The Fourth Queen, page 42
She could have anything she wanted. Why, then, did she feel so empty?
In the washroom she tied back her hair and stripped off her clothes. Pouring warm water, she began lathering herself quickly: her feet, beneath her arms, between her legs. Then reached for a jug of cold water and sluiced it all over herself, gasping at the shock of it, feeling her skin shrinking and tingling. Then suddenly there were hot tears on her cold cheeks, and she was kneeling on the wet tiles and sobbing into her hands.
“TELL HIM I'M BLEEDING.”
“What?”
“If the Emperor asks, tell him it's my time. He'll understand. Malia's not here or I'd ask her to do it for me.”
“Are you bleeding, Lalla? I didn't realize.”
“No, but Malia said that sometimes, when the body's been weakened by some illness, it can be many moons before the bleeding returns.”
“Yes, Lalla. I had heard that too.” She made no move to leave.
“What is it?”
“I was just wondering what you will do if the bleeding doesn't return.” She looked steadily into Helen's eyes.
So. She knew. Helen felt a weight lift.
“There's a potion I can take. Malia left it for me.”
“But you haven't taken it.” It was a statement.
“No.”
Reema narrowed her eyes. “Are you going to take it?”
“I don't know.” Helen put a hand on her belly. She imagined a tiny blind creature holding on somewhere deep inside her body, refusing to let go; a wee heart beating strong; a fragment of Microphilus' world. There must be a way; all she had to do was think of one. She could get Reema to paint brown blotches on her skin like Zara, and pull her hair out to pretend she was ill again. If he sent her away soon enough, he'd never know about the baby.
If he sent her away, she'd lose her jewels.
“Have you ever been to Tafilalt, Reema?”
“No, Lalla. But they say it is a fine place. In a valley, with many rivers. Though they say it can be very cold in the winter.”
“Where I was born it was very cold in the winter. But our houses are built differently than the ones here. We have a fire in the middle of the house, and everyone sleeps near to it, either in the attic beside the chimney, or in box beds.” Reema looked blank, so Helen started to explain. “They're like cupboards, but with a mattress inside, and doors and thick curtains so you can close yourself in. So you only know who's sleeping inside by the shoes on the floor outside.
“When I left home I was in such a hurry I left my shoes behind. So a girl I was traveling with lent me hers. She said they hurt her feet, but I think she did it really so that we'd be friends. Her name was Betty. She was only eighteen, but she already knew she couldn't have children.”
Reema didn't say anything. Just stood in the doorway with her strong arms crossed over her chest.
“I was thinking, when Fijil comes back, he'll have some beautiful women with him.”
“Yes, Lalla. Last time there was Naseem and Naula, and yourself of course. And many others. All beautiful. The Emperor was very pleased.”
“And he'll probably get married again soon. So these rooms—” she waved vaguely out through the door. “They'll all be full again soon of new queens.”
“Very likely, Lalla Aziza.”
“The houses in Tafilalt, do you know how big they are? The ones the queens are allocated. Zara was allowed to take two slaves, so they'd have a small courtyard, wouldn't they? And a kitchen, maybe, and a couple of other rooms? A fountain and an outhouse—” Her heart was thundering in her chest. She'd decided.
“If I'm going to speak to the Emperor, I should be going now.”
“Yes, yes. Of course.” She started smiling. A baby, she was having a baby. “Reema—”
“Yes, Lalla?”
“If you wanted to find someone. A white girl who'd been sold into a whorehouse in Sallee about a year ago. And you didn't even know whether she was still alive. What would you do?”
The older woman pondered a moment. “I'd sneak out of the Harem and visit a man I know. He was a slave once but now he's a free man. He knows those ports like the back of his hand. I'd ask him to look for her—but he'd want paying.”
Before she'd finished, Helen had opened her trunk. “Would my emeralds be enough?”
AFTERWORD
Based on a true story
I first came across a reference to Helen Gloag in a book of local history while holidaying in Perthshire. The book described a character straight out of a fairy tale: a green-eyed beauty with “the Gloag hair” (a mixture of red and gold found only in Scotland), who was captured by pirates en route to America in 1769 and ended up as the wife of the Emperor of Morocco.
The book gave directions to the place where she'd been born: a tiny hamlet called Mill of Steps, just outside the village of Muthill in Perthshire. I bought an Ordnance Survey map and went to investigate.
There was nothing there, of course. Just a few mossy foundations by the river where the eponymous mill must have stood, and the remains of barns and cottages nearby. But in the graveyard of Muthill Church I found some tilty old headstones for several members of the Gloag family, and the graves of a much larger family by the name of Bayne.
The guidebook made much of young Helen's dubious relationship with a wealthy local farmer named John Bayne. It also suggested that the Scottish lass might have played a part in “civilizing” the brutal Emperor Sidi Mohammed (à la The King and I), who signed a treaty with Spain and established cordial trading relations with the rest of Europe and Turkey during his reign.
I tracked down the book's author, historian Archie McKerragher, who passed on some of his sources. This set me off, that sticky summer, on a long paper chase through the archives of the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library in London—and libraries in Greenock and Edinburgh—to find out more about Helen Gloag and about what life might have been like in a harem in eighteenth-century Morocco.
As anyone who has ever done historical research will tell you, it's both fascinating and confusing. The problem is that authors exaggerate and pass on their prejudices. They report rumor and hearsay as the truth. They reorder events to make neat sequences. They omit items that cloud the picture they're drawing.
I discovered many references in Scotland to a red-haired beauty who became an Empress in Morocco, but they referred to dates ranging from 1618 to 1769 (The Fourth Queen is set in 1769). No European traveling in Morocco during this time ever recorded actually meeting Helen Gloag, however—or any other red-haired woman—though someone answering to her description is mentioned again and again, as being “Irish” or “English,” as the mysteriously absent wife, mother, or grandmother of various Emperors throughout this era. And the notoriously vicious Emperor Yaseed, who reigned after the Emperor in The Fourth Queen, was said to have had red hair.
After a while I was forced to conclude that Helen Gloag's enslavement was just the best-documented of a whole series of kidnappings that took place during this time. The earliest I came across was in 1618. This lass, too, was captured by pirates and incarcerated in the Emperor's harem.
I suspect that this early interracial match touched a profound mythic chord in the population at that time, which resonated again and again with tales of the depredations of the swift Moroccan pirate ships that ranged up and down the West coast in those days—sometimes even as far north as Greenock—terrorizing traders and fishing communities. It's no accident, I think, that the central characters in these archetypal stories have red hair: No one has whiter skin than a redhead. To emphasize the point, a statue carved in 1618 to commemorate “the Emperor” in the earliest story depicts him with African features and curly hair (and so presumably very dark skin), despite the fact that Moors in those days were typically more Semitic than African in appearance.
In common with other “true” accounts of the period, I have reordered some events to make a neat sequence, included events from preceding and succeeding emperors' reigns, because I could not resist them, and I embroidered the gaps in between. If you're curious to discover to what extent I have deviated from the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts, I have listed the most important books I consulted.
A Dr. William Lempriere really was held under house arrest and forced to treat the wives of the Emperor—including one Lalla Zara, close to death with suspected poisoning. A woman named Julia Crisp really did visit Morocco and pretend to be married as a ruse to deflect the Emperor's amorous advances. If we can believe the historical accounts, Lalla Douvia, the tortured child queen, really existed; Lalla Batoom, the head queen who wrestled with the Emperor, did too.
As for Microphilus: his voice is based on the writings of Jeffrey Hudson, the “peppery dwarf” in the Court of Charles I. Hudson was captured by Barbary pirates and enslaved for around twenty-five years—during which time he grew in stature by eighteen inches. As he died in 1681, over seventy years before Helen was born, they could never have met. But I fell in love with him, so I thought she might have done so, too.
Debbie Taylor
North Shields, Tyne and Wear, England, 2002
FURTHER READING
Crisp, Julia. The Female Captive: A Narrative of Facts, Which Happened in Barbary in the Year 1756. Printed in London by C. Bathurst, with an introduction by Sir William Musgrave, 1769.
Hudson, Jeffrey. Lord Minimus, a.k.a. Microphilus. The New Yeere's Gift, 1638.
Leared, Arthur. Morocco and the Moors (illustrated, with an introduction by Sir Richard Burton). London: 1876.
———. A Visit to the Court of Morocco. 1879.
Lempriere, William. A Tour from Gibraltar to Tangier, Salee, Mogodor, Santa Cruz, Tarcidant and thence over Mount Atlas to Morocco: Including a Particular Account of the Royal Harem, etc. London: 1791.
McKerracher, Archie. Perthshire in History and Legend. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers Limited, 1988.
Meakin, Budgett. The Moorish Empire. London: 1899.
Page, Nick. Lord Minimus: The Extraordinary Life of Britain's Smallest Man. HarperCollins Publishers, 2001.
Pellow, Thomas. The Adventure of Thomas Pellow, Mariner: A Narrative of His Shipwreck and Subsequent Enslavement in Morocco. London: 1715.
Playfair, Sir R. Lambert, and Dr. Robert Brown. A Bibliography of Morocco from the Earliest Times to the End of 1891. John Murray: London, 1892.
Poirot, Jean-Louis-Marie. Travels through Barbary, in a series of letters written from the ancient Numidia in the years 1785 and 1786 and containing an account of the customs and manners of the Moors and Bedouin Arabs. 1791.
Russell, M. The History and Present Condition of the Barbary States. 1835.
Shearer, John. Antiquities of Strathearn, with Historical and Traditionary Tales and Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Individuals Belonging to the District. 1836.
Smollett, Tobias. The Adventures of Roderick Random. Originally published in 1748.
Tully, Miss. Narrative of a Ten-Year Residence in Morocco. London: 1816.
When Helen Gloag storms out of her father's cottage and heads for the coast, her plan is simple: an escape from Scotland, a pleasant sea voyage, and a new start in the American colonies. Yet what begins as an adolescent rebellion quickly turns into the stuff of nightmares. The grueling poverty and desperation Helen had hoped to escape by leaving home is magnified ten-fold in the hold of the ship, where illness and starvation run rampant. Then one day, Helen makes a startling and useful discovery about the gross stratification of society: While she and the other passengers wrestle for scraps in the squalid pestilence of the ship's belly, the captain's silk-clad guests enjoy claret and crumpets above-deck. The germ of resolution takes hold in Helen's mind. She will do whatever it takes to become a proper lady, with gorgeous clothes and sumptuous food, soft hands and idle days. Helen has no idea just how soon her wish will come true—and what a bizarre and devastating price she will pay for it. This guide is designed to direct your reading group's discussion of The Fourth Queen.
About the Book
Helen's fantastical journey leads her to the court of the Emperor of Morocco, where she finds herself incarcerated in the gilded prison of the royal harem. She has been chosen for her milk-white skin and fiery hair—qualities guaranteed to arouse the Emperor's libido—yet she is a novice in the art of seduction, and so begins an intense period of training. But learning how to “play sex” with the Emperor is simple compared to the other skills Helen must learn, such as how to navigate the shifting loyalties and deadly rivalries in the harem, how to handle the mind-numbing tedium of endless idleness, and how to negotiate the terrifying whimsy of the despotic Emperor's mood swings. As Helen becomes entranced by the promise of wealth and prestige, her memories of the outside world fade, and her goal crystallizes: She will become one of the Emperor's four privileged wives.
Meanwhile, someone in the harem is playing a lethal power game: A curse is slowly killing the Emperor's favorite women, and Helen is next in line for attack. Only the friendship and devotion of one man, a dwarf named Microphilus, will save Helen from the murderer—and from the snares of her own short-sighted greed.
Questions for Discussion
1. The first time we meet Helen, she is dismayed that conditions on the ship are not how she had imagined them. Rather than “little round windows, splashed with saltwater . . . a few neat partitions to separate family groups,” she finds a filthy, pestilent debacle. Only then does she realize that her decision to run away might have been rash. Does Helen continue to act impetuously in the rest of the novel, or does she learn from this one horrible mistake?
2. Fijil waxes rhapsodic on “God's penchant for the crooked.” He feels that he has found his niche among God's “cock-eyed creations.” He writes, “In this Land of Giants I am the runt pup escaped from the drowning sack. In my darker hours I muse on the motives of our Good Shepherd for hauling my sack, and others like it, from the river.” What does he conclude? How would you compare Fijil's self-esteem with that of Helen? Batoom? The Emperor? Is this a real faith in the divine he alludes to, or is he only joking?
3. Fijil describes power in the harem as “wielded constantly downward, like a very waterfall of tyranny, from the Emperor at the apex, inexorably down through the hierarchy of wives and slaves. . . .” Where do Fijil, Malia, and the four queens fall in this hierarchy? Which characters wield power without the Emperor's knowledge? Fijil and Malia could easily blackmail each other with secret knowledge—what stops them? Discuss how Helen's role in the hierarchy shifts throughout the novel.
4. Analyzing the Emperor's hunger for riches, Fijil observes that “a man whose vocation is Accumulation often looks on that which he has accumulated with a sort of repugnance. Once a thing has been purchased it loses much of its value, much as the food, once chewed and swallowed, becomes a loathsome wet bolus contaminated with gall juices of the foulest kind. Thus the very Act of Consumption degrades that which it consumes.” Discuss hunger as a recurring theme in the novel, including hunger for money, sex, power, home, freedom, belonging, acceptance. Which characters are able to satisfy their hunger? In which cases does Fijil's theory—“once a thing has been purchased it loses much of its value”—hold true?
5. The author conveys a pivotal shift in Helen's self-perception and heralds a major plot twist, with the introduction of a simple object—a purple dress—and the sentence, “And one day, when she'd scrubbed herself thoroughly and washed her hair, and the Bairds were off playing cards in the captain's quarters, she decided to try it on.” What are the ramifications of Helen wearing the purple dress at the moment the ship is captured? What does the dress represent to her? Does it function as a sign that Helen is ready to dump her friends Betty and Dougie if a better opportunity comes along? What is ironic about this episode?
6.The Fourth Queen is Helen's story. Yet Batoom is arguably the heroine of the novel. Do you agree? Why or why not?
7. The first time Helen is chosen for the Emperor's bed, Fijil feels like a pimp: “She is his: every curl, every eyelash. And I am his Pimp, with his emerald, my Pimp's wages, in my pocket.” Forty-eight chapters later, during one of Helen's last visits to the Emperor, Fijil again calls himself “a most superlative pimp.” Why is his meaning completely different this time? Why does this second episode mark a turning point in Fijil's life?
8. The harem is described as a claustrophobic, walled maze of “fripperies and cloying oils,” dulled by “a terrible ennui.” Fijil writes: “It's all slippers here, you see, night and day: shuffling along down at heel, as if there were no tomorrow, as if each destination were of like importance (by which I mean of no importance) and each appointment equally pressing (by which I mean not pressing in the least).” What projects do Naseem, Lungile, Batoom, and Douvia use to circumvent the boredom of the harem and create exciting interior lives for themselves—as well as a vision of the future? Why is Helen unable to employ this trick?
9. The extent of the Emperor's cruelty is woven subtly into the novel. Douvia's torture, the maiming of servants, the dismissal of unwanted women, and so on, are dropped casually into the text. Why do you think the author uses this method to unveil the character of the Emperor?
10. At what point do you realize that Helen is ruthlessly self-preserving? Does this make you like her more or less? Why do you think she loses her sense of caution after becoming the Emperor's favorite, since she can clearly see the dangers inherent in becoming queen? Is her recklessness based on naiveté, or does she have a self-destructive streak?
11. Fijil, Batoom, Naseem, Lungile, even Malia, view the world outside the harem with hope, longing, and memories that are fond even if they are painful. But for Helen, “Thinking of the outside world made her feel edgy, like being reminded of an important chore she'd forgotten.” How do you account for this difference? What is Helen escaping by embracing life in the harem?
12. Discuss Fijil's motto about our human capacity to collude with tyrants: “By donning clean garments and a winning smile, a monster may monster unmolested forever. And we will be dazzled by the white of his linens, and rub our eyes, and sigh with relief that the shadows have receded. And forget his dark deeds. And so become culpable, too.”
