Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [226]
Onophrion helped him prepare. He would take nothing but the plainest of dress, and a cloak in whose pockets could be carried all else he required. Onophrion gave him a waterbottle, and, overriding protests, a satchel with enough dried food to last several days.
Alone of the few who knew Lymond was leaving, Georges Gaultier did not go to him that evening to wish him Godspeed. Since the attacks began, Georges Gaultier had kept to his room, and had stared back in hostile alarm when Lymond, only four days before, had laid before him a summons with the seal of the Capi Agha, from the Seraglio. The message, in Turkish, was easy to decipher. A tuning fault had developed in the horological spinet. The presence of M. Gaultier was requested to repair it.
The usurer’s eyes had tightened on reading. ‘It cannot be so. The spinet was in perfect order when it left here.’
‘It is so,’ Lymond had said gently. ‘I arranged it myself.’
For a long moment, Georges Gaultier stared up at him. Then: ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Then you may repair it yourself.’
It was then that Lymond, sliding forward a stool, had seated himself softly, saying, ‘I cannot do that, as you know. I am speaking of the safety of Philippa Somerville.’
‘Oh?’ said Gaultier. ‘You’re not asking me to stab the Grand Vizier? I am merely to come out with Mistress Somerville in one pocket, and the child in the other?’
‘You are merely, at no risk and out of the goodness of your heart, to take a message to Philippa Somerville from me,’ Mr Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny had said.
And Gaultier’s thin mouth had twisted. ‘Is she my family friend? No. This is where I make my living, Mr Crawford. We cannot all afford to be troublemakers. If you wish to meddle with the Seraglio, ask someone else.’
The Ambassador had persisted, still quietly. ‘No one else can plausibly touch that spinet save yourself. Or Marthe, if she were here.’
‘Then you will have to wait, won’t you?’ had said Georges Gaultier. ‘Perhaps the girl will do it for you. You will, I’m sure, have no qualms about asking.’
‘They ask for someone tomorrow. It is at the Seraglio’s bidding: you will be perfectly safe. No one dare touch you.’
Georges Gaultier grinned. ‘Make my excuses,’ he said. ‘An old wound in my shoulder …’
‘Or a new one,’ said Lymond. The blade in his hand was slender, its hilt set with cornelians: above it his eyes were cruel and cold. The dealer hardly felt the featherweight pressure as the steel slid through his tunic and shirt, and then the sting as it touched the soft flesh of his shoulder. His cheeks blanched, he stared up at his tormentor.
‘You will do it,’ said Francis Crawford.
And Gaultier, staring into those unyielding eyes, maintained stubbornly, ‘No!’
He saw the face above him harden and change. Then Lymond calmly leaned on his knife, driving it slowly through skin, flesh and sinew till Georges Gaultier, his voice piping, his fists ineffectually beating, gave a snort and fainted away.
Afterwards, the tale had lost nothing in telling, nor had it enhanced Lymond’s popularity with the household. They feared him: they blamed him somehow for every catastrophe, even while granting that but for his skill and providing they would have suffered far more. Since Gaultier was in a sense a man of his own company, the Baron de Luetz had not interfered. But it did not, at bottom, make him any less relieved, in a strange emotion streaked with anxiety, to know that by the morning his self-willed successor would be gone.
Where Crawford was going, and how he proposed to cross the Golden Horn, at night, without being observed by his enemies was something M. d’Aramon took care not to ask. After dark, there was little legitimate traffic.