by Louise Allen
Feluccas could carry at least a dozen passengers, so there was ample room for their possessions and those of the four villagers who would come with them to sail the boats. The great lateen-rigged mainsails were large to catch every breath of breeze and manoeuvrable enough to tack from side to side down the meandering river to avoid the constantly shifting sandbanks. They were halfway between the annual inundations so there was still enough water in the main channels to ensure a fairly smooth trip and, of course, once they had beaten upstream to meet with the army barges, they would turn and go with the current.
‘Excellent. I will have this one.’ Cleo glanced up to see her father was already organising all his luggage around him in the foremost felucca, filling the small cabin.
‘You need to allow enough room for your daughter, Sir Philip.’ Quin switched back to English.
‘She can sleep on the other boat.’ He was already opening boxes and putting his folding chair in place.
‘I am on the other boat and you have left me no room on yours. In the absence of a female companion Madame Valsac should be with you at night.’
‘Sleep ashore if the proprieties worry you. Who is to know in any case?’
Quin vaulted over the side to wade to the shore. ‘I don’t like to leave you alone on the boat, not when we are away from the area you are familiar with. Would you object if I slept on the deck?’
So close I will be able to reach out and touch you. So close you could come to my bed and no one would know. Only you will not, will you, my chivalrous American whom I do not quite trust?
‘I would be grateful,’ Cleo said, striving for a balance between gratitude and distance. The sight of Quin moving so effortlessly around the boat, his long legs encased in wet linen, the neck of his loose shirt open to reveal glimpses of the sun-bronzed skin of his throat, were all reviving pleasantly dangerous feelings that it would be most unwise to acknowledge. That kiss had been bad enough, but now she was recalling his naked body with accuracy.
‘We are ready, effendi,’ the oldest of the four boatmen called.
Quin raised one hand in acknowledgement. ‘Ready?’ he asked her and, when she nodded, simply scooped her up, waded through the shallow water and deposited her in the boat. She might have been a sack of wheat, she thought resentfully, so impersonal was his grip.
The villagers had gathered on the bank to watch them, faces as impassive as Cleo hoped hers was. These Inglizi with their strange habits had descended on them as though from the heavens and now they were taking themselves away, Allah knew where. Their ancestors must have watched like this as the temple builders came and went and then for hundreds of generations after as the sand took over the sacred places and a new religion and new conquerors swept across their land.
She had no idea what they thought of them, but she waved and the children waved back, running alongside as the boats cast off and began to drift with the current. The great sails flapped and filled and the women turned and went back to their village, incurious and uncaring of where the Inglizi were going now.
‘I hope the villagers will be safe when the Mamelukes come through.’
‘They should be. They’ll hide their livestock on the islands, I imagine.’ Quin stood amidships and leaned against the main mast, one bare foot on the strakes, his wet trouser leg flapping in the breeze. The wind ruffled through his hair and his face was more relaxed than she had ever seen it. He had said he was twenty-eight and she wondered just what his life had held to give him that strange ability to switch between bland courtesy, warm concern and an almost dark intensity. There was something in his family background that contributed to the darkness, she had sensed that easily enough, but why did she have so much trouble picturing him as the engineer he professed to be?
He was intelligent enough and practical, too. And yet... ‘How long will it be?’ she asked as she settled down opposite him.
‘To Cairo? Depends on the army barges, I suppose.’ He shrugged. ‘I assume they’ll want to make all speed, but we cannot travel at night, not with these sandbanks. Within ten days, I’d hazard, unless there are problems on the river or with the barges.’
Ten days to plan what she would do when they arrived in Cairo. There, at least, she could leave her father with a clear conscience. He could hire an assistant, servants, a house. These past few days had shown her that if she let him he would simply suck the life out of her. But where could she go on her own? France or England? Both strange, both at war. And both requiring money to reach them.
Cleo watched Quin, who seemed intent on the great flocks of geese and ibis on the shore. Where was he travelling next? Home to America? He would have to go to France or England to get a ship across the Atlantic, her geography was good enough for that.
‘Quin.’ He turned his head, still tipped back lazily against the mast. ‘Where will you take ship to America from?’
‘Oh, anywhere in the Mediterranean. Greece, perhaps, or there might be one in Alexandria. They trade all over Europe.’ He smiled at her. ‘Why? Thinking of starting a new life on the other side of the world?’
‘No.’ She shook her head firmly. America was out of the question or he would think she was building dreams on that kiss. ‘No, just making conversation.’ She needed the practice, that was certain. How on earth did one make small talk without sounding like a twittering female? ‘Have you commissions to go back to or will you be seeking employment?’ Was that all right? Showing interest in a man always seems to be acceptable. Or will he think I am unduly curious?’
‘I have employment waiting.’ Quin’s eyes were closed now, he seemed capable of resting whenever the opportunity presented itself. ‘But thank you for your concern.’
Silence fell. Cleo could not decide whether she had trespassed, or whether she should respond with another question or...
‘I was employed before I came to the Middle East. I can take that up again when I get back home.’
‘That must be reassuring.’ She was getting the hang of this now. ‘Is your family in the business?’
Quin, who had been, she could have sworn, motionless, became even more still. ‘No,’ he said at length. ‘My family are not in the same...business. Or in any other, come to that.’
Aristocrats? No, that could not be right, there were no titles in America. But perhaps the upper classes were the same as she understood they were in Britain, living on inherited wealth and the income from land. So why did Quin have a profession? Had his father thrown him out, cut him off? She felt a surge of fellow feeling for him, then remembered that he had spoken of hugging brothers and male friends, young relatives, his old nurse. He was not alone.
‘What is the sour face for?’ Quin’s eyes were open and he was watching her.
‘An attack of self-pity,’ she admitted. It was an unattractive trait and a weakening one, too. If she had given way to misery at her life of lonely drudgery she would have gone mad years ago. It was so much easier not to feel at all, to simply exist and manage from day to day and conserve her strength for when the opportunity for escape presented itself.
‘Surely you did not want to stay at Koum Ombo?’
‘No, not at all. Look, we have reached the barges.’ On the next bend of the river the dozen barges were loaded with packs and folded tents, a few men on each, stacks of weapons amidships. Compared to the graceful feluccas they were unwieldy and heavy, but they were stable and, going with the current and guided with long poles, they would cope with the river easily enough.
Capitaine Laurent stood on the river bank, arms folded, watching the soldiers as they finished tying down the loads. ‘You will precede us,’ he announced the moment the feluccas bumped against the bank.
‘Bonjour, Capitaine,’ Quin said and countered the officer’s peremptory greeting with a smile. ‘We will follow you, I think,’ he continued in the same language. ‘I have no wish to have my vessels run down by one of those things if it gets away from your men.’
‘Your vessels?’
‘No. Madam requires the protection of my troop.’ Laurent turned his shoulder and began to shout orders at his men.
‘And monsieur requires to keep an eye on us, I think is rather more to the point,’ Quin observed as he sat down, put both feet up and watched the activity through slitted eyes. ‘He really does not like me, does he? I wonder why. I am normally considered the most amiable of fellows.’
‘He was Thierry’s best friend.’
‘And he thinks you need protecting from me? Or he wants you for himself and wishes he was here and I was there?’
‘Wants me? I hardly think so,’ Cleo said. ‘He told Thierry he should never have married me, that I was a nuisance.’
‘But Thierry had no choice, had he?’ She looked sharply at Quin, but he added, ‘A man in love is powerless.’
Control your reactions, Cleo told herself. Why she did not want Quin to know her suspicion that her husband had been ordered to marry her, other than her own pride, she did not know. It would have been easier if she understood why a French general should be so concerned about the protection of one insignificant Englishwoman that he would order an officer to marry her.
The pretence of love had not lasted long once they were deep into the desert. Confused, in love and horribly insecure, with only her parents’ hopeless marriage as an example, she had floundered, trying to reach her taciturn husband in the little time he spent with her. She was frigid, she was too demanding. She talked too much, she was no fun, she sewed his buttons on wrong, she was aloof with his friends. She flirted with his friends so she was a slut. At that she had flared up, hurt and angry, and he had hit her, a back-handed slap across the face. Goodness knows what he had told Laurent about her.
Now she hunched a shoulder at Quin’s comment. ‘I have no intention of inviting Laurent to dinner, that is certain.’
‘Hell.’ Quin sat bolt upright. ‘Food. I should have thought—I do not want to be dependent on Laurent.’
‘I did think. We have enough to last several days, although once supplies run low I suggest we overtake the barges and get to the next village ahead of them or there will be nothing left to buy. Ah, here is the goat.’
‘Goat? Where the blazes did that come from?’ Quin demanded as the protesting animal was heaved over the side of their felucca. The steersman grinned and tied it to the second mast where it bleated irritably, rolling its strange slit-pupilled eyes at her.
‘I sent a message when we were loading,’ Cleo said. ‘We cannot count on getting fresh meat every day and it will go off quickly in this heat when we do. We may need the goat.’
‘And who is going to be the butcher?’ he demanded, then cursed under his breath when she simply smiled. ‘Me, I suppose.’
‘Then catch fish and we won’t need to lay a finger on it, except to milk it,’ Cleo said. The goat was actually in milk and she’d had no intention of killing it unless things got really desperate, but it was amusing to tease Quin. ‘You are very squeamish. Don’t you hunt things?’
‘Not things I am living with,’ he said as another villager heaved a sack full of greenery on board. The goat stopped protesting and started munching. ‘And it smells.’
‘Poor Delilah.’ Cleo leaned forward and put her hands over the goat’s ears. ‘You will offend her.’
‘That does it.’ Quin looked disgusted. ‘I refuse to eat something with a name. Delilah, indeed!’ He saw she was laughing at him. ‘What is so amusing?’
‘You! You are a big tough man and yet you are sentimental about a goat you have only just met.’
‘It is not sentimentality,’ he protested, but he was grinning. ‘I will catch fish and if you give them names as I haul them out I will hand them to you, all slimy, to gut.’
Cleo shrugged. ‘I always do.’
The laughter faded from his face. ‘You should not have to. You are a lady, not a kitchen drudge.’
‘A lady?’ She held out her hands with their calluses and the black stains where the pomegranate juice had got on to her fingers and the half-healed cut from cutting up meat for the skewers.
Quin caught them in his and turned them so they lay curved upwards on his broad palms. His fingers closed over as he stroked the swell at the base of her thumbs. ‘A lady,’ he repeated. ‘Are you not?’
My grandfather is a duke. Or was. Is he still alive? ‘My father is a baronet. I thought Americans were not impressed by titles and rank.’ Her hands trembled a little at the gentleness of his touch. So unfamiliar, this sensitivity.
‘We know how to look after the women under our protection, like any gentlemen.’ He seemed in no hurry to release her hands, even though it brought them knee to knee. When she looked into his eyes they were intent and darkened by something that only increased her perturbation. Desire? Longing? Or simply the concern of a friend?’
‘I will never live like a baronet’s daughter does in England,’ she said when she found her voice. ‘If...when I get away from my father I will have to work for my living.’
‘Don’t be so certain.’ Quin shifted his grip so their hands were palm to palm, his fingers sliding up to press against the pulse points in her wrists. ‘Like a bird tramped against a window pane,’ he murmured. ‘The beat of little wings.’
‘I am not trapped and I am not a powerless little bird.’ Cleo tugged her hands free and slid back on the bench seat. ‘There was nothing I could do here, deep in the desert, but once we reach civilisation I will—’ She broke off at the intent look on Quin’s face. ‘I will be independent. I have lived at the whim of men for too long,’ she finished. It would be just like him to decide to protect her from whatever she wanted to do. When she knew what it was.
Quin twisted round to get his back against the mast again and tilted his broad rush hat, the better to study the toiling soldiers. ‘Laurent is efficient,’ he remarked as though nothing had just occurred between them. ‘He has had to be, I suppose, for them to survive. Bonaparte left this army in a parlous state when he made his grab for power.’
‘At least under him the killing of civilians in France has stopped.’
‘You think it safe to go there? To find your in-laws perhaps? I would not advise it. France is a country at war on every front. You would do better to go to England.’
So much for any little fantasy that he might ask her to go with him to America. Not that she wanted to be with him, of course, but it would have been protection on the journey and she would like to satisfy her curiosity about Quin Bredon.
Laurent came striding over. ‘We are ready. I would have you remember that I am in command of this troop, Monsieur Bredon.’
‘But of course,’ Quin rejoined. ‘You command your troop, I command my feluccas and we sail in convoy with you while it suits me. I will see you at dinner, Capitaine. Or in Cairo.’
‘He does not make a good enemy,’ Cleo murmured, her eyes on Laurent’s rigid back as he stalked back to his men who had begun to pole the heavy barges out into the current.
‘Neither do I,’ Quin responded with that wry half-smile of his. He turned to the man at the stern. ‘Taiyib?’
‘Taiyib,’ the man responded and shouted to the others to cast off the ropes and push off from the shore.
It is well, Cleo translated. And somehow she felt it was, even though Laurent made her deeply uneasy and the journey was filled with perils, expected and unimagined. She believed Quin when he said he would make a bad enemy, although why, she could not say. He was lean and fit, but he did not have the scarred body of a warrior. He had handled the weapons in their chest competently the previous evening, but not with the casual familiarity she had become used to with Thierry who had seemed to be almost part of his sabre and firearms.
Quin had tipped the hat over his eyes and relaxed against the mast as apparently boneless and limp as a sleeping cat. Cleo made herself comfortable and studied what she could see of his
face beneath the tilted brim. The strong, stubborn jaw, the straight line of his mouth, the shadow of stubble where his morning shave had been hasty and in poor light.
He was confident and supremely determined, she decided. When he had been ill he had refused to give in to it. Faced with Laurent’s hostility he would not back down. But he was not stubborn. He had stayed in his bed until the worst of the fever had passed, he had been prepared to rest and admit weakness, he accepted Laurent’s aggression by smoothly deflecting it, not rising to it. Intelligent, then, and flexible. A man capable of playing a deep game. Dangerous.
A man she was not going to allow herself to trust. Desire now...that was another matter and one, she suspected, that was beyond her control.
Chapter Eight
Her bed shifted and rocked. Earthquake! Cleo woke with a start, bolt upright, clutching the thin sheet to her chest. Under her clenched fists her heart thudded.
The bed rocked again, there was a splash of water and she remembered where she was, on a felucca, moored against the bank at Asna.
‘Shh. I am here.’ The quiet words from the other side of the woven wall were deep and reassuring and came immediately on her moment of panic.
‘I’m sorry,’ Cleo whispered. ‘I forgot where I was.’ She parted the hanging and found Quin lying full-length along the side of her shelter. He was propped up on one elbow and his face was quite clear in the moonlight.
‘There’s no need to whisper. The men are all asleep on the bank, the sentry passed a few minutes ago and your father is snoring on the other boat. Even Delilah is asleep.’
‘Who—oh, the goat, of course.’
His chuckle told her he was well aware she had been teasing him by inventing a name on the spur of the moment.
‘But you are not asleep,’ Cleo observed. ‘Are you uncomfortable?’
‘No, only restless.’
Quin Bredon was the least restless man she had ever encountered. ‘No you are not, you are keeping guard. But the men are sleeping by the mooring ropes and there are two sentries.’
