The Lioness of Morocco(54)

Emily had been gone four months now, and Sibylla could not remember a more joyless Christmas season. It was now the end of April and still she felt just as sad and despondent as if their falling-out had come just yesterday.

“She will return to you,” André had said when he left. “Be patient and don’t worry! I am taking good care of our daughter.”

If only patience were not so difficult, she thought and looked across the funeral procession to Qaid Samir, who was standing on the other side of the city gate, surrounded by his entourage, to pay his last respects to the dead tujjar al-sultan. Next to her, two traders were engaged in a conversation under their breath.

“To think a simple box with a body is all that is left of one of the country’s most influential men,” one of them whispered, looking at the humble wooden casket, adorned by neither picture nor ornaments nor flowers. Only the dates of Toledano’s birth and death according to the Hebrew calendar were engraved on the lid.

“The man was eighty years old. I hope I can reach such a venerable age,” said the other and reverently doffed his hat.

Sibylla thought about Benjamin. He’d have been fifty-one years old now, had he not died a gruesome death. The secret he’d left still cast a shadow over Sibylla. For his part in things, Toledano had gotten off lightly. Too lightly, in Sibylla’s opinion, and she had stubbornly refused to do business with him all these years.

She turned to John and was about to tell him that she wanted to go home when Victoria accidently met her eyes, then quickly lowered her gaze.

Victoria had apologized, but the relationship between the two remained strained. The peace was superficial and, in her heart, Sibylla had not yet forgiven her. She knew that John had had a very serious talk with his wife and told her that under no circumstances was she to tell outsiders either the reason for Emily’s sudden departure or her whereabouts. Since then, Victoria had hardly left the house and Sibylla assumed that the young woman felt lonelier and unhappier in Mogador than ever.

The funeral procession had now gathered around the grave in the Jewish cemetery, a dusty, untended piece of land. The rabbi was reading aloud from the book of Genesis, and Qaid Samir and his entourage returned to the city. The traders too began to leave.

“Hello, Mrs. Hopkins. This weather is perfect for a funeral, is it not?”

Sibylla turned around in surprise. Sara Willshire stood behind her, smiling nervously.

Sibylla muttered a greeting and turned to leave, but Sara quickly asked, “Where’s Emily? I do hope she’s not ill. I haven’t seen her for such a long time.”

Sibylla felt herself growing angry. Where did this woman get the nerve to ask such a question when her gossiping was the reason that Emily was gone!

“I’m sorry, but did you just inquire about my daughter?”

“I was merely trying to fulfill my neighborly duties and inquire about Emily’s well-being.” Sara sounded aggrieved.

“Well, in that case, allow me to answer your question.” Sibylla gave her a withering look. “Emily is with her father.”

“With her father?” Sara stammered. “What do you mean? I mean, how is that possible?”

“Why, Mrs. Willshire, you amaze me. You know very well how that is possible. After all, you yourself contributed to it!”

Sara blushed and looked away. “Your reproach is unfair. Everyone in Mogador knows the truth. Sooner or later, your daughter-in-law would have found out anyway, and Emily too.”

Sibylla’s nostrils quivered. “I have only one thing to say, Mrs. Willshire: don’t you ever again pour poison in my family’s ears!”





Chapter Twenty-Six

Qasr el Bahia, early summer 1861

At breakfast, André announced, “Today, the women and the older children are going to work the upper terraced field. You will take out all the plants that have more than three bulbs and separate and replant them.”

After half a day, Emily furtively massaged her aching back. She wanted no one to know how exhausting the work in the field was for her. Aynur noticed, however. She could imagine how the city girl was feeling. After all, she herself had once been a pampered little thing whose most arduous task had been to pick flowers in the harem garden.

André had paid little heed to her laments and tears in the beginning. He was not even bothered when the sun burned her delicate skin and her soft hands blistered.

“You can return to your tribe anytime you wish,” he had said. “But if you wish to stay, you must share my life with me. I have no use here for a harem princess. What I need is a woman who is going to farm this estate with me.”

He had not spared her in the beginning and she knew it was his way of punishing her for driving the Englishwoman away. But it had only served to motivate her. She wanted to prove she could win the good-looking foreigner for herself, even if he carried the Englishwoman in his heart. She made sure he never saw how she cried with exhaustion or loneliness. She persevered and fought for his respect. With time, she came to realize that she much preferred this life to the idleness of the harem. She reflected on her Glaoua heritage, the pride of her tribe, its longing for freedom and love of the land, and she wondered how she had survived so many years of a walled-in life.

As her pregnancy became visible, André was careful not to overwork her. Then came the day when the child moved. She took his hand and placed it on her belly and he smiled at her for the first time. But only when Tamra placed the newborn Malika in his arms and he looked at the baby with tender, surprised eyes did she know that he would not send her away.

She had been fearful for a long time that the Englishwoman would return and claim André for herself. But strangely enough, she had never been seen at Qasr el Bahia again. Aynur now had to witness every day how much the Englishwoman’s daughter meant to her husband, but she did not complain. Maybe he had loved the Englishwoman more than her, but he loved all his children with equal devotion. She also knew she had become indispensable to André. The Englishwoman was a spoiled city dweller who was probably ill-suited for life out here. But her daughter, she had to admit, put up a good front. She never complained or shirked her work, and she tried to keep up with her half siblings. She tried to emulate Malika, who picked up bundles of saffron bulbs from the freshly plowed furrow and threw them into the basket on her arm without breaking the rhythm of her walk.

The little Crocus sativus, whose minuscule pistils make the world’s most precious spice, stayed in the same field for four years. After that, the bulbs had to be taken out of the soil, divided, and replanted elsewhere. André hired Ait Zelten for that work, the saffron harvest, and many other jobs on the estate.

Christian had attached a mule to a simple plow consisting of a wooden rod with an iron hook on the end. He followed the plow and directed the mule with reins and voice commands as the crocus bulbs were exposed. The women gathered them up and threw them in the baskets over their shoulders. Once the baskets were full, they were placed on the field, the children carried them to the edge, emptied them, and separated the bulbs. Then the bulbs were taken to be stored in a dry, dark, and well-ventilated storage facility until the end of July, when they were planted in different fields after the barley harvest.

The Ait Zelten women in their colorful skirts looked like splashes of bright paint on the brown soil. Emily had already captured their suntanned faces with charcoal or oil color and brush. Mothers with their babies strapped on their backs, children bustling about and playing catch or petting the mule in between doing their chores. Emily’s only regret was not being able to depict the sounds and smells on her canvas: the melodious singsong of the language, the children’s laughter, the soft jingling of the women’s silver jewelry, and the smell of the earth.

Canvases, paint, charcoal pencils, and sketchbooks had been the first things she packed for her move to Qasr el Bahia. She had been uncertain at first if André’s family and the Ait Zelten would allow her to draw. After all, Islam prohibited the depiction of any part of God’s creation. But neither André’s family nor the Ait Zelten were bothered when Emily painted them. They were pleased to look at themselves in her pictures and proud when they were chosen as models. In the countryside, far removed from the guardians of the faith in the cities, people made religion their own. The Ait Zelten maintained their traditional faith in nature spirits, omens, and symbols as firmly as their faith in Islam. But André and Aynur’s children observed their prayer times only for their mother’s sake, as Frédéric confided in Emily, and André himself said that he would rather put his faith in good old common sense than in any deity.

Emily had been living here for six months now and had immortalized everyday life on the estate in many paintings and drawings: her father and Frédéric shoeing a horse in the threshing area in front of the stables; André Jr. proudly perched on a branch of the blue-silver Atlas cedar in the courtyard; old Tamra dozing in the sun on a bench in front of the house; two barefoot Berber boys driving a herd of goats along the old mud wall. She had sketched Aynur decorating the graves of her two little daughters under the gnarly old holly oak in her garden with the delicate first flowers of spring, and Malika, one evening in April, when a troupe of jugglers and storytellers had come by and she had danced with them in front of the campfire.