Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘If she adds one hairsbreadth to the peril of this ship and the people she carries, I can and will stop her now,’ Lymond had said. ‘She is one of the family, you say. You’ll have to tell me much more.’

  ‘Will I?’ said Gaultier. ‘Well, maybe you’re right. She’s an orphan—name of Marthe—brought up in a convent. We paid for that. And since she finished her learning she’s been in the business helping me. She’s no schoolgirl. She’s been to Anatolia with me and back; and she goes to Venice on her own when it’s necessary, to buy and to sell. There’s not much she doesn’t know about clocks, or about jewels … or about men.’

  ‘I want to meet her,’ said Lymond.

  ‘You’ll see her,’ had said Georges Gaultier comfortably. ‘If not here, then at Marseilles. You’ll take her, too.’

  So Philippa got her leave to bring Archie Abernethy with her and sail on the Dauphiné. But they had not seen the woman Marthe before they left Lyons. And permission to sail from Marseilles depended still, Philippa was grimly aware, on whether or not the woman Marthe was found to be eligible. Kiaya Khátún, she imagined, would pass like a shot.

  But Jerott’s manner, greeting them all when they arrived in Marseilles, was unusually difficult to define. Yes, they had had an uneventful journey. Yes, the crate had arrived in good order and was now waiting in the King’s Marseilles lodging, where they would be permitted to stay until the Dauphiné sailed. And yes, Maître Gaultier and his assistant were also safely installed with it, awaiting Lymond’s instructions.

  ‘Jerott?’ said Lymond. ‘What are you not saying?’ His eyes, as the orderly cavalcade paced through the muddy streets, had not left that forceful aquiline face since they met. And Jerott, Philippa saw with disbelief, flushed.

  For a moment longer, the strict blue eyes studied him; and then Lymond laughed. ‘She’s an eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity? Or more frightful still, an eighteen-year-old blonde of unstained innocence? I shall control my impulses, Jerott, I promise you. I’m only going to throw her out if she looks like a troublemaker, or else so bloody helpless that we’ll lose lives looking after her. Not everyone,’ he said, in a wheeling turn which caught Philippa straining cravenly to hear, ‘is one of Nature’s Marco Polos like the Somerville offspring.’

  Pink with irritation, Philippa fell back into line with one of Jerott’s men, but not before she heard Jerott Blyth murmur, ‘Leave it. Leave it till we get in;’ and saw Lymond’s sharp turn of the head.

  It was then that Philippa, dropping back still farther, said cheerfully to her neighbour, in an undertone, ‘They’re talking about Marthe, Maître Gaultier’s assistant. What’s she like? Pretty?’

  ‘She’s pretty,’ said the man.

  Philippa studied the taciturn face. ‘Oh, I see,’ she said. ‘Mr Blyth wants her all to himself?’

  For a moment, she thought it hadn’t worked. Then the man gave a snort. ‘Mr Blyth want her? He held us up at Avignon for two days refusing to go on until she was sent back home, but Gaultier wouldn’t do it, and he had to give in. Mr Blyth and Gaultier haven’t spoken since. Aye,’ said Jerott’s man morosely. ‘It’s going to be a grand, sociable trip.’

  Arrived at the house, Philippa didn’t even wait for her luggage. Followed, panting, by Fogge, she raced to the bedroom allotted her; flung off her cloak, changed into a pair of unsuitable slippers from her maid’s carpet bag, splashed her face and hands with water, curry-combed the end of the hank of hair that hung down from under her cap and galloped, muddy skirts and all, downstairs towards the sound of Francis Crawford’s light voice.

  The principal chamber in the King of France’s lodging, Marseilles, was small and neatly proportioned and figured with rich colour from the fruitfully painted ceiling to the allegorical and expensive tapestries all over the walls. A scented wood fire, already warm and red with several hours’ burning, tinged with flickering, rosy light the gloom of the wintry afternoon and pooled with flame the smooth marquetry of the floor. Grey light, through three small lattices, touched on the crimson velvet of the window-seats and expired at the edge of the fringed stools and the few high-backed chairs. Darkness, warmth and firelight in turn owned the rest of the room. Philippa entered, following that pleasant, discouraging voice.

  At first, she saw no one. Then, as a flame jumped, it revealed two people standing at the far end of the room behind the service screen, and the light glimmered, for a moment, on the pleated cambric at the neck of a man’s doublet. Lymond’s voice, continuing lightly, said in French, ‘It seems very clear that there is some objection. I should be obliged to know what it is.’

  She could not see whom he was addressing, but in any case the problem was instantly solved for her. Georges Gaultier’s voice said, ‘The young man is temperamental, merely. There is no possible objection that I can think of. Once afloat, believe me, there will be no time for childishness. You are more than capable of taking care of that.’

  ‘That is hardly the issue,’ said the other, cool voice. ‘The point is rather that I have no desire to be exposed to it in the first place. I think perhaps you should bring your friend in. Obviously we are going to get nowhere until we have this meeting you have all been so eager to avoid.…’

  They were going to emerge from the screen. Perfectly prepared to be an eavesdropper but unwilling to look like one, Philippa backed quickly towards the door and collided, hard, with an unseen person striding forward equally fast into the room. There was a hiss, more than echoed by herself as the breath was struck from her body. Then two cool, friendly hands held and steadied her, one on her shoulder and one on her flat waist, and a low voice said, ‘Admirable Philippa. I always enter my battlefields in reverse, too. But my own battlefields, my little friend. Not other people’s.’

  It was the same voice. But it couldn’t be. It was the same felicitous, dispassionate voice that she had just heard speaking from behind the screen at the far end of the room. There, a shadow emerging from the screen, was the speaker. And here behind her, as she spun round and he dropped his impersonal grasp, was Lymond himself.

  A sense of danger, instant and unreasoning, overwhelmed Philippa. She saw Lymond look at her with sudden attention, and in the same moment there was a flood of light outside the door behind him and Jerott arrived, breathless, with a servant bearing candelabra behind him. He had no time to speak. As the branched candlesticks were borne in and the room filled with flickering gold, the two whom Philippa had overheard moved from behind the screen and walked slowly towards them.

  One of them, as Philippa had guessed, was the usurer and clock-maker Georges Gaultier. The other, whose voice Philippa had thought so unmistakably familiar, was not a man at all, but a girl. A girl far younger than Kiaya Khátún, with high cheekbones and open blue eyes, set far apart; with a patrician nose, its profile scooped just less than straight. The face of a Delia Robbia angel, set in gleaming hair, golden as Jupiter’s shower. ‘This,’ said Maître Georges Gaultier gently, ‘is Marthe.’

  ‘Hell,’ said Francis Crawford so softly that only Philippa heard him, ‘and damnation. And God damn you, Lady.’ Then, his face wiped clean of all real expression, he moved forward smoothly and sociably to greet Maître Gaultier’s assistant, while Jerott and Philippa stood side by side helplessly behind.

  An eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity, had been Lymond’s first ironical guess. But, Philippa thought, Jerott had tried to send this girl home for other reasons entirely. In acute discomfort, sitting, she saw the girl Marthe address Francis Crawford for the first time. ‘I have heard of you, of course,’ she said. ‘Objections have been raised, I believe, to my travelling. What, precisely, do you find so alarming? My character, or my looks?’

  If Lymond was unprepared for her voice, he showed no sign of it. After a short, placid interval during which he surveyed her as she sat, from the shining fall of her hair to the pale blue folds of her gown, he said, ‘That was only Jerott, wishing to preserve both from the barbarian.’

>   ‘Meaning you?’ said the girl Marthe’s light voice. ‘Meaning me,’ agreed Lymond.

  ‘I think,’ said the girl pleasantly, ‘that you may quite safely leave that aspect to me. If it also concerns you, I have sailed the Middle Sea a great many times without either giving birth or fainting in battle. If I am captured, it is no concern but my own.’

  ‘How disciplined of you,’ said Lymond. ‘Et tu ne vois au pied de ton rempart …’

  ‘ … Pour m’enlever mille barques descendre. Of course not. No man would. So why should I look to be rescued?’

  ‘Is that why you wish to come?’ said Francis Crawford. Flippant though his tone was, his eyes, Philippa noticed, had never dropped from the girl’s. ‘To prove your masculinity?’

  There was a little pause. Looking into that angelic, fair face Philippa saw the authority she had missed before: the small lines round the mouth; the winged curve of spirit on either side of the fine planes of the nose: the faint, single line between the arched brows. ‘I came because I was told to come,’ said the girl Marthe. ‘My wishes have very little to do with it.’

  It was coolly said; and she added nothing. But Philippa, sensitive to every shade of the exchange, suddenly caught the controlled anger behind it. This girl, whom Gaultier had refused to allow home, had no desire to sail on the Dauphiné with Francis Crawford of Lymond. And at the same moment, Lymond, no less perceptive, spoke with a coolness fully equal to hers. ‘On the contrary. Your wishes are paramount. If you prefer it, I shall send you back to Lyons with an escort today.’

  Sitting straight-backed, her hands modestly in her lap, the girl answered, sweetly. ‘Thank you. I fear in this case inclination must give way to duty. If you have no other valid objection, I intend to sail with my uncle.’

  ‘Your uncle?’ said Jerott, startled into speech.

  ‘A courtesy title,’ explained Georges Gaultier placidly. ‘In fact, she is more of a collector’s piece, are you not, Marthe? In exquisite taste. Given the choice, I make no doubt that Sultan Suleiman would prefer her to the spinet. How happy,’ he added, in the inimical silence, ‘that you have taken to one another. I was certain that we should have your permission to sail. What an enchanting voyage, with two such ladies, in prospect.’

  Slumped stricken in her mud-encased frieze, Philippa suddenly realized what he had said. She applied to Jerott, in an undertone. ‘Has he given permission? Am I going?’

  Lymond had heard. Rising, in one practised movement, he gave one hand to Marthe and the other to Philippa and, raising them so that they stood before him, frieze to satin to velvet, he lifted each girl’s hand in turn to his lips and holding them lightly, smiled speculatively into the blue eyes and the brown. ‘You are going,’ he said. ‘Like an Ethiopian grasshopper plague, we’re all going. And we shall know each other better than this when we come back.…

  ‘If we come back, that is to say.’

  Many weeks later, long after the Dauphiné had sailed, cannon firing and pennants streaming, from Marseilles harbour and when Lymond and Marthe and Philippa indeed knew each other better, two letters reached Philippa’s mother at her home in Flaw Valleys, near Hexham in England: one written by Lymond, and one by Philippa herself.

  My dear Kate, Lymond had written. She is with me, and safe. You know what she feels her mission to be: and I cannot bring myself to flatten that Somerville pride. We are sailing tomorrow from Marseilles and very soon her own common sense is going to tell her that, unique as she is and competent as she is, she cannot be of real use to me here.

  Meanwhile she has a maid, a bodyguard and the company of another, older girl whose professional expertise we require. Not the kind of help, sweet Kate, which, tongue in cheek, you envisage. Constantinople beckons, and we must cherish the palate. Who could refuse a royal envoy, bearing gifts to the Turk?

  Be kind to her when she comes back. Her love is not only for children but for humanity. She will be a good-hearted and magnificent zealot one day. As her mother is now.

  Goodbye, Kate. And below he had signed as he rarely did, with his Christian name.

  Philippa’s letter, from an afflicted conscience, was not very much longer.

  … if I don’t look for him, no one else will. You know I’m sorry. But I couldn’t leave that little thing to wither away by itself Don’t be sad. We’re all going to come back. And you can teach him Two Legs and I Wot a Tree, and save him the top of the milk for his blackberry pie. He’ll never know, if we’re quick, that nobody wanted him.…

  Which had, Kate considered as she scrubbed off her tears, a ring of unlikely confidence about it, as well as rather a shaky understanding of the diet of one-year-old babies.

  Neither of Kate Somerville’s correspondents had said much about Marthe, and a reticence about Marthe was the main feature, apart from the foul weather, of the Dauphiné’s crossing from Marseilles to Algiers.

  Winter in the Mediterranean was seldom cold, but produced rain, and wind, and current, and the small, gusty storm which could make travel impossible for a shallow-draught boat like a galley. Corsairs and fighting craft stayed in harbour during the winter except for the most urgent travel or the most tempting prize: a Spanish galleasse putting into Cádiz, full of Mexican bullion, or another coming out of Seville with converted Spanish ryals in stamped cases for the Low Countries. There might be a shipload of troops and munitions being rushed to a rising: there would certainly be the sporadic journeys of the merchants, the pilgrims, the spies, who could not put off their duties till summer. There was always the fishing.

  For the Dauphiné’s task, the urgency was relative. A journey to Constantinople would not take less than four months at that time of year, and might well take a good deal longer. Again, once arrived there might be a wait of several weeks at least if Sultan Suleiman were absent, say on a summer Persian campaign. If the King of France’s prodigious clock-spinet failed to arrive in the Sultan’s hands before the next winter, no one would be surprised.

  On the other hand, according to the Dame de Doubtance, Oonagh O’Dwyer was in Algiers. However fleeting Lymond’s association with her, thought Philippa, he had tried to free her last year, when Dragut found and took her to Tripoli. To do her justice, according to Jerott, Oonagh O’Dwyer had not wished to be freed. She had not intended to burden Lymond or to inform him of his impending offspring. It was Gabriel who had done that. And it was Gabriel who was drawing Lymond now to Algiers, with Oonagh O’Dwyer as the bait. So, concluded Philippa, clarifying the thick fogs of quixotry, there was no immediate rush indicated to free Mistress Oonagh O’Dwyer, as the said Mistress Oonagh O’Dwyer, if alive, would certainly be kept alive until Lymond reached her; and if dead, was unlikely to alter that attitude even if the Dauphiné went down with all hands.

  ‘You do grant,’ said Jerott, approached with this view, ‘that there might be a certain naïve interest in proving whether she’s dead or alive?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Philippa. ‘But there’s no hurry. That’s the point.’

  ‘I’m not arguing,’ said Jerott. ‘I like living, too. But try convincing M. le Comte de Sevigny, that’s all.’

  In fact, the weather was the final arbiter. No master was going to keep a galley at sea overnight in the Mediterranean in winter in any case, and the port-hopping wind which took them bowling stormily across the Gulf of Lions to the Spanish coast and thence to the Balearic Islands changed the next day to a southerly wind with a fine cross-swell which suited the journey to Algiers not at all, and the insides of the Dauphiné’s passengers even less.

  Philippa, with hitherto no more than cross-Channel experience, was thankful to find that the iron stomach of the Somervilles had apparently been granted her. She could have put up with being sick before Lymond, but not before Marthe, with whom she shared the chambre de poupe next to the Master’s own cabin.

  Marthe, it was obvious, was not the motherly type. Nor was she the sisterly type. Possessed of perfect English when it was required of her, she displayed also perfect
self-command, perfect courtesy, an exceedingly well-equipped mind and a cultivated and unalterable coolness towards Francis Crawford and all his lesser companions. During most of the journey she read: occasionally she spent an hour with the captain, who welcomed her as an experienced traveller and a beautiful young woman; occasionally she and Gaultier would sit on a hatch-lid and talk.

  Lymond she had hardly exchanged a dozen words with since they met: at their daily formal meal with the Master she sat, her cool, sardonic blue gaze resting on him as he spoke, and contributing herself almost nothing at all. She made no inquiry about the purpose of their proposed halt at Algiers, and none about Philippa’s presence on board. Philippa had a feeling that she was completely informed on both counts. It did not do to forget that the Dame de Doubtance stayed in Georges Gaultier’s house.

  For friendly company, Philippa had Fogge to fall back on—a broken reed, as Fogge was not a Somerville and took to her bed straight away. That left Jerott Blyth and Lymond himself, who, watchful during the rough weather, rescued her from Fogge’s side and took her up into the raw grey daylight to see the ship in full operation.

  He knew a great deal about it. As she walked the high gangway between stem and stern, looking down at the two long ranks of oars with their chained rowers—nearly three hundred of them, unwashed, unshaven, naked to the waist; as she was shown the sakers and demi-culverins arming the bows, the chains to prevent main and mizzenmast falling inboard during battle, and below, the divided rooms of the hold, for stores of food and barrels of wine, for munitions and sick men, for the captain’s coals and the officers’ baggage, for the livestock which a seaman, bucket in hand, was feeding as she passed—Philippa began to realize how much.

  Coming back, he showed her the cordage of the two lateen sails, now tight to the wind, and explained, as the bos’n’s silver whistle blew, that they were rowing à quartier, using a third of the oarsmen at a time, in order to help the galley to hold a few points nearer the wind without exhausting the rowers. ‘One depends on them and them alone during battle, so one cherishes them, as you can see,’ Lymond said. His face, when she glanced at it, was as totally unimpassioned as his voice. ‘These benches, and these, need the most powerful oarsmen. It’s usual to stock them with Turks, but we’ve avoided that this voyage, for obvious reasons. These are mostly Flemish and Spaniards, or criminals culled from French prisons.’ But she knew that already, as they jerked back and forth on the smooth pinewood benches, by the letters burned in their backs.