Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [211]
On either side, as before, stood the Janissaries, but dressed this time in silk with jewelled gold on their brows. Before them, two men waited to welcome them: the Agha of Janissaries, black moustached and hugely turbaned, his long hanging sleeves lined with fur. Then after him the most powerful civil authority in the Seraglio: the Bostanji Bashi, who under the title of Head Gardener was master of all security within the Seraglio, possessor of great estates and executioner of the great. To them, bowing hand on breast, the Baron d’Aramon presented his successor. The swarthy faces did not change, nor did the new Ambassador, speaking most formal French and awaiting, courteously, the interventions of the interpreter, show either excitement or apprehension. Then, gifts presented, they were in the big reception chamber which led off the vestibule to the right, and awaiting permission to enter the Court of the Divan.
From the Hall of the Divan, Rustem Pasha as Grand Vizier and supreme head of the civil and military hierarchy under the Sultan governed the kingdom for his master with his judges and Treasury officials, with his three lesser viziers and the Grand Mufti, head of the Islamic religion. The Grand Vizier, who ruled over six thousand salaried servants and a harem, they said, as big as the Sultan’s: who had in his palace, they said, six hundred silver saddles and eight hundred sabres with jewel-covered hilts and a library of five thousand ancient manuscripts—who was worth altogether three-quarters of a million silver ducats—the Grand Vizier was leading the army against Persia. In his place Ibrahim Pasha, the second Vizier, would welcome and feast them before, at last, they were summoned to the Sultan himself.
They waited perhaps half an hour, their staff standing rigid under Master Zitwitz’s forbidding eye; Gaultier shuffling uneasily among the black and crimson robes of the sweating, whispering merchants until Lymond’s pleasant voice said in his ear, ‘Griping, isn’t it? What are you worried about? Unless they’ve dropped the bloody thing in the Bosphorus, it’ll be the sensation of the Seraglio.’
‘If it works,’ said Georges Gaultier. The lines on his face, usually dirt-coloured, were orange.
‘Well, if it doesn’t work, there’s always the jewellery,’ said the new Ambassador blandly. ‘And if they’ve picked off all the garnets, there’s still the spinet. And don’t have the face to tell me that doesn’t work, even though your brilliant niece didn’t arrive.’
For in those last days of panic Lymond himself had tuned the spinet, perched on a stool, his head to one side, patiently tapping, listening, adjusting while Gaultier worked on the case, against time, adjusting the weights, repairing and repainting the damage caused by friction and damp and the vagaries of temperature during the long nine-month voyage. Marthe’s boxes were there, with their hanks of Nürnberg wire; the fish glue, the felt, the pins and the nails, and the kid bag of vulture feathers for plectra. It had taken two days, the tuning, in between Lymond’s other affairs; and he appeared both to know what he was doing, and to enjoy it.
At the end, there had rung through the rooms of the Embassy a faint, fast cascade of sound M. d’Aramon had never heard in that air before, and seldom anywhere else. With Gaultier and, in time, a gathering group of the household, he