Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [21]
Archie Abernethy, a small battered Scot with a skin like old hide, made no complaint, but Philippa, who had always been fond of him, found that her arrangements to leave would take at least twenty-four hours. These she spent, as she had spent the last three weeks, in endless, bitter, detailed and exhaustive argument aimed at persuading either Jerott or Lymond to take her with them to Algiers. Finally Lymond, already riled by Gaultier’s non-appearance that morning, took her by the shoulders, forced her into a seat and said, ‘Ecco il flagello dei Principi. I believe one of the most trying circumstances of this entire oppressive trip has been your craving to haunt me in a little burden like a tinker’s budget. As I have said before, and am now saying for the last time, I cannot tell you with what awe my family and friends, not to mention yours, would receive the idea that I should ship a twelve-year-old girl along the Barbary coast——’
‘Fifteen-year-old?’ said Philippa, furiously, for the third time.
‘Or fifty-year-old: what’s the difference?’ said Lymond. ‘The coast’s a jungle of Moors, Turks, Jews, renegades from all over Europe, sitting in palaces built from the sale of Christian slaves. There are twenty thousand men, women and children in the bagnios of Algiers alone. I am not going to make it twenty thousand and one because your mother didn’t allow you to keep rabbits, or whatever is at the root of your unshakable fixation.’
‘I had weasels, instead,’ said Philippa shortly.
‘Good God,’ said Lymond, looking at her. ‘That explains a lot. However. The fact remains. I am not taking a woman.’
‘Dear me: but aren’t you?’ said Georges Gaultier, arriving at that precise moment and standing, wet cloak in his hands. ‘But I did tell you, didn’t I, that my assistant’s a woman?’
There was a moment’s complete silence. ‘No,’ said Lymond.
‘Well, she is,’ said Maître Gaultier finally; and, discarding the cloak, sat down unasked in a near-by chair and warmed his hands at the fire. ‘And I’m not going without her.’
Which was how Philippa Somerville came to sail on the royal galley Dauphiné out of Marseilles, bound for Constantinople via Algiers in Barbary, and accompanied by His Most Christian Majesty of France’s Special Envoy, Jerott Blyth, Onophrion Zitwitz, Archibald Abernethy, Georges Gaultier, a woman called Marthe and a spinet.
3
Marthe
It is doubtful if, at the time, even Lymond realized how little of all this was coincidence. And how very far from chance, for example, was the plan which led to the spinet with its maker and all its attendants, with Jerott and a strong bodyguard to protect it, making the journey from Lyons to Marseilles smoothly by water, while the rest of the party, including Philippa and Zitwitz and himself, travelled by road. Then, a safe and steady trip on the Rhône seemed unequivocably best for that remarkable packing-case, while leaving the rest of the party mobile to make their last arrangements on land. It meant also that by the time they all met at Marseilles, and boarded their galley, only Jerott had met Gaultier’s woman assistant.
Philippa, it was true, already had the strongest suspicions. Her conscience tender with the memory of her unconfessed qahveh-supping with soothsayers, she would have laid a heavy wager, if she had had anyone to wager with and if her mother had not always found gambling ridiculous, that the unwanted helper would be Kiaya Khátún. One of the family, Georges Gaultier had implied when Lymond, his phrasing bell-like with anger, had marshalled, yet again, the arguments against carrying women.
But to Gaultier, it appeared, the embassy was of no special moment, nor was he worried at the prospect of losing his fees. Only one