Sultan's Wife

by Jane Johnson

  We cross the great river over a long bridge lined by tall buildings that narrow the roadway to only ten feet or so, thus herding us all together and making the sounds of our horses’ hooves and the rumble of the cartwheels loud in our ears, whilst affording only brief glimpses of the dark ribbon of water to either side. In the middle of the bridge there rises a fantastic structure replete with turrets and cupolas, its intricately carved façade gleaming with gilt. Upon sight of it, ben Hadou declares, ‘This must be the king’s palace!’; at which the man riding beside me – a solid fellow in his middle years with as much grey as colour in his hair, who has told me his name is John Armitage, and that he is happy to be home after five years of being stationed in Tangier – guffaws and, raising his voice, explains it is just Nonsuch House, over a hundred years old, and no more than a fancy gatehouse, which effectively silences our ambassador.

  The city into which we pass on the northern side of the bridge appears very alien to me, with its wide thoroughfares, and towering stonework grey-white beneath the rising moon: very different to the dark, dank, smoky hell Doctor Lewis had once described to me. And everywhere, this being, I gather, a Sunday and therefore the English holy day, there is the sonorous clang and peal of bells, a sound never to be found in any Muslim city, since Mohammed deemed bells to be the Devil’s pipes. In general, London bears little relationship to my past experiences of European cities – Venice or Marseilles, with their winding canals and alleyways and smart merchants’ houses; though here and there I catch a glimpse of Florence or Bologna in the porticoes and columns of the great buildings. But after a while it strikes me that there are similarities with our own Meknes here, for a great deal of demolition and building work appears to have been going on. I ask John Armitage the cause of so much activity.

  ‘There was a fire,’ he explains. ‘Fifteen, sixteen years back. It destroyed whole swathes of the city – hundreds of streets and churches, thousands of homes. I remember how it was before, dark and teeming, rank with sewage and rats. They have worked wonders, Mr Wren and Mr Hooke, under his majesty’s guidance.’

  In comparison with the dark labyrinth of Fez and the busy passages of the Meknes medina, this is a very different world: spacious and unfussy. I find myself wondering what sort of king he must be, who rules over this great modern metropolis. Well, soon, I imagine, I shall find out.

  31

  10th January 1682

  We are quartered in the royal palace of White Hall, an immense maze of a building containing, we are told, nigh on two thousand rooms. While we await the formal reception with the English king, which is to occur the next day, ben Hadou bids us all to keep to our chambers in case we embarrass him by succumbing to foreign temptations or misbehaving ourselves in ignorance of the customs of the court here.

  The view from our window is fascinating to Momo: he climbs up beside me on the chair with a compliant Amadou in his arms, and I point out to him the people and animals in the park beyond the Tilt Yard and the horse guards’ exercise square. There are lots of people out there parading up and down amidst the pretty trees and flowerbeds, and all manner of beasts wandering the grassy meadow beside the lake – sheep and dogs, cows and goats.

  ‘Can we go and see them?’ Momo pleads.

  ‘Soon,’ I promise, and hope I do not lie.

  I wash him using a bowl of fire-warmed water (last night I had foolishly asked a servant whether there was a hammam at the palace I might use, explaining that I wished to bathe, and was stared at in amazement. ‘There is a bath in the queen’s chambers, but no other may use it. You might arrange a visit to the Streatham Spa or to Bagnigge Wells, I suppose; and the king in summer swims in the Thames, but …’ He faltered, then bobbed his head, made an excuse and went running off down the corridor as if he had encountered a madman). Then I put Momo to bed, tuck the coverings around him and wait till he sleeps. Only then do I take out my leather satchel and check through the contents. Sewn into the lining for safekeeping is the embroidered scroll made by the White Swan that I was given by little Mamass. Taking my dagger, I slip the point carefully through the stitching and remove it, then turn the roll of fabric over and over in my hands.

  The temptation to keep on with my clever dagger and unpick the stitching that sews it closed is high: now that we are safe in London what harm could it do to peep inside? I can feel my fingers itching to cut through those neat silk locks; I am, I reason, a fair hand with a needle myself, and have with me the small repair kit I always carry – I can sew it up again after looking. The lady has, after all, entrusted me with her son: what secrets can there be between us? After long seconds of indecision, I chide myself that if Alys has not seen fit to vouchsafe its contents to me, I must attempt to deliver it unmolested, since the information within is not for my eyes. Others, I am sure, would not be so scrupulous. Now, where to hide it, as much from Amadou’s wicked little fingers as from any other threat? I could carry it on my person, but that would mean changing my robe for one bearing a pocket, or tucking it next my skin or inside my shoe, which would seem a churlish and disrespectful way to treat an object destined for the king’s hand. At last I slip it back inside the satchel and sew up the lining once more with long, careless stitches. Perhaps it is safest always to carry the bag with me.

  To this end, I remove all those items which will weigh it down unnecessarily: spare clothing for Momo, my copy of the suras, a cake of French soap that ben Hadou had kindly given me and that I cannot bring myself to use, it is such a luxury, a spare headcloth, a rolled pair of linen breeches, some leather socks. A little bag of dates and nuts with which to keep Amadou quiet. In the bottom of the satchel, beneath my pouch of money and Momo’s little stash of jewels, I come across the scrip of paper Daniel gave to me and look at it long and hard, deciphering the unfamiliar hand. Might I risk the ambassador’s wrath by leaving the palace to seek out the man whose name and address are written here? Golden Square, a rich and royal address indeed, which must surely lie close by: how hard could it be? Even so, dread gnaws at me, and I tuck the scrip away again in the bag.

  Amadou, sighting the treats, chatters at me and paws my robe. Rather than have him wake the boy, I take out some dates and peanuts and put them on the windowsill. He capers after them and leaps up to squat upon the sill, and applies all his concentration to shelling the nuts. This reminds me that I have not eaten since dawn. Locking the door, I go to find something to eat.

  Downstairs, the public rooms are much grander than our apartments, with high corniced ceilings, and walls covered with colourful tapestries and paintings of great men and women and scenes from stories – another strangeness to the members of our embassy, since the depiction of the world in any terms other than abstract ones is forbidden under Islam. Distracted from my purpose, I find myself drawn to an immense portrait, Italian Renaissance, vivid with colour. I am standing rapt beneath its ornate golden frame, taking in the glorious hues, the face of the Virgin translucently pale, gentle in repose, her blue eyes fixed adoringly on the child in her lap, and thinking of Alys and the child sleeping in my locked chamber upstairs, when a voice behind me says, ‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’

  Without thinking, my thought pours out, ‘She is so sad: she knows already she is destined to lose her son.’

  ‘Od’s fish, sir: that’s a distinctly gloomy interpretation of such a pretty scene.’

  I turn to find a tall, saturnine man behind me regarding the painting with a lugubrious expression on his heavy face. He is well advanced into his middle years, but his hair is as black as night, his moustache too. Too dark to be an Englishman, I think: Spanish, perhaps, or Italian? He is dressed in a simple suit of burgundy cloth with a plain linen shirt beneath and is attended by two small red-and-white dogs and three young ladies garbed in a most becoming, if immodest, fashion, the swell of their round white breasts provocatively displayed.

  Tearing my eyes away from this distraction, I return to the painting. ‘See the downward turn of her mouth,’ I find myself s
aying. ‘And look at the angle of her eye, gazing away past the child into the distance. She’s looking into the future and seeing his death.’

  He laughs, a deep baritone, rich and warm. ‘You mean, unlike any usual new mother, who has eyes only for the babe in her arms and gives not a fig for the rest of the world, let alone her poor man?’

  One of the women raps him lightly on the arm with her fan. ‘Oh, Rowley, I never turned you away once, and you know it.’ She comes closer to look up at the portrait. ‘Don’t she look sad? I never really looked close up before. Perhaps Mr Cross should have painted me as the Blessed Virgin, rather than as silly Cupid. My poor little Charlie, he was only twenty-seven when he passed on last year; even Christ got six more years than that.’

  Scandalized, the other women tut and shush her, but all this seems to achieve is to goad her further, for she turns to me and peers at me lasciviously. ‘Od’s fish, but you’re a big ’un!’ she declares, mimicking the man’s deep tones. Her gaze is as sly as a cat’s, and she is clearly not as young as I had first thought. ‘And as black as ink. Tell me, sir, are you that same colour all over?’

  Her companions titter loudly and flutter their fans.

  ‘Now, then, Nelly,’ the man chides her. ‘Leave the poor chap alone: he is here to spend a quiet, appreciative moment in the company of the sacred Madonna, not to be the butt of your profane and teasing ways.’

  She drops a mocking curtsey. ‘Begging pardon, my lord.’

  My lord? The man raises a sardonic eyebrow. His eyes – large and liquid and as dark as onyx – take me in from my white turban to my yellow Fassi slippers, and whatever he sees seems to amuse him mightily.

  ‘Forgive me, Lord … Rowley.’ As I would in the Moroccan court when in the presence of one far more exalted than this slave, I prostrate myself with as much grace as I can muster, and at once one of the dogs comes and snuffles at me curiously, its bulbous brown eyes slick with light, its nose wet against my face. It has been eating something so pungently unpleasant that I am forced to hold my breath.

  The women break out into peals of laughter now, and I wonder if it is because of the dog, or me, or some other unrelated thing.

  ‘Come away, Rufus!’ the man calls, and the beast retreats. There follows a long, profound silence in which all I can hear is my own blood beating in my ears, then the sound of heels clacking away over a stone floor. I raise my head, just an inch, and turn enough to see the company walking away on the other side of the room. I push myself slowly up on to my knees and watch them disappear, chattering merrily. How rude, I think. But maybe I have given offence in some way: it is true, as ben Hadou said, that we do not understand the customs of the court here.

  Feeling rather cross, I go in search of food and resolve to keep to my room until I know better how to comport myself in this strange place.

  The next day the embassy is to be formally introduced to the king at a reception at the Banqueting-house. Ben Hadou frets when informed that he cannot bring the lions and ostriches and other gifts with him; these may be presented at a private audience only, since today is a day of formal ceremony. And so, it seems, all his plans for a grand entrance are thwarted; again, he is thrown into a black humour and keeps us all waiting as he pays extra attention to his costume for the event, and certainly when he eventually makes his appearance – heralded by a fragrant cloud of frankincense – he does look most splendid, in a robe of rich crimson silk, embroidered in gold at sleeves and hem and neck, with a white woollen burnous thrown over the top, and a red turban wound around with pearls. At his side he wears his scimitar of damascened steel in a scabbard of leather and gold thread; on his feet kidskin babouches glittering with jewels. We have all done the best we can with our djellabas and whatever jewellery and perfumes we own, but he puts the rest of us to shame. Which, I am sure, knowing the Tinker’s pride, is his intent.

  Carriages arrive to deliver us there in style, but we have no sooner boarded them and travelled a short distance than they come to a halt and we are at our destination. As we arrive, I understand why it would have been impossible to walk the short distance up the King’s Street from our palace apartments to the impressive, pillared façade of the Banqueting-house. Huge crowds have gathered, filling the wide thoroughfare to the Holbein Gate and beyond, all craning their necks and surging forward, curious to see the exotic foreigners from far Barbary, the monsters who have all these years been abducting their countrymen to use as slaves, who have had the temerity to bombard the Tangier colony and kill their soldiers by the hundreds. When the carriages draw up, the mob presses forward, threatening to overwhelm the scarlet-coated ceremonial guards with their gleaming halberds. The smell of the mob – which permeates even the Tinker’s strong frankincense – impresses itself on me almost as much as the imprecations they cry. Does no one wash in this city? The combination of the stench and the noise is overpowering, frightening.

  ‘Black bastards!’ I hear, and ‘Heathen savages!’

  ‘Murderers!’

  ‘Rapists!’

  ‘Barbary devils!’

  I turn to Hamza and shout over the tumult, ‘They are baying like hounds! I believe they would tear us to pieces if they were able. Do they really hate us so? And can you imagine Ismail standing for such behaviour?’

  He grins wolfishly. ‘As well that Ismail does not rule here. The English cut the head off their last king – outside this very building.’

  He pushes past me and I am left staring after him in shock, wondering what a sort of country we have come to that could enact such popular savagery. It must be a most unstable place indeed. And then I think of Ismail’s own words: ‘My subjects are like rats in a basket, and if I do not keep shaking the basket they will gnaw their way through.’

  Protected by the yeomen guards, we are led into a vast hall teeming with people dressed in flamboyant clothing: men in the main chamber, women leaning down over the galleried balconies to peer at us with no less curiosity, but rather more manners, than the populace outside. I had thought the Ambassadors’ Hall at Meknes a grand venue, but this outdoes it a dozen times over. I gaze around at opulent tapestries adorning the walls; the dozens of tall, fluted pillars; the blaze thrown off by thousands of sconces and candles, the glitter of jewels on hands and ears and throats. The ceiling is divided into lozenges of riotous colour wherein some giant has painted vast scenes of heroic figures girded with flowing draperies, crowned kings and naked cherubs, all garlanded about with gilt flourishes and festoons. I look down again, feeling giddy, just as a hush falls across the chamber. The doors to either side of a great canopied dais now open, and out of them issue from one side a small, mousy woman whose teeth stick out at a most unfortunate angle and from the other a tall, magnificent gentleman. The man walks to the front of the dais and, taking the little woman by the hand, leads her to the two thrones set there, beneath a crimson canopy. She sits down in one and he in the other, and I begin to feel a little sick, a little faint, as I take in those lugubrious dark features, the black hair and moustaches of the man I encountered the previous day. It cannot be, surely? The man I saw yesterday was most plainly dressed, rather than in this extraordinary effusion of silks and frills, and without doubt this kind-faced lady with the rabbit teeth was not amongst the women who were with him, chattering so gaily and flaunting their soft white bosoms. I stare and stare, but there can be no mistake. The man with whom I traded words yesterday as with an equal is the king of England himself. And there, by his side, the queen, his wife, once Infanta of Portugal, Catarina of Braganza, by whose dowry Tangier came to be in English hands.

  I am torn out of my appalled reverie by the sudden appearance of a court official in front of me. ‘Who is the translator here?’ he demands.

  Hamza and I both claim the role at the same moment, then glare at one another. Ben Hadou raises his voice. ‘I am the ambassador: I speak good enough English.’

  ‘Excellent. Then you may inform your retinue that for the insult shown to Sir Jame
s Leslie in Morocco by your king, they are to divest themselves of their hats and footwear and approach the throne bare-headed and shoeless.’ And with that terse instruction, he turns on his heel and marches back into the chamber.

  I look at the bands of pearls threaded with such care through the crimson folds of ben Hadou’s turban before my gaze drops to his darkening face. Suppressed fury emanates off him in waves as he unwinds his elaborate headwrap; when we are ushered through into the receiving chamber, he stalks all the way to the throne straight-backed and haughty, and neither bows nor makes any sort of reverence, which causes the English king to raise a thick black brow.

  To be truthful, I can hardly remember what passes during the ceremony, so overcome am I not only by my horrible misstep of the day before, but also by a nagging terror that, having squandered the perfect opportunity to pass Alys’s message into the sovereign’s hands, I will probably never be afforded another chance. All I know is that during the Kaid Mohammed ben Hadou’s extremely long peroration – greetings from His Majesty Sultan Abul Nasir Moulay Ismail as-Samin ben Sharif, Emperor of Morocco and the ancient kingdoms of the Tafilalt, Fez, the Sus and Taroudant, to the exalted King of England; wishes for the extended good health of his body and his soul (including a detailed comparison by the sultan himself of those points in the Muslim religion and that of the Protestant English in which the two faiths share some correlation, thus making them superior to the beliefs of our shared enemy, the Catholics) … and on and on – King Charles’s bored gaze slides past ben Hadou and connects with my own and I feel as if a small lightning bolt has passed right through my eye socket and is rooting me to the ground. His lips quirk, then one of those heavy lids droops in what might have been seen by others as no more than a twitch, but which looks remarkably to me like a wink.

  Days pass in which we see neither skin nor hair of the English king, but only a succession of dull court officials, sent to take statements of intent regarding the matter of the Tangier garrison and its proposed rights and safeguards; then others to discuss the fate and possible redemption of certain named prisoners they claim are held by the sultan, none of whom either ben Hadou or I have encountered and are likely either to be dead or gone missing, or perhaps to have apostasized and adopted Muslim names.