Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [238]
Marthe at least had had the grace to thank him, with characteristic irony. ‘Receive the blessings of St Blasius, patron of bones in the throat. It cannot have been a congenial task. After all your admirable sheep-herding from Aleppo: what a pity you won’t be able to guess, in the end, what knavery we are planning.’
‘I could have you watched,’ said Jerott, rashly. With her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling, the fine-chiselled face took the breath away.
Marthe laughed: a true laugh of mischievous pleasure. ‘Do,’ she said. ‘Why not? You might see the ichneumon.’
She had the door half closed when he said, on a sudden impulse of despair, ‘Marthe … what are you going to do? People die here, you know, for very little. Who will help you?’
She stood in the doorway and smiled. ‘Who will help me? Myself. What am I doing …? Don’t you remember the jingle?
Where are you going, pretty fair maid, said he,
With your white face and your yellow hair?
That was all she said, and she shut the door, laughing. It took Jerott most of the journey home to find, searching his memory, that he had no recollection at all of the rest. Francis would have known.
Elsewhere in the city, a number of interesting occurrences took place.
The blind Meddáh, of whom the boy Ishiq took such good care, continued to make his rounds of the city and to give pleasure to the simpler-minded of her citizens, who found the story-teller quiet, but by no means enfeebled. At night, he was given shelter at the house near the Valens Aqueduct which the Pilgrims of Love shared with their brethren and other friends of the road.
It was one of these, curled up outside the Mehmet baths preparing to spend a comfortable hour in the ashes, who accosted the Jewess Hepsibah courteously for alms as she came out pink from the apodyterium, her slave behind her with the covered brass bowl on her head holding her linen, her smock and her coverlet. It also held, as everyone knew, the embroidered chaplets and girdles and scarves Hepsibah spread out and sold wherever she went.
She gave alms, with a loud and not very delicate quip, and received in return the address of a suitable customer whose house was surprisingly near the Valens Aqueduct. There she encountered at least one face she knew; was given rather too much Greek wine and a great deal of gold, and both exchanged news and received a number of instructions. These, on her next appointment at the Seraglio, she carried out.
Archie Abernethy arrived. Unlike Jerott, he made no production of his entry, but slid in one bright frosty day and made his way to two or three people he had known, long ago, in his chosen profession. Under Suleiman the Magnificent there was no central menagerie: only a collection of beasts kept in temporary confinement in the empty rooms of the half-ruined building called Constantine’s Palace, against the east city wall. The rest were maintained, for the Sultan’s amusement, in the courtyards and sunken arcades of the old Royal Palace, below the walls of the harem.
Hussein, the Chief Keeper of the Royal Menageries, was an Egyptian: a lethargic man with a paunch who was pleased to see Abernaci, the old Indian friend so light on his feet and so full of boundless vitality, who could spend all day shuttling tirelessly between the two collections; flying out of the city to bargain for fodder and back to arrange the profitable purvey of dung. A man full of ideas.
Archie reported to nobody: there was really no need. In a matter of days one of the Pilgrims of Love, who had been drifting aimlessly in the region of Constantine’s Palace and other places frequented by animals at regular intervals, came up and slipped the Egyptian twenty aspers, as was the custom, to have a closer look at the beasts. Abernaci showed him round; and they had quite a comfortable conversation. After the visitor had gone, Archie and the Egyptian drank some of the aspers, guardedly, like the old gentleman of the city who shouted before taking wine, to warn his soul to stow itself away in some corner of his frame