Chapter 1

“I recognise them, I think.”

“Yes, you might well do. Drusilla and Caroline Halberd. How bizarre that they should be here. I wonder if the British Representative knows.”

“That would be you, Charles. Will you bid?”

“Oh, I suppose I am, now Bertie has gone. It isn’t official. Bid? No, not I. Aside from the fact that I have no official position and therefore would get nothing back from the government; and aside from the fact that their father is Sir Harry Harlberd and is notoriously hard to get money out of. Aside from that, I say, they are a pair of stuck-up bitches. Deserve all they get. They were very rude to Maddie I remember, very, very rude. No.”

The two discussing this turn of events were Solomon Degas and Charles Smythe, both merchants in one of the less popular countries of North Africa. The Sultana tolerated them because she thought they could help her stay in power long enough to get let her son become of age. The family blood letting of four years ago had been nasty and vicious. Only the young Sultan Siha was left with all his limbs and his head at the end. The Sultana had gathered enough support to get him made official Sultan of Jiha, and the British presence was felt to help lend some legitimacy to the enterprise.

Jiha still played host to numerous pirate ships, as did the other Barbary coast states. Degas and Smythe were very aware that the time was coming when the Powers would take action, but in the meantime, sailing close to the wind, they bought and sold in bulk and made very good profits. Both took the trouble to export much of their profits against the day when the Americans, or the British, or even the French finally had enough of the predations on their shipping and started mopping up this bastion of uncivilised lawlessness.

Actually, lawless was not a fair description of Jiha. It was one of more organised of the states, that was why Degas – a quarter Jewish, a quarter Huguenot, a quarter Scottish and a quarter English – and Smythe – third son with no inheritance – operated from there. They were less likely to lose their money or their lives since they had the protection of the current authorities; (they actually also cultivated the only possible opposition, in a subtle way). But the laws were different to those of Queen Victoria. They still had slavery for a start.

Solomon had been in the market looking for a replacement bath girl. His current one had got pregnant and he had freed her in consequence, much to the amusement of his Arab merchant friends who advocated beating her for getting pregnant, keeping her to give him a new slave in the future, or beating her hard enough to lose the baby, and assumed that child was his in any case. It wasn’t. So he freed her, gave her a job by buying one of the city baths and improving it. She was grateful and would bring him good profits. He had already signed the baths to her if he died. He had no interest in a household of mewling infants, he said.

So he had brought Charles Smythe along to help; they had agreed on a black girl of very dark hue. She had been brought up from the south. She wasn’t quite as upholstered as the Arabs liked, but several had bid against him on the assumption that she could be fattened up. Fattened up for sex, that is. Solomon didn’t like losing, so he paid well over the odds for a slave to run his bath rooms back in his house; she would learn in time how lucky she was when she found that opening her legs to his every whim was not part of her duties. He liked to wash after a hard dusty day, and a maiden in the steam room or in the warm bath to scrape off the dirt and then later to oil him was one of the delights of the day. He kept a small staff, some (including Smythe) judged themselves by the number of slaves they had; it was easier keeping slaves rather than camels in the city. She had been taken by one tribe raiding another. They were happy to take slaves from other tribes and then sell them to the Arab caravans that traded in the area. His own monarch had banned slavery for the United Kingdom and its empire, but he was very aware of the complex world trade that still existed.

So he had bought his new slave. It wasn’t that he approved of slavery, but employing servants was not a concept that existed in the Barbary States. You owned the people who worked for you, or you worked with other free men. Paying someone to work for you was unknown. He bought his slave and then noticed the three white women.

Mostly the privateers captured stock. Merchant vessels that sailed or were blown too close, or even were just unlucky. The crew often joined the galley slaves, theirs was not a good life. It was horrendous, they ate, slept, defaecated, pissed and died at their bench. Some crew simply jumped overboard rather than be taken. The Powers knew of this but it mostly only affected poor people so the governments had done little to stop it. The new United States was beginning to plan to take action. Richer passengers might be ransomed. This was what would happen with the Misses Halberd. The third woman was less likely to be ransomed as she was their governess. She was young and attractive, but again not sufficiently voluptuous to be a real find. The fashion was for Circassian beauties with well rounded hips and thighs, Madeline Alsop was thin of body, narrow of waist, though large of bust. She would be bought by a man for recreational rather than reproductive sex, she might be able to be fattened up; until he was bored, then he would sell her on. The two younger women would be bought by a merchant for the ransom they could produce.

This was another aspect of the organisation of Jiha. Rather than the pirates organising the landward side of the operation, they simply auctioned off their spoils to merchants, who would then move the goods on. An early example of logistics companies.

If there had been an official British representative, he might have bought the three women on behalf of the Foreign Office. But the government did not recognise or reward initiative, so buying them to save them from whatever fate awaited was not likely to reap rewards, or even payback. Solomon shrugged and nearly moved off with his young woman in tow, the paperwork completed; then he had a crisis of conscience, and joined the bidding.