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and left it to prove, then gathered armfuls of herbs from the courtyard garden. They’d mashed the aubergine flesh with garlic and lemon juice and sesame paste and chopped the herbs and cucumbers and radishes for the salad. Only then had they turned their attentions to the fiddly, infuriating pastries.
    “Oh my,” Nima said suddenly. Her cheeks were flushed; sweat beaded on her forehead. She ran a hand through her hair.
Were those
grey streaks there yesterday?
Zohra wondered.
Well, of course they were. No one goes grey overnight
.
    “Take a rest, Ummi. Go, sit in the shade in the courtyard, out of all this heat.”
    “No time for that. We must finish these and then get the
qidreh
on.” Nima wiped her forehead, then carried on cutting and filling and crimping like a woman possessed.
    Zohra felt powerless. There had been nothing she could do to dissuade her mother from hosting the feast. Nima had been insistent, partly because she wanted to impress her sisters-by-law. Their husbands were well-to-do importers, whereas Zohra’s father was an invalided veteran, and they had to scrape by on whatever Malek sent home from his wages as a soldier in Salah ad-Din’s army. But really, who cared what the aunts and cousins thought of them? Zohra didn’t.
    She found her thoughts drifting to the man she’d met at the perfume stall. Nathanael, the doctor’s son. What a strange-looking creature he was. All that curly black hair and that bold, bold look in his eyes. And the way he had laid a kiss on her palm! No one had ever touched her like that. A Muslim girl was sacrosanct: to be touched by any man was
haram
, forbidden. And yet the doctor’s son had behaved as if it were entirely normal, and no shame at all. He was a mystery, a fascinating, disturbing mystery …
    “Zohra, wake up! It’s as if you’ve been in a dream all morning. And, oh! Look at the mess you’ve made of those. Well, it can’t be helped now. Quickly, take them down to the oven, and don’t forget the dough.”
    Zohra loaded up a tray, made their symbol in the dough and, with it held precariously on her head, ran to the communal oven down the road to leave the
ma’amul
and flatbreads to bake, only to find that the oven was full: everyone was celebrating. The next oven had a queue that stretched around the corner, and so she randown the hill to a third bakery she located only by the spiral of woodsmoke that rose from its fire.
    “Leave those with me,” an old woman said, taking hold of the tray. Zohra recognized her with despair as the Widow Eptisam, an incorrigible gossip. She had an eager, rabbity face with protruding teeth, and eyes that constantly darted from one thing to another. “I’ll put them in as soon as my own come out, it would be my pleasure,
binti
.”
    “No, it’s fine. I’ll wait.” Zohra didn’t want to be beholden to her. But the widow had a firm hold on the tray, so in the end, rather than have to stay there and be talked at for half an hour, she left the pastries and dough with the old woman and turned for home.
    As she passed a junction of alleys an idea nagged at her: if she followed one of them down the hill she would come to the Street of Tailors, where the doctor’s son, Nathanael, lived. The idea of his proximity made Zohra flush.
    All this time—the best part of three months since she had encountered him in the bazaar—she had toyed daily with the possibility of following his impudent instruction to come to his house, and daily, she had retreated from imagining what might happen if she did.
    Zohra had been brought up to believe that a good angel sat on one of her shoulders and a bad angel on the other, and that every decision involved a struggle between the two. So far her good angel had prevailed—during daylight hours, at least—but she could feel the pull of the bad angel now. Or perhaps it was the djinns with which Nathanael had threatened her.
    When Salah ad-Din’s army had reclaimed Akka there had been chaos