To Catch a Bride Read Online Free PDF

the comparison.
    Laila’s brother Omar bestirred himself as little as possible. It was Laila who earned the money that fed them, baking bread and pastries in the clay oven in the tiny courtyard. She scoured the city surrounds for wood and dried animal dung to burn in the oven, she made fillings for her pies with wild greens and herbs and just a smidgeon of cheese, but she was a born cook and her pies sold as fast as she could cook them.
    She was also a born mother, her barenness notwithstanding. She ached at the plight of the street children, would have fed them all if she could, but Omar forbade it. He took every coin that Laila earned. It was his right, as the head of the family.
    Every coin that he knew about. Laila and Ayisha had hatched a plan . . .
    “Omar is not a man; he is a leech,” Ayisha said. “And there is no such thing as women’s work, only work. So if Laila asks you to pick greens, you pick greens—understand?”
    Ali sighed and nodded, then glanced wistfully to where the Englishman stood in his long black boots, looking tall and handsome and exotic and in every way so much more exciting than an herb. “Can’t we just ask to see the picture?”
    “No.”
    “Why not? You want to, I know. Otherwise why are you here?”
    “I was passing and stopped out of curiosity,” she told him. “But I have work to do and so, my little greens picker, do you. So go.” She pushed him lightly in the direction of the river.
    Ali left, his steps lagging, a vision of martyrdom, but then, boy-like, he suddenly brightened and bounded off. Ayisha grinned. He was unsquashable, that child, and she loved him for it. She turned back to the Englishman, but he was leaving, his face remote and unreadable.
    Gamal remained outside his house and boasted to the small crowd of curious neighbors who came closer now that the Englishman had left. Ayisha sidled up behind them to hear what Gamal had to say.
    “He is a great lord from England, my visitor—Rameses, brother to the English king.”
    Ayisha tried not to snort. As if a royal English prince would be wandering the backstreets of Cairo with one interpreter and no armed guard. Even if the English king allowed it, Mehmet Ali, the pasha, would not.
    Gamal drew himself up to his full girth and said, “Indeed, he traveled all the way from the other side of the world just to talk to me. He asks about the Englishman who used to live in the rose-colored villa near the river.”
    “Is that one not dead?” someone asked.
    “Yes,” Gamal said, “but property went missing and the Englishman’s family wishes to recover it.”
    Property. A cold trickle ran down Ayisha’s spine.
    “Did you steal it, Gamal?” someone joked, and everyone laughed, not in a friendly way.
    “Why should I, who speaks with English lords, bother with ignorant fellahin?” Gamal gave his neighbors a disdainful look and went inside, closing the door.
    The neighbors muttered huffily and began to drift away in small indignant clumps. There was nothing more to be learned and the day was passing, so Ayisha left them to it.
    She caught up with the Englishman and his interpreter as they turned off the main road and into a quiet, cobbled alleyway. Ayisha’s steps faltered. She knew that street. The third house from the end was well known in certain circles . . .
    Zamil’s.
    Sure enough, they stopped at Zamil’s and knocked on a thick, iron-reinforced door.
    Anxiety coiled in the pit of her stomach. What business would he have with Zamil?
    She loitered in the shadows while the interpreter spoke to someone through a grill. A moment later they were admitted. The heavy door clanked shut behind them.
    Every instinct she had shrieked to get as far away from this place as she could. She started to leave, then turned back. She had to know what she was up against. She had to. She dithered for a moment, uncharacteristically indecisive.
    “What do you want at Zamil’s, young bantam?” growled a deep voice behind