Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The five men stopped. Opposite him and to right and to left ran a blank wall. No help there, and no help it seemed from a chance passer-by, for the alley, so far as it went before curving out of sight on each side, was completely deserted. Behind him, the bell jangled into silence without eliciting more than renewed sounds of derision from his tormentors: as he pulled again, Jerott said calmly, in Greek, ‘You look as if you would know, friend. Are they the right sort in here? Whom would you recommend?’

  One of them at least was sober enough or had enough Greek to understand. The man nearest to Jerott, broad-shouldered and with a fringe of red beard, grinned, showing the yellowed stumps of his teeth, and said, ‘They will lay you out well, giáur.’

  ‘I trust,’ said Jerott unhurriedly, ‘it will be the other way around.’ Damn the women. It came to him that assaults from the street were perhaps not unknown at this house. No matter how long one rang or one knocked, they would probably take good care to ignore it. At the back, if he could only get there, they would have their clients’ entrance, and probably one or two of a guard. Meanwhile, he did not need to turn to know that the wall in which the front door was set was both windowless and too high to scale.

  Ah, well. ‘They are out. A pity,’ said Jerott; and ignoring the ring of men, turned, casually, as if to walk away to his left.

  They jumped on him just as, at the last second, he wheeled and ducked in the opposite direction, his hand already holding the knife he always carried, inside his doublet. He cut at the sword-arm hurtling down on him; dragged himself free of one over-extended grip, broke another; half dodged a cudgel on one side of his ribs and cut a slice through the muscle of a bare, hairy thigh. Then he was off like a hare with the pack of them after him; up the side of the building and praying that the garden gate by which the Syrian lady’s clients might enter was unlocked, narrow and handy.

  It was handy. It was narrow. It was not only unlocked but open. And not only open but completely blocked by a satisfied client, in the act of letting himself out.

  He was a very little man, in a turban; and hardly, Jerott supposed, with regret, at the top of his strength. But he was too hard-pressed just then to pause to consider. Jerott flung himself at that half-open door with a wordless bellow of warning, and flinging the little man back with his shoulder, spun round to push the door shut against the onrush of men at his heels.

  He was too late to close the door, but the sight of him waiting, knife in hand, in that narrow gap was enough to make the first two hesitate as shoulder to shoulder they threw themselves through the fast-closing entrance. Then their swords flashed, and Jerott’s knife came up in a shower of sparks, and there was another, much louder clatter of steel at his elbow which was followed, almost immediately, by a squeal from one of the two dellies before him. One of the men crowding in from the street suddenly dropped back, and as another leaped into his place, Jerott snatched a second to glance hurriedly round to the source of the noise.

  It came from the little man in the turban who, recovered from the thrust which had bounced him back inside the garden, had returned to the door and was standing on the balls of his feet, with eighteen inches of steel in one hand and a long-handled axe in the other. Inside the turban, the scarred, sun-darkened face was familiar. ‘Well, now,’ said Archibald Abernethy. ‘D’ye think we should rush them; or just let them run on inside and exhaust themselves?’

  Suddenly, the odds were utterly perfect. So long as they fought in the doorway, they couldn’t be rushed. They had weapons. They had all Jerott’s formidable experience. And they had every dirty trick a little Scots mahout had learned in a lifetime of Eastern bazaars. As the second man gasped and fell, choking, Archie pursed his lips and gave a small whistle. ‘It doesna seem fair,’ he said, axe whirling, dodging and stabbing at Jerott Blyth’s elbow. ‘But I heard the lassie call them in yesterday.’

  ‘Who?’ said Jerott, gasping. Two against three now: even better. A pity to summon help at this stage and just spoil it. Then, like a nightmare ride of some dwarvish Valkyrie, the air turned black, as prompt to their call, half a hundred unwieldy scarlet-beaked partridges laboured on urgent wings out of the firmament, and hitting turbans, weapons, arms, shoulders, chests in their haste, descended with the weighty assurance of the loved into the garden.

  Inside the house, an interrogatory door opened. Outside the house, another door shut, as the men pressing upon it from the outside abruptly withdrew and fled. ‘O michty,’ said Archie with sorrow. ‘They’ve flattened a partridge.’

  Jerott Blyth took him by the shoulder and shook it. ‘Were you inside?’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said Archie.

  ‘The Syrian woman is …’

  ‘Oh, aye,’ said Archie. ‘I know. I went to see her.’

  ‘What about it then?’ With an effort, gasping, Jerott kept his voice low. ‘Does she still have the baby?’

  ‘No. She says it’s in Constantinople,’ said Archie. ‘At the house of a nightingale-dealer. She paid the sponge-boats to take him.’

  It was the same direction Marthe had given him. ‘Do you think she’s speaking the truth?’ Jerott asked. Someone had come through the house door and was crossing the garden towards him. He opened the door and a partridge strutted in, clucking.

  ‘I think so. She didna know why I was asking. But I was going to ask down at the rocks to make sure.’

  Jerott, too, had seen the brown Egyptian divers, sliding into the water knife in hand to wrest the sponges from the sharp rocks, and the dead treasure from the bones of the ocean. They carried oil, it was said, in their mouths to spit out at the bottom, through whose magnifying gouts the smallest coin became plain. Or with sponges stopping their mouths, soaked in oil, stayed below, seventy, a hundred fathoms under the surface, until their air was exhausted. There were many tales of the divers: how they were reared on dry biscuit so that they would remain thin, how they were trained from small children, and might not marry until they had stayed half an hour under water. He had seen the small boats travelling north, laden like ill-treated asses with their ragged, billowing cargo: the sponges brought ashore every night in mountainous sackloads for drying.…

  There was no one in the lane or the alley. Shutting the door, Jerott walked away, without looking back, from the Syrian’s house. He said to Archie, ‘They could hide a child in a sponge-boat.’

  ‘It struck me,’ agreed Archie, ‘that it would be an easy way to get the wean into the town.’

  They went, none the less, down to the harbour; and on the way Archie heard Jerott’s account, edited, of how he had traced the Peppercorn here to Chios; and in return heard Archie’s story, un-expurgated, of how he had called at every port used by the English until, by elimination, he had landed at Chios. ‘You’ll not have heard from Mr Crawford?’ he ventured. ‘If he got the other child and the Somerville lassie?’

  Francis. It was Francis’s money he had been using just now, out on the rocks, to smooth the path of their interrogation. It had been Lymond’s money which had paid for the confirmation they had just received: that a child of two years had indeed left on one of the sponge-boats, some time previously, bound for Stamboul. Because Marthe had shown no concern for the child he, Jerott, had come determined to find it.

  If he still wished to find it, he must go to Constantinople, with Marthe; with Pierre Gilles and his bloody Herpestes. And worst, he had to come face to face with Francis, whose past actions he could not condone … whom he had promised never to leave … about whom he knew something which, he suspected, for his very life he must appear not to know.…

  He had told Archie nothing of that; and only the barest account of Marthe’s and Gilles’s presence. ‘I’ve heard nothing,’ he said. ‘He may even have the girl and the child and be on his way home.’ But it was a faint hope. Lymond would never have left without sending word of it.

  ‘No,’ said Archie. With Jerott he had walked out on the low mole, scanning the small boats tied up in the harbour and the big galleon
s anchored outside in the channel, their lamps beginning to glow in the sinking evening light. On the other arm of the bay, the Genoese lantern, freshly lit, burned red against a sky washed with pale apple green. A flock of cranes, a black wedge against the pale light, flew across the sky and was gone on the long wintering journey south. ‘It’s getting late,’ Jerott said.

  ‘It’s late.’ Under the turban, the broken-nosed face was passive and lined. ‘Pray God it’s not too late.’

  Jerott stopped.

  ‘He’s in Constantinople,’ said Archie. ‘That I’ve heard. He couldn’t catch up with the girl or the wean before they both got there, and he hasna got them out yet. They’ve made him Ambassador.’

  Jerott was startled out of his thoughts. ‘But d’Aramon …?’

  ‘M. d’Aramon’s going back to France, and a loon called Jean Chesnau is going as chargé d’affaires. Mr Crawford’s made accredited Ambassador, which means he’s got the power of France behind any demands he may make.…’

  Jerott let out a long breath. ‘Then surely they’ll give him both Philippa Somerville and the boy that she followed. The other child we only have to locate. He isn’t a child of Devshirmé, poor brat.’ He sobered. ‘Unless a report of Gabriel’s death somehow got through and was acted on.’

  There was a short silence. A longboat, pulling strongly, moved out into the harbour, its wake thin as a paint-line behind it. A cloud of fireflies, like sparks from newly lit wood, fussed through the darkening air and was gone. An aroma of cooking, borne from a galleasse which had just put up her awnings, floated, seductively, over the water. ‘They say …’ said Archie. ‘They say in Candía that Gabriel isna dead.’

  ‘I know,’ said Jerott. ‘What have you heard?’

  ‘They say he was nursed back to health in Zuara,’ said Archie in his flattest Scots voice. ‘And they say that Rustem, the Grand Vizier now with the army, has sent a new deputy north. He’s been in Stamboul this week or two back. By the name of Jubrael Pasha.’

  Oh, my God. Francis …’ said Jerott.

  ‘If it’s true … it’s too late,’ said Archie. ‘It’ll all be over by now.’

  After nearly a month at Topkapi, Philippa was elected to more than Paphian honours: she was appointed to make music for Roxelana herself.

  Thus were justified all the crowns Kate and Gideon had spent on her study of lyre and of spinet. It was the only field, so far, in which the Pearl of Fortune had shown any precocity, other than the feat of keeping her head, her reason and her sense of the ridiculous amid conditions of civilized lunacy.

  To her fellow odalisques, she was aware, the only lunacy was hers and her protests a matter of friendly derision when, upon her third bath and her seventh hairwash of the week, she struggled against the stinging boredom of uprooting her hairline and eyebrows.

  At first, sitting through extraordinary lectures on how to paint her lips red; to dye her eyebrows and lashes, to draw, with a steady hand, a black line above and under her lashes with a filthy mixture of antimony powder and oil they called surmèh, Philippa was too overawed to protest. When you are living, surrounded by giant black eunuchs, in a palace where the master has power of instant and hideous death, you do not niggle at trifles. When they spent half an hour painting her finger- and toe-nails, going on to demonstrate the uses of hènnah against perspiration and the alternative uses of kohl, kajal and tutia as a cooling eyeblack which also guarded the wearer from the perils of the Evil Eye, she began, after a day or two, to suffer a terrible impulse to giggle. She acquired her own moleshair brushes and pots, and learned how to get the paint off with linen and cream. She learned how to make kohl with lemons and plumbago over the Bath Superintendent’s brazier; and how to make face-powder with ground rice, borax and cowrie shells, mixed and dried in a melon rind with beanflour, lemons and eggs, but when they tried to put it on her face she exploded in a cloud of sneezes and laughter, and they had to give up for that day.

  She grew bolder. She refused the Chinese mudpack of oil and rice-flour and would not let them shave off her eyebrows, although she submitted to the day-long hair brushing, the dressing with tonics of olive oil and maidenhair fern; the plaiting and scenting. On that point, watching her long, mouse-coloured hank gather lustre and colour, she was prepared to admit that, as Kate used to say naggingly, a little attention produced amazing results.

  Under the bathing and massage, also, her skin was improving: that must be said. The fruit, too, had something to do with it: the apples and pears; the plums and raisins and figs; the grapes and peaches and melons. The red cherries of Sariyár, each yielding a hundred drops of their juice. The juice of Bokhara apricots, Mardin plums; Azerbaijan pears. Grapes from Smyrna; apples from Kojá-ili; Temesvár prunes. Water-ices made of snow flavoured with fruit-juice, pomegranates … Khusháf made from Stamboul peaches flavoured with amber and musk.

  Kate and Gideon and she had led a life of simplicity: a loving community of amiable pursuits with which, making music, laughing and talking, they had filled the flying days of her childhood, when baths and diet and fussing about one’s appearance would have been as irrelevant as engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin.

  Something of grace and good grooming, no doubt, had been missed. Walking up and down rebelliously, over the deep carpet in Kiaya Khátún’s room, Philippa did not enjoy having pointed out to her, in that deep, even voice, the undoubted faults of her posture and carriage. Because one cannot clown one’s way quite through everything, she learned to stand and to sit so that no one sang out something rude and nothing forced her to think out a reply. Under the Mistress of the Wardrobe, she learned to execute fine embroidery, to make rose-leaf pillows; to distinguish brocatelle from brocade, velvet from Bursa from Cyprus velvet; to tell the quality and the price of a pearl.

  They were allowed to use their own small kitchens for lessons and experiments. It was unlikely, to say the least of it, that she would ever find herself explaining to Betty, in the big, cosy old kitchen at Flaw Valleys, how to make crystallized violets, or mince-meat pies, or rice dressed with butter and almonds, but she found this the least boring part of the day. Because of her appearance she was spared some of the other things which came every day, in covered dishes, from the long range of harem kitchens. Such as tripe, the Prince of Dishes. She had stopped quoting that, since the Kislar Agha had spoken about it. Tripe, with pepper and cloves, had been one of the Prophet’s favourite dishes. The Prophet had been fond of his food. ‘The love of sweetmeats comes from the Faith. The Faithful are sweet; the wicked, sour.’

  The Prophet had said a few other things too, as she was reminded on the day when her eyebrows were plucked. It had been altogether one of the less happy days, when Kuzucuyum, who had a slight temperature, had been kept in the nursery quarters, and when, that morning, she had received with the other novices her first lesson, in Kiaya Khátún’s golden, ironical voice, on how to attract, to foster and to satisfy the peculiar cravings of man.

  One does not live on a farm in the Border country of England and remain unduly naïve. On the other hand, for Philippa up to that day, the world had been divided into people, some of whom, like Kate and herself, were female, and some of them male. Whatever the sex of your friend, you extended to him or to her the kindness, the courtesy, the thoughtfulness which affection prompted, and would expect to receive the same in return. Very occasionally, at Flaw Valleys, Philippa had observed someone—a servant, a neighbour—embark on some long, subtle campaign designed to prompt favours. They had received short shrift from Kate.

  Between human beings, it was an indignity. Between friends, it was an insult. Between man and woman, as a means to promote love, it seemed to Philippa, there would be surely nothing more childish and degrading than a planned and detailed exercise to provoke and allure.

  ‘Look, it doesn’t hurt,’ Laila had said soothingly as Philippa sat bolt upright under the tweezers. ‘You’ll look a different person.’

  Philippa gazed at her with the e
yes of despair. ‘But I’m a different person now. All they’re doing is making us all look the same.’

  ‘Lie down.’ The Mistress of the Baths stood no nonsense. ‘There is a standard. You must conform to it.’

  Fleur de Lis, amused, said, ‘Your hair shines. You do not mind that? Then why object to having your features improved?’

  Between finger and thumb, the tweezers nipped their implacable way over her skin. ‘All right,’ said Philippa. ‘Let’s take care of what’s there already. But why spend so much time and emotion and energy upon improving on it? I’m happy with my face as it is. If it’s not frightening you or the eunuchs silly, I don’t see why we can’t all leave it alone.’

  The Mistress paused, tweezers in hand, and regarded her. ‘You have good points,’ she said. ‘The eyes; the bones. I have little to complain of in the hands. The flesh will come. But you have not yet that which will draw your lord’s eyes as you stand with the others in the Golden Road. One day—Allah preserve her, long hence—Roxelana Sultan will enter the green fields of Paradise, or, Allah forbid, the Lord himself will leave to walk in the paths of the Blessed. Then each night one of you will be chosen; and will be sent to me, and to Kiaya Khátún and the Wardrobe Mistress to be bathed and painted and scented and robed as you have been shown. Then, when you enter the Grand Seigneur’s chamber, and the old women part the sheets at the foot, and you draw yourself up, as you have been taught, until you lie at his side … then you will have need of every art you have learned, to charm and to arouse; to pique and to surprise; to know when to satisfy and how to leave unsatisfied something he will not take to another.

  ‘If you please him; if you do as you have been told, you may become First Khátún, his bedfellow, with a suite of your own, where he may visit you: where you may cook for him and entertain him by day as well as by night. If you bear him a son, you may rule, through your son, the whole Ottoman Empire. Now will you lie still while I pluck?’