Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [109]
All their guards had been changed and increased in number, and two armed men now followed each of them whenever they stepped outside the palace: Lymond’s doing assuredly. Rumour had it that Dragut’s woman had proclaimed that any further escapes would be paid for by the torture and death of Onophrion: Onophrion, shrugging, had said, without any great originality but with characteristic fortitude, ‘To make an omelette, eggs must be broken. My death is no loss compared with Mr Crawford’s, when one considers the garments one has prepared for him; chest after chest; all of them unused.’
Walking across the sand between the Aga Morat’s soldiers, it struck Jerott that only a short time ago it would have seemed inconceivable even to ask himself whether or not Lymond intended to put Onophrion’s life thus to risk. Insulated in his own island of trouble, he had failed to notice the extent of the breach—the empty bed, the unspoken counsel—which now lay between them.
Entering the Aga Morat’s tent, blinding scarlet and gold under the morning sun, the first voice he heard was Francis Crawford’s, speaking softly as he did in extreme anger, and in Arabic. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the shade, Jerott saw that the Aga, his lips scarlet against the black mass of his beard, was inflated with rage also, sitting outglaring the speaker, his small fists like gourds fastened on to his horse-wand.
Jerott’s feet moved on the carpet. Lymond swung round, his face disfigured with bruises and anger, and said, ‘You are not needed here. You have the Aga’s permission to go.’ There were deep weals on his arms. Puzzled and angry in turn, Jerott said, ‘What’s wrong? The Aga’s just sent for me.’
‘And you came. That was obliging,’ said Lymond. ‘Now the Aga wants you to turn and go back. Will you pack up all your cold-boiled emotions, and do what the hell you are told?’
The Aga Morat, gasping with fury, said to Lymond, ‘You will pay.… You will pay. And for nothing.’ Then Jerott, meeting Lymond’s blazing blue stare, turned and strode out. Behind him, he heard Lymond fling back at the Aga, ‘What else do you have?’
For the rest of that day, if he came back at all, Lymond eluded him; nor did he use his bed that night. By the second night, too stiff-necked to go about asking and too uneasy to sleep, Jerott left his mattress and wandered out into the dark, his loose burnous brushing the little hedges and potted trees, the tiled steps and chalices of unsleeping fountains winking under the moon. Scents marbled the night, streamed and skeined in the air, as tangible as the dyes in Youssef’s exquisite picture: lemon and orange, mint, marjoram, rose and the thick, warm perfume of peaches … My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi.
His beloved was dead. He could not remember her face; he could only remember what she was not: that her wit did not lance nor her indifference wound; that her eyes were not blue nor her hair long and heavy and fair.
It was Marthe; Marthe who filled his mind tonight; when an invisible key opened the door he had tried so hard to keep shut. He did not know, even now, why it had seemed so imperative to form no relationship with Marthe; he did know that his instincts had been all against trespassing on the no-man’s land which lay between Marthe and Lymond.
But both Marthe and Francis Crawford had shown that, far from bringing them irresistibly together, the terrible similarity between them had driven them apart as surely as the opposite poles of the magnet. She was no one’s property, thought Jerott, his heart pumping deeply. Since they were so alike, then … might