City of Jasmine

Two

The next day the editor of a newspaper in Los Angeles came through with tickets for the Orient Express, and Aunt Dove began to pack. She insisted on bringing Arthur along—“Roman air is insalubrious to parrots, dear”—and I left her to go in search of Wally. He was still tinkering with the Jolly Roger, whistling a bit of jazz as he worked.

“How’s my darling?” I called, patting her wing. It had been my idea to paint her to resemble a pirate flag. The black highlights lent her a certain gravitas while the dazzling white skull and crossbones on her tail said I meant business.

Wally looked up from the engine. “Your aeroplane is fine and so am I, thanks for asking.”

“Can I fly her to Venice?”

“Depends. Do you feel like landing her in the lagoon? Venice is water, pet.”

I pulled a face. “Not the Veneto. There’s a darling little airfield where we can get some smashing pictures before Aunt Dove and I catch the train to Constantinople.”

He considered then nodded. “She’ll be fine for that, but no further. I’ll take the train up to Venice and finish working on her there. As soon as she’s able, I’ll hopscotch her down to Damascus. There’s a small airfield just outside the city and the ambassador has already contacted the authorities for you, although I’m surprised he knew who to ask. Are we still in charge over there or is it the French now?”

I rolled my eyes. “Wally, do you ever actually read the newspapers we get? It used to be a vilayet of the Turks. We liberated it and there’s an interim Arab government now. The French are hanging around to act as advisors and we’re out.”

He shrugged. “Makes no difference to me and they change their minds every week. I think it’s a conspiracy on the part of mapmakers to sell their wares.”

“More like another souvenir of the war,” I reminded him.

At the end of the war, the Ottoman Empire, once stretched tautly from North Africa east to the Silk Road and north to the Balkans, had been shattered into a thousand pieces. Britain and France had swept up the choicest bits for themselves, leaving the crumbs for others. Unfortunately it had meant breaking a slew of promises to the native Arabs that they could have a country of their own after the war in exchange for their help in throwing off the Turks, the largest and most powerful of the German allies. These accords had left the whole of the region seething with rebellion and resentment with British and French overlords attempting to maintain an uneasy peace, while Arabs rightfully demanded autonomy. The trouble was the French had been meddling in the Holy Land ever since the Crusades and the British authorities weren’t about to be left out of the oil fields in southern Mesopotamia—particularly not since Churchill had set his heart on building an air force.

“Will you have trouble getting through Constantinople?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t do, although Aunt Dove is insisting on giving me a six-shooter to carry. She says Turks can’t be trusted.”

His expressive brows inched upwards. “A six-shooter?”

“Goodness, I don’t know what it is. Something that makes a bang and persuades people to stop doing things you don’t want them to do. It looks like a child’s toy actually, small enough to fit in my palm and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. I feel quite like a gangster’s moll.”

“Did she mind the change in plans?”

“Not at all. In fact, she’s rather happy to get Arthur Wellesley out of Rome. She said he’s picking up Popish habits. She heard him reciting the Paternoster in Latin this morning. In any event, it might not be a bad idea for you to keep the ambassador’s details handy. We might need a little diplomatic assistance if Aunt Dove decides to misbehave.”

He rolled his eyes to heaven. “Saints preserve us.”

I patted the Jolly Roger lightly. “Mind you tighten everything up. I have a little surprise.”

The surprise was a series of barrel rolls I pulled off over the Piazza San Marco. As I heard it later, the Italian authorities were not amused and the pigeons in the square flapped about irritably, but Aunt Dove thought it was all great fun and the reporters lapped it up like kittens with cream. The only one who protested seriously was Arthur, who kicked up a tremendous racket and then played dead for the better part of an hour while Aunt Dove fussed over him with warm brandy. He feebly opened his beak when she spooned the brandy into it, and when she cracked some pistachios for him and drizzled them with honey he hopped around, fluffing out his feathers and making a queer chortling noise that meant he was very happy indeed.

We rested in Venice a day before boarding the Orient Express, and I blessed the instinct that had caused our friend in Los Angeles to book two compartments. Aunt Dove was delightful company, but she snored like a fiend, and Arthur tried my patience at the best of times. I spent most of the journey reading up on the political situation in the region—as pretty and fickle as a spring thunderstorm—and the rest of the time staring out the window at the passing Balkans. It was hard to imagine that this peaceful, beautiful countryside had been the start of such a bloodbath, I mused as I watched hill town and pasture roll past. There were stunning mountain gorges and pastoral and village scenes like something the Brothers Grimm might have conjured out of a storybook. And with every passing mile, I found something new that I would have liked to have shown Gabriel.

Damn. There he was again, hovering at the edge of my life like a ghost that just won’t quit. When he’d first been reported missing and presumed dead at the sinking of the Lusitania, I had spent months catching glimpses of him out of the tail of my eye. Psychosomatic, Aunt Dove had pronounced firmly. She’d prescribed demanding war work and long country walks to clear my head. She’d even found me a job working at a convalescent hospital run by Wally’s mother at their estate at Mistledown. Because his mother was a viscountess and an unrepentant snob, she insisted on taking only pilots as her patients and she wanted a very select group of nurses to attend them. She gave us splendid uniforms of crushed strawberry-pink with clever little caps designed to show off our hair. Most of the girls worked there only to catch a husband, but I had other ideas. I made friends with the lads, and within a few months, I understood the rudiments of flying. And that was what saved me when I thought I would drown in regret after Gabriel. For the first time since he’d been lost, I slept whole nights through, and I didn’t see him around corners and in shadows. I learned to say goodbye, to get on with the business of living.

But now, the nearer I got to Damascus, the closer he felt. I slept badly and dreamed of him when I did. And when I had time alone, I found myself remembering.

I was staring out the window of the Orient Express, a book open on my lap, thinking of the last time I’d seen him, when the door to my compartment opened and Aunt Dove slipped in, a dozen necklaces of polished glass beads clacking as she moved.

“That’s Baroness Orczy’s newest effort, isn’t it?” she asked with a nod to the book in my lap. “I heard it’s quite amusing. Pity you’re not enjoying it.”

I perked up. “What makes you say that?”

“You’ve been stuck on the first page for the last two days. You’re brooding. And from the way you’re toying with your wedding ring on that chain, I’d say it has to do with Gabriel.”

I dropped the chain as if I’d been burned. Since I had been waiting to divorce Gabriel when he was lost, I didn’t have the right to call myself his widow, I reasoned, no matter what society and the law said. But I hadn’t the heart to chuck the ring away, either. I had worn it on a chain since the day of his funeral, tucking it securely into my décolletage even though it brought back the most painful memories of all. I hadn’t expected a wedding ring. We had eloped, and it had seemed like a particularly romantic bit of conjuring that he had managed to get me a ring. He pulled it off my finger on our wedding night to show me the inscription.

“When did you have time?” I had demanded.

He smiled. “It’s mine.” He held up his hand and I saw that the slender gold band he’d worn on his smallest finger, tucked under his Starke signet ring, was missing. “I found a jeweller to inscribe it this afternoon while you were looking for a frock to wear to the wedding. Have a look inside.”

I peered into the ring, puzzling out the script in the dim light. “Hora e sempre,” I read aloud.

He gave me a mock-serious look. “It’s Latin.”

“Yes, I may not have gone to university, but I’m not entirely uneducated,” I said, giving him a little push. “Now and forever.”

He dropped the ring back onto my finger. “I mean it, you know,” he said, his tone light, but his eyes desperately serious. “I suspect I’ll be a rotten husband, really frightful, in fact. I’m not very good at living up to anyone’s expectations but my own, and I’m abominably selfish.”

I looped my arms about his neck. “Yes, you’re a monster. I still married you.”

In spite of my teasing tone, he didn’t smile. Some melancholy had come over him and he put his hands to my wrists, pinning them gently.

“Damned if I know why. What I’m trying to say, Evie, is that my best is a bloody poor thing. But I’ll give you that best of mine, now and forever. Just don’t expect too much, will you?”

I had thrown my arms completely around him then, as much because I couldn’t bear the look of hunted sadness in his eyes as from passion. Some hours later, when he slept heavily, one leg thrown over mine, his face buried in my hair, I closed my hand tightly so I could feel the ring bite into my hand. Now and forever. We had lasted four months....

I let my gaze slide back to the passing Balkan countryside. “Those are particularly nice cows.”

Aunt Dove gave a sigh and took a seat, her beads still clacking. “If that’s meant as an encouragement to me to mind my own business, it’s feeble. Try again.”

“Mind your own business,” I said, smiling.

She shook her head. “It isn’t good for a woman to brood, you know. I think you need a man.”

“Of one thing I am certain, I do not need a man.”

Her expression was sympathetic. “Darling, I know you love Wally dearly, but I think there’s something you ought to know.”

I rolled my eyes. “Oh, heavens, Dove! I know that already.”

She gave a sigh of relief. “Thank God for that. I thought I was going to have to explain to you about boys who go with other boys. Did you figure it out for yourself or did he tell you?”

“A little of both,” I admitted. “One night we had rather too much gin and not enough to eat. I told him the whole story of Gabriel and sobbed a bit in his arms, and then he was holding me. Everything went sort of soft and blurry, and we fell into a kiss. I realised after about two minutes that neither of us had moved. It was what I imagine it would be like to kiss a brother. Or Arthur Wellesley. Just nothing there at all.”

“Really? Curious. One of the best kissers I ever knew was a poof—but he was royal. Perhaps it makes a difference,” she said consolingly. “But that doesn’t change anything, child. You need a proper seeing-to.”

“A ‘seeing-to’? What on earth—” I held up a hand. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

She pursed her lips. “Sex, dear. I’m talking about sex. You need some. And badly, I should think.”

“Aunt Dove, we are not having this conversation. Not now, not ever.”

She pretended not to hear me. “It isn’t your fault, my dear. I imagine after a man like Gabriel Starke, I’d be a bit choosy about my male companions, as well. But just because you won’t find someone to...er, fill his rather large shoes, so to speak, doesn’t mean you can’t have a perfectly pleasant time of it.”

“How do you know he had large shoes to fill?” I demanded. The fact that she was entirely correct was beside the point.

She smiled. “Because for the duration of your brief marriage you looked like the cat that ate the canary. Now, you fought like tigers and he was a crashing failure as a husband. That leaves the bedroom. Clearly, things were satisfactory there. More than satisfactory, if I’m any judge of these things, and I think I am. But just because you are still pining for Gabriel, that’s no reason not to have an interesting time of it. In fact, I think you should. A woman’s insides need lubrication, you know. They’ll go all dry and stick together otherwise.”

I ignored her vague grasp of biology and seized on something else. “I’m not pining for Gabriel. I can’t imagine why you’d think so.”

She rose and kissed the top of my head. “Child, you’re transparent as glass.” She went to the door. “I seem to remember the last thing Gabriel Starke ever gave you was a copy of Peter and Wendy. Interesting that you named your aeroplane the Jolly Roger.”

She closed the door before my shoe hit it, neatly marking the glossy wood.

The brooding over my failed marriage had taken its toll by the time we reached Constantinople. I was snappish and tired, with dark circles under my eyes, but the photographers were waiting. I powdered my face and painted my lips with the brightest crimson lipstick in my box and posed for photographs with a smiling Aunt Dove and a moulting Arthur. He shed bright green feathers all down the train platform, but by the time we had settled in for the last leg of the journey to Damascus he had perked up. Aunt Dove flirted her way through Customs outrageously and as a result, our bags weren’t so much as opened, much less searched. She plied me with pistachios—which I was darkly afraid had once been intended for Arthur—and in due course we arrived in Damascus. The approach to the city was not the finest. For that we ought to have come from Baghdad, crossing the desert to find Damascus shimmering in its oasis with the snowy bulk of Mount Hermon looming up behind. But rolling through the orchards of olive and lemon, pomegranate and orange, we saw Damascus standing on the plain, a gleaming, jewelled city of white in a lush green setting. It smelled, as all ancient cities do, of stone and smoke and donkey and spices, but over it all hung the perfume of the flowers that spilled from private courtyards and public gardens. Sewage ran in the streets, yet to me it would always be the city of jasmine, the air thick with the fragrance of crushed blossoms.

We collected a taxi at the station and after a harrowing ride through narrow streets, the driver deposited us neatly on the walk in front of the Hotel Zenobia, a new establishment in a very old structure. Once a pasha’s palace, it had been only recently converted to a private hotel. It was decorated in the traditional Eastern style with courts fitting together like so many puzzle boxes, each with its own staircases and tinkling fountains where gilded fins darted through the pale blue petals of the lilies. Outside, the manager—a tall, elegant Belgian—was waiting. He bowed and kissed Aunt Dove’s hand, murmuring something into her ear. She dropped her eyes and gave him a doelike look from under her lashes, and before I knew what was happening, he snapped his fingers for porters and in a very short time we were ensconced in the largest suite in the hotel. It was a delicious mixture of Damascene luxury and European sensibility with a wide veranda and comfortable sitting room linking our bedrooms. The bedrooms had modern furniture, but the sitting room was fitted with traditional Eastern divans, long and low and thick with tasselled silk cushions.

The maids bustled, unpacking and hissing at one another in French and Arabic, occasionally breaking into giggles when they discovered something unexpected like my leather aviatrix suit or Aunt Dove’s French underwear. But I merely stood and surveyed the surroundings while Aunt Dove flipped through the post that had been waiting for us.

I gave her a suspicious look. “Do you know the manager? From before I mean?”

Her expression was determinedly innocent. “Who? Étienne? Oh, our paths have crossed from time to time.” Before I could ask more, she took me in hand. “We’re travel-fatigued,” Aunt Dove pronounced. “It happens when one passes too quickly from one culture into another. I’ve always said trains were uncivilized. One ought only ever to travel by steamship or camel.”

“So sayeth the woman who has learned to fly my aeroplane,” I remarked. A large bowl of orchids had been placed upon a low table between the cushion-strewn divans and I bent to sniff it.

Aunt Dove waved off my remark. “That is entirely different. Aeroplanes are novelties, not real travel. No one would ever want to use them for anything other than publicity. Now, I want a beefsteak and a cigarette and a stiff whisky, not necessarily in that order. Go and wash for dinner, child. It’s time to see Damascus.”

* * *

Thanks to a broken strap, I was ten minutes later than Aunt Dove in getting ready and found her in the crowded lobby. She was wearing a gold turban with her great paste emerald brooch and an armful of enamelled bangles that clattered and clinked as she gestured. The lobby was one of the many courtyards of the hotel, this one furnished with the usual divans and endless pots of flowering plants and palms. Soft-footed servants trotted back and forth with trays of cocktails and little dishes of nuts while a discreet orchestra played in the corner. The place was thronged with international visitors, most of whom were craning to get a look at Aunt Dove. She was chatting animatedly with the handsomest man in the room. There was nothing unusual about either of those things. She often dressed with originality, and one of her greatest skills was finding the most attractive and charming men to do her bidding. She caught sight of me just as I descended the stairs and waved an elegant hand.

“Evie, darling, come and meet Mr. Halliday. He’s a British diplomat posted here to keep an eye on those wily French.”

I extended my hand and he took it, staring at me intently with a pair of delightfully intelligent grey eyes. “How do you do, Mr. Halliday? Evangeline Starke.”

“Miss Starke,” he said, shaking my hand slowly and holding it for an instant longer than he ought.

“Mrs.,” I corrected gently. “I am a widow.”

A fleeting expression of sympathy touched his features. “Of course. The war took a lot of good men.”

I didn’t bother to correct him. Gabriel had died during the war—just not doing anything useful like actually fighting.

He glanced to Aunt Dove. “Lady Lavinia was just telling me about your Seven Seas Tour, but she needn’t have. I’ve been following your exploits in the newspapers. It’s dashed thrilling. Will you be doing any flying here?”

“Not just yet. My plane is still in Italy. Aunt Dove and I are here for pleasure. We mean to relax and revive before we move on to the Caspian for the next leg of our tour.”

“Damascus is the place for that,” he assured me. “Lots of picturesque sights and loads of delicious gossip, but it’s just the spot for shopping or lounging in a bathhouse or lying by a fountain and letting the world pass you by.”

Those pursuits would interest me for about a day, but I smiled. “I’m very interested in how the interim government is faring, as well. I know the French are determined to meddle, and I’m curious how their efforts compare to the British presence in Palestine.”

Mr. Halliday’s brows lifted in delighted astonishment. “I say, beauty and brains. What a refreshing combination! Most women only want to talk tea and scandal, but if you really want to know the truth of the political situation, I am more than happy to give you the lay of the land, so to speak.”

Aunt Dove smelled the opportunity to make a new conquest and leaped on it. “How very kind of you, Mr. Halliday. My niece and I were just about to go to dinner. Won’t you join us as our guest?”

He accepted quickly, extending his arm to Aunt Dove. I followed, watching him as he deftly negotiated the crowds to secure a taxi and handed her in. He turned to me and I put my hand in his.