Pirate King: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

“I do a bit of shooting.” No point in telling her I’d had a Purdy pointed at me before. No point in telling myself that, either – only time quiets a racing heart, not logic and reassurance. I brushed myself off, and dragged the bench back to where I’d found it.

Still, the fellow’s presence confirmed my suspicions: The men’s prison was adjoining our own, and care was being taken to ensure we remained apart.

Not enough care, of course – but just as our earlier decision to delay rebellion was tied to the presence of innocents, so now was my ultimate freedom of movement linked to my fellow prisoners. And although the indomitable Mrs Hatley might wrestle her length over one of these walls to be lowered by rope, the more buxom mothers of Isabel and Fannie would never make it.

In the high chamber of his highest tower

Sate Conrad, fetter’d in the Pacha’s power.

The first muezzin began his sunset call to prayer from a nearby minaret. Fettered in the pirates’ power, I propped my arms and chin on the southern wall, listening as other voices joined in from both sides of the river, drowned out regularly by the boom of waves. This was a quiet, snug little town around my feet. Sale marked the farthest reaches of the Roman empire-Sala Colonia-long before the pirates established their republic. The present rulers, the French, lived mostly in the modern European community, across the river in Rabat. Although Sale’s former violent xenophobia had been suppressed by the French, and manacled Christian slaves no longer worked in the gardens and fields, this town kept to itself, thinking its own thoughts behind its pale walls.

There would be no helmeted police constable strolling past on the street below.

This meant that I should have to cultivate an Irregular force from within.

I followed my nose, down the stairs, past the courtyard (tea had been laid out – Moroccan tea, steaming glasses stuffed with mint that instantly transported me back to a goat tent in Palestine – along with trays of sugar cakes and nuts and fruit and crescent-shaped biscuits) and through a sitting-room followed by a dim, heavily draped dining room with a table big enough for us all, past a small office space (no telephone – I would have been astonished to find one) and to a swinging door.

The kitchen was occupied by one woman in simple green Moroccan dress, two young girls similarly robed, and our resident snoop, Annie. Other than Annie’s anachronistic frock and uncovered hair, they might have been occupants of a Medieval alchemical laboratory, furnished with retorts and alembics. The woman disappeared in an explosion of fragrant steam; the girls took one look at my trousers and short hair and covered their mouths to giggle; Annie gave me a grin.

“Doesn’t this smell absolutely fabulous? I’ve been trying to get them to tell me what it is, but we don’t seem to have a language in common.”

The odour spilling out of the pots was, truly, intoxicating. My very soul opened to the spice-laden air, and I found I had moved closer to the cook, to stand within the penumbra of steam. I smiled, to show that I meant no harm.

“Are we to have dinner, then?”

Of course she did not understand, so I handed out another of my miser’s stash of Arabic: “Dinner soon?”

It took no pretence to stare blankly at the flood of heavily accented Arabic that washed over me, but it seemed to be positive, and I began to leaf through my other languages to ask, “When?”

French, of course – although the cook, who had understood the question, spoke little of the tongue, and that mostly monosyllabic. But she got across the answer, which was that dinner would be served in two hours.

Then she made a gesture that clearly invited us to take ourselves away.

Outside, Annie said, “Well, it’s good to know that we don’t have to produce our own meals in that kitchen.”

“It is a bit primitive,” I agreed.

“I didn’t know you spoke – Arabic, is it?”

“I know about ten words, picked up on a trip to the Holy Land. Bazaar, dinner, bread, please, thank you, ma’alesh – which is sort of like, oh well-and How much is it? I’ll need to arrange for a Moroccan Mr Pessoa, to help with trips into the bazaar.”

“Oh good,” she said. “They’ve left us some tea. Ooh – mint?”

I drank my syrupy tea and checked on the arrangements for beds. When the door opened an hour later and our trunks and cases were unceremoniously tossed inside, I said nothing to draw attention to the sound that followed: the door being wedged shut from without. When dinner came – magnificent heaps of exotic foods that the cook told us were couscous and tagine (a rice-like dish, and lamb with dried apricots cooked in a massive low crockery bowl topped by a sort of Chinese hat) with shredded salads and plates of pickles and relishes that had the mothers making dubious noises even as they helped themselves to second servings – I said nothing to dispel their easy assumption that the following evening we would share such foods with the men. And when yawns began to creep in and the women creep away to their richly furnished beds, I wished them sweet dreams, and said not a word about the guards on the door.

Permit them a night’s peace, before anxiety moved in.

* * *

The room I had claimed as my own was small and dark and although it was clean, it had no decoration on its whitewashed walls. A servant’s room, conveniently placed for a shouted summons from one of the ornate bedrooms nearby. A servant’s room, with little but a mat and blankets for sleeping. A servant’s room, with a window too narrow for most European frames.

All the windows in the house were firmly shuttered, either by decorative wood latticework or, in two of the lower rooms, workaday iron bars installed so recently the black paint was still tacky. This, too, went with the Moslem architecture, and the others did not even question it, since the inner walls were so patently free and open to the lightest breeze.

I dozed, waiting for the household to succumb to sleep before rising from my servant’s cot and turning my attentions to the window.

Being on the upper floor, this was a window not formerly barred. The mortar holding the bars was thoroughly set, but not as deep as it might have been on a real window.

And being women, no one had given us, or our possessions, a more than cursory search.

I divested myself of the hardware I had worn about my person all that day, ending by loosing my trousers and unwinding the length of silk rope that had saved my life more than once over the years (although it did have a way of making me look rather stout). I held a small looking-glass out between the bars to be certain that the street below was empty, then unfolded my pocket-knife to the blade used for prising stones from a horse’s hoof, and set to.

By three in the morning, the bars were down.

By five minutes after three, I was dressed head to toe in garments borrowed earlier from the house’s lumber-room, my spectacles tucked into a pocket, my face and hands darkened with dust from the window-sill.

By ten after three, I was on the street.

It is one of my favourite sensations, that of stepping out of doors without leave. The very air smells sweeter – as every child knows and most adults forget – whether in London or Morocco. I paused to savour that aroma of freedom. And also to orientate myself in relation to the muted sound of a violin that had begun to play some hours before.

In my borrowed djellaba, spectacles off and blonde hair covered, scuffing along in run-down and overly large sandals and with a moon too small and street-lamps too sporadic to give me away, I was taken for a local boy. As I went past our two guards, who spent their night pacing up and down the exposed sides of our prison, I greeted them in an Arabic onto which I had fastened something resembling the local accent. I did the same when I came to the guards outside the men’s prison.

“Good evening,” I mumbled politely.

“What are you doing out at this hour?” the shorter man demanded.

“My mother needs something from her sister.” A speech I had prepared earlier, in