“Did your soldiers often rape the local women?” Pitt said with something close to innocence. “Perhaps you would have less difficulty keeping the ill feeling from erupting if you stopped that.”
“Look, you impudent…” Margason snarled, whirling around with the tension and agility of an animal about to spring.
Pitt did not move. “Yes?” He raised his eyebrows.
Margason straightened up. “I was here then, but I was only a major. I don’t know anything about Lovat except that he was a good soldier, not remarkable. He courted a local woman, but according to all I’ve heard, it was perfectly in order. Just a young man’s romantic fantasy about the exotic. She certainly never had any complaint. He was invalided out.”
“What with?”
“No idea,” Margason replied. “Some kind of fever. No one was paying a great deal of attention then. We were all expecting trouble. It was shortly after the incident at the shrine. Over thirty people were killed in a fire. All Muslims, but the shrine was Christian as well, and feelings ran very high. We were afraid of religious battles breaking out. Colonel Garrick was very decisive. Stamped it out immediately. Arranged for burial, memorial, everything. Posted a guard on the place. Any man after that caught treating the Muslims with disrespect was confined to barracks.”
“And were there further incidents?” Pitt asked, remembering what Ishaq had said.
“No,” Margason replied without hesitation. “I told you, Garrick was very good. But it must have taken a great deal of skill and tight discipline. A case of fever that a man recovered from was hardly going to stay in the memory at such a time.”
“Do you usually send men home for a fever?”
“If it’s a recurrent sort, you might as well. Malaria, or something like that.” Margason shook his head. “You can find the medical officer’s report if you want to. I haven’t got time to find it for you. Far as I know, Lovat was a good officer, sent home for medical reasons. Loss to the army, but plenty for him to do in England. Talk to anyone you like, just don’t start rumors, and don’t waste our time.”
Pitt stood up. Margason would tell him nothing more, and he had no intention of wasting his own time either. He thanked him and availed himself of the permission to speak to the other men.
Pitt spent the rest of the day asking and listening, and he formed a far clearer picture of Lovat, particularly from a lean and wind-burned sergeant major who was finally persuaded to speak with some candor. It took a lot of recollections from Pitt of the London east end, where the sergeant major had grown up, descriptions, a trifle sentimental, of the dockside and the river stretch towards Greenwich, but eventually the man relaxed. They were walking slowly beside one of the many delta branches of one of the greatest rivers in Africa in the milk-soft, peach-colored glow of early sunset before he spoke of Lovat.
“I couldn’t stand ’im meself,” he said with cheerful contempt, his eye following a flight of birds, black against the luminous sky. “But ’e weren’t a bad soldier.”
“Why did you dislike him?” Pitt asked curiously.
“B’cause ’e was a self-righteous bastard,” the sergeant major said. “I judge a man by ’ow ’e be’aves hisself when the goin’s ’ard an’ that, an’ when ’e’s drunk. See a lot o’ truth about a man when ’is guard’s down.” He squinted sideways at Pitt to see if he understood. Apparently he was satisfied. “Got no time for a man wot wears ’is religion ’ard. Don’ get me wrong, I in’t no lover o’ Mohammed, or anythink ’e says. An’ the way they treat women is summink awful. But the way we does things sometimes in’t no better. Live an’ let live, I say.”
“Had Lovat no respect for the religion of Islam?” Pitt asked, not sure if it made any difference. He would hardly have been killed in London for that.
“Worse ’n that,” the sergeant major replied, his face puckering into a frown, dark as a bronze statue in the waning light. “ ’E were angry about anythink they ’ad as ’e reckoned should ’a bin Christian. Burned the ’ell out of ’im that they ever took Jerusalem. ’ ’Oly city,’ ’e said. An’ all places like that.”
“And yet he fell in love with an Egyptian woman,” Pitt pointed out.
“Oh, yeah. I know all about that. Mad about ’er, ’e were, for a time. But she were a Copt, so that made it all right.” He pulled his face into an expression of disgust. “Not that ’e were ever gonna marry ’er, like. It were just one o’ them things yer do when yer young, an’ in a foreign place. ’Is society’d ’a had pups if ’e’d come ’ome with a foreign wife!”
“Did you know her?” Pitt asked.
“Not to say know,” the sergeant major replied. “Beautiful, she were,” he said wistfully. “Moved like them birds in the air.” He gestured towards another flight of river birds gliding across the sunset.
“Did you know Lovat’s friends-Garrick and Yeats?” Pitt asked.
“ ’Course I did. An’ Sandeman. All gone ’ome now. Invalided out at the same time. Got the same fever, I s’pose.”
“Out of the army? All of them?”
The sergeant major shrugged. “Dunno. I ’eard as Yeats were dead, poor sod. Killed in some kind o’ military action, so I reckon ’e must ’a stayed in, just got posted somewhere wi’ a diff’rent climate. Yer wanna know about them too? Yer thinkin’ as they might ’a killed ’im?” He shook his head. “Dunno wot for. Still, that’s yer job, not mine, thank Gawd. I just gotta see that this lot”-he jerked his hand towards the dark silhouette of the barracks-“keeps order ’ere in Egypt.”
“Do you think that’s going to be difficult?” Pitt asked, more for something to say than because he expected the man to know, and then the moment after, he realized he cared. The timeless beauty of the land would remain with him long after he went back to the modern urgency of London. He would always wish he had had time, and money, to go up the river and see the Valley of the Kings, the great temples and ruins of a civilization which ruled the world it knew before Christ was born.
And he also realized how profoundly he wanted Ayesha to be innocent, and to be able to prove it. He now believed she had gone to England to try to accomplish something for the economic freedom of her people. She had been looking for a justice she was not sophisticated enough to know would never be granted as long as the cotton mills of Lancashire fed and clothed a million people, who also were poor, with all the misery and disease that poverty brought, but who had political power in London. And even larger than that, a few miles across the desert older than mankind, ochre and shadow under the first stars, lay the modern miracle of a canal cutting its way from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and the other half of the empire.
He stood beside the sergeant major and watched the very last of the light die before thanking him, and going to look for Avram, to tell him that tomorrow they would return to Alexandria, where he would find Avram a suitable reward for his help.
CHAPTER NINE
GRACIE SAT in the corner of the public house staring across the table at Tellman. He was watching her intently, more than was required for what she was telling him, and with a warm ripple of both comfort and self-consciousness, she knew he would have looked at her that way even if she had been talking complete nonsense. It was a fact she was going to have to address sooner or later. He had shown all kinds of emotions towards her, from his initial lack of interest to irritation at her acceptance of being a resident servant in someone else’s house, totally dependent upon them even for the roof over her head. He had been forced into a grudging respect for her intelligence when she had assisted Pitt in certain cases, then showed more clearly than he knew, fighting for all he was worth not to admit to anyone at all, especially himself, that he was in love with her. Now he no longer pretended he was not-at least not all the time.