Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [72]
‘He had sold her,’ said Jerott. ‘None need fear the wrath of Dragut; and the one who sheltered this woman and child we would make great.’
‘But I know not his name,’ said the dervish with gentle regret. ‘Only that Mehedia was near to his village, and that for alms he was moved to offer me this.’ And with long, irregular fingers, he touched the strip of rawhide round his neck. Attached to it, Jerott had already observed, was a small bag made of soft white cotton, whiskered with wood ash. It contained, he supposed, the dervish’s fortune; and he wondered if perhaps the nature of the coins would hint at the donor. Marthe, watching his eloquent face, smiled. ‘You don’t come from Lyons, or you would know what you are looking at,’ she said. ‘Two ounces of oriental insect called bombykia, Mr Blyth. As useful a clue as any we might possess.’
‘Bombykia?’ said Jerott, whose mind was not at that moment in perfect alignment with Aristotle.
‘Silkworms, Mr Blyth,’ said the girl Marthe. ‘The horned worm of India at whose mating men rejoice as at a wedding; from whose bowels came the robes Cleopatra wore, spun from the wind. Go look, Mr Blyth, for a mulberry bush.’
8
Mehedia
Go look, Mr Blyth, for a mulberry bush, Marthe had said. And Jerott Blyth went, because he thought she was right. Ali-Rashid, they knew, had sold the slave-nurse and the infant to the Bedouin. It was entirely possible that the nurse, taking the child, had contrived to escape, and had been given asylum by some family breeding silk near Mehedia … which was in Spanish hands.
If it was true, they might have broken Gabriel’s prearranged train of progress, provided they got to the child quickly enough. If it wasn’t true, they were abandoning Francis, along with the waiting-post, and walking straight into an ambush.
Faced with this logic, Marthe had merely raised her slim shoulders indifferently. ‘You must, of course, do as you please,’ she had remarked. ‘But I really think, through all these years, that Mr Crawford has learned to take care of himself. I am sure his unique sense of domestic responsibility will impel him, unswerving, to trace us wherever we go.’
Which was precisely the kind of bitchy remark, thought Jerott furiously, that Lymond himself would have made.
In the end, Jerott chose the moderate course. He travelled alone because he would not allow their waiting-post to be abandoned. Salablanca and Marthe remained there: Marthe wild with impatience and Salablanca smiling, unmoved. The bulk of the money, well hidden, stayed with them while Jerott, carrying only enough for his needs, mounted his horse and rode east, into high spring and the enemy-held territory of Mehedia.
Soon, these flat plains would lie exhausted again under the dusk-drinking lions of summer. Now Jerott rode past green hedges and plane and pomegranate trees and date palms, through olive groves and by fields sprouting with barley and wheat. Wild mignonette sprang among the thistles between the cracked marble stones of some forgotten Roman-built path and the blue of cornflowers and wild lupin and hyacinth hazed the long grass. In the villages there was milk to be had from the pale, full-bellied cows, and honey like muslin, eaten beneath the blossoming orange trees in an orchard where the scent fed the senses like the threshold pleasures of love. And Jerott, who had wished to be alone for his own sake as well as for Lymond’s, closed his eyes as he sat under the orange trees, and prayed for Francis Crawford, who did not recognize love, and for himself, who did.
Presently through the olive trees, said to bear the name of God on every leaf, he saw as he rode the rocky peninsula with the walled town of Mehedia on his left. Then the olives gave way to low green bushes, fat and glossy, rich with rotten fish and oil cake and lascivious feeding as Marthe had described them. Jerott rode through the grove of white mulberries, and past the rows of thatched rearing-houses, and began to pursue an altogether spurious line of inquiry, gently, from farmhouse to farm, about the purchase of soufflons