Pawn in Frankincense (29 page)

‘Jerott. How are you feeling?’

It was what Jerott expected him to say, and yet the inflexions today and those of his awakening in the Governor’s prison in Mehedia, still sharp in his mind, were totally different. Then Jerott realized he
was comparing two sides of a difficult illness and pushed the thing from his mind. He said, ‘What’ve you done to your hair?’

Lymond’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Cut it,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind. I’ve also shaved, washed behind my ears and trimmed my nails, if you want to inspect them. Personalities aside, what can I do for you?’

Today, Jerott decided suddenly, he did not feel well enough to be mocked. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said briefly, and turned on his heel.

He had not heard, amid the rush of light voices and the tinkling of bells, someone rise and come down the steps: he did not realize as he spun round that someone was approaching to greet him until she was so close that turning, he had to fling out his arms to avoid a collision.

He was holding, he found, the straight shoulders and folded-back veil of a beautiful woman. She was small, hardly over his heart, but of a classical perfection: her eyes, looking up at him, were deep brown and momentarily serious. He released her, looking still. He saw a clear, olive face with black brows and heavy coils of black hair, strung on her brow with looped pearls. Her nose was Greek, long and straight, and her lips soft and full. But her voice, when she spoke, was a full contralto, commanding its English with a mingling of accents he was unable to place. ‘Mr Blyth? You are well, and have come to discover why you may not proceed forthwith to Aleppo? I am afraid I am the one you must blame. You see, I have explicit instructions from my dear lord.’ She smiled, the black brows arched. ‘We shall try to make your enforced sojourn as pleasant as possible.’

Jerott opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he said, ‘You are …’

‘I am Güzel, Dragut Rais’s principal mistress,’ said the woman agreeably. ‘But I should like you, if you will, to address me as Kiaya Khátún.’

On the Venetian island of Zakynthos, in better times known as the Flower of the Orient, off the west coast of Greece, and with the full width of the Mediterranean Sea between herself and the occurrence at Gabès, Philippa Somerville sat in the local Lazaretto in her fifth week of quarantine, playing a cut-throat game of cards for olives, with Archie Abernethy, her escort. Looking on, in varying stages of convalescence, were their three fellow sufferers from Venetian hygiene: a Sicilian currant-importer, a freelance interpreter and another dervish, one of which, said Archie gloomily, seemed to turn up, free, in every two pokes of pepper.

Determined to look on the bright side of things, Philippa collected her winnings, and ate them. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’re a nice,
representative
group. I can do card-tricks, and you can train animals and Haji Ishak can he on nails and Sheemy Wurmit can do a comic turn with his parrot and Signor Manoli can swear in ten different dialects of Sicilian. We only need a good bass-baritone and a tenor rebec, and we could work out a tour.’

Nobody grinned. Sighing, Philippa took up the cards, gazed sorrowfully at Archie Abernethy, and began dealing again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘How was I to know I was a chicken-pox carrier?’

To Archie Abernethy, as well, it seemed a long time since he had left Lymond’s ship just outside Algiers and sailed with Leone Strozzi to Sicily in the simple belief that he was about to escort Philippa, her maid Fogge and four men-at-arms safely home.

They had reached Syracuse safely enough. They had taken leave of Strozzi and returned to the inn he had found for them while Archie arranged the next stage of their journey. At that point, Philippa had broken the news that, far from going home, she was on her way to Zakynthos, and why. ‘Urn,’ said Archie Abernethy, staring at her so intently that his two eyes seemed to meet over the broken bridge of his nose. ‘So the Dame de Doubtance teilt ye the bairn might be there? And ye’ve a ring?’

He studied the ring. ‘And this wasny from the old lady, but another one. D’ye mind the young woman’s name?’

‘It was Kiaya Khátún,’ said Philippa. ‘She gave me the address in Zakynthos I was to call at. And it’s no use looking like that, Archibald Abernethy, because I’m going.’

‘I doubt Fogge isna going,’ said Archie artfully. Fogge, prone ever since Pantelleria, was prepared to set sail again, she had conveyed, in her coffin. ‘And if you take the men-at-arms, who’s to protect her?’

‘I don’t want the men-at-arms,’ said Philippa. ‘It’s none of their business. If you’re not interested in saving a Christian child from the hands of the Turk, Archie Abernethy, I’ll just go on my own.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ intoned Archie Abernethy through his broken-backed nose, and looked at her sideways, considering.

It had been a matter for concern, of course, and even, he deduced, of unacknowledged jealousy that Marthe had not after all left the
Dauphiné;
and Philippa had displayed a certain nervous irritation during the voyage to Sicily which Archie knew was unusual. Last year in Scotland, as one of Lymond’s master-company of officers, he had met Philippa Somerville and knew her for a lassie of good sense and courage. On the other hand, he was not sure how much she knew of his own doubtful history. Once, long ago, his brother had been Lymond’s right-hand man in the days of his outlawry. Once, too, he himself had fought with Lymond in Europe. But all the rest of his life, Archie Abernethy had been something else: he had been a keeper of menageries. Two years before, he had kept the elephants of the Royal House in France.

And before that—a good deal before that—he had been in Constantinople. Except that as menagerie keeper to the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent he was known as Abernaci the Indian, and not as Archibald Abernethy of Partick-head, Glasgow, Scotland. A matter of tactics not so far removed from the truth. India was only one of the countries with which Archie had become familiar in the course of his life. In his professional capacity, he was perfectly capable of conducting Philippa wherever in Europe or Asia she might find reason to go. But what he knew and she didn’t was that, on the other side of the Mediterranean, Francis Crawford was already following the only authentic trace they possessed of a child born to the Irishwoman and sold first to a hovel in Algiers and then, it appeared, to a camel-dealer. Jerott Blyth had told Philippa the child had died on being dispatched overseas as a piece of pure fiction to drive her away.

That the child was dead, Philippa would not believe. That it had been sent to Zakynthos seemed very likely indeed, Archie could see, to one exposed to the Dame de Doubtance’s mystic pronouncements. Unfortunately, although always meticulous to the letter, the Dame de Doubtance’s statements, Archie from past experience was aware, were sometimes a wheen irregular in the spirit of that which they seemed to convey.

So she was a capricious old besom. There was no child at Zakynthos, because the child was known to be still in North Africa. If he, Archie, mentioned that the child was in North Africa, the benighted lassie would turn straight about and sail back to Lymond. If he didn’t, she would go to Zakynthos, draw a blank, and return quietly home. Zakynthos, although it paid yearly tribute to Turkey, was

Venetian-governed and safe. So, thought Archie, grinning his crooked, disingenuous grin; let’s go to Zakynthos together.

He had begun, in the last few weeks, to grow his black beard again. He knew his languages: he could at a pinch take the turban and blend into his old, familiar identity. The girl was young and plain enough to avoid notice, and in cheap clothing even more unremarkable, passing for a tall twelve. Sewn into Archie’s cloak, his baggage, his undershirt was a small fortune in gold which Lymond had supplied for their journey, and part of this Archie used to launch the frail Fogge and her four men-at-arms on their slow journey home. Then, with Philippa, he boarded the English ship
Mary
, laden with tin, pewter, lead, rabbitskins and kerseys from Newbury and bound for Odysseus’ kingdom.

Unhappily, since Odysseus’ time, the Flower of the Orient had drawn up a few rules. If you wished to enter Zakynthos you had to
far la quarantena
, and stay ten days at least in the Lazaretto outside Zakynthos to obtain your
sede
for the three signors of health.

It was a pleasant enough place, consisting of single stone cells built round a patio and low-roofed, of necessity because of the earthquakes. And although the windows to the outside were small and stoutly latticed in fir, they were allowed to walk in the courtyard and sit in the shade of the fig tree, and the guardian, who lived with his wife over the entrance vault, supplied them with bedding and bought all their needs, as they required, in the town.

Philippa, with a room to herself and the services of the guardian’s wife, was full alternately of impatience and a kind of weak-minded alarm over her own rashness. She ought to be at home in Flaw Valleys, doing her morning exercise on the lute, at which, said her teacher, she would have had a distinguished future, had she not been born English.

Instead she had sailed over the blue sea from Sicily to this narrow white town lying at the foot of its green hill with the Proveditore’s castle on top; the stony earth studded with olive trees, with sheep and goats grazing; the wide harbour with its piled barrels of oil and its packed ships of every country on earth. Nations at war found in Zakynthos discreet haven for merchant ships, and the banners of the Lion, the Lily and the Crescent flew there together. What happened outside, in the turmoiling dangers of the intricated Isles of the Ionian and Adriaticall Seas, was none of Zakynthos’s business.

Faced with ten days in the Lazaretto, Philippa longed to march outside and grapple with the strangeness of it all, exercising whatever sophistication she had acquired in these months of untoward travelling and the despised talent which was the only one she had ever been credited with: a gift for plain common sense.

Not that life in quarantine was humdrum. Sitting in the courtyard between Archie Abernethy and the wee man with the parrot, she
was able to watch the Aïssqoua dervish in meditation, interrupted by brief performances of frenzy twice daily, when he rolled on sword-edges, kissed snakes, chewed glass and clutched red-hot iron bars. Philippa heated them for him, when the guardian’s wife refused to come in because of the snakes, and inspected his blister-free palms admiringly afterwards while he and Archie held a long foreign conversation which had to do, Archie said, with transcendental meditation. The little man with the parrot, who had come off a ship just in from Syria, sat for a while allowing the Arabic to flow over his head, and then leaning towards Philippa said, ‘Are youse English?’

In public, Archie was an Indian animal-trainer and Philippa was, as the fancy took her, niece, wife, daughter or assistant, of nameless origin. Since they always ended up speaking English to one another, it was not a deception they were able to keep up for very long, and in the Lazaretto, Philippa supposed, it hardly mattered. In any case, she was all too familiar with the cadences of that inquiry. ‘I’m English,’ said Philippa. ‘And my friend is Scots, but he prefers to use his Indian name for his menagerie work. And you don’t need to tell me what you are.’

The man with the parrot, who was a very little man with a triangular grin and a black bonnet with two dangling earflaps, said frothily, ‘No, I ken. I’m Sheemy Wurmit frae Paisley. Trader. And that’s Netta. She’s no weel.’

Philippa gazed at the parrot, and the parrot rasped Sheemy Wurmit’s arm with one gnarled grey claw and stared blearily back. It was moulting. ‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘Archie, this is Sheemy Wurmit, and his parrot’s no weel.’

Philippa, who had never before had the experience of introducing two Scotsmen to each other, found to her relief that they got on rather well. Sheemy, indeed, viewed Abernethy’s dark, turbaned face with a certain reverent awe. ‘Ye’ll hae seen a Rhynocerots then,’ he said. ‘Oo: a right gruesome beast, yon. And yon great humphy-backit deils wi’ the long grisselly snouts hanging down twixt their teeth. That’s an awful sieht, yon.’

‘Elephants,’ said Archie.

‘Whatever ye call them. And Ziraphs. Hae ye seen a ziraph? All speckly reid and white neck, wi’ a camel-heid on the tap that could lick the roof off a ten-storey tenement. Yon’s a disgrace against Nature. I seen one cut up back there outside Cairo, for why I’d not care to guess, gin ye needed a speckly stair-runner.’

‘Cut up?’ said Archie quickly. ‘D’you mean dissected?’

‘I mean cut up,’ said Sheemy Wurmit. ‘By a fellow called Giles.’

‘Peter Giles?’

‘I dunno. Giles. He was on his way to Aleppo to get another beast
there. He makes drawings of their insides. He’d done it before, with one o’ yon humphy-backit …’

Philippa, watching Archie’s reminiscent black eyes, remembered suddenly who this must be. Archie’s hero, Pierre Gilles of Albi, scholar and zoologist, who for years had toured the Levant on commission from the monarchs of France, finding and buying precious manuscripts for the French royal libraries, and sending home unique animals for the French royal menageries. Archie knew and revered Pierre Gilles of old; and for a moment Philippa wondered if the pull was strong enough to divert him to Aleppo, and away from his search for the child. But although he asked one or two questions, Abernethy soon dropped the subject when it became clear that the other man had no other information; and taking Netta instead, began to examine the parrot.

Later, as the parrot’s treatment progressed and they met, day after day, in the courtyard in company with the dervish lying peacefully on his swords and the Sicilian merchant muttering over his papers, Philippa learned that few people knew their Europe better than Sheemy. As
terdji-man
, or interpreter to traders, and dabbling in the barter line sometimes himself, he crossed and recrossed the seas. Just now, he had stepped off a boat bound for Venice with a cargo of Tripoli ash for glass-making: ‘Man, that’d gie ye a hoast,’ said Sheemy. ‘Rubric from Aden: that’s another hell o’ a cargo. Ae spatter o’ rain, and your hinter end’s reid as twa cherries.’