“If you hope to have a peaceful relationship with your future family, you will have to endure this yearning, whether you like it or not—watch out!” Sibylla grabbed Emily’s arm and pulled her away from a suspended crate spinning dangerously on its way off a Danish ship.
“I’m so happy that Uncle Oscar and his family are coming for our feast!” Emily said once the danger had passed. “It’s all right if Grandmother Mary finds the journey too strenuous, because I’m going to meet her soon anyway.” Emily and Sabri were planning to travel to London for their honeymoon and stay there for one year so that Sabri could further his medical training and Emily could finally undertake her art studies.
“The rooms for Oscar’s family still have to be made ready. I really don’t know how we’re going to get everything done in time!” Sibylla sighed as they entered the warehouse. “Wait here. I’ll be right down.”
As Sibylla ran up the stairs to the second floor, the muezzin’s call to prayer came from the minaret; the hall rapidly emptied out, as did the entire harbor, with the exception of a few Christian sailors.
Emily leaned against a pallet of leather and dreamily stroked the smooth material. She thought of Sabri and how much she loved him. So much that she would have endured anything, even leaving Mogador forever.
She had sensed it immediately when they first met on his return from London. Now that they were married, she was sure: he was the one. She had never thought that it would be so wonderful to be man and wife—one flesh, as Captain Comstock had read from the Bible when he married them. She closed her eyes and thought back to their first night together in the captain’s quarters, which Comstock had lent them for the occasion. She thought of Sabri’s arms, which had held her so tightly and told her that she belonged to him from now on; of his mouth, which had caressed not only her mouth with his lips and tongue but also all the other areas of her body, especially those where her most overwhelming sensations lay hidden. A strange, greedy desire had taken hold of her when he tenderly touched her in these hidden places . . .
The warehouse gate creaked on its hinges. Emily turned around and watched it being opened slowly, stealthily. A shadow lingered a moment, then entered. A tall man in a black djellaba and a black turban crossed the hall and climbed the wooden stairs so rapidly that he did not notice Emily standing there in the semidarkness. He hurried toward her mother’s office. Emily stayed quiet as a mouse next to the pallet. The hairs on her neck stood on end when she saw that the stranger had covered his face except for a small slit for his eyes. Who was this man? He wore Arab clothing and yet he had not answered the call to prayer. She held her breath and watched as the stranger raised his hand and knocked. She could hear her mother’s muffled voice telling the man to enter. He opened the door and disappeared.
Emily had a tingling sensation in her stomach, half frightened, half curious. Without making a sound, she climbed the stairs and tiptoed to the closed office door. She hesitated, but her curiosity won out. She crouched down and peered through the keyhole. The stranger was standing with his back to the door, so Emily’s view was partially blocked, but even so, she could see the unspeakable terror on her mother’s face.
“Hello, Sibylla. Why are you looking at me like that? Do you no longer recognize your husband?” The stranger removed his scarf.
“Benjamin?!” Sibylla stammered and then again, “Benjamin?” She recognized his voice, that slightly nasal, haughty voice, like an echo from times past, and his icy blue eyes. And still she could not believe it—she had thought him dead for twenty-two years, burned to death in a blaze no one could have survived. But there he was, standing before her, pale and shrunken, his face covered in scars and bulges as though liquid wax had hardened, no eyelashes, eyebrows, or proper nose. She had the feeling a ghost was standing in front of her, and she shuddered with fright.
Benjamin pulled his lipless mouth into a hideous, knowing grin. “I’ve changed a bit, haven’t I, my dear? But the same is true of you. You have aged.” Before she had a chance to react, he was by her side, touching her hair, now more white than blonde, with fingers that resembled claws, bulging and fissured. She recoiled full of disgust, but he quickly grabbed her wrist. “Go ahead and look at me, look at my new skin! It took me one whole year to grow into it.”
“Let go of me at once!” Sibylla freed herself with one lurch and sought refuge behind her desk.
“Oh, calm down, Sibylla! I have always found your money far more attractive than you. But then, you always loved your books more than you did me.”
He stepped over to her abacus, which stood in front of the wall in a large wooden frame on a movable table, and idly moved some beads along the wires.
“How did you survive? I saw the ruins. No one could have made it out alive.” She stared at his back, still struggling to understand that it was really and truly Benjamin standing there.
He moved awkwardly, not because of her question but because his cloak scraped against his scarred skin. He would never get used to this feeling of being sewn into a suit that was too small for him. He pushed one of the wooden beads. It glided silently along the wire and crashed against the frame.
He was tormented by more than his deformities. The horrific images of the bombardment haunted him as clearly and vividly as if he had escaped the inferno yesterday and not many years ago. He could still hear the earsplitting crash of the cannonballs, the impact of the incendiary projectile that swallowed his screams of fear. He could still feel the sand and dust, mortars and small rocks raining down on him, and he still had to force himself not to fall on his knees and whimper, covering his head with his arms whenever the air around him shimmered with heat or smelled of gunpowder and sulfur.
His fingers clenched the wooden frame of the abacus.
“Where have you been all these years?” Sibylla asked. “Why did you never get in touch or come back?”
“Be quiet!” He spun around, making his cloak fly, and she flinched. “Do you want to make me believe that you’ve missed me? Don’t bother. I know that you let that Frenchman kiss away your tears before even the first month of mourning had passed. I know that and then some!”
She clutched the edge of her desk and shuddered to think that Emily might enter at any moment to find out what was taking so long. She did not even want to imagine what Benjamin might do if he discovered Emily and began asking questions.
But for now, Benjamin was not asking anything. He was absorbed in memories. Almost a whole year of darkness lay between his old life as the respected businessman Benjamin Hopkins and his new existence as a nobody disfigured by fire. This new life had begun with unspeakable pain in the naval hospital in Gibraltar. Military doctors and nurses had told him what he no longer remembered: that French soldiers had found him lying on the beach after the bombardment. Unconscious, naked, and covered in terrible burns, he was found between two dead French soldiers. The French had taken him for one of theirs, carried him on board one of their warships, and transported him with other casualties to Gibraltar. He had been expected to die, but—to the great astonishment of all—he had grimly clung to the little bit of life left in him.
By the time he was finally better and the physicians cautiously began speaking of survival, he knew that he would have to start a completely new life. If he returned to Morocco, he would surely be arrested again. So he caught a ship headed to London, went underground in the large city, and built a small import-and-export business. His talent as a businessman was all he had left. He did well in his business and could have lived undisturbed until the end of his days. But thoughts of the fortune hidden away under a sundial in Mogador ate at him. Only after twenty years had he finally summoned the strength and courage to retrieve it.
“You could have come back, Benjamin.” Sibylla’s voice intruded into his reminiscences. “I had gone to see Abd al-Rahman, don’t you remember? He pardoned you. You were free!”
The ground under his feet swayed as Benjamin realized that he had been living in hiding for nothing.
“Is that true?” he asked flatly. “You really convinced the sultan all by yourself?”
“Well, I had help.” She thought of André.
“Yes, right!” he sneered. “You went with Rouston to see the sultan. And I’m quite sure you compensated him generously for his support.”
“How dare you?”
“Why so virtuous all of a sudden, my dear?” The hem of his djellaba undulated through the air as he took a quick step toward her. “You mean it’s not true, what everyone in Mogador is saying?”
Sibylla was speechless as he went on. “That you squandered my gold by giving it to these good-for-nothing Moors? That you had houses, schools, and even a water-supply system built for those who had me arrested? I wouldn’t have thought that you were so stupid and sentimental.”
Benjamin struck the desk angrily with his fists. Oh, how he had dug, first with a shovel, then with his bare hands, only to discover that everything was gone, that not a single gold sovereign was left under his sundial! Afterward, he had returned to the tiny room he had rented in the fondouk and sat and brooded until he realized that only Sibylla could have found his gold. He himself had given her a clue during her visit to his cell on the Island of Mogador when he had asked her how much money Qaid Hash-Hash’s soldiers had found and where they had searched. The bitch must have turned the whole house upside down until she had finally found it.