Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [173]
A second before Míkál, Lymond looked up. Gaultier heard him shout, and saw him in the same moment thrust the young geomaler spinning and, flinging himself back on the rebound, cannon into and drive back with his shoulder the seaman lingering nearest him. As he did so, the yardarm of the mainmast, thirty-three solid metres of smouldering wood, crashed where he had been, followed by flakes of still-flaring hemp from the burning sheets which had severed it.
Someone screamed. Then Lymond, Míkál and the splintered mess where the yardarms had fallen were all hidden by the rush of seamen and officers to the wreckage, followed by swift deployments to put out the fires flying like pennants from the standing rigging and braces and now endangering the masts. Someone, groaning, was carried past Gaultier and taken below—an oarsman, he thought. No one else appeared to be hurt.
On any ship but Lymond’s, Gaultier thought, a thousand metres of sailcanvas would have fallen, burning, with that yardarm. But the Dauphiné was not permitted to ride at anchor with her mainsail still bent. The circumstance that, on a windless night, the candles of such a ship should become so oddly disarrayed was not, as he said later to Onophrion, a matter on which he had any views.
Master Zitwitz, instead of being flattered by this ironical offering, had been insufferable. ‘Your pardon, M. Gaultier,’ he had said, his round eyes severe in his round, boneless face. ‘But only Mr Crawford’s presence of mind averted what might have been a very great tragedy. I do not regard it as a matter of levity.’
On the subsequent voyage, which was quite as unpleasant as he expected, Maître Gaultier did not mention Onophrion’s insolence, although he took occasion to complain on the two instances, in a temperature near the nineties, when the meat was not perfectly fresh. Whose carelessness was responsible for the fire, it seemed, was never discovered, although Lymond’s inquiry was of the kind which turned the ship silent with its repercussions for twenty-four hours. Then they were in Thessalonika, and one of the ship’s trumpeters with two soldiers and Míkál as guide had gone ashore to hire horses and ask the Beglierbey of Greece on Mr Crawford’s behalf for the honour of an audience.
‘I wonder,’ said Georges Gaultier to Lymond as they sat at dinner that noon, ‘whether that delicious impromptu party on deck outside Volos was as innocent as it seemed. Could, for example, someone have been jealous of Míkál?’
‘No doubt the world is full of individuals of either sex jealous of Míkál,’ Lymond answered. Sitting there in the sunlight, in one of Onophrion’s exquisite doublets, peeling one of Onophrion’s peaches, he looked like any rich man at leisure; who would cultivate his sensibilities like a man with a garden of coffee trees. ‘But if you are referring to the descent of the yardarm, I doubt if Míkál was intended to suffer. There had already been two similar and ineffective accidents before Míkál set foot on the galley.’
Gaultier sat up. ‘Have there? When?’
‘On the way to Zakynthos. A barrel of pitch, left on the gangway which rolled … where it might have caused considerable harm. And four days after that, when landing Salablanca, the caique nearly sank.’
‘You were in it?’
‘I was in it,’ agreed Lymond. ‘But you were not.’ For a little they stared at one another. Then Gaultier said, ‘Are you making an accusation?’
‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘Only an inquiry.’
For a long moment, Georges Gaultier gazed at the other man; then he grinned. ‘I would draw your attention to two facts,’ he said. ‘Apart from myself, a remarkable number of other people, Mr Crawford, were not on that caique. And ask yourself: if I wished you harm, why should I have taken such pains to preserve you, as I did, when you were injured at Blois?’
It was an incident long past: an incident which would remind the Special Envoy of the royal galley Dauphiné that he