Blue Damask Read online

  Farmadi frowned, but did not argue with her. “They say the English have him in a troop transport and will be here tomorrow or the next day. Out here there is not a real sense of time, fraulein. A ‘day’ might mean a week. Damascus has sent a man here to get the tribe assembled, so we do know they will come.”

  Ah, someone she could talk to, then. Good. She felt better already. “Thank you Mr. Farmadi. I am so very grateful for your help. If there is anything I can do for you, please do not hesitate.”

  Farmadi looked at her, his mouth grim. “This is my advice: make no promises. Do not lie. Do not believe anything they say.”

  She did not know if he meant the Syrians or the British. It did not matter, as the tribesman with the horse put his hands on her waist and lifted her up. She had only one hand to grip the waving mane, as she clutched the file and the bundle close to her stomach. Her legs splayed out over the animal’s rump before she could wiggle into a sitting position.

  The men were grinning at her, showing their white teeth against their dark beards. Elsa decided she must look very foolish indeed. She tucked a foot into each leather loop and adjusted her scarf and her skirt. The horse turned its ears backward to her. The man on the ground said something before giving the reins a tug and leading the animal toward the north. She could not turn around to wave goodbye to Farmadi without losing her balance and both hands were occupied, squeezing her papers to her stomach and holding on to the horse. She heard the engine start, she heard the tires on the rough gravel, she heard the rumbling of the engine fade behind her until she finally heard nothing but the wind.

  No one spoke to her. The man on the ground leapt up gracefully behind one of the other riders and the journey continued with her reins in his hands, led at a slow walk though ravines between the low undulations of sand and rock. Near dusk she saw spread out before her a wide river valley, as green as the desert had been brown. The setting sun glinted off the ripples on the river and the sweet smell of water and plants revived her. The men were glad to see it too. Their conversation became more lively and louder. They looked at her now, as they spoke, and she assumed they were discussing what to do with her.

  As they moved closer to the river she could see small mud brick houses with conical roofs and scattered among them some pointed tents. People came out and stood watching them approach. Little children running here and there stopped and stared. Horses raised their heads from the grass and pricked their ears. Elsa took a deep breath and readied herself for more introductions. Her back hurt and her bottom did too. The last few days had made a good sleep impossible. In a way her exhaustion was welcome, because it took the edge off her anxiety. After a long adventure, she realized, one is too tired to care much about anything.

  But it seemed the tribesmen were not interested in formal introductions. In fact, she was pulled down from the horse and ushered into a cool mud brick hut right away. A heavy rolled rug and a bundle that turned out to be thick wool blankets that smelled of horse were pushed through after her. Elsa unrolled the rug onto the dirt floor, but was unwilling to sit on it. She still ached from the horse ride. Moments later, an oil lamp was pushed through the doorway, which was covered with some kind of hide.

  The little lamp illuminated the interior with a yellow glow. A welcome water skin was passed through soon after. Elsa was at the point where water and light was enough. She needed nothing more, except to sleep, but something else might be pushed through the leather door. She watched the edges of the flap. A brown hand pushed a bowl of flat bread inside.

  Sitting was not an option. She reclined on one side and stretched her legs out, one and then the other as she chewed the dates carefully around the pits. Farmadi had told her she might be smothered with hospitality or frozen with hostility. He didn’t know which, and couldn’t. There were factions on every side of the issue of power that loomed in this land after the war. Elsa determined that this reception must be the middle way, which was promising. Neither a welcome guest, nor an imprisoned enemy. It meant they were still deciding. The blankets were soft, and horse is such a comforting smell.

  They kept her inside the next day, bringing food and water, fresh clothing and a comb and posting a changing guard outside the entrance to the little shelter. Elsa spent the time reading her file and combing her hair, which was suffering from the dry desert winds. She sat with her back against the cool bricks near the space where a rectangle of light shone through the edge of the hide door and landed on the floor. She could move the papers as the sun changed the angle, and keep reading as she carefully combed.

  In the car with Farmadi, she had skimmed most of the material, looking for the most pertinent facts about Lord Sonnenby, and especially about his father and why this journey to the crumbled Ottoman Empire was necessary to the British government. Now she had the time to read even the more tedious reports about legal matters in the family and school records and mine the many papers looking for more personal insights into the man the government felt was so important to their cause.

  As she had suspected from the first, Sonnenby’s relationship with his mother was the key. School records suggest that she championed her son in disagreements while the father stood with school administrators on heavy discipline. Elsa assumed that this tendency had applied at home as well and had possibly been a source of friction within the family beyond school matters. In a letter from a headmaster expelling young Henry, Elsa read a sentence that suggested the child’s mother had exasperated the school administration to the point of being the cause of the expulsion.

  She tried not to smile, imagining that scene in the stuffy offices, Lady Sonnenby taking the child’s hand and marching him out of the school after a storm of words that the secretary suggested, “could not decently be recorded on paper”.

  School expulsions are traumatic for a child, she reminded herself. It is a fierce rejection from authority and a terrible blow to the ego, whether the child welcomes the release or not. But Henry had seen his mother in action. He had seen the results of her temper. She could be a feisty ally, but was she cruel to him? Elsa looked for more mentions of his mother in letters where such a thing was most likely to be found, from when he was enrolled in another school.

  And yet no mention of mental illness, only what might be considered an excess of youthful energy and a predisposition toward fist-fighting. Some colorful language perhaps. Nothing about melancholy or suicide or deviant cruelty to others. Certainly if anything like that had been evident it would have been recorded.

  Later in the military section she found letters between commanding officers suggesting that Lord Sonnenby had been reprimanded for dueling. That was unusual in this day and age, but perhaps not unusual for him. She could imagine him challenging other officers for slights real and imagined.

  Elsa was familiar with dueling scars on the left cheeks of young men she treated in Austria. The English preferred their fists to blades. If she had Lord Sonnenby with her she might check his knuckles for dueling scars.

  She was brought out of her reverie by the shouts of the men in the village. Her guard moved back and forth across the entrance and blocked the light. Elsa closed up her files and put them near the wall and then placed her bundle of ruined clothing on top, hiding it. She stood and adjusted the simple wool dress and sash she had been given, and put the veil over her head and wrapped the ends around her shoulders. When her guard moved again, she leaned on the edge of the doorway and peeked through the gap.

  Visitors were coming. Coming in trucks. The camp was in an uproar. Women and children fled to the shelters as the men congregated along the dirt track that served as a road. The trucks came from the north, raising clouds of dust that obscured their numbers. Elsa tried to determine if the vehicles were British or French or Turkish, but when her guard caught her with her head out the doorway he made a gesture with his palm, suggesting she remain hidden.

  She glared at him in defiance and he widened his eyes and tilted his head, insisting without a word tha
t she obey. Reluctantly she backed into the darkness. Her ears told her that the convoy was English. The wild shouting she heard was in Arabic, but the regulated voices were definitely English. She leaned as close to the flap over her doorway as possible, listening.

  The rumble of the trucks’ engines faded as each vehicle became silent. There was still a great deal of shouting. She recognized a European voice speaking Arabic loudly and slowly, and imagined a series of announcements. The villagers calmed and soon this voice was the only one speaking.

  Elsa’s guard was replaced by another who was more interested in what was going on closer to the river that to her. She was able to peer through the edge of the flap down into the village if she lay on the ground and lifted just the corner. Between his handmade leather boots she could barely see the edges of the troop transports below on the slope to the river bank. There were four of them parked in formation between the village and the river. Two of the vehicles were flatbeds armed with machine guns mounted in the back, the other two had canvas covered beds. The man doing the talking was in civilian clothing, but the others were all in uniform.

  She wondered if this was the meeting Mr. Marshall had planned. She could not see him, but that did not mean he wasn’t there. He almost certainly was. The speech ended and there was discussion among the village men. The British waited silently. It was late afternoon. If there was to be another meeting, it would be conducted over a meal, or after dark in one of the larger tents. None of the brick buildings were large enough to hold more than a handful of people at a time.

  Her body felt an overwhelming desire to jump up and run out, but her mind held her back. She sat against the wall again and thought about her options. Revealing herself would only cause a change of jailers. That much she knew. And the British had ordered her to be taken out to the wilderness and knocked out with ether. But for what purpose? To kill her? Sell her to the villagers? No, certainly not that. The odds that she would walk back to Damascus were too much in her favor. Were they going to hand her off to another who would take her further away, or back to Europe? If she revealed herself now, she would not be able to count on Mr. Marshall coming to her defense. The sickening thought that he had been the one to give the order for her to be eliminated made her groan. No. Running to the convoy could be a fatal mistake.

  But what did the villagers have planned? It occurred to her just then that no one had come to take her to the English. They were not planning on handing her over. That was a good sign. They did not trust the English either, or they had instructions to give her only to Lord Sonnenby.

  A shout from somewhere to her right was echoed through the village. Her guard’s feet moved back and forth across the threshold of her hut and the flap swung in and out. More shouting. She lifted the edge of her flap and looked out.

  Mr. Marshall and Lord Sonnenby had made an appearance in front of the transports. Her breath caught in her throat and told her how worried she had been. Her guard looked down at her and frowned. He waved her back in, but she defied him. He looked puzzled at first, and then said something unintelligible to her in an exasperated tone of voice. But she did not look at him.

  Her eyes were on Lord Sonnenby now standing on the back of the flatbed truck with Marshall. He was a small figure, far enough away that she could not read any expression on his face, but his posture told her he was injured. He did not stand straight like a man at attention, or a man defiant. His shoulders were hunched just enough to indicate it hurt to stand, and rounded the way a man stands after being punched in the gut. She grit her teeth, thinking of it.

  She would give Marshall such a tongue-lashing in his own language and then when she ran out of English words her German ones would strike at him. The English hated being cursed in German. Elsa had cursed plenty of them in the past. She felt her face get warm, remembering her own loss of temper on occasion in hospitals during prisoner exchanges. She had been marched away by the hospital matron once for causing a disturbance. Elsa rubbed her face to make that memory go away and focus on the drama before her.

  Mr. Marshall now put a hand on Lord Sonnenby’s arm and pushed him forward. His other hand made an expansive gesture to the crowd. Everything got very quiet, and her guard stood straighter, leaning in to listen.

  Sonnenby’s voice started out weak, and Elsa saw him nudged by Marshall until he increased the volume. Murmurs from the crowd suggested they did not like whatever the message was. She turned her eyes to the European man who had spoken Arabic when they arrived. His expression would tell her more about Sonnenby’s content. His face was turned away from her, however, so she had no idea what was being said.

  Her guard made a few approving sounds in his throat, so she suspected the villagers were being praised for their courage or their loyalty. A more ominous silence followed, so she thought perhaps Sonnenby was getting to the real heart of the message.

  The British soldiers looked uncomfortable, but she knew this was most likely because they could not understand what was being said. Lord Sonnenby was interrupted by one of the villagers. Elsa recognized him from his black turban as the leader of the group of men who had taken her from Farmadi. His voice was defiant and challenging. There was a long pause before Sonnenby answered. Again, an uncomfortable silence followed his words. Her guard grumbled something under his breath. He glanced down at her and she saw him thinking. His face registered an idea, his eyes flicked over her, then he turned back to the trucks before turning back again to her. He said something gentle and polite and pointed to the interior of her hut. Elsa backed her head in until she was out of sight, watching him. He then shouted something.

  Another shout, and then another. Then silence. She could hear murmurs of the crowd now as the villagers discussed what had been said, but nothing more in English or French, and nothing that sounded like “Lord Sonnenby”. After a long while the flap in her doorway lifted up and her guard and the black-turbaned leader appeared framed by the light of the setting sun, bending down to look into the hut.

  “Madam Sonnenby, please come with us.” The turbaned leader gave her a sly smile.

  “Oh,” she breathed, “you speak English.”

  He merely smiled again. She glanced at the file under her bundle. She did not want to leave her papers. She could not be seen to be carrying them around, either. “Give me a moment to arrange my clothing,” she said to him. The flap swung shut. Though it was darker now, she moved the bundle and took the file folder and placed it inside her dress and re-wrapped the sash so it would hold the papers firmly to her body. The nature of the veil made it easy to conceal the bulge in her middle, and allowed her to hold her forearm crossed in front as she kept everything together.

  They led her across the village away from the trucks. She could see the vehicles in the murky twilight against the emerging stars. Small fires dotted the village here and there, casting moving shadows on tents and brick. Elsa followed closely, careful of the hem of her long dress, lest she drag it through one of the fires. They stopped before a large tent, big enough for ten people.

  The flap parted and they were beckoned into a fragrant room filled with the soft glow of oil lamps and the rich red colors of fine rugs and the glint of brass water jars. Elsa looked around through her veil at the strong poles that held up the fabric of the tent. There was no one inside. She turned around expectantly.

  “What is the nature of this visit?” she asked.

  The black turbaned man made a gesture that sent the other man away. He answered her when he was gone, “Lady Sonnenby, I have made arrangements for you to meet with your husband, alone.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Ah,” she said. “Well.” She was grateful for the veil. “I thank you for that, sir.”

  “I am Ozgur Mehmet, Lady.”

  “I am, pleased to meet you, Mr. Mehmet.”

  “The British think he is meeting with his uncle, and they will be watching this tent carefully.” He tilted his head meaningfully. “And listening.”

&n
bsp; “I understand.”

  “I have told Lord Sonnenby that you are here, though no one else knows.”

  “Oh.” Elsa wondered how he reacted to that news. She imagined a range of possibilities.

  “I have sent the others to bring him, hanim. He will be here shortly.” Mehmet ducked through the doorway and let the tent flap drop closed behind him.

  Elsa tried to appreciate the beautiful patterns on the rich red rugs or the sweet smell of the incense that burned in the brass braziers while she waited. She fingered the tassels of a bridle that hung from the center tent pole, then moved to the side of the tent and peered inside an urn. She did not have to wait long before she heard the sound of voices greeting someone at the entrance.

  Sonnenby came through the tent flap tentatively. His eyes widened when he saw her.

  “Good God! Elsa. It’s you. They told me my wife was in this tent.” He offered her both hands as he took a step forward. “And all I could think was that my uncles had married me to one of my cousins while I was in England.”

  She took his hands and squeezed them. She was surprised that she couldn’t speak. Her throat tightened and her nose stuffed so she couldn’t breathe. It must be the dust.

  He looked her up and down. “Are you hurt? Did they hurt you? Is that why you are crying?”

  She shook her head, seeing the bruises on his cheekbones over the thick stubble and how one eyelid did not open all the way.

  She took one hand from his and rubbed her throat so she could talk. “Mein Gott,” she said, her voice thick. “What have they done to you?”

  One corner of his mouth turned up. “They will not take nein for an answer, Schatze.” He leaned in close and put his lips on hers. She permitted it. The kiss was brief and chaste. She wondered if he kissed her for effect, as they were being watched. There were many breaks in the fabric of the tent, and some worn places that would make effective peep holes. He pulled back and asked, “Why are you here? Marshall told me you were safe on a ship to Istanbul with Davies.”