The Companion (2 page)

A bluff knock sounded downstairs. She heard the door open quietly on leather hinges, the small man who owned this apartment salute the guest.

“Monsieur L’Bareaux,” she greeted him in the tiny parlor next to her sleeping quarters.

He was a large man, her father’s partner on the last three expeditions. Monsieur L’Bareaux’s mustache was black and expressive, his kindly eyes an indeterminate gray that could go hard when bargaining. That he was French might surprise, since France and England were incessantly at war. But out here, wars were subordinate to the lure of antiquities. It was the French who, initially armed with money from Napoleon, had swept across the Mediterranean looking for traces of human dynasties long dead. It was a Frenchman,
Monsieur Broussard, who had discovered the city of Petra in Palestine six years ago.

Monsieur L’Bareaux was more interested in salability than historical significance. But Monsieur L’Bareaux’s way coincided with her father’s dream. As Edwin Rochewell and his daughter trekked about North Africa looking for the lost city of Kivala, they cataloged one wonderful repository of antiquities after another, leaving Monsieur L’Bareaux plenty of opportunity to send back treasures to his dealers in Paris and provide enough money to help fund the next expedition.

“Do you bear up, Mademoiselle Beth?” His grave gaze roved over her.

“Yes.” Was that true? Beth had not yet been able to cry for her father. She could not yet even comprehend his death. Did that mean she was “bearing up”?

“That’s a good girl.” Monsieur L’Bareaux patted her shoulder. “You are
tres fortissant
.”

“You really want to know whether I’m ready,” Beth returned in the forthright way that disconcerted so many people in England. “I am.”

Monsieur L’Bareaux opened the door and she plodded down the stairs. She mustn’t think about the fact that she was burying her father today. She must think about how to get what she needed from Monsieur L’Bareaux. It was the only way to carry on her father’s dream. It was the only way to preserve the only existence she knew.

The nightmares receded. He was awake, but he didn’t open his eyes. Something had changed. The burning pain in his veins was gone. In fact, he felt . . . strong, stronger than he had ever been. Blood pulsed through his arteries. His heart thumped a rhythm in his chest. His senses assaulted him. Linen rasped over his bare skin from a light coverlet. The aroma of beef and onions cooking in olive oil was obvious, as was the jasmine. But dust, the faintest of scented oils, perhaps used long ago, and the smell of leather lurked just under the cooking. How could he smell those things? There
was a joyful quality to the surging of his blood. He thrust it away.
She
told him she felt that way when she fed, just to torment him.

Despair fought with the joy thrumming inside him. He wasn’t going to die. Now he might truly be damned—or worse, he might be Satan himself. Had he become like
her
?

A doctor. He needed an English doctor. A frightened Arab goatherd had said there were Englishmen at El Golea. Had he made it to his goal? He remembered English voices.

He opened his eyes. It was the room he remembered from his delirium. Slats of sunlight coming through the shutters burned him. He dragged himself from his bed, stumbling to the window. He held himself up by the sill and scraped his fist along the slats to shut them. The wood broke with a crack. Light stabbed through the shattered shutters. He cried out and groped for the curtains hanging to each side of the embrasure. The room was cast into dimness. Even in the darkness he could see every detail of cracked plaster, every dart of a cockroach. Slowly, he sank to the floor, his back pressed against the plaster. How had he broken those shutters?

Booted feet thudded outside. The wooden door set in a border of blue-figured tiles creaked open. He was grateful for the huge form that blocked most of the light. He shielded his eyes. “Light,” he croaked in a voice he did not recognize. “No light.”

“Sorry,” the figure said in English with a soft reminder of Yorkshire at the edges. It was the voice from his fever. The door closed. “You must have had enough of sun.”

Now that the room was dim, he could see the figure for what it was. The face was English through and through, with slightly protuberant pale blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a chin that could have used a bit more strength. Still the man would be considered handsome. He wore the uniform of the Seventh Cavalry. How long since he had seen boots? The man had eaten eggs and dates and toast with orange marmalade for breakfast. Once he would never have known that. Now the fact that he could smell it frightened him. He could
not let this Englishman know what he was, or the man would never help him to an English doctor.

“Yes,” he croaked, because the man expected something. The pale blue eyes examined him. He looked down. He was naked. What did the officer stare at? The scars. Did they reveal him? The marks of the whip said he had been a slave. But the twin circles all over his body? He hoped to God no one knew what those meant. Of course, God had nothing to do with him now.

The officer leaned down and helped him to his bed. He collapsed against the slatted headboard. “Major Vernon Ware,” the man said as he sat on the side of the bed. “Attached to the English legation at El Golea. We found you in the streets about a week ago. And you are?”

There might be a thousand answers to that, none of them good. But this Major wanted something simple . . . a name. “Ian George Angleston Rufford.” He hadn’t thought of himself by that name in more than two years.

“Rufford?” The Major peered at him. “I knocked about London with Rufford Primus. You must be his younger brother.” He held out a long-fingered hand.

Ian did not take it. He was not sure he dared. “Third son,” he said. “My brother is Lord Stanbridge now.” His brother a Viscount. It sounded so . . . normal. Even if you were poor, your estates encumbered, and your wife a bore . . . it didn’t matter. You knew who you were.

The Major’s eyes lit with memory. “Your brother said you stripped to advantage at Jackson’s. Won a pony on you.”

Had he ever been the careless rake who boxed at Jackson’s? That man was gone now.

“I’ll have one of the lads bring you some broth,” the Major said. “You’ll be back to beef and claret soon, but you’d better take it slow. We didn’t think you were going to make it. You . . . you must have had a hard time of it.”

Ian nodded. If he knew how hard, the Major would despise him. His feeling of euphoric strength faded. He was tired. But the goal that had burned in him as he dragged himself
over uncounted miles of sand pushed him to speak. “I need an English doctor.”

The Major stood, looming over him, and pulled up the linen sheet. “No English doctor within six hundred miles of here. Rest now. We’ll find you clothes. I kept your belongings.”

Ian was puzzled. Belongings? Nothing had belonged to him for a long time.

“I threw the water skin away. Something had rotted inside it.” Ian started. The water skin held damnation. “But the little pouch you had hanging around your neck is safe with me.”

Ahhh. The diamonds. The diamonds were his way back to England. After a doctor cured him he would wager at White’s and be fitted for a hat at Locke’s and canter about Hyde Park at five of the clock like everyone else with nothing better to occupy them.

The room swam. The Major saw his weakness and withdrew. Ian did not have to be like
her
. And he would not submit himself to a woman again, ever. Someday the horror in the desert would be only an occasional nightmare. As his eyes closed, images of London filled him.

The patch of ragged grass was a tattered camouflage for the sand beneath. The hiss of sand being shoveled in on top of the coffin whispered that this was a foreign grave in a foreign place. With his dirty collar and slurring words, the priest was still the best the Christian God had in these climes. There was only a wooden cross to place at her father’s grave. The stone would come in three weeks, if the stonemason did not get distracted by another job or go to stay with his cousins unexpectedly. That was the way of the world in these parts.

She turned away from the grave, still dry-eyed and empty, along with Monsieur L’Bareaux, several Arabs who had been with her father for years in one capacity or another, and the disheveled Italian who traded with them for supplies. It was a small enough group that dispersed into the rising heat of the late morning.

Monsieur handed her back up into the cart and sat heavily beside her. He snapped the reins over the donkey’s back. They plodded toward the blockish outline of the village. The heat, settling over her mantilla and her cambric dress, was stifling.

She was alone in the world. Her father was gone. Her mother had died giving her life. She was an only child, just as her mother was—unusual in her mother’s native land. There was only her father’s sister, Lady Cecelia Rangle in London. Beth had met her only half a dozen times. She could not go back to England. She did not belong there. She belonged here, in Africa, carrying on her father’s dream. Monsieur L’Bareaux held the key, she knew. She had resolved only this morning to accost him, and yet now she could not speak.

It was Monsieur L’Bareaux who finally cleared his throat. “Mademoiselle Beth,” he began, not looking at her. “It is perhaps time we talked of you.”

She took a breath and recruited her resources. He had made the first sally. It was now or never. The only tactic likely to prevail was a hit direct. “I could not agree more, monsieur. Once we have seen that Imam in Tunis, I will be able to map our course for Kivala.”

Monsieur L’Bareaux pulled at his collar. It wasn’t because of the heat. “I signed the contract with Revelle,
petite
. He will pay well for excavating the ancient kasbah at Qued Zem.”

“But we have caught the scent of the Lost City now; I know it!” Her voice rose with her anxiety. She couldn’t lose Monsieur L’Bareaux’s support at the outset. “The old man’s directions corroborate the text on that stylus outside Cairo, if one revises Robard’s clumsy translation.”

Monsieur L’Bareaux glanced down at her. His bushy brows, now drawn together, had long since stopped seeming fierce. His sympathy made her shrivel. “I have not the doubts that you are right,
petite
. But the francs say I must excavate Qued Zem.”

Beth stared straight ahead. She must not let the fear into her voice. “Well, if it must be Qued Zem, it must. We can be
ready in a fortnight.” Perhaps the bluff Frenchman would not hear that little quaver. If she had to make the final sacrifice, he could not know that she was afraid.

There was a long pause. She dared not look at him. Perhaps he would just acquiesce. Or maybe he was only thinking how to break the bad news.

“You cannot stay here,
petite
.” He said it softly but with finality. “It is not proper.”

“Did my father care for propriety?” She shook her head. “If it comes to that, I took more care of him than he of me.”

“I know.”

“Who will organize everything,
and
who will translate texts for you? You know you read the Coptic very badly and you have no hieroglyphs at all.”

He rubbed his mustaches with one hand. “I have engaged a foreman. We shall do without a scholar. We are just digging trinkets, you know.

“But why must you do without? What has changed?”

“Before, you had him. Whether he was watchful or no, the men knew that you were to be treated with respect. It would be different now.” She could see he was sorry to have to explain this to her. The donkey plodded on under the blue dome of sky toward the village wall. They joined the main road, clogged with the commerce of the desert. Men hunched under lumpy nets of cheese and baskets of dates. Women carried fowl in crates.

“Even if I engaged a chaperone?”

“What woman would trek across the desert for months at a time?” He shook his head.

“A Bedouin woman or a Berber,” she answered promptly.

“That would bring neither propriety nor protection.”

“You could give me protection, Monsieur L’Bareaux.” Her voice was small, but it was steady.

“
Assez
,” he continued, “I have made the arrangements for you to have full escort on the next caravan to Tripoli. Lord Metherton, he knew your father. Already I have written that he should have a kindness for you, and see that you get back to England safely.”

“What difference if I am alone on a caravan or on trek with you?” One last protest.

“You will go with an Arab family I know, as their daughter.” He spoke slowly, as if she had suddenly become a child. “The caravan master will see that you are safe.”

Well, she wasn’t a child. She was a fully grown woman who should be able to stay in Africa if she wished. Night sky and total quiet echoed in her memory. How could one not feel close to God in the desert? She could feel the Sphinx towering above her in the unforgiving sun as she ran her hands over the pitted stone of its paws and had a revelation about it. She had seen many things in the desert that could not be explained by the rational mind: the old woman who healed others’ wounds before her very eyes, the amulet that burned when you lied—she had seen more than most women in England saw in a lifetime. How could she give up the freedom, the excitement, for English drawing rooms? And if she could not even stay in Africa, she would never see her father’s dream realized. She let that thought give her courage.

“There is one answer to both our problems,” she heard herself say. “You get someone to organize and translate, and I stay in North Africa.”

He glanced at her with wariness in his eyes as a herd of goats flowed around their cart. “What are you saying,
petite
?” She could tell he did not really want to know.

“I’m asking you to marry me, Monsieur L’Bareaux.” She had known that it would come to this, a final sacrifice needed to do what she wished, be whom she wished.

The silence stretched. She must let him consider it. He couldn’t be more than forty-two or forty-three. She was full twenty-four. Did he hesitate because he thought she would be demanding? “I shouldn’t be a charge upon you,” she blurted. “It would be a marriage of your convenience, sir, not mine. I could be as much or as little of a wife as you like.” The arch of Bi’er Taghieri’s west wall passed overhead. They plunged into the stifling village once more, its narrow streets constricting her hopes. Monsieur L’Bareaux’s Adam’s apple trekked up and down.