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Silence fell. Cleo could not decide whether she had trespassed, or whether she should respond with another question or...
‘I was employed before I came to the Middle East. I can take that up again when I get back home.’
‘That must be reassuring.’ She was getting the hang of this now. ‘Is your family in the business?’
Quin, who had been, she could have sworn, motionless, became even more still. ‘No,’ he said at length. ‘My family are not in the same...business. Or in any other, come to that.’
Aristocrats? No, that could not be right, there were no titles in America. But perhaps the upper classes were the same as she understood they were in Britain, living on inherited wealth and the income from land. So why did Quin have a profession? Had his father thrown him out, cut him off? She felt a surge of fellow feeling for him, then remembered that he had spoken of hugging brothers and male friends, young relatives, his old nurse. He was not alone.
‘What is the sour face for?’ Quin’s eyes were open and he was watching her.
‘An attack of self-pity,’ she admitted. It was an unattractive trait and a weakening one, too. If she had given way to misery at her life of lonely drudgery she would have gone mad years ago. It was so much easier not to feel at all, to simply exist and manage from day to day and conserve her strength for when the opportunity for escape presented itself.
‘Surely you did not want to stay at Koum Ombo?’
‘No, not at all. Look, we have reached the barges.’ On the next bend of the river the dozen barges were loaded with packs and folded tents, a few men on each, stacks of weapons amidships. Compared to the graceful feluccas they were unwieldy and heavy, but they were stable and, going with the current and guided with long poles, they would cope with the river easily enough.
Capitaine Laurent stood on the river bank, arms folded, watching the soldiers as they finished tying down the loads. ‘You will precede us,’ he announced the moment the feluccas bumped against the bank.
‘Bonjour, Capitaine,’ Quin said and countered the officer’s peremptory greeting with a smile. ‘We will follow you, I think,’ he continued in the same language. ‘I have no wish to have my vessels run down by one of those things if it gets away from your men.’
‘Your vessels?’
‘My money, my boats,’ Quin said. ‘Or we can leave now and get well ahead if you prefer.’
‘No. Madam requires the protection of my troop.’ Laurent turned his shoulder and began to shout orders at his men.
‘And monsieur requires to keep an eye on us, I think is rather more to the point,’ Quin observed as he sat down, put both feet up and watched the activity through slitted eyes. ‘He really does not like me, does he? I wonder why. I am normally considered the most amiable of fellows.’
‘He was Thierry’s best friend.’
‘And he thinks you need protecting from me? Or he wants you for himself and wishes he was here and I was there?’
‘Wants me? I hardly think so,’ Cleo said. ‘He told Thierry he should never have married me, that I was a nuisance.’
‘But Thierry had no choice, had he?’ She looked sharply at Quin, but he added, ‘A man in love is powerless.’
Control your reactions, Cleo told herself. Why she did not want Quin to know her suspicion that her husband had been ordered to marry her, other than her own pride, she did not know. It would have been easier if she understood why a French general should be so concerned about the protection of one insignificant Englishwoman that he would order an officer to marry her.
The pretence of love had not lasted long once they were deep into the desert. Confused, in love and horribly insecure, with only her parents’ hopeless marriage as an example, she had floundered, trying to reach her taciturn husband in the little time he spent with her. She was frigid, she was too demanding. She talked too much, she was no fun, she sewed his buttons on wrong, she was aloof with his friends. She flirted with his friends so she was a slut. At that she had flared up, hurt and angry, and he had hit her, a back-handed slap across the face. Goodness knows what he had told Laurent about her.
Now she hunched a shoulder at Quin’s comment. ‘I have no intention of inviting Laurent to dinner, that is certain.’
‘Hell.’ Quin sat bolt upright. ‘Food. I should have thought—I do not want to be dependent on Laurent.’
‘I did think. We have enough to last several days, although once supplies run low I suggest we overtake the barges and get to the next village ahead of them or there will be nothing left to buy. Ah, here is the goat.’
