Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
‘Thank you,’ said Jerott to Marthe; and stood and waited, his hand once more covering her mouth. ‘It seemed time for a short cut. I feel I can deal with friends Gaultier and Gilles without requiring the advantage of utter surprise.… What a pity you couldn’t resist that little poem, you know. I couldn’t solve it, but Francis did, without thinking. He said, if you are at all interested, “Leave her, for God’s sake. She’s welcome to anything she can get.” … Where would you say they are going to come up? The next room, perhaps?’
He kept his hand over her mouth as he walked her again through the door; but she made no resistance now. Only, as the sounds became definite and close and he was able, smiling that grim smile, to free her entirely, did she say, standing beside him, ‘Why don’t you? Why don’t you leave me then, for God’s sake?’
But by then the door-handle was turning: the door to a small apartment little more than a cupboard, which Jerott had overlooked in his haste. There was a sudden sharpening of the distant, sonorous noise. Then it opened, and Georges Gaultier burst through, a spade in his hands.
Jerott had respect for a spade; but very little for Georges Gaultier. It was Marthe who nearly tripped and disarmed him on his lunge forward: with a twist, Jerott recovered his balance and handed her off with a painful grip of one hand, as with the other he sank a blow deep in the little man’s stomach. Gaultier retched and collapsed, the spade clattering to the floor, while Jerott stood and looked down on him.
He was very dirty. Over his shirt, his neck-strings hanging loose and his sleeves tightly rolled up, he wore a short leather jerkin, rubbed and stained with sweat and water and earth. Below it, long coarse woollen stockings and fustian breeches were also blotched and grimed on their creases: his stub-toed shoes were scuffed and blackened with wet. ‘Are those the hands,’ said Jerott, ‘out of which trusting young harpsichords feed? What, no ichneumon?’
Gaultier stopped sobbing for breath and said, wheezing, ‘How dare you force your way into this house and assault us?’
‘How dare you spring out at me with a spade?’ said Jerott mildly. ‘Or were you going to work in the garden?’
‘Marthe …?’ The usurer struggled on to one elbow and looked a her, but Marthe, walking away, had dropped on to a mattress and was sitting there, her chin in her hands.
‘He knows,’ she said. ‘You fool; can’t you even hold a man off with a spade?’
‘I don’t want to kill anybody,’ said Gaultier. ‘You let him in. There must be a Janissary outside. You can’t kill a man with a Janissary outside.’
‘Not unless you kill the Janissary as well,’ said Jerott. ‘Marthe might, but I doubt if you have the stamina, Gaultier. Suppose you let me into that cupboard instead.’
Gaultier did struggle to his feet and ineffectually try to stop him, but Marthe stood back, her face frozen. His hand on the doorknob, Jerott gave her back stare for stare.
‘Where are you going, pretty fair maid,
With your white face and your yellow hair?’
And as she did not answer, he continued himself, his voice soft against the grunts of her uncle, again laid on the floor:
‘I am going to the well, sweet sir, she said;
For strawberry leaves make maidens fair.’
Then he opened the cupboard door and walked through.
It was a small room, once adjoining the kitchen, with the remains of some shelving on the white plastered walls, and a smoke-blackened circle where a lamp was accustomed to hang. The floor had been flagged, but some of the slabs had been lifted and piled neatly against the stained walls, leaving in the centre a square hole, perhaps three feet by two, with a caking of stone dust and slime and many wet, muddy footprints marking the edges. From the threshold Jerott looked straight down into the hole. It was very black; but far below, gently moving, there was an