Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [39]
Dragut Rais’s Algerian palace was of marble, and set within gardens whose walls traced, in stucco, the benign injunctions of the Prophet Mohammed. Behind the blank walls no lights could be seen, and the double-leafed doors, gilded and inlaid with woods, were decisively closed. Skirting the wall for a weak place, Lymond found, somewhere, an invisible foothold and, in spite of the hampering cloth, was neatly up and over: Jerott, left below with the silent messenger, wondered sardonically how many ducats’ worth of vermilion velvet had lost its spruceness in going. From the top of the wall, Lymond’s voice said quietly, ‘There’s a light on at the back somewhere, and voices—he probably keeps a few servants, or they move in with their families, more likely, when he goes away. The main rooms seem to be empty, and the courtyards aren’t lit. Ask him where she’s supposed to be.’
Jerott turned. It was as well that he did, for the doubled fists of the messenger, striking hard for his neck, met his shoulder instead. Jerott grunted, twisted, and grabbed.
He was a second too late. Ducking, the felt-capped man, muscles hard, dragged himself out of that grasp and, flinging off to one side, got his balance, glanced once at Jerott, and then darted off into the darkness. After the first step, breathing hard, Jerott stayed where he was, swearing. But he could hardly leave Lymond. He looked up.
‘Bravo,’ said Francis Crawford, sitting crosslegged on top of the wall, his hood shaken free on his shoulders. ‘You’re a credit to the bloody Order, aren’t you? You know you’ve got a knife in your hand?’
There was no excuse, which didn’t make it any better. Jerott said, ‘I apologize. I’ll go after him now.’
There was a furious pause. Then Lymond’s voice, the chill gone, said, ‘Don’t be an ass, Jerott? You know I can’t do without you.’
It was an obvious answer. But it was also something Jerott had never had from Lymond before: an apology and an appeal both at once.
He found he had nothing to say. Instead, he pushed back his hood and, giving Lymond his hand, pulled himself up to the wall-top beside him. Then, side by side, they dropped silently into the unlit garden of Dragut Rais’s house, and methodically set about entering and searching its rooms.
It took half an hour. Familiar with Arab houses and their lack of all but movable furnishings, Jerott was not surprised that breaking in should be simple: there was literally nothing to steal. Possessions, packed into coffers, moved from house to house with their owner: Dragut’s would be at Djerba or Prevesa or Constantinople by now. For the Viceroy had clearly been truthful, if in this respect only: Dragut Rais was not there.
Walking through chamber after bare chamber, and skirting the dark courtyards with their rustling trees and dried and derelict fountains, Jerott tried to imagine it as it must have been in the summer, when the corsair princes sailed through their rich, sunny playground and made sport with their luxurious spoils.
Oonagh O’Dwyer had been one of those captives: had lain perhaps by that marble basin and watched the fish play and tended her child … perhaps. Jerott had never seen Oonagh O’Dwyer, and could imagine no child of Lymond’s here.
In the end, they did hear children’s voices, but the screeching voices of Algerine children, black-haired, filthy and raucous, swarming in one room far at the back with half a dozen half-bred Moorish women … the servants, or the families of the servants left to safeguard the property. Of menfolk there was no sign: at that hour they would have business in the lower town common to their kind, Jerott knew. Dropping softly from his viewpoint through a high, half-shuttered window, he rejoined Lymond saying, ‘Now what?’
Just that, for there was no use in saying, What did I tell you? At the royal palace your rank had royal protection. In the streets, perhaps, you were able to escape