Mickey allows a pause long enough for Wellsted to take in his news, whatever it may be. ‘All is well in London, I hope,’ the agent says gently.
‘News of home, that is all,’ Wellsted dismisses the letter briskly, pushing it into his pocket. He has no time for personal matters or at least he never makes any. ‘I did not come for the letter,’ he admits. ‘I am here on another more serious matter. We have two officers gone missing in the interior. They were led across the
jabel
and into the desert by
Dhofari
guides to visit the
Bedu
several weeks ago. Dr Jessop who was our ship’s surgeon and First Lieutenant Jones. They missed their rendezvous and have not been heard of since. We docked at every decent-sized port along the coast but have found out very little, though outside Aden I encountered a group of
Bedu
. I heard the men were prisoners of the emir – that they had offended him in some way and were being held in his caravan. The description the
Bedu
gave was consistent with the appearance of the men though the captain – Captain Haines, that is – believes them dead. When we made rendezvous with the
Benares
however, Captain Moresby was of the view that we must be sure.’
Mickey scratches his cheek with a long, carefully manicured finger, which sports a thick ring of yellow gold with a red stone embedded on the face. He takes a sip of his strong coffee.
‘Captured by an emir’s caravan and held there? Now that’s not good. I will make enquiries,’ he says. ‘Leave it with me, Lieutenant Wellsted, and I will see what I can find out.’
‘It is a matter of some urgency, sir.’
Ibn Mudar bows. ‘Of course. Immediately.’
With the efficiency of a man who is used to getting a great deal done, Ibn Mudar calls his slave boy.
‘Bring me Rashid,’ he snaps. The yellow-robed child immediately disappears to find the chief clerk, who is stationed at Mickey’s warehouse, a few streets away.
Wellsted’s cup is refilled and the agent asks polite questions.
‘And your work? How goes the survey?’
‘Slow but sure,’ Wellsted grins. ‘The reefs are all but impossible but the charts are coming along.’
‘Any French vessels?’
This is of interest to any trader with ships on the nearby seas.
‘Only very close to the Egyptian coastline. Where you would expect, really.’
‘It will be good to have maps,’ Mickey points out and Wellsted says nothing in reply, only downs the rest of his coffee.
‘Do you think they might still be alive?’ he asks.
The agent’s face does not alter its expression one iota. ‘My brothers would say it is in Allah’s hands,’ he says. ‘Let me see if I can find out what Allah has in mind. I will send Rashid the moment he comes. He is the man for this job. Leave it to me.’
The men shake hands and Mickey sees the lieutenant to the door of his office.
While he waits, Mickey strokes his thick, salt-and-pepper beard and retreats back onto the comfortable cushions in the corner of the room to consider matters. The British survey interests him tremendously, for if it is successful there will be a far greater volume of English ships in the Red Sea and he will be contracted to see to their needs. He is determined to do his job well for the English. Mickey is inclined to do everything well – he is careful and fastidious in all his dealings. He will apply this to the search for Jessop and Jones – which potentially, he realises, is one of the most dangerous situations with which he has been asked to help. Men die all the time, but kidnap is a different matter.
Watch out,
he says to himself.
God knows what they are up to, the tricky bastards. And now there are two of them missing.
When Mickey thinks of the English, the voice in his head is always that of his Irish wife, Farida, who maintains that without question the English are untrustworthy. Her tribe, it seems, are perpetually at war with the lily-skinned sailors, though they share the same tongue. Mickey trusts Farida’s judgement. He was young when he bought her at auction after she had been captured on a shipwreck. He was a brash, young buck of a merchant of twenty who had made his fortune quickly. He wanted to show the world that he was cosmopolitan and he knew an exotic, white-skinned beauty in his
harim
would make his name as much as any bale of fine silk ever had. There was no question of love. When he met her, however, he realised just how much he had focussed all his attention on his business and how little he knew of the world beyond it. At first he expected she resented being captured and sold, but she told him frankly after only a fortnight, that his house was a hundred times the size of the cottage in Rowgaranne, County Cork, where she was brought up, that she had spent much of her young life there hungry, cold and in want and that she would gladly stay in his beautiful
harim
, especially as his wife.
The land of white men still seems to Mickey like a fairy-tale kingdom. The landscape Farida describes is undoubtedly accurate and yet it is so outlandish. She swears on her life that Cork is so rainy that much of the land is bog, and so cold that sometimes when it rains the drops freeze solid. He finds this particularly difficult to imagine – Mickey, for all that he is a trader, has never left the south of the Arabian Peninsula and the thought of freezing, squelching mud flats is almost incomprehensible to him. That the people who live in such a place should subsist on potatoes and that spice is almost unheard of is bizarre. In fact, he finds the lack of camels and gazelles in the stories his wife tells of her homeland profoundly eerie. And the infidels have such strange names – Macgregor, McLean and O’Donnell.
‘Why, you are silly,’ Farida laughs, dismissing him with a wave of her elegant, snow-white hand. ‘That’s only your
Ibn.
Macgregor is the son of Gregor (that is the name of the man who taught me to read – our priest at home) and O’Donnell (which is my name, you know) is Son of Donnell. It’s exactly the same as yours – Ibn Mudar – the son of Mudar. Or Ibn Rashid is the son of Rashid. The word Ibn is only O or Mac in English, or rather in the Gaelic. We shan’t go into the Fitzes now, my dear. But it’s only a way of identifying your family – like all names. Don’t you see?’
* * *
At first Mickey can’t get used to it – European languages simply have too many consonants. He is certain that he’ll never become fully accustomed to the sound.
‘You Arabian lads,’ Farida continues, ‘have great swagger and no mistake. We only call our chief soldiers, our boxers and wrestlers The Knife or The Hurricane. Whereas you fellas have legions of names like that – serious fellas can be Al this or Al that. The Dog, The Thief, The Lion. Well, fair play to you, I say. You’re warriors one and all. You can be my Ali Ibn Mudar, Ali Al Malik – Ali the King. I am your possession now, after all, and you my master, like royalty.’
Mickey kisses his wife hotly on the lips. She is a wonderful woman. She has taken to his household far more easily than could have ever been hoped and, better still, she is a boon in business. Farida has no qualms about Arabian manners or customs and her open-mindedness rubs off on her husband, who finds himself more and more intrigued by her tales. His world is opening up.
The strangest thing of all though is that in Farida’s country, it seems, men only take one wife. Or, as she says with a characteristic giggle, ‘One wife at a time’. This shocks Mickey to the core – it seems such a barbaric practice.
‘But what happens to the other women the man desires?’ he says.
‘Exactly, my boy,’ Farida grins. ‘Now in these parts here you have what I would term a practicable system. I can see this working out very nicely indeed.’
Over the years she has remained indescribably foreign for all her aptitudes and the whole-hearted fashion in which she has adopted her new, Arabian life. While his other brown-eyed beauties scent themselves interminably with exotic oils, coil their hair into glossy ringlets and dote on the nursery of children that they have produced, Farida or Fanny as she originally wished to be called, on her very first day demanded pen and ink to draw pictures of the plants in Mickey’s courtyard garden and write reams of descriptive prose and poetry. Within six months of her arrival, the Pearl, as he has come to call her, is speaking Arabic like a master at the university. She reads and mem -orises long portions of the
Quran
and fashions herself a set of silk garments from the
harim’s
stock of materials that prove to be deeply enticing to Mickey O’Mudar.
‘Never been without a bodice. Not going to feckin’ start now,’ she says.
Mickey never can tell what she is going to do next, what she might read or what strange ideas she will voice. The thing he likes about her most, though, is the fact that she is clearly interested in pleasing herself as much as she pleases him – both in bed and out of it. This is an irresistible challenge after years of women bred to compliance. Farida is a matchless pearl indeed and, illuminated by the spark of independence that is so natural to her alongside her fierce intelligence, she stimulates him body and mind. It does not matter to him one jot that in all the years she has not borne him a child. In fact, it adds to her allure, her difference from his other wives. It is also probably the only reason why the other women in the
harim
accept the strange, pale-skinned foreigner. She is not – as far as they are concerned – competition, for she has no son to compete with their own. She is, they think, a mere dalliance to keep Mickey amused.
‘Do you mind?’ he asks her.
‘Well you can’t say we haven’t given it a good enough shot,’ she giggles.
He loves her all the more for being so contented. Farida has the admirable ability of being able to adapt and he’d never be where he is today if it wasn’t for her. It was Farida after all who made the navy job possible. He might not have taken it had she not encouraged him.
When he tells her of the opportunity that has presented itself, Farida makes no judgement on his lack of manliness in sharing his concerns – she takes it in her stride as easily as she has taken their habit of discussing literature and art (also, now he comes to think of it, unusual).
‘Well now,’ she sips a glass of rose-water and pomegranate juice and contemplates Mickey’s smooth, chestnut skin as he lies naked beside her on purple, satin sheets that she picked herself from the lavish stock of textiles available to all his women. ‘Into bed with the English is it, eh? Well, my advice, dear husband, is to take their money. They have acres of money, the English. Take their money and charge them plenty, treat them fair – true to yourself – but never trust them. Individually they are fine, I’m sure, but as a nation they’ll stab you in the back as soon as look at you. My father, God bless him, used to say there are four things you can never trust – a bull’s horn, a dog’s tooth, a horse’s hoof and an Englishman’s smile. And a man such as yourself, a fine man with brown skin, is worth even less to them than a penniless Catholic. Remember that, my darling, whatever happens, whatever friends you think you have made – you are a darkie to them and that’s all.’
In what can only be described as ongoing training, his pale-skinned wife teaches Mickey a thing or two about matters European and briefs him in British manners and business customs as a matter of course, so that when he agrees to Allenby’s proposition and takes up the post of naval agent, the officers with whom he comes into contact feel instinctively that somehow he understands what the Navy needs. Quickly he is trusted and liked throughout the service.
These days though well into her forties, and displaying with each passing year, were it possible, less interest in his household and domestic matters, it is still Farida who Mickey seeks out most regularly for company and advice. It is she he most desires when it comes time to retire. He has tried asking his other wives for their opinion but the conversations never go beyond what they think he wants them to say. Her delight these days, as always, is her frantic scribbling and reading any Arabic text that comes her way. She quotes poetry, whispering well-constructed if profane lines in her husband’s ear as she pulls him on top of her pale flesh. Most surprisingly of all for a woman, she has, as far as he can remember, never been wrong about anything.
There is a clattering sound on the stairway to Mickey’s office as Rashid arrives from the warehouse. He has recently put henna in his hair but immediately decided against the resulting shock of colour, so he is wearing a long headdress to cover the luminous orange while it fades. The material sways behind him lending an unaccustomed elegance to his entrance.
‘
Salaam aleikhum,’
the boy bows.
He comes from a long line of
Ibadi
herdsmen and he learnt to read purely by chance, when he was taken ill and sent to Muscat to the house of a distant relative. Having discovered indispensable administrative skills, which have benefited Mickey’s business immeasurably, Rashid never returned to the shit-poor caravan where he spent the first ten years of his life. He is, however, a competent horseman and good with a camel. He knows how to survive on the sands.
‘I need you to come with me,’ Mickey says. ‘We will be gone for a few days. There are two
Bedu
I want to find on the
jabel
who can help me. Two white men are missing. We must find them. Though first some enquiries in town, I think.’
Rashid hovers, hopping from foot to foot very lightly in a barely perceptible movement that Mickey completely understands.
‘Oh yes, Rashid. There will be bonuses if we find them. For you and for me. If they are still alive.’
Six weeks into their captivity and having moved camp twice, Jessop comes to understand that the curse of being a doctor is the knowledge what a man can survive and what he can’t. His is a profession that does not countenance much in the way of hope. He wonders if it is for this reason that Jones has survived more easily than he, for Jones has been able to believe that the treatment they have received in the camp will kill them, that it will end soon. Jessop, however, understands that the emir has a particular talent. He is extremely good at keeping men alive. Just. The heat has exacerbated their decline, and when he thinks of it logically he knows that it really hasn’t been that long. For heaven’s sake, the
Palinurus
will only recently have abandoned the rendezvous point at Aden. But every day of this has been hell – the heat and the terror of never knowing when they may be hauled from the tent and made to march for miles overnight or, worse, perhaps be beheaded. Jessop is sure he read somewhere that it is beheading that is most likely.
The men have quickly become two ragged piles of skin and bones – the doctor is a good two stones down on what he considers his fighting weight of two hundred pounds, at which he left Bombay all those months before. He has little fight left now. For a while he hoped the abrasions caused by their initial struggle against the ropes might cause blood poisoning or that the sign that the emir had branded agonisingly on the white men’s buttocks might become infected to the same effect but neither of these possibilities has transpired to release either him or Jones from their captivity, and he has become resigned simply to waiting, endlessly, and hoping despite himself for food and water. If the meagre rations stopped, at least there would be an end to the whole damn business. In this weakened state, a couple of days of privation would certainly do it.
However, when their stony-eyed jailer arrives and pours some warm, brackish liquid from a goatskin down Jessop’s face, he cannot help but lick at it in desperation. The survival instinct, he notes, is stronger than his logical response to the situation and thirst turns any man, even a scientific kind of chap, into a panic-stricken, babbling, begging fool. The doctor has come to realise that a man will sit in his own excrement, wracked by hunger pains, baking in his own skin, and still he will survive despite himself.
‘Me too,’ Jones begs and receives a dark dribble of lukewarm liquid.
Jones, it has turned out, has no dignity and less goodness. Jessop does not blame him, and it is hardly a surprise. Jessop suspects that when Jones is occasionally taken away by one of the guards that he is gratifying the man sexually for extra food. Firstly, he never mentions what happens when he leaves the tent, which is odd. And then the lieu-tenant’s weight has not dropped as dramatically as the doctor’s own. Jessop is not sure what he would do given that opportunity – Jones’ blonde hair is clearly of more interest to those so inclined. In any case, he does not like to think about it preferring, when he is not wishing fervently for death, instead to fantasise about either crisp, green apples and a stroll he took shortly before his departure through the winding lanes of his father’s estate or, occasionally, the madman’s dream of escaping the tent, stealing a camel and somehow outrunning and outfoxing the emir’s well-fed warriors on their own territory, to make it back to the coast and safety. Both these dreams seem equally outlandish and unlikely but they occupy him nonetheless. Out on the
jabel
there are
falaj
– stone-lined irrigation systems to carry the water. They were built by the Persians more than a thousand years ago. Jessop dreams of bathing in one. Why won’t the man simply let him die?
Most evenings there is thin soup of some kind or other – the watered-down, half-rancid remnants of meals served days ago at the emir’s table. The moisture in this mush is as important as the nourishment though Jessop has noticed he is sweating less and as a consequence he cannot cool down. He knows he is in the advanced stages of acute dehydration and thinks it would be good to write to his professor at King’s about the phenomenon. The old man would be interested, no doubt, for the human body is always endlessly fascinating to him and he values practical experimentation above all else. Both of the men have lost the ability to grow their beard and the thin, straggly wisps on their chins are matted against the skin. If you think about it too much, it becomes devilishly itchy.
Jessop is jolted out of this reverie by the voice of his companion.
‘I don’t see it,’ Jones says his first coherent words in several weeks that have not been formed to beg for food or water. ‘I’ve no idea how we are ever going to get out of here, old man.’
Jessop laughs more in shock than in amusement. He had assumed that Jones, like him, was wishing for death but that clearly has not been the case.
‘Really,’ Jones continues, as if it is only just occurring to him, ‘at most we could run if we could get through these ropes. But then how would we survive? There’s sand everywhere. Sand and baking sun. This whole damn country is just an oven.’
‘We’re not going to survive,’ the doctor says wearily. ‘At least, I hope not for much longer. A little more privation and we’ll be there, my friend, and that is my considered, medical opinion.’
Apparently, this has not occurred to the lieutenant. Perhaps, Jessop wonders, he thinks this is a tale in some story book and we have to get out because, as white men, we are the heroes. It occurs to him that Jones did not have much of a grasp on reality even before their fortunes changed, and now he does not comprehend that he is filthy, ragged and hovering on the cusp of death.
‘But they will send someone when they realise we’re missing, won’t they? I mean, we’re British subjects.’
The lieutenant manages to sound almost outraged. It’s actually quite admirable and Jessop can’t bring himself to point out that Haines is well-meaning but not always effect ive and that it will take an extraordinarily effective man to cross the burning sands and come to find them. All this to be done quickly – for in current circumstances, the doctor does not give himself or his companion much more than a few weeks of life. A man given no food can last three months, of course, there’s always that – and they are at least receiving some rations. But still, he considers, with the heat, another two months seems an impossibility unless things improve.
In any case, it is not, as far as the doctor can see, in Captain Haines’ nature to marshal his men into a search party or to undertake what would surely be an arduous negotiation with the
Bedu
. If the emir were for turning he would surely have done so by now. Their best hope is that he has sued for ransom, though there has been no mention of that, and truly the fellow would have a cheek, given they’d paid for his hospitality already. Jessop feels outraged. He didn’t kill the damn girl on purpose. In fact, he cured all the others. There is no accounting for it; the emir is grieving, he is not reasonable. He may never return to reason and that’s the truth. It is too exhausting to think about.
‘How long do you suppose we have been here?’ Jones cuts in on the doctor’s rambling thoughts. ‘How long do you think it will take them to rally the troops and come for us? It’s really not on. Seems to me that we’ve been tied up for far too long, anyway.’
It’s a good question. Jessop tries to work out how long it might have been but the trouble is that one scorching day merges into another. It’s impossible to measure time.
It’s weeks,
he thinks,
not months.
He’s sure of it though he is aware that in these conditions he is easily confused. For all he knows they could have been here a year, perhaps, or longer. The imprisonment in the tent is punctuated very occasionally by a sandstorm or a few days of exhausting marching to another oasis where the tent is set up again and the two men are bound again to a stake. Once, they were lucky and the ropes were long enough to allow them to sleep on their stomachs. Sleeping on the stomach, Jessop has come to understand, diminishes the pain of extreme hunger. Today his bonds are far too tight, however, to manage it. They’ve been bound like this, he thinks, for ages and ages, though how long that actually is escapes him.
‘They’ve certainly held us for several weeks,’ is the best he can do.
‘Well, I hope the rescue party make it soon,’ the lieutenant says testily, as if his carriage is late for the opera or the vicar and his sister have, inexplicably, not turned up to take tea. ‘Really I do.’