Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [198]
In Marthe’s blue eyes, studying him then, there was a curious look. ‘He doesn’t want you to understand,’ she said. And added quickly, as he opened his mouth, ‘Save your breath. I have nothing to tell you. I am a bastard, brought up in the charge of the Dame de Doubtance, of Blois and Lyons, of father and mother unknown. All I have been told all my life is that a rich Scottish lord, Francis Crawford of Lymond, is my brother.’
‘Then when you met him, you thought …’
The cool voice was sardonic. ‘One early outgrows one’s visions of being transported to luxury. I knew when he stood in that room in Marseilles that he had not known I existed.’
But Lymond had realized in the end who she was. Day by day, becoming surer and surer. And far from acknowledging it, had openly shown his distaste. Jerott said, helplessly, ‘I still don’t … some of the things he has done I … cannot condone. But I have never known him be less than generous.’
‘Then we are different, my brother and I,’ said Marthe dryly; and rose to her feet. ‘Generosity is a virtue I have had no chance to study. Or it may have escaped me, perhaps, through the parent we do not have in common … always assuming, of course, there is one parent we don’t have in common.…’
And Jerott, riding sticky and filthy in that tumultuous cavalcade, thought once again of all that these words could imply, and remembered the look in Marthe’s eyes as she spoke them. And it struck him that if Francis Crawford and his sister showed little mercy towards the world and each other, it was not without cause.
They had never spoken of it again. He had no cause to trust her. He knew her dishonest. He was aware that she was travelling to Constantinople merely to rejoin Georges Gaultier and that although she had offered him, supposedly, the whereabouts of Lymond’s child—the child, my God, thought Jerott distractedly, of her own blood—she felt no concern about its recovery.
And in spite of all that, he remained obsessed with her: with the long veiling lashes round the intense blue of her eyes; the high polished brow over which her hair fell, cream and ochre and lemon and chrome in the sun; and the colour of the sun on her cheekbones and the thin bridge of her nose. The slimness of her arms … the long, slender bones of her foot. Her voice; her wit; her laugh when she was entertained.
For whatever reason, Marthe laughed easily on all that laborious journey: even when, reaching the big khan at Ulukişla, they and all the caravan were detained, together with all those travellers already within, by a detachment of mounted Spahis from Eregli, a day’s journey north. By the third day, when the tally at the door of the khan was full, and Jerott was becoming extremely uneasy, they were released and allowed to continue their journey. Eregli, when they stayed there next day, was full of activity, and there were Janissaries’ tents, with the ceremonial cooking-pots of more than one company set in the plain between Eregli and their next halt at Karapinar. The rumour was that the Sultan was on his way south.
At Konya, two days farther on, Jerott and his three companions together with Marthe’s woman and two guiding Janissaries left the main caravan and waited with their mules and horses and three baggage camels and driver for a party travelling west, to Izmir.
It was less warm, there on the high plateau, than it had been: the hills around the old town were dusty and bare, and the khan neglected. Using the night once more for sleeping, their rest was perpetually fractured by the voice of Herpestes, and the rats he slaughtered and brought to his master, bloody and warm from the kill. During the day Jerott listened, without enthusiasm, to the voice of Pierre Gilles describing the glories of ancient Iconium: the citadel (into which they could not penetrate) and the mosque with its ranks of stolen Byzantine capitals (which they could not visit). There was a tekke on the east of the town where the founder of the Whirling Dervishes lay in his marble sarcophagus; but Marthe merely smiled when Jerott suggested, acidly, that