Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [273]
Lymond said, ‘What treasure?’ through his hands, and Jerott told him. Archie was taking a hell of a time. But then of course he had the stuff sewn in the seams of his clothes, to be sure of it. Jerott finished what he was saying and was trying to think of something else when Archie’s turbaned head loomed out of the darkness. Jerott got to his feet and moved away, as far as he could towards the high barred little window. He waited a long time, until Archie’s voice stopped; and then turned and went back.
Lymond was asleep; and Archie, using the last light from the candle they had saved for this purpose, was stowing away again with care what he had carried inside his clothes. To Jerott’s raised eyebrows: ‘Ye can talk,’ he said. ‘He won’t hear you. That’s something else I’ve given him, because the poppy isn’t quick any longer. But he’s had a dose of that, too, I wouldna like to give to a beast.… If it’s any comfort, he’s very near the edge now. He couldna have gone on much longer.’
‘He won’t have to,’ said Jerott. ‘I imagine tomorrow will end it, one way or another, for all of us. He has enough now to see him through, and that’s all that matters.’ He paused, and said, in a detached voice, ‘It’s a pity we didn’t mind our own business, isn’t it?’
‘Is it?’ said Archie. He finished what he was doing, consulted Jerott’s face and, leaning over, pinched out the candle. ‘I doubt, sir,’ said Archie, ‘if we had kept out of it, you could no more have lived with yourself after than I could.’
The two mutes who had locked her in brought Philippa breakfast next morning, and the wherewithal to make a rough toilet. She had just finished when the cell door opened and was shut and locked again behind Marthe.
Marthe, it was clear, was as bewildered as Philippa, although in a moment she had masked it; and, surveying the tray of half-eaten food, observed, ‘I don’t blame you; although, I advise you, it is easier to be bold if your stomach is full. You didn’t escape?’
‘I did. We were brought back.’ She explained, and listened in turn, flushing, to Marthe’s story. ‘They kept you because you’d carried a message for me. I’m sorry. And it all went for nothing because Míkál told Gabriel everything.’
‘Míkál,’ said Marthe, ‘who went with you to find the child at Thessalonika?’ Onophrion had told her all they had learned on that journey, when he and Lymond had sailed on the same route with Míkál on board. She said, ‘Weren’t there accidents?’
‘Where? I don’t know,’ said Philippa.
‘On board ship with dear Mr Crawford.… It doesn’t matter,’ said Marthe. ‘It isn’t your fault. You had an outburst of philanthropy and I made an error of judgement, and it has landed us both in precisely the same spot.’
Untouched and slender, she seemed to Philippa’s eyes quite unchanged: a little thinner perhaps; a little quieter perhaps, but that was all. It did not occur to Philippa to wonder how much she herself had grown in the last year or more; or how she had altered. She had seen herself in Lymond’s eyes as the schoolgirl she had always been: an additional burden to be reassured. She did not see in Marthe’s quieter mood a sober assessment of what the long imprisonment must have meant, and of the kind of spirit which had not only endured it but built on it. Philippa said, her hands hard one on top of the other, ‘There was another child, too. I don’t know if they caught him. Gabriel says one of them is his. I wonder what they’ll do to the children?’
‘Nothing, probably,’ said Marthe. ‘Mr Crawford, I suppose, stands to pay the full penalty for taking you and the children away against the Sultan’s commands, and we shall be punished for helping him.’
‘It’s more than that,’ said Philippa. ‘They talked of sedition.