Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [11]
‘There’s a place,’ said Philippa suddenly. ‘If you open the back window, there’s a rubbish-dump underneath. The snow would cover it quite fast.’ Lymond walked to the window.
‘Well?’ said Jerott. Alone of the three he had stayed where he was, waiting. ‘You don’t want Gabriel dead. Supposing you tell us all why?’
‘Oh, Jerott,’ said Philippa. She turned, a trembling green jelly in one hand and a bowl of soup in the other, and her nose had begun to run because she was crying inside her eyes. ‘Because if anything happens to Gabriel, the little boy has to die.’
‘But …’ said Jerott, not adjusting and loathing it. ‘But …?’
‘But how amusing,’ said Lymond, admonishing. In a shower of almond blancmange, the last of Master Onophrion’s light supper went shooting into the yard and, closing the shutters, Francis Crawford walked back into the room and laid the platter carefully back in its place. ‘You heard. The policy is one of strict laissez-faire for a very good reason. If anything happens to Gabriel, Daddy’s little bastard will die.’
Soon after that, Master Onophrion Zitwitz arrived. Shivering, in spite of the newly filled stove, Philippa barely heard Lymond’s smoothly turned compliments, or the controller’s satisfied acceptance of them. In her ears were Jerott’s guarded apologies, and the light ruthlessness with which Lymond had silenced him.
More clearly now than when they had entered the chamber that evening and met the first shock of his anger did she understand why Francis Crawford found their presence in Baden insupportable. Jerott, she knew, would not join Lymond now. Nor would she presume to scratch the gloss of his mission with her juvenile presence.…
A long time afterwards, she was to remember what an excellent chess-player Francis Crawford was. And that, whether romance existed in him or not, sentimentality had no place at all.
But at the time she arrived only so far in her thinking; and then was drawn out of her abstraction by Master Zitwitz’s voice saying, ‘But, M. le Comte, I cannot tell you how sensible I am of the honour. I shall serve the embassy with my life.’
‘What?’ said Philippa hoarsely to Jerott.
‘It’s recruiting day,’ said Jerott in a murmur. ‘He’s asked Master Zitwitz to leave the duke and travel with him as household controller to the Ambassador’s residence in Turkey.’
Philippa Somerville blew her nose sharply. ‘On the strength of his sweet cherry sauce?’
‘On the strength, I think, of that handy right uppercut,’ said Jerott. ‘I’ve said we’ll ride with them to Lyons, and then I’m taking you back home to England. If you agree.’
‘I think,’ said Philippa mutinously, ‘I want to go to Brazil.’
It was dark on the stairs when they left, and the taper Jerott’s manservant carried hardly lit the bare steps outside Lymond’s closed door. Moreover, the woman waiting at the first bend who slipped past them, averting her face, and ran up those same stairs was cloaked and heavily veiled. But Philippa recognized her, none the less, in a puff of bean-powder and chypre, as the soap-merchant’s wife.
Jerott’s hand increased its grip on her arm. ‘He is an island with all its bridges wantonly severed. What hostage to evil,’ said Jerott, poetic in his thumping displeasure, ‘will this night’s business conceive?’
‘I don’t know. But they’re both nice and clean, if that’s anything,’ said Philippa. And led the way philosophically down.
The lady from Munich left, with equal discretion, just after two o’clock in the morning. Some time after that, after listening outside Lymond’s door for a moment, Salablanca, his personal aide and his friend, laid down a candle and, entering noiselessly, crossed in near-dark to the bed.
Lymond was asleep, his hands outflung on the pillow-mattress; the sheets twisted about him. Satisfied, Salablanca moved from his side and in a few moments, soundlessly, had