Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [232]
There was only one note out of tune: one of the lowest accidentals, seldom employed; but so glaringly off pitch that, once struck, it was bound to be noticed. With great care, alone in the silent room, Philippa drew out the drawer to its fullest extent, exposing the soundboard with its shimmering parallel strings. There she made an interesting discovery. Caught in the turns of the wire where the faulty string coiled round its wrest-pin was a small scrap of paper. And on the paper, when she carefully unwound the wire and released it, was nothing but a minute drawing in ink of a six-pointed star.
Philippa stared at it for a long time before she realized what it meant. She turned it upside down and reversed it: she even took it to one of the candelabra and heated it, with all too clear recollections of the house of Marino Donati. There was nothing there at all but the imprint of a star. A star with six points, not the eight of the star of St John. The star of David: the symbol of Jewry.
At that point Philippa held the paper in the candle flame and watched it burn, and then, thoughtfully, returned to the spinet. A Jew, in this haven of Moslems? No, wait. No Jew, but there was a Jewess. A dark, middle-aged woman with more than a hint of a moustache, who came in weekly to instruct in cosmetics and undertake small commissions: the matching of silks for their embroidery; the passing, Philippa suspected, of love-letters.… It had seemed more than likely, to Philippa’s practical mind, that everything she was told the woman took straight to the Kislar Agha or Kiaya Khátún—it was, after all, a harmless enough outlet for their excess of romantic imaginings and could come to nothing: no man unauthorized had ever entered the harem and left it alive. Was she to gather from this that she could trust the Jewess?
Or was it all a trick of Gabriel’s, to mortify her and taunt Mr Crawford still more?
She could not recognize the writing. Supposing Lymond had sent it: how could he guess she would be the first to perform on the spinet? Or was it well known at the Embassy that there was a dearth in the Seraglio of performers, and had he guessed that, at any cost, she would apply for permission to play it?
Chewing her nails thoughtfully, until she remembered, Philippa stared at the strings. Then she noticed something else. The faulty string had been slack. It had also been doctored. It had been filed, very lightly and carefully, at the point where it would require to wind round the wrest-pin in order to secure its true pitch. If she were to tune it properly now, it would break.
And someone would have to come from the Embassy to repair it. There were no spare wires: she had asked.
Again, a trap for Mr Crawford? No, hardly. The Ambassador himself could scarcely come, wire in hand, to mend the Sultana’s spinet without causing unusual comment. Gaultier, then; or Marthe. Someone who could bring her a message or take one away; or at very least learn some news of her and the child. It must be so: it must be from Mr Crawford.
Looking again at the card, Philippa grinned suddenly at its very austerity. Gabriel, surely, of the deep, insalubrious mind, would have signed it F. or F.C. Only Lymond, surely, would have appended that collection of impersonal surnames. And to him, somehow she was sure, belonged that small, picturesque script.
Philippa pulled the card off and, regretfully, burned it. Then she tuned the spinet quickly and deftly, standing clear as the wire snapped.
She was still there when Khourrém Sultán came back and comandeered her services in rewriting a letter in English. The coincidence seemed so great: that it should be to Lymond, and that it should refer to herself, that Philippa, rather pale, thought at first it was a dastardly