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‘And pigs might fly,’ Quin muttered to himself.
‘Are you well?’ Cleo asked, right behind him.
‘Well enough and better for the prospect of heading north.’
She nodded agreement as she took the leading rein and started down the path towards the village with the boats. ‘It will be a relief to be back in civilisation.’
Then you are going to be sorely disappointed, Quin thought, fanning away the flies with a leafy twig. We are heading into a plague-ridden battlefield and the best you can hope for is that your father is exposed as a gullible idiot. At worst, perhaps that crocodile might be the kindest option after all.
Men were lounging around the ramshackle jetty where the boats were moored, but Quin made for the largest house. ‘This will be the village sheikh, I imagine. Are you going to sit meekly outside with the donkey while I negotiate?’
He expected an argument, but Cleo simply slipped the tail of her headscarf across her lower face and went to sit under the shade of the wall. ‘I know my place,’ she said. It was said without inflection or complaint, but there was something in the way she spoke that made Quin look back. ‘Yes?’ She raised one brow. ‘I assume your Arabic is up to it, or do you need help?’
‘No, thank you.’ But you do, Quin thought as he tapped on the door, clearing his mind of French and English. ‘Salaam alaikum,’ he said to the elderly man who opened it and ducked through the opening as the sheikh gestured him inside.
* * *
Quin knew that bargaining required patience and persistence—he’d had plenty of practice when buying his camels—but the negotiations took more than two hours. No, they could not sell the boats. Yes, possibly they could be hired and the men to crew them. For how much? The effendi wished to beggar them, like the Feranzawi from the soldiers’ camp who came to buy food?
Patiently Quin pointed out that if the boats and their crew were absent from the village when Murad Bey and his men came through they would be safe. If they hired them to him, they would be out of reach and earning at the same time.
By this time they had moved to the waterside and there was much murmuring and gesticulating at this suggestion. A price was named. Quin reeled back in exaggerated horror. He prodded a battered gunwale, curled his lip at the state of the ropes and named another figure.
When finally they had come to an agreement and he had drunk bitter coffee and handed over half the price, Cleo was still sitting in the same place, motionless. When he turned from the waterside in a flurry of jokes and waving hands from his new acquaintances she rose smoothly to her feet and followed him in silence until they were out of sight.
‘Will it take long to break camp?’ he asked when it seemed she was not going to say anything.
‘No. Not with you to help.’ Her voice was muffled behind the veiling cotton.
‘What is wrong, Cleo?’ Quin stopped and turned. ‘Don’t you want to leave?’ This mission might be, quite literally, a pain, but at least he’d believed he was effecting a rescue. Now it seemed the victim might not want rescuing.
‘Of course I want to leave.’ She wrenched the veil from her face and glared at him. ‘Only a fool would want to stay.’
‘Then you worry that your father might be stubborn and refuse? I am certain I can—’
‘If he refuses, then we leave him.’ She kept walking, swept past with the donkey trotting obediently behind.
‘Abandon your father?’ he asked her retreating back, the set shoulders and reed-straight spine. This woman was going to be a shark in the ornamental fishpond that was London society.
‘He abandoned Mama. He has abandoned me. She was simply an unpaid maidservant and so am I. I want him safe and looked after, but after that...’
It took Quin several loping strides to catch up with her. ‘Abandoned? But you are with him now.’
‘Abandoned emotionally, abandoned in his head. Family is just a nuisance, a tie, to him. Mama thought he loved her and eloped with him willingly.’ Cleo snapped out the explanation as though she slapped down cards on a gaming table. ‘He loved the dowry he counted on my grandfather handing over when the marriage was a fait accompli. But Mama’s father simply cut her off. By the time she realised that she had tied herself to a profoundly selfish man I was on the way.’
At least her grandfather wanted her, although Quin refused to contemplate whether it was from love, duty or simply family pride. He found he could think of nothing to say so he reached out and laid his arm over her shoulders. A hug might help...
Cleo shrugged off his touch and stalked on. ‘Mama was very good at explaining things as I grew up. Papa was a very busy man. Papa was very important and so was his work. Papa must not be disturbed. Papa loved me really. That worked all through Italy and Greece and Anatolia while I was a child. Then we came to Egypt and Mama died and I realised—’
