Hadir shakes his head. ‘He was a good man. No enemy!’
Nicholas thinks, I would have said the same thing of Solomon Mandel, if anyone had asked me. He remembers what Hadir had told him on the road from Safi, how Sultan al-Mansur had forgiven his old foe al-Seddik: Sometimes a new sultan will punish his enemies after a battle. Sometimes he will command that the skin shall be flayed from their living bodies…
He looks again at the patch of dirt Hadir has led him to. A small scorpion emerges from the meagre shade of a rock and sets off in a slow scuttle towards the nearest acacia bush.
‘I’ve seen all I need to see here,’ Nicholas says. ‘Now show me where your friend is buried.’
A twenty-minute walk brings Nicholas to the Aduana quarter, a district of warehouses and private dwellings where the Christian community of Marrakech plies its trade with its hosts across a mud-brick frontier ten feet high. In the heat, Nicholas feels as though he’s walked from Bankside to Barnthorpe without resting on the way.
To his relief, it is shady in the lanes of the Aduana. But the shadows cannot dim the colourful garb of its inhabitants. Instead of soberly dressed Woodbridge merchants or the dark-gowned worthies he’s seen in the Exchanges in Antwerp or Rotterdam, here the factors and the middlemen, the sellers and the buyers are draped in vividly coloured clothes. He sees silk gowns, linen ponchos, brilliantly dyed cloth coats, pantaloons and galligaskins of every hue under the sun. From Hadir, he learns these are Christians from Andalucía, Constantinople, Alexandria, from the Balkans and the Levant, some even from Persia. Hadir exchanges greetings with many of them. Nicholas begins to understand now why Cecil House is so full of busy, serious-faced clerks hurrying to and fro. If Adolfo Sykes was but one single agent in the Cecils’ vast network of intelligencers, the reports flowing into Cecil House must give Lord Burghley and his crook-backed son an almost god’s-eye view of the known world.
The Christian church in the Aduana is a mud-brick building almost indistinguishable from the others in the lane, save for an iron three-bar cross of Eastern design above the entrance. In the adjoining graveyard, Nicholas walks amongst a score of dirt mounds, each bearing a simple cross. Adolfo Sykes’s resting place is the newest. The stone still bears the recent marks of the mason’s chisel, and the wind has not yet softened the dirt mound beneath it. Though he has had cause in his life to question the deity to whom this little plot is sacred, Nicholas stands for a moment in silence and offers up a prayer that Adolfo Sykes’s suffering is at an end.
‘Why does Sayidi Nich-less wish to see the grave of a man he does not know?’ Hadir asks, his gentle brown eyes focused on the grave, as though he’s embarrassed by his own question.
Not wanting to ensnare himself in a hasty lie, Nicholas takes his time replying.
‘A friend of his, in England. He hadn’t heard from Master Sykes for some time. When he learned I was coming here, he asked me to seek news of him.’
Hadir looks him in the eye. ‘Is this friend you speak of the minister of the English queen? The minister who sent Sayidi Nich-less here to study our medicine?’
‘Just a friend,’ Nicholas says, before making a discreet bow and turning away from the grave.
An innocent question? he wonders. Or has Hadir Benhassi started drawing his own conclusions about my visit to the grave of Adolfo Sykes?
When Sumayl al-Seddik had told him ‘my tent shall be your tent’, he was being somewhat modest, Nicholas discovers the next day.
The minister’s mansion is near the el-Badi Palace, close enough for the rotund little courtier to answer the sultan’s whim without working up an undignified amount of perspiration. Like most fine houses in Marrakech, its external walls are an unremarkable, unadorned expanse of mud-brick. Only when he is inside does Nicholas see the beauty – and the wealth – on display. He sits with his host and Professor de Lisle on cushions in a fragrant garden, shaded from the worst of the sun beneath a row of fig trees. Musicians serenade them with strangely enticing music played on lutes with extravagantly long necks. A spicy fish pottage is served. ‘We call it shebbel,’ al-Seddik tells him. ‘It is similar to your English salmon.’ But Nicholas cannot think of any salmon he’s ever eaten that was plucked by hand from an ornamental cistern full of water piped down from the Atlas mountains. The dish is serviced to him by a black slave more than six feet tall, as handsome as an angel, and purchased – as his master is happy to explain – at huge expense from the most exclusive slave merchant in Timbuktu. His companions, not one of them less imposing, cast cooling water scented with ambergris from brass censers over the diners. The plump little courtier, Nicholas decides, has a taste for the exceptional.
The meal is commenced without formal prayers, Nicholas notices. Al-Seddik simply mouths his own grace before tucking into the food with his bare fingers.
As they eat, Nicholas learns where this great wealth comes from: interests in gold mines, in tanneries, in slaving ships. And al-Seddik is humble in his gratitude for his good fortune. ‘I am a simple man, with simple tastes,’ he assures Nicholas on more than one occasion. ‘Why Allāh, the most merciful, the most compassionate, has chosen me for such favours, I cannot imagine, other than that I might contribute much al-waqf to my fellows. The Bimaristan al-Mansur hospital will ensure that I may continue to thank Him long after I have passed into heaven.’
Nicholas cannot stop himself smiling as he thinks of what old Baronsdale, the president of the College of Physicians, would make of this, with his parson’s rectitude and stern frugality.
The talk turns to physic, de Lisle translating the more arcane matters that al-Seddik’s otherwise excellent English cannot encompass. Nicholas discovers that the Moors practise medicine much as the Europeans do, using the same Galenic and Hippocratic texts from antiquity. Plague, he learns, is as much a tribulation here as it is in London, though London is happily spared the malignant ills caused by eating too many musk-melons and apricots, which al-Seddik terms fruit-fevers.
‘Tomorrow, Dr Shelby, you must visit our Bimaristan,’ al-Seddik says, as though he’s kept the best dish till last. ‘I think you might find it a little different from your hospitals in England. A procedure is to be performed that may interest you. Have you perhaps witnessed a… a…’ He struggles to find the correct English. ‘Help me, please, Professor – an operation on the qassabat al-ri’a – the pipe of the lung?’
‘The windpipe,’ says de Lisle in a superior voice. ‘The procedure to be performed is a laryngotomy.’
Nicholas’s eyes widen in surprise. To his knowledge, the procedure has been performed successfully only once in Europe, and that almost fifty years ago. Al-Seddik might just as well have invited him to watch a hanging or a burning – because the subject’s chances of survival could hardly be worse.
29
‘It’s nothing but a sentence of death,’ Bianca tells Jenny Solver, barely able to keep the tears of pity from pooling in her eyes. ‘They might as well drag the poor souls to Tyburn and hang them. It would be quicker and a deal more merciful.’
‘I heard it from Alderman Goodricke’s maid,’ the other woman replies, with the customary joy of an inveterate gossip, ‘so it must be true.’
Bianca shakes her head in disbelief. ‘A wooden house, thrown up on the Pike Garden, to imprison all who have the sickness? It’s positively heartless. They should be treated in their own homes. If they must die, let it be in the bosom of their families.’