Authors: Anne Gracie
To Catch a Bride (9 page)
“You will never go hungry again,” he added, his voice so deep and persuasive, like dark honey laced with opium. “Nobody will harm you ever again. You’ll be safe and secure forever.”
The words wound themselves insidiously around her heart, tugging, trying to find a way in.
Dangerous, untrustworthy words. Words that, even if she believed them, were not for Ayisha. They were for another girl.
She shook her head, as if to clear it of his spell. “Tell the old lady that Alicia Cleeve is dead.” She made a futile little gesture with her bound hands. “Here, there is only Ayisha.”
Four
H
e let you go?” Laila was stunned. “He knocked you out and tied you up, and then he just
let you go
?”
e let you go?” Laila was stunned. “He knocked you out and tied you up, and then he just
let you go
?”
“Yes,” Ayisha said. “He said I was to think it over and go back.” She’d returned to Laila’s house the moment the city gates were unlocked.
“Go back for Ali—he is all right?”
“Yes, I told you.” Ayisha had told Laila a dozen times that Ali was all right, but Laila had been up all night fretting and would not be wholly reassured until he was home, safe.
Ayisha squatted to feed the oven fire. Laila was usually up at dawn to start the baking, but today she was fretting instead. So they’d started the baking late.
She found the Englishman’s action puzzling, too—more than puzzling—it was disturbing. She didn’t understand what game he was playing, but she was sure it was a deep one.
“How will we get Ali free? Is it money the Englishman wants?” Laila asked, with a glance at their hiding place behind the bricks.
“No. He has more money than you and I will ever see in a lifetime.” Ayisha thrust a handful of twigs in the fire.
Laila pulled off pieces of risen dough and rolled them into balls. “He wants you in exchange for Ali?”
“Yes,” Ayisha said. The morning air was chilly, so the heat of the oven was a comfort. She washed her hands and face in a bucket of warm water.
“But he had you. He could have kept you.” Laila kneaded dough briskly. “So why set you free?”
“He wants me to come back of my own free will,” Ayisha said with irony.
“And you really are English?” Laila was still not convinced.
“Half English, yes.”
“And your father was a lord? And you can speak English?”
“Yes.”
“Say something.”
“Laila is my best friend,” Ayisha said in English.
Laila pinched her chin affectionately. “And you, little chick, are the daughter of my heart,” she responded in the same language. They stared at each other and laughed.
“You speak English?” Ayisha exclaimed.
Laila chuckled. “Not so good as you. I learn when I was girl. I work for English people before I marry. And look at you—all this time, and I never guess you are English girl.” She flattened dough balls into rounds.
“I’m not. I was born here.”
“Phhht!” Laila waved that notion away. “Your father was an English lord. That make you English. And all this time you have been hiding in fear, dressed as a boy.”
Ayisha said, “You know why.”
Laila waved the reason away with a floury hand. “Of course I know why. But now it will be different. Let this man, this Englishman, take you to this grandmother in England. Why not?”
“Laila, you know why not.”
“Pah! They do not know, so why should you care? The old lady will look after you and you will take good care of her, and after she dies you will be rich and own her house and will want for nothing.”
“I cannot do it.”
Laila slapped dough balls flat. “What is wrong with you, girl? It is everything you have dreamed of and more.”
“I know, but—”
“But nothing. This is the chance you have been waiting for. And if this old woman is indeed your grandmother, you must go to her and take care of her, for she is your blood and you are hers. And this you know is true.”
Laila dusted flour off her hands and stroked Ayisha’s cheek with the back of her hand. “To have imagined yourself all alone in the world, Ayisha, child—and then to find you have family—it is a gift, a holy gift.” Her soft brown eyes were moist with emotion.
“But I—”
“Not you, the old lady. She has lost her husband and her only son and now, when she is in the twilight of her life, alone, lonely, and without hope, here is the beautiful young granddaughter she thought was dead and gone, restored to her. Of course it is a holy gift and you cannot refuse, little one.”
“But you and I both know it’s not me she wants. You are my family, Laila. You and Ali.”
Laila shook her head. She cupped Ayisha’s chin and said, “Listen to me, daughter of my heart. What future is there here for you, dressed in men’s clothes, hiding all the time from those who come looking? How will you marry? How will you have children?”
“Maybe I don’t want to marry.”
Laila shook her head, her eyes wise and knowing. “You will, chick. One day you will meet a strong, handsome man and your heart will beat thud-thud-thud.” She thumped her fist against her chest. “And your knees will go weak and your woman’s loins will warm and—aha, you blush! Perhaps you have already met someone, perhaps this Englishm—”
“No, it is your foolishness that makes me blush,” Ayisha retorted. “My woman’s loins will warm indeed!” She could feel her cheeks warming, nevertheless. So what if she did find the Englishman appealing to look at? He was handsome, that was all.
Laila chuckled. “Ah, little one, until you have gripped a strong man between your thighs and felt him thrusting like a stallion as he pours his hot seed into your body, do not talk to me of foolishness.”
Ayisha stared, her mouth drying at the picture Laila’s words conjured in her mind. Laila had always been earthy, but this . . .
“Now you really are blushing, and me, too.” Laila gave a deep chuckle and hugged Ayisha. “It’s been so long since I have had a man in my bed, I forget my manners.”
“Is it truly like that between a man and a woman? So . . .” Ayisha groped for a word. “Magnificent?”
Laila sighed. “With my husband, it was, though I know from other women it is not always like that with their men. But he was mad for me, and I for him, and when he came to me at night, he was like a stallion.” Her eyes glowed, remembering.
“But he divorced you.” Ayisha could not imagine the pain it must have caused Laila.
The light died from Laila’s eyes. “I thought he loved me, and perhaps he did, a little.” She made a helpless gesture.
“But not enough. Marriage is about property—and my family is poor, remember?—and about children, and so when I could give him no child, he divorced me and took another wife.” She gave a wistful sigh. “She brought him land and gave him sons, so he was probably a stallion with her, too.”
Ayisha shook her head. After fifteen years of love and trust in a man, that was Laila’s reward. Tossed aside and thrown to the mercy of that slug Omar.
It was what happened when you trusted a man to take care of you. It happened to Mama, it happened to Laila. Ayisha would never make the same mistake. Never.
“Do you think of him often?” Ayisha asked.
Laila shook her head. “No, it is just . . . Sometimes I wake in the night, hot and restless, and I miss . . . a stallion in my bed.”
She looked at Ayisha and giggled. “Look at your face! I have shocked you, an old woman like me talking of such things. Come, let us get the baking finished. The morning is passing.”
“Five and thirty is not old,” Ayisha said.
“It might as well be, living on memories as I must.” Laila sighed. “I will sleep alone the rest of my life, for Allah has made me barren, and what man would take a barren woman to wife? But you, Ayisha—you choose to live like this, hiding as a boy.”
She let her words sink in, then said, “It is not a future for you, dear child; it is lifelong imprisonment.”
She was right, Ayisha knew.
Laila arranged the rounds of dough on baking sheets. “Take the cover off and I’ll see if the oven is hot enough.” She took up a small jug of water and a sprig of herbs. Ayisha removed the cover of the oven door. Heat gushed out.
Laila flicked water onto the stone base of the oven with the herb bunch. It hissed. “Perfect,” she declared. “Pass me the trays.”
Ayisha passed the bread trays to Laila, who pushed them deftly into place with a long wooden paddle, then covered the door again.
“Don’t let me forget the time,” Laila said, her face flushed from the heat of the oven. She started wiping down the bench. “Your father would want this for his only living daughter.”
Ayisha grimaced. “My father left me with nothing.” Worse than nothing. He had left her to be a target for evil men.
“If you were not meant to go to England, you would not be given this chance. Besides, blood is blood; you have obligations to your father’s mother.”
“And what if they find out?”
“Piff!” Laila waved an airy hand. “How will they know? They are in England, on the other side of the world.”
“There were people here who knew. English people, who are now in England.” People who had shown no mercy, no kindness to a nine-year-old child.
“Worry about that if it happens,” Laila said. “If your grandmother did not know, how would anyone else? No, you must go to England.”
“But what about you and Ali?”
Laila snorted. “Foolish child, have you so soon forgotten who takes care of you? Am I suddenly an old woman who cannot take care of her family? Do not worry about me and Ali. We will do very well, you will see. Now, the bread will be done, I think.” She tossed Ayisha the cloth to protect her hands from the heat and picked up the flat wooden paddle.
Ayisha fetched the flat rush baskets they carried the bread in and for the next hour or two they concentrated on baking bread and selling them through the wooden hatch in the wall that looked out into the street. The morning batch always sold quickly: people could not resist the delicious smell that wafted in the air.
When all the bread was sold and half the takings securely hidden in the hollow behind the bricks, Laila made them both a coffee from Omar’s special hoard.
They sat in the backyard, sipping the thick, steaming brew, and shared the last, fresh, hot round of bread that Laila always saved for them. Today she spread it with honey for a special treat.
Ayisha sipped the coffee and licked honey off her fingers. Hot bread and honey and coffee was her favorite meal in all the world, but today the coffee seemed too bitter, the bread tasteless, and the honey merely sticky.
Laila didn’t understand. To her, the choice was simple: be rich or be hungry; take care of your grandmother and the rest would take care of itself.
But Ayisha already lived a life of deception and it had been hard, harder than Laila realized. She didn’t mind deceiving strangers. But when you started to get to know people, to become friends with them, to care about them, such deception became . . . complicated.
And when—if they came to care about you, it became . . . painful.
In this life only Laila and Ali knew she was a woman. Omar had no idea. Even Ali hadn’t known at first. Childlike, he’d accepted her as she was. But when he first learned she was a woman, she knew he had felt betrayed.
It would be worse in England. Lying to her grandmother, letting an old lady come to care for her . . . It was one thing to get bread under false pretenses; it was quite another to steal love meant for another, to raise hopes built on lies.
To go to England and make a new life—it was what she’d dreamed of. But at the price of living another lie? It might not be imprisonment, but it would be an ax poised over her head, waiting to fall.
The only way to avoid deception was to tell the Englishman the whole truth. But that would put her entirely in his power, and that she simply could not, would not—dared not—do.
“You look worried, my chicken,” Laila observed.
“I don’t want to go with him. I don’t trust him.”
“Did he try to do anything to you?” Laila asked sharply.
Ayisha thought. She’d felt his arousal . . . He could have taken her if he’d wished, though she would have put up a fight with every breath, but . . .
“No,” she said. “He treated me with honor. But then, with Lady Cleeve’s granddaughter . . . he would.”
There was a short silence, then she added, “But I don’t want to go back there.”
“I can see this,” Laila said. “What about Ali?”
Coils of guilt swirled in Ayisha’s belly. “Can’t you go?”
Laila shrugged. “I will try, of course, you know I will, but if it’s you he wants, it will do no good. Is he a stubborn man, do you think? Or persuadable?”
Stubborn? More than stubborn, Ayisha thought. As persuadable as the sphinx. And as easy to understand.
She sipped the bitter brew thoughtfully. She had no choice. Ali was her responsibility.
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