Secret of the Sands

by Sara Sheridan

  Wellsted gestures at the vista. ‘Not long enough to both swap our news and enjoy each other. There is a sloop due that will take me as far as Cape Town. I am recalled at once, you see. It arrived after sunset. Mickey hopes it will sail tomorrow. I must leave early.’

  ‘One night?’ It seems ungrateful, but she can’t help but want longer.

  ‘But we won’t sleep. Not a wink,’ he promises. ‘And I’ll be back, Zena, I’ll be back before you know it.’

  She pulls the jilbab over her head and shifts a little, turning so he can see her in the darkness. ‘I want to hear your adventures, of course,’ she says.

  Wellsted laughs. ‘Me too, my girl,’ he whispers as he lays her gently on the rooftop, and it does not take long until they have forgotten everything except each other, as they move together in the moonlight. Any tales of adventure will simply have to wait till he returns.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  In London, the wives of gentlemen who are fellows of the Royal Society become accustomed to eating later than usual when there is an interesting meeting scheduled. However, the bleak February afternoon that Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted speaks to the assembled throng, two dinner parties in the City do not commence until almost midnight and one is cancelled altogether. Admiral Rose has not attained his distinguished rank only for his formidable powers in the heat of battle. He is an accomplished lobbyist and the Society’s newly gas-lit rooms are packed to capacity to hear what the serious young man, his skin still pink from the desert, has to say. When Sir Joseph Hooker presents him to the party he speaks in the most glowing terms of Wellsted’s adventures and his burgeoning naval career. ‘The first white man to cross the Arabian Peninsula,’ he says, ‘and a hero.’

  The Fellows are not disappointed. Wellsted is an excellent orator and he not only provides detailed information about the geographical features of the Peninsula and the political situation with the French, but brings to life the searing heat of the dunes, the smell of mint in the souk, the savagery of the plague towns and the mercurial spirit of the desert tribes. One or two of the younger members find themselves so inspired they consider setting out overnight for Portsmouth and taking passage to see this magical place for themselves.

  ‘Capital evening,’ Rose congratulates Wellsted as they take the steps down to the waiting carriage with Murray.

  The boy has certainly done what they wanted him to do. All society is alight with talk of abominable French slavers and the need for the British to control the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Wellsted will meet the Prime Minister and give evidence to a Parliamentary committee the following week. He has proved entirely reliable, if slightly eccentric. Once when Admiral Rose returned home, the lieutenant was standing in the garden soaked to the skin. Apparently he was contemplating the rain.

  Wellsted has never been homesick for anywhere or anyone before, but now he is so thirsty for Zena, he fears he will never be able to slake it, and despite the social attentions of several eligible girls of good family (one an heiress) his heart remains under the low, full moon on a roof either in Riyadh or Muscat.

  ‘You not succumbing to the charms of any of those beauties whose mothers presented them so eagerly at the ball the other evening?’ Murray teases him in the carriage. ‘I am shocked you do not have an assignation of some kind! A single man of your age!’

  There is hardly a mother in England who could want a more fashionable beau for her daughter. With one bestseller on his slate, Wellsted has completed his second manuscript. Murray is confident the new book will run to several editions. The account of Socotra sells out as fast as he can print it.

  Wellsted shakes his head. ‘Women,’ he says, as if he is exasperated.

  ‘Passionate chap like you,’ the admiral comments.

  ‘When a chap is passionate, the readership can sense it.’ Murray offers Wellsted his hipflask. ‘All the better if he proves damnably readable. Shall we dine at Claridges?’ he suggests. ‘Or the club?’

  The Royal Society’s business, of course, was fascinating, but it is getting rather late and Murray hates to go to bed on an empty stomach.

  Wellsted stares out of the window as the carriage rocks along the muddy streets. London has been a shock. Cool, dank and grey, he feels an indescribable loneliness and oppression here. In Mayfair, Westminster and Whitehall he will never be able to be himself. When he visited Molyneux Street, it was not as he remembered – his father was an old man who did not know him, and his brothers were strangers.

  ‘The first white man to cross the desert.’ Wellsted Senior hugged his son. ‘We Wellsteds shall have cake!’

  It was not unpleasant, James thinks, but so strange. He cannot tell anyone the thing that is of the most importance to him. The reason he must return.

  And yet the prizes are glittering – The Times reported his meeting at the Geographical Society and there is a hint from Rose that a promotion is in the offing. He can’t wait to get back to Muscat. A captaincy will mean the prospect of a new life with Zena. The wages are far higher and he will be able to build her a home.

  He glows at the very thought. His love for Zena has given him a life rather than what now feels like a series of achievements. He can’t wait to see her. There is talk of an expedition into the interior of Persia. She will come with him, he is sure. This time they can travel as husband and wife. They will be married, he has decided. As the carriage pulls up at Claridges, Wellsted steps out onto the glossy pavement.

  ‘What are you thinking of, old fellow?’ Rose asks.

  ‘The desert and all her charms,’ Wellsted says with an engaging smile.

  ‘Can’t wait to get back, eh? Our hero is missing the intrigue, I think,’ Rose comments.

  Murray grins. ‘Well I don’t blame him’ he says. ‘It sounds damn marvellous out there.’ Murray has no intention of leaving London, of course. He prefers his adventures second-hand.

  Wellsted heads smartly up the steps and into the foyer. He has an expression of nonchalance on his face. He is a man with a secret. A wonderful secret. A secret of the sands.

  Epilogue

  In the slave market, the palanquin loiters with the women inside and the bearers wait on their instruction. The attention of the crowd is focussed on the auction, which has been underway a few minutes already. Farida’s light eyes miss nothing – she comments upon the fat auctioneer, the crowd of men sharing a hookah pipe. The 13-year-old sidi slave who, after all he has been through, strains to get away and is restrained with brutal force by the stocky guards.

  ‘They seemed bigger,’ Zena remembers. She is no longer afraid.

  Zena pulls a burquah over her clothes and picks up the basket the women have brought with them. She slips out of the palanquin so slyly that the bearers do not notice her disappear in the direction of the dock. The holding warehouse is unguarded now, though the door is barred. She lifts the catch. Inside, it always shocks her. The mass of bodies and the smell. She has only a few minutes.

  ‘Here,’ she lays the basket on the ground and opens it.

  The scent of fruit rises through the stench and the hands begin to grab. Zena backs away, like a spectre, leaving the door open behind her. Not one of them will leave, she knows. But still, it is good they have the option.

  The burquah gives her anonymity and she disappears easily as soon as she has rounded the corner.

  ‘All right?’ Farida checks as the girl appears back through the thin curtains.

  Zena nods. She’d like to steal the cargo if she could or buy them all and set them free, but there is no measure in that – one would lead to her own execution the other only encourage the slavers. This small act of kindness is the best the women have been able to come up with. They make the journey to the dockside twice a week.

  ‘It’s like being home again,’ Farida chuckles. Her brothers used to bait the landlord’s agent over rent.

  Zena removes the burquah and sits cross-legged beside her friend.

  ‘He’ll be h
ome soon, my duck, with all his fortune.’

  Zena hopes so. Farida has been teaching her English and she wants to try it out on the lieutenant. That and other things.

  ‘And now,’ Farida suggests, ‘shall we trouble them a little on the way home? We can probably drive up the prices a dollar or two?’

  Zena finds that today she has no stomach for it. ‘Let’s not stay to watch the auction,’ she says.

  Farida shrugs. She strikes the side of the palanquin and the litter wobbles a little as the men hoist it and move off in the heat of the afternoon. ‘Stop at the horse bazaar,’ she orders and settles back onto the cushions to enjoy the journey.

  Historical Note

  This note contains spoilers

  ‘Slavish accuracy must necessarily reduce the novel to a piece of archaeological pedantry instead of a living image of the times.’

  Edith Wharton

  I am not a scholar and, though fascinated by history, I have been engaged in a work of fiction in writing this story far more than a reconstruction of actual events. That said, I spent a good deal of time examining what archival evidence remains of the Bombay Marine’s mission to the Red Sea and Arabian Peninsula. I researched life in the Wellsted household at 13 Molyneux Street and beyond. I poked and prodded at the history of events in London during 1820– 1842 and gathered a whole file of information referring to the same period in what are now Ethiopia, Eritrea, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman. I read James Raymond Wellsted’s accounts of his desert travels and pondered long and hard over the gaps he left in his story. History makes my mouth water – and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone. I am frequently moved by the bravery of many explorers and adventurers whose only memorial is an entry or two in a ship’s manifest or an institutional payroll and whose death is only marked by the clerk’s removal of their name when the documents have been updated.

  Secret of the Sands belongs to the genre that Truman Capote named ‘faction’. What I’ve written is largely consistent with the records that remain of James Raymond Wellsted’s life – both in England and while on active duty during the survey of the Red Sea and in the Arabian Peninsula. The story is also consistent with what I perceive as the atmosphere of the times – the abolition of slavery, the French/British rivalry and the spirit of adventure that spawned the British Empire (for better or for worse). Wellsted was one of the very first Europeans to be given permission to travel inside Oman’s borders. The sultan appears to have been very taken with him, and though in some places I have taken liberties with his actual itineraries or dates, he did travel widely during this period and among other adventures spent a good deal of time in the desert (though not Rubh Al Khali) as well as visiting plague towns on the east coast of the Peninsula.

  Occasionally, where historical fact has proved a barrier to invention, I simply moved a detail a little one way or another or made up a new story to get my characters out of a fix as rambunctiously as possible (history at its best is a gritty, dirty business). As a result, I have taken particular liberties with some truths and feel I must point out one in particular. Dr Jessop Hulton existed and, indeed, died of malaria (or some other tropical fever) in the service of the Indian Navy in 1836. He wrote The Palinurus Journals, in which he mentions the unpleasant atmosphere aboard ship when Wellsted fell out with the captain. However, although (as today) kidnapping of Europeans was not unheard of in the region, Dr Hulton was not, in fact, kidnapped by an enraged emir and held for months in the desert. I did however base Dr Jessop in the story on the character that emerges from Jessop Hulton’s own writing and on Captain Haines’ touching epitaph about how popular the doctor was with his fellow officers and men. I feel now, in putting that down, like a magician who has told his audience how the trick works, but there we are.

  In real life there was an East African slave girl called Zena. She was stolen from Wellsted’s caravan in the desert during his travels. Though he was touched by the stories she told him of her homeland, intended to set her free once his journey was over and genuinely regretted the theft of her person, there is no record that they ever met again or that the connection between them was more personal than a gentleman might admit to in his written papers. Still, Zena and indeed, Mary Penney, the protagonist of The Secret Mandarin, are both inspired by the stories of real women who travelled in disguise. There is, for example, the likes of the lady who masqueraded as a male servant on Louis de Bougainville’s mission. This 25-year-old called herself Mr Bare, and travelled very many months before de Bougainville unmasked her. Then there is the later, Victorian case of the famous Dr Barry, who was so determined to practise medicine that she disguised herself as a man for the whole of her career as an army doctor. The deception was only uncovered when she died. Likewise, female skeletons have been uncovered, dressed in armour, on Crusader sites. There truly were some very brave women who were determined to travel and explore, no matter what it took to do so, and many more, I suspect, whose adventures (like those of Zena and Mary) were enforced and who simply had to make the best of what was thrust upon them.

  For Secret of the Sands I chose a particular period of a few months in Wellsted’s life. But of course, from there on, his real-life story continued. James Raymond Wellsted took London by storm when he returned from his Arabian mission. Billeted in the house of a senior officer at 43 Edgware Road, he gave evidence in committee at the Houses of Parliament and attended meetings at both the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society. Shortly after doing so, however, Wellsted fell gravely ill with a tropical fever that he had nursed during his voyage. The disease ravaged him and in a very weakened state he was sent to Herne Bay in Kent to recuperate for several weeks. Wellsted at this time was so ill that he could not attend to his own correspondence and his carer, his young brother William, acted as his secretary. To this day, letters dictated by James to William (in William’s handwriting) are contained in the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland alongside the diaries of Sir Charles Malcolm during his time in Bombay.

  As soon as Wellsted was able, he returned to Bombay and intended to go back to Oman from there, but he was hit by a second bout of fever, which progressed to a delirium. One night, late, and by all accounts raving, he put a gun to his mouth and fired. The shot, amazingly, did not kill him, though as a result of this injury and the fact he simply never properly recovered from the fever, he was discharged from the service, granted a generous pension of £270 per annum (which later was reduced slightly at Captain Haines’ objection to £240 per annum) and, still weak and very vulnerable, he was sent home to London. Latterly, John Murray published two of Wellsted’s travel memoirs, respectively entitled Travels in Arabia and Travels to the City of the Caliphs. Both were received very well by the cognoscenti of London.

  The lieutenant, however, was permanently disfigured and never recovered. He spent some years in Blacklands House in Chelsea, a madhouse for gentlemen run by a friend of the Darwin family. On 25 October 1842, after a great deal of suffering, he was brought home to his father’s house at 13 Molyneux Street where he died. He was 37 years of age. There was a short obituary in The Times two days later and then he all but disappears from history, bar his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, some details in the memoir of Dr Jessop Hulton, the angry rantings in the correspondence of Captain Haines (contained now in the archive at the Royal Geographical Society) and one mention in the letters of Charles Darwin, who took a professional interest in the account of Wellsted’s Socotra trip. This, I have to say, is not what I would have written for him (we novelists believe ourselves gods). He deserved a far more glorious and illustrious fate. I admire James Raymond Wellsted. I firmly believe had he been a duke’s son or an Oxford man his tremendous achievements, adventurous spirit and open mind would not have been so sidelined and easily forgotten.

  Sara Sheridan

  Edinburgh, 2010

  Questions for Reading Groups
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  1 How important is it in historical fiction to stick to the real-life history of any character?

  2 If Mickey found out what Farida had been up to, what would his reaction be? Was Farida luckier to end up enslaved in Arabia than if she had followed her friend’s advice and simply gone to London?

  3 Had Kasim lived would Zena ever have rested easy? Would she have killed him?

  4 Should Zena have run earlier? What might have happened? Was Wellsted right to accept Zena as his slave? Should he have freed her immediately?

  5 What must life in the harim really have been like?

  6 Does the social mobility of the Arabian Peninsula during this era make it more free than Victorian Britain?

  7 If you were writing a sequel to Secret of the Sands what would you like to happen to the characters? Which characters in the novel were really most free?

  8 Is two nights of true love enough?

  9 Were slaves in Arabia any worse off than agricultural or factory workers in Britain of the same period?

  10 What evokes period in an historical novel?

  For details of books and websites that proved useful in the writing of this book and further reading suggestions please go to www.sarasheridan.com and look at the Research and Bonus Material pages. There are videos, podcasts and some additional reading, including unpublished chapters of Secret of the Sands. Sara Sheridan tweets about her writing life as @sarasheridan.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks are always due to the many on an enterprise such as this because no one can write a book entirely alone. To the archivists who were both kind and patient with me, I extend my sincere gratitude. You are the gatekeepers of our history. David McClay of the John Murray Archive at the National Library of Scotland deserves a particular mention because of his tremendous enthusiasm and support and because he was the person who said, ‘Have you heard of James Raymond Wellsted? I think we have some letters from him to John Murray. It could be good material.’ There were three and they (and he) started off the whole idea. Dorian Leveque at the British Library was a hub of help and information and Nichola Court at the Royal Society was so enthusiastic that I felt buoyed up for ages after our e-mail exchanges. It is particularly lovely when institutions that could be crusty, fusty bastions of old-fashioned academia turn out to be vibrant, stimulating and very alive. The interest and enthusiasm of those at the Chelsea Physic Garden was very kind – thank you. Alison Halley was a massively well-informed workmate in the genealogical research that went on behind Wellsted’s story and deserves a shiny medal! A nod also to all the kind people who guided me through the National Archives, the London Metropolitan archive, the Royal Geographical Society archive – oh, for heaven’s sake – there were a lot of archives and societies to get through! Cheers to Ian Gardiner and Dr Livingstone, who helped me by talking about their experiences in Oman – such fantastic, exciting lives you’ve been leading! Thanks to Peter Upton, author of The Arab Horse for his kind help and information about, well, Arab horses! To Carl Phillips for trying to keep me on the track of real history, though I stray on an ongoing basis (novelists being tricky.) Thanks too to Loretta Windsor at the Natural History Museum for giving me a chance to see behind the scenes. Also Anna Taylor, who talked so frankly about her experiences as a black woman in Britain and her background in Ghana – you first got me interested in the issues surrounding slavery and I’m very grateful we got chatting about it.