“The press has got wind of your escape from Omdurman, and your arrival in this country,” he told them. “They are agog. I have no doubt they will be waiting at Waterloo station to pounce upon you.”
“How can they know what train we will arrive on?” Amber asked.
“I dropped a little hint,” Hardy admitted. “What I would refer to as pre-baiting the waters. Now, may I read this manuscript?”
Amber looked to Penrod for guidance, and he nodded. “I think you should trust Mr. Hardy. Your father did.”
Hardy skimmed through the thick sheaf of papers so rapidly that Amber doubted he was reading it. She voiced her concern, and Hardy answered, without looking up, “Trained eye, my dear young lady.”
As the carriage ran in through the suburbs he shuffled the papers together. “I think we have something here. Will you allow me to keep this for a week? I know a man in Bloomsbury who would like to read it.”
Five journalists were waiting on the platform, including one from The Times and another from the Telegraph. When they saw the handsome, highly decorated hero of El Obeid and Abu Klea, with the young beauty on his arm, they knew they had a story that would electrify the whole country. They barked hysterically as a pack of mongrels who had chased a squirrel up a tree. Hardy gave them a tantalizing statement about the horrifying ordeal the couple had survived, mentioning Gordon, the Mahdi and Khartoum more than once, all evocative names. Then he sent the press away and led the couple out to a cab he had waiting at the station entrance.
The cabbie whipped up his horse and they clattered through the foggy city to the hotel in Charles Street where Hardy had booked a room for Amber. Once she was installed they went on to the hotel in Dover Street where Penrod would stay.
“Never do for the two of you to frequent the same lodging. From now on you will be under a magnifying lens.”
Four days later Sebastian Hardy summoned them to his office. He was beaming pinkly through his pince-nez. “Macmillan and Company want to publish. You know they did Sir Samuel White Baker’s book on the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia? Your book is caviar and champagne to them.”
“What can the Benbrook sisters expect to receive? You know that Miss Amber wishes any proceeds to be shared equally between them, following the example their father set in his will?”
Hardy sobered and looked apologetic. He removed his reading glasses and polished them with the tail of his shirt. ‘I pressed them as hard as I could, but they would not budge beyond ten thousand pounds.”
“Ten thousand pounds!” Amber shrieked. “I did not know there was that much money outside the Bank of England.”
“You will also receive twelve and a half per cent of the profits. I doubt this will amount to much more than seventy-five thousand pounds.”
They gaped at him in silence. Placed in consols, irredeemable government treasury bonds, that sum would bring in almost three and a half thousand pounds per annum in perpetuity. They would never have to worry about money.
In the event, Hardy’s estimate erred on the side of caution. Months before Christmas Slaves of the Mahdi was all the rage. Hatchard’s in Piccadilly was unable to keep copies on its shelves for more than an hour. Irate customers vied with each other to snatch them and carry them triumphantly to the till.
In the House of Commons the opposition seized on the book as a weapon with which to belabour the government. The whole sorry business of Mr. Gladstone abandoning Chinese Gordon to his fate was resuscitated. Saffron Benbrook’s harrowing painting depicting the death of the general, to which she had been an eye-witness, formed the book’s frontispiece. It was reported in a leading article in The Times that women wept and strong men raged as they looked at it. The British people had tried to forget the humiliation and loss of prestige they had suffered at the hands of the Mad Mahdi, but now the half-healed wound was ripped wide open. A popular campaign for the reoccupation of the Sudan swept the country. The book sold and sold.
Amber and Penrod were invited to all the great houses, and were surrounded by admirers wherever they went. London cabbies greeted them by name, and strangers accosted them in Piccadilly and Hyde Park. Hundreds of letters from readers were forwarded to them by the publishers. There was even a short note of congratulation from the sirdar, Kitchener, in Cairo.
“That will do my new career no harm at all,” Penrod told Amber, as they rode together down Rotten Row, acknowledging waves.
The book sold a quarter of a million copies in the first six weeks, and the printing presses roared night and day churning out fresh copies. They were unable to keep up with the demand. Putnam’s of 70 Fifth Avenue, New York, brought out an American edition, which piqued the interest of readers who had never heard of the Sudan. Slaves of the Mahdi outsold Mr. Stanley’s account of his search for Dr. Livingstone by three to one.
The French, true to the national character, added their own fanciful illustrations to the Paris edition. Rebecca Benbrook was depicted with her bodice torn open by the evil Mahdi as he prepared to ravish her as she courageously sheltered her beautiful, terrified little sister Amber. The indomitable thrust of her bare bosom declared her defiance in the face of a fate worse than death. Copies were smuggled across the Channel and sold at a premium on stalls in the streets of Soho. Even after the payment of income tax at sixpence in the pound, by Christmas the book had earned royalties little short of two hundred thousand pounds. Amber, at the suggestion of Penrod Ballantyne, instructed Mr. Hardy to place this in a trust fund for the three sisters.
Amber and Penrod celebrated Christmas at Clercastle. They walked and rode together every day. When the house-party went out to shoot Sir Peter’s high-flying pheasant, Amber stood in the line of guns beside
Penrod and, thanks to her father’s training, acquitted herself so gracefully and skilfully that the head keeper came to her after the last drive, tugged at the peak of his cap and mumbled, “It was a joy to watch you shoot, Miss Amber.”
January came too soon. Penrod had to take up his post in Cairo. Amber, chaperoned by Penrod’s sister-in-law Jane, went to see him off from Waterloo station on the boat train. With Jane’s assistance, Amber had spent the previous week shopping for the correct attire at such a momentous parting. Of course, price was now of little consequence.
She settled on a dove-grey jacket, trimmed with sable fur, worn over ankle-length skirts and a fashionable bustle. Her high-heeled boots buckled up the sides and peeped out from under the sweeping skirts. The artful cut of the material emphasized her tiny waist. Her wide-brimmed hat was crowned with a wave of ostrich feathers. She wore the amber necklace and earrings that he had given her on the road outside Gallabat.
“When will we see each other again?” Amber was trying desperately but unsuccessfully to hold back her tears until after the train had departed.
“That I cannot say.” Penrod had determined never to lie to her, unless it was absolutely necessary. The tears broke over Amber’s lower lids. She tried to sniff them back, and Penrod hurried on: “Perhaps you and Jane could come out to Cairo to spend your sixteenth birthday at Shepheard’s Hotel. Jane has never been there and you might show her the pyramids.”
“Oh, can we do that, Jane? Please?”
“I will speak to my husband,” Jane promised. She was about the same age as Rebecca, and in the few weeks that Amber had lived at Clercastle they had become as close as sisters. “I can see no possible reason why Peter should object. It will be the height of the grouse-shooting season and he will be much occupied elsewhere. He will hardly miss us.”
Sam Adams came down from Cairo to meet Penrod when his ship docked in Alexandria. Almost his first words were “We have all read the book. The sirdar is as pleased as a cat with a saucer of cream. London was starting to have second thoughts about rebuilding the army. Gladstone and those other idiots were dithering with the idea of using the money to build a bloody great dam on the Nile instead of giving it to us. Miss Benbrook’s book created such a rumpus in the House that they changed their dim minds sharpish. Kitchener has another million pounds, and to the devil with the dam. Now we will certainly have new Maxim guns. As for myself, well, we desperately need a good number two if we’re to have any chance of retaining the Nile Cup this year.”
“After my brief meeting with the sirdar, I estimate that he is not likely to set aside much time for polo.”
Adams’s wife had found and rented a comfortable house for Penrod on the bank of the river, close to army headquarters and the Gheziera Club. When Penrod climbed the steps to the shady veranda, a figure in a plain white jibba and turban rose from his seat beside the front door and made a deep salaam.
“Effendi, the heart of the faithful Yakub has pined for you as the night awaits the dawn.”
