Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [199]
Thereafter the journey to Izmir was blurred by that circumstance. He remembered the ferry to the island of Chios because the ferryman was a thief whom he had to throw into the water, which gave him much satisfaction, even though some twenty close relatives of the Syrian arrived, none less than nine feet in height, and would have served him in the same way or worse if his Janissaries had not prevented them. He remembered a voice, presumably Marthe’s, quoting with gentle amusement, ‘Alas … if angels should sniff at his shroud?’ and the old tub-thumper saying, in plain French for once, ‘What happens if we can’t get a ship?’
At that point, governed by a soldier’s instinct which never entirely deserted him, Jerott Blyth painfully pulled himself together. Whatever Marthe and Pierre Gilles might desire, he had not come to Chios as fast as abominable travelling conditions would allow merely to take ship for Constantinople. He had come because the Peppercorn had called here to load mastic, and to disembark, so it was said, a Syrian woman and a two-year-old boy.
In the grip therefore of a high degree of nausea and a mind-wrecking headache, Jerott deposited the whole of his party, with ichneumon, at the house of Joseph Justinian, the French Consul at Chios, and left them drinking cherry syrup on the wooden balcony into the gardens while he went, with the help of a secretary, to find the English Consulate, and then those officers of the Seigniority, the Genoese administration, who might be able to tell him the fate of the Peppercorn’s passengers.
It wasn’t difficult. It was extremely simple, in fact. The Peppercorn had sailed in, loaded with mastic, and gone. The Syrian woman had disembarked; reported as required to the Council, and had set up business in Chios. For some reason, Jerott had expected to find her, like her brother, settled in one of the silk-growing colonies, or in one of the villages of the Mastichochonia, where pistacia lentiscus wept its gummy St Theodore’s tears from August to September. It had not occurred to him that she might simply continue with the trade she had followed in Mehedia: that of running a brothel. He obtained its direction, dismissed the unwilling secretary, and set off.
Chios the island was little more than a hundred and twenty miles round all its circumference. Chios the city lay round its harbour with rocky hills at its back and a big double-walled castle to the north, sharing its hill with the colonnades of a natural hot bath, built like a temple. The flag of St George flew over a bourse as adequate, he was told, as that of Lyons or the Royal Exchange in London itself and the city, four miles from the mainland, was a trading centre for the fine mohairs of Anatolia as well as its own silk and cotton and marble and the aromatic resinous gum with which one qualified one’s new wine or spirits, or drank mingled with honey and water.
Chios paid ten thousand ducats in tribute to Turkey, and could afford to. Its soil was a garden. Outside the walls Jerott had seen fig trees, almonds, apricots; date palms, orange and lemon trees; grapes, olives, pomegranates and a wealth of late summer flowers. The streets were narrow but the houses, unlike Turkish houses, were handsome, of dressed snow-white stone; and the people were richly attired: Greeks, Genoese, Jews and their beautiful wives in velvet, damask and satin, their sleeves laced with silk ribbons, their narrow aprons fringed and embroidered. Their hair was long, under tall ribbed coifs of white satin, sewn with pearls and with gold, and half veiled in yellow and white, through which their chains, their jewels and trinkets glittered and trembled. Look out, had said the attaché at Aleppo, for the partridges and the women, whose very husbands acted as panders. Nine English shillings a night, had added the attaché at Aleppo, seeing him off. And supper included.
And indeed, under his feet, all red beak and claw,