Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [20]
‘His mother …?’ began Philippa.
‘The Dowager Lady Crawford will not live for ever.’
‘Then Mr Crawford himself …’
‘After the child Khaireddin is found,’ the Dame de Doubtance said calmly, ‘Francis has to meet and kill Graham Malett.’
There was a silence. Then: ‘What you are saying,’ said Philippa slowly, ‘is that the child Khaireddin would be better unfound?’
The Dame de Doubtance said nothing.
‘Or are you saying,’ pursued Philippa, inimical from the reedy brown crown of her head to her mud-caked cloth stockings, ‘that you and I and Lymond and Lymond’s mother and Lymond’s brother and Graham Malett would be better off if he weren’t discovered?’
‘Now that,’ said the Dame de Doubtance with satisfaction, ‘is precisely what I was saying.’
‘How can I find him?’ said Philippa.
In the tall, old-fashioned chair opposite the bony hands fell apart, the dusty robes shifted; the Dame de Doubtance’s face under the coarse yellow plaits changed and glittered and finally held back between aged cross-curtains the ghost of a lost, true delight. ‘Come, child,’ she said; and as Philippa, stony-faced, rose and went over, she leaned to lift the girl’s own right hand. It lay, rather dirty, on the waxy sunk palm: a young brown hand, with almond nails pink with health, and a white seam where the knife slipped, when she was making a cage for the weasel.
A large tear, from nowhere, ran down the back of Philippa’s nose, and she coughed. And at the same moment, as if caught reading some illicit book, the Dame de Doubtance abruptly covered that palm with its fingers and, returning the folded hand to its owner, said harshly, ‘You will go to Algiers. You understand? Then, if you still wish to trace the child by yourself, you and the man Abernethy will go to the isle of Zakynthos, to the House of the Palm Tree, and you will present there a ring which my cousin will give you. After that, all will depend on her goodwill.’
Behind them, the velvet robes stirred lazily, in an aroma of qahveh and musk. ‘Not on my goodwill,’ said the musical voice of Kiaya Khátún. ‘On my whim.’
It was over. Five minutes after that, a dirty white with post-tension nausea, Philippa Somerville had rejoined maid and servant in the street. On her right hand, its stone turned inwards for safety, was an old black ring stuck with gummy dark jewels. In her head was an improbable address on the isle of Zakynthos. And carved in her heart was the promise she had just made that never, until she arrived at that improbable address, would she reveal to Jerott, Lymond or Onophrion Zitwitz what had happened that morning. Between her teeth: ‘I do not like melodrama,’ said Philippa Somerville to the air.
It was her last adventure in Lyons. How Lymond had spent the previous night no one knew: least of all Jerott, whom he had seen drunk under the table at the Ours and promptly abandoned to Onophrion’s skilled ministrations. But the following morning, the extreme pressure began: to finish preparing at speed, and to move south as quickly as possible to take ship for Turkey. The name of Oonagh O’Dwyer was not mentioned, except by Jerott to Philippa.
That it took them so long, in the event, to embark was the fault largely of Maître Georges Gaultier. Part of the spinet was found faulty, and had to be mended. The painter who had undertaken to complete the inscription fell ill, and then the work had to dry. The joiners made three attempts to create a packing to Gaultier’s satisfaction, and then it had to be done a fourth time because they had forgotten to use waterproofed cloths.
Meantime Archie Abernethy, travelling from Lymond’s French home at Sevigny to escort Philippa back home to England, was also