Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [37]
‘Indeed,’ said Lymond gently, ‘thou art a man born to great occasions. It shall be according to thy desires.’ He picked, Jerott noticed, the fat vizier for his personal hostage. To stay with him in the palace, he kept no one but Jerott himself.
They had to wait a few moments while their companions joined the men-at-arms in the yard and, mounted again, rode down to the harbour with Salah Rais’s escort to proffer Lymond’s written note to the sous-patron and have the carbines unloaded from the Dauphiné’s hold. Until that was complete, Jerott supposed, they would be under courteous guard. Salah Rais wanted those weapons. A man governed by a distant and powerful nation and at the mercy of its colonial army wanted all the surprises he could achieve, up his sleeve.
Of the ethics of that, this was not the place to inquire. Instead, Jerott said in English to the man waiting silently at his side, ‘I see. A policy of strict laissez-faire. When did you make it known you’d pay for news of Oonagh O’Dwyer and the child?’
‘A long time ago.’ Lymond was listening, his eyes fixed on the door.
‘Before we met you at Baden?’
‘Oh, God, yes.’ And seeing, perhaps, Jerott’s face, Lymond said, ‘I’m sorry. But it was, after all, my own business. And my own money.’
‘How much?’ And as Lymond did not reply, Jerott persisted. ‘How much? My God, it was my neck you were risking today.’
Lymond looked at him. ‘Did I ask you to come on this voyage? I can’t say I recall it.’
Jerott’s colour was high. ‘No, you didn’t, you bloody high-handed bastard. You might at least have cut your friends in for a share of the prize-money. How much is it?’
‘On the day I am brought face to face with the living child, or the living woman,’ said Lymond carefully, ‘my bankers at Lyons will pay five hundred thousand ducats, in gold, to those who contrived that I found them.… You will wait here, please, for me.’ A robed figure, silently arrived in the doorway, bowed and beckoned.
Lymond was turning to go when Jerott, abruptly, put out a hand. ‘Did you say what I think you said? You have a fortune this size? And you have offered it all?’
‘It is all I do have,’ said Lymond. ‘And pride is expensive to buy. As Gabriel knows.’
Francis Crawford was away for two hours. He interviewed fifteen human beings in the small room where Salah Rais, with Egyptian irony, had summoned all who claimed Lymond’s reward, in the hope of placing the Special Envoy of France conveniently in Salah Rais’s debt.
The Viceroy’s requital, come so patly to hand, was the speedy delivery of the carbines, even now loading on the quay under the no doubt amazed eyes of the women, and Onophrion and Archie. In exchange for it Francis Crawford received nothing; for none of the fifteen he interviewed possessed the information which he sought.
To Jerott, on his return, Lymond said simply, ‘None of them. Shall we go?’
‘Are you sure?’ It was a stupid question. Lymond merely said, ‘They didn’t go away empty-handed. I have sent my respectful leave-takings to the Governor: let not a whelp go unsaluted.… Let’s go back to the ship.’
‘You’re leaving Algiers?’
‘What else? Dragut Rais isn’t here. We’ll give the Viceroy his feast early tomorrow, and sail.’
‘Will he come?’ said Jerott. ‘Now he has his beautiful carbines?’
‘He’ll come,’ said Lymond briefly. ‘When he notices I haven’t included the bullets.’
And that smart and equivocal transaction and its useless corollary might have been the end of the incident at Algiers.
Except that before Jerott, with Lymond, left the palace, a man found them: a thickset man whose coarse shirt hung on powerful shoulders, and who wore a round felt cap on his forceful black curls. He spoke in Arabic. ‘The Envoy from the French ship?’
Lymond