Pawn in Frankincense (70 page)

After all, she understood very little Turkish, and certainly not Turkish spoken softly and fast, without an interpreter. Even if she were seen, none would concern themselves. From taciturn, Philippa turned very gay among the other girls, though to herself she was capable of long stretches of silent communing. Then came the day when she was asked to perform on the spinet, and she had her first close inspection of the ungainly thing: a chest of drawers topped by a campanile.

To her relief, the frenzy of bells and of puppetry stilled as she drew out the keyboard. It at least was fashioned properly: the naturals formed of ebony had arcaded ends; the accidentals had slips of ivory. Flowers, in leather and ivory, were set into the soundboard. Inside the drop front was pasted a small oblong card, unseen until the drawer was opened. On it, someone had written in English,
I have tuned this myself. C. de L. & S
. The script was level and small, and extraordinarily clear. She had never seen it before.

With hands which shook very slightly, Philippa ran her thin, flat-padded fingers over the keys. The quilling, she realized at once, was very light indeed; the touch of the plectra gave a soft bright tone which ran like spray under the hand—all except … there. Pausing, Philippa played it again, and then continued, launching into the piece she had chosen, while she thought. At the end, dismissed to busy herself with sweetmeats, she put her request in a low voice to the eunuch who understood English, who presently approached Khourrém and received the necessary permission. If the spinet required adjusting, she might stay behind when Roxelana Sultán went to the bath, and do what she could.

There was only one note out of tune: one of the lowest accidentals, seldom employed; but so glaringly off pitch that, once struck, it was bound to be noticed. With great care, alone in the silent room, Philippa drew out the drawer to its fullest extent, exposing the soundboard with its shimmering parallel strings. There she made an interesting discovery. Caught in the turns of the wire where the faulty string coiled round its wrest-pin was a small scrap of paper. And on the paper, when she carefully unwound the wire and released it, was nothing but a minute drawing in ink of a six-pointed star.

Philippa stared at it for a long time before she realized what it meant. She turned it upside down and reversed it: she even took it to one of the candelabra and heated it, with all too clear recollections of the house of Marino Donati. There was nothing there at all but the imprint of a star. A star with six points, not the eight of the star of St John. The star of David: the symbol of Jewry.

At that point Philippa held the paper in the candle flame and watched it burn, and then, thoughtfully, returned to the spinet. A Jew, in this haven of Moslems? No, wait. No Jew, but there
was
a Jewess. A dark, middle-aged woman with more than a hint of a moustache, who came in weekly to instruct in cosmetics and undertake small commissions: the matching of silks for their embroidery; the passing, Philippa suspected, of love-letters.… It had seemed more than likely, to Philippa’s practical mind, that everything she was told the woman took straight to the Kislar Agha or Kiaya Khátún—it was, after all, a harmless enough outlet for their excess of romantic imaginings and could come to nothing: no man unauthorized had ever entered the harem and left it alive. Was she to gather from this that she could trust the Jewess?

Or was it all a trick of Gabriel’s, to mortify her and taunt Mr Crawford still more?

She could not recognize the writing. Supposing Lymond had sent it: how could he guess she would be the first to perform on the spinet? Or was it well known at the Embassy that there was a dearth in the Seraglio of performers, and had he guessed that, at any cost, she would apply for permission to play it?

Chewing her nails thoughtfully, until she remembered, Philippa stared at the strings. Then she noticed something else. The faulty string had been slack. It had also been doctored. It had been filed, very lightly and carefully, at the point where it would require to wind round the wrest-pin in order to secure its true pitch. If she were to tune it properly now, it would break.

And someone would have to come from the Embassy to repair it. There were no spare wires: she had asked.

Again, a trap for Mr Crawford? No, hardly. The Ambassador himself could scarcely come, wire in hand, to mend the Sultana’s spinet without causing unusual comment. Gaultier, then; or Marthe. Someone who could bring her a message or take one away; or at very least learn some news of her and the child. It must be so: it must be from Mr Crawford.

Looking again at the card, Philippa grinned suddenly at its very austerity. Gabriel, surely, of the deep, insalubrious mind, would have signed it
F
. or
F.C
. Only Lymond, surely, would have appended that collection of impersonal surnames. And to him, somehow she was sure, belonged that small, picturesque script.

Philippa pulled the card off and, regretfully, burned it. Then she
tuned the spinet quickly and deftly, standing clear as the wire snapped.

She was still there when Khourrém Sultán came back and comandeered her services in rewriting a letter in English. The coincidence seemed so great: that it should be to Lymond, and that it should refer to herself, that Philippa, rather pale, thought at first it was a dastardly trick. Then she realized that the Sultana had probably not even connected Durr-i Bakht, the Pearl of Fortune, with Philippa Somerville: might not even know in the first place what petition the French Ambassador had made which the Sultan had rejected. She was merely refusing the present Lymond had offered her since she could offer no service in return.

So it seemed. Philippa had copied the thing out, correcting the phrases with her heart hammering. The eunuch might read English, although he could not write it: she dared not alter the sense. But she could and did mark it, when no one was looking, with a small star of David close to the seal.

It was done and she was kneeling, awaiting dismissal, when Khourrém Sultán opened the casket and ran through her hands, for the last time, the
tespi
in diamonds it had contained. Staring at it, Philippa did not hear the words of dismissal. When they were repeated, she looked up at her mistress with her face aghast, as if she had witnessed an accident; and her eyes full of shocked tears. Then she bowed herself out of the room and, stumbling through the harem, curled on her own cushions and cried.

As Lymond had once had cause to observe, Ishiq, the lad who guided the blind Meddáh, took good care of his master.

Holding the story-teller’s purse, with its small store of aspers, he charmed the ferryman at Tapano to take them both over the Golden Horn for a canto of Yúnus the illiterate, the mirror of whose heart, as they said, was undulled by the turbidity of loopings and lines. Once over, he soon established a circuit, as he often had before, with other masters: the courtyard of Ayasofya and the market under the Hippodrome; the covered bazaar and the gardens of the Beyazit Mozque.

They did well. Despite his grey hair, the Meddáh’s speaking voice was sweet and untroubled; and he told the stories people liked best to hear, such as the one of the Persian khoja who played a trick upon a Baghdad khoja and his son, as well as the heroic romances, and tales of his own, shaped to his company. They were given meat and yoghourt and sweet water to drink, and slept most nights on straw: on the third day they were bidden to perform at a wedding, and on the fourth they gave of their art at a circumcision ritual and banquet.

These Ishiq enjoyed. But they were tiring and noisy for a man in
ill health, and sometimes Ishiq’s arm ached from guiding his master and tending him when the day’s work was done. Best then he liked the days in the Beyazit garden, with the nightingale-dealer’s birds singing under the walls of the Old Seraglio, even in winter; when one of the children would steal out over the waste ground and stand at the edge of the brazier, listening, until the marvellous tale ended, and Ishiq went round, collecting aspers and bread in his greasy cap, and those who did not want to disperse would gather round the Meddáh, asking for more.

He was kind to the children, perhaps knowing that the black folds round his eyes frightened them. For them he told short, strange stories in which a child always triumphed, even over the great Cham himself, and to the small one from the nightingale shop he was always gentle, talking slowly and clearly, until the boy would stand almost touching, at his knee. Then he would run away.

That day the Meddáh was very tired. It was cold. Although the coarse brown robe he wore was stiff and thick, it was worn, and the bands of fur round the hem and yoke and wide sleeves were bald and glazing with age. When a slender man, well but quietly dressed, called Ishiq over and, after commending his master, offered them both warm food and a bed for the night Ishiq did not hesitate, but listened to the directions given him; and so soon as the crowd was dispersed, he tugged the Meddáh’s worn sleeve, and helping him to his feet, began to guide him as he had been instructed: up over the crown of the hill and down the twisting lanes on its slopes to the north-west, until they came to the long, double-arched line of the aqueduct of Valens, and the lane of rough-timbered houses beside it.

It was raining. Unlike the principal streets, this was nothing more than rubble and mud, so narrow that the overhung storeys almost met crooked window to window, and the wet had hardly laid the stink of turned fat and cabbage heads rotting. He stopped where he had been told.

It did not look like the house of a wealthy man. Ishiq hesitated; but his arm ached, and the Meddáh, dragging, felt the threshold with his stick and leaned on it, as on a crutch. Then the door opened and the man who had spoken to them in the garden appeared, smiling, and beckoned them in.

It was strange inside. The house was crowded with people. Two playing chess on a painted cloth looked up and smiled, and a man, naked but for a wolfskin, turned round, a sheep’s leg-bone held against his ridged brow and snapped it, throwing the pieces away, before picking up an ox’s chest-bone and doing the same thing, absently, on his elbow. Another man, in a corner, was stringing a bow, humming. Ishiq, lagging, turned to see his guide ahead turning and beckoning, and taking a fresh grip of his master, he pulled him doggedly on.

The next room was a bedchamber, the mattresses already lying unrolled, with the quiet man standing beside them. ‘He is unwell, your master?’ he said gently to Ishiq. ‘Perhaps he should sleep. Or are you hungry? When have you eaten?’

‘Not since morning,’ said Ishiq. ‘But the Meddáh has not eaten for more than a day. He feels no hunger.’

‘He should eat,’ said the stranger. ‘Wait. Come with me to the kitchen. We shall let him repose while I send for some food I know will please him. Then you will both sleep.’

He was kind, and courteous. Ishiq went to the kitchen, where he was made much of by the old woman there; and when he went back to the bedchamber it seemed that the Meddáh had already eaten and was sleeping. Assured that his master was well, Ishiq curled up and slept.

He did not know, some little time later, that the kind stranger knelt down beside him and after listening a moment said, ‘He is asleep. He will stay so for a while. Tell him to come in.’

He did not see the curtain move and a second man enter, clean and sweet-smelling and clothed all in silk. Or had he been awake he would have seen him move over to the other occupied rug and kneel by the still, blindfolded face of the Meddáh, upturned and silent in sleep.

For a moment the man in silk watched him. Then he stretched out a long, graceful hand, and turning back the worn fur of the collar, began to slip from the story-teller’s shoulders the folds of stiff, heavy robe, pulling it little by little from under him until he lay revealed in pale, soft lawn and close-fitting breeches, his arms lying still at his sides.

The man in silk smiled, and from the other side of the bed, the quiet man who had acted as guide caught the smile and returned it. Then the comely man lifted his hands, and running them up the sleeping man’s face, with one movement smoothed away the grey wig, and pulled the black scarf from over his eyes. Underneath, the sleeper’s hair was not grey, but fair and shining and dark-edged with sweat. And the eyes below the bandage were not blind, but half-waking and blue.

‘Sweet singer,’ said the man in silk gently. O bird of the dawn. Learn love from the Moth, who yielded up its life in the flame without protest. The footprints of the dog are like roses. What, then, are thine, coming to me?’

The sick blue eyes closed. ‘
Míkál
,’ said the Meddáh, his voice almost soundless.

‘Yes, Efendi,’ said the musical voice. ‘And this is Murad, my friend. Thou hast no money?’

And the Meddáh, who was young and not old, and dressed in European shirt and trunk hose and whose name was Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, opened his eyes and spoke, in the spent voice
which was not a pretence. ‘You gave me something to take, a while ago. What was it?’

Míkál gazed at him; the beautiful boy whom he had last seen long ago at Thessalonika. ‘That which would ease thee. Hast thou no gold, that thou couldst not buy it thyself?’