Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [258]
There was a silence. ‘You didn’t ask,’ said Jerott at length. ‘But I would have forgone even the body for the sake of the mind. And I would have claimed neither body nor mind, had I discovered a soul.’
He informed M. Chesnau that day that Gaultier’s niece was willing to adjust and rewire the spinet, assuming the Kapi Agha still thought it necessary.
It was, as he knew, entirely necessary; no one else having the proper thickness of wire. The following day one of the Chiausi arrived with a summons for Marthe, and, the following morning, she entered Topkapi.
She was unescorted, save for the Janissaries who were commanded to fetch her. Gaultier had refused point blank to associate himself with a folly he considered she had brought on herself, although what she could have done to stop Jerott he was unable to suggest. He remained in his house with Pierre Gilles, who had now received, from Jerott, an outline of the quest which had brought him and his friends to Stamboul.
‘Then of course,’ Gilles had said, ‘the girl must go to Topkapi.’ And to the vociferous Gaultier: ‘Tacite, little man.’
Nevertheless, the outcome mattered to Gilles no less than to Gaultier. If Jerott found Marthe had failed him, he might do as he threatened and denounce them and their treasure. And if anything happened to Marthe, how would he ever recover his papers?
Jerott took no chances. Having discovered that neither Gaultier nor the old man could swim, he removed the boat to another part of the cistern. The swim back through dark, ice-cold water was more exhausting than he had expected, but he accomplished it; and set someone he could trust to keep a watch on the house. No one after that was allowed out or in but the negress, for food. Until Marthe came back, no one was going to smuggle that treasure away from under Jerott Blyth’s nose.
Marthe wore her best dress for Topkapi, but made no other concessions to the occasion; stalking through to the ultimate splendours of the Ottoman Empire like a physician called in to bleed it. She made no comment on the magnificence of the room in the selamlìk where she was led to work on the spinet. It was one of Khourrém Sultan’s chambers, although the Sultan’s wife was not there. Marthe asked the black eunuch who brought her, presently, to request the presence of anyone who could play it; and Philippa appeared almost immediately.
Of all those who had set out on the Dauphiné, Philippa’s lot had been the most solitary, and the separation from her own kind now very long. Her brown eyes were waterlogged, frowning to keep back the tears at the first sight of Marthe; but the blue answering gaze was unsmiling and even, in a curious way, angry. In French, which the eunuch understood, Marthe reeled off a number of questions on the spinet’s performance; returned to the instrument and tinkered with it while Philippa stood, stupid and tentative, in the middle of the floor. Then Marthe called her over to hear some instructions.
It was timed with the efficiency she so scorned in her brother. Above their heads, as they bent over the spinet, the clock struck the hour. And under cover of its bells and its bustling automata, Marthe gave rapidly to Philippa the details she had been told to pass on.
When the frenzied activity stopped, Marthe was already bent over the wires, pliers in hand, while Philippa sat at the keyboard, her frightened body drowning her mind with primitive chemicals. Escape, with the child, was something she had never dreamed possible. She began, with cold fingers, to play a run in a difficult key, and said softly, in English, ‘Is there another child?’
‘Play middle G,’ said Marthe. ‘Yes. There are plans for him also.’
‘Which—?’ began Philippa, her brain beginning to function once more; but Marthe cut her off. ‘No one knows. Thank you. Now D and C. Yes. I shall call the eunuch over now and instruct you both together. Is there anything more?’
Only to thank you,’ said Philippa. ‘To thank you for coming.’
Marthe stared at her. Whether she saw the fresh skin and bright hair; the straight