Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [229]
Odd that until Archie put the thing into words, he, Jerott, had never even thought of the possibility of Lymond’s dying before him. His own hurt, his vexed abhorrence of so much which Lymond had done and said, had blinded him to the fact that this was not an exercise in high ethics. Gabriel had gone out of his way until now to preserve his victim at all costs, tenderly, as in Nero’s flakes and crystals of ice, so that he might distinguish more clearly the nauseating destruction of all those around him.
It had to end some time. Some time, the cat would trap the mouse for the last, teasing time, and his true and exquisite punishment would begin.
If it happened: if he and Marthe and Gilles got to Constantinople and found Lymond dead, what then? Jerott thought. And though his hands were cold on the reins he found the answer easily enough. If Lymond could come so far and risk so much for the sake of an idea: an idea of duty and compassion which had nothing to do with the affections; a concept of evil quite apart from the calls of revenge, then he could do no less. Up to his rescue from Mehedia, Jerott realized now, looking painfully back, he himself had done almost as much, freely and gladly, for the opposite reasons. All he had done had been done for Lymond. With the vanishing of that star from his firmament he had found nothing to take its place: nothing to drive him but pique.
He was quiet when they rode into wall-less Bursa through the plane trees and pines, and was hardly surprised, so elegiac was his mood, to find himself in a city of mourning. It was Marthe who elicited the reason, in a khan of anxious and uncommunicative travellers. On his way south to join Rustem Pasha and the army, the Sultan Suleiman had halted to make camp outside Eregli, and had summoned from his post in the provinces his son and heir, Prince Mustafa, whose command of the Janissaries Rustem Pasha had so extravagantly praised.
It seemed to Suleiman, they said, that Mustafa had alienated his people’s affections. It even seemed that Mustafa had put it about that the Sultan was old, and incapable of leading his army; and that he, Mustafa, would be better ruling now in his place.
Whatever the truth, Suleiman had sent for his son, and whatever his misgivings, Mustafa had promptly come. Within the royal pavilion, he had failod to discover his father. Instead there awaited him three mutes, with a bowstring, which they knotted, and pulled round his neck. It was said that from behind the hangings, Suleiman watched his son die.
In Bursa lived Mustafa’s widow, and their four-year-old child. ‘Let’s get out,’ said Jerott briefly. And they did.
Ten days later they crossed the Bosphorus, and rode up the hill to the French Ambassador’s house. Rain, the fifth blessed of God, soaked the vines of Pera and Onophrion Zitwitz, welcoming them in, spoke like a man who had forgotten the sunshine.
M. d’Aramon had gone back to France as soon as the Sultan left the city, and in his place M. Chesnau had arrived at last from Gallipoli and was acting as chargé d’affaires. M. Gaultier remained, in moderate health, anxiously awaiting Mademoiselle. M. le Comte.
‘I understood Mr Crawford had been appointed Ambassador,’ said Jerott. His pulses thudding, he did not know how angry he looked.
‘It was so. He was received by the Sultan,’ Onophrion said. ‘Unfortunately, the Sultan was unable to agree to free Mistress Somerville and the child, and M. le Comte resigned his position, to recover his freedom of action. I do not know whether you have heard that Sir Graham Malett is Chief Vizier in Rustem Pasha’s present absence.… Mistress Somerville and the child are in the Seraglio. The whereabouts of the other child is not known. May I ask whether your own inquiries have borne better fruit?’
‘We haven’t got the other