Free The House of the Scissors by Isobel Chace

well-being.
    “We ought to,” Arab began.
    “I want to go to Mambrui again. Lucien says I should have shown you the pillar tomb there. Please , Arab, do let’s just go there and back, and then go home?”
    Arab hesitated for only a second. “Do you think they’ll recognise us?” she asked, painfully aware of the outcome of her last visit there.
    Hilary looked her up and down, her eyes very serious. “I don’t think so. Those trousers aren’t a bit like the jeans you were wearing the other day. Anyway, they won’t do anything to us. It wasn’t you they were angry with. They were angry with the boy who took you inside the shrine without telling you to take off your shoes. They know that lots of tourists don’t understand these things.”
    “Are you sure?”
    Hilary gulped with laughter. “You’re afraid!” she accused her.
    “I think I’d feel happier if we had someone with us,” Arab confessed. “Oh well, on your head be it—”
    “It’ll be all right,” Hilary confirmed eagerly. “We won’t be going right in to Mambrui. The pillar tomb is on the outskirts. It’s very interesting. Lucien says that it was still standing at the end of the war, but since then it’s fallen down. In a way that’s better, because you can go right up to it and look at it.”
    “Okay, pet, we’ll go!”
    Having committed herself, Arab was as keen to make the trip as Hilary was. She drove out along the north road and across the river with a feeling of exhilaration that she was going to see something that Lucien thought important. She thought it would be a clue to the people of the coast, who everyone told her were quite different from those of the hinterland. Their long contact with the Arabs, who came sweeping down the coast on the monsoon winds in their dhows , had brought more than their Islamic faith’ with them; they had brought the whole flower of their civilisation, which had sent down firm roots in its new African environment. Other strangers had followed, adding their different flavours to the basic brew, but it had remained true to its first character, with a fierce loyalty to the values that had arrived on the winds as long ago as the eleventh century, at a time when William of Normandy was busy conquering England.
    Hilary chatted happily by Arab’s side. There were other pillar tombs, she told her. There were two actually in Malindi. But the one at Mambrui was, in Lucien’s opinion, the most interesting.
    Even broken and lying on its side, the pillar was a thing to wonder at. When it had been upright, it had reached some twenty-seven feet into the sky. Now, the top part had toppled over and lay at the foot of its one-time support. Still intact, in the upper portion of the pillar, were a number of delicate porcelain bowls, half-buried in the muddy concrete substance of which the pillar had been built.
    “What are they for?” Arab asked Hilary.
    The child shrugged thin shoulders. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “They’re Chinese bowls of the late Ming dynasty,” she added. “They’re pretty, aren’t they?”
    “Are you sure?” Arab demanded.
    “Of course I am.” Hilary wrinkled her nose with displeasure that anyone should cast doubt on her veracity. “Lucien said so!”
    Hilary danced into the sitting room ahead of Arab, unperturbed that Lucien and Sandra Dark were sitting closely together on the long leather sofa.
    “We went to Mambrui again,” she announced. “Arab doesn’t believe that those bowls are Chinese. You tell her, Lucien.”
    Arab wished that she hadn’t come in. Sandra’s lipstick was smudged and she was almost sure it was because Lucien had been kissing her. A tight knot of dismay grew within her and, if she could have done so, she would have gone out again as quietly as she had come in, and gone away, back to the hotel and the loneliness of her room.
    Lucien stood up, his eyes noting the unnatural colour in Arab’s cheeks.
    “Wasn’t it rather brave of you to dare