Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
A breath of embarrassment, in passing, kissed the gummy, triangular grin. ‘Oh, I wouldna say if they came to your notice you wouldna gie them a dandle,’ said Sheemy. ‘But after all, who’s tae ken where they are, or which is yours or another’s? A wean’s a wean: wet at baith ends and no very smert in the middle.… All right,’ he said hastily, as Philippa opened her mouth. ‘All right. Your friend’s a right big-hearted Da. But are ye sure he doesn’t just want the bairn so that he can kill Sir Graham Reid Malett?’
‘Does it matter?’ said Philippa. ‘So long as someone gets that poor child out of Gabriel’s control and back to where he belongs?’
There was a short silence. ‘It was awful wet in Paisley,’ said Sheemy. ‘But maybe you’re right. Anyway, ye can aye count on Sheemy. Sheemy’s the one for a rammy. We’ll go to the House of the Palm Tree together.’
It was a while before they got there, as Sheemy’s parrot died in the morning, and three days after that Haji Ishak went down with the mumps. His suffering, reported Philippa, was terrible to see, and she cuffed Archie, who was sitting in the yard among the glass and the cold iron bars, laughing hysterically. Forty days later, they were given their signed sedes and let out of quarantine, their clothes stinking of brimstone. The dervish disappeared. The Sicilian went off to the harbour. And Sheemy Wurmit, Abernethy and Philippa made for the House of the Palm Tree, Zakynthos, at last.
The long, narrow street between the west side of the harbour and the foot of the hill was unpaved, and the House of the Palm Tree nearly a mile along its length. Trotting, in her down-at-heel shoes, to keep up with the two men, Philippa fell over her feet, clutching her cloak as her eyes spun in her head, registering the throng of pushing humans and animals, the figures robed, furred, brocaded, naked, the heads bare, turbaned, veiled and capped in every size and colour of headgear, the skins of every mutation from umber to russet. Donkeys tripped past, pregnant with impossible loads; caparisoned mules with a Greek woman, earringed and décolletée, sitting astride, or a Venetian, sidesaddle, with a high silk collar and cloak, her chains jangling.
Down towards the harbour, where she counted the masts of twenty ships and the banners of eight nations, crawled the heavier traffic: the hand-drawn barrows, the bullock-carts, the hogsheads of oil and wine labouring in procession on sweating dark backs. Children danced in and out; dogs, in a rolling of bristle, pressed against her creased skirts; there was a strong smell of goat.
There was a smell of incense: from a low, plastered building came a dim gleam of candlesticks and the familiar harping of Latin: it was an Italian church, with a Greek chapel next door. Every seventh or eighth house, she thought, had been a warehouse or a Greek Orthodox church: Mammon and God, as usual, went hand in hand. Archie said, ‘What will you say to him?’
‘What?’ said Philippa; and then, shaking herself, gave Abernethy her full attention. For weeks, she had considered this whole interview, bearing in mind the singularly few confirmed facts which had brought her. When Dragut Rais left Algiers for the winter, Jerott had said, the children were mostly sold off. The baby Khaireddin had been going overseas, but had died on the way.
It might be true. It might be false, but Jerott might believe it to be true. And, Philippa had already concluded, with an unsentimental logic which would have shattered the Chevalier Blyth, it might be false and Jerott might jolly well know it. Two chances out of three said that the little boy was alive. And reinforcing these two was the Dame de Doubtance’s firm belief that she, Philippa, would have news of the child here in Zakynthos.
There had been authority in that prediction. There was also, for Philippa