Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [236]
‘I have no choice now,’ said Lymond; and shrugged; and lifting the cup Míkál had shown him, drank it down to the dregs.
22
Constantinople: The Golden Road
The house Georges Gaultier had bought was indeed exactly halfway between the Bazaar and the Hippodrome of Constantinople. That he bought it after and not before the arrival of his niece Marthe and her learned friend Pierre Gilles from Aleppo was something nobody stressed.
Jerott helped them take their belongings across the Golden Horn and into the City from their temporary abode with the French chargé d’affaires. No one else seemed particularly interested in aiding them: Jean Chesnau, who ran the Embassy now was not a d’Aramon. And Gaultier did nothing: hanging back green-faced and groaning, nursing the wad of bandaging round his left shoulder.
Hearing the story of that wound, from many sources, Jerott wondered what on earth had possessed Francis to inflict it. He had hoped of course to make contact with Philippa through Gaultier, but the man was craven and this was his punishment. Its crudity Jerott found troubling. It was unlike Lymond: and a number of other things he heard about the late Ambassador’s behaviour were perplexing also. Jerott wished again, bitterly, that he had not left before they arrived, and that he could have shackled Marthe under the eye of the one person living with the capacity to understand and control her. For reasons of his own, if Marthe was right, Lymond had refrained so far from doing either. But the time was coming, Jerott thought, when he must.
In the meantime he had disappeared, and Jerott could hardly force his company on a strange ménage. He would continue to stay at the Embassy, but at least he could make a reason for discovering where this odd household of three—and Herpestes—was proposing to stay. Then he had Francis to find.
He knew they were watched. But he had seen no sign of Gabriel and heard nothing from him, although Chesnau had told him of the palace the new Vizier had occupied, to the south of St Sophia. As soon as Lymond had left the Embassy, the persecution they had been suffering had ceased.
The damned place was full of hills. Riding up from the waterside behind the packmules, half the time they were climbing a running gulley of mud between the high pavements and twice, without the swarm of half-naked children who ran with them, they might have got stuck. Gilles, digging in his purse, announced, ‘Natura sunt Turcae avari et pecuniarum avide?’ and flung them a handful of coins. His need for a secretary, it seemed, had suddenly vanished. Staring bad-temperedly from under his spicular eyebrows, he had informed Jerott, in plain French, that he would send to him at the Embassy when and if he required him. The anger, Jerott thought, was not directed at himself, but at Marthe and her uncle. In which case, why go and stay with them?
The New Jerusalem was not looking its best today. The gold-domed mosques and slim minarets among the wet gardens were splendid enough, and so were the baths and the carved marble fountains and the stone palaces of the aghas, with their looted Byzantine porticos from the older, buried palaces of Justinian, for which he had stripped the temples and towns of an empire. But where now were the bronze roofs and gilded tiles of Constantinople; the silver columns; the statues of Ulysses and Helen; of Homer, in talk and dispute, so alive he was thought nearly to breathe? And where the figure of a bronze Justinian, clothed like Achilles, looking east with the world in one hand and his other outstretched, forbidding the barbarian to advance?
A Barbariis et incendiis deletas esse, said Gilles. Destroyed by those barbarians; by earthquake and by fire. Less than fifty years