Pawn in Frankincense (75 page)

‘I suggest that you go and rewire the spinet,’ said Jerott simply.

‘And?’ said Marthe.

‘And give Philippa Somerville the one piece of information she needs to enable her and the child to escape.’

‘To escape from
Topkapi
?’ Marthe stared and then laughed. ‘
Juste ciel:
your minds must have rotted. No one leaves Topkapi, or enters it without permission.’

‘You don’t know your brother,’ said Jerott.

‘Nor do I wish to,’ said Marthe. She stood up. ‘I tell you for the third time: I do not perform services. Your ingenious master must find another emissary, that’s all.’

‘There is no one else now,’ Jerott said. He moved forward until they stood face to face; her head only a little lower than his wide, frowning eyes. ‘It isn’t for Lymond, or for me. It’s for Philippa and
the children. You have every excuse to enter Topkapi and no risk to run. In a matter of days after that we shall be all gone except Francis, and whatever the outcome of that, you’ll be left in peace.’

Her dirty, imperious face was set hard; her eyes cold. ‘I have only to denounce you to the Janissary outside to be left in perfect tranquillity. My answer is no.’

‘
How much do you want
?’ Jerott said.

The great, the insufferable anger banked behind those brief words struck no answering fury from Marthe. Instead there grew on her face a charming, lop-sided smile; a smile full of irony and small, cruel amusements. ‘More than you have,’ she said.

He said, ‘Your brother is rich.’

‘He has shown me no sign of it,’ Marthe replied. She smiled again. ‘Shall I tell you a small interesting fact? The banker’s orders which paid for this journey, and for the bribes and rewards and gifts it entailed, are now fully withdrawn. There was enough, Master Zitwitz told me, to cover the last weeks at the Embassy, and then, but for their clothes, it was virtually finished. Lymond has no reserves. He has only a second son’s property in Scotland, and an estate in Sevigny, France, and a vagrant mercenary company, whereabouts unknown. You cannot pay me with these.’

I am good!
had cried the small, frantic voice. And Lymond had taken his hand away, holding back every impulse; and had answered him gently, his voice level and schooled.

Jerott thought of what one man had given, over all the past year; and without removing his gaze from Marthe’s defiant blue eyes he put up one hand and unfastened and flung off his cloak. Beneath, tucked out of sight, was his dagger. He slipped it out of its sheath; tossed it once, glittering in the air, and looked again, smiling, at the pale, dirty face of his hostess. ‘Then,’ said Jerott, ‘I shall pay you with your own coin instead. Lead me, mademoiselle, to your client with the mud-covered harpsichord.’ And as she opened her mouth quickly to scream, he put one capable hand over her face, and twisting her into his powerful grip, dragged her, knife in hand, through and out of the door.

She was quick-witted and supple, and not without training. But he hurled her like a kitten through the bare rooms and deserted passages of her house, while she bit and scuffled and kicked and tried in vain to free her mouth to scream a furious warning. She fought for his knife and was cut and found in Jerott’s face hard indifference to the blood streaming down her neck and her arm. They burst into the kitchens and the negress, her hand to her mouth, scuttled into a corner and crouched, her breath hissing. Jerott flung open door after door. In one was a tumble of bedding: that of Gilles and Gaultier doubtless. In another he found the neatly rolled mattress and almost clinical orderliness extended to all her possessions by Marthe. Of the
two men there was no trace whatever. Nor, needless to say, was there a sign of any mythical client with harpsichord.

It was then that he let his hand slip and she bit it; and seizing her moment as he snatched it away cursing, she filled her lungs and screamed with all her power. Somewhere, a voice called in answer, greatly muffled; and there was a metallic sound, and a series of regular thumps, clearly approaching; and another sound he could not identify: a low booming, veiled and threatening as the roar of some ravenous animal.

‘Thank you,’ said Jerott to Marthe; and stood and waited, his hand once more covering her mouth. ‘It seemed time for a short cut. I feel I can deal with friends Gaultier and Gilles without requiring the advantage of utter surprise.… What a pity you couldn’t resist that little poem, you know. I couldn’t solve it, but Francis did, without thinking. He said, if you are at all interested, “Leave her, for God’s sake. She’s welcome to anything she can get.” … Where would you say they are going to come up? The next room, perhaps?’

He kept his hand over her mouth as he walked her again through the door; but she made no resistance now. Only, as the sounds became definite and close and he was able, smiling that grim smile, to free her entirely, did she say, standing beside him, ‘Why don’t you? Why don’t you leave me then, for God’s sake?’

But by then the door-handle was turning: the door to a small apartment little more than a cupboard, which Jerott had overlooked in his haste. There was a sudden sharpening of the distant, sonorous noise. Then it opened, and Georges Gaultier burst through, a spade in his hands.

Jerott had respect for a spade; but very little for Georges Gaultier. It was Marthe who nearly tripped and disarmed him on his lunge forward: with a twist, Jerott recovered his balance and handed her off with a painful grip of one hand, as with the other he sank a blow deep in the little man’s stomach. Gaultier retched and collapsed, the spade clattering to the floor, while Jerott stood and looked down on him.

He was very dirty. Over his shirt, his neck-strings hanging loose and his sleeves tightly rolled up, he wore a short leather jerkin, rubbed and stained with sweat and water and earth. Below it, long coarse woollen stockings and fustian breeches were also blotched and grimed on their creases: his stub-toed shoes were scuffed and blackened with wet. ‘Are those the hands,’ said Jerott, ‘out of which trusting young harpsichords feed? What, no ichneumon?’

Gaultier stopped sobbing for breath and said, wheezing, ‘How dare you force your way into this house and assault us?’

‘How dare you spring out at me with a spade?’ said Jerott mildly. ‘Or were you going to work in the garden?’

‘Marthe …?’ The usurer struggled on to one elbow and looked a
her, but Marthe, walking away, had dropped on to a mattress and was sitting there, her chin in her hands.

‘He knows,’ she said. ‘You fool; can’t you even hold a man off with a spade?’

‘I don’t want to kill anybody,’ said Gaultier. ‘You let him in. There must be a Janissary outside. You can’t kill a man with a Janissary outside.’

‘Not unless you kill the Janissary as well,’ said Jerott. ‘Marthe might, but I doubt if you have the stamina, Gaultier. Suppose you let me into that cupboard instead.’

Gaultier did struggle to his feet and ineffectually try to stop him, but Marthe stood back, her face frozen. His hand on the doorknob, Jerott gave her back stare for stare.

And as she did not answer, he continued himself, his voice soft against the grunts of her uncle, again laid on the floor:

Then he opened the cupboard door and walked through.

It was a small room, once adjoining the kitchen, with the remains of some shelving on the white plastered walls, and a smoke-blackened circle where a lamp was accustomed to hang. The floor had been flagged, but some of the slabs had been lifted and piled neatly against the stained walls, leaving in the centre a square hole, perhaps three feet by two, with a caking of stone dust and slime and many wet, muddy footprints marking the edges. From the threshold Jerott looked straight down into the hole. It was very black; but far below, gently moving, there was an impression of water. Flush against the walls of the hole was a worn wooden ladder, scaled and darkened with damp. The roar was very loud now.

‘Don’t go any further,’ said Marthe. She stood up. ‘If you go down there I shall brick you in. I swear it.’

His foot on the top rung, Jerott looked up and smiled. ‘Would you?’ he said. ‘I doubt it, you know. Pierre Gilles is down there. And I don’t think somehow you want Pierre Gilles bricked up.… If you want to stop me,’ said Jerott conversationally, ‘you can always call in my Janissary.’

But Marthe had already turned her back on him and walked back into the room, without watching Jerott climb, lightly and carefully down into the hole.

I am going to the well, sweet sir, she said
. It
was
a well, the sides green with glutinous mosses. Small, transparent creatures slid past his hands as he gripped the wet rungs, looking down at the darkly
moving surface below him, whose pattern was contoured by the faintest glimmer of light.

He had climbed down a third of the ladder when the walls of the well stopped. He could see the edge of the brickwork rising past his feet as he descended and the ladder continuing below him, unsupported, into an expanse of rippling water, which was wider than the bottom of a well: which had no confines; which spread to right and to left of him as he moved down until at last he was standing within a foot of the surface, the mouth of the well a luminous square in the brick archway over his head, and his ears filled with the bellow of Thor and the hiss of storm-raising dragons: a mighty and echoing noise which drummed and seared through his head until he felt like a man caught in a millrace. Jerott looked about him, and was silent.

He stood in a limnophilous palace of marble whose faint columns, rank upon rank, marked the darkness like runes and upheld, with their ghostly carved capitals, the winged vaults of the ceilings which spread, mottled with moisture, far over his head.

Its carpet was water: water which ran green and icy and clear under his feet and licked and floated and sucked at the white marble pillars in their dim and motionless rows: a forest rooted in foam. A forest a thousand years old; built by Justinian as part of the vision by which his new Jerusalem would flower with springs and fountains and blossom: by which, conducted by pipe and conduit and aqueduct, the sweet waters flowed from the hills to the cisterns lying like this one, sunk under the city. Some were known and still used. Some were shattered by earthquake and lay exposed to the air; deep green basins transformed into gardens or sunken alleys for workshops. Some, like this, had remained secret and safe while the buildings overhead crumbled and wasted, and the trapdoors were forgotten where men in the upper air once drew their clear water from the great man-made cavern below. Or perhaps those who still lived there thought it merely a well, and lowered and raised their buckets in ignorance.

There was a boat moored at the foot of the ladder: the boat Gaultier must have used. Jerott had stepped into it when he heard a movement above, and the square of dim light over his head blazed with flickering yellow. Then as he watched Marthe appeared, climbing barefoot down the ladder, her skirt-tails tucked into her waistband; a wax torch in one hand, wincing and flaring in the eddying draughts. Then she was down, on the last rung of the ladder; her smeared face pale in the torchlight. She said, ‘Since you are here, let me take you.’

There was no sign of Gaultier. Jerott untied the rope and slotted the torch into the ring specially made for it, while Marthe lifted the pole and slid the small punt, delicately, between the long colonnades.

There were fish in the water: pale darting shapes which swarmed close under the light, flashing their thin silver sides. The columns
were thick: perhaps six feet in diameter with a passage of twelve feet between each pair, and there must have been four or five hundred of them, vanishing into the green roaring gloom. How high they were, it was impossible to tell; although from the marks on the pillars Jerott thought the cistern now held possibly as much as it could. After a thousand years, there must be small cracks and fissures in the signinum plaster and the thin sturdy bricks. Despite the ceaseless fall of the watercourse, the smooth drums of the columns and the worked Corinthian capitals were sharp-cut and intact, the masons’ marks still engraved on the stone. Marthe said, steeling her voice against the rush of the water, ‘We have seen only two other well-holes in use, cut in the vaulting. You can tell by the ferns.… There, if you look.’

He looked where she pointed: to the damp carved acanthus leaves over his head, out of which there curled, living and green, a thin clump of fern. There was no sign of the daylight which coloured it: the trapdoor, if there was one, was fastened and dark.

Soon after that they reached one of the walls, the thinly layered pink brick rising sheer out of the water into the darkness above; and Marthe, turning the skiff, began to feel her way along the rough surface, counting pillars, Jerott saw, as she went. Then she stopped. Set deep in the brick to her hand was an iron ring, old and eaten with rust, to which she tied up the boat, slipping the wax light at the same time out of its holder and bringing it up to the wall. In its light Jerott could see that the uniform courses of brick were here broken; and that beside the ring was a framing of stone: a rectangular aperture which had been filled in roughly with unmortared bricks of a different colour and shape.

‘An old conduit,’ said Marthe. ‘When the level of the water dropped, it fell eut of use. Master Gilles found it twenty years ago when he was exploring the water-system of the Hippodrome. He found that the pipes which supplied the central spina with fountains were part of a big system which ran under the seating and below all the main offices, supplying water for drinking and ablutions, and for the pens of the animals. It links up with other systems under what used to be the main Forum, and the churches of St Irene and St Sophia. He came across this watercourse when he was investigating what was left of the Church of St Euphemia: he had just begun to explore it when the Turks got it into their heads that he was removing precious antiquities from their ruins, and forbade him to investigate further. He has been back since, but never to St Euphemia. He had thought then of doing it this way, through a house, but couldn’t find anyone he could trust to help with the digging.… There are many fractures with earthquakes, and much of the passage is blocked. But he wrote, in code, what he had found; so that his patron might one day benefit from it.…’