Crossed Bones (49 page)

I stared at Idriss. ‘She’s a force of nature, your grandmother! How old is she?’

He shrugged. ‘No one knows, it’s not something we speak of much; and they didn’t have birth certificates or documentation where she was born. Even Jeddah probably has no idea how old she is. We don’t count away our days the way you Westerners do.’

‘How old is your mother, then? She is your mother’s mother?’ I persisted.

He nodded; but he had to think about that for a while too. While I waited, I thought what a very different culture this was to mine, in which every newspaper article would identify the age of its subject alongside the name no matter how irrelevant such a detail might be.

‘I… think, sixty-three.’

‘And how many brothers and sisters does your mother have?’

He counted them off on his fingers. ‘Twelve. Malika was the seventh.’

I made a rough calculation. I had read that women in the mountain regions often married very young, but even given that and any possible gaps between births that made her… ‘Good grief. Eighty-five, at least!’

‘She’s remarkable, isn’t she? Come upstairs – she’s brought the thing I wanted you to see.’ He held his hand out to me and together we went up the stairs.

At the top of the house, on the other side of the stairs from Idriss’s room, the door was ajar, and inside someone was singing. I stopped on the landing to listen, not wanting to interrupt. A moment later Idriss joined in without any hint of self-consciousness, surprising me by raising a melodious light tenor as a counterpoint to the old woman’s shriller notes. I thought of the birds we had heard in the medina, singing across the ancient walls to one another.

‘Tell me the words,’ I begged when he finished.

He raised my hand to his lips. ‘You shall be loaded up with beauty before leaving us for your grey old city,’ he promised, pushing the door open. ‘You have your silk, Jeddah has brought argan soap from the south, and my cousin Hasna will henna your hands for you later.’

I hardly heard what he was saying. The light from the unshuttered window fell upon Lalla Mariam, who stood there, straight as a reed, examining a length of shining cloth. But it was not the item in her hands which caught my attention, but her face as she looked out at me. Downstairs in the semi-gloom of the salon I had formed an impression of a stately old woman with silver hair framing long bones and smooth, dark planes. Now the sun fell squarely upon her, and I caught my breath.

‘Yes, it’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ Idriss was saying. ‘I knew you’d love it, it’s so craftily made. Jeddah is very proud of it, she loves to show it off to people.’

I tore my gaze from his grandmother’s face and looked down at the thing she had brought from the mountains. It was a great swathe of brocaded white silk, and along all its yards of selvedge, both top and bottom, someone had embroidered the most exquisite design. Hundreds of ferns and stylized curls of bracken fronds uncoiling towards an unseen sun, adorned here and there by tiny pink blossoms and rich golden flowers. The ferns and fronds were orderly, almost geometric in the exactitude of their execution: they formed a framework through which the rambling roses twined. But it was the tiny golden flowers on their spiky stems which made my knees go to water.

‘It’s gorse,’ I said, remembering the crown Robert Bolitho had made for the girl he had loved. The buds and blossoms were embroidered with such unusual realism that I could almost smell their rich confectionery aroma – like warm marzipan – unfurling from the cloth.

‘Gorse?’

‘This flower here. It grows all over the hills and cliffs of Cornwall. It’s a wild and thorny thing: a very unlikely flower to find depicted in embroidery.’

Idriss translated this for his grandmother, who through it all stood there calmly watching me with her unblinking bright regard. Then she started to speak quickly and Idriss answered her, then asked a question, to which she responded, and then the flow of words went back and forth like the chatter of magpies.

At last he turned to me. ‘Jeddah says three things. First, that this flower – this bush – is also found here on the Atlantic coast. Secondly that this veil – it’s a bridal veil – has been in the family for generations, but no one knows where it came from or who made it, though there have always been handy women in our family, expert with a needle. Thirdly: that the style of the piece is known as
aleuj
. It is a mélange of traditional Berber skills – very dense and precise and geometric – with a more fluid and realistic European style.
Aleuj
in classical Arabic means “alien” or “foreign”, or even “foreigner”: but it can also mean “one who has converted to Islam”. And the earliest known examples are from the seventeenth century.’

The old woman added something very distinctly then, repeating it three times so that Idriss understood.

‘She says that here in Rabat there was once a woman who was a master embroiderer, and she was known as Zahrat Chamal.’

I looked at him blankly.

‘It’s a given name, not a born name,’ he said. ‘It means Flower from the North.’

Had Catherine become Zahrat when she converted and married her raïs? Did ‘Chamal’ mean from the north of Morocco or from further beyond? Was Zahrat Chamal the Muslim name she had adopted when she changed her faith, like Will Martin becoming Ashab Ibrahim? Perhaps the gypsy fortune-teller had told true, that she would never be married as Catherine, after all. I looked at the stitching on the bridal veil: fine and precise, a delicate slanting satin stitch, just like the one on the Countess of Salisbury’s altar frontal. Not that that was any proof: everyone used satin stitch, even me. I pictured Cat wound from head to toe in this lovely veil, like the women in the pictures I had seen, with a silver Berber crown set on her head, its jewelled teardrops framing her pale face, her fiery hair hidden beneath a coloured scarf, her blue eyes blazing proudly out at a man clad from head to foot in scarlet and gold. And I saw him take her by the hand and lead her to the throne beneath the spectacular bridal curtains the women of the embroidery class had made as their gift to Sidi Qasem bin Hamed bin Moussa Dib and his foreign wife.

And when I looked back at Lalla Mariam I found that she, like me, had tears glittering in her blue eyes.

Alison turned my hands over in hers, the better to examine my palms. ‘And this?’ she asked.

‘A rose, I think – an old variety, like a rambling rose – one of the flat-petalled roses. But the plant on the left hand – I don’t know what it is.’

She traced the pattern of leaves like a chain of hearts that ran from the palm to the tip of my forefinger. ‘So pretty. And what about this – did you buy it in Rabat?’ She touched the antique ring I wore on the third finger of my right hand, where Idriss had placed it when he said goodbye to me outside the airport. ‘It belongs to Jeddah,’ he had told me solemnly. ‘She says it’s a loan, and she wanted me to give it to you because it will bring you back to Morocco.’ Then he closed my fingers over it and kissed me gravely and thoroughly, hidden from prying official eyes by the sun curtains of his taxi. My knees had still felt weak by the time I reached the security gate. Since then we had spoken every night on the phone, so that a holiday romance had turned into a charming and old-fashioned courtship. In that time we had discussed everything from French poetry to the failings of our respective national football teams, and now I felt I knew more about him than I had ever known about Michael.

‘How long will it last?’

I looked up, startled. ‘Pardon?’

‘The tattoo, dope: how long will it last?’

Already the henna had faded and was no longer the fiery burnt orange that had surprised me when the dried paste came away under the shower on the morning of my departure. Now it was the same shade of brown as my freckles, and, like them, it felt a part of me. I did not want it to fade. ‘Idriss said about a month.’

‘He’s marked you as his property, this Idriss,’ she teased.

‘He has not! It’s traditional: women wear henna tattoos as a form of protection against evil influences,’ I said hotly, and at that we both fell silent.

I had returned from Morocco two weeks before, and the time had passed in a whirl of activity. There were three offers on my flat waiting for me as well as a new and potentially lucrative commission. The neatness and speed with which all this came together had rather astonished me: as if fate were pushing me in a specific direction. And I had spent a lot of time with Anna. Together we had visited her friend in the Publications Department at the V&A – an elegantly turned-out and smartly spoken woman in her late fifties, who in turn had taken us to meet someone in English Textiles. Seeing their unalloyed delight at Cat’s work and their gasps of excitement as they viewed the sketches she had made in
The Needle-Woman’s Glorie
was almost reward enough in itself. They asked – of course – whether they might have the book to display alongside the altar frontal, and I told them honestly that I had not yet decided what I was going to do with it. Their faces fell, but soon they were discussing how to make fine facsimile copies and perhaps having the book on loan for a time, and we all parted in good spirits.

Anna looked radiant, and I told her so. ‘I am just so very happy to be able to do this for the family and, well, posterity, if that doesn’t sound too pompous.’ I assured her it did not. ‘And, thank God, I’ve stopped throwing up, and I’m past the dangerous stage, and the scan was normal.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘I didn’t ask. Better not to second-guess fate, I think. I am learning to take life as it comes.’

I smiled. Anna was changing. Perhaps we all were.

∗

‘Ready?’ said Alison, breaking into my thoughts.

‘As ready as I’ll ever be.’ I picked up a small flat stone from where I had been sitting and sent it skimming out across the sea towards St Clement’s Island. It touched the surface six times before sinking beneath the waves. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘I was aiming for seven.’

‘Six for gold,’ Alison laughed. ‘I don’t think that’s too bad.’

‘What, like the magpie verse?’

‘It’s what we always used to say. Though there’s a different version Andrew used to quote, which came from the Scottish side of his family: one for sorrow, two for mirth, three for a wedding, four for a birth, five for Heaven, six for Hell, seven you’ll see the De’ill himsell… Oh, dear.’

‘Oh, great: Hell,’ I said, subdued. ‘Perhaps this isn’t a very good idea.’

‘Well, you certainly don’t have to do it for me,’ Alison said firmly. ‘I’m never setting foot in the place again. Those letters freaked me out completely. Are you quite sure you want to do this?’

‘I have to. I feel… responsible, somehow, though I know that sounds mad.’

Fifteen minutes later we were standing outside the farmhouse at Kenegie just as the sun was starting to go down.

‘Have you got everything?’

I had: torch, lighter, candle, bread, salt, water. And Robert Bolitho’s letters, tied with a band of fine embroidery Lalla Mariam had given to me. The letters were the originals: when I had explained to Anna what I intended to do, she had laughed at me, but waived her deal. ‘Keep copies for me – good ones,’ she made me promise. ‘It’ll only annoy Michael all the more.’ The piece of embroidery was surely by the same hand as the bridal veil: it bore Catherine’s trademark theme. ‘It was something she would have used to tie back her hair at the hammam,’ the old lady had explained to me via Idriss. In poor exchange for this generosity, I had given her my own peacock-feathered embroidered headsquare, and had promised to complete the fourth corner for her with whatever motif she chose for it.

Leaving Alison sitting on the bonnet of the car, I went into the house, my footsteps echoing through the empty rooms. I switched on every light switch as I went up. At the foot of the stairs to the attic, I paused.

Then gritted my teeth and climbed the stairs.

The attic light, absolutely typically, was the only one in the house that did not work. I lit the candle and placed it on Andrew’s desk. In its trembling golden circle of light I laid out the bread, a little pile of salt and a flask of holy water from the font at Gulval Church. Heat and water and sustenance: all the things the dead missed, lacked and craved, as my mother used to tell me in her ghost stories on All-Hallows Eve. Then I placed Rob’s letters down beside them.

Taking a deep breath, I said, ‘Robert Bolitho, if you are here I hope you will hear me. My name is Julia Lovat: you and I may be very distantly related, I don’t know. That’s probably not very important. What is important is that I’ve brought your letters back. I’m sorry that you’ve been disturbed, and I’m sorry we took your letters away. I know you asked in the postscript that Matty burn them, but I’m afraid she didn’t. I understand that: women like to hold on to things, even things that are painful to them. It was wrong of her to leave them to be read by others, but you cannot really blame her, or us for reading them. I read your letters, Robert, so I know that you are a decent, brave man. Even so, you should not have done what you did to Andrew Hoskin, and perhaps there were others here too, others I don’t know about. Maybe you hurt so much you didn’t care who else you caught in your despair. You did a very courageous thing by following your heart and risking your life to try to save Catherine Tregenna –’

Out of nowhere there came a chill draught, and the candle suddenly guttered, sending long, jagged shadows shooting out across the room. I hugged my arms around myself and watched the reflection of the flame play across the etched silver of the ring Idriss had placed on my hand and tried to still the hammering of my pulse.