Panther's Prey (20 page)

“Kalid kept you here against your will?” Amy asked.

“Indeed he did. He gave an heirloom sword and quite a bit of money to the Sultan in exchange for me and then drugged me and carried me here from Topkapi. I woke to discover that I was his prisoner.”
 

“Did you try to escape?”

“Of course. But the harem was heavily guarded and I was the
ikbal
, the favorite, so I was watched constantly. I ran away through the bazaar when we were on an outing once and I was back here the same day, betrayed by someone loyal to Kalid.”

“Did he punish you?”

“Oh, no, not directly. He was very clever about getting me to do what he wanted. He once threatened to whip little Memtaz if I didn’t obey him in some trifling matter. He knew that it would pain me much more to see an innocent person suffer for my obstinacy than to endure the whipping myself.”

“Did he ever...force you?” Amy asked hesitantly, coloring slightly.

“Never. He was very experienced with women and could see that despite my resistance, I wanted him. When I first saw him at Topkapi I was dazzled and fascinated, powerfully attracted to him, and he knew it. That always gave him hope, but it took him quite a while to overcome my outrage at the way I had been taken from the Sultan’s palace. By the time we got together I was more than ready for him and, God help me, despite everything he had done, deeply in love.”

Amy was silent.

“You are thinking about the similarities in our histories?” Sarah asked.

Amy nodded.

“That’s why I wanted to discuss this with you. I, more than most people, can understand how you feel, how the conflict of falling in love with a man you should actually hate can tear you apart.”

“I’ll always remember how Malik made love to me,” Amy said softly. “I know I’ll never feel like that again.”

“Never say never,” Sarah observed mysteriously.

“What do you mean?”

The door to the hall opened and Memtaz entered.

“Ah, here is our lunch,” Sarah said. “I think you will enjoy it. I ordered those dishes most acceptable to a Western palate. And afterward, you can meet the children and Kalid’s mother. I’m sure she would be delighted to see you. Would you like that?”

“Very much,” Amy replied, wondering about Sarah’s previous remark.

Was there really any hope that she would see Malik once more?

* * *

Amy stayed three days at Orchid Palace, visiting with Kalid’s grandmother, who fascinated her with stories of the heyday of harem life, and playing with Sarah’s children. It was a brief and pleasant interlude before she had to deal with the next phase of her Ottoman odyssey: the arrival of Beatrice and James Woolcott.

Beatrice cried for the first ten minutes of the meeting, despite the fact that she probably would not have recognized Amy if she saw her on the street. Once she was assured, repeatedly, that Amy was fine, and yes, she felt well enough to go back to Constantinople, and no, she didn’t want to talk about any of it just yet, Beatrice began to calm down. She and her husband stayed the night at Orchid Palace, and Bea did her best not to gape over dinner at a vastly entertained Kalid, who cast amused looks at his wife behind Bea’s back while Sarah kicked him under the table. When the Woolcotts and Amy departed the following morning, Amy did not know that Sarah stood on the balcony outside her bedroom, watching the coach leave the courtyard and silently wishing her the best.

Amy passed the time during the trip back to the city looking out the isinglass window of the coach and thinking about Malik. Trying to put him out of her mind didn’t seem to be working; when she had kept busy during waking hours at Orchid Palace she just dreamed about him at night. She knew she could never locate him on her own, even if she tried; the rebels moved their camp at odd intervals and he had made it clear that he didn’t want to hear from her again. What was she going to do, traipse all over the hostile hill country by herself in search of a man the Sultan’s troops couldn’t even find, on the slim hope that he might have changed his mind about her?

It was hopeless.

By the time they reached the Woolcott house, a stately colonial on a wide, tree lined street in Pera, the wealthy European suburb of Constantinople, Amy had resigned herself to going along with whatever arrangements Beatrice and James had made for her. She had nothing else planned, and they’d disrupted their settled lives to make room for her, worrying all through the weeks of her absence that she might be injured or dead.

The least she could do was cooperate.
 

After James had retired to his study, Beatrice and Listak showed Amy to an airy second floor bedroom with French doors leading out to the wide porch which faced the treed grounds. As the servant unpacked her bag Amy examined the capacious cherry armoire, the washstand with its porcelain bowl and pitcher, the brass bed with its frilly canopy and hangings, the Victorian wallpaper printed with cabbage roses and glossy leaves. There were gas jets set into the wall on either side of the bed; Pera was one of the few areas in the Empire where gas was available to homes, as most of the Turks still made do with oil lamps, tapers or even candles. Fresh flowers stood in tall vases on the highboy and on a side table covered with an intricate lace doily.
 

“This is lovely, Aunt Bea. Thank you so much,” Amy observed.
 

“I’m glad you like it, dear,” Beatrice said from the doorway. “It’s been ready and waiting since the morning you arrived in Turkey, and Listak has changed the flowers every few days.”

“I’m sure I’ll be very comfortable here,” Amy replied quietly.

Bea patted her sagging chignon and said, “I’m a little tired from the trip, I think I’d like to lie down for a while. Will you be all right until dinner?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“James and I will see you at six, then,” Bea said, and disappeared, her footsteps hushed by the carpet as she walked down the hall to her room.

“Do you require anything else, miss?” Listak asked in her slightly sibilant English. She was standing next to the armoire, her hands folded.

“Oh, no thank you, Listak. You may go.”

“Will you need me to help you unpack your trunks later? They’re in the closet, Mrs. Spaulding brought them with her from the coach.”

“Don’t worry, I can do that. It will help me settle in to put some of my own things around, don’t you think?”

The servant bowed her head and left the room.

Amy looked out window, thinking of the contrast between this well appointed home and the rebel camp where she had recently spent so much time. She should be grateful to be back in the lap of luxury, but of course she wasn’t.

Amy frowned at her own perversity and decided to unpack her trunks. It would give her something to do.

* * *

In the month that followed, Beatrice made sure that Amy had plenty to do. The British and American embassies, oases of familiar culture to the European population, each had several functions a week, and Amy attended all of them. She sat through luncheons with embassy wives, attended charity planning meetings, dressed up for tea dances and dressed formally for evening affairs. Once the locals got over her exotic adventure in the hills, which Amy downplayed by acting sprightly and discussing it dismissively, they began to treat her as the eligible young heiress she actually was. And it quickly became clear to Amy that the routine Beatrice had ostensibly designed to keep her busy was in reality designed to get her married.
 

Amy had never thought there were so many Western men in Turkey; she had never thought there were so many men anywhere. James was known to be wealthy and successful, so his pretty niece brought them all out of the woodwork. She met junior officers from both garrisons, the sons of James’ colleagues, the scions of industrial families taking the grand tour, and even the nephew of an Italian count. Anyone watching her interact with these young men would not have suspected anything was wrong with her, unless they noticed the blue shadows under her eyes which she had covered up with alum or the continual narrowing of her waist. She took her clothes in herself to avoid comment from Beatrice but nothing could disguise the new prominence of Amy’s cheekbones or her total disinterest in meals. Beatrice varied the menus and ordered new desserts. Deceived by Amy’s apparent gaiety at social functions, Bea ascribed her niece’s lack of appetite to the heat, from which she also suffered.
 

If she had known her niece better, she would have been able to tell that Amy was unhappy. And Amy, trapped in her role of carefree young miss, vented her true feelings in letters to Sarah, who understood the younger woman’s emotions only too well. Her responses calmed Amy somewhat, but in her darkest moments Amy actually considered marrying one of her eager suitors, since Malik appeared lost to her anyway. She would forget, she told herself, she would adjust, she would do what other people did when they abandoned hope of gaining their heart’s desire but kept on living.
 

But somehow she wasn’t ready to make that final break. As summer turned into fall and the days became less infernal, the nights even colder, and the rains came, she kept the flame alive, waiting, watching, for what she wasn’t sure.

She waited, just the same.
 

* * *

Malik tossed a heavy burlap bag of corn meal into the waiting wagon and looked around him, judging how much longer it would take to fill all eight wagons with the grain. He had picked a night with no moon to disguise their operation, but that meant his men were working by the light of oil lamps and had to move quickly. The soldiers who had been guarding the granary were dead, victims of a sneak attack, and the two night watchmen inside the building were bound and gagged. As he watched the wagons fill up with the food that the Sultan hoarded for export while his own subjects were starving, Malik calculated how long it would take to finish the job and get away. The corn meal was destined for drop off points around the country, where it would then be distributed to the people. Malik smiled slightly when he thought about the Sultan’s reaction to this latest piece of larceny; he would just have to do without the revenue from the foreign sales. What a shame.

Dawn was just breaking over the Syrian hills across the border when the last bag was loaded. As the caravan headed out through the alley behind the granary, an old woman answering a call of nature in a nearby field was startled to see the wagons rolling past her. She quickly rearranged her clothes and then stood in silence, watching what was obviously a covert mission. Her somber expression changed when she saw the young man standing at the back of the last wagon holding his finger to his lips. She grinned, then made a reciprocal gesture, waving with her other hand.

The Sultan was no friend of hers. What did she care if some bandits were robbing his storehouse? Good for them!

The young man bent and two bags of corn meal went sailing through the air to land at her feet. She seized them and then blew him a kiss as the wagon reached a turn and hove out of sight.

There would be fresh
pida
bread for dinner that night, she thought, hurrying back to her house with her prize.

“You’re a soft touch,” Anwar said to Malik as the wagon carrying them rumbled along the dirt road, lurching heavily each time it hit a rut cut into the dust by the recent rain.

“Why shouldn’t she have some?” Malik answered. “She’s one of the people the Sultan has been raping for years.”

“Nothing like leaving your calling card.”

“She’ll keep her mouth shut,” Malik said, as they turned off the road and into a narrow lane leading to a series of caves, where they planned to store the haul until it could be moved.

“You trust them all too much,” Anwar said. “She’s poor, but that doesn’t mean she’s an angel, or your supporter.”

“And being rich doesn’t make a woman my enemy, eh?” Malik countered.

Anwar grabbed a bag as it lurched forward when the wagon’s rear wheel hit a rock. “You’re still thinking about her, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I haven’t stopped.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re planning to go on like this?”

“Like what?”

“Driving yourself every minute to forget her. It isn’t working, my friend.”

“How do you know?”

“I know,” Anwar answered in a tone which brooked no argument.

“So what do you suggest?” Malik asked.

“I have no ideas, it’s your decision. I’m just telling you that brooding by night and pretending that everything is fine by day isn’t fooling anybody, least of all yourself.”

Malik was silent as the wagon creaked to a stop. He and Anwar jumped down and got in line to hand the bags inside the cave. There were men already assembled in there to stack them.

“Just do something, “Anwar added, closing the subject. “You’ll feel better.”

“You’re the one who told me to let her go, Anwar. Several times, you told me that, with lots of reasons why it was the right thing to do.”
 

“So I know everything?” Anwar said, grinning. “When did that happen?”

Malik shot him a disgusted glance and handed him a bag.