Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [4]
Jerott’s eyes and Philippa’s met. ‘When I meet my friend,’ said Jerott Blyth carefully, ‘there is likely to be a detonation which will take the snow off Mont Blanc. I advise you to seek other auspices. Philippa, I think we should go down below.’
‘To swim?’ said that unprepossessing child guilelessly. ‘I can stand on my head.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ said Jerott morosely. ‘Why in hell did you come?’
The brown eyes within the damp, dun-coloured hair inspected him narrowly. ‘Because you need a woman,’ said Philippa finally.
‘And I’m the nearest thing to it that you’re likely to get. It was very short notice.’ She stopped short on the stairs and said, in the voice of discovery, ‘You’re afraid of him!’
Jerott’s expression was affably menacing. ‘And you think that because he’s an old friend of your mother’s he’ll spare you. He won’t.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Philippa. She wasn’t actually listening. They arrived at ground level and took up their stance behind an arrangement of towels, from which they had an excellent view both of the pool and of the man known to most people, briefly, as Lymond.
Francis Crawford had seen them. What he thought about it was unlikely to be visible, through a long-practised sophistication of response. His voice, conversing softly with the controller, did not falter, nor did his hands, dealing the cards. The game drew to a close, in Master Zitwitz’s favour, and a pile of gold gulden changed hands. The older of the two nuns, sitting beyond the controller, made a shy comment and the fair-haired man answered, his hands busy with a fresh game. The cards flipped. His nationality, which was Scottish, showed in neither his face nor his voice, which he had raised a little to carry over the noise of laughter and music and splashing: he detained the board and held it steady as two girls, pursued sluggishly by an elderly senator, curvetted past.
The farther nun, the plain one, leaned forward and said in Spanish-accented English, ‘We were two years, sir, in Algiers before we escaped in October, Our sufferings may be imagined. Moors, corsairs, heretics cast out of Spain.… Turkish Spahis strut in the streets and because the Pasha is a puppet of that accursed of God, Sultan Suleiman, Christian prisoners are treated like hogs. Have you seen——’
A handful of gulden slipped, sparkling, into the water and there was a wallow as several hands urgently sought them. They were now playing passe-dix, and the black-haired lady’s husband had joined them. The black-haired lady suddenly giggled. Righting the board: ‘Banker’s share, I believe,’ said Crawford of Lymond courteously. ‘I beg your pardon, Sister. You were saying?’ Gold—a large amount of gold—changed hands.
The colour was high in the plainer nun’s face. ‘I was saying—have you ever been at a ganching? Seen a man’s feet roasted black in his shoes? Needles driven into his fingers? Have you ever seen a friend flayed alive with such art he took three hours dying, and his skin then stuffed back to its life-shape with straw? Have you ever seen half a man cauterized on a red hot brass shield so that he lives a little time longer? Medicinal baths!’ said the older nun bitterly. ‘What can hot baths do for our scars?’
Her voice, at the sharp pitch of hysteria, carried even to where Jerott and Philippa stood. The decorative lady, paling, recoiled into the arms of her husband, and her husband, a stout soap-broker from Munich, expressed his displeasure. ‘There are women present,’ he said.
‘So there are,’ said Francis Crawford gently, and throwing a ten, passed the dice into the capable hands of the household controller. ‘Not a fashionable topic. Why not come back after dinner?’
Onophrion Zitwitz, arrested, the dice in his fingers, put in a question. ‘You speak of horrible tortures. But women and children surely were not subject to these?’
The young nun answered. ‘They have other uses for them,’ she said bitterly. ‘I was a slave in the corsair Dragut’s own palace. I saw his women—Spanish, French, Italian, Irish. I was at the branding of all his poor children.