Court of Lions

by Jane Johnson

  James reached out and cupped one of her breasts in a sort of wonder. “So beautiful,” he said.

  Then he bent his head to her nipple, and Kate felt her knees go liquid and a determined pulse beat between her legs. She pulled him toward the bed and they fell together in a tangle, with Kate tugging at his belt. At last it was undone, and his trousers and underpants were out of the way and she could feel the smooth, hot skin of his penis against her.

  She twisted and reached for the drawer of the bedside table, where the condoms were kept, but James pulled her back toward him. He was so strong, she realized, stronger than she’d expected, and that too delighted her and made her brain go fuzzy. She had to insist on using protection, she knew it: but just now she couldn’t seem to form the words, and instead became quiescent. She allowed him to hold her, and didn’t move when he pushed himself up on his hands to look down the length of her, taking her in, his gaze lingering on her breasts, her belly, her cunt as she opened her legs. There was a sort of power to be had by showing herself to him, she thought: it was as if he was worshipping her with his eyes.

  And then he reared back from her onto his haunches, and taking his cock in his hand, he muttered, “Benedic, Domine, nos et dona tua, quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi,” which even Kate recognized as a form of Latin grace. A few strokes later he ejaculated all over her stomach.

  The experience had left Kate feeling confused, frustrated and in need of discussion, since James refused to talk about it, saying only that sex before marriage was sinful. This seemed medieval to Kate, whose background had been rigorously secular. Surely not all Catholics shared James’s strange predilections. Though wasn’t it rather nice that he solemnized things so? At least he wasn’t a fuck-and-run, one-night-stand merchant: he was serious about her; he cared. A lot. But even so, it was…weird, and she needed some guidance. Her colleagues were not the sort of people with whom she shared confidences of a sexual nature and somehow she’d let other friendships drift over the past months. So at last she called her sister, only to have Jess cry down the phone at her.

  “Evan can’t understand why it matters to me so much,” she sobbed. “Hardly any of his friends have kids, and those who do just seem to moan about all the trouble and expense. He says he doesn’t feel that his job is secure enough for us to start a family yet, but if we don’t do it now, it’ll be too late!”

  Evan was the same age as Jess and Kate but behaved as if he were ten years younger, going out on benders with his mates, not turning up to medical appointments, disappearing at weekends. When Kate had been with Matty, Jess had been furious with her. “For God’s sake throw him out! He’s a parasite!” Kate now wondered whether Jess’s vehemence had had more to do with the frustrations in her own marriage. They had been so close as children, proper twins, but ever since Jess had got involved with Evan, she always seemed so angry and critical. It hurt Kate in a way she could hardly articulate, as if a part of her own body had gone rogue and begun to attack her. But Jess was obviously hurting now, and it made her own concerns seem pathetic by comparison.

  “Can’t you sit down and talk to him?” she asked gently.

  Jess snorted. “Evan doesn’t ‘do’ talking. Every time I try, he acts like a dog that’s been hit for no reason. Or he gets defensive and angry. Anyway—” she blew her nose “—what’s up with Prince Charming?”

  “Don’t call him that.” Kate felt herself bristle. “Look, it’s so trivial…”

  “I could do with some distraction.”

  And so Kate found herself listing the treats and gifts, the texts and compliments. Even to her own ears it was an absurd whine, but she had to build up to what had happened last night.

  At last her sister cut in.

  “Honestly, Kate, I can’t believe you’re complaining about a man treating you like a princess,” Jess said. “You’re so used to being treated badly you don’t know a nice guy when he comes along.”

  Kate laughed. “I know. He is nice,” she conceded. “But…here’s the thing, and promise you won’t laugh. No, really—promise.”

  “Okay, I promise.”

  “We slept together last night. But he wouldn’t…penetrate me.”

  There was a long silence at the other end of the line. Then Jess burst out laughing. “Sorry, sorry. He what?”

  Kate went over the events of the evening, her cheeks burning. “After he came the first time, I tried to get him hard again, but he just sort of fended me off, made me feel like some sort of wicked temptress intent on my own pleasure. He kept saying, ‘Not yet. It would be wrong.’ Look, I know it’s weird, but there isn’t really anyone else I can talk to about it.”

  “Well, maybe it’s just his thing, deferring pleasure. They’ve all got some strange kink or another. That’s what sex is all about, isn’t it? Strange kinks?”

  “No, it’s more than that. It’s like…it doesn’t count if he doesn’t come inside me, as if he’s denying himself. Or as if he’s waiting for something.”

  “Waiting? For what?”

  “I—” Instinctively her hand went to the little crucifix. “I really don’t know.”

  Funny what you got used to. Kate found that although penetration remained taboo, it was perfectly acceptable to James if she masturbated herself to a climax in front of him: indeed, it seemed to excite him inordinately. And so they continued as a couple on a reasonably stable footing: going out for walks, to dinner, to the cinema. Then, about five months into the relationship, James went missing. His landlines at the shop and his flat went to the answering machine, and his mobile straight to voice mail when Kate rang. He did not reply to her texts or respond to any of the emails she sent him, which started with gentle inquiries about his health and became increasingly anxious.

  It wasn’t like James to be out of contact. If anything, he was too assiduous at keeping in touch. Sometimes he texted or called her several times a day. Once, she had failed to reply to him for a whole four hours and he’d contacted her office colleagues to make sure she was all right. “I was worried she might have had an accident on the way to work,” he explained, sounding rather sheepish when they said no, she was fine but stuck in a long budget meeting. Now she pictured James lying dead on the floor of the stockroom with blowflies buzzing over him.

  It was odd that she was so stricken: there were times when she wasn’t even sure she liked him that much. The last evening they’d spent together they’d argued about the Charlie Hebdo atrocity. “Yes, of course it’s crucial that we defend free speech,” she had said, “but I do feel sorry for all the ordinary Muslims in Paris. Wherever they go, people will stare at them and wonder if they sympathized, if they are terrorists at heart.”

  “All Muslims are terrorists,” James said with such vehemence that she choked on her wine.

  She wondered if she had heard him correctly. “Say that again?”

  “All Muslims are terrorists,” he enunciated with patronizing clarity. “Their religion is based on violence and intolerance.”

  Kate was stymied. “You can’t possibly mean that,” she said at last. “Islam is a religion of peace—it’s only fundamentalist nutters who twist it to suit their agenda.”

  He sneered at her. “A religion of peace? You must be joking!” He ticked off names on his fingers: “Saladin, Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, Osama bin Laden, ISIS and the Taliban. What have they all got in common?”

  Kate laughed and tried to muster a counter-argument. “Um, well, what about the Spanish Inquisition, Bloody Mary, the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis and the Lord’s Resistance Army?”

  “You really don’t know what you’re talking about. Didn’t you learn anything at university?”

  Kate felt the insult like a blow. He knew she hadn’t been to university, unlike Jess: she’d told him so. Had he forgotten, or was he twisting the knife? In her family, Jess had always been “the clever one” and Kate a sort of plodder, the one who always got things done, quietly and stoically, with her head down. In retrosp
ect, Kate had realized this was unfair: it was just that Jess was more emotional and made more fuss, so people took more notice of her. But when you’re a twin, you tend to adopt roles to differentiate yourself from your sibling, and she and Jess had each formed their own stereotype. She didn’t, generally, mind not having been to university: no one in her social circles made her feel stigmatized or lacking education, and she’d been earning ever since the summer after A-levels and had bought a flat before Jess had. She saw herself as a worker, and a successful, confident woman. But now here was James reminding her that she was—in his terms—uneducated and, by extension, of a lower order. James didn’t boast about his upbringing, but he’d dropped enough snippets for Kate to gather that he had been to prep school and then to Eton; and he had the bearing and accent of the truly privileged. She did know that he’d taken a first at Cambridge and she suspected he had been a member of a debating society, for now he started using all manner of rhetorical tricks to knock down each of her arguments, quoting from learned sources and dropping Latin phrases. On the last occasion, unable to muster any cool logic, she’d yelled, “Stop it, stop it!” She’d slammed the table with both hands and her glass shuddered and fell over, breaking immediately and spilling the scant dregs onto the table. It was an expensive glass, one of the crystal ones James had bought for her.

  James reeled as if she had physically assaulted him. “Now look what you’ve done. Don’t you see how destructive you are? That says everything—” He waved at the broken glass. “You insult me and break the beautiful things I give you. Do you even care for me at all?”

  Her own violence had surprised her: she felt suddenly very much in the wrong. Was she turning into a female version of Matty? That would be awful, and James didn’t deserve such treatment. “I’m sorry,” she said, placing a mollifying hand on his arm. “I do care for you—of course I do.”

  He looked her in the eye. “Care for, maybe. Not love.”

  His gaze held her, pinned her. The air between them was charged with expectancy, but Kate couldn’t bring herself to say the word. She wasn’t ready yet, didn’t think that her feelings for James were strong enough to make this irrevocable statement. Sometimes she thought she might be falling for him, but often she wondered if her yearning for a stable relationship had more to do with her own inadequacies than with what she felt for James. The atmosphere became oppressive, more so even than during the argument, but an adamantine part at the core of her refused to be cowed. Even if it meant the end of everything.

  And when it had become clear that she wasn’t going to say she loved him, he’d shaken her hand off and got to his feet. “What’s the point of this? There’s no point, is there? I might as well kill myself: then we’d see how much you cared.”

  At the time Kate had almost laughed at his dramatics. Then she had felt angry at being on the end of such blatant emotional manipulation and told him he’d better go home. And so the evening had come to a rancorous ending. That had been the last time they’d spoken, and since then she’d felt increasingly guilty. An awful thought occurred to her now. What if he’d really meant it? What if he’d taken an overdose or something? It was, she told herself, a ridiculous case of catastrophic thinking.

  But it had been three days…

  In the end she couldn’t settle to anything. At lunchtime she excused herself from the office and took the train to East Molesey. It was November and the streetlights were already coming on by the time she reached the shop. People were muffled in scarves, heads down against the chill. The shop was locked and there was a CLOSED sign on the door. She cupped her hands against the window. Inside, the place looked gloomy and ramshackle without the glamour lent by the sparkling chandeliers. It looked like a junk shop, tawdry and untidy.

  She stepped back. No lights were on in the flat upstairs, and she had no door key: James had always been unwilling to let her in there. “It’s a mess,” he would say. “I’ve got deliveries everywhere—there’s nowhere to sit down.” She tried the flat phone again and heard it ringing in the distance, echoing and mournful. His mobile went to voice mail.

  Just down the road was a twenty-four-hour convenience store. “Hello!” she greeted the man behind the counter. “I was looking for James from the antiques shop?” She gestured vaguely to her left. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen him?”

  The man was in his early twenties, with a curving, hawk-like nose and very white teeth. “Hi, I’m Yusuf,” he said with a grin. “Lucky James.” When she didn’t smile, he added, “I haven’t, not for a few days.”

  Kate’s heart thumped. “He’s not answering his phone. I’m worried about him.”

  “Right,” Yusuf said. “Hang on.” He came out from behind the counter, locked the door and flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED. “Come on.”

  She followed him out through the back of the shop, past towers of toilet rolls and stacked boxes, into a small courtyard brimming with potted herbs and heathers. At the far end a wooden door gave onto a grassy alleyway that led behind the other premises on the road. When they reached the back of what must be the antiques shop, Yusuf tried the gate, but it appeared to be bolted. “Okay, here goes.” He launched himself up and over the fence, which shuddered briefly under his weight with the groan of an old man with creaky knees. Then he was across the yard and rattling his way up the iron fire escape. He banged on the glass window of the door. “Hello? Hello in there?” He pressed his hands to the glass and peered in. “It’s a bit of a state,” he called back, “but there’s no body or smell or nothing.” He shifted along the fire escape, onto the horizontal iron drainpipe.

  “Do be careful!” Kate called.

  Moments later he scuttled back to safety again. “Unless he’s shut himself in the bathroom, I don’t think he’s in there.”

  So where was he? Should she file a missing person report with the police: I’m his girlfriend and he’s always in contact? They would laugh at her: men were always going missing for a few days. Matty had done it all the time. But Matty was Matty, and James was…his polar opposite. It was the most attractive thing about him.

  “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Yusuf said, vaulting lightly back over the creaking fence. “He does go off on buying trips, and to see his mum in Wales. And of course he’s always had an eye for a pretty lady. Can’t blame him for that. You look a lot like his last one.” And he winked at her.

  Kate took a step back. “I expect that’s what he’s done, and forgotten to tell me.” She was so agitated she walked away without thanking him and by the time she remembered she was almost at the station.

  When she got home, it was to find a message on her answer-phone: James, suggesting a rendezvous the next day, his message cheery, as if nothing had happened. Relief flooded in. But as she put the receiver down, she remembered what Yusuf had said, about James going off to see his mother. In Wales.

  But he told me she was dead.

  8

  Blessings

  GRANADA

  1479

  Prince Mohammed and I were in the Court of Myrtles after a day spent shadowing the sultan in his court duties: Momo was being groomed for power. “This is good,” Qasim told me. “This suits us well.” I wasn’t entirely sure who the “us” referred to. “Keep your ears and eyes open and report all you see and hear. We must ensure the prince is well schooled and ready to take a step up. In case…anything should happen, to his father.” I tried, but it was a dull job, listening to the petitioners moaning out their woes to Moulay Hasan and his qadi, the judge. I had almost dislocated my jaw yawning during the judicial audiences. Afterwards, Momo dragged me into the courtyard and bade me wait. “I have something for you!”

  He presented it to me like a god bestowing a miracle. He was a boy no longer, and his beauty could take your breath away. All his years of training with ever more skilled sword masters had built lean muscle into him; a fine beard defined his jaw. But it was his kindness that always unmanned me. I looked down at the cloth-swathed object. Large
r and longer than a book, his usual (unwanted) gift. I hoped it wasn’t a sword: the best I’d be able to do with it was to use it as a crutch.

  I pulled the fabric away, and stared. Considered objectively, it was a pretty thing, covered in chased gold, intricate arabesques hammered all over the metal. Whoever had made it had given it the exact likeness of a foot—toes and toenails lovingly replicated.

  “Well, try it then!” he urged me. “It’s made of thuya wood from the Atlas Mountains,” he said eagerly. “From the root burl. That’s what makes it so hard and dense. It won’t rot or spoil, even in water. And see—” he pointed to a peg at the ankle “—it even articulates, just like a real foot, so with practice you should be able to walk, even run on it, without limping too badly. Here—” He helped me place the false foot over my linen-covered stump, where to my surprise it fitted well. I caught his smug expression. “I measured it while you slept. It’s taken months to get it made. I was worried the stump would grow, but it doesn’t seem to have. The foot was put together by a carpenter in Fez: it’s where the finest craftsmen come from, you know. He worked from the drawings of a man from Florence who’s made a great study of human anatomy. Leonardo something.”

  I wound the long leather laces in a tight criss-cross up to my knee, realizing I should be grateful for all this thought, effort and no doubt expense, but the gratitude weighed as heavily as the foot. I had been getting around perfectly well until now with a long forked stick tucked into my armpit. It seemed a great nuisance to have to bind an artificial foot as heavy as a lump of iron stuck onto the end of my leg. Leaning on Momo, I clumped around a bit, the foot clanging on the patio tiles. There would be no sneaking up on anyone in this thing.