The Aviary Gate (25 page)

Soon they must go in, but not just yet. Her anger with Annetta was spent. In its place the terrible question came to her again: does he know I'm dead? But I'm not dead. I'm alive. And if he knew I were alive, would he still love me? If he knew I were here, would he try to find me?

‘If he's here, you know I'll have to try to reach him somehow,' she said to Annetta slowly, ‘you know that, don't you? Annetta?'

But Annetta did not reply. Celia turned, and what she saw made her jump from her seat in alarm. ‘Quick, quick, someone come quickly.' She began to hurry towards the palace, and almost at once a group of senior women were coming out to meet her. Their way was lit by servants carrying flaming torches. Forgetting the harem rules, Celia ran up to them.

‘It's Annetta – I mean, Ayshe – she's not well. Please, someone help her …'

The little procession stopped short. At the head of it were two of the harem's most senior officials, the Mistress of the Robes and the
Mistress of the Bathhouse. Despite Celia's pleas for help they seemed not to register what she was saying at all, did not even look towards Annetta.

‘Greetings, Kaya Kadin, you who are
gÖzde
,' they intoned.

The women bowed low, so low that the sleeves of their robes dragged in the dust before her.

‘The Sultan, the most glorious Padishah, God's Shadow Upon Earth, will honour you again tonight.'

It was early in the afternoon when Elizabeth finally left the palace. She found a taxi easily outside the First Courtyard and gave the address of Haddba's guest house. But halfway across the Galata Bridge she realised she felt too restless to return to her room just yet. On impulse she leant forwards to speak to the driver.

‘Can you take me to Yıldız?' she asked him in English. ‘Yıldιz Park?'

A few days ago she remembered that Haddba had told her about a little café in this park overlooking the Bosphorous, a pavilion known as the Malta Kiosk where all the Istanbullus went to take tea on Sunday afternoons, only then she had felt too lethargic still, and too cold, to take up the suggestion.

The ride took longer than she expected, and by the time Elizabeth reached Yildiz the clouds had cleared. The taxi driver dropped her at the walls of the park, at the bottom of a hill, leaving her to walk up to the kiosk itself.

Inside, Yildiz turned out to be more of a forest than the metropolitan shrubbery of Haddba's description. Immense trees, their few remaining leaves as yellow as golden guineas, stretched up through deep glades on either side of the path. Elizabeth walked quickly up the road, enjoying the sweet damp smell of the forest air. Jackdaws chattered in the branches. Perhaps it was the sight of blue sky after days of grey or the feel of the sun against her face, she could not tell which, but she was surprised by the sudden energy she felt, as if, after days of lassitude, something inside her, some hard and bitter place, had begun to thaw.

The kiosk turned out to be a nineteenth-century baroque building surrounded by trees. Elizabeth ordered coffee and some baklava in the café, and found a table outside on the terrace, a semi-circle of white marble shaded by a pergola, which looked down over the park and the Bosphorous below. A few leaves blew fitfully across the flagstones. Even in the sunshine the pavilion had the melancholy feel of an out of season attraction. Yesterday, it would have suited her mood exactly; but today, after her visit to the palace, and the strange deserted rooms of the harem, today was different. As Elizabeth drank her coffee, a surge of optimism flowed through her. She would find the remaining fragment, she felt sure, if not here then back in England; she would find out what really became of Celia Lamprey.

More than anything at this moment she found that she wanted to tell someone about her experience at the harem but there was no one to tell. Should she ring Eve? Better wait until she could use the telephone in her room, her mobile bill must be astronomical by now. Haddba? But, no, she didn't want to leave the kiosk just yet. She could tell Haddba about it later. On the terrace, where until now she had been sitting alone, she was joined by a Turkish couple. They sat a little way away from her at the end of the terrace. For one anarchic moment Elizabeth wondered what they would do if she went up to them and just started talking, telling them about a lost story, the tale of an Elizabethan slave girl.

But no, perhaps not. Tilting her head backwards she smiled to herself and closed her eyes, feeling the sun warm her skin. With her eyes still closed she half expected a likeness of Celia Lamprey to come into her head, but instead, in her mind's eye she saw again the deserted room inside the harem. She saw the rotting raffia beneath the carpet, the coverlets on the divan, with their faint suggestion of having been recently slept on.

Elizabeth put her hand in her pocket. The chip of blue and white glass glinted in her palm. A talisman against the ‘Evil Eye', that's what Berin had said when she had shown it to her. They were supposed to ward away bad spirits. You saw them everywhere in Istanbul, hadn't she noticed?

‘Should I show it to someone?' Elizabeth had asked.

‘Of course not,' Berin had said, ‘keep it. It's just a cheap thing, a trinket from the bazaar. You can get them anywhere. One of the
caretakers probably dropped it.' She gave Elizabeth a quizzical look. ‘Are you all right?'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘You look a little pale, that's all.'

‘It's nothing.' Elizabeth's fingers had closed around the smooth glass. ‘I'm fine.'

Now, sitting on the pavilion terrace, Elizabeth dropped the charm carefully back into her pocket. She took a pen and notebook from her bag, and started to write ideas down at random: thoughts, questions, anything, in fact, that came into her head, allowing her mind to slide. Freefalling, down and down.

‘Celia Lamprey,' she wrote at the top of the page. ‘Paul Pindar. A shipwreck. 1590s.' There's four hundred years separating me from their story, she thought, although it might as well be four thousand. ‘And in the heat of bloud in front of her verie eyes did runne her father in the side with a Culaxee …' Elizabeth's hand flew across the page ‘… cutting him clene through his body.'

She stopped; put down her pen. Then picked it up again and began to make a doodle around the ‘C' of Culaxee. A double trauma then. Not only had Celia been taken captive – dowry and all – on the eve of her marriage, but she had seen her own father struck down, murdered, in front of her eyes. She stared, unseeing, at the page. And what about Paul Pindar: had she loved him, too? Had she mourned her lost love, as I do …?

Elizabeth shook the thought away, forced herself back on to neutral ground.

The question was: how had Celia's story survived in the first place? Was it at all possible that she had lived to tell her
own
tale? Had lived to be reunited with Paul Pindar, perhaps married him after all, travelled with him to Aleppo, had children …

The
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
, which contained a long entry for Paul Pindar himself, made no mention of a wife, but that didn't prove that he hadn't had one. There had been nothing under ‘Lamprey', of course. The fact remained: someone had known Celia's story, and known it well enough to write it down.

Idly, she carried on doodling, cross-hatching the circles of the 9s in the date, 1599. The same year as Thomas Dallam, the organ maker,
presented his wonderful device to the Sultan. Well, at least his story had survived.

Elizabeth had found the passage in Hakluyt easily enough. She took out a well-thumbed photocopy of Thomas Dallam's diary.
In this Book is the Account of an Organ Carryed to the Grand Seignor and Other Curious Matter
. The diary described his journey to Constantinople in the Levant Company's ship, the
Hector
; it told of how, after a six-month voyage, the marvellous gift, on which so many of the merchants' hopes had depended, had arrived half-rotted by sea water; of how Dallam and his men went every day to the palace to rebuild it. It described his growing friendship with the guards, and how one day when the Sultan was at his summer palace, one of them had allowed him a forbidden glimpse into the women's quarters:

When he had showed me many other things which I wondered at, than crossinge throughe a litle squar courte paved with marble, he poyneted me to go to a graite in a wale, but made me a sine that he myghte not go thether him selfe. When I came to the grait the wale was verrie thicke and graited on bothe the sides with iron verrie strongly: but through that graite I did se thirtie of the Grand Sinyor's Concobines that weare playinge with a bale in another courte. At the first sighte of them I thoughte they had bene yonge men, but when I saw the hare of their heades hange doone on their backes, platted together with a tasle of smale pearle hanginge in the lower end of it, and by other plaine tokens. I did know them to be women, and verrie prettie ones in deede … I stood so longe loukinge upon them that he which had showed me all this kindes began to be verrie angrie with me. He made a wrye mouthe, and stamped with his foute to meke me give over looking; the which I was verrie lothe to do, for that sighte did please me wondrous well
.

Than I wente awaye with this Jemoglane to the place where we lefte my drugaman or intarpreter, and I tould my intarpreter that I had sene thirtie of the Grand Sinyores Conconbines; but my intarpreter advised me that by no means I should speake of it, whearby any Turke mythte hear of it; for if it were knowne to som Turks, it would presente deathe to him that showed me them. He durste not louke upon them him selfe. Although I louked so longe upon them, theie saw not me,
nether all that whyle louked towards that place. Yf they had sene me, they would all have come presently thether to louke upon me, and have wondred as moche at me, or how I cam thether, as I did to se them
.

Elizabeth put down the page and tried to order her thoughts. Everyone always assumed that it would have been impossible to have any contact with the women in the Sultan's harem. But Thomas Dallam's diary proved that the women's quarters were more accessible than most foreigners would ever guess. It might have spelt death for the organ maker and his guard if any Turk had come to hear of his escapade, but the temptation to tell his English friends about it must have been overwhelming. Whom had he told? Tilting up her face to the sunlight again, Elizabeth pressed her fingers over her eyelids. In her mind's eye she could see the soaring tiled corridors of the harem; the room where she had found the lucky charm. What was it that had been so puzzling about it? Carefully she added more curlicues and cross-hatchings to the doodle. I know, it should have been a sad place, she thought with sudden clarity. But it wasn't. I heard footsteps running. Laughter.

Sitting back in her chair Elizabeth pushed the notebook to one side, stretching her arms luxuriously over her head. Her thoughts were still a jumble, but somehow it did not seem to matter. Live with the mess: who had said that? This was how projects always began. She had a good feeling, a good instinct about this. Things would become clear soon enough, when she was in possession of more facts. How Marius would deplore her methods so far, if you could call them methods – so messy, so
emotional
– but, do you know what, she said to herself with a small inward shrug, so what?

It was still warm out on the terrace, and Elizabeth lingered. She had finished the coffee but not the baklava, and she ate it now, breaking off small pieces and then carefully licking the flakes from her fingers.

She was not sure what made her turn round, but when she glanced up at the couple sitting at the other end of the terrace, something about them, a certain stillness, told her that they must have been watching her for some time, and that it had been their gaze that had made her turn. Only it was not the couple after all, she saw now, but a man sitting on his own.

Elizabeth met the man's eyes briefly; and then turned away again quickly, so that he should not see that she had seen him. But of course he had.

Feeling foolish she sat staring resolutely ahead of her. She had thought herself alone here, had felt energised by the combination of sun and solitude, but now, beneath this stranger's gaze, the charm of the discovered pavilion, of the whole afternoon, was altered subtly. It was time to leave.

But for some reason she did not go. Elizabeth waited, half afraid that the stranger would make some attempt to approach her. But he did not. Why should I go just yet? she told herself, I still have one piece of baklava left.

Elizabeth ate the remaining piece of pastry slowly. The honeyed flakes stuck to her lips. Perhaps I should use a spoon, she thought; but somehow her fingers seemed best. She ran a thumb over her bottom lip, licked the tips of her fingers, sucking them slowly and carefully, one by one. She knew that he was still watching her. What are you
doing
? one part of her whispered to the other. But she did not stop, not because she was able to ignore him, but because there was, she realised, a quality to his gaze which robbed it of any insolence. He merely sat watching her, with an air of … what? Elizabeth searched for the word. Appreciation? Yes, something like that. Balm to her bruised soul. Sunlight after days of cold and rain.

But that's ridiculous – that whispered voice again – he's a complete stranger. The other part of her merely shrugged: who cares? I'll never see him again.

For one long surreal moment she knew that he knew that she knew he was watching him. And then, all of a sudden, Elizabeth had had enough. She took one last bite, and without a backward glance, picked up her bag and began to walk back down the hill.

The second time Celia was prepared to greet the Sultan there was no Cariye Lala to help her; no drug to blur the edges of her mind, to blot out memory, or to help her sweet flesh – on display like one of Carew's subtleties – forget the indignities heaped upon it.