amused by his own choice of metaphor.
“You mentioned the missing dhurra,” Penrod broached the subject again.
Ryder nodded. “I have a proprietary interest in that shipment,” he said. “It once belonged to me. It was transported at great expense and no little hardship several hundred miles down the river, then commandeered, some might even say stolen, by the redoubtable Chinese Gordon the minute I landed it safely in Khartoum.” He fell silent and brooded on the injustice.
“Naturally you have not the faintest notion what happened to it once it passed out of your hands?” Penrod suggested delicately.
“I have made some enquiries,” Ryder admitted. Under his instructions Bacheet had spent several weeks pursuing them. Even the rabbit warren of ancient buildings and alleyways of Khartoum could not hide five thousand ardebs of grain indefinitely.
“I would be fascinated to known the results of those investigations.”
Ryder regarded the tip of his cigar with a frown of annoyance. The lack of humidity in the desert air desiccated the tobacco leaf and caused it to burn like a grass fire. “Did you hear if, by any chance, the good general has offered a reward for the return of the missing dhurra?” he asked. “Lord knows, he paid little enough for it on the first purchase. Six shillings a sack!”
“General Gordon has not spoken to me of a reward,” Penrod shook his head, ‘but I will suggest it to him. I would think that a reward of six shillings a sack might bring forth information, don’t you?”
“Perhaps not,” Ryder replied. “However, I believe that an offer of twelve shillings would be almost certain to produce results.”
“I shall speak to him at the first opportunity.” Penrod nodded. “Although that does seem a trifle steep.”
“None of his promissory notes, either,” Ryder warned. “It is common knowledge that the Khedive has given him drawing rights of two hundred thousand pounds on the Cairo treasury. A few gold sovereigns would sing sweeter than all the paper canaries ever to come out of the forest.”
“A sentiment most poetically expressed, sir,” Penrod commended him.
Rebecca sat in her secret place in a hidden corner of the battlements in the consular palace. She was hidden by an ancient hundred-pounder cannon, a monstrous rusting relic that had probably never been fired in this nineteenth century, and would certainly never be fired again. She had covered her head and nightgown with a dark woollen cloak, and she knew that not even the twins would find her there.
She looked up at the night sky and could tell by the height of the Southern Cross above the desert horizon that it was well after midnight, but she felt as though she would never be able to sleep again. In a single day her whole existence had been thrown into uproar and confusion. She felt like a captive wild bird, battering its wings against the bars, bleeding and terrified, falling to the floor of the cage with heart racing and body trembling, only to launch itself at the bars again in another futile attempt to escape.
She did not understand what was happening to her. Why did she feel this way? Nothing made sense. Her mind darted back to that morning when, as soon as she had seen the twins bathed and dressed, she had begun her weekly housekeeping inspection. As soon as she entered the blue guest suite she had seen the strange figure occupying the four-poster bed. She had not been informed by the staff of the arrival of any guests and Khartoum under siege was the last place to attract casual visitors. Knowing this, she should have left the bedroom immediately and raised the alarm. What had made her approach the bed she would never know. As she stooped over the sheet-covered figure, it had launched itself at her with the suddenness of a leopard dropping out of a tree on its prey. She found herself borne to the floor by a stark naked man with a dagger in his hand.
Remembering that terrible moment, she bowed her head and covered her face with her hands. It was not the first time that she had seen the male body. When Rebecca turned sixteen her parents had taken her on a tour of the capital cities of Europe. She and her mother had gone to see Michelangelo’s David. She had been struck by the statue’s unearthly beauty but the cold white marble had invoked in her no troublesome emotions. She had even been able, unblushingly, to discuss it with her mother.
Her mother often described herself as emancipated. At the time Rebecca thought that this merely meant she smoked Turkish cigarettes in her boudoir and spoke frankly of the human anatomy and its functions. After her suicide Rebecca realized that the word had deeper significance. At the funeral in Cairo she had overheard some of the older women whispering together, and one had remarked tartly that Sarah Benbrook had made David a cuckold more often than she cooked him breakfast. Rebecca knew her mother never cooked breakfast. Nevertheless, she looked up the word ‘cuckold’ in her father’s dictionary. It took her a while to work out the true meaning, but when she did she had decided that she did not want to be emancipated like her mother. She would be true to one man for life.
Rebecca had next seen the male body only last year. David had taken her and the twins with him on an official visit to the upper reaches of the Victoria Nile. The Shilluk and Dinka tribesmen who inhabited the banks of the river wore no clothing of any description. The girls recovered from the first surprise when their father remarked that it was merely custom and tradition for them to adopt the state of nature, and they should think nothing of it. From then onwards Rebecca looked upon the enormous dark appendages as a rather ugly form of adornment, rather like the pierced lips and nostrils on the tribes of New Guinea that she had seen illustrated.
However, when Penrod Ballantyne had leapt upon her that morning the effect had been devastating. Far from leaving her uninterested and rather pitying, she found emotions and feelings of whose existence she had never dreamed until that moment erupting into her consciousness. Even now in the darkness, with the cloak over her head and her face covered with both hands, she was blushing until her face felt as though it was on fire.
I won’t think about it ever again, she promised herself. “It’ was as fully as she allowed herself to describe what she had seen. Never. Never again. She even eschewed that description on the second attempt. Then immediately she found herself thinking about it with all her attention.
After that long-ago visit to Europe, Rebecca had overheard her mother discussing the subject with one of her friends. They agreed that a woman in a state of nature was beautiful, while a man was not, except Michelangelo’s David, of course.
“It wasn’t ugly or obscene,” Rebecca contradicted her mother’s shade. “It was … it was…” But she wasn’t sure what it had been, except very disturbing, fascinating and troubling. What had happened later between her and Ryder Courtney was connected with the first episode in some strange way that she could not fully understand.
Over the previous months she and Ryder had gradually become friends. She had realized that he was strong, clever and amusing. He had an inexhaustible fund of marvelous stories and, as Saffron had often remarked, he smelt and looked good. She came to find his company reassuring and comforting in the days of the siege, when death, disease and starvation gripped the city. As her father had observed, Ryder Courtney was a man of accomplishment. He had built up a thriving business enterprise and sustained it even though the world seemed to be falling apart. He took good care of his own people and his friends. He had shown them how to make the green-cake, and he could make her laugh and forget her fears for a few hours. She felt safe when she was with him. Of course, once or twice he had made physical contact with her a light touch on the arm when they were talking, or his hand brushing hers as they walked together. But always she had pulled away. Her mother had warned her often about men: they just wanted to ravish you, then leave you sullied for ever so that you could never find a husband. That was bad enough but, worse, ravishment was painful and, in her mother’s experience, only childbirth more so.
Then that very morning after her horrible experience in the Blue Bedroom when her emotions had been in turmoil, she had gone alone to Ryder’s quarters. She had never done that before. She had always taken at least one of the twins with her as a chaperone. But this morning she had been confused. She felt guilty about her strange and ambivalent thoughts of Captain Penrod Ballantyne. She was terrified that she had inherited the bad seed from her mother. She needed to be comforted.
As always, Ryder had been pleased to see her, and ordered Bacheet to brew a pot of the precious coffee. They had chatted for a while, at first discussing the twins and their lessons, which, since the beginning of the siege, had fallen sadly into default. Suddenly and unexpectedly, even to herself, Rebecca had begun to sob as though her heart would break. Ryder had stared at her in astonishment: he knew she was neither a whiner nor a weeper. Then her had put his arms round her and held her tight. “What has happened to you? I have never seen you like this. You have always been the bravest girl I know.”
Rebecca was surprised by how good it felt to be held by him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, but made no effort to pull away. “I’m being very silly.”
“You’re not silly. I understand,” he told her, in the deep, gentle tone he used when he was comforting a
