Pawn in Frankincense (20 page)

‘You are proposing to use force?’ said Marthe. Her hair, combed out over her shoulders, lay on her bedgown outlined in silver from the deck lamps behind her: her voice expressed nothing but a kind of wary contempt.

‘I see no need. I mean to make landing on Malta,’ said Lymond. ‘It is a private matter, and as far as you and M. Gaultier are concerned the official embassy ends here. Your responsibility for the spinet is also therefore at an end, and since there is an element of danger, I see no point in exposing you needlessly. You will have, I hope, a safe and comfortable journey home.’

‘And my uncle?’ said Marthe.

‘Has expressed a preference to continue on board meanwhile. As far as he is concerned, you are your own mistress. As far as I am concerned, you are not.’

‘And if the spinet sinks to a watery grave,’ said Marthe, ‘who will recompense the King and the Sultan? Or have you providently amassed a second fortune for that?’

‘I am hoping it won’t immediately concern me,’ said Lymond. He gathered the door-curtain in his hand. ‘You have perhaps twenty minutes to pack.’ Then, as she stood unmoving, the mocking smile still on her lips, he said with the same weary courtesy, ‘Mademoiselle. There is nothing personal in this. If I could take you, believe me, I should. Since I have decided against it, you have really no rational alternative. I can have you tied and carried on board; you can threaten and even carry out suicide; you could possibly damage me or my men. These would be the petty exchanges of juveniles; and we are not juveniles.… Please pack quietly, and go.’

‘And your oath, on Gabriel’s altar in the Cathedral of St Giles?’ Marthe said in her pleasant, identical voice. ‘Was that a juvenile foolishness too?’

There was a long silence. The woollen door-curtain, released from Lymond’s hand, swung to across the cold doorway and he smoothed its folds, unseeing, with gentle fingers. Without turning, he said, ‘Very few people know of that.’

‘I am one of them,’ she said; and, watching his back, continued softly to speak. ‘Nor am I fool enough to believe that child is dead, whatever Mr Blyth tried to pretend. I know the truth now. Up to yesterday, your first duty was to the woman and boy. Now it is to the boy. If you reach any other decision, it is due to Gabriel’s strength and your own moral vapidity.’ And as he wheeled round, unamused, she spoke again, with deliberation, in the tongue so like his own.

‘What have you learned from life, that you cannot face facts? What happened in Algiers that is so paralysing that your mind cannot work through it? Shall I tell you?’ Between the strands of pale hair, the pale, clever face blazed into the blank face of the man.

‘Shall I tell you? By Gabriel’s orders, they took your lover, living or dead, and they flayed her. So that there might be none of her essence to bury, they flung what was left to the dogs. The skin they kept; and painted, and stuffed with wool, hair and straw, and set as in life, where you would be certain to find it.…

‘There is your picture. Acknowledge it. Acknowledge, too, that she was not the first to suffer it, and will not be the last. That she was ill, and did not want to survive. And that, from what you were told, it seems likely that she either died by her own hand or was killed before the flaying.

‘The moment of her death was
that
moment, cleaner than the death of old age. What happened later was nothing to Oonagh. Where would you have found her a grave? What dignity did she have that was not of the spirit? What happened later was aimed not at her, but at you. And you are now doing precisely what Gabriel meant you to do.’

She paused. ‘There is a saying. ‘O
Bhikshu! empty this boat! If emptied, it will go quickly. Having cut off passion and hatred, thou wilt go to Nirvâna.
’ It is not a time for emotion. You are facing east, and you cannot fight the East with emotion; only with your brain and your soul.’

The lamp flickered. Motionless in the gathering darkness, his head pressed against the doorpost, his face turned fully away, he gave no sign whether her words had reached him. Whether he did not choose to speak, or found speech physically impossible, no one could have told. The silence dragged on. Breaking it, eventually, herself, Marthe said quietly, ‘Your other problem, of course, is myself. You won’t solve that either, by dismissing me as if I had never existed. You may consider that you are sending me ashore in my own interests, but I put it to you that you are not. I am prepared to risk my life by staying. You must find the manhood to allow me to stay.’

Lymond straightened. Turning his head until the bruised, heavy blue eyes looked into the blue eyes of Marthe, he said, ‘Who are you?’ His voice was exhausted.

Marthe’s, cool and articulate, did not alter at all. ‘My name is Marthe.’

‘What is your other name?’

‘The name of my father.’

‘And who is your father?’

The slender, strongly made shoulders sketched a shrug. ‘Who knows? He had no ship and no money; or if he had, he found better employment for both than in looking for me. Like your son, I am a bastard.’

‘No, my dear,’ said Lymond. ‘Forgive me.… But I think you are a bastard like nobody else.’ And brushing past her, he walked up into the solitary deck of the poop.

When the longboat came from Strozzi requesting his passenger, he sent it back empty.

He stayed alone on the poop for a long time, and it was nearly dawn when, moving carefully, he walked down to his cabin. It was no surprise to find Salablanca there. Lymond said, ‘Tell the master in the morning we are not going to Malta. He is to make straight for Djerba instead.’ And walking past the slumbering Jerott, rolled on to his own neatly made bunk, and was still.

In these tart waters, there came to the
Dauphiné
a spring Jerott Blyth was never to forget.

They were no longer travelling direct to Constantinople, but instead following the track of an unknown child in a journey which might take them anywhere. And now they knew that, step by step, they had to expect direct opposition on Gabriel’s behalf.

Summoning them all to the tabernacle on the day after that encounter with Leone Strozzi, Francis Crawford had made sure there was no misunderstanding about that, and had given them all, once more, a chance to withdraw from the voyage.

None had taken it. Marthe and Gaultier, Jerott supposed, had business interests they could pursue in the Levant, whatever the fate of the spinet. Onophrion perhaps had not yet given up hope of seeing his new master disembark, groomed and painted at the Golden Horn in the tournure so carefully furnished. And he, Jerott, remained for some reasons he knew, and some he would not admit to himself.

Lymond did not make it easy. His dry voice during that meeting still rang, on occasion, in Jerott’s head. ‘I suggest, if you come with me, that you remove from your minds the image of a live human child. We are going to be brought literally hundreds of these, now the size of the reward is known. We are going, if I know Gabriel, to be shown disease and poverty and young children in distress unimaginable. If you are coming, Jerott, you must recognize that
nothing can be done for these
. They can’t eat money. We can supply them with food for one meal and medicine for one day and it will do nothing but spin out their misery by those few hours longer.…

‘We are looking for one object, which happens to be the key to Graham Malett’s destruction. That is all.’

‘If that is all,’ had said Jerott, ‘why look for it at all?’

‘Now that,’ Lymond had said, ‘is a very good point. I seem to remember making it myself, in fact, last night. Mlle Marthe persuaded me differently. That is why I am now warning you all, Mlle Marthe included, against sentimentality. We are looking for a pawn. And if we succeed in taking it, Gabriel’s pride will be pledged, wherever he is, in attempting to recover it. That attempt, I trust, he will not survive.’

Silent so far, Onophrion Zitwitz had raised his sonorous voice. ‘On what,’ he had asked, ‘does a child of one year endeavour to feed?’

‘Does it matter?’ Jerott Blyth had said bitterly.

The days that followed, Jerott passed in the routine concerns of
the voyage, in perfecting with Lymond and Salablanca what he already had of Arabic and of Turkish; and in drinking.

To Lymond’s single disparaging comment on this last, he had answered without civility. ‘I’ve had enough of obedience, chastity, sobriety and poverty. Other men are not frigid, Francis.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Lymond. ‘If you find this whole project unbearably irritating, there is not the slightest reason why you should stay. What else do you find so inflaming? Marthe?’

In spite of himself, Jerott grinned. ‘There’s a girl who hates the sight of you.’

‘She hates, if you notice, anything masculine. I can only recommend that you don’t allow yourself to be drawn to her. And that you either stop drinking, or leave.’

Jerott said nothing until the indifferent gaze, returning, rested on him. Then he said, ‘Do you mean that?’

‘Yes,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘I mean it. And you can disregard any other conversations we have had on this subject. If you’re desperate for women, you can disembark and buy a Berber slut with a ring through her nose, to the spoil of kissing, tomorrow. No doubt you’ll find it easy to buy a quick passage home.’

High on his cheekbones, the blood stained Jerott’s skin. But he said caustically, ‘I think I might succeed in controlling my ravening hunger. But if I want to drink, I’ll drink, Francis; whether it pleases you or not. If you want me off, put me off. Otherwise, you’ll just have to put up with it, won’t you?’ And he walked out.

Their first official stop was at Bone, although they put off a skiff at Cape Tedele and at Gigeri. The peculiar difficulty of this search was so obvious that it needed no stressing. Apart from Algiers and Bône and one or two others, the rest of the harbours on this coast were closed to them, because they had been taken back by the Emperor in the fighting of the last two or three years, and now came under the Crown of Castile. And the Emperor, of course, was the sworn enemy of France. So Susa, Monastir, Mehedia, the fort of Calibia and most of Tunis itself were out of bounds to the
Dauphiné
. The only harbours she could frequent were those which paid tribute to Algiers. And from there, undetected if possible, the investigation would have to be prosecuted inland to the forbidden towns under Spain.

They had one clue: the camel-trader Ali-Rashid. That he had gone through Bône all these weeks ago Salablanca had discovered on these quiet shore-going visits, along the dunes and sandy cliffs east of Algiers. One moonlit evening off Tigzirt, Jerott had gone part of the way with him, drawn by the silvered Roman pillars standing above the sand, and had found himself wading ashore through the streets of the drowned city of Iomnium, with weeded carving pricking his fingers, and phosphorescent life rolling in
clouds of green fire under sculptured black arches. It was there, in the lee of the mountains, that Salablanca heard that the trader had passed through, after Dragut had gone, in the autumn. It was a cold trail they were following.

It was there, too, that Jerott, in vinous and melancholy solitude on the aft deck at night, saw Marthe slipping in from the sea, her robe incandescent in the moon, and her hair fronding her shoulders like the dark weeds of Iomnium. ‘Salablanca told me. I had to see it,’ she said. ‘Look.’ And she opened her hands.

Blurred by the abrasive seas and disfigured with molluscs, a grey, once-marble cupid lay in her palms, its wings honeycombed, its eyes hollow and vacant. Her own, staring at it, had lost all remembrance of herself: her breathless young eagerness was something Jerott remembered once in Francis Crawford, before the years of disenchantment ground it away. ‘So the sea, at least, will yield you its delights,’ Jerott said. ‘I thought you were perhaps like the Sarmates, who might not lie with a man till they had first killed one in battle.’

Like a rippling conch in the moonlight, her fingers closed fast on their prize. ‘Must you spoil it? Must you spoil everything?’ she said. And turning abruptly in her dark runnels of wet, was instantly gone.

Jerott stayed, with the explicit intention of finding a new flask of wine and emptying it, before he went down below.

The Cadi at Bône was a renegade Christian, who sent them bread, roast mutton and the regrettable speciality of the area,
macolique
, or platters of paste, meal, onions and bony pullets in sauce. Onophrion, receiving them, shrank a little and disappeared while Lymond was effusively thanking the Cadi’s emissary: they never saw the platter again.

Next day, while Lymond made his ceremonial call at the Cadi’s house, Jerott and Salablanca interviewed two hundred children between them.

Bône, standing lop-sided on high, ragged rocks, had in its time been a great corsair port, and had still a good fortress and harbour, a fine mosque to which the Cadi’s house was attached, and the broken ruins on the foreshore of the great city of Hippo. In two sackings, the town itself had shrunk to three hundred poor houses, but there were good wells on the lower, southern side of the town and fertile ground just outside it. No one in Bône was starving though none, as they stood in their robes, black and white, brown and striped; in the thick, carpet-like textures of the desert, and the muslin of the Cadi’s officials, showed the untroubled bloom of high-spirited health.

The people of Tedele had been gay, Salablanca had told them. The people who thronged the quayside at Bône as Salablanca began to shepherd them to the site he and Jerott had chosen were anxious,
vociferous, sarcastic, aggressive, derisive, beseeching and, some of them, silent. Among the last were the women who accompanied their menfolk, heads folded in cotton, eyes downcast above the
yaşmak
. Jerott, grim-faced, found he had no words for the women. It was Salablanca, walking firmly among them, who was saying gently over and over, ‘There will be money; it is so. The Efendi is just. Bring your children over here. The children will be examined over here.…’

All along the coast from Algiers, Salablanca had spread the word. And long before that, carried by the fishing-boats and the raiders, Lymond’s message had reached the Barbary coast. A yellow-haired, blue-eyed child named Khaireddin, born in Djerba the previous spring to a black-haired
giáur
taken prisoner from Gozo by Dragut Rais, and bearing his brand, was sought, said the message, by a Christian Efendi who would pay gold for delivery of the unquestioned child to him, alive.