reach the top of the wall from the bench-top.

Annie, whose attention had been caught by the sound of Edith going through two doors and up the stairs, caught the child arranging a chair atop the bench. And although Edith tried hard to convince her that it was the only place the mysterious person could have gone, Annie had the sense to keep Edith from throwing herself on top of the wall and, for all either of them knew, into range of that Purdy shotgun.

She tried to convince Edith that she had been hearing things, that there was no sign that any intruder had passed here, that the bench had, in fact, been against the wall when they went to bed (even though Edith was adamant that it had not been, and Annie herself not at all sure). In the end, she offered to sit with Edith and wait, thinking that half an hour of staring into nothingness would be enough to convince the child to return to bed.

But Edith was made of sterner stuff; although I had been gone over an hour, she’d been determined to wait me out.

“And so you did,” I told her in that jollying voice one uses towards children, which had about as much impact on her as it had on any other child.

“I’ll rat on you.”

“Edith, what kind of English is that! You’re not going to give me away.” The warning note was clear in my voice – although, with Annie standing there, I could not very well be more specific about my own side of the threat.

“I don’t care, tell them if you want, I’ll do the same on you.”

“Now, why would you do that?” I chided desperately. What could I use on the child to keep her mouth shut? I really did not want the entire household to know that I’d shinnied down the walls at night. For one thing, half of them would promptly demand that I take them along the next-

Ah.

“Do you want to go out?”

Her expression made for a sharp contrast to the warm little light Annie held, being cold and very adult. Idiotic question, she might as well have said aloud.

“I’m not going to take you over to the men’s house, because there are armed guards over there who might come at any minute. But the next time I go down into the town at night, you can come. If, that is, you don’t mind dressing up as a boy.”

“I-” She caught her tongue before it gave her away to Annie. “No, I don’t mind. When?”

“Probably not tomorrow night, but possibly the next.”

“That’s too long!”

“Sorry, but I’m not going to put everyone else in danger just to take you on an outing.”

“You’ll probably go without me.”

“I promise,” I said, and when the young face continued to eye me with mistrust, I added, “I give you my word as an Englishwoman.”

“The next time you go down to the street, you’ll take me, too?”

Annie started to object, but I put up a hand to stop her. “I will take you.”

“Then I won’t tell that you went away tonight.”

I put out my hand, and we shook on it.

“Now, you must go back to bed,” I told her. “And make sure you don’t go dropping large hints to the others tomorrow about adventures you’re going on. If they find out, I won’t be able to take you.”

“You have to come to bed, too!”

“I need to have a word with Annie.”

“But-”

“Go.”

Drooping and dragging her slippers, Edith slumped across the rooftop and through the door. I waited; eventually, it clicked all the way shut.

Annie, too, had stood waiting, and now she chuckled, and dribbled a bit of wax onto the bench to attach the candle upright. She settled herself across one end of it, and I straddled the other, wondering what I was going to have to promise this older foe.

“Don’t tell me you want to dress up as a boy and walk through the bazaar at night, too?” I asked her.

“You’re not as bright as I thought you’d be.”

“I beg your pardon?” My husband had back-handedly referred to my lack of beauty; now an actress was questioning my brains?

“I figured you’d have this all sorted in nothing flat, and we could all go home, waving the flag and cocking a snook at His Majesty’s enemies.”

“I-” I stopped. Oh Lord. She was right, I was being exceedingly stupid. “You’re Mycroft’s operative.”

She made the gesture of smacking her forehead, and gave me a grin that made her look both younger and more competent. “One of them.”

“Bert?”

“At least you caught that. Or should I feel proud, that I’m better than he?”

She was right: I was every bit as guilty as the others, overlooking this person because she was a woman – a very pretty woman. Still …

“How do you know who I am?”

“I recognised your husband. And I had heard about you, so when the two of you appeared, well, I figured you were on the same track as I.”

“Perhaps you should explain why you are here?”

“I’ve been working on this case for six months, so that-”

“Which case is that?”

“What do you mean, which case? La Rocha and his brother, of course. What other case is there?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“So you’re not here because Mycroft sent you?”

“Just at the moment, I don’t know that I would cross the street for Mycroft. No, I’m doing a favour for a Scotland Yard friend.”

“Extraordinary.”

“Extraordinary doesn’t begin to describe it. But you were telling me why you were here.”

It was a typical Mycroft assignment – if any of Mycroft’s assignments could be called “typical.” In early summer, Annie had been told to look into the activities of La Rocha and the man I knew as Samuel, with no suggestion as to how she might go about doing that. Taking up residence in Lisbon, she had spent several months in disguise, doing what amounted to keeping her ears open. Then a few weeks ago, a rumour circulated through the Lisbon hills that Fflytte Films was coming to do a film about – aha! – pirates.

She made enquiries and discovered the name of Fflytte’s local liaison: Senhor Fernando Pessoa, the man of many personalities, who clearly had played an appropriately diverse number of rôles in this unscripted little drama of ours. Annie arranged to fall into casual conversation with the translator one evening at his favourite drinking establishment, loosened him up with poetry and port, and steered him towards the topic of pirates, and Pirates. Once she understood the set-up (The Pirates of Penzance; filming on location; casting in London and in Lisbon), she took care to remind her new friend of a bit of local colour that might interest his English clients: Captain La Rocha.

With Pessoa hooked, she booked passage to London, flung off her false spectacles, bohemian clothing, and black wig, and got there in time to try out for a rôle in the picture.

Although she admitted to me that she was not much of an actress, she got the part (of course she got it, with her perfect skin, snub nose, and big blue eyes – had Bibi been at the casting things might have gone differently, open competition not being a welcome sport among actresses). Once back in Lisbon, she took care to keep away from Pessoa, and no one recognised the sweet-faced English blonde as the town’s dowdy but competent part-time type-writer.

“I assume Bert came about his part in the same way?”

“I think he bought off one of the constables who’d already been hired, and took his place.”

“There’s a lot of that going around,” I remarked, but shook my head at her look of enquiry. She went on.

“I was surprised to see him-‘Bert’-on the steamer in Southampton; the last I heard he was in Ankara. But you – if you’re not after La Rocha, why are you here?”

I could see no reason not to tell her. “I’m looking into Fflytte Films. Everywhere they film, they’re followed around by criminal behaviour. They make a film about guns, and no sooner do they move on than a dozen revolvers go onto the market. A film about cocaine, and the drug is suddenly available. A movie about rum-running, and the world’s most famous rum-runner is arrested.”

“And after Hannibal, were there elephants all over-”

“Please, I didn’t say I believed any of it. But I have to agree, the disappearance of Hale’s assistant requires looking into.”

Annie looked at me sharply, so I gave her what I knew.

When I was finished, she shook her head. “I’d be happier if they’d found a suicide note.”

“Wouldn’t we all? What’s also troubling is the suggestion that Geoffrey Hale makes a habit of seducing his employees. We believe that Anne Hatley – the child playing June – is his. Myrna Hatley is a robust personality, but if this assistant was a more fragile type, or more vulnerable …”

“If she was pregnant, she might have seen suicide as the only escape. On the other hand, if she chose to assert her rights and make a fuss …”

I admired the way this woman’s mind worked. “Then Hale might have decided to remove a problem. Either way, he was involved. As now he may be involved with the current situation. Last night, he spent some time in private conversation with La Rocha and Samuel, and afterwards was given leave to impart the message that the men would be permitted a degree more freedom tomorrow – today, rather – if they spent a quiet morning.”

“Internal tensions in the film world?”

“Of course, I’ve also had my suspicions of Will-the-Camera. And of you, for that matter.”

“An embarrassment of riches when it comes to shady types.”

“Speaking of shady types, what of our pirates? Holmes and I are operating under the assumption that we’re to be put up for ransom. You’ve been investigating La Rocha for months, do you have any idea what he’s up to?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m not altogether certain that La Rocha’s the centre of this.”

“Samuel?”

“As you know him, yes.”

“He’s both more intelligent and more cold-blooded than La Rocha, a dangerous combination.” I thought of the first time I’d seen Selim, standing behind La Rocha: the power behind the throne?

“And his sons?”

“Adam and Jack,” I replied: This was beginning to feel a bit like one of Holmes’ examinations.

“I don’t think that Adam altogether approves of his father’s … work.”

The wistfulness in her voice did not sound like the judgment of an experienced espionage agent. It sounded like the wistful desires of a besotted young woman.

I sighed. “You know, if we’d been working together on this from the beginning, we might be heading home by now. Mycroft’s mania for keeping his left and right hands from communicating leads to more confusion than one requires.”

“Would you have come if your brother-in-law asked?”

“No. But you don’t seem-”

“I’m glad you’re here,” she cut me off.

“Oh. Well.”

“How much do you know about La Rocha and Samuel?”

“Not a lot.”

“Well, I had some months to build a dossier. You’ve probably figured out that they’re brothers – or, rather, half-brothers? They believe themselves descended from Murad Reis. You know who that is?”

“Dutchman. Salé Rovers, English captives.”

“Converted to Islam in 1622, made Salé his centre, brought slaves from as far as Ireland and Iceland. When the Sultan tried to take the city and failed, he just made the Dutchman governor and married him to one of his daughters. Another sort of conversion, you might say.

“He had a number of children by his two Moorish wives, and there seems to have been some kind of a pirate in each generation. La Rocha’s grandfather was hanged for killing a man in 1860, when La Rocha was four. La Rocha started his own career before he was twenty, boarding merchant vessels and robbing them, then slipping away. He seems to have paid for his brother to go to university in France, while also buying up holdings that had belonged to earlier generations of the family and been seized as reparations after they were gaoled or hanged.

“It wasn’t until Selim – Samuel – graduated from university and came into the family business in 1895 that things began to get vicious. Victims would be thrown overboard and their ships stolen, other ships set alight with their dinghies stove in. Women passengers would disappear entirely. Over the next twenty years, the brothers created a network of informants and occasional partners to supplement their crew. During the War they went dormant, because of the number of warships in the Mediterranean, but they did manage to board a small ship that was removing gold from Turkey. A lot of gold. They lay low after that until the gunships retired, then after the War, started up again. In 1920, they made a raid on what looked like an easy target, and was not. Their ship went down, hands were lost, La Rocha and his brother were very nearly caught.

“After that, they seem to have taken a hard look at themselves, decided that they weren’t getting younger and the modern world was inhospitable to their profession, and more or less retired to Lisbon.

“At any rate, La Rocha did. In recent months, there have been signs that they may be rebuilding the old alliances. Several of the pirates Mr Fflytte hired, for example, are the sons or grandsons of the original crew.”

“Restoring old grandeur? But surely they can’t believe that they can rebuild their pirate kingdom here in Salé, under the noses of the French?” I asked.

“I imagine that Salé was a symbolic choice, just as the Harlequin was seized upon to evoke the heyday of piracy. Once they’ve finished with the ship and the city, they may slip away.”

“So you’d say that after selling us back to the British, they’ll take the ransom monies – where? Somewhere out in the Sahara?”

“A startling amount of this continent is beyond the reach of British guns. The Rif mountains have already declared independence – one can reach them in a day. And,” she added, changing her voice as if to mimic a textbook or lecture, “the giving of ransom is no guarantee of the getting of hostages.”

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”em›). 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 Annie’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 his 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!” Not that Mycroft would be in time to stop the gun-boats entirely, but he might possess a spanner sufficient to slow the works, and permit us time to work.

The door closed; a hubbub of outrage and tears and How dare theys and I knew there was something wrongs shocked the little songbirds into silence. But as if to speak up for its fellow creatures, a terrifying but familiar scream ripped away the clamour of the mere humans; our chins jerked upwards to the shape on the rooftop grate.

“The people will rise!” it roared, adding darkly, “She was a phantom of delight.” There above us, its head descending through a square too small for the rest of its body, perched La Rocha’s parrot, in search of its gaoled master. Lesser voices held their silence for a moment, then as one burst into the relief of laughter. When conversation started up again, the panic had retreated, although talk was no more coherent than at their first reaction.

Annie calmly went to fetch herself coffee, and brought it back to sit at my side.

“This makes matters considerably more serious,” she murmured around the cup.

“We have to get them out of here.”

“And abandon the men?”

Our presence might be the only thing keeping the men from slaughter. “No, we have to get them, too.” “I’d say we have at least three or four days before …”

“I agree. I’ll talk to Holmes tonight, and co-ordinate our resources. I gave him a pen-knife. I wish I still had my revolver.” “I have one.”

“You do? How did they not find it?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Probably not. But you only have the one?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Pity, it might have given the men’s side an edge.”

“We could let them have it. Just barricade ourselves behind the door and trust that His Majesty will reach us before the pirates break it down.” “We may have to.”

“If you want to take it with you tonight, let me know.” “What are you two talking about?” Edith demanded.

Not missing a beat, Annie said, “We were agreeing how smashing you look in that garment.” Men in this place wore long robes (not, in fact, night-shirts) called galabiyyas, with or without hoods, of plain fabric but often with elaborate embroidery down the front. The women’s garments, called kaftans, were nearly identical – to an outsider. Edith’s galabiyya had been made for a taller person, but we did, after all, have an official seamstress with us, for whom it had been no task at all to raise a few hems.

Edith looked unconvinced, but couldn’t help glancing down at the thick intertwining pattern decorating the front of the otherwise plain brown garment. “I need a belt for my knife.” Somehow, the child had adopted (and what was more, managed to retain) one of the pirates’ dummy knives, impressive but useless for anything more demanding than cleaning beneath one’s fingernails.

Annie stood up. “Lots of men wear their weapons in a sort of sash. I’m sure we can find something that will do.” And thus the long day began, with the worst possible news and a dive into the dressing-up box. Many, many maddeningly long hours later, during which every possible permutation of our captivity and rescue had been mooted, I finally took up my climbing rope and Annie’s revolver and made my escape over the wall.

Holmes was expecting me, the shutter-latch already open. The odour from within suggested that a candle had recently been extinguished, lest it outline my figure dangling outside, but the room remained dimly illuminated by the light seeping around the door. His hand came out, reassuring and warm. I adjusted the rope so the pressure was to the side of the previous bruises rather than directly on top of them, and greeted him.

“Were you permitted to converse with the two diplomatic gentlemen this morning?” I asked.

“Briefly, but enough to see that they are working hard to shape a disaster. You caught the messages I embedded into the song?” “That Hale is not a villain?”

“When La Rocha and Samuel came for Hale the other evening, it was to compose letters to the British and French authorities. Ransom has been set, two thousand guineas a head in British or French currency, to be paid the day after tomorrow.” “Hale told you this? And you believe him?”

“I think him an unskilled actor. In any event, his claim is verified by Maurice.” “The cook?”

“He is French, so Samuel handed him the letter and had him translate it aloud into English, or enough of it to satisfy him that it was as he had instructed.” “Two thousand guineas a head,” I mused.

“They must be in a hurry to conclude the business, else they’d have asked for more.” “Well,” I said, “Annie thinks – oh, that’s right, you don’t know – oh, for heaven’s sake, Holmes, if I try to tell it all out here, I’ll never make it up the rope again. Move back.” Between my wriggling and Holmes’ tugging I got inside without a huge amount of noise or loss of skin, and I was alone with my husband for the first time since Lestrade’s bombshell of a letter had arrived in Sussex. He relit his candle and we sat, shoulder to shoulder, as I recounted the events since last we had met.

“When I returned to the rooftop the other night,” I began, “two of the girls were waiting for me. Though one is a boy, and the other is Mycroft’s man.” He reached into his garment and came out with his tobacco pouch; clearly this was a tale requiring thought. His hand went still when I told him Annie’s theory about white slavery, and although I tried to keep it light, by that time I more than half believed it myself. The grimness with which he continued filling the pipe bowl suggested that he did, too.

When I had finished, he asked a question that seemed to have nothing to do with it.

“Am I correct in thinking that from your side, there is no view of the water?” “A slice to the south and another to the north, but you’re right, the wall they put up to separate the two houses blocks most of it.” “Then you will not have seen the British gun-boat, lying offshore.” To that, there could be little response but an expletive. I readily provided one, adding, “Do they think they can shell the town?” “I shouldn’t say the verb think applies in this case.” “And Holmes, they’ve arrested La Rocha.”

“That explains why one keeps hearing the parrot.”

“Searching for his master, yes.”

“A person would imagine Lestrade was in charge here,” he muttered.

“Sir Morgan intends to come back tomorrow with biscuits and fresh milk, and to take away any letters we wish to send home.” “They won’t permit him inside the city wall.”

“I agree.”

“Tell me the rest of your day.”

My story took some telling, but eventually I came to the distasteful admission of my surreptitious message to the English envoy. I added, “I have to say, however, that the name seemed to have no effect on him. Either he is ignorant of Mycroft, or so hard of hearing that he missed the message entirely.” Holmes drew thoughtfully on his pipe, although by this time it no longer contained any combustible material. “One must indeed speculate over the relationship between La Rocha and his brother. If they are close and Samuel is content to be subordinate, he will do all he can to free La Rocha. Which would include physical threat to his prisoners. On the other hand, if your new friend’s speculation is correct and Samuel is making a bid for control, then he will leave here as soon as possible, now that the British have confirmed the state of those to be ransomed.” “You don’t think he’ll wait until he receives the ransom money?” “He may. He may also leave us men here, under guard and with an agent, until the British monies are transferred, while he heads into the Atlas mountains with you women. Or he may simply dispose of us as superfluous burdens. I should say it would depend on whether or not he has a trusted agent he can leave behind.” “Like, a son.”

“Precisely.”

“And yet, I’d have thought Adam too squeamish for killing and abductions. He’s more than half in love with Annie.” “He is also the age at which young men need to prove themselves to their fathers.” I found that I had been leaning against him, firmly enough that his arm was now around my shoulders. I relished the heavy security, the sense of being under protection. Then I noticed what I was doing and sprang to my feet, suddenly furious.

“Holmes, I have no intention of permitting any of those girls to be put into a harem, even temporarily. We can get everyone away. We simply have to.” He withdrew his pipe from his lips; his grey eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “That’s my Russell,” he said. “How?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

POLICE [pianissimo]: Tarantara, tarantara!

I SPENT HOURS in Holmes’ cell as we shared what we knew of the city, of our captors, and of our fellow prisoners. We agreed that Fflytte and Will were our weak points: Will would refuse to abandon his reels of exposed film; Fflytte would refuse to abandon his dreams. In the end, we decided that Hale would just have to tuck his cousin under his arm, while Bert and one of the other pseudo-constables could deal with Will.

We would go at midnight tomorrow, an hour that in Lisbon would find half the city still moving around, but here found even the dogs asleep. Using the pick-lock I had given him, Holmes would let himself out of his cell and, when he had overcome the closest guard, loose his fellow prisoners.

At one a.m., we would assemble on the street outside, men and women alike, and move fast through the streets of the medina to the gate.

The success of the venture rested on the element of surprise: By the time anyone could decide to shoot at us, we would be upon them.

We sat on his hard cot, staring at the candle – wearing, no doubt, identical expressions of dissatisfaction. Holmes glared at his stone-cold pipe. “There are too many uncontrollable variables.”

“I don’t like it one bit!”

Get a grip, Russell. “I agree, it stinks of the stage. One of those plays in which every turn is thwarted by disaster. I keep expecting some unforeseen twist that will throw everything into confusion. Oh, I’m sorry, Holmes,” I said. “I’ve been surrounded by actresses too long.”

“Never mind,” he said. “I’ve spent much of my life being thought of as a fiction. One grows accustomed to it.”

Time for me to leave.

I stood up and removed Annie’s revolver from my pocket. “I think you should have this.”

He shook his head.

“Holmes, you have armed guards, we have one housekeeper and a pair of adolescent house-maids. We are valuable property, you are easily disposed of. We have more knives and blunt implements than we can hold; you have your hands. Until we join forces, you have greater need of armament than we do.”

He pressed the weapon back into my hand. “The pocket-knife is sufficient. If I succeed in overcoming the first guard without noise, then we will have a gun. If I do not, those on this side are lost in any event, and you will need your gun to get out of your front door.”

Reluctantly, but in agreement, I returned the weapon to my pocket, and went to the window. When he had snuffed the candle, I put my head out, waiting until I was certain there was neither guard nor traffic before I inserted myself into the narrow slot and permitted Holmes to shove me steadily outward.

“Until midnight tomorrow,” I whispered.

“Insh’allah,” he returned, that Arabic phrase and philosophy that I had learnt (and lived by) in Palestine: If it be the will of Allah.

Indeed.

* * *

Annie and Edith were on the rooftop again. This time, they had wrapped themselves in their bed-coverings, and were fast asleep.

I would have left them where they sat, propped upright against each other, but their backs were to the door and I did not feel like finding an alternative route downstairs. I laid a hand on Annie’s shoulder, and found myself looking into the gleam of a knife in the low lamp-light. I went still; she blinked; the blade went away. She threw off her bed-clothes and stood.

Edith did not wake – or did not appear to – but still I turned my back on her before I retrieved the gun and handed it to Annie. “He didn’t want it,” I said. She thrust it without hesitation into her waist-band, then squatted to pick up Edith. I tucked cotton and eiderdown under one arm, held up the shielded lamp, and followed the two of them down the stairs.

* * *

Despite the misgivings I had shared with Holmes, no unexpected disaster met us on the stairway, no twist of wicked fortune roused us from our beds.

The Fates waited until we were up and around the next morning before throwing out their threads and entangling us all in catastrophe.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

PIRATES [very loud]: With cat-like tread,

Upon our prey we steal;

In silence dread

Our cautious way we feel.

IN THE THREE days we had spent here, the outer door had opened precisely six times: once to receive our luggage, twice for the diplomats the day before, and once each afternoon during the quiet time between lunch and tea, when the cook’s two girls collected the baskets and string bags of supplies, and gave any requests for the following day. Apart from that, it was closed and locked.

Which meant that when the door was pushed open that morning, it took a moment to identify the noise. Confusion lasted but an instant, replaced by alarm as the sound of multiple boots on tiles echoed down the entranceway.

Half of us were on our feet, and of those still seated, most had a hand at her throat when Samuel marched in, two armed guards at his back and a look of open triumph on his face. It was the sort of situation in which women traditionally swooned; actresses, it seemed, were of sterner stuff.

Mrs Hatley, one of those who had stayed in her chair, forced her hand away from her throat and brought her spine upright. “What is the meaning of this?” she demanded, her voice very nearly under control.

“Meaning is, time to go now.” He leered; that is the only word for that expression.

Everyone but Mrs Hatley and I were on their feet now, the girls drawing together in uncertainty. “You mean,” Fannie asked, “we’re free to go?”

“Oh, at last!” Isabel cried.

June’s head came over the upstairs balcony. “We’re leaving?”

Doris’s pale curls appeared directly above June. “Have I time to wash my hair?” A third golden mop was just visible above hers, on the other side of the wooden grating – someone had gone up early to the rooftop. No head was still on its pillow; all ears were hanging on the pirate’s words.

Edith, who had just come into the room wearing her Moroccan pirate’s gear, looked from the men to me and asked, “Shall I change back into my frock?”

“No,” I said in a loud voice. The criss-cross of talk stuttered and died. With all attention on me, I faced Samuel across the courtyard. “He doesn’t mean we’re free to go. He means he’s taking us elsewhere. Someplace very secure and impossible to escape.”

He ignored the ripples of distress that swept the house and had the guards tightening their grips on the guns. His gleaming boots padded across the tiles. With every step he grew larger, until he came to a halt a hand’s breadth from my knees and stared down, willing me towards retreat. But I had no place to go, literally or figuratively, and I fingered the knife I had secreted in my sleeve, waiting for a distraction that might give me a chance against those lightning reflexes.

“What is this, Parrot?” he asked.

Being a tall woman leaves one ill prepared for the sensation of smallness. I felt myself shrinking with this cruel figure towering over me, growing small, and weak.

And he knew it. I saw in his eyes the dawning of cruel delight. His lips parted, but-

“Edith, no!”

Samuel whirled away – God, he was fast for a big man! – before my arm could move. Edith, sprinting across the tiles, skidded to a halt not because of her mother’s command, but because of the blade in Samuel’s hand.

Seeing the threat was nothing more than a little girl in a boy’s caftan, Samuel straightened, and said something to the guards. They laughed; Edith flushed; Mrs Nunnally gathered her child in. The pirate’s lieutenant turned back to me – and the sky fell in.

That was what it felt like. Impossible motion from the upper reaches of my vision, a sound like a roomful of teeth crackling down on a million tiny bones, and then a huge hand smashed out of the heavens. All the musical notes in the world shouted at once; as I cowered down, my hunched back was pummelled by a rain of sharp, dry objects.

Things stopped falling. My head beneath my arms seemed to be in one piece. I tentatively raised one arm – then remembered Edith, and staggered upright.

The child stood, her mother at her back, both of them untouched but gape-jawed with shock. I, too, was aware of that familiar swaddled sensation that accompanies a severe blow. I bent to pick up a length of silver-dry timber that my foot had kicked. There seemed to be quite a bit of the stuff scattered around. Numbly curious, I looked upward, past first one, then another blonde girl, both wearing the same flabbergasted expression as Edith. Beyond them a third face looked down, from the rooftop. Yet I could see her clearly. For some reason, the wooden grating seemed to have a hole in it. A large hole. Through which I could see Annie. Her big blue eyes were wide, too – but not with shock, or horror.

With triumph.

Unwillingly, I made my gaze descend, to see what caused that expression.

And saw an overturned piano.

From under its edges protruded a pair of shiny black boots.

* * *

Isabel’s mother broke first, with the sort of dangerous giggle that pleads for a slap. Fannie and June followed, their laughter freer, as if this might be one of Mr Fflytte’s clever tricks.

The guards put an end to it. No one but me understood their urgent command for silence, but all grasped the intent of those weapons.

The house shuddered into silence, broken only by the whimper of Isabel’s mother.

The larger of the two men walked over to his engulfed boss. Samuel’s disbelief had frozen him to the spot for one crucial second; now the instrument neatly covered all but a few inches of his footwear. A glance under the other edge convinced the man that he did not want to see further. He told his partner, “He’s dead.”

The man gave forth a rich curse, and followed it with, “What do we do now?”

“We hold them until someone comes.”

“No one will come.” I spoke in Arabic; the guards goggled as if the fountain had made a pronouncement. I went on, my voice inexorable, speaking a language designed for pure rhetoric. “No one will come but the British and the French armies. They will find you here and they will kill you. They will fall on you and they will arrest you and they will arrest your families, then they will stand you before a line of men with rifles and they will shoot you dead, your sons and your brothers and your mothers, if you do not leave us this instant, if you-”

I’ll never know if my words alone would have broken their will and sent them bolting for the door, because instead of the Army falling on them, an afrit came down, a ghost or perhaps the spirit of their dead leader: A great billowing white cloud filled the air over their heads, giving out a ghostly moan. Both men snapped up their shotguns and fired, both bores. The next moment, as one panicked guard was beating away the shredded bed-sheet, a regiment of harpies fell upon him, pounding at him with flower pots and broomsticks and the upper half of the tagine crock, descending on him like the Red Queen’s deck of cards, screaming and pummelling him to the ground. The other guard dropped his empty shotgun to rip at the revolver in his sash, and my hand threw the weapon it held – except as it left my grip I realised it was not my knife but the scrap of wood. I scrabbled for my blade. His gun went wildly off, once, before the blade reached him and he grabbed his shoulder and went down, the revolver skittering across the tiles to Edith’s feet. She picked up the heavy weapon and pointed it at him, her hands wavering but determined.

Panting and wild-eyed, twenty-one English women in dressing gowns and galabiyyas surveyed a tableau of ruination. The lovely tiles were buried under blood, death, dirt, and débris.

I thought my heart would burst with pride.

The man with my knife in him groaned – reminder that the battle was by no means over. I flew to the kitchen, where the house-keeper and her girls cowered in one corner. The younger one cried out when I appeared but I ignored them, upending drawers and overturning jugs to gather all the knives I could find. Back in the courtyard, I distributed the blades along with a couple of sturdy pestles, and we waited for the next phalanx of guards to pour in. We waited, as the pounding of our hearts gradually slowed. We waited, until we could hear over the heart-beats. Hear the boom of the surf, the nervous cheep of a bird, and some peculiar noises, coming from above.

Annie’s head vanished from the ruins of the sky-light; I stepped forward to relieve Edith of the guard’s revolver. In three minutes, Annie burst from the stairway. “I don’t think they heard! The men are doing some kind of bashing about – they had just come out onto their rooftop when I … did that.” She gestured at the entombing piano.

We waited, collective breath held. Incredibly, the violin started up, and with it, our hopes.

“Tie them and gag them,” I said. “Use bed-sheets. And the cook and her girls, we’ll have to tie them as well.” I roughly bound the knife wound on the one guard, more to save the tiles than him, and ordered my fellow Amazons to get their shoes and to bring all the clothes from the dressing-up box to the roof.

“Don’t stop to fuss with your hair,” I called after them.

“What shall I do?” asked Annie at my elbow.

“Get the girls singing, and have Maude put brown make-up on everyone’s faces and hands. And see if you can think of a distraction. Holmes heard the gunshots – that’s him covering up our noise – but if we can divert their guards’ attention for a moment, it’ll give the men a chance.”

“I may be able to think of something,” she said.

I returned to the kitchen, dropping to my heels in front of the bound cook. “I am sorry we had to tie you up,” I told her in Arabic. “Once we are out of the city I will have someone come back to set you free. And I will leave a knife in the courtyard, for you to cut your bonds. Thank you for all your service, these past days.”

The Arabic startled them into stillness, the coins I placed on the table widened their eyes. I laid a small knife on the ground near the fountain: It would take a while for one of them to reach it, but I would not wish them helpless forever.

I snatched up various table-cloths and towels on my way to the roof, where I found the girls valiantly singing along to Holmes’ tunes, mixing up the words but belting out the music unabated. Maude had her lips pursed as she smeared brown paint onto pink faces, assisted by Mrs Hatley and Bonnie, both of them old hands at the make-up box. I turned to Annie, who was waving the girls into greater enthusiasm. She was wearing a tan galabiyya, the hood thrown back so that her pale hair and English skin shone out.

“You need some face paint,” I noted. “Did you come up with a distraction?”

“I need more than face paint. I’m the distraction.” She yanked off the voluminous garment, revealing a sight that had the girls strangling mid-song. She whirled around, tassels flying, to wave them back into full voice, although in truth they found it difficult to produce music past the choking laughter in their throats.

“A belly dancer?” I exclaimed. “Where on earth did you find that … costume?”

“It was in one of the boxes. Mrs Hatley didn’t think it was appropriate for the girls, so we hid it away. Do you think it’s distracting enough?”

The question was, would it be so universally distracting that it would turn every man over the wall to stone, prisoners and guards alike? “Well, if we put you at one end of the wall, I can go across at the other end and simply tip them on their faces. Maude?” I called. “I hope you have a good supply of paint.”

I distributed the various scarves, cloths, and towels to the girls whose garments lacked hoods, demonstrating how they could be wrapped. I hid Annie’s platinum locks under the folds of a brightly embroidered table-runner, then stood back to study the result. I could only hope it didn’t give any of our men a heart attack.

I motioned the girls to come together around me, and when the song came to an end, I quickly explained, “Annie’s going to catch the guards’ attention so our men can overcome them and get their weapons. Once the men are free, they’ll come here and we’ll all go down together and make our way to the nearest city gate. We will have guns at the beginning and at the end of the group, so you need to stick together between them. If there’s any shooting, jump into the nearest doorway and get as small as you can.

“Ready?”

They weren’t, of course – what normal person considers herself ready for a daring armed race through a strange and hostile city? But none of their protests were of any import, so when the next song got under way – the oddly appropriate pirates’ song that begins, With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal-I waved my hands and glowered at the chorus until they began to chime in, and were soon singing as if their very lives depended on it.

Annie and I took up positions at opposite ends of the dividing wall. We had heaped a table and bench on top of each other, to give her the height to display her … self, while at my end I had another bench, sufficient to help me scramble over. She knelt in place. I looked at her, and nodded.

She stood. The girls were singing their hearts out-the household soundly sleeps-and Annie rose from above the parapet, stretching her arms high, moving to the tempo. She was too thin for a proper belly dancer and had no clue how to mimic the sinuous sway of the original, but somehow I did not imagine that would matter to her audience.

I began to count, and got as far as “two” before the violin descended into a parrot-squawk of discord. I raised my head above the stones, saw nothing but the backs of many heads, and swung myself over.

Holmes recovered first: A heart-beat before my feet hit the rooftop, his hand was swinging the violin hard into the face of an open-mouthed guard. As it made contact, I leapt for the back of another. In an instant the roof was a battlefield tumult of shouts and cries and grunts and bellowed commands and the single blast of a revolver as the pent-up masculine frustrations of twelve British citizens and a French cook exploded on the heads of the four guards.

In thirty seconds it was over. Daniel Marks continued to batter the man at his feet with – oddly – a fringed velvet pillow, but the man’s unconscious sprawl suggested that some more solid implement had gone before.

“Are there other guards?” I demanded.

As if in answer, the door crashed open and a big man came through it, moving fast, shotgun up and ready. Holmes stuck out a foot; our chief constable caught the falling guard with a tea-pot as he went by; Bert delivered the coup de grâce with a flower pot: as neat a piece of choreography as I had seen off the screen.

Except: The shotgun went off as it hit the ground.

And a wail of pain rose up from the women’s side.

I launched myself over the wall, seeing nothing but a scrum of galabiyyas and dish-towels. I hauled away shoulders until I had uncovered the victim, and saw – oh God, I knew who it would be before I got there – Edith, huddled over, one hand plastered against the side of her face.

She was breathing. “Edith, let me see. Is it your eye?” God, I should never forgive myself, if-

Annie enfolded the panicking mother’s hands in hers, and I gently peeled away the child’s bloody hands, expecting a terrible sight.

But an eye looked back at me, stark with alarm but undamaged. And the blood seemed lower. I wiped my sleeve across the young cheek, and went light-headed with relief at the neat straight slice across the top of the cheekbone.

Around me, nineteen females drew simultaneous breaths. “Someone give me a handkerchief,” I requested, and dabbed at the wound with the delicate white scrap. The ooze was already slowing.

“Ooh,” groaned Mrs Nunnally, “my poor baby, look at that, there’s going to be a scar!”

Mrs Hatley tried to assure her that, no, it would heal nicely, but I had seen the flash of hope behind the blood. “No, she’s right,” I said. “That’s almost certain to leave a scar.” The expression on the child’s face was undeniable: pride. I gave the wounded warrior a hand up, and said solemnly, “Yes, you’re going to have a nice handsome scar. People will ask about it for years.”

The men began to spill over the wall. As they came, each was led to the small mountain of clothing we had brought up from below, and each was draped, painted, and covered to give him a semblance of belonging here. The last one over was Bert-the-Constable, holding a familiar Purdy shotgun; Annie grabbed his hand and pulled him to one side for an urgent briefing.

As the trickle of scrambling men slowed, I climbed onto the bench to peer over the wall. Five guards lay trussed and gagged, dragged into a shady patch. Two were conscious and angry, two were half-conscious. One would be lucky to live ’til evening.

I went back to where Annie was handing Bert a cloth and Holmes was making a head-wrap out of a length of curtain. As I pawed through the much-diminished pile of clothing, hoping to find something other than one patched galabiyya the colour of goat dung, Bert’s Cockney voice stated the obvious. “That shot will bring attention. We must go.”

“You two bring up the rear,” Holmes ordered the two agents. When they protested, he simply picked up the shotgun he’d left leaning against the wall and disappeared down the stairway. I dropped the disgusting robe over my head, checking that I could reach through it for my weapons, then turned to this singular assortment of lovely young women and comically ugly men.

I overrode the gabble of conversation with a trio of brief declarative sentences, capped by a pair of imperatives. “We have to hurry. We’ll all go together through the city to the gate. Once we’re outside the walls, the Army will see us and we’ll be safe. If shooting starts, get into a doorway. And don’t say a word to anyone.”

Then I stepped through the doorway before the questions could begin, although I heard Fflytte’s voice behind me, raised in protest that a mere assistant should give the orders, and why were all the women in men’s dress? But Hale shut him up before I had to, and we poured down the stairways to the courtyard. Male exclamations and female explanations rose up at the sight of the boots, the piano, and the two tied guards, but I turned and brutally squelched it.

“If you want to live, do as you’re told, immediately. Do you understand?”

They understood.

Holmes and I led the ungainly procession; Annie and Bert brought up the rear. Holmes ventured out first, checking the narrow street for guards, then continued to the next intersection before giving a signal that we could follow. One after another, our charges stepped over the threshold onto the dusty stones: Fflytte and Hale, Will and Mrs Hatley, mothers and daughters and fictional sisters, with six constable-actors, a make-believe sergeant, and a cook mixed among them. They looked as much like Moroccans as a group of painted storks might have, but from a distance, in the dim, thatched recesses of the Salé medina, each of us swathed in the same anonymous hooded galabiyyas the rest of the population wore, moving fast, we might not attract too much of an audience.

I was the only one who had been out here, so I went first – with a frisson of terror, sure that I had forgotten the way. But my feet remembered, even with the distractions of day versus night, and we trailed along, stretching out more and more as we left the quieter sections and came to the bazaar proper. Soon, we were forced to edge past laden donkeys and men with carpets and sellers of oats and spice and the occasional flayed goat or camel hanging before a butcher’s.

“I hadn’t realised how crowded it would be,” I hissed at Holmes. He raised an eyebrow in agreement and stepped to one side in order to survey the long – too long – trail of foreign shapes, moving at a snail’s pace in our wake. I shook my head in despair, edged around a donkey (four legs and two ears sticking out of seventeen baskets of yellow slippers), and looked into the lane beyond.

To come face to face with a band of enraged pirates.

CHAPTER FORTY

PIRATE KING: Let vengeance howl;

The Pirate so decides.

I LEAPT BACKWARDS towards Holmes and collided with the donkey. The creature blatted; a rope parted; a yellow tide of leather spilt into the lane; the shoe-maker began to bellow. “Go!” I shouted at Holmes, but it was too late. On the other side of this four-legged cork the slow momentum of my fellow countrymen continued to pile up. Holmes, who was tall enough to see even over a laden donkey, spotted the pirates as they pounded around the corner at my back: Adam, Jack, the beautiful Benjamin, the Swedish accountant Mr Gröhe (in whose hand a knife looked simply bizarre), and an uncountable number of others (in whose hands the knives looked far too comfortable). Holmes turned to shout at the escapees; those who heard him did attempt to reverse their tracks and flee, but by this time the column had come to a halt, thoroughly wedged between the pressure from behind and the irritated quadruped.

The howl of pirates filled the alleyway; the donkey’s ears twitched its displeasure; those on the other side would have milled about if they had not been stuck fast; I turned towards my pursuers, and came face to face with Adam.

“Why are you here?” he demanded in Arabic, then remembered, and paused to assemble a translation.

“We wish to leave,” I replied in his tongue.

He started to answer, realised what I had said, started again, paused a second time, and then looked past me and saw the others. Including Annie, who had climbed on a greengrocer’s display to see what the problem was. Adam’s words died away as he and Annie regarded each other above the crowd. They were both unaware of the growing turmoil, the shouts of the donkey’s owner, the cries of other would-be pedestrians in three directions.

The owner of the slippers swam upstream towards his four-legged lorry, bawling a constant stream of “Bâlek! Bâlek!” (“Give way!”), although the additional pressure only forced the creature backwards, onto me and the pirates. In a minute, the beast would start to kick. Adam shouted. The man shouted back, until he came to a clear place and caught sight of his foe. His mouth went wide, then snapped shut. Without a glance at his lost wares, he grabbed the creature’s halter and hauled furiously away. A receding wave of cries, protests, and curses traced his retreat; the sardine-tin sensation grew less marked.

Adam turned at last to look at me. “You speak Arabic.”

“I do. The others do not. You must let us go. This will bring war onto your city.”

His dark eyes did not react, although a slight tilt of the head made me aware of the men at his back. A dozen or more large, armed, ferocious-looking men, hungry for a fight.

“We will return to the house,” he said.

“No!” I looked at his younger brother, Jack, and thought of those shiny boots sticking in such awful absurdity from under the piano. No child should live with that image in his memory. “Your father is dead there.”

Reaction rippled back into the men, with a burst of cross-talk. Adam seemed oblivious, but Jack took a step closer to him.

“You lie,” the younger boy declared.

“I do not. It was an accident,” I said – which, granted, was not exactly true, but … “He lies in the courtyard.” Then I added in English, “Your brother does not need to see it.”

Adam’s black eyes studied me for the longest time. With the donkey gone, Holmes and the others had come together, and I could feel him, three feet from me, ready to pull his revolver from its inner pocket and go down shooting.

“Dead.”

“I am sorry for you.” I had no idea what he was thinking, how he was going to react.

“And my uncle?”

“As far as I know, he’s still under arrest. The French-”

“The guards?”

I switched back to Arabic. “Your men are tied. Two are injured badly, the others merely bound.”

“And my father is dead.”

For God’s sake, was he about to gut me? Hug me? Turn his head to the wall and weep? “He was a brave man,” I ventured.

“He was a-” I was not familiar with the word, but his inflection made me suspect it was not a term of endearment.

He took a tremulous breath, then seemed to grow two inches taller and ten years older. For the first time, I saw a resemblance to Samuel. He looked towards the back of the crowd – towards Annie – and then whirled about to face his compatriots.

“You heard this foreigner!” he shouted at them. I thrust my hands into the galabiyya to grab my knife in one hand and the revolver in the other. Holmes pushed forward, and a sudden caterpillar of motion from the rear suggested that Annie and Bert had done the same. “My father is dead. My uncle is in the hands of the French. Who will deny that I step into my father’s boots? Any?”

The lad’s fury brought the others up short, stopped me in my place, made Holmes raise one hand to keep those at his back from shoving into an uncertain but clearly perilous situation. The pirates looked at one another. Jack wormed his way around to take up a position at his brother’s side. Benjamin stared, first at them, then at Mr Gröhe, and finally craned to look into the foreign faces, but Celeste was not to be seen. He shifted, looking as if he were about to move away – when a scream rent the air.

Everyone ducked. A gun went off, although the shutter it destroyed was a good ten feet from the bright visitor that swooped through this urban canyon, beating its wings to perch upon a frayed clothes-line strung between buildings. “She is MINE!” the bird screeched.

The street blinked, and began to breathe again. Benjamin lowered his eyes to the two brothers and, as if Rosie’s words had been meant for him alone, stepped forward to side with Adam. The remaining members of the crew exchanged another round of speechless consultation; their weapons stayed up, but their shoulders lost a degree of belligerence.

Adam kept his chin raised, as haughty as if the question of succession had never been in doubt. “You take me as leader?” he demanded. “You agree that I am my father, in your eyes?”

No one openly denied it; in fact, a general shrug of acceptance ran through them as if to say, Well, why not?

I shot Holmes a glance, warning him, and then Annie at the back – because, in truth, whether it be Samuel or his son giving the orders, our position had changed little. We had to fight here, or risk abduction into the distant inland, never to return.

Should I attack first, before Adam could give the order? The confusion that followed would free the others for a panicked flight-some of them might find their way to safety. I eyed the young man’s back, tightening my fingers on the knife in my sleeve. If I go in under his ribs with a sharp push to the right, my knife will clear as he falls into Benjamin and that big fellow, after which-

“Then I say, we let them go!”

– my right hand is clear to shoot the Swedish accountant and … Wait. What?

The pirate crew were looking every bit as puzzled as I.

“No!” one of them finally said, although the word grew elongated and ended in a distinct question mark.

“Yes!” Adam shouted. “You said you would follow me. And I will lead you, and I will provide for you and for your families. This I vow. But I will not have you living off the takings of a wicked act. I will not feed my men off the suffering of women.”

Good God: The subversive sentiments of W. S. Gilbert had converted this hereditary Moroccan cut-throat into a Frederic of morality. I had never before thought of the Savoy operas as a tool of Anarchic philosophy.

“Noble lad!” Holmes murmured.

But the pirates were not convinced. Indeed, judging by the spreading grumble of dissatisfaction, if something was not done quickly, this would be the briefest reign in Salé’s history.

I raised my voice. “I know you men were looking forward to your share of the ransom monies, but there remains much money to be had, and without the disruption of British cannonballs or the inconvenience of French gaol.”

That caught their attention.

“The small man, in our company – Randolph Fflytte? He is a man who lives for the privilege of giving money to others. He points his camera, and it makes a man wealthy. And he may be small in stature, but in my country, he is huge in authority. If he says ‘Come,’ many will follow – all of whom will have busy cameras and equally large purses, and an equal desire to share their wealth. Think for yourselves, O men of Salé: A single payment”-(What the hell was the Arabic for ransom?)-“now, followed by years of grief with your families huddling in the far mountains? Or a moment of generosity that opens the doors to long years of gentle thievery? The choice is yours.”

The men knew all about Fflytte; even those who had not received his money personally had heard that he could certainly throw it around. It was not a far reach to believe that he might cause a tap of gold to flow. They thought about it, and the weapons in their hands sagged a fraction.

“Your pride is your country,” I persisted in a gentle voice. “You can conquer the world from within.”

None of which actually meant anything: I was merely offering a stall and a distraction, desperately gambling that their blood might cool and dilute their single-minded intent.

Adam stepped forward. “My friends, the days that my uncle and my father were trying to remake are gone. The wind has shifted. If we deny this, if we shake our fists at the sky and tell ourselves that the wind is still at our backs, we will end up wrecked upon the shore, or worse, becalmed. If, however, we trim our sails and run with that new wind, who knows where it will take us? Us, and our sons and grandsons, bearing the blood of our noble ancestors.

“The pirate way gives all an equal voice and an equal share. The pirate way demands that the king be chosen. I ask that you trust my father’s blood, and follow me.”

When he ended, I half expected the film crew to burst into applause – then remembered that they did not understood Arabic, and in any event, had their hands full with knives. Adam’s followers, more inured perhaps to flights of Arab rhetoric, were not so instantly convinced, but they could not deny that a boy who could talk like this might be just the fellow to deal with the French authorities.

Gröhe felt the shift in the metaphorical rigging first, and gratefully worked the unaccustomed blade back into its scabbard. One by one, others did the same. Three men at the far end looked at each other, looked at the guns they carried, and put them up.

Adam nodded, and gave a brief command that I did not hear, but that sent one of his men off at a run. When he faced us again, he was no longer a boy.

“Come,” he said.

We came. Through the medina we passed, the streets gone silent as word spread like a fire through dry grassland. Donkeys miraculously vanished, heaps of merchandise no longer filled the way, and I pushed the hood from my robe, allowing my European hair to shine out. When I glanced back, I could see the others doing the same.

Full points to Adam, the new pirate king of Salé, parading his foreign captives through the streets of his realm.

He led us, not to the closest gate in the walled city, but to the river entrance we had come by, half a lifetime before. Boats were already waiting, summoned by the new king’s runner. By the time the first of the boats had crossed the Bou Regreg – laden with the younger girls and their mothers, despite Edith’s furious protestations that she wanted to stay behind, to be a pirate, with Jack – a crowd had begun to gather on the Rabat side.

Finally, a small knot of us remained: Holmes, Annie, Will, and I, talking to Adam as we waited for the last boat to come back for us.

Or so I thought.

“I’ll send the film over with the luggage,” Will said.

Annie looked puzzled, Holmes (although he later denied it) did, too. I, however, merely asked, “What about the cameras?”

“I’ll keep one. They’ll be hard to find here, and Mr Fflytte owes me that much.”

“Will!” Annie protested. “You’re surely not thinking of staying behind?”

Holmes had caught up quickly. “I believe you’ll find that Mr Currie is concerned that if he comes within reach of the British authorities, he’ll find himself behind bars.”

“What? Will! No, not you – tell me you didn’t kill the poor girl!”

“Kill? Who? Me? I didn’t kill anyone! What are you talking about?” He looked confused, and frightened.

“Lonnie Johns,” I said.

“What, Lonnie? Good heavens, has she died?”

I remarked to my husband, “He’s a cameraman, not an actor.”

“I agree.”

“When did she die?” Will asked.

“No guilt in his eyebrows.”

“No avoidance of the eyes.”

“How did she die?”

I took pity on the man. “We don’t know for certain that she’s dead. The police suspect it.”

“They’re usually wrong,” Holmes commented.

“I wouldn’t say ‘usually,’ Holmes,” I chided.

“Then why the hell did you tell me she was dead? Accuse me of killing her?”

“To see your reaction. You smuggled guns, and drugs. If Miss Johns had discovered it, perhaps you’d have killed her.”

“I never!”

“But you did sell the guns and the drugs.”

Now he looked down, kicking at the dust with his boot. “Well, yeah. But it was just … lying there. Hale got all that stuff, for Fflytte. Nothing would do but that we had the real thing, for the camera. Insane, but it’s what he wanted. Only the three of us knew, the others thought it was washing-up powder or something. And then when we moved on to the next project, someone had to tidy after them.”

“And you always resented, just a little, that Fflytte’s name alone was on the credits.”

The Welshman’s face lifted, his eyes bitter and defiant. “Without me, Randolph Fflytte would still be scratching his head over that first camera. So yes, I will admit, I thought that picking up a little extra on the side might make up for it, just a bit. But I never hurt anyone.”

That was, I supposed, debatable. But I for one did not intend to tackle him and truss him for the next boat across the river. “You want to stay here in Morocco?”

“It’s warm. I like the food. The French can’t arrest an Englishman here. There are worse places to retire. And, somebody has to let these boys know how to deal with the actors and directors they’ll be meeting.”

Adam decided we had finished, and said to Holmes in English, “I will return your things by morning.”

Holmes replied in Arabic, “The ladies will be glad for their clothing, certainly. And do not forget your guards on the roof of the house.”

“Or those in the ground floor of the women’s quarters,” I added.

“The punishment for the men should be light,” Holmes suggested. “They were overcome by the artistry of women, a mistake they will not make again.”

“We are all overcome by women,” said the young pirate ruefully, and turned to the yellow-curled source of his overcoming (and of his guards’ overcoming, which I was glad he did not know). “Would you stay?” he pleaded. Holmes and I studied the river, although we did not move out of earshot. Neither Adam nor Annie seemed concerned with privacy; why should we be?

“I cannot,” she replied, her voice low with emotion. “Your people, your country, are beautiful, but they are too different from what I know. My heart tells me to try, but my head tells me that in the end, that difference would come between us. And I would not hurt you, not for the world.”

“I will come to you, then. Let me help my people for a few years, and then I will return to you.”

“No,” she said – just the tiniest fraction of a second too quickly. “Your people need you. I see that now, and I rejoice for them, even as I sorrow for myself. I can live with the hole in my heart, knowing that it is for a good cause.”

I couldn’t help giving her a quick glance, then looked away again, astonished: I’d have sworn her eyes welled with unshed tears.

Adam seized her hands, a shocking public demonstration for a Moslem male.

“You are as noble a woman as any man could desire, and I can only say, if your heart aches too much, when you are home, if you wish to return here and become my wife, I will be here.”

“You must not wait for me,” she answered firmly. “You must marry and have sons of your own.”

“Oh, I will. But I will always welcome you as another wife.”

I shot her another glance, but fortunately her head was down, studying their entwined hands, and when she raised her face, any reaction was hidden away.

“I will always remember you,” she told him.

“And I, you,” he said.

And with that she retrieved her hands and walked away, head bent, to the last boat. I got in behind her, with Holmes last. She kept her head down as we crossed the muddy river, and when we climbed out, she kept her rigid spine to the pirate town across the water.

We pressed our way into a noisy crowd made up of British soldiers, French soldiers, film personnel, half-naked bathing children, donkeys, sheep, a camel, some bewildered tourists, and a parrot. A half-naked water carrier with a bulging goatskin slung over his shoulder was selling cups of water to an audience of delighted locals who sat atop the wall, kicking their heels and passing around small baskets of pistachios and dates.

Hale was pointing at the figures on the northern shore and shouting about his camera, his film, his-

Fflytte was in full bore to an uncomprehending poilu about the interruption to his schedule, his urgent requirement for a local assistant, someone to help him hire replacement pirates-

Mrs Hatley and Isabel’s mother had set the sails of their bosoms, despite their enveloping galabiyyas, and had cornered a British officer to demand that they and the girls be taken to the best hotel in Rabat, that very instant, because heaven only knew what sorts of vermin these costumes had in their folds, and they hadn’t seen a proper tub in days, and-

Bibi, with her customary skill at arranging the scene around her, waited for a camera to appear before she gracefully fainted into the not entirely willing arms of Daniel Marks, who staggered and permitted her to slump to the filthy paving stones, which revived her into a cry of disgust recorded by the camera and-

The parrot decided in the end that we were not where fate had intended him, and flew away across the river in search of his pirate king, shouting all the while, “The people will RULE! Golden daffodils! SEIZE the-”

A perplexed and red-faced Mrs Nunnally was trying to quiet the tear-streaked Edith, who was demonstrating several new additions to her vocabulary and declaring that the instant she turned eighteen she would return, and that she would never wear a frock again, and that she wanted a hair-cut immediately, and that-

With all this going on, I nearly missed the sound Annie made. My first thought, seeing the rhythmic heave of her body, was that she was sobbing at the loss of her one true love. Then she shot a look over her shoulders, back across the river where lingered the newly crowned pirate king of Salé, and I saw the dance of her dry eyes and the quirk of her lips.

And the woman had claimed she wasn’t much of an actress.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

PIRATE KING: … with all our faults, we love our Queen.

I DID NOT know if Mrs Hatley and Isabel’s mother got their baths that day. I did not know if Edith – Eddie – was granted his hair-cut. I did not discover until some days later whether or not Hale got his film back or if Bibi arranged a more satisfactory news photograph or if Fflytte found a local capable of working the ropes. And some things I never did learn: if Hale knew that June was his child; if the girls found a source of chewing gum in Morocco; if Rosie screeched forever in the air above Salé.

Two things I knew, when I staggered into my own very small, very dim hotel room, very late that night. First, a telegram from Scotland Yard informed us that Lonnie Johns had been found, alive and well, having returned from an illicit holiday in Barbados with a Member of Parliament she’d met in the course of making Rum Runner. And second, that I was wearing the same goat dung – coloured robe I’d put on that morning; the itching from the wool (I prayed it was only from the wool) was driving me mad.

I tore it off and threw it into a corner, replacing it with a dressing-gown I had chosen from a heap of cast-off clothing Rabat’s European community had hastily donated to their filmic refugees. The garment might have been designed for Randolph Fflytte, but modesty was not high on my list of concerns. I tied its belt, dropped into the armchair that was wedged between bed and wall, kicked off my boots, tipped back my head, and closed my eyes.

“Just so you know,” I said, “I plan to murder Lestrade when we get home.”

There came a ting of cut-glass carafe against tin mug, then the tap of my drink being set atop the small deal table tastefully decorated with cigarette burns.

“I may be too tired to swallow,” I groaned.

I heard another movement of clothing, then the cup nudged my hand. My fingers wrapped around it: perhaps I was not too tired to swallow, after all.

“A most successful day, Russell. You overcame a band of ruffians with minimal bloodshed, freed thirty-two British captives and a Frenchman, and prevented a war. You oversaw the peaceful change of régime of a criminal gang into the hands of a young man eager to promulgate the noblest sentiments of Victorian England. You made your erstwhile employer – he is, I trust, erstwhile? – happy by finding a source of what might be described as Moroccan actors, and in the process not only salvaged the economic future of the British film industry, but saved King and country from scandal.”

“However,” I told him, “scandal there will be, enough to keep Fflytte Films in the news for some weeks. To begin with Edith keeps trying to sneak across the river. Her mother caught her the first time. The second, she was returned by Benjamin.”

“The pretty pirate?”

“Yes. Who brought her into the dinner where the entire crew was gathered – her mother had thought she was sleeping – and asked M. Dédain for assistance.”

“Asking for asylum?”

“Asking for marriage.”

“Celeste, wasn’t it? Well, at least someone is happy.”

“Celeste is not happy. Oh, she was when she first saw him. But after a short time, the pretty young man contrived to be sitting next to Daniel Marks. Celeste swore she would talk to every newspaper in England.”

“I see.”

“Daniel removed himself to sit with Bibi, which made everything settle down nicely. Although as I came past the hotel tonight, I saw Benjamin going in through the service door. So everyone except Celeste should be happy.”

“And thus is Fflytte Films hauled from the rocks of scandal. In addition – although I do not for a moment suppose such was your intent – you appear single-handedly to have shaped the basis for a future Moroccan tourist industry, by giving the country’s hereditary buccaneers an outlet for their innate drive for plunder.”

“I’ve certainly left Fflytte Films open to plunder, at any rate.” My final duty that evening had been a long and brain-wracking English-and-Arabic, legal-and-criminal conversation with Captain La Rocha in his gaol cell, arranging for the hire – at rates just short of extortion – of the Harlequin, which (it turned out) was still registered in his name. It had been my offer to restore to its hull the ship’s previous name, the Henry Morgan, that sealed the deal with the former pirate king. “As for my employ, I’ve given Geoffrey Hale notice that he needs a new assistant.” I took another mouthful, relishing the sensation as the young cognac seared its way down my very empty gullet. I looked past the glass at the pair of filthy, blistered feet propped on the bed-covers.

“However, Holmes, I’m afraid there may be a slight delay in our departure.”

My cheeriness gave him pause. After a moment, he ventured, “Yes?”

“It would appear that while Randolph Fflytte does not mind having been taken hostage by his actors, Geoffrey Hale is not so forgiving. He firmly decrees a new set of pirates. And although I don’t imagine there will be a great problem in locating a sufficient number of dark-complexioned gentlemen here in Rabat to fill the rôles of the pirates, it will take some days to teach them their parts. During this time, Fflytte Films will be paying the cast and crew – girls, mothers, Sally, constables, Marks, Maude, and Maurice – simply to lie about in the sun.” While I talked, I had set down the empty mug, and noticed the state of my hands – the morning’s brown paint had mostly worn off, but the edges were quite disgusting. I stood, easing a crick in my back, and limped over to the room’s sole luxury, the cold-water basin in the corner.

“Yes?” The wariness in his voice was stronger; I could feel his narrowed gaze drilling into the back of my head.

“Well, instead of supporting them at their leisure, he proposes to employ them in an interim project. He is, even as we speak, madly penning the script for a new picture, to be filmed while his substitute pirates are in training.”

I looked into the speckled mirror, grimacing at the ravaged face and hair that met my gaze.

“Why does this concern us?” Holmes’ voice now contained outright suspicion. And rightly so.

“Because,” I said, turning on the tap, “we do have a means of lending assistance to the British film industry and to the House of Lords, if not the Palace itself. It seems that Mr Fflytte was inspired by today’s passage through the medina. He envisions a tale weaving together said passage with elements of Byron’s epic poem, The Corsair. Particularly the scene in which the pirate, Conrad, is rescued from a sultan’s dungeon. By a woman.”

I lifted my scrubbed face from the now-grubby towel, and met my husband’s eyes.

“He proposes to call the new picture Pirate Queen. Starring Mary Russell.”

“When stern duty calls, I must obey.…”

This one’s for Gabe:

Welcome to the madness.