‘Who is Suleiman?’ asked Mahmoud.
‘My lady’s man.’
‘He works in the fields?’
‘No, no, he’s too grand for that. About the house. He’s another Sudani. Comes from the lady’s family. Always going back there to do this or that.’
‘Sudani?’ said Mahmoud. ‘Like Soraya?’
‘Closer. Soraya’s not really part of her family. Well, she is, but not really. A distant cousin. Very distant, I know, because I heard them talking once, she and the lady. They were trying to puzzle out the family connection. And not finding it easy, I must say. But it did exist. The lady remembers Soraya’s mother.’
‘And Suleiman went off?’ said Mahmoud. ‘This morning?’
‘Yes. In a hurry, like I said.’
‘That would be before the men came in from the fields?’
‘Just before. He was leaving as they were arriving.’
‘But …’ began Mahmoud.
The Pasha’s lady had known that the servants would be parading before him, had agreed to it herself. And then she had done this! Made sure he wouldn’t speak to everybody. Not, almost certainly, to the one person with whom he wanted to speak.
They had done it again. Tricked him.
But this time there was a difference. He now knew exactly who the Pasha’s lady did not want him to speak to.
One day Zeinab came back home to hear shrieks inside the house. She dropped the packages she was holding and rushed in. Leila was standing in the kitchen sobbing. She held her arms out and Zeinab, without thinking, grabbed her and held her close.
Neither Musa nor his wife were to be seen. They had gone out to the market, Leila explained between sobs. They were buying a lot of things and Musa, unusually among Egyptian men, had gone to help carry them. And she, Leila, had tripped over the step and blooded her knee!
She showed Zeinab the knee fearfully.
It was indeed bloody but not a mortal wound, and Zeinab, who, in her father’s house would normally have shouted for a slave, reckoned she could cope on her own. She carried Leila, still racked with sobs, into the bathroom and sponged the blood off.
‘Look!’ she said. ‘It’s all gone!’
Leila peered doubtfully; then saw a part where the skin had come off and opened her mouth to roar again.
‘We’ll put a patch on it,’ said Zeinab hastily. There were, she knew, patches in the cupboard. Owen sometimes used one when he cut himself shaving. She found one and spread it over the wounded area.
Leila, curious, cut off her scream in mid-roar.
‘It will be all right now,’ said Zeinab reassuringly.
Still the little body heaved and Zeinab hugged her tight. Eventually the sobbing subsided, but Zeinab went on holding her. She found she quite liked the experience. It came to her that not all things should be delegated to slaves.
Musa and his wife returned at this point. Musa’s wife rushed across and took over from Zeinab. And Musa patted his heart and said he had heard the shouts and feared Leila was dying.
‘Would you mind?’ asked Leila.
‘A bit,’ said Musa.
Leila knew he was teasing her. She broke into chuckles and soon the incident was forgotten.
But not by Zeinab. She had seen the way that Musa’s wife handled Leila, and she had observed the way her friend Aisha behaved with her children, and she guessed that this was the way mothers behaved with their children. When she came back into the kitchen, after collecting the purchases she had dropped, she gave Leila a hug.
Leila put her arm round her neck and gave her a kiss. Then she climbed up on to Zeinab’s lap. ‘You have a lovely smell, Auntie,’ she said.
‘Thank you!’ said Zeinab. ‘It’s perfume.’
‘It’s in your ear,’ said Leila.
‘Not in my ear but behind it,’ said Zeinab. ‘Would you like to try some?’
After this they were more at ease with each other. Zeinab even took her with her sometimes when she went shopping in the fashionable, almost entirely French, great stores.
One day when they were out together, Leila tugged at her arm and said: ‘Auntie, why is that man looking at me?’
‘Which man?’
‘He has gone away now.’
‘Are you sure he was looking at you?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘I expect he was thinking what a pretty little girl you are.’
‘I don’t think he was thinking that,’ said Leila doubtfully.
Zeinab let it pass but she remembered Owen’s worries that the slavers might try to steal Leila back and decided to keep her eyes open in future. Once or twice she saw a man look at Leila in a way that troubled her but in each case Leila said it was not the man who had looked at her before. Zeinab mentioned it to Musa’s wife and she said she would talk to Musa about it so that he could be on his guard, too.
Zeinab also told her friend Aisha about it, but Aisha said that men were always looking at young girls in a troubling way and she doubted if there was any real matter for concern. However, Zeinab thought she would mention it to Owen when he got back, which she hoped would be soon.
SIX
There was an unfamiliar face at the station, belonging to the man standing in for the clerk. He said that he was the clerk’s brother and that he had done the job before. He was familiar with the duties. His name, he said, was Babikr.
Owen asked him about the station. How much traffic was there? Lots, said Babikr. But, on further enquiry, it didn’t seem to amount to that much, merely the train coming up from Luxor once a day and then a corresponding train returning south late in the afternoon. Sometimes a goods train passed through, usually at night. It must have been this train that Leila had seen and then hidden under. Trains stopped at Denderah for water and to drop or pick up packages. Like the bride box, thought Owen. There wasn’t a lot of business of this sort.
Owen asked if he knew of a white man who had come to Denderah recently on business.
Babikr nodded.
‘That would be Clarke Effendi,’ he said. ‘He trades in gum arabic and trocchee shells. The desert men’ — this was said with a certain contempt — ‘bring the gum in on their camels. It gets divided here and sent to different destinations, some on the coast, some in the big cities. A lot goes to Cairo. Clarke Effendi comes to see to that himself. He does not keep a man in Denderah.’
Babikr said that Clarke Effendi did not come often. He would wait, perhaps for months, for the stocks of gum arabic to build up and then would come with a big caravan to take it away. He combined this with a large trade in trocchee shells. On the outward journey from the coast to Denderah he would bring trocchee shells, which again would be distributed from Denderah. Most would go up to Cairo, from where they would be distributed to factories inland, but some would go straight to Alexandria or Port Said for export abroad. The shells went all over the world, some as far as America.
Having deposited trocchee shells in Denderah, the caravan would pick up gum arabic for the return journey. It was a big operation, said Babikr, and it all came together at Denderah. For over a week Denderah would be transformed.
‘You wouldn’t recognize it, Effendi.’
The space behind the station, about the size of two football fields, would be given over to camels and their drivers. The incoming loads of trocchee shells and gum arabic would be divided and subdivided and re-consigned. All, said Babikr, was bustle and busyness.
And over it all, Clarke Effendi presided in person. He had assistants, of course, mostly Levantines from the north, but he watched over it all like a hawk. ‘Trusting no one,’ said Babikr in admiration.
Miraculously, in little more than a week, it would all get sorted out. The trocchee shells would go one way, the gum arabic another. The desert men would go back to their gum trees, the caravan, its camels now loaded up with bales of gum arabic, back to the coast. The space behind the station would become empty and all, said Babikr, would be still again.