Bell of the Desert

by Alan Gold

  “Oh!”

  She turned towards him, and put her arms around his waist, drawing him closer to her. She kissed his lips, his forehead, his nose and his lips again. His face was still cold from the night air, but he drew closer and kissed her again, this time more passionately.

  “Mr. Cadogan, I do believe you’re trying to seduce me,” she whispered into his ear.

  “Would you permit it?”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until we’re married?”

  “Then you’ll marry me?” He dared not raise his voice in his excitement, fearful of waking the others nearby.

  “We’ve only known each other for a moment, but it’s been a glorious moment. But yes, dear Henry, with my father’s permission, I’ll marry you. But not yet. Not until you’ve improved your position and become a first secretary or an ambassador. You must understand that I have a position in society, and being the wife of an ambassador will be completely acceptable to my circle, whilst being the wife of a third secretary, no matter how fond of you I am, will be a problem. Oh, I know you’ll think I’m a frightful snob, but when one’s been presented to the queen and taken tea with the prime minister, one has a certain . . . how can I say this without sounding insufferable . . . a certain standing. Does that sound awfully snobbish, my dear?”

  “Yes, but I understand what you’re saying. You come from a very wealthy family, and your position in society means that like must marry like.”

  “Of course we can marry, but not until you’re elevated in the service of the crown. And that means we must have a long engagement, both to give you time to secure your position, and also to ensure that we’re not making a mistake.”

  “But that could be years.”

  “Perhaps, but with my connections in London, you might not have to wait nearly that long for advancement. A word in the foreign secretary’s ear, and you might find yourself helped up the ladder. Anyway, we’ve hardly got to know each other, so it’ll be wonderful plumbing each other’s depths. I think it’s probably best to give each other a period of time. The last thing I want to do is to make an error when I’ve finally met a man I want to marry. What about a situation where either of us can retreat from our understanding if we find the other objectionable after . . . oh, what shall we say . . . twelve months?”

  “Dear heavens, Gertrude, you sound like you’re a lawyer drawing up some agreement. I’ve just asked you to marry me. You should be overwhelmed.”

  “I’m whelmed, Henry darling, but I never allow myself to be overwhelmed. It’s just not in my nature.”

  He laughed, and snuggled closer to her, touching her breast. It sent a surge of desire through her body, but she smiled as she slowly removed his hand, delaying several moments more than was necessary.

  “Wasn’t it you who said that we’re nearing the twentieth century. Haven’t times and conventions moved forward?”

  “Times might have advanced, Henry, but on issues of morality, the clock is still running slowly.”

  “So I can’t seduce you?”

  “Not with my Aunt Lascelles so close at hand. What would she say if she were to see this blanket suddenly bobbing up and down like a trampoline?”

  Henry laughed, and snuggled closer. She was becoming excited by his obvious enthusiasm, despite the freezing night air. She felt his strong arms and pulled his body closer to hers.

  “Good heavens,” she suddenly said. “Is that your . . .”

  “Yes. Should I apologise?”

  “No. Please don’t do that. Apologise I mean. Good heavens.”

  “Have you never . . .”

  “No. Have you?”

  “Once, but it was with a Peruvian llama.”

  She looked at him in horror, and his straight face in the starlight made the moment even more excruciating for her.

  “I’m kidding.”

  She banged him on the shoulders. “You rotten thing,” she said, and they collapsed in each other’s arms muffling their hysterical laughter.

  An hour later, when they were sure the rest of the party was asleep, they made love. The first time was cautious, quick and passionate. The second time, an hour or so later, was slow and loving and tender. It was everything Gertrude had ever hoped for.

  The following day, Mary Lascelles couldn’t understand why the normally boisterous and quick witted Gertrude seemed like a dullard and why she was yawning throughout the day.

  ~

  During the next four weeks, Gertrude and Henry spent an increasing amount of time together. While they were intimate in their private moments, kissing when they were alone, hugging in corridors and holding hands underneath the ambassador’s table, they maintained an outward propriety when they were in public. Increasingly they found excuses to leave the embassy and travel unchaperoned to locations where Henry knew they could lay together and make love. Sir Frank asked his wife Mary whether it was appropriate for the young couple to be alone together, and she put him firmly in his place.

  “Unless Henry marries Gertrude, at her age, she’s likely to spend much of her life alone and without the company of a man. Frankly, my dear, she needs all the experiences she can accumulate now in order to keep her warm on long cold nights alone.”

  “Do you think Hugh will allow Henry to marry Gertrude?” her husband asked.

  “He’s a lovely young man but without a penny to his name, he’s not in her class. No, I can’t see Hugh allowing the wedding.”

  “She wouldn’t do anything stupid, would she, like running off and eloping?” he asked. “After all, I’m in loco parentis, and Hugh would blame me.”

  “Times are changing, Frank, and I just don’t understand what’s in the minds of young people these days. But I doubt that Gertrude would elope. She’s fearless and intrepid, but she’s got a wonderful mind and I’m certain she’s destined for great things. She’d think twice before doing a rash act which might destroy her prospects and expunge her from our society. No, let her and Henry have their fling, let’s keep our mouths shut, pretend we don’t know and hope for the best.”

  Sir Frank smiled. “So you want me to act like a diplomat?”

  Mary said, “Just be true to form, my darling.”

  ~

  What excited both Gertrude and Henry as much as their physical relationship was their exploration of each other’s minds. Gertrude revelled in Henry’s excitement when she told him things about history which he didn’t know, and she was his willing and grateful pupil when he explained to her the intricacies of Middle East politics, culture, and traditions. He introduced her to the original text of the poems of Omar Khayyam, not FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat, a thin interpretation at best. Instead, he read her the original words in ancient Persian, whose beauty and elegance, whose profound insights and depth of feelings made her weep.

  At Mary’s instigation, Frank Lascelles called Gertrude aside one morning and suggested that while he neither approved, nor disapproved of their closeness, it could become the subject of gossip and urged them to be less public in their private affection. But when Henry told his ambassador that he would be writing to Gertrude’s father Hugh to request his daughter’s hand in marriage, Frank knew that this particular horse had bolted, and cancelled his cunning plot to send Henry on some spurious exploratory mission to the far east of the country.

  Gertrude also wrote imploring Hugh to give his consent to their wedding. And while they waited for a response, they continued to read together the great works of medieval Persian literature, especially the poet Hafez. With her amazing ability to learn the intricacies of the ancient Persian language, she was able to begin translating with the intention of launching his elegiac verse on the British public.

  Gertrude used the long delay in her father’s response to learn more about the condition of women in Arabia. Little was known or written about how women were treated. It was as though an entire half of Arab society didn’t exist. Aside from the wives of Mohammed and his followers, women were a vacuum in Arab culture, history, and societ
y. On a bicycle ride to a mosque on the outskirts of Teheran, Henry told Gertrude about the status of women before the advent of Islam.

  “Before Mohammed, women in Arabia had no rights at all. They were sold into marriage by their fathers or guardians for a fee and after the husband had his way with her, he could simply end the marriage. The woman left the marriage with no property or rights and was often abandoned or shamed into the outskirts of her society. It was terrible.”

  “But isn’t that still the situation today?” asked Gertrude. “I had long conversations some time ago with the leader of the Sa’ud tribe, and he said to me that women in his tribe, and in the rest of Arabia, had no rights, other than to stay at home, cook, and perform their bedroom duties.”

  “It’s a terribly tribal society, but not nearly as bad as it used to be,” said Henry. “Mohammed, when he created Islam, laid down rules. Before him, if a woman gave birth to a girl, the father was shamed, buried his face, and often had the girl-child killed. Mohammed put a stop to all that, and insisted that women were accorded respect and some rights. He was quite advanced for his age, especially when you think of the condition for women in Europe at the time.”

  “Perhaps,” said Gertrude, “but it’s a shocking indictment on Arab society that it does nothing for its women, except enslave them in something like a domestic prison. Something needs to be done to bring these pathetic women into the 19th Century. It’s disgraceful that women should be treated like chattel to be bought and sold without their will, and that half of Arabia should be invisible.”

  Henry looked at her and winced. “My God, Gertrude, you sound like some of the women The Times reported demanding the vote. Suffrage, they call it. Are you one of those?”

  “No, not until they’ve earned the right to vote by understanding the issues. But this situation with women in the Arab world isn’t just about equal rights and voting. It’s about the dignity of the human being. And frankly, I can’t see much dignity being a woman in Arabia, where you’re expected to follow some role laid down for you by men a thousand years ago, and you have no voice, no say, no rights.”

  Henry interrupted her, “But darling, when John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women twenty something years ago he was talking about English women. He said that our Christian civilization has been claiming that they’ve restored rights to women, and he said that was all bunkum. He said that the wife is the bondservant of her husband with fewer rights than the slave. So what you’re saying, surely, applies to English women as much as their dusky sisters in the desert.”

  “Which means that British society is just as regressive as the Arabs? Of course it doesn’t Henry. We have a long way to go before we’re able to claim equal rights, but the Arab woman hasn’t even begun to tread the path we’ve started down.”

  “Alright. What’s needed?”

  She thought long and hard before she answered. Henry knew from experience that you didn’t interrupt Gertie when she was in one of her deeply reflective moods.

  “Saladin.”

  He turned to her in surprise. “Saladin? But he was a vicious bloodthirsty tyrant. He’d be the last to give women—”

  “On the contrary. He’s the perfect model. He was a fair-minded, decent, honourable, and just leader. He only had one wife, not the four to which he was entitled, and it’s said that he listened to her advice and respected her very highly. She, apparently, played a role in his court. And as a warrior, he was almost never unjust and fought fairly.”

  “But he was a Kurd.”

  “Precisely. If change is to be brought to the Arab world, then the impetus for that change has to come from outside, and not within. People like the Sa’uds and the Rashids and all the other tribal leaders are fixed into an almost unbreakable mold. It’s going to take hundreds of years to transform Arab society from within for the benefit of women. But an outsider can bring in sweeping changes, and that’s what we need,” she said. She shook her head in determination.

  “We?”

  “Yes, we. They can’t do it themselves, you know.”

  Taken aback, Henry remained silent, looking at Gertrude.

  She was pondering the difference between her society, and that which lay to the south. And she realized how much work there was for her to do.

  ~

  They continued to wait achingly for Hugh’s reply. But the longer they waited, the more concerned and certain Gertrude became that her father would reject Henry as a suitable life partner. Sir Frank and Lady Mary knew what the answer would be, but refrained from telling her what they saw as a reality. Better that she should live in hope for a week or more.

  The delay in her father’s response was at first painful, and as the days wore on, heartbreaking. For she knew her father intimately, and understood that he would respond immediately if his answer was going to be positive. When eventually his letter arrived, Gertrude already knew its contents, but still she howled as she read the letter alone in her room.

  As she read, and re-read his letter, she was in turns furious and resentful. How could he be so blind to her needs? He knew her age, and must realize that this was her last chance at marriage. Her father explained that despite Gertrude’s obvious affection, and her understanding that the couple must wait until Henry was more advanced in his career, her young man was not a suitable match for a girl of Gertrude’s fortunes or position in Victorian society. He was impecunious and even if he did rise to be an ambassador, it was insufficient without a private income to keep Gertrude in a lifestyle to which she’d been born. Further, he wrote, he’d checked the young man out with others who knew him and the family and was reliably informed that young Henry was not only very poor, but his father was virtually bankrupt, and that the young man was said to be argumentative and a gambler.

  Furious, indignant, and determined not to let Henry slip through her fingers, she kissed him a fond farewell without revealing the depth of her father’s concern in his letter, explained that she was going back to England to change her father’s mind, and left Persia within the week. She promised that she and Henry would be married, even if she had to wait ten years for him to be made an ambassador. As she departed, bidding a loving and fond farewell to Frank and Mary, she whispered to the ambassador, “Uncle, I’m begging you not to believe that this is a flight of a young woman’s fancy. I love Henry. I’ve never loved any man as I do him. I know he has his failings, but he complements me more than any man I’ve ever known. I know in my heart that I can spend my entire life by his side. Please support me.”

  Frank kissed his niece, and said, “Be assured, Gertrude, that your best interests are in my heart.”

  And as she mounted the carriage to travel to the Caspian Sea port to return to London, she said to Henry, “I swear to you, my love, by all in which I believe, that I will return to you and we will be married.” He could barely speak as he watched her leave, but as she closed the door, through the open window, Henry handed her an icon of the Hittite Sun Goddess, Arinnitti which they’d dug up together in Persepolis. “Return her to me when you come back to be my wife,” he whispered, kissing the idol.

  ~

  Gertrude Bell’s life changed forever two months after she returned to England. Try as she might, she couldn’t persuade her father to change his mind about her desire to marry Henry. She tried logic, then pleading, then attempted to use her step-mother Florence to intervene, and finally informed her father that while she would never marry without his consent, she would continue to be Henry’s partner in all but name. He was shocked at her assertion, but she assured him that there had not been, nor would there be a physical partnership without a wedding ring, even though she determined to define for Hugh just how much she loved Henry and why he was so right for her.

  And every night when she went to bed, she took out the idol Arinnitti, a tiny white marble figurine with exaggerated pointed breasts and a swollen belly, and kissed the goddess on the lips, whispering a request to keep her Henry safe and sound, his
love for her constant and faithful.

  She would ride with the goddess inside her bodice and close to her breast. She would go to sleep with the goddess underneath her pillow, and when she rose and dressed for breakfast, she would place the goddess on the windowsill of her bedroom looking south-east towards Persia in the hope that it would keep her Henry safe.

  Yet for some reason, a feeling of doom was beginning to creep into her mind. She couldn’t put her finger on it, nor explain it logically, but for the past two weeks or so, the clouds had been thick and hidden the stars, the air had been chilled, and nothing which she tried to do could elevate her feelings. It was as though a veil had been placed over her face, and she found it difficult to breathe. Riding, fishing, and reading no longer held out the distractions she’d once found in them. Neither did writing letters to friends or family. And inexplicably, she hadn’t written to Henry for a week.

  Then the letter arrived from Frank Lascelles. A letter in an envelope with a black border.

  It was steeped in sympathy, profound regret, but his sentiments couldn’t alleviate the shock which shook her very marrow. “Your dear Henry, waiting every day for your return, and in consolation at your departure, took some pleasure in fishing in the River Lar, high in the Alborz Mountains on the shores of the Caspian Sea. He insisted on going alone, despite his colleagues offers to join him.

  “I deeply regret that during one of his fishing trips, he slipped on some rocks and fell into the waters of the river, icy with the melt-water from the nearby peaks. Returning to the embassy and still chilled to the bone, he took to his bed, but his cold became pneumonia. Try as we might and with great medical attention for his health, your young man passed away last night. His light has been extinguished. We are all darkened by his loss. I beg you to be consoled by his last dying word . . . Gertrude.”

  No matter how many times she read her uncle’s words, nor what combination of meanings she ascribed to them in order to alter their construction, in the end, her Henry was no more. His knowledge and joy had been extinguished, like blowing out a brilliant candle. She would never see him again. They would not marry. Gertrude would not be his bride.