Читать книгу Creatures of the Chase - Mikail - L. M. Ollie - Страница 7

Six months after giving birth to her twin boys, Shahana Maya Mauphet Benghazi and her youngest brother Yusuf Hassan journeyed to Cavendish Hall in secret. Proof of paternity was not an issue as Charles Develin readily admitted forcing himself on the then sixteen year old girl. It was when Shahana Maya insisted that he divorce his wife and marry her that things began to seriously unravel. When he made it clear that Develin men do not divorce - they usually murder their wives - she became angry; threatening to expose him as a rapist and despoiler of women. This was too much, so Charles Develin shot them both through the back of the head. Then he began searching for the child not realizing then or ever that there were two of them.

All this happened in early spring 1932. By then Charles Develin was a committed Nazi with friends in high places. The files locked away in the vault at Cavendish Hall were for the most part correspondence between Develin and Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Paul Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler. Charles Develin did not need a young Moroccan girl or her brother making waves.

No one in the Benghazi family knew what became of Shahana Maya or her brother Yusuf. Their uncle Omar Mauphet Benghazi took charge of the twin boys; sending the infant Yusuf Nessim to Italy to be raised by Maria and Giuseppe Sarquazi. Merhot met a similar fate in Switzerland with the Capritzo family. It wasn’t until the boys were twenty-five years of age that they were told the truth about each other and themselves. The boys were told that their mother had died in childbirth. Five years later Omar Benghazi died and Yusuf Nessim Sarquazi Mauphet Benghazi, age twenty-nine inherited everything including a half share in his brother’s business – the highly lucrative Brownstones.

*****

It was Carl Emery who told Sarquazi the truth about his mother and his uncle.

‘Your mother didn’t die in childbirth Sarquazi; your father murdered her. Your mother and your uncle died at Cavendish Hall and they are buried at Cavendish Hall.’

Yusuf Sarquazi was devastated by this news. ‘All my life I have dreamed that my mother would find me; that I would hear the sound of her voice, feel the touch of her hand. The truth, it is here in my head but my heart … my heart cannot accept it.’

Sarah put her hand on top of his. ‘Yusuf, Richard lost his mother when he was not yet nine years old. Until he was twenty-five he believed that she died from influenza but the truth was that Charles Develin, your father and his, murdered her because she was having an affair with another man. I think that, just like you, the truth was devastating for him.

‘I don’t know whether your prayers include remembrances of those who have gone before us but I would like to think that you could spare a thought for a half-brother you never knew who also suffered a life of loneliness, neglect and longing for something that could never be – a mother’s comfort and love. I know what I’m talking about Yusuf. I lost mine when I was sixteen and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think of her.’