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Cleo shivered. Thierry had spoken about the Mamelukes, their bravery and savagery, and his hand had tightened on his sword hilt as if to still a tremor of fear. She had no wish to encounter them either. ‘What will you do?’
‘I am hoping the soldiers will have been recalled towards Cairo. I imagine they will go by river, will they not? It seems perverse to march in this heat.’ Quin stood and stretched, six feet of lean muscle unselfconsciously displayed.
‘I cannot imagine how I would persuade Father to go.’ She got to her feet and made rather a business of straightening the panniers. ‘He is very stubborn.’
‘Nothing a sharp blow to the head would not cure,’ Quin said. He took the leading rein and walked off down the path leaving her blinking at his retreating back.
Did he mean that? How wonderful if he did. She was certain he would accomplish it very neatly, with no more damage to Father than a sore head when he awoke. No, it had to be a joke. Respectable engineers did not go around hitting scholars over the head and loading them on to river boats. She took a grip on her imaginings and ran to catch Quin up.
* * *
The camp was small and orderly in the bleak, soulless way of soldiers without women. Capitaine Laurent was sitting on a folding chair outside his tent, his two lieutenants standing listening to him. When he saw them approaching he stood up, watching the stranger from under heavy black brows.
‘Madam.’ He sketched a bow and the other two men did likewise. ‘Qui est-ce?’
‘Quintus Bredon, American engineer, Captain,’ Quin responded in French before Cleo could speak. ‘I have been rescued by Madame Valsac and her father. Bedouin raiders took my camels.’ He pushed back his sleeve as he spoke, revealing the edge of the bandage.
‘American?’ Laurent still made no gesture of hospitality.
‘The United States is the ally of France, is she not?’ Quin said easily. But he could see that Laurent’s stance was alert, subtly more aggressive. The two men were facing up to each other like dogs meeting on the edge of their territories, not convinced yet that a fight was required, but quite willing to scrap if necessary.
‘Oui. But what are you doing here?’
‘Indulging my curiosity. I was in the Balkans, I heard about your emperor’s savants and I decided to see for myself. There is a brotherhood amongst scientists, I find. I had hoped to reach the Cataracts—an intriguing problem in navigation—but I hear that would be suicide now.’
‘Ha!’ Laurent gestured to one of the soldiers and the man ran forward with two more folding chairs. ‘Sit, have coffee. Murad Bey is on his way north with a force of fifteen thousand, the latest intelligence confirms it.’
‘And you have what...fifty men?’ Quin glanced around the encampment. ‘I imagine your orders do not involve suicide either.’
‘Correct. We will strike camp and load up the barges.’ He gestured towards the river bank and the moored vessels. ‘I was about to send to your father, madam, to tell him to prepare to move by dawn tomorrow. We have room for the two...the three...of you and one small piece of baggage each.’
‘But my father’s books, his papers...’
‘His life?’ the captain enquired, one brow lifted. ‘Yours?’
‘It seems I may have to take you up on your offer to knock Father out after all, Mr Bredon.’ Escape, at last. A way to get across those hundreds of miles to the coast and there... And there, what? she asked herself. She was a woman with no money of her own and no protection once she left her father’s side in this dangerous country. But if she could get to France or England, surely she could find work of some kind?
Quin sat back in the chair, his relaxed stance steadying her circling, futile thoughts. ‘We might not have to resort to anything so drastic,’ he observed. ‘Would he come if he could take everything with him? He is not so blinded by his work as to think he could sit making notes on Egyptian antiquities whilst the most dangerous fighting force in Egypt sweeps over your camp, surely?’
‘No, I hope even Father would bow to the inevitable under those circumstances. The problem is to prevent the days of argument beforehand while we convince him the danger is real.’
‘The village we passed on our way here had several feluccas moored. We could buy or hire two—surely that would be enough room for the three of us and all your possessions.’
‘But I cannot sail and Father...’
‘I can sail a small boat. The rig is different, but the principles are the same. Besides, we can hire some men.’
Laurent was watching them intently, his head moving from side to side, eyes narrowed in calculation. ‘How will you pay for this, monsieur? I have no funds to buy boats for civilians.’
And that was all too true, Cleo knew. The emperor had left his troops short of everything from coin to boots, while promising to send them a shipload of clowns and entertainers from Paris to keep up morale. Thierry had once bitterly observed that he would be quite prepared to eat a comedian, provided he was roasted well enough.
‘I have money,’ Quin said and stood, his hand held out to help her to her feet. Quite how he managed to stand there, clad in a galabeeyah like any local peasant, and look as though he was in a drawing room, Cleo had no idea. Not that she had ever been in a drawing room in her life. ‘Capitaine, we will join you here tomorrow before noon.’
Laurent looked as though he was searching for reasons to argue and could find none. ‘Your father’s correspondence, madam?’
‘No need to trouble you with that, I am sure you have a great deal to do, without having extra paperwork cluttering things up,’ Quin said before Cleo could respond. ‘He will be able to deal with it himself when we arrive in Cairo and probably he will want to add to it as we sail down river.’
Cleo opened her mouth to argue, then closed it again. What Quin said was perfectly true, her only objection was with his casual assumption of complete control.
‘Shall we go, madame? The sooner we reach the village and open negotiations, the better.’
‘One moment, Monsieur Bredon. I wish to have a word with the capitaine.’ She held his gaze. ‘In private.’
‘But of course.’ He bowed to the officers and strolled off to where the donkey was grazing.
‘He is insolent, this American, but then I hear they all are,’ one of the lieutenants observed as the junior officers walked away to leave her alone with the captain.
‘What do you know of him?’ Laurent demanded, as she knew he would. She had no answers for him, but she wanted to discover what he thought of Quin.
‘Nothing.’ Cleo shrugged. ‘He had an infected wound and was burning up with heat-stroke. He carried money, but nothing else. I have no reason to suspect he is anything but what he says.’
‘But it is strange to find an American here.’
‘The frontiers are easy enough to penetrate for a single traveller, are they not? Many people beside the emperor are intrigued by Egypt.’
‘The English certainly are,’ Laurent remarked, his eyes on Quin’s elegant back as he leaned one hip against the panniers and waited, apparently incurious about their conversation or the camp around him. His head was bowed and Cleo wondered fleetingly if he was very tired. ‘And not for the antiquities either.’
‘You think he might be a spy?’ That had not occurred to her before, but then it would be madness to send an agent deep into the desert when there could be nothing of interest to the British here. ‘He is not a soldier, I saw his body when I nursed him, he has no scars beyond old ones that must belong to his boyhood.’ She shrugged and answered her own question. ‘But what would a spy be doing here? In Cairo or Alexandria, I could understand it. No, he must be what he says.’
She was never quite easy with Laurent, who had been her husband’s friend. Sometimes she wondered if she could ask him why Thierry had married her. Her father’s enthusiasm for allying his daughter with an officer in the army of his country’s enemy she understood quite clearly—it protected their position. But why had Thierry courted her with every appearance of passionate attachment and then proved such a distant and uncaring husband?
In the low times, in the hour before dawn when she lay restless and aching with unhappiness, she wondered if the mess her marriage had become was her fault or... Or what? He knew who he was marrying. Anyone would think he was a fortune hunter, but I have no fortune.
‘Madam?’
‘I am sorry.’ He must have been talking to her and she had been far away in her head. ‘I must go and see if we can secure those boats. If not, we will be here tomorrow with our bare necessities.’
‘Of course. You are certain you do not wish to give me your father’s correspondence?’
‘Perfectly, thank you.’ Surely he had more pressing matters to concern himself about just at the moment? ‘Au’voir, Capitaine Laurent.’
* * *
Quin pushed the twine back into place and dropped the package of letters into the pannier as he heard the tone of Cleo’s voice change into an unmistakable au’voir. If he had no further opportunity to get his hands on them, at least he had memorised the names of the eight men addressed, including the Englishman, a Professor Smith of Portsmouth. Was it coincidence that the professor happened to live in the country’s foremost naval town?
‘And pigs might fly,’ Quin muttered to himself.
‘Are you well?’ Cleo asked, right behind him.
‘Well enough and better for the prospect of heading north.’
She nodded agreement as she took the leading rein and started down the path towards the village with the boats. ‘It will be a relief to be back in civilisation.’
Then you are going to be sorely disappointed, Quin thought, fanning away the flies with a leafy twig. We are heading into a plague-ridden battlefield and the best you can hope for is that your father is exposed as a gullible idiot. At worst, perhaps that crocodile might be the kindest option after all.
Men were lounging around the ramshackle jetty where the boats were moored, but Quin made for the largest house. ‘This will be the village sheikh, I imagine. Are you going to sit meekly outside with the donkey while I negotiate?’
He expected an argument, but Cleo simply slipped the tail of her headscarf across her lower face and went to sit under the shade of the wall. ‘I know my place,’ she said. It was said without inflection or complaint, but there was something in the way she spoke that made Quin look back. ‘Yes?’ She raised one brow. ‘I assume your Arabic is up to it, or do you need help?’
‘No, thank you.’ But you do, Quin thought as he tapped on the door, clearing his mind of French and English. ‘Salaam alaikum,’ he said to the elderly man who opened it and ducked through the opening as the sheikh gestured him inside.
* * *
Quin knew that bargaining required patience and persistence—he’d had plenty of practice when buying his camels—but the negotiations took more than two hours. No, they could not sell the boats. Yes, possibly they could be hired and the men to crew them. For how much? The effendi wished to beggar them, like the Feranzawi from the soldiers’ camp who came to buy food?
Patiently Quin pointed out that if the boats and their crew were absent from the village when Murad Bey and his men came through they would be safe. If they hired them to him, they would be out of reach and earning at the same time.
By this time they had moved to the waterside and there was much murmuring and gesticulating at this suggestion. A price was named. Quin reeled back in exaggerated horror. He prodded a battered gunwale, curled his lip at the state of the ropes and named another figure.
When finally they had come to an agreement and he had drunk bitter coffee and handed over half the price, Cleo was still sitting in the same place, motionless. When he turned from the waterside in a flurry of jokes and waving hands from his new acquaintances she rose smoothly to her feet and followed him in silence until they were out of sight.
‘Will it take long to break camp?’ he asked when it seemed she was not going to say anything.
‘No. Not with you to help.’ Her voice was muffled behind the veiling cotton.
‘What is wrong, Cleo?’ Quin stopped and turned. ‘Don’t you want to leave?’ This mission might be, quite literally, a pain, but at least he’d believed he was effecting a rescue. Now it seemed the victim might not want rescuing.
‘Of course I want to leave.’ She wrenched the veil from her face and glared at him. ‘Only a fool would want to stay.’
‘Then you worry that your father might be stubborn and refuse? I am certain I can—’
‘If he refuses, then we leave him.’ She kept walking, swept past with the donkey trotting obediently behind.
‘Abandon your father?’ he asked her retreating back, the set shoulders and reed-straight spine. This woman was going to be a shark in the ornamental fishpond that was London society.
‘He abandoned Mama. He has abandoned me. She was simply an unpaid maidservant and so am I. I want him safe and looked after, but after that...’
It took Quin several loping strides to catch up with her. ‘Abandoned? But you are with him now.’
‘Abandoned emotionally, abandoned in his head. Family is just a nuisance, a tie, to him. Mama thought he loved her and eloped with him willingly.’ Cleo snapped out the explanation as though she slapped down cards on a gaming table. ‘He loved the dowry he counted on my grandfather handing over when the marriage was a fait accompli. But Mama’s father simply cut her off. By the time she realised that she had tied herself to a profoundly selfish man I was on the way.’
At least her grandfather wanted her, although Quin refused to contemplate whether it was from love, duty or simply family pride. He found he could think of nothing to say so he reached out and laid his arm over her shoulders. A hug might help...
Cleo shrugged off his touch and stalked on. ‘Mama was very good at explaining things as I grew up. Papa was a very busy man. Papa was very important and so was his work. Papa must not be disturbed. Papa loved me really. That worked all through Italy and Greece and Anatolia while I was a child. Then we came to Egypt and Mama died and I realised—’
‘Realised what?’
‘That it was time to stop being a little girl and become a woman. To stop expecting what he cannot give.’
‘Love? Is that why you married Capitaine Valsac?’
‘But of course.’ She turned those mysterious greenish-grey eyes on him and smiled. ‘Why else would I marry, save for love?’
Chapter Five (#ulink_930e0f8e-a29d-5035-a263-daeee27131d7)
‘Why marry other than for love?’ Quin Bredon fell into step beside her. ‘I can think of many reasons. For protection, for money, for status.’ She sensed his gaze slide sideways for a second. ‘For lust.’
Cleo winced, then hid the reaction with a slap at a fly. To escape, she added mentally. And for lust, let’s be honest. You desired Thierry, he was big and handsome and active. Alive. He looked at you and saw something beyond a drudge, so you thought.
‘I married my husband loving him,’ she answered honestly. And by the time I was left a widow three months later I hated him. Pride kept her voice light and her lips firm. She had been a fool to marry a man she hardly knew. And she must still be a fool, because she could not work out why he had married her. But she was not going to admit any of that to this man who was also big and handsome and active. And worryingly intelligent and curious.
‘I’m amazed you found a priest to marry you all the way down here,’ Quin remarked. ‘Or did you wed in a Coptic church?’
‘We married in Cairo. Father and I were there when the French took the city in July ninety-eight.’
‘Good God,’ Quin muttered.
‘It was not amusing,’ Cleo agreed, with massive understatement. It took an effort not to let the memories flood back, filling her nostrils with the stench of smoke and blood and disease. She had only to close her eyes and the screams of the sick and dying would drown out the sound of the river and the cries of the hawks overhead. ‘Fortunately there was no prolonged siege. Father made himself known to the new French authorities at once—he had heard about les savants, you see.’
‘And they allowed him, an Englishman, his freedom, even after their defeat at the Battle of the Nile?’
‘They saw he was harmless, I suppose. He talked to the governor and must have convinced them he was exactly what and who he said. They gave him protection and even facilitated his correspondence.’
‘Why are you not still there?’
‘We stayed for a year, then the next July they found the Rosetta Stone and brought it to Cairo, but they wouldn’t let anyone but the French savants look at it. Father was livid. Napoleon left for France to stage his coup and things began to fall apart in Cairo—the generals were arguing, there was very little money or food and the plague got worse. Father said he wanted to go south and they said he could if we went with a party of troops that was going too.’
‘And luckily Valsac was one of the officers? You must have been delighted.’
‘I did not know him before. We were introduced when the plans were being made. Thierry began to court me. Then Father and the general said it was awkward me being the only woman, and unmarried. So he proposed.’
‘How fortunate that a marriage of convenience should turn out so romantically. And how sad it lasted such a short time. How did he die? If you don’t mind talking about it.’
There was no hint of sarcasm in his words and Quin sounded genuinely sympathetic. It must be her own nagging unhappiness about the whole marriage that was colouring her reaction to his words.
‘He was killed in a skirmish when we came up against Murad Bey’s rearguard on his return south. It has been peaceful since, which is why we live apart from the troop now. They have found a better base for themselves and Father wanted to be close to the temple.’
‘And you returned to your father’s tent.’
‘I was always there when Thierry was away from camp.’ Who else was going to look after him? she thought and bit back the words. There was no point in bitterness, she was the only one it hurt. ‘Look, here is our village. I must arrange some help tomorrow to carry our things to the boats.’
There was no problem here, she was known and trusted even though the villagers thought her father was most strange and the women sympathised with her lack of a husband. Cleo negotiated with the sheikh’s senior wife for men and donkeys to carry their baggage to Shek Amer in return for her own little donkey and everything that would not fit on the boats.
Quin did not enter the village with her, perhaps sensing that his presence as a strange man might be an embarrassment. He was quite sensitive, quite unlike what she imagined an engineer to be like. He was more suited to being a diplomat, Cleo decided as she stopped on the river bank to cut some greenery for the donkey’s evening feed. When she looked round for him Quin had climbed the piled sand around the temple and was standing in the shadow of one of the great pillars.
Cleo lifted the packet of letters, the knife and water flasks from the bottom of one of the panniers and heaped in the greenery, then laid the things back on the top, straightening the cord that tied the bundle of correspondence as she did so. When she had fastened it that morning she had wrapped it round once, then twisted it so the cord caught in the other sides of the little bundle like a parcel, before knotting the ends in the middle. Now one corner was creased and the cord not straight. Odd. Perhaps it had been knocked when the water bottles had been dropped in.
She lifted her gaze to the figure almost invisible in the deep shadows of the temple. Or perhaps Quin pushed the cord aside to look at the addresses on the letters. But why should he do that? She recalled her conversation with Laurent. Could Quin be spying? But all there was here was one English scholar and his daughter and a small troop of French soldiers, miles from base.
