‘It is beautiful,’ says Nicholas. ‘Until I came here, I had never seen a mountain. We don’t have them in Suffolk.’
Hadir’s outstretched hand draws his gaze back towards the palace. It looks to Nicholas like a castle set down inside the city. While it lacks the ravelins, bastions and tenailles of a modern European fort that create a killing ground for any attacker, it looks formidable enough, though he suspects it wouldn’t take long for an artillery train to batter down the sandstone walls. Wooden scaffolding reveals where construction work is still going on.
‘The sharif make all this with gold taken from the Portugal infidel,’ Hadir tells him confidently, as though the sultan has been pleased to confide this fact to him personally. ‘And Portuguese slaves to build it. Take many slaves.’ He turns back to the roof terrace and with sadness in his voice says, ‘This is where my friend Sy-kess tell me many times of the English queen, and how it is to live in her country. Here we eat together when the sun goes down. Here I learn how to speak England.’
‘You admired him, didn’t you?’
‘Sayidi Sy-kess was a kind man. I like him, even though he was berraniyin, like you.’ He frowns as he searches for translation. ‘From outside.’
‘An outsider.’
‘Yes. An outsider.’
You couldn’t have described me better, if you were the president of the College of Physicians, Nicholas thinks. He walks to the street side of the terrace and looks down. Al-Annuri’s two armed men are still there, sitting in the shade of a date palm within easy striking distance of the front door, and looking like two wolves who’ve cornered a lamb in a thicket and can’t be bothered expending the energy to go in after it. At least, for the present.
26
Nicholas wakes to the morning call to prayer, a lyrically resonant song of unshakeable faith echoing from the Koutoubia mosque. He lets his head fall back on the pillow, feels the warmth of the sun flooding through the little window. And then he remembers: he is lying in a dead man’s bed.
By his judgement, in a week it will be Whitsunday. He looks into the future and imagines Bianca at the Jackdaw, supervising the celebrations, chivvying Rose and Timothy about their tasks. The taproom will empty as the Morris men pass by, stamping, clacking and trilling their way towards Bermondsey Street. Farzad is to be crowned Summer King this year – a role he will play to excess, insulting the Pope and the Spanish king to riotous applause as he’s enthroned on an upturned tub in the taproom.
Thinking of Bianca now, his memory offers him the occasion the night-watch caught the two of them together at the corner of Black Bull Alley, sneaking back from hiding the enciphered letters that had unlocked the Samuel Wylde conspiracy. She pushed him up against the wall of the chandler’s shop to make the watch think they were lovers enjoying a secret tryst. What had stopped him from kissing her then? Guilt at the thought he might love another woman, after Eleanor? Or the ring-bolt in the wall that was pushing on his spine like an implement of torture?
Remembering how her body had felt against his, Nicholas understands now that it was neither. It had been his own timidity. It had been the fear of what kissing her would unleash. He curses himself now for not being brave enough to seize the moment. Why did I have to wait for Ned and Rose to bring us together beneath the lover’s knot in the Jackdaw taproom? he asks himself accusingly.
Hadir’s voice, calling down from the roof terrace, breaks into his thoughts.
‘Did you sleep well in God’s city, Sayidi Nich-less?’ he asks when Nicholas joins him.
‘Very well, Hadir, thank you.’ The sleeping was fine. It was the waking I found disconcerting.
Hadir has conjured a breakfast of dates, freshly baked bread and preserves made of fruit that Nicholas cannot identify. He pours piping-hot atay into a glass cup. The scent of mint blows through his mind like a bracing winter wind.
When the meal is over, Hadir insists on trimming Nicholas’s beard with a sharp knife. ‘Sayidi Sy-kess like his beard short,’ he tells Nicholas. ‘My father was barber, so I do this for him.’
Nicholas is happy to submit. After almost three weeks aboard the Righteous his beard has become unruly, and he prefers to wear it close. Besides, he thinks, it would be better if Sir Robert Cecil’s envoy to the court of Sultan al-Mansur didn’t arrive looking like a country poacher.
‘Tell me, Hadir, does the new factor for the Barbary Company have the records of the old factor in his safekeeping?’
‘Of course, Sayidi Nich-less.’ A hurt look – What manner of incompetent fool do you take me for? – followed by a glint of suspicion. ‘Why do you wish to see them? You are a physician, not a merchant.’
‘Do you read English as well as you speak it?’
‘No, Sayidi. I cannot read it at all.’
‘Then what if there were letters amongst his papers that should rightly be returned to England?’
Hadir considers this hastily contrived explanation for a moment. Apparently it passes inspection. ‘I shall fetch them, Sayidi.’
Squatting in the shadiest part of the terrace, Nicholas reads through Adolfo Sykes’s tally books and records, which Hadir has brought from a storeroom. They appear meticulously kept. Nicholas can imagine not a single bolt of imported English cloth has been unaccounted for, not a bushel of exported sugar or slate of salt overlooked. Whatever the reason for his death, it wasn’t poor accountancy.
‘Come, Sayidi Nich-less, we have work to do,’ Hadir says when Nicholas has finished. ‘Now Hadir find you servants!’
‘I told you, Hadir, no slaves. I will not buy a man – or a woman, for that matter – as I might purchase a new pair of boots.’
‘No slaves, no slaves,’ Hadir promises with a weary sigh.
Leaning over the terrace wall and looking down into the street, Nicholas sees al-Annuri’s two men lounging under a date-palm tree. He wonders if they’ve been there all night.
Am I a prisoner here? he wonders. Does my liberty depend upon the continuing indulgence of Muhammed al-Annuri?
When he steps out of the door with Hadir, his fears are confirmed. One of the men gets up, brushes the dust off his white robe and follows them at a discreet distance with all the feigned innocence of a Bankside purse-diver caught in the act.
At the end of the Street of the Weavers is a patch of open ground dotted with olive trees. In their shade sprouts an undergrowth of conical tents. Huddled around each, Nicholas can see families taking their ease in the warm morning air. Their stoic faces tell of people who live or die by what they can scavenge from the earth after richer folk have had their turn; people who must daily ask God if they should starve, die of thirst, or – inshā Allāh – survive. The women, their faces darkened by the rims of broad felt hats fringed with trails of beads and medallions, gossip as they keep watch over earthen cooking pots. Children stand guard over grazing sheep and camels. The men wear cloth hoods dyed as blue as the sky.
‘Berbers,’ Hadir tells him. ‘They live in the empty desert beyond the mountains. It is told that before they learned of Allāh, the most merciful, the most compassionate, they worshipped nothing but rocks.’
Hadir delivers a rapid fusillade in his language to the nearest group. Nicholas stands uncomfortably as the faces lift to regard him with varying degrees of interest. To some, he is clearly a creature of fascination. To others, of no more import than the stones on the ground.