Lady Emily's Exotic Journey (14 page)

* * *

Mélisande was unable to believe her eyes. She had gone up to the roof to find Lucien. He had come to escort her home, of course, though why he had thought to find her on the roof, she could not imagine.

She had been about to call out to him when she realized what she was seeing. He was kissing Lady Emily.
Lady
Emily!

No! That was all wrong! He was not interested in Lady Emily. He was going to marry her, Mélisande Carnac, and he was going to take her to France.

She had it all planned.

It was absolutely necessary.

In a mixture of fury and despair, she fled, slamming the door behind her. She ran, and kept running, down to the courtyard, past the doorkeeper, out into the street. She had not even wrapped her blue cloak about her, so that her head and face were uncovered. People frowned at her as she ran past, and some of them shouted, but she did not care. She ran and ran until she was back in her father's house. She hesitated for a moment, but the cook looked up and seemed about to ask her something. With a shake of her head she dove into one of the store rooms. There, behind a crate of pottery shards, she curled up and sobbed.

When she was all cried out, she began to think.

It was not fair for Lady Emily to have Lucien. She already had everything any woman could possibly want. She was rich and safe, and she had all the clothes and jewels she wanted. She had even been to Paris and could go there again any time she chose.

Lady Emily did not need Lucien, but Mélisande did. Without him, she would be trapped here in Mosul forever. She would grow old and ugly and be buried under the dust of all these stupid broken bits of worthless pots. She swung her arm at the crate, but it was too heavy. Not only did she not knock it over, but she bruised her hand.

Tears of anger came now, and she stood up to pace back and forth across the narrow space. Her hand hurt, and she sucked at the bruise. The space was dark and dusty and small, like her life. She wanted to run, but there was nowhere to run.

Slowly her thoughts began to tumble into some sort of order. Lady Emily was at the center of her difficulties. She did not need Lucien. She was an English lady who already had everything. She had no business trying to steal Lucien.

She would be leaving soon, but it might not be soon enough. She might not be gone before Lucien was planning to leave, and he still did not know that he needed to go to France, not to Samarkand or whatever foolishness was still in his mind. Lady Emily was distracting Lucien, and so long as she did that, he would not realize that he needed to marry her, Mélisande, and take her to France.

The distraction had to stop.

Lady Emily must be removed.

Although she was well covered by her blue cloak, and her face was hidden by the black veil, Mélisande did not deceive herself. These two knew who she was, but that did not really matter. They worked as diggers for her father from time to time, the most casual of the casual laborers. No one would trust them with any but the most menial tasks, for they were both lazy and dishonest. Everyone knew it.

They were perfect for her purpose.

She had found them sitting, half-asleep, behind the crates they were supposed to be loading onto the rafts, and their first reaction had been to excuse themselves. She waited. Eventually their fanciful tales of weariness and exhaustion on behalf of the French lord who employed them, accompanied by sly glances at the woman they obviously knew to be his daughter, wound down.

Then she told them what she wanted them to do.

They looked uneasily at each other, then at her, then back at each other. Truly they were ugly men. Dirty, scrawny, with ragged beards. The taller one, Hadad, had teeth that stuck out, making him even uglier.

It was the shorter one, Karif, the one who was missing the tip of a finger on his left hand, who spoke first. “A foreign woman? But is she not the daughter of the visiting pasha? The one who is a friend of the sultan himself?”

“What is it to you who her father is? She can vanish as easily as the daughter of the Greek merchant who vanished last year.”

They shared a look again, and Karif said, a bit regretfully, “We had nothing to do with that.”

Hadad added, “Twenty pieces of gold was the reward offered for her return.” In response to Mélisande's frown, he shrugged apologetically. “Such things are known. Many people searched for her.”

She made an impatient noise. “This one need not return, so there is no need to hide her.”

Karif looked at her through narrowed eyes. “It is not a question of hiding her or not hiding her. Her father is a man of great importance. He has soldiers from the sultan at his command. There will be a great search, and many questions will be asked. No one will worry about how the questions are asked of poor men like us.”

She narrowed her eyes in return. She was not accustomed to negotiating with such creatures. They were servants, and she had always given them orders. This situation was different, however. That she could see. They were as lazy and greedy as she had thought, and as lacking in scruples. But perhaps they were not as stupid as she had thought. Not when their own safety was in question. It would be necessary to negotiate. Just like buying melons, she thought bitterly. Her life was spent haggling with peasants.

“How much?” she asked.

Hadad shrugged—he seemed much given to shrugs—and lifted his hands. “A man who would do such a thing, who would make the daughter of an important foreign pasha disappear, he would have to disappear himself.”

“Indeed,” said Karif, nodding in agreement, “it is a dreadful thing to contemplate. A man would have to flee the city, leave his home and his friends.”

“That would indeed be dreadful for a man who had a home, who had friends. But for men who have neither?” Mélisande allowed scorn to tinge her voice. “For such men, a change of city would be no hardship. And a change with gold to ease the way…?”

“One hundred pieces of gold,” said Hadad.

She laughed in scorn.

Offers and counteroffers went back and forth. Truly, it was no different from buying melons. The sums were higher. That was all.

They refused to act with no gold in their hands, not trusting her to pay once she had what she wanted. She refused to pay in advance, not trusting them to fulfill their part of the bargain. Finally a payment of fifty gold pieces was agreed upon, ten to be paid in advance, the rest once Lady Emily had disappeared.

It was as well they had agreed to that price. Ten gold pieces was as much as she could lay her hands on. As for the rest, well, once they had stolen Lady Emily away, they would be in no position to come about demanding payment, would they?

The problem was finding a way for them to get close enough to Lady Emily to capture her. She never wandered about alone. She was always surrounded by family, friends, servants—people who would protect her.

It would be up to Mélisande to lure her away, to get her close to the wharves along the river. It should not be difficult. Lady Emily was a trusting and curious fool. She would soon learn the price of folly.

* * *

Irmak walked along the river with two of his men, returning to their quarters after a rather lengthy night. The morning mist hovered over the water, drifting up to sneak ashore and find its way into the alleys, much as the morning fog did in Constantinople. At the wharves, the rafts were loaded, ready to begin the journey downstream. Once they were gone, perhaps this Lord Penworth would be willing to depart from this dismal city and continue his journey to Baghdad.

Baghdad would be the end of the journey for Irmak and his men. They could then return to Constantinople, and perhaps be sent someplace where they could see some action. Irmak had no complaint to make about Lord Penworth and his family. They made no unreasonable demands, they caused no difficulties. They even behaved sensibly.

He had been worried at the start of the journey. It was a difficult trek for civilians, and not one normally made by wealthy, pampered ladies. He had expected complaints, demands that would be impossible to meet, tantrums, and tempests. He had been pleasantly surprised.

Admittedly, the women rode and spoke with the men in outrageously bold fashion, but it appeared to be their custom, and it did not create any of the difficulties he had feared. In addition, the women had won his admiration by their coolness under fire when those lunatic Kurds had fired on them.

Still, they had been here in Mosul far longer than expected. Lord Penworth had apologized for the delay, but a delay it was. Supervising a clutch of peasants while they loaded crates of stones onto rafts was hardly work for soldiers. His men were getting bored and restless. Irmak was bored and restless himself.

He frowned. Two women had appeared up ahead and were walking along the waterfront, where women had no business being. One of them, he was certain, was Lord Penworth's daughter. He could tell by the way she walked—tall, not huddled, walking as if she owned the earth. The other looked like the daughter of that bad-tempered Frenchman. He stopped and looked after them for a moment. He shook his head to clear it. The effendi's daughter here, down by the docks? She should not be here. Something was wrong.

He signaled to his men and followed her.

* * *

Emily trailed along behind Mélisande, trying to pretend some interest in whatever it was that had the girl so excited. For her part, what mattered was that there had been no word, no message of any sort, from Lucien all day yesterday. No one had seen him. She knew that, because she had asked. No one knew where he was. He had simply vanished.

Shouldn't he have something to say after the way they had parted? Even if it was just, “Yes, you are right. We must part.” Or something. Something that would give her a chance to say, “Wait. Let us not be too hasty.” Maybe she should just say, “Samarkand. Yes, I would like to go to Samarkand.” Did it matter what came after that?

Well, of course it mattered. But did it matter enough to mean she would never see him again? No. She had to see him again. She had to tell him that she would go with him anywhere he wanted. Nothing would matter if she could be with him.

“Come along,” said Mélisande, tugging on her arm impatiently.

Emily shook free and looked around. She had never been on this part of the waterfront before. In other places there were gardens running down to the water, some with vegetables, others with trees and flowers. Not here. They were walking along an unpaved street lined with buildings that looked decrepit even by Mosul standards. Admittedly all the buildings in this town looked gloomy, with their heavy doors and almost no windows, but here the walls were cracked and the alleys were too narrow to allow any light. And there were no people at all.

Warehouses, she thought, since this seemed to be a businesslike stretch of the river. A number of heavily laden keleks bobbed in the water alongside the wharves. They were probably part of the flotilla her father and David had collected to carry M. Carnac's finds down the river.

Was that what Mélisande wanted to show her? Something from the excavation?

She heard footsteps behind her and turned in time to see two men converging on her, one holding a cloth that he tried to drop over her. She twisted aside enough to escape most of its bulk, but not fast enough to escape the grasp of the other man. She screamed and struggled, trying to pull away, but he caught hold and pulled her back against him.

Trying not to panic, she slowed down, trying to think, and dropped her chin down to her chest. Then she flung her head back, hearing a satisfactory cry as she hit something boney and her captor released his hold enough for her to pull a hand free and reach back to claw at his face while she kicked out at cloth man coming toward her from the front.

They were shouting, whether at her or each other she had no idea since she didn't understand a word they were saying. All she could do was keep struggling. She did manage one satisfying kick on cloth man's shin, and she saw him stumble. And she was pretty sure her nails had made some inroads into the other fellow's face. But, good lord, they stank. How could they bear it?

Then all of a sudden, it was over. Her captor threw her to the ground, and when she lifted her head, she saw them running away, pursued by men in tan uniforms with red hats. Irmak's Turkish troopers. One of the troopers stopped to help her up, smiled when he saw she was not injured, and ran off to join the pursuit.

She stood, or at least leaned, against the building while she caught her breath and waited for her heart to slow to a reasonable pace. Moving gingerly, she checked her limbs. Nothing seemed to be broken, though she was bruised in a number of places. Then she realized that Mélisande was standing there looking distraught. The poor child must have been terrified.

“It's all right, Mélisande. They are gone, and I am not seriously hurt.” She wasn't really finished being frightened herself, but she tried to sound confident for the girl's sake and managed a weak smile.

Mélisande turned on her in a fury. “Those stupid Turks. They have ruined everything.”

Emily wondered if she had hit her head. She felt decidedly confused and couldn't even manage a question. All she could do was look at Mélisande blankly. Then she asked, “The Turks? They were Turks who tried to grab me?”

“No, of course not. The Turkish soldiers are to blame.”

“To blame? But they rescued me from those two men.” Emily was growing more, not less, confused as Mélisande spoke.

“They were supposed to make you disappear, those two, and now the Turks have frightened them and they have run away. Where will I find another pair? And it will not matter if I do, because now everyone will know about it, so you cannot just disappear.” Mélisande was swinging about, waving her hands rather the way an angry cat swishes her tail.

“They were supposed…? You wanted them to…?” Emily shook her head. Was it her French that was at fault? Was she misunderstanding what Mélisande was saying? “I don't understand. What are you talking about?”

Mélisande spun about to face her. “Lucien is mine! You don't need him, and I do. He must marry me so he can take me away from here, back to France. You cannot take him away from me.”

Emily backed up a step, away from the building and the alley. “Really, this is absurd. What are you talking about? I am not taking Lucien away from you.”

“Do not deny it. I saw you kiss him, there on the rooftop. You want him for yourself, but he is mine! He has to be mine!”

As Mélisande kept coming toward her, Emily kept backing away. She was getting nervous. What on earth had possessed the girl? She was talking like a lunatic. “This is ridiculous. Lucien does not belong to you. You are just a child.”

That was obviously the wrong thing to say, because Mélisande shrieked in fury and flew at Emily, who held up her arms to fend off the girl's claws. Suddenly she was falling through the air. She screamed in fear. A stab of pain went through her head.

Then there was nothing.