Pawn in Frankincense (17 page)

At noon, Salah Rais along with eighty attendants presented himself on the quay beside the
Dauphiné
to break bread with his host. Resplendent in silks, velvets and jewels, with the slaves capped and shirted and the ship dressed with streamers and tassels and hangings of blue silk brocade, the Special Envoy and his entourage
welcomed him, and under the awning dispensed talk, food, music and non-alcoholic refreshments.

No shadow of significance was allowed to dim the flowing periods or interfere with the interminable courtesies. No reference was made to the Knights of St John, to the inconvenient return of the Agha, to the Special Envoy’s interest in certain inhabitants of the city, or to various incidents and inconveniences which had come to light during the night. There were, perhaps owing to the fact that a princely gift at the King of France’s expense had been dispatched that morning to the Agha, no hitches at all. Only immediately before retiring and after presenting Lymond with a copy of the Qur’ân, tastefully enclosed in a solid gold and pearl box, did Salah Rais, through his interpreter, murmur something about bullets.

The query died on his lips. Before him on deck, already borne by his escort, there passed crate after crate, already opened, and revealing the shining balls cradled within. As the procession creaked over the gangplank and began its journey on shore up to the palace, the Viceroy rose to bestow his blessing and thanks for the open heart and generous Christian hand of royal France.

He left; and so did the eighty. On shore, Onophrion and his minions, aided by the improvident of the town, began to clear off the feast. Like a well-oiled machine, already rehearsed and well used to submission, the ship prepared to take rowing stations and leave. Jerott, standing by the poop rail with Gaultier and Archie, watched the awnings drawn back, and the pilot depart for the outer harbour to survey the weather.

In an hour, the ship was clear for departure. Under a cloudy sky, in a light, lukewarm air, Marthe and Philippa joined the little band at the poop, and finally Lymond came himself with the captain.
‘Notre homme, avertissez que nous allons partir: que le canon soit leste pour tirer le coup de partance.…

‘
Boute-feu!
’ The bark of the cannon. ‘
Leva lengue!
’ Silence. ‘
Tout le monde fore du coursier et tout le monde à sa poste!
’

Like puppets, they jumped, thought Philippa. Seamen to the rambade; pilot to the poop; the
comite
to the coursier, the helmsman to the tiller, the gunners to the prow. Only the slaves, being chained, had no need to run. At a blast of the whistle, they had already stripped off their shirts: at another blast, naked to the waist, they bent forward, the calloused hands repeating their pattern along the great looms of the oars. The whistle blasted again and again, and the
Dauphiné
started to move.

Philippa stood on the tabernacle a long time, watching the glittering white-robed assemblage on the quay blur and dwindle, and the perspective of house and college and minaret, of trees and gardens, of the corsairs’ palaces, and the Viceregal Palace and the Kasbah, crowning it all, become a flat white triangle on the hilly African slopes.

Perhaps because there was, in the end, nowhere else he could go, Lymond stood with them also, without speaking, and watched it pale and recede. Georges Gaultier, standing at his niece Marthe’s side, suddenly turned and addressed him. ‘You are a hard man, sir, to give firearms to folk such as these. I trust you never have cause to regret it.’

‘Your sentiments also, Jerott?’ said Lymond. The light voice mocked.

For a moment, Jerott was silent. Then he said, ‘There’s a saying.
Dio dà i panni secondo i freddi.
’

Lymond turned his back on the coast of Algiers. He put his hands on the rail and returned Jerott’s stare and said, ‘Yes. It was cold. And God gave of his comfort accordingly, but with modifications from outlying quarters. The wheel spindles on those carbines are faulty, and all the key-spanners are missing.… Let us,’ quoted Francis Crawford largely, with a sudden scathing theatricality, ‘let us imitate the swallows, the storks and the cranes, which fetch their circuits yearly, like nomads, and follow the sun.’

And as if he had so commanded it, the light above their heads burst its watery films and drove warmingly on the ridged backs of the rowers, on the seamen and courtiers and officers and on the heads of the two girls standing, brown-headed and fair, on the poop, as the
Dauphiné
turned east, and away from the cold.

Having worked extremely hard at his job, having fought for his life, and having undergone considerable strain with the briefest of rests in the previous thirty-six hours, Jerott passed that afternoon on board the
Dauphiné
in something of a dream, and at dusk, having seen her safely anchored for the night just off the Barbary coast about thirty miles east of Algiers, he checked that he was no longer wanted, and stumbled below to sink into sleep.

Philippa, watching him go, noticed that Lymond had not yet succumbed. There was, of course, a great deal to do at the outset of a voyage of this length, They had unloaded some of their cargo and taken on fresh stores of fruit and water and livestock, which had to be properly stored. The dirt of the harbour had to be cleaned away, and all the temporary dispositions made for staying in port. They had found two stowaways: Christian slaves who had slipped on board unseen, and these had given rise to concern because recent wholesale defections to visiting French ships had made the Viceroy unduly sensitive to such happenings.

But all these, thought Philippa, were properly the business of the ship’s master and of Onophrion. She eyed Lymond as he moved about; wishing she were older; wishing she were a man, and battling, too, with a weight on her conscience. Oonagh was dead. Believing the child too to be dead, Lymond would now make his way direct to the Sublime Porte. But what if the child were alive? What if it had crossed the sea safely, and could be traced through the address the Dame de Doubtance had given her, on the island of Zakynthos?

Go alone with Abernethy, the old woman had said; and she had promised. And what if, after raising false hopes, the child proved after all to have died? She carried her problem into supper, found Lymond was not there, and carried it out again.

Because of the warmth of the night, the tents had not been put up. After the long stint of rowing, the slaves were already half asleep, curled in their chains, although there were lights round the
fougon
, and the smell of food hung on the air. Subdued talk came from the rambade and the benches flanking the galley, where the
chiourme
sat or lay, and she could hear voices below, where the hatch-covers had been opened to let air into the holds. Lymond she found, elbows crossed on the rail beside the unguarded tiller, in complete darkness, staring down at the invisible water. Changing her mind, Philippa turned and began to beat a retreat.

‘Philippa?’

He had seen her. She said, ‘It’s all right. I thought I’d dropped something.’

Lymond said, ‘Come here. I want to speak to you. I don’t mind company: it’s only food I don’t want.’ He waited until she came slowly up beside him, and then spoke gently. ‘You know, Philippa, we can’t take you with us: not now. Kate would never forgive me.’

Philippa took a long, shaky breath, and kept her voice steady. ‘You mean, now the baby’s dead, you don’t need me?’ she said.

There was a little pause. Then he said, ‘Jerott told you?’ And as she nodded her head in the dark, ‘I see. Yes, that’s partly the reason. The other is that the … issue between Gabriel and myself has changed in character a little. I’m going to put you on shore at Messina with Fogge and Archie and two of my men, and you’ll find your way to Sevigny and home by a route which I’ll give you: there are friends of mine all the way.’

‘And Marthe?’ said Philippa jealously.

‘Marthe also, I hope.’

But Philippa, struggling with the implications of all that, was suddenly pierced by another sickening thought. ‘You’re going to try and kill Gabriel? Now it won’t harm the baby?’

There was another little pause. Then Lymond said carefully, ‘He must die, Philippa. You must understand that.’

‘But he’s on Malta. If you touch him, you’ll lose your own life.’

‘So long as he dies, what does that matter?’ said Lymond with sudden impatience. ‘In any case, I’m not discussing Malta at present. Even if we don’t get a good wind in the morning, we can be in Sicily in two or three days. Make quite sure you’re ready, that’s all.’

Thinking wildly, Philippa Somerville stared at him, his face no more than a high-lighting of the dark. She was free. She could go to Zakynthos with Archie. But——

But if the child was alive, she would have to trace it before anything happened to Gabriel. Or by the terms of the pact, on Gabriel’s death, the child also would die.

Restlessly, Lymond had moved back to the rail. Her first instinct had been right, Philippa thought. Tired probably beyond sleep, he had no prospect of being alone except here, for the short space during which the master was at supper with the rest. She opened her mouth to talk about Zakynthos, and instead turned on her heel, thumped down several ladders, extracted a powder from Archie and a cup of wine from Onophrion, and proceeded to try to turn Jerott out of his cabin.

Jerott, three-quarters asleep, stared at Philippa, glanced at the empty bunk bed beside him and said, ‘Well, for God’s sake, that’s his affair. If he wants to come below,
I
shan’t disturb him; I’ve had enough of him today. Leave him alone.’

Marthe, who had come to watch, stood amused in the doorway
and said, ‘She wants to nurse him. It’s an interesting experiment. But he has lost his temper so often today, perhaps he has no more to lose.’

His eyes shut, Jerott added his last word. ‘Look, Philippa: don’t. You can’t expect him to behave as he should. You’ll regret it, and so will he, afterwards.’

At fifteen, Philippa was immune to that kind of adult abjuration. Stalking out of the cabin, potion in one hand and skirts in the other, she climbed all the ladders up to the poop and marched across to her victim.

He was still there at the rail. She saw the dark sheen of his doublet; and his folded arms, on which his bent head was resting. She said, ‘Mr Crawford?’ stoutly, and this time there was a pause before he lifted his head, turned and saw her.

He had perhaps been asleep. Certainly, his face was bemused; and at first he didn’t seem quite to recognize her. Then he said, ‘Oh
Christ. The bloody wet-nurse again
’ and, with a vicious blow of the hand that jarred her arm to the shoulder, jerked the heavy cup from her grasp and sent it flying into the sea.

‘They said you’d do that,’ said Philippa.

He had been going, she thought, to lay hands on her; but at the sound of her voice his arm dropped, and he brushed past instead, without speaking, and left the small deck. She watched him swing along the high gangway going nowhere: to the crowded castle; to the crowded planks at the side, when he suddenly stopped, his hand on the mainmast. A second later, his voice rang out; then the
comités
whistle shrilled, urgently, again and again and again.

The ship leaped into life. Rattling steps plunged up from the cabins; the master jumped to the tabernacle and somewhere there was the rumble she had come to recognize: the rumble of guns being run out. The ship went suddenly dark, and Archie Abernethy, who had appeared out of nowhere beside her, said, ‘He says you’re to get down and stay down, until you’re teilt to come up.’

Philippa didn’t stay to be told twice. She ran, and as she ran, passing Jerott kneeling by the gunroom hatch-cover, she looked quickly over her shoulder.

There, where in the cloud-torn sky the faintest new radiance told of the uprising moon, loomed the dark shape of a ship. A ship painted black. The corsair capital ship Lymond had fooled on the way to Algiers.

Jerott had had two hours’ sleep when it happened, and he felt like a man half-clubbed to death. He knew, as he effected, at top speed, his share of their practised defence, that if the pirate ship chose to close in, firing, the
Dauphiné
would sink where she lay.
Sails up, oars manned, guns primed and aimed, the corsair had all the searoom and the initiative. She could sink or board as she chose. Jerott wondered, heaving up arquebuses, what Lymond would do to the look-out. But it was hardly the fault of the seaman. Lightless on a black, starless night, the enemy ship might have come nearer yet, unseen but for that late-rising moon.

Still no guns. They were barely in cannon range. Give us another two minutes, thought Jerott, and we’ll have our firing-power ready, at least. That was the anchor coming up. The oars were dipping, waiting for orders. Pouring like animals over the gangway, the seamen were taking up positions. Jerott, sprinting round checking crutches, glanced up again, measuring the speed of the adversary.

She hadn’t moved. Standing off, just out of firing-range, she had turned to lie head to wind, and, as he watched, the mainsail slid down. Finding Lymond unexpectedly beside him, Jerott said with disbelief, ‘She hasn’t seen us?’