Chapter Sixteen
July 1, 1811
Three fifteen in the morning. The palace of Nazim Pasha in Kilis, Turkey. A chamber in which Sabine Godard had so far contrived to stay since her uncle’s death. She had, in fact, not left the room since her uncle died. She was aware there were now armed guards at her door. She was also aware that strangulation was the preferred method of disposing of inconvenient women, and was, therefore, relatively confident the men were not there to murder her at some agreeable moment in time.
Sabine lay on her mattress unable to sleep. Her body and heart were heavy with grief and disbelief. She hadn’t slept much since before Godard had died, and when she had managed to close her eyes, she kept waking up in tears or in the grip of fear. Twice now, she’d tried to leave the palace, but each time her instructions were countermanded or simply never carried out. Nazim Pasha had a charming, infuriating habit of agreeing that she must return home, and yet nothing ever happened. His promises were always for a tomorrow that never came.
She’d known for days that Foye had been right. Nazim Pasha’s interest in her was indeed personal. Sexual in nature. From the very beginning of their arrival in Kilis, overtures had been made and carefully misunderstood. The pasha wished to be—intended to be?—intimate with her. The thought of him touching her like that turned her cold and hollow.
She could not help but consider the fate of Aimee du Buck de River, Empress Josephine’s cousin who was rumored to have ended up in the Seraglio sometime after 1788 when the ship she was sailing on was attacked by pirates. That Sabine might share such a destination could not be discounted. The pasha himself had a harem. She’d passed by the cloistered quarters several times, and once, just once, in the first days of her stay at the palace in Kilis, she had been given a tour of the women’s quarters.
They lived quite well, if one did not mind that these women’s lives were confined to this single area of the palace. The pasha’s wives had a freer existence, but his concubines were not so lucky. She was sorely afraid she would end up in the harem.
In the middle of these myriad thoughts, typically unpleasant for her of late, she heard the door between her room and Godard’s creak. But that room was empty of life now. The door had been firmly closed for days. Sabine lay motionless, convinced, hoping, praying that her thoughts about the Empress Josephine’s cousin had led her to hear things, to mistake the sound of a servant outside her door for the sound of an intruder in her room.
Someone was here. The soft pad of footsteps on the carpet wasn’t her imagination. Nor was the flicker of light from a lamp. Terror slid like ice down Sabine’s spine. This could not be happening. Surely not. Not to her. And yet, someone was in her room. Creeping from the interior door toward her bed. She had a fascinating and paradoxical desire to cover her head with her blanket in the hope that whoever it was would realize he’d made a mistake and leave her alone, a bit shaken, but none the worse for her fright.
Sabine willed herself not to move or change her breathing while she processed what she was hearing. The choice of doing nothing, which still exerted considerable pull over her, was unthinkable and illogical.
Whoever was in the room was being very quiet. Stealthy. She forced her limbs to relax as she turned to face the door and slide a hand beneath her covers. She palmed the pistol she kept with her at all times since shortly after Godard had died. She clenched her hand around the butt of the weapon and prayed she would not shake when the time came to pull the trigger. No one, not even the pasha himself, would take her anywhere without first learning that she was going to fight for herself.
The intruder stopped walking. She peeked from beneath her lashes. If she was going to shoot a man, she intended to get a look at him first. He was large. Far too tall and too slender to be Nazim Pasha.
Had he sent someone to strangle her after all?
Underneath the covers, her fingers searched for and found the safety on her little pistol. My God, the man was a giant; at least as tall as Foye. With her heart pounding and with her trying to maintain an even breathing that simulated sleep, she registered the impossible fact that, from what she could see, her interloper was wearing English clothes.
Foye was not here. There was no reason on earth to think he would be. They had parted quite finally in Buyukdere. By now, he must be hundreds of miles away in Palmyra or Damascus or even further south, if not, in fact, entirely gone from the continent. He might already be on his way to England, to the lovely city of St. Ives.
She steeled herself against the fear ripping through her. There was no ignoring the terror, but she would not meekly accept whatever the pasha intended for her. She turned onto her back, heart racing, and brought up her pistol. She pointed the weapon at the man’s heart when he knelt at her bed. “Get away,” she said in Arabic. “Or I will shoot you like a dog.”
In the darkness, she could see her attacker was an Englishman.
Before she could react, she was pinned to the mattress by a large and heavy male body. English clothes or not, he squeezed her wrist in a painful grip that prevented her from firing the gun. In the same motion, he covered her mouth with his bare palm.
He held her completely immobile. There was nothing she could do to combat the truth that she did not have the physical strength to free herself. His lower body lay on top of her, heavy and immovable. Panic tore through her again, and she exploded against the restraint. She squeezed her fingers around her pistol. If she got the chance, so help her, she would shoot him dead before she let him touch her.
He put his mouth by her ear and whispered in a low, desperate voice, “Sabine. It’s Foye.” English. He was speaking English to her. He tightened his grip on her. “Be still or all is lost.”
She went quiet even though it occurred to her she might be dreaming. Maybe none of this was happening. Foye, or whoever he was, did not remove his hand from her mouth nor ease the weight of his body pinning her to the bedding. Each lungful of air she sucked in brought her in closer contact with his torso. He raised up enough that she could see his face in the light of his tiny lamp.
Without releasing his hold on her, he leaned over her enough for her to confirm that it was, indeed, Foye. Her breath caught in her lungs. She recognized the uneven features, the hooked nose and his light eyes. She didn’t understand how or why he was here, but he was. Emotion choked her. She wanted to cry with relief, but she couldn’t even do that much.
In the same low, low voice as before, Foye said, “Nod your head if you understand I am Foye and not here to do you harm.” She nodded, and slowly, he removed his hand from her mouth, ready to stop a cry if he’d misjudged her or the situation. “I presume,” he said in the same whisper, “that you no longer intend to shoot me.”
When she shook her head, her lips brushed his palm. He lifted his hand from her mouth.
“Nor that you are averse to leaving this place.”
“I am not,” she murmured back. Foye’s eyes were fixed on her, looking into her. He seemed unaware that he remained lying across her, his body trapping her against the mattress. Despite everything, from the moment she’d recognized Foye, her panic eased.
“Excellent.”
“Is it really you?” she whispered. “Foye?”
“Yes.” He lay a finger across his lips. He torqued his upper body to reach for something that he dropped beside them. A battered satchel. He did not release her wrist from his vise-like grip until he’d reached in and taken her pistol. He set the trigger lock and slipped the gun into his coat pocket. From the satchel, he brought out a bundle of something, clothing, she thought. He continued in a voice so low she had to strain to hear him. “Put these on.”
She took a breath and pulled aside the covers. Her body felt too light and her heart fluttered in her chest, a sparrow trying to find a way out. Her thick cotton shift, quite English in its hideousness, hid her from the top of her throat to all but an inch or two above her ankles. She was quite safe from him seeing much that was indiscreet. Foye watched her as she unrolled what proved to be clothes and a pair of shoes. She separated the various pieces.
“Men’s clothes?” She, too, spoke in a low voice.
“You must pass for a native boy.” He stayed close, his mouth near her ear. “For the illusion to succeed, wear nothing but these clothes. Nothing occidental. Nothing womanly. These clothes and nothing else, clear?” He pressed her elbow. His fingers were warm through the fabric of her nightdress. “Make haste, Sabine. There is little time to spare.”
She looked at the unfamiliar clothing. She’d seen any number of men dressed in such a costume, but that did not mean she knew how to don one herself. She could only guess the order in which they went on.
If she was to leave the palace as a boy, her costume must be precisely right. For that, she would need Foye’s assistance. Her body hollowed out, but she nodded curtly and like him, stood.
“The shirwal first.” He picked up the baggy trousers, demonstrated how she must step into them, then handed them to her. Foye’s tiny lamp did not cast enough light for her to put on clothes with which she was so unfamiliar. What’s more, she knew from his miserable expression he had already anticipated the difficulty. “I’m sorry,” he said with such abject wretchedness that she felt, if not better, then at least less awkward.
So be it. She hiked up her nightdress high enough to step into the shirwal.
Foye turned his head while she pulled up the trousers, but he had to fasten them for her while she held her nightdress above her waist. His fingers brushed her bare skin in incidental touches she suspected were more awkward for him than for her. When the trousers were managed, he fumbled around on the bed a bit before he selected a long, narrow length of fabric. He hesitated, staring at the cloth in his bands.
She grabbed his wrist until he looked into her face. “We do what we must,” she told him, squeezing her fingers around him for emphasis. “There can be no modesty now.”
Foye nodded. She did not think she was mistaken about his relief.
With some fumbling, they got the fabric in place enough that she could hold it over her chest while Foye removed her nightdress in a swift, efficient motion. Despite that she was not tall, she did not have a boy’s figure. She understood, as Foye had anticipated, that her bosom, if left free beneath clothes intended for a man, would give the lie to her supposed gender. Foye grabbed the ends of the strip and tightly wrapped the length of silk twice around her in an improvised corset of sorts. She could hardly breathe after he tied a knot in the back and stepped away.
Relieved, she supposed, that the need to touch her was over with. As was she.
He reached into the satchel and took out a clay jar about the size of his hand. She frowned and forgot that she was indecently covered when he opened the jar. A pungent smell filled the room.
“Closer,” he said, gesturing. She did so, and he slathered some of me contents of the jar on her bare shoulder. “A walnut extract,” he explained, “to darken your skin.” Indeed. If she was to pass as a native boy, best she not be English pale. Between the two of them, they covered her upper body and arms with the lotion. The intimacy of him touching her naked skin hardly felt intimate at all. Instead, she worried that in the dimness of her room they would miss some crucial spot. They covered her face and throat last. Sabine applied the ointment using both her hands, and when she thought she was done, she lifted her face to his so he could examine her for spots she’d missed.
Foye picked up the lamp, taking care to keep his body between the light and the door, and slowly examined her. His perusal was thorough. He used the side of his thumb to even out the application on her cheek and underside of her jaw.
“Thank God you’ve got brown eyes,” he said. “Otherwise this would be doomed to failure.”
She rubbed a place on her cheek that still felt damp, then waved her arms to make sure the lotion was sufficiently dry on her skin.
Foye snatched a shirt from what was left of the bundle on her mattress. She glanced up while he positioned the garment over her head and confirmed her arms were correctly placed for the sleeves. He brought the shirt down, she thrust her arms through the sleeves, and he continued the downward motion. She was covered now.
The worst was over.
“When we get outside,” he said, “do not touch anything. Most especially, don’t rub your face.”
She nodded. When she had her arms free to finish adjusting the shirt, he picked up an outer shirt of a lightweight fabric with narrow vertical stripes. They were in the process of getting it settled on her when a loud bang from outside her door startled them both.