Ali’s fingers faltered, then resumed.
“Tell me again about the two people who came onto the rooftop, after the soldiers had gone,” Holmes ordered.
My headache had returned, with a vengeance. I wanted to find a heap of something very soft, lower my skull onto it, and leave it there for a long, long time.
“A man and a woman. They looked Moroccan. At any rate, they were wearing Moroccan dress.”
“Tell me your impression of the pair. Married couple? The house’s owners? Servants?”
“How should I know? Servants. Maybe. My head feels as if there is a red-hot poker through it.”
“Was the woman wearing a head-covering?”
“Of course. No.” I considered, head in hands. “They didn’t match.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean they were together, but not intimates. And she was in charge. That seems unlikely, doesn’t it? They were consulting. Her skin was lighter than his. She … she was older.”
“As if he was her long-time employee?”
I raised my head to meet his eyes. “Exactly.”
He smiled, and for the first time, I knew his face. Not his history or who he was to me—but that he was a part of me, I no longer doubted. I came near to weeping, at the relief of having a companion in this lost world.
His expression shifted, to one of concern. “You must sleep.”
I did not exactly require his help to stand, but I did permit it. He led me to the adjoining room, which held a pair of beds. He even pulled back the bed-clothes for me. “There is a lock, if you wish, although following a concussion, a locked door may not be the best of ideas. You will be safe here.”
When he had left me, I looked at the key in the door, then poured myself onto the soft mattress, where I stayed until the sun had left the sky.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sound of men’s voices slowly wormed its way into sleep’s cocoon. I felt my breathing change. I could smell bread baking, somewhere near. And coffee.
As if in response, my body turned onto its back for a hard stretch. The odours suggested morning, but it felt more like night. I raised my head to blink at the dimly lit room: A lamp was burning low; brighter light came from around the doorway, but not from the window.
I threw back the coverings, then remembered the dangers of motion. More cautiously, I sat upright on the side of the bed, but my head’s pain had changed, to a localised ache over the right ear; the previous day’s terrible throb of pressure did not come with the change in elevation. My fingers made gentle exploration of the tender spot, feeling the stiff thread of the stitches and the dried scab, but no fresh blood.
You may survive, Russell, I thought.
Russell: yes. It was what Holmes called me—and with his name, several large pieces of myself came tumbling into place.
Mary Judith Russell, child—orphaned child—of a Boston Brahmin and a rabbi’s daughter. Apprentice-turned-partner of one Sherlock Holmes, survivor of motorcar smashes, bullets, knife-fights, and furious theological debates. Mycroft Holmes was now a person, the source of countless intricate machinations on the stage of international politics. I could even recall the outlines of Ali Hazr, if not the specifics—he seemed to inhabit the hazier edges of what I knew.
But I remembered his brother, Mahmoud, a man I’d once compared to an amused stone. Solid and dark beside Ali’s colour and energy, Mahmoud Hazr had taken us into their small band, forced me to learn the ways of the desert, led me to the beauty of the Qur’an. We had fought side by side. Together, we had rescued Holmes from a terrible death. The four of us had saved a nation from catastrophe.
Perhaps it was the aroma coming in from the other room that brought me a vivid image of Mahmoud’s hand dribbling a fistful of green coffee beans into a shallow roasting pan; the regular twitch of his wrist to keep them turning; the graceful motion as he poured the oily black mass of beans into the mortar for grinding.
The humour, deep within his all-seeing eyes. The powerful effect of his approval on me.
But that had been Palestine—an earlier waking with blood on my hands—and confusion in my mind, come to think of it—in an attic room with a sloping roof. For some reason, Mahmoud had come to Morocco. And he was now missing.
Apart from the phenomenon that I seemed to have married my teacher, I wondered what else I was supposed to know. Morocco itself was lost in the haze, although the impression of boats near a lighthouse seemed recent—feluccas, they were called, with high pointed sails. I had no more idea what I was doing here than I’d had the previous day, and the concept of an encampment of moving picture persons was still just as incomprehensible.
However, the thawing of one portion of my frozen past came as a huge relief. More would come, I told myself: patience.
Someone had been in the room while I slept. The lamp was burning and my spectacles lay neatly folded on the bed-side table. I picked them up, finding them as straight and true as ever they had been. My scalp gave a sharp protest as the earpiece passed over its tender portion, then subsided. Experimentally, I got to my feet, and aimed myself at the door.
Everything worked. And despite a hard wince at the brighter lights in the sitting room, the headache stayed away.
The room now held three men and the boy. The stranger shot to his feet, a tall, pale-eyed gentleman as straight and flexible as a tree, whose age showed only in his close-cropped white hair and greying moustache that tapered to sharp points. The other two men looked at each other, then rose as well. The boy, who had been drawing on a paper, gaped in puzzlement.
Holmes spoke up, in French. “Russell, this is Maréchal Lyautey, Morocco’s Resident General and currently your host. Cousin Hubert, my wife, Mary Russell.”
“Good evening.” I held out my hand.
“Enchanté, Madame,” Lyautey said, bending over the fingers with a military bow.
The near-kiss startled a laugh out of me. “The formality of generals! Your British counterpart in Jerusalem did just that—and when I was dressed in similar clothing.”
Ali made an exclamation. Holmes said, “You remember!”
“Not all, but pieces. May I apologise for tossing you over my head, Holmes?”
“You are welcome to throw me about anytime you have amnesia, Russell. Take a seat. The Maréchal was inviting us for dinner, but I expect that you will claim you lack the proper clothing.”
“I even lack the proper men’s clothing,” I noted, looking down at the garments Holmes had found for me—less rough than the first set I had ruined, but not what a lady, or indeed a gentleman, would wear to dine with Morocco’s Resident General.
“Unfortunately,” Lyautey said, “I have other guests tonight in the Residency—a family of tedious Americans, I regret to say—or I would join you en déshabillé here over a tray. Consider yourself fortunate that you have escaped my obligation. I shall attempt to excuse myself early, and rejoin you. If nothing else, Madame, I look forward to meeting you properly, before my cousin spirits you away.”
With a click of his heels, he was gone. I turned to Holmes. “Cousin?”
“Oddly enough, yes.”
“Have I met him before?”
“You have not.”
At least there was something for which my delinquent brain was not responsible.
Holmes poured me a glass of tea from the pot warming before the brazier. “How much has returned?”
“I seem to remember everything about some things. Although, how would I know if I did not? Various years of childhood seem to be there, sailing to England after my family was killed, moving to Sussex. I distinctly recall meeting you. And spending some weeks in Palestine, with Ali and Mahmoud.”
Ali was sitting near the warmth. After Lyautey left, he had pulled out the wicked blade with which he fixed my spectacles, and started to whittle on a chunk of wood. The boy sat at his feet, watching the process closely. Now Ali snorted. “Amnesia! We seem to have entered an Ethel Dell novel.”
“You don’t believe me?” I demanded.
Holmes said, “You must admit, Russell, amnesia is more commonly found in fiction than it is in real life. And to have you of all people living out a lady’s—”
“Damn it, Holmes, there’s nothing funny about this!”
“Now, that sounded more like Miri,” Ali remarked. A perfect curl of pale wood dropped into the boy’s outstretched hand.
“Indeed it did,” Holmes agreed.
“Irritability is one symptom of concussion.”
“And, I should think, a natural consequence,” I said.
“Irritation would also appear to act as an aide-mémoire,” Ali noted.
“Perhaps we merely need to keep her irritated?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” I growled.
“Perhaps not,” Holmes agreed. “How far does your memory go? Do you remember seeing Ali and Mahmoud in England a year ago? At Justice Hall? The Hughenfort family?”
I slowly shook my head. “There’s a sort of an echo, like … like a tuning fork under a blanket. But not active memory. And what’s there is not continuous. There was … Someone came to our house.”
“Ali.”
“No, a woman. We’d met her in Palestine, at a dig.”
“Dorothy Ruskin.”
“Right! She came to visit, and she brought me, what was it? A box, a little decorative box. When was that?”
“Seventeen months ago.”
I stared at him. “A year and a half ago? I’ve lost a year and a half?”
“In the last ten hours you regained twenty-two and a half years, Russell. I shouldn’t give up on the remainder yet.”
He was right, I knew he was. And yet, I’d have sworn that I’d only met Miss Ruskin a few days before.
I shivered, and hastened to swallow some of the tea.
“The Maréchal did not send soldiers into the medina on Friday,” Holmes said. “He is making enquiries into who might have done so, but as soldiers are often used to supplement the local police—it is his policy not to inflict a French gendarmerie on a colony—the answer may take some time. However, I did find the place where you woke up.”
“Really? How clever of you. Where was it?”
“More to the point is what it was. When you described the two people as being familiar, yet not intimate, as if he was her long-time employee, I knew it was unlikely to be a traditional Moroccan household. And when I considered that you were, as the boy told Ali, ‘babbling,’ you might well have been doing so in English. Assuming your rescuer recognised the tongue, where would an injured English speaker be taken, but to an English nurse in the medina?”
“Is there such a thing?”
“There is. And you were. To Miss Peg Taylor, who is as much missionary as nurse—the sort of missionary who serves rather than self-serves. When I spoke with Miss Taylor this afternoon, she was relieved to hear that you were well. Oh, and she sent a few things you left behind. These, for one.” Holmes reached under his chair and pulled out a pair of much-abused boots. They were mine—I’d had them made in London, what felt like a few months before—but it was as if a friend had aged a decade overnight: mismatched laces, worn toes, one of the metal grommets missing, the brass lace-hooks at the tops worn thin. I slipped my fingers inside the top, and smiled as I drew the throwing knife from its hidden sheath.
Not enemies, then.
“Did Miss Taylor also give you a revolver?”
“It’s in the desk drawer, over there. You remember having it?”
“Not really. My hand did.”
My fingers wrapped around the familiar steel, searching for memories. After a moment, my eyes went to Ali’s arm. He shook back the sleeve on his right wrist: This knife had sliced that scar. By accident, of course.
“Was there blood on the knife?”
“There was blood all over your upper garments, but she couldn’t tell if it was yours or someone else’s. She had a message, at about half past ten on Thursday night, that she was needed at the nearest gate. There she found a farmer with you on his cart. She claims he was a stranger, although I don’t know that I believe her, but in any event, he helped transport you to her door. When she had stitched your head and cleaned you up, she put you to bed, and she or one of her servants checked on you every hour. Later on Friday morning, when your condition seemed to be improving, she sent a message to the authorities.”
“Which authorities?”
“Unfortunately, her message went both to the Fasi police and to Dar Mnehbi. Hence the difficulty in finding who sent soldiers. I will say, it is fortunate the lady decided not to notify them immediately you arrived on her doorstep. Had they come to your rescue then and there, it might have killed you.”
To my rescue? I wondered. Or to take me for interrogation?
“Thank you, Nurse Taylor.”
“She salvaged everything from your pockets—and, since you came to her wearing a boy’s tunic, she felt she ought to duplicate it. Excepting, of course, the bloodstains.”
“Could she describe them? The stains?”
My question brought a quick smile of approval, as if he’d been concerned that my brains were scrambled into utter uselessness. “There was blood on the right shoulder from your head wound, and on the left sleeve from shoulder to wrist. Also on the knife.”
I was left-handed. Some of the latter had come from the slice in my arm, but again I was visited by the queasy sensation of knife parting flesh. I pushed it away: no reason to believe I’d killed a man. And in any event, it was self-defence. Had to have been. “That suggests that I used it. And put it away afterwards. Any other stains?”
“Various spatters in the front, she could not be certain where. And some on your boots, which was why they’d taken them away for cleaning. The garments were also damaged: the slice at your left arm, a large tear at the right hip, a number of smaller rips, and a great deal of dirt. The sort of damage that might be expected from someone rolling down a hillside. Unfortunately, the tunic and djellaba had already been given to the rag-pickers. I told her I would pay for their return, but I don’t have much hope.”
“So, the boy’s story holds up to an extent. At least we can be relatively certain that at some point on Thursday I became separated from Mahmoud, got into a fight where I used my knife against another knife, and I was hit in the head—possibly all at the same time. Were there any—”
“—reports of such a battle? Yes. At sundown, three men were caught attempting to sabotage the aeroplanes. One soldier was killed, two injured—and before you ask, yes, one with a knife. One of the intruders was killed—not,” he hastened to say, “a man with a scar on his face. The other two escaped into the night. A soldier thought he might have hit one of the intruders with a bullet.”
At least I hadn’t killed a soldier with that knife-thrust.
Ali spoke up, frowning at the tip of his blade as it worked some fine detail into the wooden object, which was so tiny, it was hidden by his fingers. “I went to all the city’s hospitals and surgeries. And the morgues. My brother is not there.”
“The military base,” Holmes told me, “is to the south of the city. You left and returned through the northern gate.”
“There was also confirmation from the funduq,” Ali said. “The three of you came in Thursday afternoon. The boy and the bearded man left. The boy returned after a time with a bundle, then left again. Later in the afternoon, he and the man came back and you all three went out. While you were away—according to Idir’s story, taking a meal in the medina—a man the owner did not know came with a message, to be given on your return. You left after dark, the boy following behind, and did not return that night. The next morning, two rough men came asking for you. The funduq owner did not know them, and when he refused to turn over to them the possessions you had left behind, one of them hit him. The other man stopped the beating before it could go too far, and they left. When Idir arrived, looking for you or Mahmoud, the owner told him to leave o
ver the back wall, and not to return.”
He sat back at last, sliding his blade into the decorated scabbard he wore, and held the figure out to the boy. When it sat upon a flattened palm, I could see it was a cat, less than an inch tall.
“What did he say about these ‘rough men’?” Holmes asked.
“They were not from here. He thought, from the way they spoke, that they were Jibali.”
“What is that?” I asked.
“The Jebala is the north-western part of the Spanish Protectorate. The Rif is the eastern portion.”
“The Spanish Protectorate? What about—” But Holmes overrode my quest for knowledge.
“Raisuli’s?” he asked Ali.
“Not all Jibali follow Raisuli.”
“Still, he’s popping up rather too often to ignore.”
“Who— Oh, never mind,” I muttered.
A knock came at the door, and the man Youssef entered with dinner trays. He supervised a trio of lesser minions, correcting one as to the placement of a spoon, another in the distribution of glasses.
He lingered behind Idir, who looked up, saw the servant, and held out the tiny wooden cat to show him. Youssef gave the lad a fond smile, then asked, “Would you prefer for the boy to eat in the kitchen?”
“He’s fine with us,” Ali said.
“Very well. Bon appétit, Messieurs,” he said, reaching out to ruffle Idir’s head as he went past. I watched him warily, lest the dignified retainer decide that my head was that of a lad requiring ruffling as well, but he only swept past, and closed the door silently.
It was reassuring to know that my male disguise would fool a Moroccan.
Talk of gunshots and morgues was suspended while we ate, and we had just settled to our syrupy tea when Lyautey returned—he must have rushed his Americans through their main course and abandoned dessert entirely.
He rubbed his hands as he took the empty chair before the brazier, and accepted a glass of tea from Holmes. “Now, my good Sirs and Madame, you will tell me again why you propose to deliver my neck into the hands of this ruffian in the hills, M. Abd el-Krim.”
Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Page 11
