Chapter One

 

Running desperately down the palm-shaded street, Helen heard the baying of the mob behind her, the mob that had pursued her all the way from the burning pyre that once had been the biggest of the luxury tourist hotels. The recollection of the screams of their victims and the roar of flames still filled her mind with panic. Sweat ran down her back and flanks, though her short skirt and sleeveless top made a suitable enough costume in which to run for her life. She had kicked off her high-heeled sandals right from the first and now, mindful of her bare feet, had to keep swerving to avoid broken glass that had spread from the frontage of wrecked hotels along the street.

Ahead of her she saw disaster looming, yet another mob of looters welling out from shattered doors and into the street, threatening to trap her between the two terrors. The rising ululation of female voices from the excited women hanging on the fringes of the mob like flapping black crows told Helen that she had no hope of sneaking past, her scant clothing and light hair had made her instantly identifiable. Taken up with a deeper note by the savage voices of men, the menace of the converging mobs spurred a desperate desire for concealment; the open street was a death trap. She swerved instinctively to make for the nearest cover, scrambling over a waist-high steel railing and plunging into the ornamental shrubbery that divided the line of tourist hotels from the riverside. The thick growth turned out to be largely composed of thorny bushes masking a steep drop and the thorns caught at flesh and clothing as she forced her way through, plunging perilously faster as the slope fell away from under her feet.

Coming to the bottom she burst into the open with a rush, frantically collapsing onto hands and knees atop a vertical revetment wall. Below her and between the wall and the river stretched a multi-lane highway, wide but empty, for under wartime conditions there was no petrol for any but government or military use. On the far side, beyond a safety barrier, lay the embanked margin of the river with the tall triangular sails of a few river craft visible above it. There could be no going back. She could hear the sound of noisy threshing upon all sides as pursuers, better equipped, smashed their way through the bushes in search of her. She saw at a glance that the wall wasn't impossibly high, only about her own height above the tarmac.

She slid over the edge, dropped to the road surface and broke into a run again, bare thighs flashing, clutching one arm across her breasts. In her precipitous passage the thin cotton of her top had been ripped open and her bra had torn loose, while her skirt was held together only by the depth of the waistband. Hanging on to the remains of her bra, she ran a little way along the side of the roadside of the road. Hearing the renewed outbreak of triumphant male yells with despair, she risked a scared glance behind her. Men and boys were straggling out of the bushes and spilling down into the roadway and then, as she looked ahead, spreading out there too, to encircle her both before and behind.

Suddenly, from a distance, she heard the noise of an approaching car and, as it was her only prospect of rescue, ran out into the road. A big black limousine came round a curve and into the crowd behind her. It hardly slowed at all but merely scattered them, sending them leaping and yelling out its path. Helen ceased her efforts to hold her rags about her in favour of frantic signals, waving her arms wildly, hardly caring what sort of figure she made.

For a despairing moment she thought that the car would run her down too, but suddenly it braked hard, slewing a little with a shriek of tires as it came to a stop alongside her and the doors front and rear flew open. A man in a dark suit sprang from the front. In one hand he brandished a short stubby gun of some kind, with the other he grabbed Helen by the arm and thrust her towards the rear door.

A black-enveloped female figure whose pale youthful face seemed strangely familiar to her, peered open-mouthed at Helen from the interior. Helen was given a vigorous push in the back and sent flying across the female legs. Another male hand reached out to yank her inwards. The door slammed shut behind her. The man from outside landed heavily in the front seat and that door slammed too, the car accelerating away even before it was shut.

For a moment or two the men in the car yelled what sounded like angry curses at one another, the car swerving violently this way and that, while from the front came bursts of automatic fire that made Helen shudder in further horror. Then all at once the men relaxed, their voices suddenly jovial and the car settling to a steadier progress. Helen was still on her hands and knees in the well of the car between the passengers' legs and the back of the front seats. The man who had thrown her into the car leaned over from his seat beside the driver and took a grip on her hair, lifting her face towards the female passenger and asking a question of the girl in impatient tones.

The girl ignored him. "It is Miss Pearson, isn't it? How did you get here? Why was that dreadful mob chasing you?"

Helen knew then where she had seen the face before. The girl was Leila Ghaddoui whom she had taught for a while in a London school. She was the daughter of a rich family whose father had filled some important position in his country's embassy. Perhaps she had found a potential protector as well as a rescuer!

 

Chapter Two

 

"Why you brought her here, I don't understand... Think of your father's position... She should go to an internment camp..." Madame Ghaddoui, Leila's mother, was tall, dark and elegant. Helen had met her once at a parents' meeting at the school but Madame Ghaddoui actually seemed inclined to be doubtful of that, reluctant to admit any connection. She regarded the bedraggled and nearly naked female whom her teenage daughter had rescued from the mob as impatiently as if the girl had returned with a stray cat of doubtful provenance.

"Mama, that hotel was being used to house interned foreigners. She only just escaped with her life. The other camps are probably just as dangerous and it would be difficult to deliver her to one, these days anyway." Leila eyed Helen meaningfully.

Her former teacher had reacted with terror to the same suggestion when Leila had made it in the car. Helen's experience of internment to date and in supposedly privileged conditions didn't inspire confidence in the safety of the remoter camps. In the desperate state the war had reached, she suspected there would be few soldiers available to protect them. After consulting with her bodyguards Leila had admitted that she knew of no internment camps within easy reach, since most of them were out in the desert, situated far from urban centres. She made the same points to her mother now.

"I thought she could work for us here instead," the girl suggested. "You know we've needed a new maidservant ever since Asfa went back to her people. Father always said that the internees should be made to be of use, not just sitting out there in the desert being fed and protected."

"Oh Madame Ghaddoui! I would do anything!" Helen begged fervently, shivering in the cool interior hall, her nakedness and general grime compared to the smart dresses and high heels of the Ghaddouis making her feel like the stray cat that Madame seemed to envisage. She had jumped at such a solution when Leila had first suggested it, though she had expected Leila's mother to be more sympathetic to the idea, remembering her as quite Westernised in style. Evidently the Ghaddouis, like many others lately, had undergone a sudden drastic conversion to the prevailing Traditionalist ethos.

With horror, Helen saw herself now as a liability who might be shrugged off. The requisitioned hotel had been intended as a particularly luxurious place of internment during what was expected to be a short war. The mob had been otherwise minded.

Madame Ghaddoui stared down a thin nose at her.

"Of course it could only be upon the strictest terms. We couldn't possibly be thought simply to be protecting a runaway. An experiment in corrective training, perhaps? Redeeming a handmaid of Satan from ignorant wickedness? That would do as an explanation." She looked Helen coolly up and down. "You understand you will be employed merely as a servant. You will have to get used to your new position very quickly. No impudence or indiscipline from you, or out you will go! Do you understand that?"

"Yes Madame Ghaddoui." Helen said meekly, only too relieved that she was not to be ejected into the terrors of the world outside.

Yet being a servant was to prove more painful than Helen expected. Madame Ghaddoui made no concessions and Leila seemed to think that she had done more than was required of her.

Helen was to sleep in a tiny cubby-hole in the kitchen which was presided over by a big black Sudanese woman cook called Sulima who was to be in charge of her. It was as well that she wasn't claustrophobic, for her bed was in a sort of cupboard just long enough to lie flat and not high enough to stand upright. The black shift dresses she was given to wear as uniform were those left behind by the departed Afsa, who seemed to have been a much shorter girl. They were tight across the bust and showed a good deal of bare thigh.

Sulima seemed jolly enough at first acquaintance, but she had soon proved to have a primitive idea of discipline. Since neither of them had any language in common, Helen was frequently in error and Sulima evidently assumed that her incomprehensible orders would be made more effective by the vigorous application of a wooden spoon to her subordinate's rear.

The first time she had just whisked Helen's short skirt up and given her a couple of smart cracks on her seat. The handed down uniforms hadn't included underwear and Helen had to make do with worn out bras and skimpy knickers discarded by Leila or one of her younger sisters. The skimpiness of the knickers in particular left the cheeks of Helen's bottom painfully exposed to the hard round end of the spoon.

Helen soon learnt to spot an impending strike and skip nimbly out of reach. After one or two such brushes, however, she had carelessly put away what she thought was an unused kitchen pot, without noticing there were traces of burnt food in the seams. That time she hadn't been given a chance to dodge. Gripping the novice maidservant firmly by one ear, the big black woman hooked a stool out from beneath the kitchen table with her foot and, thrusting Helen across her broad lap with a brawny arm, whisked up her skirt and pulled down her knickers with a speed that precluded resistance. This time the wooden spoon was applied hard and flat to Helen's bare bottom.

The sound of the resounding smacks almost drowned out Helen's indignant squeals and protests. She squirmed to little avail in the cook's evidently practised grasp, then after the first few smacks, tried to protect herself with her hands. This only resulted in her discovery that the impact of the spoon on her fingers hurt even worse than on her behind. Soon she was making so much noise that the younger Ghaddoui girls came to see what was going on, though only to giggle at the sight.

Red-faced and nursing her stinging rear with numbed hands, Helen fled from the kitchen as soon as she was released from the cook's grip and rushed at once to confront her employer, only to be ordered by that lady to make an immediate return to the kitchen and apologize to Sulima, which Helen refused tearfully but indignantly to do.

"You have already been discourteous to Sulima who was put in charge of you and now you dare to defy me!" Madame stormed. "I said I wouldn't tolerate any impudence! You must submit to rightful punishment! Leila, Aissa! Get hold of her and make her bend over!"

Flustered and taken aback, Helen first let the girls take hold of her, then with a sudden rise of spirit, changed her mind and fought to shake them off.

"Our servant girls have always been beaten if they disobey!" Leila panted, gripping one of Helen's arms. "You aren't any different now!"

On the other side, Aissa, the other daughter, squealed angrily as Helen flung her to and fro and then all three Ghaddouis milled about her, shrieking indignantly while Helen tried shrilly to defy or reason with them by turns. Behind her she heard the ominous sound of a door opening and gathered herself for fresh effort, though expecting hopelessly that it heralded the imminent intervention of the cook to overwhelm her with numbers.

The thunderous intervention of an angry male voice cut through this female squawking and brought sudden silence. The dominant male in this female milieu, Ali Akbar Ghaddoui, towered over them physically and authoritatively, tall and broad shouldered in a tight turban and long starched white gown. Hawk nosed and dark eyed with a close trimmed black beard, he was the supreme masculine presence about whom this household of females revolved by tradition and instinct. The girls faded deferentially into the background. Even Helen had absorbed enough of this milieu to be affected. Madame fluttered uncharacteristically.

"My dear, I'm sorry you should have been disturbed by such a minor domestic matter," she said, as if soothing a dangerous animal of uncertain temper. Faced by this panicky anticipation of masculine wrath, Helen's posture of defiance instantly deflated.

"Nothing that we need bother you with, my dear. Just the new girl being foolish." Madame brandished the little cane she had produced, as if to display that the matter was under control. "I'm sure Helen will not want to annoy you further."

Nodding briefly, Ghaddoui reached out to take Helen's chin in strong brown fingers, tilting her face up towards him, his dark eyes seeming indifferent at first, taking on a hint of interested cruelty as he looked into her blue ones.

"My wife is fully responsible for your conduct and discipline and while you are in my household, I expect you to be obedient and submissive. Do you understand?" Helen swallowed, conscious of his overpowering masculinity, deciding rapidly that she did not want to risk this masculine intervention going any further.

"Yes sir," she squeaked.

"I am sure that Helen will not resist proper discipline, will you, girl?" Madame asked, closing her lips firmly and smoothing the little cane between her long fingers.

"Yes Madame. I mean ... No Madame!" Helen said nervously.