Taming Charlotte (25 page)

Alev looked weary, and she wrung her hands as she nodded. “Rashad knows,” she answered. “Pray that he’s
able to hide himself, if the invaders succeed in overrunning the palace.”

“He would never tell them where to find us,” Charlotte said quickly. The baby she held had settled down a little, but she continued to pat his tiny back.

“You are right,” Alev agreed sadly. “And they will kill Rashad for his silence.”

Charlotte felt the color drain from her face. She and Rashad had not been friends, exactly, but neither had they been foes. It made her ill to think of the pressures he might face. “The princes were hidden here when Ahmed overthrew Khalif. Why didn’t the would-be sultan try to force Rashad to show him how to get in?”

Alev’s smile was wan, and Charlotte noticed that faint shadows were already forming under her eyes. Or perhaps that was just a trick of the light.

“Ahmed was mad with power. He was too preoccupied with playing sultan to recall that the harem was overseen by a eunuch.” She looked grim, snatched her child back from Charlotte and held him so tightly that he began to whimper again. “Oh, Charlotte, what if someone releases Ahmed in all the confusion? Who is protecting Khalif?”

Charlotte didn’t have the heart to tell Alev about the sultan’s fierce determination to guard his home and family. She simply said, “Rashad was there when I left.”

An hour passed, and some of the women and children sat down on the floor, leaning back against the stone walls. Alev nursed the baby she held, having already fed his brother, then arranged him in her lap to sleep. Pakize still held the other child.

The air in the secret room became hotter, thicker, harder to breathe. Charlotte needed a chamber pot, and her muscles were beginning to cramp. She thought of Patrick, and his boneheaded determination to “protect” her, and giggled half-hysterically at the irony of it all.

Alev gave her a strange look, as did several of the others.

Charlotte felt a need to make it clear that she wasn’t losing her reason. “I was just thinking,” she began, a little defensively, “how funny it is that Patrick insisted on leaving me here in Riz so I would be
safe. “

Her friend clearly didn’t see the humor.

Another hour passed, then another, and the light coming in through the roof began to thin. Finally darkness fell, and a few candles were brought from pockets and pouches and lit, and the children began to fuss in earnest.

Charlotte could bear the waiting no longer. She stood, dusted off her robe, and announced, “We’ve got to take this situation in hand.”

Alev stood, awkwardly, after jostling her sleeping baby into the arms of one of the other women. “What can you be thinking of?” she snapped, her hands resting on her hips. “There is no better place to hide—even the Turks did not find this room when they invaded Riz during the time of Khalif’s grandfather!”

Charlotte was struck by the odd, old-fashioned meter of Alev’s speech. Even though her friend had been born and raised in England, she had clearly absorbed the culture of Riz, and made it her own.

“We will need food and water,” Charlotte reasoned. “Besides, there weren’t all that many pirates left, once the sultan’s soldiers sank the ship and several of the skiffs that remained. It’s quite possible that things have returned to normal and Rashad and the others have simply forgotten that we’re in hiding.”

Alev had an argument at the ready. “It is also ‘quite possible,’ Madame Trevarren, that you are wrong. The very act of leaving the hiding place might well reveal the rest of us to the enemy.”

Charlotte sighed, looked around the shadow-filled cubicle. “There must be another way out, besides grinding open a part of the wall,” she reflected aloud. “We need to find out what’s going on out there, and I could bring back some food and water, too.”

In rapid, hushed Arabic, Alev consulted with the senior wife, who had stood apart from the others from the beginning, looking haughty and aloof. Finally the wife, or
kadin,
grudgingly indicated a place in the floor where the stones were broken.

Upon investigation, Charlotte was surprised and pleased to find an underlying board, which had been covered with
smooth rocks. Beneath that was a narrow tunnel, burrowing away into darkness.

“Where does it lead?” she asked, already preparing herself inwardly for the forthcoming expedition.

More consultation followed, then Alev replied, with a shiver, “To the passageway behind the dungeons.” She looked gray as death in the gloom. “Oh, Charlotte, don’t do it, please—just stay here with the rest of us and wait.”

Charlotte looked at the tunnel and thought of all the different sorts of vermin that surely lived inside it, and for a moment her resolve wavered. When she weighed the dangers of the unknown against the prospect of sitting passively by and waiting for someone to come and rescue them all, however, she hesitated no longer.

“I’ll return as soon as I can.” She lowered herself to her stomach and peered inside the hole. The best course of action would be to crawl in headfirst, she decided, and slowly grope her way toward freedom. She looked directly at Alev. “If the palace is clear of enemies, Rashad or I will come and open the secret panel. If it is not, I’ll return by way of the tunnel. Whatever happens, though, I won’t tell anyone besides the eunuch where you are.”

Alev must have guessed that Charlotte’s mind was closed to further persuasion; she nodded grimly, and the two women exchanged a brief embrace.

The tunnel was dark and musty, and at times it narrowed to such a point that Charlotte feared she would not be able to squeeze through. She had more than one moment of paralyzing fear, imagining what it would be like to get stuck and die of hunger and thirst in the bowels of an ancient palace. Once, she encountered a rat; she saw its red eyes glowing in the darkness and felt its fetid breath upon her face. Her heart thudded in her throat while she tried to project an attitude of unremitting menace, and finally the rodent retreated into some cubbyhole farther along and did not trouble Charlotte again.

Still, she knew the memory of the creature would not soon leave her. There would surely be nightmares in which the animal grew bigger and bigger, until it filled the tunnel.

Charlotte wept, though she wasn’t consciously aware of it, as she inched on toward an uncertain fate.

Whether an hour or a day had passed since she’d left the secret chamber, Charlotte had no way of knowing. Her courage stirred, however, when she caught the first faint murmur of voices ahead of her.

She crawled on, elbows and knees scraped, hair tangled, and at one point the tunnel grew so constricted that Charlotte had to let out all her breath to squeeze through. Then, reaching a wider place, hearing a conversation clearly, she rested, catching her breath, wishing she spoke the language of Riz even one tenth as well as Patrick did.

The speakers were men; that was all she could determine without getting a look. New terrors presented themselves. She might be heard moving within the wall, and captured. Or—and this fate was still worse—she could find herself in one of the cells, at the mercy of Khalif’s prisoners. Not only would she be cruelly used, and probably killed long after she’d begun to pray for death, but Ahmed and his followers would escape through the tunnel and find the hidden women and children.

Charlotte made herself take a deep breath and hold it. She had come this far; now was no time to lose her mettle. Besides, there was no room to turn around and retreat. Taking great care to be silent, Charlotte shinnied forward, toward the rumble of voices.

Finally she found herself looking out into a dark passageway, through a crack in the sandstone wall. The stench emanating from the cells on either side of the torchlit hall—urine, vomit, excrement, and mold—brought acid surging up from her stomach. She retched silently, convulsively, then lay still, thinking of Lydia, who had seen and smelled much worse during her service as a nurse during the Civil War.
Physically,
her stepmother had said,
one builds a tolerance, but a part of the spirit never forgets the horror.

What would Lydia do in my place? Charlotte asked herself. She did not have to wait long for the answer; Mrs. Brigham Quade believed in going forward, never back.

Charlotte crept close to the wall again and put her eye to the thin vein of light to look out.

Two Arabs entered the passageway at the far end, talking between themselves. Their clothes were not fine, but dirty and poor and wrinkled, and one man laughed raucously at some comment of the other.

Behind them came two more men—like the first pair, they were strangers to Charlotte, but the half-conscious prisoner they dragged between them was not. Even in the gloom, Charlotte recognized Rashad, and she could tell that he’d been savagely beaten.

Her heart sank, for a moment, into a mire of unutterable despair. Somehow the worst had happened, the unthinkable—the invaders had managed to prevail against Khalif’s soldiers. But how?

A cell was opened, Rashad was thrust onto its filthy, straw-covered floor, and metal clanged against stone as the door was slammed. It was locked, and then the jailer hung the keys from a spike and he and his companion left the dungeon.

Blood pounded in Charlotte’s ears as she waited, marshaling her thoughts and praying devoutly for courage and guidance. Then, as quietly as she could, she began picking away at the sandstone rocks that hid the tunnel from plain view.

Moans and coughs sounded from the shadowy depths of the cells, but no one seemed to notice when Charlotte finally cleared the way and writhed out of the entrance like a snake leaving its hole. She landed on the hard floor with a bone-jarring
ker-thump,
waited in an agony of suspense for the guards to burst in and find her.

Nothing happened.

At first Charlotte was unsteady on her feet, having been wedged into the tunnel for so long, and she stood for a time, gripping a bar of one of the cells, struggling against a cowardly urge to abandon her mission and shinny back to relative safety.

In the end, however, she could not bring herself to leave Rashad to further sufferings. She walked slowly to the end of the passageway, took down the ring of keys, and returned to his cell.

He groaned as she ground the ancient key in an even more primitive lock.

“Hush,” she whispered, “it’s only me. Charlotte.”

The straw rustled as Rashad sat up, making a mountainous shadow against the inside wall of the cell. “Allah preserve us,” he muttered in disbelief. “How did you get here? Did Ahmed’s friends find the hiding place?”

The lock finally gave, though it made rather more noise than Charlotte would have liked. “The women and children are still safe, as far as I know,” she assured him in a whisper, entering the stinking chamber and crouching beside him. “For you and me, my friend,” she went on philosophically, “the outlook is not so encouraging. I didn’t expect to find you here and I have no plan for getting you out. Being a portly man, you would never be able to pass through the tunnel.”

Rashad sighed, labored to his feet. “You must go back the way you came. I will look after myself.” He swayed, and Charlotte steadied him, feeling the sticky warmth of blood under her hands.

“You’ve been doing a fine job of that so far, haven’t you?” she mocked, though not unkindly. It was apparent that Rashad had suffered enough already. “Is Khalif alive? Have they taken him prisoner?”

Rashad’s teeth flashed in an unexpected grin. “Khalif was drugged by a faithful servant, then bound and gagged and deposited in the back of a deep closet.”

Charlotte knew that Patrick’s method of keeping her out of trouble, when they’d first returned to the palace, had inspired the eunuch, but she had no time or energy for resentment. “The palace has fallen, then?”

The grin was gone. “Yes,” Rashad answered. “The men in the ship had spies inside. The traitors helped them get past the gates, and Ahmed was immediately released.”

Creeping to the cell door, Charlotte peered cautiously into the passageway. “I wish Captain Trevarren were here. He’d know what to do.”

“He’d tell you the same thing I did: Go back where you came from. I will cover the opening in the wall after you.”

“I can’t just go off and leave you,” Charlotte replied
impatiently. “You’re hurt. Besides, there is no food ‘or water in the secret chamber. I promised to bring some back.”

Rashad leaned close, his low voice thundering in the darkness as he replied, “Sometimes promises must be broken.”

“What about your wounds?”

“The very pain itself will serve to drive me past the obstacles in my way. Go now. If you are found here, there will be nothing I can do to save you or the others who depend upon us.”

Before Charlotte could reply, the latch of the outer door clattered. Quickly Rashad pushed Charlotte back into the shadows of the cell and stood there with her. One of the guards ambled along the hall, eating an orange with a total lack of grace. He saw the open door first, and then the opening of the tunnel, but even as a shout of alarm formed on his lips, Rashad was upon him.

Charlotte winced at the cracking sound she heard, watched wide-eyed as the sentry folded to the floor. Rashad took both a gun and a knife from the man’s belt and handed the former to Charlotte.

It was a small, shiny pistol.

“Take this,” Rashad said, clearly expecting Charlotte to follow his earlier dictates and climb back into the tunnel. Instead, she put the gun into the pocket of her robe and hastened to replace the stones that would hide the opening in the wall. Whatever happened to her and Rashad, Ahmed must not learn of this passage.

Rashad had taken the keys earlier, and with only one glance back at Charlotte and a disgusted shake of his head, he began unlocking the doors of the other cells. Many of the prisoners were wounded and remained inert, but a good number poured out to await orders from the eunuch. Charlotte, having finished covering the tunnel entrance, blended in with the men, marveling that they’d been so quiet while she was speaking with Rashad.

She would have followed the others out of the dungeon and into the thick of conflict had it not been for a pitiful groan coming from one of the newly opened cells. The need to be in the center of things drew her forward, but duty
pulled her back. She could not ignore human agony, not when there were things she might do to combat it.