Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [25]
Meanwhile she has a maid, a bodyguard and the company of another, older girl whose professional expertise we require. Not the kind of help, sweet Kate, which, tongue in cheek, you envisage. Constantinople beckons, and we must cherish the palate. Who could refuse a royal envoy, bearing gifts to the Turk?
Be kind to her when she comes back. Her love is not only for children but for humanity. She will be a good-hearted and magnificent zealot one day. As her mother is now.
Goodbye, Kate. And below he had signed as he rarely did, with his Christian name.
Philippa’s letter, from an afflicted conscience, was not very much longer.
… if I don’t look for him, no one else will. You know I’m sorry. But I couldn’t leave that little thing to wither away by itself Don’t be sad. We’re all going to come back. And you can teach him Two Legs and I Wot a Tree, and save him the top of the milk for his blackberry pie. He’ll never know, if we’re quick, that nobody wanted him.…
Which had, Kate considered as she scrubbed off her tears, a ring of unlikely confidence about it, as well as rather a shaky understanding of the diet of one-year-old babies.
Neither of Kate Somerville’s correspondents had said much about Marthe, and a reticence about Marthe was the main feature, apart from the foul weather, of the Dauphiné’s crossing from Marseilles to Algiers.
Winter in the Mediterranean was seldom cold, but produced rain, and wind, and current, and the small, gusty storm which could make travel impossible for a shallow-draught boat like a galley. Corsairs and fighting craft stayed in harbour during the winter except for the most urgent travel or the most tempting prize: a Spanish galleasse putting into Cádiz, full of Mexican bullion, or another coming out of Seville with converted Spanish ryals in stamped cases for the Low Countries. There might be a shipload of troops and munitions being rushed to a rising: there would certainly be the sporadic journeys of the merchants, the pilgrims, the spies, who could not put off their duties till summer. There was always the fishing.
For the Dauphiné’s task, the urgency was relative. A journey to Constantinople would not take less than four months at that time of year, and might well take a good deal longer. Again, once arrived there might be a wait of several weeks at least if Sultan Suleiman were absent, say on a summer Persian campaign. If the King of France’s prodigious clock-spinet failed to arrive in the Sultan’s hands before the next winter, no one would be surprised.
On the other hand, according to the Dame de Doubtance, Oonagh O’Dwyer was in Algiers. However fleeting Lymond’s association with her, thought Philippa, he had tried to free her last year, when Dragut found and took her to Tripoli. To do her justice, according to Jerott, Oonagh O’Dwyer had not wished to be freed. She had not intended to burden Lymond or to inform him of his impending offspring. It was Gabriel who had done that. And it was Gabriel who was drawing Lymond now to Algiers, with Oonagh O’Dwyer as the bait. So, concluded Philippa, clarifying the thick fogs of quixotry, there was no immediate rush indicated to free Mistress Oonagh O’Dwyer, as the said Mistress Oonagh O’Dwyer, if alive, would certainly be kept alive until Lymond reached her; and if dead, was unlikely to alter that attitude even if the Dauphiné went down with all hands.
‘You do grant,’ said Jerott, approached with this view, ‘that there might be a certain naïve interest in proving whether she’s dead or alive?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa. ‘But there’s no hurry. That’s the point.’
‘I’m not arguing,’ said Jerott. ‘I like living, too. But try convincing M. le Comte de Sevigny, that’s all.’
In fact, the weather was the final arbiter. No master was going to keep a galley at sea overnight in the Mediterranean in winter in any case, and the port-hopping wind which took them bowling stormily across the Gulf of Lions to the Spanish coast and thence to the Balearic Islands changed the next day