Pawn in Frankincense (13 page)

Below, she signed her name. There was no word of fondness or of recrimination.… She must, thought Jerott, looking out of the side of his eye, have been a strange and powerful woman, this mistress of Lymond’s.

No … not mistress. She had been that to Cormac O’Connor, who wished to be King of all Ireland, and whose dream she had lived until, spoiled and gross, Cormac had lost all his vision and lost her, finally, too. Then Lymond and she had been on opposite sides, Archie Abernethy had told him. What had brought them together was one move, coolly plotted, in some far more vital intrigue. What it had led to was this.

She had no regrets. That was probably true. With the death of her lifelong struggle for Ireland, it must seem that little else mattered. And of the child she spoke with complete unconcern. Jerott wondered if she were a woman indifferent to children. Or one who, weighing Lymond’s life and the child’s, had made a hard choice.

Then Lymond, looking up, said, ‘Where is she?’ and the messenger, smiling and bowing, said, ‘Dragut’s house. Dragut Rais is with the fleet; he is away. The woman waits for the Hâkim there.’ He paused. ‘The Hâkim will not wish an escort. If he will follow, there is a side door which will take us out of the palace.’

‘Wait a bit.’ Jerott, catching a handful of white tissue and emeralds, held Lymond back. ‘Didn’t the note say something about poor
people? It doesn’t sound right. And in any case you can’t walk about the back streets like that.’

‘It had occurred to me,’ Lymond said, and Jerott let his hand fall. It crossed his mind to wonder why he had not been dispatched back to the harbour, and then he realized that his appearance in the courtyard, alone, would only set inquiries afoot. Also, Lymond would need his help with the woman. It further crossed his mind to wonder why he had thought it important to come in the first place.

He kept his mouth shut while, sent off with silver, the felt-capped man returned promptly with two white, hooded burnouses, smelling strongly of goat, which he and Lymond put on. Then, stepping into the dark, noisome air, Lymond said softly, ‘She is in Dragut’s house? I know the place very well. Suppose you and Mr Blyth follow, and I choose the way.… Mr Blyth, I should warn you, has a nervous disposition and a very sharp dagger.’ And as they set off, twisting and turning through the dark, precipitous streets, Jerott thought, acidly, that a slip of that dagger, if it happened, would save Francis Crawford a large sum of money. That the thought was unworthy did not make him any less peevish.

Dragut Rais’s Algerian palace was of marble, and set within gardens whose walls traced, in stucco, the benign injunctions of the Prophet Mohammed. Behind the blank walls no lights could be seen, and the double-leafed doors, gilded and inlaid with woods, were decisively closed. Skirting the wall for a weak place, Lymond found, somewhere, an invisible foothold and, in spite of the hampering cloth, was neatly up and over: Jerott, left below with the silent messenger, wondered sardonically how many ducats’ worth of vermilion velvet had lost its spruceness in going. From the top of the wall, Lymond’s voice said quietly, ‘There’s a light on at the back somewhere, and voices—he probably keeps a few servants, or they move in with their families, more likely, when he goes away. The main rooms seem to be empty, and the courtyards aren’t lit. Ask him where she’s supposed to be.’

Jerott turned. It was as well that he did, for the doubled fists of the messenger, striking hard for his neck, met his shoulder instead. Jerott grunted, twisted, and grabbed.

He was a second too late. Ducking, the felt-capped man, muscles hard, dragged himself out of that grasp and, flinging off to one side, got his balance, glanced once at Jerott, and then darted off into the darkness. After the first step, breathing hard, Jerott stayed where he was, swearing. But he could hardly leave Lymond. He looked up.

‘Bravo,’ said Francis Crawford, sitting crosslegged on top of the wall, his hood shaken free on his shoulders. ‘You’re a credit to the bloody Order, aren’t you? You
know
you’ve got a knife in your hand?’

There was no excuse, which didn’t make it any better. Jerott said, ‘I apologize. I’ll go after him now.’

There was a furious pause. Then Lymond’s voice, the chill gone, said, ‘Don’t be an ass, Jerott? You know I can’t do without you.’

It was an obvious answer. But it was also something Jerott had never had from Lymond before: an apology and an appeal both at once.

He found he had nothing to say. Instead, he pushed back his hood and, giving Lymond his hand, pulled himself up to the wall-top beside him. Then, side by side, they dropped silently into the unlit garden of Dragut Rais’s house, and methodically set about entering and searching its rooms.

It took half an hour. Familiar with Arab houses and their lack of all but movable furnishings, Jerott was not surprised that breaking in should be simple: there was literally nothing to steal. Possessions, packed into coffers, moved from house to house with their owner: Dragut’s would be at Djerba or Prevesa or Constantinople by now. For the Viceroy had clearly been truthful, if in this respect only: Dragut Rais was not there.

Walking through chamber after bare chamber, and skirting the dark courtyards with their rustling trees and dried and derelict fountains, Jerott tried to imagine it as it must have been in the summer, when the corsair princes sailed through their rich, sunny playground and made sport with their luxurious spoils.

Oonagh O’Dwyer had been one of those captives: had lain perhaps by that marble basin and watched the fish play and tended her child … perhaps. Jerott had never seen Oonagh O’Dwyer, and could imagine no child of Lymond’s here.

In the end, they did hear children’s voices, but the screeching voices of Algerine children, black-haired, filthy and raucous, swarming in one room far at the back with half a dozen half-bred Moorish women … the servants, or the families of the servants left to safeguard the property. Of menfolk there was no sign: at that hour they would have business in the lower town common to their kind, Jerott knew. Dropping softly from his viewpoint through a high, half-shuttered window, he rejoined Lymond saying, ‘Now what?’

Just that, for there was no use in saying,
What did I tell you? At the royal palace your rank had royal protection. In the streets, perhaps, you were able to escape notice. But you are here because you were sent here … by a woman in Baden; by another woman in Lyons; by a man you have never seen before who brought you this far and then ran away. It is a trap—you and I know it’s a trap, of Gabriel’s devising; and we have no protection at all.…

‘That leaves the gardens,’ said Lymond. ‘Not very likely, but we’ll search them to make sure. What puzzles me is why they didn’t attack in the house, if they’re going to. They can hardly surround
the whole house and garden, unless they’ve got a squadron of troops, and they’re not going to find it very easy to catch us out here in the dark. If this is all Gabriel’s doing, then it’s for some other purpose, surely, other than a simple ambush and killing.’

Leaving the path, they moved over the soft winter grass and through a dark maze of small, hanging trees. More paths, a fountain, a paved square lined with dark tubs. Jerott barked his shin and bit back an exclamation. Lymond’s voice, even and quiet, said, ‘Unless there has been a mistake, a fault in his plans. But I can’t believe that, though I’d like to.… ’

Before them the rest of the gardens stretched into darkness, unknown and quiet. From the house, muffled by bushes and trees, women’s voices scratched the silence, raised in anger or argument. A cat mewed, and far off, the constant, irritating barking of a dog was taken up by another, still more distant. Of the crammed, multilingual, vociferous life that lay outside this expensive, deserted oasis there was no other sound, and they could hear the wet, lukewarm wind moving the tops of the trees and blowing a dead leaf, like tinfoil, along the brick path. Jerott said, ‘There’s nothing here. If it’s a trick, it’s just the malicious one of leading us up a blind alley. That brute who ran away wouldn’t have turned his back on a fortune.’

‘Unless …’ said Lymond, ‘… Oh, bloody hell, let’s get it over with. You take that wall and I’ll take this. We’ll walk the length of the garden and compare notes at the bottom. There’s no point in sticking together anyway: if anyone attacks you in this place, you don’t fight; you run, and get back to the ship as you can. If anything strikes you as mysterious, whistle.’

‘Right.’

‘… Jerott?’

Two steps away, Jerott stood perfectly still. ‘I hear you.’

‘You sound like a schoolmaster,’ said Lymond’s voice at his ear, with a trace of its usual lightness. ‘It doesn’t matter. Go on.’

Jerott did not move. ‘What were you going to say?’

‘Something regrettable. I’ll say it; and then we can both forget it,’ said Lymond. ‘You put up with a lot, you know. More than you should. More than other people can be expected to do.… I find I need a sheet anchor against Gabriel. However much I try—don’t let me turn you against me.’

Jerott said slowly, ‘You command your own will. Otherwise I shouldn’t be here.’

‘You mean I swallowed my pride. But then, there are some things I don’t think I could stomach.… And Gabriel knows them too well.’

‘Gabriel,’ said Jerott firmly, ‘is now at Birgu, Malta, engaged in a life-and-death struggle for the Grand Mastership of the Order of
St John. He is unlikely to spend a large part of his time arranging esoteric disasters for his adversaries. He is far more likely to arrange to kill them stone dead.’

‘All right. You go and get killed stone dead on that side of the garden, and I’ll stick to this,’ said Lymond. ‘
Calamitosus est animus futuri anxius
, or why worry about tomorrow, when your funeral is today. Goodbye.’

‘Au revoir,’ said Jerott Blyth, in stout contradiction of his own theory; and, striding off to the right, contacted the wall rather suddenly and proceeded to follow it, in cloud-muffled starlight; surveying his half of the ground as he went.

And so he was the first, in the end, to encounter Oonagh O’Dwyer … far down the garden and out of range of their whispering voices. So far off that Jerott was drawn to the place by a sound which had been inaudible where Lymond and he had stood before parting. In that disused and derelict garden, the sound of light, wind-blown fountains, playing in a large pool. Listening, Jerott turned and walked slowly towards it.

There were cypresses in the way; formal gardens sealed from the stars by wall and creeper and a hedging of palms. It was from this absolute dark that he turned a corner and saw stretching before him a study in milk-quartz and silver; a fantasy lit by the moon and the stars and a single lamp hung in the distance, an ox-eye on velvet.

It was a flower-garden, the green growing scents stirring already in the mild African winter. The pond sunk in its centre was a long one, edged by a vista of twinned silver sprays: from end to end, the spray rose like a mist and obscured the kiosk at the far end, a lacy thing hung with leaves, where the oil lamp burned quietly still.

And under the lamp, Jerott saw, a woman was sitting.

He stopped. From the rest of the garden there came no untoward sound; no voice, no footfall; no stir but the wind shaking the tree-tops and the kissing patter of water on water, nearer at hand. If Lymond was near, there was no sign of him. If this were Gabriel’s trap, it was delicately baited indeed.

His sword drawn, moving from shadow to shadow along the tall cypresses, his footfalls lost in the waterplay, Jerott advanced to the kiosk until, reaching the last of his cover, he was able to stop and study as much as the lamp showed him inside.

The little building was of great elegance: a marriage of Fez and Granada, with flowered tiles and fine marquetry and, above, a honeycomb of rose-coloured stucco like a flower-form sheathing the chamber. Inside, there was a single divan, draped and set with fine cushions, and a rug on the floor.
She is not one
, Archie Abernethy had once said,
who has ever looked young, nor would she ever look less than beautiful. Black hair she has, you would say like a barrel
of pitch; and queer, light eyes that look through you, and a neck you could put your one hand around. That is Oonagh O’Dwyer
.

The woman sitting there, straight and still on the bright velvet cushions, was not young; nor was she less than beautiful. The black hair, loose and shining, and deep, fell back over her shoulder and forward down to her waist; her chin was high above the pure line of her neck, which you could have held in one hand. Her eyebrows were black, and arched in pride, or surprise, or over some deep, long-held thought; and below the black, silky lashes, the wide eyes were packed full of straw.

Fighting for the Order in Malta,
sub suave jugo Christi
, Jerott Blyth had seen many things. He knew what man could do to man; he knew, given primitive nature and primitive provocation, what of suffering and what of brutalization and what, sometimes, of nobility could ensue.

So he turned his back on that elegant kiosk and, closing his eyes, leaned against the smooth birch-tree bark until the sickness cleared from his brain and the blackness from his sight and until the turmoil was locked hard within him.

He did not look again, after that, at that cold, lighted arbour. He sheathed his sword and whistled; and at an answering whistle, strode through the dark garden, heedless of noise, to find Francis Crawford.

Lymond stood, a taut shadow on some dim, arcaded path, and said, ‘What?’ sharply as Jerott appeared. Then as Jerott, breathing hard, suddenly found himself speechless, the other man soundlessly joined him. In the dark, he could not read Jerott’s face. But he said, as if he had, ‘Lead on. I’ll follow you.’

The pond this time was not a vista but a panorama, laid out before them, with the kiosk in profile on their left. Faced with the sparkling garden; the pool, the plash of live water against the shadowy trees and the mellow, innocent light from the tiny kiosk, Lymond stopped and Jerott stood with him.