04 Pawn in Frankincense by Dorothy Dunnett

Author:Dorothy Dunnett
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

To dissect a fully grown giraffe with any success, in the open, in Aleppo, in September, demands an esoteric assortment of talents, such as, for example, a smart turn of speed.

At sixty-three, Pierre Gilles was a few years past his best, but he was going to have a damned good attempt. A day after he came across the beast, on its last legs on the road in from Cairo, he had bought it, had it brought to the French Consul’s house in Aleppo, and ignoring the cries of the attaché, who was a fool, had got the men scurrying to fill the courtyard with straw, set up the tables and basins and a stool for his secretary, Pichón, and fix the awning from wall to wall, ready for day. He had started work then and there, by torchlight; and by dawn, when he stood back for the first time, sweating, and drank off the Candían wine that they brought him, the beast was already half flayed, and Pichón had ten pages of notes.

That was when he went indoors, devil take it, to exonerate nature and to snatch, while he was there, a quick bite of food; and this damned girl caught him.

When he came out of that argument half an hour later, he was red in the face, from the old cap on his head to the uncurled white beard which straggled over his blotched working-smock. He seized his apron and jerked it over his head with an imprecation in Latin which made his secretary sit up; and even when he had his knife in his hand again, he found it hard for quite ten minutes to concentrate.

By noon, when all the bins were full and the flies were proving a problem, he went indoors again, for the sun staring through the awning was fairly unpleasant, although it had taken a fool like Pichón to faint from it. In his room he stripped, upended a jug of water over his great hulk and put on the smock again without resuming his clothes.

Pichon’s notes, so far as they went, were on the table. Stripping off a chicken wing they had left for him, he chewed and wrote, his fist making faint red smears over the Latin, swearing under his breath. Then he drank some grape-juice, which was better than wine when you wanted your hand to be steady, and strode out of the room, the battered notes in his hand, just as a young man, with a face as livid as Pichon’s, came out of another door and collided with him. The young man apologized.

The voice was educated. Looking at him with attention, Pierre Gilles thought the boy looked reasonably intelligent. From the suntan under all the picturesque black hair, he had obviously been here or travelling all summer, although the accent, he thought, had been Franco-Scots. Gilles made up his mind, and snapped, ‘D’you write Latin?’

Sometimes Jerott forgot that the blazon of chivalry, with all the status it once had carried, was no longer his.

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