“But, Mother, you do not even know him!”
“No, but I know something about him — I have good friends who from time to time make me little presents for use at just such times as this.” She smiled softly and warmly into her son’s surprised face. “It may be enough, it may not. I make no promises, but I will try. You will visit Tho’mas? I think that he should not be left to think that Tussun has abandoned him.”
“I am going to the guardhouse as soon as I leave you, my Mother.”
“So, that is well. Tell him that he has friends; tell him that we are trying to save him. But tell him also that if we fail, we shall not easily forget him.”
As soon as her son was gone the Lady Amina called for her most trusted among the harem eunuchs and sent him to fetch Captain Ballatar. Then she went to her little gilded escritoire, and wrote a short note. She was sanding and sealing it when the captain arrived.
“Do you know in which apartments Abbas Pasha has been housed?” she asked.
The man’s dark, scarred face showed surprise, and a certain hastily suppressed curiosity. “Yes, Lady, His Excellency is lodged in the Shirkup rooms in the north-west wing.”
“Then will you give him my compliments; say how much I regret disturbing him at this late hour, but that I should be grateful if he will do me the honour of paying me a short visit — without delay. If he makes excuses or seems unwilling, then give him this note. If not, then keep it close and return it to me later.”
Captain Ballatar’s battered countenance showed surprise quite clearly this time, and concern; he was an old and trusted friend.
The Vicereine laughed softly. “Do not worry, my friend; if I am playing with fire, it is not the kind you fear, and I know how to handle it.” She gave the scented billet into his hand. “And, Captain, on the way, double the guards in the corridors, and bid your men be at their most alert and salute the minister most punctiliously. Also, when you have escorted him here, remain on guard yourself outside the door, and let him know that you do so. He may be here some time.”
Captain Ballatar saluted, and went off to carry out his orders.
As soon as he was gone, and the door safely shut behind him, the Lady Amina went into her bedchamber, locking the door behind her. She opened a great blackwood chest standing in an alcove, and lifted out and unlocked a box of ancient and curiously fretted ironwork lined with fragrant sandalwood. She thrust aside handfuls of gold and silver, coral and turquoise and amber — the jewellery she least often wore, but which yet did not merit a place in her husband’s treasury. Underneath it all she withdrew an almost invisible pin and, lifting out the false bottom over a shallow hiding place, went quickly but carefully through several packets of letters and documents within; found the one she wanted and withdrew one sheet, then returned all the rest to their hiding place, piled turquoise and amber and milky moonstones back over all, and returned the jewel box to the blackwood chest. Then she returned to her private salon to await her visitor.
*
Thomas sat on the edge of the trestle bed in the narrow guardhouse cell. It was late, but he had no desire to lie down. He was so tired, with a kind of stunned exhaustion, that if he lay down he might even fall asleep, and it seemed a waste to spend the last night of one’s life in sleeping.
He could still not really understand what had happened, could not quite believe that it had happened at all. The face-change had come about with such nightmare suddenness. He had gone out to fight his duel with Aziz Bey with the full permission of the Viceroy, and he could have sworn, the support of his sons and the whole Egyptian and Arab section of the Court, and afterwards he had gained the distinct impression that he himself had been the only person of his acquaintance to find that the killing of the Mameluke interfered with his supper. And now, here he sat in the guardhouse cell, condemned without trial to die in the morning for the death of an officer of the Imperial Ottoman forces — and dead already, it seemed, to the men he had called his friends: Zeid — Tussun …
He shook his shoulders, what could Zeid or Tussun, even Ibrahim Pasha, do against the decree of the Viceroy? But he might have been allowed visitors — one visitor. Och, but what good would that do? Did he really want the boy here, tearing his own heart out with sorrow: making the parting harder for both of them. Better for them both, like this.
His mind did not go back to his boyhood, even to Broomrigg among the low, green Border Hills. It did not seem strange that nobody in Edinburgh would ever know what had happened to him. That was all part of another world. There was an old tune running in his head:
Oh, I will ride the wide world o’er,
A thousand leagues an’ three,
But even that belonged to his present world, because of the night he had sung it under the pomegranate shadows in the Vicereine’s courtyard.
Tae see my brither’s face aince more,
An’ ken he trusted me.
He watched the frantic fluttering of a moth whirling its own dark shadow about and about the smoky flame of the small palm-oil lamp in its niche. He saw the exact colour of the sky, deep green beyond the bars of the high narrow window, and one star like an infinitely small white flower adrift in it. He heard the tramp of the sentry outside.
If he could avoid thinking about yesterday, all the yesterdays, surely he could keep from thinking about tomorrow.
The moth blundered into the lamp flame and fell singed and sodden in the oil, so that the light burned steady again. The pale star moved from the space between the second and third bars to the space between the third and fourth. The sentry’s feet passed and re-passed.
Then other feet came hollow-sounding along the corridor and halted outside the door. He heard the rattle of bolts being slid back, and as he turned to face it the door swung open. For an instant he thought that it was Tussun, but the shadow against the wall sconce outside was thicker than Tussun’s. Ibrahim Pasha entered and the door clanged to behind him.
Thomas got up, but the visitor gestured to him to sit down again, and himself took his seat on the rough wooden stool below the window.
For a long moment the two looked at each other in silence, even the Viceroy’s son a little at a loss to know how to begin; Thomas wondering why with Ibrahim Pasha he always felt himself in the presence of a man his father’s age.
“I come to bring you certain messages from my mother,” the pasha said at last. “But first I must explain to you why it is I who come, and not my brother.”
“No explanation is necessary,” Thomas said stiffly.
“Ah, but we both know that it is. And the explanation is simple enough. I have had him drugged. In all probability Zeid also, who I have ordered to keep him close in my quarters, and who will no doubt have shared the wine I had sent for them. Tussun has already called down our father’s wrath upon himself for the forcefulness of his pleas and protests on your behalf; and left at liberty he might very well try to break you out of here by force, which would end in your instant death and probably the deaths of several other men beside. I am sorry that, to prevent that, I have had to take a course which has also prevented him from coming to you now.”
“Maybe it is as well,” Thomas said. “Better without leave-takings.”
There was a small pause. Then Ibrahim Pasha said, “It is only right that I should tell you, though I cannot imagine that you will find much comfort in it, that the Viceroy himself regrets the action which events have forced on him. If an important Ottoman minister had not by ill-chance arrived within a few hours of Aziz’s death, and demanded the full rigours of the law, there would have been no question of anything but the lightest and most nominal of penalties in your case.”
“It is as Allah wills,” Thomas said.
“The Beneficent, the Most Merciful. The message from my mother is that you are not without friends who will continue their efforts to save you. That you should not lose heart, but that I should not buoy you up with false hope.”
“It is good to know that I have
friends. Will you thank the Lady Amina, and tell her that I thought I had the Viceroy’s permission; and that in any case I did not set out to kill Aziz, until it became obvious that he meant to kill me.” Thomas could not keep a trace of bitterness out of his voice.
“Under Egyptian law such duels are to the first blood only, not to the death. For a duel to the death a different sanction is required. We should have made that clear to you.” Ibrahim Pasha gave a faint hitch to his shoulders, a hint of a rueful smile. “Though what good that could have done is not clear, seeing that Aziz Bey did indeed set out to kill you.”
Thomas found himself returning the smile. “Did I not say it is the will of Allah?” He hesitated and his voice tightened in his throat. “There is a question I should like to ask, Excellency.”
“Ask then.”
“How will the execution be carried out?”
“By a quick and clean method,” Ibrahim Pasha said quickly. “The headsman’s sword. The executioner here in the citadel prides himself he never needs more than one stroke.”
“In my own country, only the great ones of the earth used to be honoured with beheading,” Thomas said, looking at his hands lying across his knee. “For lesser men it was — it is — a hanging matter. I am glad that I shall not dance my life out on the end of a hangman’s rope.”
“Remember there is still hope, though admittedly a slim one,” said the pasha. He got up, Thomas instantly, if wearily, following suit. “I shall visit you again at dawn; but in the meantime is there anything that I can have done for you? Some wine perhaps?”
Thomas shook his head. “Not that, I thank you, Sir. But if I may ask a favour — Two who I value as friends are with General Ahmed Bonaparte in the Delta, an army surgeon, Donald MacLeod, and a young Albanian soldier, Medhet by name, who has the makings of a fine officer. If ever you can do so, will you befriend them for my sake?”
“That I can promise. Ahmed Agha shall know that their well-being is of great concern to me; and they shall be taken into the Viceroy’s service as soon as the opportunity arises. Also they shall know that you thought of them at this hour. But is there nothing now for you yourself?”
Almost to Thomas’s surprise his new faith remained strong with him at that moment. “If a soldier could fetch my Koran from my quarters, I should be very grateful, Sir.”
Their eyes met, and Thomas, who had long since realised that the Viceroy’s elder son was a just man, but despite his friendly aspect a cold one who made few real friends, saw with surprise the sympathy and regret, almost the warmth, in the other man’s gaze. “You shall have your Koran with you in a few minutes. But try to get an hour or two of sleep if you can. All things are easier to face if one has had even a little sleep.”
He crossed to the door and gave a single sharp rap on it with the hilt of his dagger. As it opened, he said, “My mother bids me tell you that if we fail, we shall none of us easily forget you.”
“My thanks to the Lady Amina,” Thomas said. “If we are allowed to carry memory with us, I shall remember also.”
Ibrahim Pasha checked a last moment in the doorway. “The Peace of Allah the All Merciful be with you, my friend.”
“And with you, Ibrahim Pasha.”
11
At almost the same time as Ibrahim Pasha was leaving the guardhouse, the Vicereine, with only one of her women in attendance, was greeting her visitor with a charming show of pleasure, thanking him for yielding to her whim by coming to visit her at such short notice, ordering coffee and sweetmeats to be brought.
Settled over coffee and a dish of plump dates and rose-flavoured lokoums she began to ask after mutual friends in Istanbul.
Abbas Pasha, a man built on much the same lines as the silken cushions on which he sat, responded with light and easy chat, but there was an abstracted look about him, as though he was perhaps scuttling about his own mind in search of the real reason behind the summons, as though he had perhaps noticed the large number of well-armed soldiers on duty in the chambers and corridors through which he had passed, and was remembering the number of ministers like himself who had met with unfortunate accidents in Cairo over the past years. Certainly he was aware of Captain Ballatar posted immediately outside the door. And the Vicereine, refilling the coffee cups, read his face with interest.
She was less accustomed to the tortuous and convoluted diplomacy of the Ottoman ruling circles than was Abbas Pasha, but she was a woman, which gave her a certain advantage in any case, and a clever one, and perfectly able to keep the Turkish minister talking all night if she wished, leading him around in graceful circles without ever coming to the point. On this occasion, however, she had no desire to keep up polite conversation longer than the customs of courtesy demanded.
Leaning back against rose- and saffron-coloured cushions, nibbling lightly as a butterfly at a sticky sweetmeat, as though she had indeed all night to spare, she led the conversation to a common acquaintance in Parga, who had died the previous year.
Finally she had reached the starting point for the actual business of the evening. “Such a sad loss to his friends,” she said on a note of gentle regret, signalling to the woman sitting unobtrusively in the shadows to come forward again and pour yet more coffee. “Do you remember, I wonder, the letter which you wrote from his house to another friend of mine, Ali Pasha Tepedelenhi” — a soft purr of amusement — “the Lion of Yannina I think they call him, in the summer of ten years ago?”
Abbas Pasha slopped a trickle of coffee over the rim of his cup, and glanced warningly at the woman in the shadows.
The Vicereine sounded faintly amused. “Do not be uneasy. Ayesha is both deaf and dumb. She can repeat nothing of what passes between us.”
“Over the years I have had occasion to write to Ali Pasha many times, usually on behalf of the Sultan,” Abbas said smoothly. “But I cannot say that I recall any particular letter from Parga in that year. He had fallen out with His Majesty and the Sublime Porte over the pacification of Sula and I scarcely think I would have sent him any letter at that time except on the Sultan’s orders.”
“This was certainly not written on the Sultan’s orders,” the Lady Amina said in a velvet voice. “I fear that your memory is not so good as once it was, Abbas Pasha, but alas, that comes to all of us, and it was a long time ago.” She slipped a hand behind the silken cushions against which she leaned, brought out a single sheet of paper and held it towards him. “But you will not have forgotten your own handwriting.”
The minister looked at the open sheet, and the olive of his face turned slightly green.
“Look at it closely,” the soft voice insisted. “I am sure that there was no harm in it, none whatever; but such letters — unguarded — are so easily misunderstood, and, at that particular time, it might be misconstrued as being — almost seditious, would you not agree?”
The minister looked; and the greenish tinge deepened in his cheeks; his eyes bulged slightly, and he looked as though he might be going to be sick. “That page is neither signed nor dated nor addressed,” he said at last.
“Not this page, no, but the first page is addressed and dated, the last page is signed. And my dear Minister, I have them all.”
“I have heard it said of late years that the Lion of Yannina is a treacherous dog,” said the minister as though to himself.
“Who has not? But one hates to speak ill of old friends — indeed, we are very distant kinsfolk, he and I.” The Vicereine sighed. “It has been such a responsibility all these years since it came into my possession. I have so often wondered what I should do with it; and now — I would be so glad, Excellency, to return it to you.”
Abbas Pasha muttered the word “forgery” but without conviction.
“Oh no, it is no forgery. On the other hand there is no copy, so far as I know, and with the original safely back in your hands, even if I were to possess a copy, it could be safely discounted as a forgery.”
The Vicereine’s tones had become brisker, more business
-like.
The green tinge faded a little from the pasha’s face, as the smell of a slow and ugly death grew fainter. Supposing that he could pay whatever the price was for getting that accursed letter back unseen by the Sultan … “I shall be most glad to receive back this letter, harmless though it is, from Your Highness,” he managed a slightly wan smile. “Perhaps there is some way in which I can show my most sincere gratitude?”
“For myself, Excellency, nothing is required but the knowledge that I and all my family have in yourself a friend in the Imperial Divan. However there is one small matter in which you can do a service to the Sultan whom we both serve.”
“On my friendship and influence so long as I remain a minister, you and His Highness can always depend. But what is the service which I can perform for the Sultan?”
“Oh, the merest trifle.” The Vicereine’s hand fluttered a little, and the page of the letter with it. “Owing to a misunderstanding — did I not say before, how easily misunderstandings can arise? — a misunderstanding resulting from the problems of Turkish-French-Arabic interpreting, a young soldier of great promise, British by birth and now a devout convert to Islam, whose only wish is to serve in the armies of the Ottoman Empire, has been condemned to death in the morning.”
“The man who killed Aziz Bey?” the minister said, his eyes clinging to his own handwriting on the page the Vicereine held.
“Yes. He was not given properly to understand that the duel was to first blood only, and not to the death. Even so, he did not intend the killing. But you know how it is —an affair of honour — young men fighting in hot blood — a tragic mischance. You could of course not possibly know of the circumstance, and so very rightly you requested this young man’s death. My son Ibrahim, whom I believe you know from his time in Istanbul, has put it to his father already that the death of so promising a young officer will be a loss to the Ottoman forces and therefore to the Sultan himself, but the Viceroy my husband has given you his word and signed the order, and feels that he cannot in honour rescind it. In deference to Your Excellency he has refused even to speak of the matter further.”