The Book of the Seven Delights (11 page)

"They lied."

"Why would they do that if you've done nothing wrong?"

"Good question." He turned to scan the sunbaked red terrain around them and when his gaze came back to her, he swung down from the horse and leaned close to her with a probing look that turned into a sardonic half smile as he handed her the reins and took back his hat.

"Maybe they can't do without me."

Wretched man, she thought. He clearly enjoyed being a puzzle. She sat studying him for a moment after she climbed aboard the horse, trying to put the pieces of him together.

An Englishman. Well-educated. Well-spoken, if occasionally profane. Not without a few civilized and possibly even chivalrous impulses. He served five years in the French Foreign Legion… fled to England… then returned to Morocco, where he had become a wanted man. It didn't make sense that he would voluntarily come back to a place where he was wanted and hunted. The longer she thought about it, the deeper her itch to know the truth became.

"You must have been safe in England," she said, riding after him. "Why did you come back here, knowing it would put you in danger?"

His answer accompanied a slight straightening of his spine, suggesting that the question had stirred a greater reaction than he wanted to reveal.

"I told you. It's
a family
matter."

She watched him stride faster across the stony ground and thought he was proving as difficult to decipher as T. Thaddeus's journals. It was beginning to seem that the only thing more irresistible to her than an undeciphered text was an undeciphered man. One specific man. Why else would she keep making these distracting side-trips into his personal sagas?

As she mounted the horse and headed after him, her gaze settled on his broad shoulders and slid down his back to linger on the mesmerizing strength of his long, muscular legs. He was enigmatic and opinionated and infuriating, and she wanted to grab him and… shake him until he… until she…

She realized her gaze had settled on his buttocks and jerked her head.

Just ride, Abigail
, she told herself.
And pray he really does know the way to Marrakech
.

Well into the afternoon a "haloooo!" followed by a warbling high-pitched cry stopped them both in their tracks. They scanned the horizon from different directions, but their gazes converged on the sight of a squat, turbaned figure on horseback coming out of the northwest toward them.

Haffe waved as he neared them and made his curious cry again.

"Smeeth! Miz! I find—I find you!"

Behind the voluble steward's mount trotted another horse laden with several bundles and three large carpetbags. Abigail swung down out of the saddle and hurried to greet him.

"Haffe! Thank God you're safe!" The little steward shrank from her touch, so she transferred her attention to her things, circling the horse, touching the bags. "The Legionnaires didn't bother you?"

"They want Engleesh." He gave a smile that was a pure burlesque of "canny" and patted the rolled up rug tied behind him. "Not faithful of prophet… at prayer."

"What the hell's in these things?" Smith demanded, un-tying and lowering one bag while the one he freed with it dropped with a crash on the other side.

"Hey—some of those things are breakable!" She hurried around the horse to see what might have broken.

"What's this?" Smith opened the bag at his feet and held up a large cream-colored sheet of doeskin in one hand and a doeskin clad pillow in the other.

"Bed linen—which, in case you have forgotten, is something civilized people sleep on."

"You won't need it," he declared, tossing both items aside.

"The blazes I won't." She ducked around the horse to pick the things up and cradle them against her.

"I've already used them. Accommodations here are primitive at best."

"What the hell's this?" He held up a bolt of translucent cotton gauze.

"Haven't you ever seen a mosquito net?" She tried to snatch it back.

"A mosq—" He pushed it behind him, out of her reach. "Look around you, Boston." He gestured to the semiarid landscape. "You're headed for the desert. They don't
have
mosquitos in the desert."

"Who knows where I'll end up before my search is over?" she declared.

He gave it a toss so definitive that it landed some distance away, and while she charged over to retrieve it, he pulled out yet another stack of cloth.

"Towels?" His mouth pursed in disdain. "Plan on taking a lot of baths while you're here, do you? And is this what I think it is?" He held up one of the several napkins she had brought and let it fall open to dangle from his hand. "You brought
table linen
?"

"A woman never knows when she might be required to entertain some important local personage, and proper linen might not be available." Her arms were already stuffed with textiles, but she made room for more. "Let go!"

"You have an interesting notion of desert travel, Boston. Beds with linen… mosquitos… tea parties for Berber tribesmen…" Holding up a cracked wooden box leaking tea leaves and the handle and bottom half of a shattered ceramic teapot, he fixed her with a look somewhere between incredulity and horror.

"Whatever possessed you to bring such stuff?"

"I consulted a most authoritative source. Mariana Starke published a list of things a woman would need while traveling—"

"Published?" He winced. "In a
book
?"

"
Travellers On The Continent
." When he started to groan, she felt compelled to explain: "There weren't any experienced women travelers for me to consult firsthand. So I consulted the next best thing: books written by them."

With his jaw set, he trudged around the horse to the other bag and worked the buckles free. He drew out a small set of cutlery; a sugar cannister; thick ceramic mugs, slightly chipped; a block-tin tea kettle; calico sheets; an oilcloth tarpaulin; a sewing kit with shears, tape, worsted, and needles; wooden clogs: a universal dispensary kit: matches, a collapsible rubber bladder for carrying water; spools of cotton and hemp cord…

Every item he tossed aside she picked up and set in a growing pile, intending to repack as soon as he quit venting his urges for male domination on her things. Then he held up a canvas cot sling, staring at it in dismay, and she pounced to the ground opposite him and grabbed it. He tried to pull it away, and she grabbed one of the wooden legs out of the bag and brandished it at him.

"Let go! This is none of your business!" she shouted.

"It is my business. I'm not risking my neck so you can drag half of England along through the desert with you."

"It's not half of England, it's three carpetbags. And if I had a proper packhorse and a porter or two none of this equipment would be in question."

He studied her and her weapon for a moment, then headed for the third bag… the one with the built-in lock.

"Don't touch that!" She scrambled to her feet and rushed over to drag the bag away from him. "That contains my personal things."

"Open it," he demanded, slipping a knife from his boot. "Or I will."

There was a tense moment before she produced the key and opened the case lock. There in the midst of her clothing and toiletries lay T. Thaddeus's journals and two ribbon-bound sheaves of maps.

He pulled out one of the journals and then another, thumbing through each as if looking for something.

Halfway through the fourth one he came across an envelope that he yanked out and stuffed down into the front of his shirt.

"What are you doing? Put that back!" She stared at the lines of the envelope visible through the fabric of his shirt. "How dare you?" Emboldened by anger, she made for his shirt front, but he grabbed her wrists.

"It's mine," he said straining to contain her. "I slipped it into one of your books before I left the ship." Her struggles eased.

"What is it?" She glared at his midsection, not convinced.

"It's personal. None of your concern."

She suddenly recalled what he'd said on the ship.

"
Family documents
!" she said with a furious edge.

"Exactly."

She fought the impulse to seize his shoulders and shake him until he yielded up—wait—that was why he'd gone after her stolen bag—to retrieve something he'd put in it! A memory materialized in her mind of him with a knife in his hand, bent over her missing bag. She'd caught him starting to open her bag when she surprised him in her hotel room!

That was why he insisted on taking her to Marrakech. He just wanted his envelope back! Nothing chivalrous about it.

Anger and disappointment competed for her control. She stood toe-to-toe with him, feeling his hands hot on her wrists, feeling her knees weakening at his nearness, and feeling utterly, humiliatingly beguiled.

He released her and took a huge step back, then another.

"Fine. Take what you want." He raised both hands, palms out, to say he was finished. "But we're a horse short and that means either your precious mosquito nets and tablecloths ride or you do. You decide."

And he stalked off.

She turned to look at the chaos he'd created in her things and feeling a similar chaos churning her usually rational and predictable internal workings.

Her or her bags.

Put that way, it made a wretchedly compelling argument. She sank to her knees by the pile of discards and, with stinging eyes, began to sort her things and repack. Haffe knelt beside her to help and she swallowed hard.

"Spawn of… why didn't he just say that in the first place?"

That evening they stopped in a small grove of palms to make camp. There was no spring or well, but there was lush green all around, rich grass for the horses and long shadows of sweet shade for them.

Abigail took it in with aching eyes. Strictly speaking, they weren't in desert country yet, but the grove of palms was an oasis all the same.

Haffe set about gathering fuel for a fire, while Smith unloaded and unsaddled the horses. She busied herself carrying the supplies and carpetbags to a sheltered spot between the trees. Haffe had taken pity on her and agreed to take some of the items, packed in her second bag, onto his horse with him.

By the time the sun set, Haffe had started a fire in a circle of stones and was feeding it flat brown disks that resembled mashed coconut husks.

"Camel sheet," he said with a beaming smile. She dropped the piece she was inspecting. "Make good fire."

Rubbing her hands thoroughly on her skirt, she watched him feed the dried dung to the flame until there was a glowing fire and then set a battered pot on a metal grate above it. She didn't want to think about the "flavor" his choice of fuel would add to their food.

The sun that had been so unrelenting earlier mellowed into a hazy red ball that painted the surrounding landscape in gold, rose, and deepening purple. As she collapsed against one of the palms to watch the half moon brighten against the darkening sky, she felt something bite her and smacked the side of her neck. Moments later she heard a determined buzzing and looked around to see several large mosquitos hovering around her.

"Aghhh!" She shot to her feet, batting aside a small swarm of the insects and stalked over to Smith to yank aside the collar of her blouse.

"See that?" she demanded.

He gave it a cursory glance before looking pointedly away.

"I've seen better," he said dryly. It took a moment for that to register.

"Not
me
." Battling the urge to smack him, she pointed at the lump forming on her neck. "The bite. A
mosquito
bite. You said there weren't any mosquitos here."

"I said there aren't any in the
desert"
he said frowning and suddenly starting to scratch his own neck…

and chin… and the back of a hand…

"Well, we're not in the desert, and you made me throw my mosquito net away," she said irritably. "Now I won't sleep a wink, and I'm going to look like a victim of some sort of desert plague!"

Haffe, who had been watching between them, pulled her deerskin sheet out of her bag and carried it to her, motioning for her to wrap it around her.

"Berber wrap up. Engleesh ma'am wrap up. No more bites." Haffe nodded and motioned to her to do as he suggested.

Waving the buzzing from around her head, she draped the sheet over her shoulders and clamped it under her chin so that only the most essential parts of her face stuck out.

The swarming insects soon transferred their attentions to Haffe, who merely huddled closer to the smoke of the fire, and Smith, whose flexing jaw muscles betrayed just how miserable he was and whose refusal to scratch revealed just how stubborn he could be.

"I believe I did bring
two
deerskin sheets," she said with a taunting lilt.

As he stalked off toward the horses, the sound of him slapping mosquitos wafted back and she smiled vengefully. Arrogant man. Thought he knew everything. Well, it didn't matter what he knew and didn't know… as long as he got her to Marrakech in one piece. He
owed
her that much.

Night had fallen fully by the time Haffe dished up some of his concoction of coucous and peas and dried squash of some kind. He was humming and seemed to be quite at home cooking over a campfire of camel dung.

"Haffe, what are you doing here?" She glanced up at Smith, who was standing, finishing his food, with his shoulder against a nearby palm. "You're a ship's steward."

"No, no.
Star
first sheep." He pointed to himself and then held up an index finger. "Too much water." He made a two-handed dismissing motion toward the harbor he had just abandoned. "Son of desert." He smacked his chest proudly with an open palm. "Berber."

"Then why did you go to sea in the first place?"

He frowned a moment, then caught her meaning.

"To get wife." His toothy grin, huge brown eyes, and his rounded face made him seem strangely cherubic.

"You hoped to find a wife aboard the ship?"

"To make money to take a bride," Smith inserted from above, scratching the side of his jaw. "He needs money to give to a father of daughters to convince him that he will be a worthy husband."