Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [130]
In the doorway, an Ethiopian awaited her; quite different from the Moors she had seen carrying saddles outside: a big man, his glossy black skin sheathed in lawn and a pale figured weave. As he dismissed her escort and turned, signing her to follow him, Philippa saw the rings on his plump fingers and thought, suddenly, he is a eunuch. Then he opened the door of the selamlik, and stood aside as she walked in.
The room was vacant. It was bigger than any she had yet seen. In the centre of the floor was an elaborate brazier, now empty, set in a pattern of tiles. All the rest of the room was a dais covered in carpets, on which thick mattresses, two or three deep, had been piled at intervals round the far wall, and heaped invitingly with coloured silk cushions in each window embrasure. The walls were white, with a calligraphic frieze of phrases from the Qur’ân picked out in blue and gilt: Hasten to forgiveness from your Lord: and to a garden.
Philippa smiled, her wrestling hands stopped for a moment; then, folding her arms solidly over her stomach, she stumped up the three little steps to the dais and marched to one of the windows. All right: they liked flowers. They liked music. They liked animals and birds. You never saw a badly used dog; and the granaries in Cairo, so they said, were never closed from the sky, so that the pigeons might feed when they chose. But they killed by ganching and slicing and cautery, and by doing what they had done to the woman Oonagh O’Dwyer.
Philippa gazed down on the kitchen courtyard. There were serving-women there; one or two; and a big marble bath full of water, and some cloths laid out bleaching on the sparse grass by the wall. Underneath her some shallow trays were also spread in the sun, filled with a golden mess she did not at once recognize. Then the open lattice under her fingers stirred against a warm breath of air, and the perfume of peaches pressed into the room.
She had tasted that in Larissa … peach jam, confected by sun-heat alone cooking the trays of ripe peaches and sugar and syrup as they lay, day after day.… If they would not sell her the child it meant, of course, that Gabriel had found out and warned them. Perhaps the merchant Donati, writing another of his bills of lading, had described his strange visitors too well. Perhaps Sheemy Wurmit, arrived in Malta to discredit Graham Malett, had told too much too soon, and Gabriel had been able to send his instructions.…
She was English, and allied to Spain, Turkey’s most implacable enemy. Turkey had nothing to lose, materially or politically, by her death. She had wondered, working it out, why the Beglierbey’s sanction was necessary, until she recalled mentioning that a French embassy to the Sultan was involved. Just at present, Turkey did not wish to fall out with France. There was a chance, then; a slim one; if she could persuade the Viceroy that this child was indeed the son of the King of France’s Special Envoy. Or were Gabriel’s services so valuable that, in spite of that, he could persuade the Turks to do anything that he asked?
A child had come into the yard, jostled by three lambs on a string. It held them with difficulty, its fat bare feet braced in the dirt, and shrieked with delight, its shirt of striped Joseph silk smeared with their muzzles. Inside the kitchen a woman spoke sharply.
The child heard, too. Philippa saw its capped head turn, rocking its balance; as it tried to recover, the lambs tugged,