Garment of Shadows (13 page)

“Shall I—” the older man began, then immediately caught himself. “No, probably not.”

“What were you about to ask?”

“I was going to suggest that I might help you clean your hair, since it would not be a good idea to get too much soap and water in that wound, but I doubt in your current state you would care for that.”

“I should think not,” I said with indignation, then paused. “Er, were I not in my current state, would I permit your assistance in the bath?”

“It has been known. Russell, I am your husband.”

The room was very still. Even the boy, who had followed none of this, glanced up from his snack. “Well. So you say. Perhaps I ought to ask your name?”

“Sherlock Holmes. You call me Holmes.”

The name had a distinct ring of familiarity to it, and I tipped my head as if it might encourage my scattered thoughts to roll back into place. But no, if anything the name sounded like a story, and I’d had enough of unreality for a while. I looked at the other man.

“Ali Hazr,” he said. Recognition seemed to be expected, but at least he did not claim to be my brother, or a second husband. I looked more closely, confirming that the man’s slight lisp was caused by a pair of missing front teeth—but what is normally a humorous, even endearing speech flaw had in this man a sinister air. One’s mind lingered on the blow that had caused it.

“Mr Hazr, Mr—er, Holmes. I should appreciate the use of your bath. Although I believe I shall make do without your assistance, for the present.”

“It is the first room to your right. Latch the door, if it makes you feel better,” he said. “I’ll have Youssef leave a change of clothing for you, and one of the female staff can help cleanse your hair once you’re dressed. Or I can. Oh, and I found these in your—you left these behind.”

He crossed the room and came back with an object in each hand. The first was a passport, very battered. I glanced at the pages, tracing what appeared to be my travels: a lot of borders crossed in the past twelve months. The other was a small object, pinched between his thumb and forefinger. I stretched out my palm and drew back a ring, gold like the other. This one was a wedding band.

It breathed out familiarity, as the stone in my pocket and the writing on the scrap of onionskin had. Which could mean everything, or nothing at all.

I thanked him and was moving towards the door, then stopped when I noticed a subtle design etched into the ring’s surface: a pattern of fine, interwoven hexagons circling the ring. Almost like a honeycomb.

Bees, yet again. The persistent hallucinatory odour of honey. The hive images that had kept coming to me in the medina. And when I looked up into the grey eyes, I realised that I did, in fact, know him: The face before me had appeared in a brief flash the previous day, surrounded by fog. “Are you by any chance a beekeeper, sir?”

“I am. Among other things.”

I nodded, and slipped the ring onto my finger.

It fit perfectly. I knew it would.

The hot water was utter Paradise. I scrubbed my filthy skin, nose to toe, even managing to get at the undamaged side of my head. Then I filled the large porcelain tub a second time, with water that was considerably cooler, and sank in it to my chin, safe behind the locked door.

For ten delicious minutes, I lay without thought or concern. I was aware of voices and movement outside, aware even of anger there, but that was another world, and I did not care.

Since the clipaclop of donkey’s hooves had wakened me in the brass-maker’s shop, snips and flashes of my past had come to me at odd moments. I had the clear memory of a room, for example, crowded with furniture, presided over by a stern white-haired lady who smelt of lavender. And the ocean—I remembered sitting on a cliff over the ocean, looking across at a distant smudge of land, ships in between.

And beehives, redolent with the summer-smell of honey.

All in all, I felt distinctly more real, now that I had a body and not simply multiple layers of rough drapes. I raised my arm from the water, trying to read my skin’s history.

The hands were brown, but above the elbows, I was pale, suggesting that I had spent some weeks in the sun, dressed in short sleeves and without the ring. There were many old scars, including what could only be a bullet hole in my right shoulder, but the more recent injuries were mostly contusions. Multiple bruises explained the tenderness I felt in my right hip and shoulder, my left knee, both elbows—all over, really. They were mostly the same degree of black, indicating that whatever herd of bison had run me down, it had been about two days before.

The day before I woke up.

A different kind of pain came from the back of my left biceps, which I craned to see: a neat slice, sharp but not deep, about three inches long.

Again came the disquieting sensation of a knife in my hand, and I shivered in the cooling water. I could sense the knowledge of what those bruises meant, what that slice came from, resting just at the edges of my mind.

It was reassuring, really, if still maddening. When the man who claimed to be my husband (he did not look like someone who fit the word
husband
) said my name, faint reverberations had gone down my spine, stirring—not so much memories as the shadow of memories. As if I were outside of a library (libraries—those I remembered!) anticipating the treasures within.

I considered the taps, and decided that I had soaked enough. I splashed my face again, tugged out the stopper, and heaved my aches out of the French-manufactured porcelain.

As I moved towards the towels, my eye caught on the strange person in the elaborate brass-rimmed looking-glass. She had my blue eyes, my lanky build, but what happened to my hair? I lifted a hand to the blonde crop, and was brushed by another odd sense of dissonance: My eyes did not know the short hair, but my hand seemed to. I took a face flannel and worked at the matted locks around the wound, and at the end of it I had clean hair and a tentative acceptance of the woman in the glass. Mary Russell.

With a towel wrapped securely around me, I snaked one arm out the door to draw in a stack of garments. They were, as before, those of a Moroccan man, but a richer fabric, tawny brown with dark chocolate trim. The slice on my biceps had opened in the bath, but the ooze was not serious, so I just wrapped a hand-towel around my upper arm before I dressed. I took a final glance in the looking-glass, grateful that the bruising seemed to have by-passed my face, then ran my fingers up the ridge of my nose.

At the reminder, I squatted by my discarded garments, emptying the pockets.

The match-box and fruit I dropped into the waste-bin. The knife and its makeshift sheath I strapped back on my arm. The spectacles needed repairs lest that shaky and irreplaceable right lens drop to the tile floor, so I pushed them into a pocket along with the mysterious ring, the crimson note-book, and the rest of my worldly goods. Then with a deep breath (
husband?
) I went down the balcony to the first room.

Three sets of eyes met me.

“May I ask for another moment of your nursing skills?” I asked Mr Holmes. “Just a small plaster—I’d do it myself, but it’s awkwardly placed, and I hate to get any blood on this nice robe.”

By answer, he picked up the roll of gauze. When I had wrestled my arm out of the garment and pulled away the stained hand-towel, he gazed at my arm in silence.

“You have been in a knife-fight.”

“I’ve been in a lot more than that,” I replied. “My epidermis appears to have been bounced down a rocky hillside.”

His hands slowly resumed their motion, wrapping a neat bandage around my arm. As I stood there, feeling his unexpectedly strong fingers at work, my attention was drawn by the laden tray on the table; my stomach rumbled. To distract myself, I asked where, and what, this place was.

“This is the guard-room and guest quarters attached to Dar Mnehbi, the headquarters of the French Resident General, in the Fez medina. Dar Mnehbi is where Maréchal Lyautey holds meetings, houses the occasional guest, and keeps his finger on the pulse of the city—and thus, the country.”

“He doesn’t live here?” Passing through the ornate building next door, it had seemed small to me, and decidedly non-European.

“The Maréchal and Madame have quarters in a larger palace a quarter mile away. He keeps rooms here, to use when he has been working late. Which seems to be most nights.”

That explained the formality of the main portion and the more cramped quarters we had veered into before coming up the steps. It also explained the new-looking European elements, such as external windows and internal doorways.

The man—
Holmes
—finished binding me up, gesturing at the table.

I hesitated no more, but applied myself with enthusiasm.

Holmes poured out some of the sweet mint tea, setting the gold-rimmed Venetian glass by my plate. “Have you lost your spectacles, Russell?”

By way of answer, as my mouth was otherwise occupied, I dug a hand into my pocket and dumped the resulting fistful of my earthly possessions onto the table. “Broken,” I managed indistinctly. He stared down at the tumble of objects; the boy looked at the pile, too, his eyes for some reason going wide; but it was the other man’s reaction that had my chair flying over and me scrambling backwards with the stolen dagger in my hand.

Hazr had been at the window with a glass of the tea, looking down at the city. He glanced around at the sound of metal hitting wood, and then he was in urgent motion, leaping across the room to snatch at—not the damaged spectacles, but the heavy gold signet ring caught up in the earpiece. He shook the spectacles free, sending the loose lens skittering down the table, and thrust the ring towards me.

“Where is he? Where is Mahmoud?”

“I don’t know!” He stared, breathing heavily, and now I saw that he was not angry—or, not just angry. He was afraid. “Who is this Mahmoud? What does he look like?”

“Like me. Shorter, heavier. He has a scar on his face.”

A peculiar sensation, like a mental tickle, passed through my thoughts. “Scar?”

“Not as dramatic as that of Captain De la Rocha,” said Holmes.

“Who is— Oh, never mind, I don’t know either of them. And I’m very sorry, but I don’t know why I have that ring or where it came from.”

Hazr looked near to exploding, an expression that made his face slightly more familiar.

“I am sorry, Mr Hazr. If I knew, I would tell you.”

“Ali,” Holmes said, “let her finish her meal. Shouting won’t bring her memory back any faster.”

I pulled my attention away from the angry man at last, and met the other man’s eyes. They were intriguing eyes, grey and calm and sure and very, very intelligent.

I hoped to God this man actually was a friend. If he was my enemy, I was in grave trouble.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

F
ood helped.

So did having this Hazr fellow’s furious gaze turned away from me. He watched me put away the weapon and gingerly reclaim my chair and plate, then lowered his attention on the boy.

Interviewing someone who lacks speech is a slow business, particularly when the mute person is only vaguely literate. Granted, it kept Ali’s attention occupied while I put away the meal, but it did not make him any less irritable. His questions were put in a combination of Arabic and the language I had heard in the medina. The boy’s answers took the form of nods, negative shakes, waves of the hand, and the occasional laborious scripting of answers. Which, since the only alphabet he knew was Arabic even if the words were in the other tongue, caused Ali a great deal of puzzling.

Trying to follow their conversation brought my headache back, so I closed my ears as best I could, and concentrated on the sensation of being clean, warm, and fed.

And, apparently, safe, for at some point, I closed my eyes, to be startled back into the room by the closing of a door.

The boy was gone, the nearby sound of running water explaining his absence.

Ali sat, tugging at his beard as he studied the boy’s scratches on the page. The robe he wore, I thought, was subtly different from those I had seen in the medina—rather, the robe itself was the same, but the way he wore it was not. On other Moroccans, the
djellaba
was a shapeless hooded garment that opened far down the sternum, like a large feed sack with a hood stitched on. When the men sat, one side or the other tended to fall off the shoulders entirely, revealing the shirt beneath. Ali’s, on the other hand, was pulled neatly to his collar line. The turban he wore—snug and high on the head, in the Moroccan fashion, but lacking the common plait—was a darker shade of the rich
café au lait
colour of his robe. The shirt beneath it was crisp white.

The man was a dandy.

“Idir and Mahmoud arrived in Rabat after two nights on the road,” he told me, “which, as you say, puts it on Monday, in the afternoon. They’d spent Sunday night in Fez, then took the train to Rabat, where they went to the hotel where Mycroft had said you would be.”