Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The ancient, powerful face looked down. ‘You will see her.’ A yellow nail, strongly curved, followed the line of his cheekbone. ‘You were a pretty boy; but ungovernable. You are right not to trust me.… You will see her. But your father’s two sons will never meet in this life again,’ said the Dame de Doubtance, looking at Lymond, the candle-flame in her round, predator’s eyes.

  And under them, Jerott saw the fluid posture of the other man stiffen; and his stretched gaze in turn hold the woman’s, stare for raw stare, until the Dame de Doubtance laughed shortly and said, ‘Ah, Khaireddin. Of course. That was the child’s name,’ as if she had just been informed.

  Your father’s two sons will never meet in this life again. Jerott, listening, scowled. Lymond had only one brother—Richard, third Baron Culter, at Midculter in Scotland. Richard, the well-loved and reliable family man who held the family title and administered the family estates and who shared his home with his widowed dowager mother. Lymond said, smoothly, to that grotesque and brooding face hung above him: ‘Promise me that Richard will be safe.’

  And the Dame de Doubtance, glibly, repeated his words: ‘Richard will be safe;’ while Jerott, at last, was brought to regretting the childish sentiment which had inspired him stay and to force this queer confrontation to an inhuman issue.

  ‘Put the next question,’ the Dame de Doubtance said lightly, but Lymond said, still quietly, ‘I have no more questions to ask. You wished to make Jerott your witness?’

  ‘How quick you are,’ she said, mockery in the thin voice. ‘You don’t ask the date of your death? I can tell you.’

  It was suddenly too much. The old bitch, thought Jerott, falling back dazed through the boundaries of rank common sense. The crazy, senile old bitch. She ought to have a stall at a fair. And here we are, two grown men, crediting her …

  She had moved; and, bending forward, was holding out that rheumatoid claw to be taken and kissed. Rising, Lymond held it in his and said slowly, ‘Then I think it had better be soon.’

  And the Dame de Doubtance, smiling, shook her head as he bent over her hand. ‘Despite everything, not soon enough.’ And as he straightened: ‘You and I will not meet again. You do not know it, but I have loved you. Mr Blyth …’ Jerott moved slowly forward. The jointed fingers snatched, and the little pearl crucifix he wore still, loose over his shirt, lay in her ruinous palm. ‘I tell you this, Mr Blyth, from my stall in the fair, senile though I appear. I tell you by this cross and by all you still believe that what I foretell will come true. Be my witness.’

  He stood still, without speaking, his crucifix still in her hand. She had read his exact mind: he had nothing to add. But Lymond, in the unchanging quiet voice, said, ‘You have been kind, by your lights. For what you have done in the past, and what I think you believe must be done now, I am thankful.…’ He stopped, and said, ‘You have said nothing of Graham Malett. It may not matter.’

  ‘Evil matters. So does love. So does pity. My pilgrim,’ said the Dame de Doubtance gently, ‘you have still three bitter lessons to learn.’

  For a moment she stood, the little cross flickering in the dim light in her hand; then she let it slip so that, swinging back on its chain, it found its home again on Jerott’s broad chest. Then she addressed Lymond. ‘What Mr Blyth needs is a large drink and some bawdy conversation, as quickly as possible. Can you arrange that, do you think?’

  ‘All Mr Blyth’s friends can arrange that,’ said Lymond gravely, and bowing, steered Jerott out and downstairs into the street. There, looming miraculously before them, was a familiar figure.

  ‘Oh, Onophrion,’ said Lymond, and Jerott, who had seen his face only a moment before, wondered at the pleasant, familiar pitch of his voice. ‘Onophrion, where with safety and propriety do you consider that Mr Blyth and I might go to drink ourselves senseless?’

  And Onophrion, of course, knew.

  In the event, the spinet took three weeks to crate and prepare for the journey. In the interval, Master Zitwitz finished outfitting the Comte de Sevigny’s party and failed finally to do the same for the Comte de Sevigny himself. And Philippa, whose sardonic brown eye had been the first to greet Jerott on his aching return from that night-long carousal, found that Mr Blyth was not after all to escort her to England, When she discovered why, her reaction was wholly characteristic. She waited until Lymond, Jerott and Onophrion Zitwitz were all safely out of the way, and then, with maid and bodyguard expostulating behind her, marched off to the Dame de Doubtance’s house.

  This time it was daylight. The shutters were flung back in the shabby big bedroom and the ancient lady, whom Philippa reached with extreme rapidity, passed from servant to servant indeed like a familiar but insalubrious parcel, was sitting in a morning gown before a crackling fire, drinking something hot from a cup. ‘Ah, yes. Philippa Somerville. You’re early,’ said the Dame de Doubtance. ‘I have underestimated Mr Blyth’s capacity. Sit there.’

  Philippa sat. Clearly seen, the daffodil wig Jerott had told her about was soiled and chased, here and there, with grey fluff. But the bold, bony features were far from senile, and so were the shrewd black eyes. The Dame de Doubtance said, ‘My cousin will bring you some qahveh, which you will dislike until your taste is formed. Then we shall be very pleasant: three women together. Men,’ said the Lady of Doubtance, rolling the words, ‘I find at times tiresome. Tell me: do you like melodrama?’

  Philippa, her hands clamped hard in her lap, sat like a ramrod. ‘I think there’s more than enough in the world,’ she said, ‘without anyone adding to it.’

  ‘What!’ said the old lady. Her wrinkles deepened. ‘An unromantic woman at last! You would not have your fortune told even if paid for it?’

  Philippa drew a deep breath. ‘Mr Blyth says you can read people’s thoughts,’ she said. ‘So why ask me?’

  ‘So that you may ask yourself. What a silly question,’ said the Dame de Doubtance. ‘So Mr Crawford is setting off for Constantinople, and Mr Blyth has now announced that he will accompany him? But why not? It is an amusing prospect. Francis makes austere company at present, but he will improve. And another will come, surely, to take you back home.’

  ‘Archie Abernethy is coming from Sevigny. One of Mr Crawford’s men. The one who used to tame elephants.’ She waited, but as the old woman made no comment on that, she continued. ‘That doesn’t matter. What matters is that Mr Crawford and Mr Blyth are going to Constantinople by way of Algiers.’

  ‘Well?’ The Dame de Doubtance was interested.

  ‘Because you said Oonagh O’Dwyer was there.’

  ‘What an extraordinary fuss there has been,’ said the Dame de Doubtance raspingly, ‘about that irresponsible Irishwoman and her improper child. The woman has paid her price and Francis his. She has not the slightest need of him now. He will find that out soon enough in Algiers.’

  ‘The nuns we met in Baden were paid to send him to Algiers, too,’ said Philippa; and met the yellow, considering stare with a brown, obstinate one of her own.

  ‘I see,’ said the Dame de Doubtance at length. ‘I see. It occurred to you that I too might be an agent of Gabriel’s. Francis, I am sure, would avenge your death very prettily; but I am not. There is a trap awaiting him in Algiers, placed there by Graham Reid Malett: Francis knows this very well. Algiers is a town run by proscribed men, refugees, criminals and corsairs, paying tribute to Turkey. He knows this too. If he wishes to see Oonagh O’Dwyer he has certain odds to overcome, that is all. Ah, here comes your qahveh.’

  Behind her, a woman had come into the room, silently, in a swirl of musk and some thick, hot scent which Philippa could not identify. Her dress, unlike the Dame de Doubtance’s, was rich and new: a black silk velvet trimmed with sable, and with a girdle set with jewelled enamels. Philippa, expecting a contemporary of her hostess, saw instead a clear olive face, vividly defined with black brows and heavy, coiled black hair; a long, straight Greek nose and reddened lips, cut softly and full. ‘My cousin,’ said the Lady of Doubtance,
watching Philippa’s face as the young woman, advancing, laid a small tray before her and sank smoothly into a chair. ‘… Whom you may call Kiaya Khátún.’

  The cousin wore, Philippa saw, turquoise earrings like pale blue sparrow’s eggs, and baroque pearls in rayons all over her black velvet slippers. The family was, of course, in the business. Accepting a cup of hot liquid mud from the ringed hands, Philippa said, ‘Thank you, Kiaya Khátún.’ It smelt of burnt nuts, and pepper, and toffee, and tasted quite awful. She drank it all, including the silt at the bottom, and returned her relentless brown stare to the other two women. Kiaya Khátún, she observed, had orange palms and painted her mouth. ‘… And has Oonagh O’Dwyer’s son paid its price, too?’ inquired Philippa.

  ‘O England,’ said Kiaya Khátún. Her voice, mellow and strong, held an accent or a mingling of accents Philippa was unable to name. ‘O England, the Hell of Horses, the Purgatory of Servants and the Paradise of Women.’ She turned her splendid eyes on the soothsayer. ‘She will be like Avicenna, and run through all the arts by eighteen.’

  ‘… The baby, I gather, doesn’t matter,’ said Philippa, keeping to the subject.

  Settled back in her tall chair, the tarnished brocade cast about her, the Dame de Doubtance brought her attention back to the girl. ‘Is it not enough to discover the mother? The child is safe, so long as Graham Malett is unharmed: is this not sufficient? I need not remind you of the ridicule his father would suffer—and rightly suffer: you have discovered that for yourself when you renounced so nobly your plan to accompany him as dry-nurse. But what you have not considered, in this so-called practical head,’ said the Dame de Doubtance dryly, ‘is that the trouble of rearing this inconvenient and foreign-born by blow will fall not on Francis Crawford but on Richard his brother. Hardly a suitable companion for Richard’s son, the heir to the title. And hardly a suitable return for all Richard has already endured on Lymond’s behalf.’

  ‘His mother …?’ began Philippa.

  ‘The Dowager Lady Crawford will not live for ever.’

  ‘Then Mr Crawford himself …’

  ‘After the child Khaireddin is found,’ the Dame de Doubtance said calmly, ‘Francis has to meet and kill Graham Malett.’

  There was a silence. Then: ‘What you are saying,’ said Philippa slowly, ‘is that the child Khaireddin would be better unfound?’

  The Dame de Doubtance said nothing.

  ‘Or are you saying,’ pursued Philippa, inimical from the reedy brown crown of her head to her mud-caked cloth stockings, ‘that you and I and Lymond and Lymond’s mother and Lymond’s brother and Graham Malett would be better off if he weren’t discovered?’

  ‘Now that,’ said the Dame de Doubtance with satisfaction, ‘is precisely what I was saying.’

  ‘How can I find him?’ said Philippa.

  In the tall, old-fashioned chair opposite the bony hands fell apart, the dusty robes shifted; the Dame de Doubtance’s face under the coarse yellow plaits changed and glittered and finally held back between aged cross-curtains the ghost of a lost, true delight. ‘Come, child,’ she said; and as Philippa, stony-faced, rose and went over, she leaned to lift the girl’s own right hand. It lay, rather dirty, on the waxy sunk palm: a young brown hand, with almond nails pink with health, and a white seam where the knife slipped, when she was making a cage for the weasel.

  A large tear, from nowhere, ran down the back of Philippa’s nose, and she coughed. And at the same moment, as if caught reading some illicit book, the Dame de Doubtance abruptly covered that palm with its fingers and, returning the folded hand to its owner, said harshly, ‘You will go to Algiers. You understand? Then, if you still wish to trace the child by yourself, you and the man Abernethy will go to the isle of Zakynthos, to the House of the Palm Tree, and you will present there a ring which my cousin will give you. After that, all will depend on her goodwill.’

  Behind them, the velvet robes stirred lazily, in an aroma of qahveh and musk. ‘Not on my goodwill,’ said the musical voice of Kiaya Khátún. ‘On my whim.’

  It was over. Five minutes after that, a dirty white with post-tension nausea, Philippa Somerville had rejoined maid and servant in the street. On her right hand, its stone turned inwards for safety, was an old black ring stuck with gummy dark jewels. In her head was an improbable address on the isle of Zakynthos. And carved in her heart was the promise she had just made that never, until she arrived at that improbable address, would she reveal to Jerott, Lymond or Onophrion Zitwitz what had happened that morning. Between her teeth: ‘I do not like melodrama,’ said Philippa Somerville to the air.

  It was her last adventure in Lyons. How Lymond had spent the previous night no one knew: least of all Jerott, whom he had seen drunk under the table at the Ours and promptly abandoned to Onophrion’s skilled ministrations. But the following morning, the extreme pressure began: to finish preparing at speed, and to move south as quickly as possible to take ship for Turkey. The name of Oonagh O’Dwyer was not mentioned, except by Jerott to Philippa.

  That it took them so long, in the event, to embark was the fault largely of Maître Georges Gaultier. Part of the spinet was found faulty, and had to be mended. The painter who had undertaken to complete the inscription fell ill, and then the work had to dry. The joiners made three attempts to create a packing to Gaultier’s satisfaction, and then it had to be done a fourth time because they had forgotten to use waterproofed cloths.

  Meantime Archie Abernethy, travelling from Lymond’s French home at Sevigny to escort Philippa back home to England, was also unaccountably held up. The full story in fact was never related because Lymond, by then extremely short-tempered, informed him that he had better save his breath for the return journey, which might begin as soon as Philippa was ready: that morning, for instance. Gaultier had promised that the spinet would be ready to travel south that day or the next.

  Archie Abernethy, a small battered Scot with a skin like old hide, made no complaint, but Philippa, who had always been fond of him, found that her arrangements to leave would take at least twenty-four hours. These she spent, as she had spent the last three weeks, in endless, bitter, detailed and exhaustive argument aimed at persuading either Jerott or Lymond to take her with them to Algiers. Finally Lymond, already riled by Gaultier’s non-appearance that morning, took her by the shoulders, forced her into a seat and said, ‘Ecco il flagello dei Principi. I believe one of the most trying circumstances of this entire oppressive trip has been your craving to haunt me in a little burden like a tinker’s budget. As I have said before, and am now saying for the last time, I cannot tell you with what awe my family and friends, not to mention yours, would receive the idea that I should ship a twelve-year-old girl along the Barbary coast——’

  ‘Fifteen-year-old?’ said Philippa, furiously, for the third time.

  ‘Or fifty-year-old: what’s the difference?’ said Lymond. ‘The coast’s a jungle of Moors, Turks, Jews, renegades from all over Europe, sitting in palaces built from the sale of Christian slaves. There are twenty thousand men, women and children in the bagnios of Algiers alone. I am not going to make it twenty thousand and one because your mother didn’t allow you to keep rabbits, or whatever is at the root of your unshakable fixation.’

  ‘I had weasels, instead,’ said Philippa shortly.

  ‘Good God,’ said Lymond, looking at her. ‘That explains a lot. However. The fact remains. I am not taking a woman.’

  ‘Dear me: but aren’t you?’ said Georges Gaultier, arriving at that precise moment and standing, wet cloak in his hands. ‘But I did tell you, didn’t I, that my assistant’s a woman?’

  There was a moment’s complete silence. ‘No,’ said Lymond.

  ‘Well, she is,’ said Maître Gaultier finally; and, discarding the cloak, sat down unasked in a near-by chair and warmed his hands at the fire. ‘And I’m not going without her.’

  Which was how Philippa Somerville came to sail on the royal galley Dauphiné out of Marseilles, bound for Constantinople v
ia Algiers in Barbary, and accompanied by His Most Christian Majesty of France’s Special Envoy, Jerott Blyth, Onophrion Zitwitz, Archibald Abernethy, Georges Gaultier, a woman called Marthe and a spinet.

  3

  Marthe

  It is doubtful if, at the time, even Lymond realized how little of all this was coincidence. And how very far from chance, for example, was the plan which led to the spinet with its maker and all its attendants, with Jerott and a strong bodyguard to protect it, making the journey from Lyons to Marseilles smoothly by water, while the rest of the party, including Philippa and Zitwitz and himself, travelled by road. Then, a safe and steady trip on the Rhône seemed unequivocably best for that remarkable packing-case, while leaving the rest of the party mobile to make their last arrangements on land. It meant also that by the time they all met at Marseilles, and boarded their galley, only Jerott had met Gaultier’s woman assistant.

  Philippa, it was true, already had the strongest suspicions. Her conscience tender with the memory of her unconfessed qahveh-supping with soothsayers, she would have laid a heavy wager, if she had had anyone to wager with and if her mother had not always found gambling ridiculous, that the unwanted helper would be Kiaya Khátún. One of the family, Georges Gaultier had implied when Lymond, his phrasing bell-like with anger, had marshalled, yet again, the arguments against carrying women.

  But to Gaultier, it appeared, the embassy was of no special moment, nor was he worried at the prospect of losing his fees. Only one person besides himself could maintain this instrument properly, and without her, he would not go at all. ‘As for propriety,’ he had ended, ‘if the shoe wrings in that quarter, there’s the English girl there who wants to go also. Let the women travel together. It’ll keep them out of our way.’ And, staring bright-eyed at the Special Envoy, he had ended, ‘If I’m willing to risk it, and she’s willing to risk it, I don’t see how you can stop us.’