Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [226]
It had been a mistake to look. She had never been well after that, and they had kept the child from her, to live on alone into the barbaric unknown, if she died; to be a threat to the safety and happiness of his father, whatever happened. To Francis Crawford, this unknown son was a tragedy of which he must never learn. Oonagh O’Dwyer had let him think herself dead to free her pride from his pity. She had no desire to live on, in macabre comedy, as the fecund mother of his unwanted son.
But she did live on, and time passed, and the heat grew worse. Dragut and his household had moved elsewhere, but she was at first too ill to travel, then well enough only to be brought here to Algiers. She knew that somewhere in the palace Khaireddin was being tended, but there were other children, and nothing to tell her whether the bubbling purr she heard at night, of a baby full and content, was his.
Once or twice recently she heard, as well as Kedi’s voice and her crooning, a baby laugh. It was an unexpected, deep, throaty chuckle which caught her breath and made the tears, stupidly, stream down into her black hair. But she did not know Khaireddin’s scream, or the sound Francis Crawford might have made when once he too was branded for the galleys. So she did not guess. And when Kedi, her face bloated with weeping, told her one day that the baby was very ill, Oonagh did not ask why, but was merely stoically glad.
‘Neither he nor I will live to burden his father,’ she had said hardily to Güzel, standing above her cradling the unwitting morsel, months ago, in her arms.
And behind the veil, she had felt the other woman’s level scrutiny, and heard her considered English: ‘You believe so? In my experience, there is no person who does not blossom near to a child. You may find you have stolen what is most precious from your friend. Who will ever know Khaireddin’s babyhood, except Kedi?’
And no one, she supposed, had known it, except Kedi, to whom he gave his first smile and at whom he laughed. Jolly, bountiful Kedi, who would do nevertheless whatever the eunuchs might order.
Soon after that Dragut called briefly on his way back to Turkey, and the third wife, who had ordered the branding, was turned off and sold. Güzel was not with him. The corsair, lighter by a stone for his summer raiding, went and stood over the silent cot where the yellow-haired baby lay, neither sleeping nor crying now, with silken, egg-blue stains under the strained, dark-blue eyes. He questioned Kedi, who gabbled, terrified, in faulty Arabic, and saw the maid who tended Oonagh each day. Then he retired to his own silk-hung room, and calling his scribe, dictated a letter to Scotland.
‘The child is like to die, and the woman also. I return thy money since neither, being in poor health, seems worth the pain of preserving. As long as she lives I am ready, for the honour in which I hold thee, to allow the woman to stay. The child, if he lives, will be I fear of no value to his parents and of less than none to the Sultan. I intend, therefore, to sell him.’
And on Dragut’s bearded face as he set his seal on the paper: the seal with his initials and the first word of a verse from the Qur’ân, was a most amiable smile.
XI
The Crown and the Anchor
(Falkland Palace and the Kyles of Bute, August 1552)
WHILE Dragut’s letter to him was being written, Sir Graham Malett was still with the French Ambassador and the Queen Dowager of Scotland at Falkland, where he had been taken two weeks ago from the March meeting to bear M. d’Oisel company.
Mary of Guise set store by the big knight’s advice. And when, at last, the subject of St Mary’s was