“Good, Mitzy,” he said. “Very good.” At this, Dimity flushed with pleasure.
“Girls, did you know the foundations of Fez el-Bali were laid on the site of a Berber camp?”
“Yes, Mummy. You’ve told us before,” said Élodie. Celeste put an arm around each of her daughters and smiled.
“Well, some things are worth saying more than once. There is Berber blood in your veins. This city is in your blood.”
“Well, Mitzy? What do you think?” said Charles, and Dimity felt all their eyes upon her, waiting for her verdict or for some keen observation.
“I don’t think anything,” she whispered, and saw Charles’s and Celeste’s faces register disappointment. She swallowed, and thought hard, but her mind was reeling. “I can’t think anything. It’s… everything,” she said. Charles smiled and patted her shoulder in a vaguely comforting way.
“There now. You must be exhausted. Come on. Back in the car and let’s get to the guesthouse,” he said.
“Aren’t we going to stay with your family, Celeste?” Dimity asked, before she thought to check her tongue. Delphine shot her a significant look, and Celeste frowned slightly.
“No,” she said shortly.
They had to leave the car at the city walls, since the streets were too narrow to drive along, and walk the last quarter of a mile to where they would be staying. The door of the riad, which was to be their guesthouse, was tall and elaborately carved, but like the rest of the buildings fronting the narrow street, it appeared to be crumbling and disheveled. Dimity felt slightly disappointed until they walked through the doors and into a tiled courtyard with a marble fountain at its center, stone benches strewn with faded mats and cushions, and straggly roses growing up around the pillars that supported the upper floors of the house. As one, the girls gazed up in wonder. There was something sublime about coming into a building only to find the clear, pale-green sky still spreading out above. One star had come out to shine; a single point of light that glistened. The floor was made of intricate blue-and-white mosaic, the walls part tiled, part plastered and painted, and everywhere there were tiny fragments missing and cracks and places where tiles had come loose and been lost; imperfections that seemed to make the whole only more magical.
“They do not build like this in Dorset, do they?” said Celeste, close to Dimity’s ear, and Dimity shook her head mutely.
A tray of heavily sweetened mint tea was brought out to them as they seated themselves in the courtyard, and a servant ran in and out of the door and up the stairs, carrying their luggage in from a handcart, a few pieces at a time. Dimity stared at the boy each time he passed; at his curling black hair and coffee-colored skin. When she saw him with her small, tatty carpet bag in one of his hands, her stomach clenched peculiarly. Nobody had ever carried anything for her before, let alone a servant. Somebody she could make a request of and have him be duty-bound to obey her. She craned her neck to keep sight of him as long as she could, until he vanished around a turn in the staircase. Delphine, sitting next to her, gave her a nudge in the ribs and another significant look.
“Not bad, I agree,” she whispered. “But not a patch on Tyrone Power.” Their hushed laughter spiraled around the courtyard, bouncing from the crumbling, blush-colored plaster.
Dimity, Delphine, and Élodie were to share a room with a low vaulted ceiling from which an iron fretwork lamp hung, casting fragmented patterns of light. It had a cool, tiled floor and flaking walls painted ocher. The beds were made up of low, hard mattresses with small bolsters as pillows and a single woven blanket folded at the foot of each. Tall windows opened onto a stone balustrade with a view to the neighboring building in front, and down the hill over the rest of the city to the right. The sky was by then a velvety black, lit up with more stars than Dimity had ever seen before.
“It’s like a different sky, isn’t it?” said Delphine, coming to stand beside her while Élodie did handstands against the wall behind them, the legs of her pajamas riding up to show her skinny shins. “Hard to imagine the same moon and stars shining down on England.”
“There are nights in Blacknowle, in the summer, when perhaps there are this many stars. Perhaps; but the sky is never as black, and the stars never as bright,” said Dimity. “Doesn’t it get cooler, in the nighttime?”
“By dawn it will be, yes, and out in the desert it gets freezing. But for a long time after the sun sets, it stays warm here in the city. The buildings trap the heat,” said Delphine. Dimity looked down at the narrow streets, and could almost see the hot air lying there, fat and supine as an overfed dog. Suddenly she was so weary she could hardly stand, and had to lean against the balustrade for support. “Are you all right? Have you drunk enough water?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“You have to drink lots here, even if you don’t feel thirsty. The heat makes you faint, otherwise. I’ll fetch you some.”
“Get me some, too, Delphine!” said Élodie, still upside down as her sister left the room.
The girls stayed up late, Élodie and dimity listening, rapt, to Delphine’s lurid tales of white slavers in Morocco capturing European men and forcing them to work until they died, building palaces and roads and whole cities. Capturing European women and forcing them to marry fat, ugly sultans; to live forever in the harem, never allowed outside. Eventually, the two younger girls surrendered to sleep, but in spite of her weariness Dimity was awake for much longer, after the whole house had fallen quiet. She stayed at the window and clasped the warm stone of the balustrade, breathing in deeply, trying to pick individual scents from the warm, loaded air.
There were roses, and jasmine, too; the resinous smell of cypress trees, almost like the sea-battered pines of Dorset but subtly different. On the breeze came a rich, herby smell, like sage or rosemary, as well as the stink of hot animal skins and manure; human sewage, too-a privy smell, sweet and familiar, not constant but rising up now and then. There was a sharp, leathery, meaty smell she could not guess the source of; a metallic smell that was almost like blood and made her uneasy; a prickly scent of spices she half recognized from the food they had eaten and the pastilla Celeste often cooked at Littlecombe. And beneath all these new things was a striking absence-the missing salty breath of the sea. Thinking of Littlecombe, and Blacknowle, gave Dimity a jolt, and she noticed that they seemed to have receded far into the distance-not just in miles but in time, too. As if her whole life up until that point had been a dream, one that was now fading fast from memory the way all dreams do upon waking. This was a wholly new life; one where the heartbeat of the sea no longer tethered her, no longer trapped her own into keeping time with it. One where she was free and unfettered, and unfamiliar, and different. She gripped the stone tightly, and felt so happy that she wasn’t sure she could stand it.
After breakfast in the morning, Celeste readied her two daughters and prepared to set off for her family’s house, outside the walls of Fez el-Bali in the more spacious streets of Fez el-Djid. She combed the girls’ hair and clipped it neatly back from their faces with quick, tense fingers, tweaking their cotton skirts and blouses into neater lines. Dimity looked down at her own attire-the same worn-out felt skirt she often wore at home-and smoothed it down self-consciously.
“Will I look all right, dressed as I am?” she asked anxiously, and Celeste looked up with a frown until a look of comprehension replaced it.
“Oh, Mitzy! I am sorry, but for this visit I must go with just my girls. It has been more than a year since I saw my parents… And after such a long time the first meeting should be just for us. Do you understand?” She came to stand in front of Dimity, put her hands on her shoulders, and scrutinized her from an arm’s length. Dimity nodded, with a sudden lump in her throat. “Good girl. Charles has gone for a walk but I am sure when he comes back he will want to start some sketches. We will be back… Well. I am not sure when. It depends… Anyway, we will see you later on.” She ushered the younger girls towards the door, and they each gave Dimity a smile as they passed-an apologetic one from Delphine, a heartless one from Élodie. In the doorway, Celeste looked back at her. “You cannot wear those woolen clothes here. You will be too hot. When we come back I will find something lighter for you to wear.” She nodded to confirm the promise, and was gone.