Page 4 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

3

Sepia Love

Morocco, 1929

I can’t honestly say which I prefer. Exploring the great Kasbah of the Oudayas in Rabat, where the sky is painted across the walls in ombré swathes that deepen from peacock to sapphire…or riding a camel behind my husband to visit the tribes he needs to befriend so they’ll tell him about local unrest before it escalates into another Rif War.

I watch him command our retinue, smiling back at me the way he’d smiled across a dance floor a few months ago. That night, every man had asked me to dance except him. It was almost midnight when I approached and asked him why.

“I was scared you’d say no. And that would break my heart,” he’d said.

If swooning hadn’t gone out of fashion last century, I might have been tempted to try it. I didn’t dance with anyone else for the rest of the night.

By morning, as I told my mother about him, I knew it was the kind of love you’d drink poison for; the kind that would make you step in front of a train if it ever died. The kind of love my mother and father had shared before he died six years ago.

Today, the powdered sand of the desert we’re traveling across is a hue I christen sepia love: a passionate red that’s gentled into something softer, like the phase our marriage is moving into now—an epoch I hope will be even more beautiful than the quick fall into love.

Halfway to our destination, we find a market erupting with scarlet pomegranates. Alongside are rugs and daggers, silks and kouskous arrayed like jewels. I dismount, bargaining for cakes of black soap, using the Arabic I’ve learned of late, my polyglot ability with languages making the stall holder come out from his tent and summon everyone over to behold the blond French woman who speaks their language.

“Get back on your camel.” Edouard’s hand is on my arm, showing a protective streak that’s a little too vice-like. His eyes are the same color as the soap. “You have no idea how dangerous it can be here.”

The stall holder turns away, leaving us to the banality of our domestic dispute. A single cloud wafts overhead, leaving one dark shadow to tarnish the red sand, which looks more like anger now than love.

Not long after, I see a twisted shape by the road. A mule, not watered properly and left to die and then burn. Morocco is both ruthless and beautiful, the blue sky and innocent white buildings hiding the fact that, out here, the sun is a weapon, trained on us.

Edouard was right. It is dangerous. I’ve always been too apt to see the waves sparkling on the water, not the ships and bones that lie beneath.

When we reach the village, Edouard helps me down from my camel and holds my hand and everything is as it was. He even claps when I ask in Arabic for the name of a woman’s child.

“This is Aderfi,” she tells me. She wears so many amulets and coins around her head that she sounds like a tambourine when she moves, and the pianist in me thinks how lovely it would be if I could wear a skirt made from piano keys so that any child of mine would know lullabies and music right from the start.

I touch my stomach very briefly, then I take the child and pass him to Edouard, which makes the mother—Ghislaine, she tells me—grin. Soon, we’re sitting before the fire and I translate for Edouard as the chief speaks of his grievances against the French. We eat a tagine that tastes of sugar and spice, and I know that no meal at any time in my future will ever surpass this one beneath a navy Moroccan night sky with my husband smiling beside me.

It’s only near the end that I realize I’m the only woman at the fireside. The rest are positioned farther back, in exile.

I pick up my bowl and take it over to the women who are washing up in a bucket, leaving the dishes to dry on the sand. Ghislaine slips in beside me speaking so fast that I don’t understand the Arabic at first. When she repeats herself, I listen with my musician’s ears and the words translate to, The chiefs of the tribes are meeting next week. They don’t want the French to know. But I don’t want another war. My brother died in the last one. I don’t want Aderfi to die in the next one.

Then she relieves me of my bowl and I’m left standing there with a secret I don’t know what to do with.

If the French find out afterward about this meeting, they’ll be angry and afraid. Fear makes nations do terrible things.

Fear makes humans do terrible things, too.

I remember back in Shanghai when our amah took me and my sister to another house to play. The mothers sat in the parlor, the children in the nursery. The amahs went to another room, out of sight. It was only when I was about ten that I understood the amahs weren’t French and some people thought that made them lesser. I asked my mother about it and she sighed and said, “I tell myself we’re giving her a job, and many others, too. But what if they don’t want our jobs? What if they don’t want us at all?”

The Rif War should tell me plainly that they don’t want us. But now I carry a mother’s pain whispered in my ear, reminding me that things are more complicated than I’ve allowed myself to see. Aderfi’s mother has betrayed her husband and her tribe by telling me that secret. But, in doing so, she’s trying not to betray her son.

“Marie-Madeleine!” Edouard calls.

Time to return to the colonizer’s side of the fire.

Later, I persuade Edouard to drag our bedding out so we can sleep beneath a firework sky. As we lay blankets on the ground, I tell him what Aderfi’s mother said and he wraps me in his arms, saying, “When you’re an outsider trying to get people to trust you, it’s a definite advantage to have the most beautiful wife in the world by your side.”

“I think it was because I asked about her child.”

Her expression, when she looked down at the brown cloth that attached the baby to her like another limb, was the same as my father’s whenever he looked at me. I can’t wait to smile at someone the same way.

So I tell Edouard, “I’ll have to ask her about the sling. Because I’ll need one in seven months’ time.”

My husband beams, then tightens his embrace, whispering in my ear, “I love you so much I can hardly bear to let you out of my sight.”