Page 28 of Silver Angel

She sighed, pulling the little gauze veil that was attached to her simple headdress up over the lower half of her face. “This has happened before,” Chantelle said. “Sharif brings in buyers who don’t wish to wait for the auction or have missed it. The last time, it was a man whose cook had just died and he was hoping to find an immediate replacement.”

She didn’t add that these buyers could touch and examine the women at their leisure, open their mouths to check their teeth, or open the little vests that all of them had been given to wear. That little vest was all Chantelle had to wear now, too. She had lost Hakeem’s concealing tunic the first time she was led to the baths and her clothes taken to wash. She was given a new set of clean clothes, nearly identical to the others, but Hakeem’s tunic was not returned to her then or later.

“But why do you veil yourself?”

“I was told to do so whenever they let buyers in here. Sharif doesn’t want anyone seeing me before my sale.”

Jeanne sniffed. “I should have been given a veil, too. I don’t think I care to have just anyone look me over.”

Chantelle almost grinned at such a haughty tone, until she noticed Sharif’s client looking directly at her. And then the breath caught in her throat when they both walked toward her.

“Is she the one?” the stranger asked while his chocolate-colored eyes moved dispassionately over Chantelle.

Hamid Sharif, who was a short, squat man of middle years, seemed to shrink even more next to this impressive fellow. For a man who always seemed to be in complete control of himself—after all, he was master here—Sharif appeared at the height of anxiety tonight.

“But this is so irregular, my lord.” Sharif had not bothered to answer the question directly. “I have sent out word of her. I have buyers coming from Algiers and—”

An elegant hand was waved to cut off Hamid Sharif’s complaint. “How much?”

“But, Haji Agha, my lord, please, what will I tell the buyers?”

“The truth, or supply them with someone else. Her.”

Haji Agha had indicated Jeanne Mauriac, and Sharif’s expression relaxed somewhat. The Frenchwomanwaspretty. He had already been thinking of adding her as a bonus at the private auction, to assuage the bidders who lost out on the Englishwoman. She was older and not a virgin, but at least she was also a blonde.

“How much?” Haji Agha repeated.

“I was anticipating at the very least five thousand piasters.”

The black man did not bat an eye. “I will give you three.”

“Impossible! I cannot accept less than four thousand five hundred.”

“Three thousand five hundred, and my lord’s gratitude.”

“If you put it that way, of course I cannot refuse,” Hamid Sharif said with a bow, and when he raised his head, he was smiling.

“Well! That certainly didn’t take long,” Jeanne commented as the two men walked across the room to stand over the chained princess.

Chantelle didn’t answer immediately. She was slightly in shock. She had just been bought by a man old enough to be her grandfather, by a man with black skin of the like she had never seen until she arrived on the Barbary Coast.

“I—I couldn’t understand every word,” she said, turning wide violet eyes to Jeanne. “Did that man really just buy me?”

“Yes,” Jeanne replied, unable to contain her delight. “And I believe I get to take your place at the auction. Oh, this is much better than I could have expected! And you,petite, need no longer worry about the indignities of the sale. It is over. You have a lord and master now.”

Over? Yes, there was that. She didn’t have to fear being stripped bare before the eyes of a dozen or more men, no matter what Jeanne said to the contrary. Over. Sold. And to an old man. Sold. But he was old. Perhaps he just wanted the privilege of being the one to own her. Would a man that old still call his women to his bed?

“I wonder who he is that Hamid Sharif is willing to risk the wrath of his clients,” Jeanne speculated. “He must be very important.”

Chantelle was still watching the men, who appeared to have concluded another sale, this time for the African girl. “What does it matter?”

The few Turks and Arabs she had seen since her arrival were swarthy, dark-eyed men, either short and wiry or short and fat, with sharp, aquiline features. There had been only one exception, the Turk looking for a new cook. The friendlier of the two guards who sat outside their door had tried to explain it to her when she had remarked on his very light-colored skin.

The Turks had once been a mixture of strictly Eastern blood—Tatar, Mongol, Circassian, Georgian, Persian, Arabian, and Turkish. But after 1350, when they began stretching their borders into western Europe, the blood of the Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians was added, for a civilization as cosmopolitan as those of the Greeks, Romans, and Byzantines. Hakeem had mentioned something about this as well, since it was the same here on the Barbary Coast. In the past centuries, more and more new blood was added, from as far away as England, the Netherlands, and, more recently, even far-off America. But all of it came from the female slaves who ended up in harems and bore their master’s children.

Now the more wealthy men, the more important ones, those whose fathers and fathers before them had possessed harems full of fair-skinned concubines, had little Eastern blood left in their veins. It was nothing for the Sultan himself to have red hair or blue eyes. It was nothing for a devout Muslim to pass for a Christian without his turban on. But you were less likely to see this in the teeming streets of the cities in the Barbary States, with the new influx of Arabs and Berbers fresh from the desert, some as dark-skinned as a Nubian eunuch.

Chantelle certainly hadn’t seen it in the crowds that filled the courtyard to buy slaves. But she was glad the man who had bought her seemed foreign to her. She would have hated being owned by someone who was so European-looking that she could have passed him on an English road and not remarked on it. She didn’t want to relate to this owner of hers in any way.