Pawn in Frankincense (51 page)

Five nerve-racking sentences later, he paused. ‘Do I have to translate?’

There was pen and ink on the table. Scribbling furiously, Jerott shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Thanks to God.’ Something flew past into a bin. ‘Did you say Abernethy?’

‘That’s right. Archie Abernethy. He looked after the menagerie at Taraassery, and I think he was in Constantinople too. He also had the care recently of the King of France’s elephants. By the name Abernaci.’

‘Oh. Now, what have we here?’ said M. Gilles. ‘Ah. Take this down …’

There followed five minutes’ furious dictation, followed by the flight through the air of another section of giraffe. ‘There’s a bit here I want to draw later. If it lasts. Abernaci? Oh, I remember him well. A small fellow, with a broken nose? So he is still alive, is he?’

‘I expected to meet him here, in Aleppo,’ said Jerott. ‘We’re both with Francis Crawford. It’s a special embassy with a gift from the King to the Sultan.’

Pierre Gilles stopped working. He straightened, his hands bent at the wrists like a begging dog’s, and said, ‘You are in the same party as the girl?’

‘What girl?’ said Jerott, a little bemused in spite of himself with the stench and the Latin and the heat and the effect of the raki.

‘The girl who calls herself Marthe, I think it is? You are a friend of Marthe?’ said the anatomist.

It required a moment’s reflection, but Jerott decided on the truth. ‘No. We are in the same party, but the rest of us know very little of Mlle Marthe. She is assistant to the antiquarian-craftsman who manufactured the gift,’ said Jerott.

‘Georges Gaultier, I understand. A rogue and a usurer. Take my advice and do not meddle with either of them. Hold that, will you?’ said Pierre Gilles.

Jerott took it, hurriedly laying down his pen. ‘Why? Do you know them, sir?’ he said.

The anatomist, screwing up his eyes, was taking measurements. He reeled them off, noting them down himself with bloody fingers, before he said, ‘I simply advise, do not meddle with them. Now pass me the hacksaw.’

It was all Jerott was able to get out of him on that subject, and almost his total pronouncement on any other. To Jerott it had seemed suddenly likely that if anyone had seen and heard of a white child landed with a Syrian woman somewhere along the coast, or even here in Aleppo, Pierre Gilles might have done so.

In an age of eccentric scholars, he had a reputation all his own: this shrewd old man with the powerful frame and flamboyant stride and extravagant temper. Fluent in the classical languages and at home in half a dozen others, he had always gone his own way, loosely armed
with someone’s commission: travelling with the French Ambassador d’Aramon in the wake of the Sultan; resting at Rome to write up his notes and publish his books, loosely under the patronage of some Cardinal. And always with Herpestes on his shoulder.

As the afternoon wore on, and the anatomist, up to his elbows and over in a frenzy of work, either did not hear what he was saying or barely took time to answer, Jerott stopped talking and confined himself to his notes. Only once, as Gilles’s pet slipped softly from the bench where he had been sitting and streaked, long and grey and deadly, to pounce on something at the edge of the courtyard, Jerott glanced round at the bright eyes, and the sharp black muzzle and the feline whiskers, and said, ‘What do you call him?’

‘Herpestes,’ said Gilles. He worked for a moment, then straightening, stretched and wiped a hand over his streaming brow. He looked at Jerott. ‘Does that mean anything to you?’

Jerott grinned. ‘Only because I knew about him.
Herpestes ichneumon
, a genus of digitigrade carnivorous quadrupeds of the family Viverridae. They have them in Egypt, as house pets for rat-catching.’

‘You have had a good tutor. I see no reason,’ said Gilles, still inspecting him, ‘why you should not come to Constantinople with me and help that fool Pichón. Your Latin is rather poorer but you have at least a strong stomach.’

‘I am honoured,’ said Jerott, amusement struggling through the stone ballast occupying the place of his guts. ‘But I was trying to explain, I am staying here because I am looking——’

‘For some child the Turk is amusing himself with. I recall. But did you not also say that in a day or two you would know from the attaché whether or not the boy has been in Aleppo? If the attaché finds the child for you, you may send him home and come to Constantinople with me. If not, you said, did you not, that the child would probably in any case now be dead?’

‘If he’s alive, he’ll still be in danger,’ said Jerott. It sounded limp. ‘I shall have to go back home with him. And if he isn’t here, I’ll have to go on trying to find him.’

Pierre Gules had just made a plan, and he did not wish it disturbed. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What is this you fear for the child? He is ill, or delicate? We shall initiate inquiries from Constantinople, and it will be found. The Grand Turk is more powerful than a little consular attaché.’

It was a long time since Jerott had taken orders from a stranger. He said curtly, ‘I am afraid it would be too late. The child was a hostage for the life of Sir Graham Reid Malett, one of the Knights of the Order on Malta. Sir Graham was killed in the battle of Zuara last month by the child’s father. As soon as the news reaches its keeper, it will be dead.’

‘One moment,’ said Pierre Gilles. He lifted his beard and stood,
arms akimbo, screwing up his face against the mellowing light falling through the stretched linen over his head. ‘The light is going. What mysteries my friend here has left, I think he must keep. And the Consul, if he comes back tomorrow, will wish the use of his courtyard perhaps. Yes, I think we may consider that we have done. Herpestes!’

The ichneumon ran towards him and leaped on his shoulder. The sweating labourers, summoned also by signal, came and received their instructions. The anatomist turned back to Jerott, untying the strings of the apron and peeling it off, to Herpestes’s annoyance. ‘You say, Blyth, the urgency comes from the death of this knight Graham Malett?’

‘Yes,’ said Jerott.

‘Then,’ said Pierre Gilles heartily, ‘there is no urgency. The knight Graham Malett is alive, though no longer a knight. It is a joke, I fear, against Malta the length of the Coast. Have you not heard of the great new Pasha just installed in Zuara? He is your dead man: your Graham Reid Malett himself.’

There was no urgency. As the sky darkened and evening fell, Jerott sat in his room, staring with unseeing eyes at the wall, thinking. When someone knocked on his door and asked him to go to the attaché’s chamber, he was already prepared for what he would hear.

The child was not in Aleppo, and was highly unlikely ever to have been in Aleppo. ‘It is strange,’ said the attaché, doing his best under bothering circumstances, ‘that M. le Comte thought it necessary to send to Aleppo in the first place. The ship
Peppercorn
you speak of is an English bottom, and does not call at Ottoman ports.’

‘They said something of the sort at Scanderoon,’ said Jerott. ‘We thought there was an English agent here perhaps.’

‘There are negotiations, but so far no one,’ said the attaché. ‘Meanwhile, English ships, you understand, may call only at those ports under the control of the Seigneury, such as Crete and Candia, where you have already been. Sometimes, depending on the weather, the
Peppercorn
calls at these places, but she has only one regular port of call at this season, and that is to load mastic on the island of Chios.’

‘Chios. In the Aegean?’ asked Jerott.

‘Between Samos and Lesbos, yes. It is ruled by Venice but pays tribute to Turkey. You do not know it? It is a garden, Mr Blyth,’ said the attaché. ‘Flowers, and trees, and great red partridges, tame as chickens. And the handsomest women in Europe, to be had for a song. They understand these matters better than in Aleppo,’ said the attaché, who had become vaguely aware of a certain undercurrent of atmosphere in the Consulate, and in any case wished to be free of
visitors before the Consul came home. ‘Each girl pays a ducat a day to the Captain of the Night, and she may do as she pleases. You will go to Chios?’

‘I want to reach M. le Comte before he arrives at Constantinople,’ said Jerott. Gabriel and Francis, he had been thinking all evening. Gabriel was alive, and Francis did not know. Francis travelling; believing he was safe at least from that quarter. Francis arriving in Constantinople, and Gabriel’s men there, awaiting him.

The attaché was shaking his head. ‘If M. le Comte left Malta when you did, M. Blyth, he will be in Constantinople by now. Or long before you might reach him. It is October soon, M. Blyth, when the winds are strong and the galleys are laid up, and even trading vessels spend weeks in harbour. You would never reach him in time.… But to go to Chios, this would take you part of the way, and maybe discover the child for you en route?’

‘Yes,’ said Jerott. ‘Could I get a ship at Scanderoon for Chios now? Or how long would I wait?’

The attaché looked doubtful. ‘There is none there today, and it is now late in the season. You would do better, Mr Blyth, to go overland. You might join a caravan; or M. Gilles would be happy, I am sure, to go with you, with a suitable escort of Janissaries: the way is very familiar to him.…’

Jerott wasn’t listening. He interrupted. ‘You said that there was no ship in Scanderoon today bound for Chios.… May I ask how you can possibly know?’

The attaché smiled. ‘You do not know of our magic channels for news? I know by pigeon post, M. Blyth. Between all the main trading-centres along the coast, and between Scanderoon and here, they fly daily with the message tied by a thread to the leg. They take four hours to travel the eighty miles which probably took you three or four days, and we have all the news of shipping as it arrives, and they likewise learn in Scanderoon when the big caravans from Persia come in. It is a charming method. They have names, even, the little ones,’ said the attaché fondly.

Marthe, standing among the Baghdad pigeons in the factor’s courtyard at Scanderoon … Gaultier, fondling Kiaya Khátún’s doves in the palace at Djerba …

Jerott stood up.

The attaché got quickly to his feet. ‘You wish me to arrange this then? To travel by land to Chios, yourself, Mademoiselle, M. Gilles and M. Pichón? There will be many good men to escort you: the Sultan’s army is already travelling south to Aleppo and many are riding to join them. You will have a swift passage to Chios, and thence to Constantinople to meet M. le Comte.…’

‘Yes. Arrange it,’ said Jerott. He had enough instinctive courtesy left to thank the foul little man as he ought before he got out, and
strode to the suite used by Marthe, and hammered on the door with the butt of his knife till it cracked.

She was singing. He had never heard any expression of happiness from her before, much less this joyous uplifting of voice, light and free. He drowned it with his hammering, and when he stopped, it had halted, too.

The servant opened the door. Jerott looked past her and saw Marthe standing looking at him, dressed for supper, with a string of beryls in her pleated hair, and one of her few fine dresses with funnelled bodice and wide taffeta farthingale in a blue which echoed her eyes.

He wondered, his heart sick, what had happened to the over-dress he had torn, in the crazed half-dark of the tekke, where they had filled his cup over and over, because otherwise she could not shake him free. ‘I love you,’ she had said, before she had led him from the room. And then, dull contempt in her voice,
Take your sops, Mr Blyth, and go back to the schoolroom
.… ‘Send the woman away,’ said Jerott.

The servant looked round. ‘No,’ said Marthe. She was not singing now. ‘I prefer her to stay.’

‘Get out,’ said Jerott quite pleasantly to the negress, and with a quick flash of her eyes, she drew her dress together and, ducking under his arm, scuttled out of the door. Jerott walked in, and slamming the door shut, locked it. Finding he still had his knife in his hand, he put that away and looked up. ‘I take it,’ he said evenly, ‘that you are working for Gabriel?’

‘Ah,’ said Marthe. She was a little pale, but otherwise quite composed. ‘You have found that Mr Crawford’s little assassination was ineffective after all.’ She sat down, where she was, on a low stool, folded her hands and, looking at him, fetched a sigh. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I am not working for Gabriel. I have told you. I am nobody’s servant. You may believe it or not, as you wish.’

Jerott, still standing, did not stir. ‘But you will agree that you knew before we left Mehedia that the
Peppercorn
was an English ship, and therefore would never be found at Aleppo?’

‘Yes. I knew that,’ said Marthe. ‘I am sorry. But there was no question of killing Gabriel first at that time; and as it happens, he is still alive; so the child has been in no danger. No harm has been done.’

‘
No harm
 …
!
’ said Jerott; and then, controlling his voice, went on. ‘But it would have made no difference if Gabriel
had
been killed, would it? After all, you must have believed for quite some time, as we did, that he was dead. But you and your uncle had business at Aleppo, and you made sure you would get there, whatever happened … whatever misery anyone else … whatever prolonged misery a child of two might still have to suffer.’