by Seven Dials
“Are you certain?”
There was no hesitation in Yacoub’s face. “Absolutely.”
Pitt was unconvinced. “Who is he?”
Yacoub’s eyes were soft, but his expression was an unreadable mixture of anger and sorrow. “He is dead,” he explained quietly. “He died over ten years ago.”
“Oh . . .” Death again. Had she truly loved this man? Could he be the key to her behavior now? Pitt was reaching for straws, but there was nothing else. “Might she have married him, had he lived?”
Yacoub smiled. “No.” Again he seemed absolutely certain.
“But you said she loved him . . .”
Yacoub looked patient, as with a child who needs endless and detailed explanations. “They loved each other as friends, Mr. Pitt. Ramses Ghali believed passionately in Egypt, as his father did.” A shadow crossed his face, and an emotion Pitt could not read, but he thought there was a touch of anger in it, a darkness.
The bombardment of Alexandria had occurred ten years ago. Was that the chill Pitt saw? Or was it deeper than that, the whole matter of General Gordon and the siege of Khartoum, south from here in the Sudan? In 1882 British forces had defeated Orabi at Tel-el-Kebir, and six thousand Egyptians had been massacred by the Mahdi in Sudan. The following year an Egyptian army even larger had been similarly destroyed, and in 1884 yet a further army was defeated, and General “Chinese” Gordon had arrived. In January, Gordon had perished, and less than six months later the Mahdi himself was dead; but Khartoum was not yet retaken.
Suddenly, Pitt felt very far from home, and for all the European decoration of the hotel dining room, and its Italian name, he was acutely aware of the ancient and utterly different heritage of the young man opposite him, and of the African spice and heat of the air beyond the walls. He had to force himself to try to think clearly.
“You said Ayesha Zakhari believed in Egypt just as fiercely,” he said, beginning to eat his pigeon, which he thought absentmindedly was the best he had ever had. “Is she a person to take any kind of action on her beliefs? Did she speak for a cause, seek to draw in others?”
Yacoub gave a tiny, almost smothered laugh, cut off instantly. “Has she changed so much? Or do you simply know nothing about her, Mr. Pitt?” His eyes narrowed and he ignored his food. “I have read the newspapers, and I think the English government will seek to get their own minister off, and hang Ayesha.” Now there was a world of bitterness in his voice, and his smooth olive face was as close to ugly as it could be, so dark was the rage and the pain inside him. “What is it you want here? To find a witness who will tell you she is a dangerous woman, a fanatic who will kill anyone who stands in her way? That perhaps this Lieutenant Lovat knew something about her which would spoil her life of luxury in England, and he threatened to tell people?”
“No,” Pitt said instantly, and perhaps the force with which he meant it carried between them.
Yacoub let out his breath slowly and seemed to listen instead of merely waiting his chance to interrupt.
“No,” Pitt continued. “I would like to find the truth. I can’t think of any reason why she would kill him. All she had to do was ignore him and he would have had no choice but to desist, or be dealt with, possibly unpleasantly, for making a nuisance of himself.” He saw the disbelief in Yacoub’s face. “Lovat had a profession,” he explained. “A career in the diplomatic service. How far would he progress if he incurred the enmity of a senior government minister like Saville Ryerson?”
“Would he exercise his influence to save her?” Yacoub asked uncertainly.
“Yes!” It was Pitt’s turn to state what was so plain to him, and apparently unknown to Yacoub. “Ryerson has already committed himself to help her in Lovat’s death, even at the risk of being sent to trial for it himself. He would hardly balk at warning off a young man whose attentions were unwelcome. A word to his senior in the diplomatic service and Lovat would be finished.”
Yacoub still looked doubtful.
Around them in the dining room the buzz of conversation ebbed and flowed. A beautiful woman with fair hair and a porcelain complexion laughed, throwing her head back so the light caught her. Her companion gazed at her in fascination. Pitt wondered if it was a romance she would not have dared entertain at home. Was this greater freedom something Yacoub imagined to exist in British society? How could Pitt explain that it was not?
Yacoub looked down at his plate. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “You really know nothing about her.”
“Then tell me!” Pitt begged. He nearly added more, then bit it back. He could see the struggle in Yacoub’s face, the need to fight for some justice, to see truth destroy ignorance, and at the same time the deep need of a private person not to betray the secrets of another’s passion or pain.
Again, Pitt tried to think of an argument that would win, and again he kept silent.
Yacoub pushed his plate away and reached for his glass. He sipped from it very slowly, then put it down and looked at Pitt. “Ramses’s father Alexander was one of the leaders fighting to govern our own affairs when our debts ran out of control under the Khedive Ismail, before he was deposed and his son Tewfik put in his place, and Britain took over management of Egypt’s financial affairs. He was a brilliant man, a philosopher and scholar. He spoke Greek and Turkish as well as Arabic. He wrote poetry in all of them. He knew our culture and our history, from the pharaohs who built the pyramids at Giza, through all the dynasties to Cleopatra, the Greco-Roman period, the coming of the Arabs and the law of Mohammed, the art and the medicine, the astronomy and the architecture. He had strength and he had charm.”
Pitt did not interrupt. He had no idea if what Yacoub was saying was going to mean anything in the murder of Edwin Lovat, or if Narraway could use even a shred of it, but it fascinated him because it was part of the story of this extraordinary city.
“He could make you see the magic in the gleam of moonlight on marble shards a thousand years old,” Yacoub went on, turning the goblet in his fingers. “He could bring back the life and the laughter of the past as if it had never really left, simply been overlooked for a space by people too insensitive to perceive it. With him you could see the colors of the world, hear music simply in the wind over the sand. The smell of dirt and sewage, the flies in the street, the mosquitoes, were only the breathing of life.”
“And Ayesha?” Pitt asked, afraid already of the answer.
“Oh, she loved Alexander Ghali,” Yacoub replied, his mouth twisted a little sideways. “She was young, and honor was dear to her. She loved her country too, and its history, its ideas, but she loved the people and hated the poverty which kept them ignorant when they could have learned to read and write, and kept them sick when they could have been well.”
Pitt waited. He knew from the suppressed emotion in Yacoub’s face, the shadows in his eyes, that the story was only half told, if that.
Yacoub took up the thread again. He had stopped only to regain control of his feelings so they did not show so nakedly in his face.
“He was a man of almost infinite possibilities,” he said quietly. “He would even have given Egypt back her independence and financial integrity. But he was flawed. He indulged his family. He gave his sons and his brothers power, and they were greedy for themselves. He was a man who fed on the beautiful things of the heart and the mind, but he had not the inner courage to deny those around him. Leaders must be prepared to walk alone, if need be, and he was not.”
He drew in a deep breath, turned his glass in his hand as if to sip it again, then ignored it after all. There was a tightness in his face, of old pain still unhealed. “Ayesha loved him, and he betrayed her, and his people. I don’t know if she ever cared wholly for any man after that, unless she does for this Ryerson?” Now he raised his eyes to meet Pitt’s. “Will he betray her also?”
Pitt wondered if that was why she had said nothing to the police. Was she numb inside, waiting for history to repeat itself?
“By bet
raying her, or betraying his own people?” he asked.
There was a flash of understanding in Yacoub’s eyes. “You are thinking of the cotton? That she went to London to try to persuade him to leave us our raw cotton to weave, instead of shipping it to Manchester, for British workers to create the greater profit from it—to grow rich, instead of us? Perhaps she did. It would be like her.”
“Then she was asking him to choose between Egypt and England,” Pitt pointed out. “If he made a decision at all, then it had to be a betrayal of someone.”
“Yes . . . of course it was.” Yacoub’s lips tightened. “Whether she could forgive him for that I do not know.” He picked up his glass at last. “There is nothing more I can tell you. Look all you wish, you will find that what I have said is true.”
“What about Lieutenant Lovat?”
Yacoub waved his hand dismissively. “Nothing of importance. He fell in love with her, and perhaps she was bruised enough to find his attention healing. It lasted a while, a few months. He was posted back to England. I think she was quite relieved by then. Perhaps he was also. He had no intention of marrying outside his own class and station.”
“Do you know anything about Lovat?”
“No. But you might find someone among the British soldiers who does. There are enough of them here.”
Pitt said nothing. He was acutely aware of the British presence in all sorts of ways, not just the enormous number of soldiers, but the civilians in administration everywhere. Egypt was not a colony, and yet in many practical ways it might as well have been. If Ayesha Zakhari had wished to rid her country of foreign domination, he could understand it very easily.
Was that why she had gone to London, not out of any desire to make her own future, but to help her people? If that was so, then presumably she had sought out Ryerson specifically, as a man with the power to help her, if she could persuade him to do so.
How had she intended to do that? No matter how deeply he was in love with her, he would hardly alter government policy to please her, would he? And according to Yacoub’s estimate of her character, she would have despised him if he had.
But then unless she cared for him, that would hardly matter to her. Did she? Had she unexpectedly fallen in love with him, and it was suddenly no longer simply a matter of patriotic duty?
Or had she planned to blackmail him, and Lovat’s murder was part of that plan, somehow hideously gone wrong, and she herself had ended up arrested, and by now probably charged as well? What had she meant to have happen? Offer him escape from blame, and increase the pressure upon Ryerson to yield more autonomy to Egypt?
Or was her goal Ryerson’s ruin, and the placement of another, more pliable minister in his place—one who would pay the Egyptian price?
But that made little sense. No minister of trade was going to yield the cotton back to Egypt unless he was forced to by circumstances far more powerful than love, or even ruin. He would simply be replaced in time by another stronger and less vulnerable man.
Pitt finished his wine and thanked Yacoub. The voices and laughter bubbled around them, but he could think of nothing further to ask, and instead they spoke again of the rich, intricate history of Alexandria.
When Pitt was at the breakfast table the following morning, a messenger brought him a note from Trenchard, asking him if all was well and if he would care for any further assistance. It also said that if Pitt cared to join him for luncheon, Trenchard would be happy to show him some of the less-well-known places of interest in the city afterwards.
Pitt requested paper and wrote back accepting, and dispatched the messenger with his reply before continuing with his excellent fresh bread, fruit, and fish. He was very rapidly growing accustomed to the exotic food, and enjoying it greatly.
He spent part of the morning in an English library reading what he could find about the Orabi uprising and looking for any reference to anyone named Ghali involved in politics at the time. The passion and the betrayal were so absorbing he was almost late for his luncheon with Trenchard, and arrived at the consulate barely by noon.
Trenchard made no comment, but rose from his chair with a smile and welcomed him in.
“Delighted you could come,” he said warmly. He regarded Pitt’s pale cotton shirt and trousers, and the already deepening color of his face and lower arms. “You look as if you are well settled in—apart from a few mosquito bites,” he observed.
“Very well,” Pitt agreed. “It is a city one could spend a year exploring, and hardly touch the surface.”
Something in Trenchard’s face eased. The lines of his mouth softened and there was an added reality to the warmth in his eyes. “Egypt has you, hasn’t it?” he said with evident pleasure. “And you haven’t even been anywhere near Cairo yet, never mind up the Nile. I wish your detection took you to Heliopolis, or the tombs of the caliphs or the petrified forest. You could not go that far without riding out to the pyramids at Giza, and of course the Sphinx, and then sat up until you could at least see the pyramids at Aboukir and Sakhara, and the ruins of Memphis.” He shook his head slightly, as if at some pleasant, well-known inner joke. “And then nothing on earth could stop you from continuing on up that greatest and oldest of all ruins till you reached Thebes, and the Temple of Karnak. That defeats even the imagination.” He was watching Pitt’s face as he spoke. “Believe me, no modern Western man can conceive the grandeur of it, the sheer enormity!” He did not wait for comment. He stood still in the middle of the room, oblivious of modern furniture and consulate papers around him. His vision was on the timeless sands.
Pitt did not interrupt; no answer was expected or wanted.
“Then south to Luxor,” Trenchard went on. “You should cross the river at dawn. You have never seen anything in your life like first light over the desert, moving across the water’s face. Then you have only about four miles to the Valley of the Kings.
“If you ride on a fast camel you will see the sunrise on the tombs of the pharaohs whose fathers ruled this land four thousand years before Christ was born. They were ancient before Abraham came out of Ur of the Chaldees. Have you any idea what that means, Inspector Pitt?” There was challenge in his eyes now. “The British Empire that circles the earth now was born in the last five minutes of time compared with them.” He stopped suddenly. He took a deep breath. “But you haven’t time for that . . . I know. And Narraway certainly won’t pay for it. Forgive me. No doubt you are eager for your accommodation, and you are honest enough to be compelled by duty.”
Pitt smiled. “Duty does not forbid me from learning something about the history of Egypt, or from wishing I needed to pursue Ayesha Zakhari’s history at least as far as Cairo. I haven’t found an excuse, but I haven’t stopped looking.”
Trenchard laughed, and led the way out through the offices to the street and a short distance along the crowded thoroughfare in a direction Pitt had not been before. He found himself staring at the beautiful buildings decorated with stone fretwork like lace in its intricacy, balconies with roofs supported by simple pillars. He saw one, shaded from the heat, where a group of elderly men sat on thick turquoise-and-gold cushions eating bread, fruit, and dates as they talked earnestly to one another. They barely glanced at the two Englishmen, contempt and dislike in their eyes for a moment, then masked, because they dared not let it be seen. Behind them, a large man with skin almost as black as his beard, dressed in loose trousers caught in below the knee, seemed to be waiting their pleasure. Pigeons fluttered around, and a tall, narrow-necked vase was stuffed full of pink roses.
Pitt thought it might have looked exactly the same a thousand years earlier.
Trenchard found the café of his choice and ordered food for both of them without consulting Pitt, and when it came it made not the slightest pretense at European form. They ate with their fingers, and it was delicious. The color, the smell, the texture—everything pleased.
“I have been making a few enquiries of my own about Ayesha Zakhari,” Trenchard said when t
hey were halfway through the meal.
Pitt stopped with a morsel of food in his hand. “Yes?”
“As we had supposed, she is Coptic Christian,” Trenchard replied. “Her name tells us as much. It seems she was deeply involved with some of the leading Egyptian nationalists in the Orabi uprising, just before the bombardments of Alexandria ten years ago. I am sorry, Pitt . . .” He looked rueful. “I have asked discreetly among the friends I have here, and it seems eminently probable that she went to London with the express purpose of ensnaring Ryerson, in some foolish and highly impractical idea that he could be persuaded to alter the British financial arrangements with Egypt . . . cotton at least, perhaps more. She has always been hotheaded where her idealism is concerned. She fell in love with Alexander Ghali, Ramses’s father, and even when he betrayed his cause, she was among the last to accept the truth about him.” Trenchard’s face was filled with profound emotion, a mixture of pity and contempt so deep even the mention of the facts which provoked it made his whole frame stiffen and his elegant hands suddenly look awkward.
Pitt felt overtaken by a feeling of emptiness also. “Disillusion is very bitter,” he said quietly. “Most of us fight to deny it as long as we can.”
Trenchard looked up quickly. “I’m sorry, Pitt. I am afraid you are likely to find that she is impulsive, romantic—an idealist who has been betrayed, and now acting from her own pain, and trying to make the old dreams come true, however unrealistic the means.”
Pitt looked down at the food in his hand. It no longer held the exotic charm it had only a few minutes ago. That was absurd. He had never even seen Ayesha Zakhari. It should matter nothing to him except professionally that she was irresponsible, a political failure who had allowed personal hurt to spoil her judgment. Yet suddenly he felt tired, as if he too had lost a dream.
“I’ll see what else I can find out about Lovat,” he said aloud.
Trenchard was watching him, his face full of regret. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I knew it would have been very much pleasanter to think there was some other explanation. But possibly Lovat gained enmities in England?”
