Queen's Ransom Read Online Free PDF Page B

least I shan’t look much like a royal courier and perhaps that’s better than looking too official. Couriers usually do assume that quickest is safest, as you put it, Brockley. Listen, both of you. I am not forcing you to come with me, not if you are uneasy.”
    But they shook their heads. “No, madam,” said Brockley. “We shall go where you go, as always. Now, you had better get your rest. May my wife join me tonight? She’ll be back in good time to help you rise.”
    “Yes, by all means,” I said.
    They had regular nights to be together and this wasn’t one of them. But they occasionally made a special request. I thought little of it at the time. Indeed, when I look back, I see that I was in a state of blissful ignorance about a great many things. Some of them directly concerned me; others were never meant to concern me but did so quite by accident.
    It was possibly that same night in early March that in a hostelry in Marseilles, in the south of France, an intrepid and resolute but by most people’s standards slightly crazy merchant adventurer named Anthony Jenkinson was disturbed in the night by would-be assassins. He and the two men with him woke up in time and it was the assassins who lost their lives. On a table by the bed, he left sufficient money to pay the innkeeper’s bill and then he and his companions fled stealthily from the inn by climbing out the window and down the creeper that clung to the wall outside. They also left two unknown corpses of Mediterranean appearance in the wide bed for the innkeeper to find in the morning.
    The meeting that had put the assassins on Master Jenkinson’s track must have been held much earlier, perhaps late the previous year. We never knew for sure, nor did we know exactly where it was held. But it probably took place in Istanbul. Quite a number of men must have been present, some of them Venetian and some Turkish. I can visualize them seated around a table in some well-appointed room with windows designed to protect the occupants from the sun rather than let it in. But this must have been winter and the weather could well have been quite cold. If any of the windows gave a view of the Bosporus, the gleam of the water could have been steely rather than bright. I have never seen the Bosporus but my cousins’ tutor was a traveled man and rather good at geography. He had been to Istanbul, and had described it.
    I can visualize, too, the men who sat at that table: their olive complexions and their dark eyes; some lively, some unfathomable, all intelligent. Some would have worn robes and some would have been in dignified gowns or doublets; most would have had rings on their hands and jeweled brooches in their turbans and hats. I can hear their voices: grave, courteous, formal, speaking—what? Greek, very likely. The tutor had once said it was a commonly spoken language in the area.
    Venice and Istanbul—different cultures, but both based on Mediterranean ports with much coming and going between them over the centuries. The representatives of the two cities had much in common. They might have different religions but they were all men of commerce. They were a consortium of Venetian and Turkish merchants, working together to get the best profit possible out of goods passing from the East to the West. They considered themselves sober, practical businessmen. I have no doubt that in general they were responsible husbands and fathers, respectful sons to their parents, probably well loved by their families.
    I feel sure that if you were to stumble in the street and fall down on the cobbles in front of them, they would help you to your feet, inquiring solicitously if you were hurt, and might even beckon a servant from their entourage to escort you safely to your home.
    If you threatened their profits, they’d kill you.
    Lightheartedness wasn’t one of their most noticeable traits but, nevertheless, I think that to some extent they shared Anthony Jenkinson’s sense that to be a