The Aviary Gate (50 page)

Elizabeth took it out of the folder, and held it tentatively to her nose. ‘Oh …'

‘Is there something wrong?'

‘It has no smell.'

‘Of course not; it's been treated since you last saw it. Makes it safer to handle.' He smiled at her, showing teeth that were very white against his black skin. ‘What did it smell of?' He seemed puzzled.

‘Oh, nothing really,' Elizabeth said, feeling foolish, ‘you know, just old paper.'

She laid the fragment carefully on the table in front of her: the same frail page, the colour of old tea, its watermark still clearly visible,

Loving Friend … You desire to have the whole proceedings of the unfortunate Voyage and shipwreck of the good ship
Celia
, and still yet more unfortunate and tragical history of Celia Lamprey …

Elizabeth's eyes skimmed quickly over the familiar words.

The
Celia
set sail from Venice, with a fair wind, on the seventeenth …

There arose a great gust of wind out of the north …

And there guard … his daughter Celia … Dogges, scurvy curtailed skin-clipping Dogges … stop stop take me but spare my poor father I beseech you … her face as white as death …

Elizabeth closed the folder in silence.

‘Do you know who she was?'

Richard Omar took a laptop out of the case he had been carrying and began to set it up on one of the tables.

‘Celia Lamprey?' Elizabeth put the folder down on the table. ‘She was the daughter of a sea captain.'

‘Well, I know
that
.' He seemed amused. ‘I've read the fragment too, you know. What I mean is, what more do you know about her? I gather you have been doing some research. I always like to know how a story ends, don't you?' He glanced up at her, half-teasing. ‘Does the girl get the boy?'

‘What makes you think there's a boy?'

‘There's always a boy.' He frowned, concentrating as he connected up the wires and plugged them into the power point on the desk. ‘What I mean is: she survived the shipwreck, but did she survive the rescue?'

‘That's a good question.' Elizabeth looked at him consideringly. ‘For a long time I was convinced that Celia Lamprey must have been set free: that somehow she escaped from the harem eventually. How else would we have her narrative, if she didn't write it? It's so very alive, so full of detail – all those details about her dress being so weighted down with water that it was as heavy as lead. Do you think a man would have written that?'

‘No, probably not.'

‘Well, that's what I thought at first anyway. But now, well, I'm not so sure. I'm pretty sure now that she never did get out. The girl, as you put it, didn't get the boy.'

‘But if she didn't write her story, then who did?'

‘And why did they write it. That's exactly what I've been trying to find out.'

‘Well, I must say, it reads like an eyewitness account to me,' Dr Alis said.

‘In that case, if it wasn't Celia, then it must have been someone else who was on board the boat when it was shipwrecked,' Richard said. ‘Come on, it's obvious, isn't it? One of the nuns of course.'

‘One of the nuns?' Dr Alis laughed.

‘I'm serious.'

‘You don't think anyone on board a Turkish man-o'-war would have bothered to rescue them, do you? They were probably all just thrown overboard, poor things.'

‘What makes you think they were all old? There was at least one young one, if I remember rightly.'

‘You're right, and I did wonder about that myself,' Elizabeth said, ‘but even if one of them had been taken captive as well as Celia, they
would surely all have ended up in different places. The original narrative claimed to tell her whole story. How would any of the nuns have got to know the rest of Celia's tale?'

‘Oh well,' he shrugged, seeming to lose interest suddenly, ‘you're the historian.'

‘Now, Mr Omar,' Dr Alis said, businesslike again, ‘what can you tell us about the fragment? I'm surprised, I must say. Usually it's rather hard to get you chaps interested in this kind of thing.'

‘Well, you're quite right – I didn't think it was very interesting at first. Most of the work I do is on vellum, on manuscripts that are far older than this. But – luckily for you – the guy who usually works on the early modern stuff is away on leave at the moment, so it got passed on to me. It was the story that intrigued me: a white English girl who ended up a slave at the court of the Great Turk. I didn't even know there were such things as white slaves then.' He turned to Elizabeth. ‘And then I noticed something. Something – especially after what you've just told me – that I think you should see for yourself. It'll be easier to explain if I show you.'

He typed something on to the keyboard.

‘The first thing we do with manuscripts these days is have them digitally photographed – it's quite straightforward. And this, as you can see, is it.'

An image of the fragment popped on to the screen.

‘A good clear secretary hand,' Dr Alis peered at the screen, ‘easy to read. Any graduate student could do it. What more can you tell us?'

‘Well, the paper is almost certainly Ottoman, although curiously there are very faint impressions of a seal having been used – probably on an outer page which hasn't survived – which is Italian. Venetian, as a matter of fact.'

‘Ah, so that's where your nun theory comes from.' Elizabeth turned to Dr Alis. ‘You remember, the nuns came from the Convent of Santa Clara in Venice.'

‘OK, anything else?'

‘Well, the first thing that struck me was how much of the page did
not
have writing on it, look how wide these margins are,' he pointed to the treated original, ‘but the thing I was most struck by was the reverse.' He brought a second photograph on to his screen. ‘As you can see, it's blank, completely blank.'

‘What of it?'

‘Paper was valuable in the sixteenth century. Too valuable, on the whole, to leave such large amounts of it unused. As I was telling you, most of the work I've been doing recently is on vellum, on manuscripts that are far older than this. Vellum was so valuable that in medieval times monks developed a technique for washing and then scraping the vellum to erase what was there, and then reusing it, writing something new over the top of the original text.'

‘You mean a palimpsest?' Dr Alis said.

‘Exactly, a palimpsest. Well now, there's a technology – X-ray fluorescence imaging – that allows us to see through the surface writing, as it were, and read the rubbed-out original below.'

‘You don't mean to tell me that you've used X-ray fluorescence imaging on this?' Dr Alis's eyes lit up.

‘Not on this, no,' he laughed, ‘but it gave me the idea. For this, I used quite a simple bit of software actually, not much more complicated than good old Photoshop,' there was a tiny pause, ‘any graduate student could do it.'

‘You're quite right. I stand corrected,' Dr Alis said solemnly. ‘Now be a good fellow and get on with it – we're on tenterhooks here.'

‘Well, I got to wondering about the blank parts of the fragment, and then it occurred to me that perhaps they weren't actually blank at all. Marks made in ink survive pretty well, as you can see; but supposing someone had written in something else, pencil for instance?'

‘You mean, it could have rubbed off?' Elizabeth said.

‘Exactly. What happens is that over time the pencil markings themselves fade, but the grooves where the lead has dug into the page would still be there. Exactly the kind of thing that I had been working on with the vellum manuscripts. Anyway, there's a relatively easy way to find out, all you have to do is put the paper through different light spectrums, and see if anything shows up. Ultra-violet didn't show up anything, but then I tried infra-red—' He paused, like a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

‘And?'

He adjusted the screen.

‘And I got this.'

What seemed to be a ghostly photographic negative of the original picture came up on the screen: white writing on a black page. Elizabeth peered at it.

‘I can't see anything different.'

‘Not on this side, no. But look what's on the reverse.'

He clicked the keyboard again and brought up the second image and suddenly, where once there had been a blank page there were now definite markings. Frail and spidery, in a hand so tiny Elizabeth could hardly make out the words at all, they glowed in an unearthly blue light, as if written in ectoplasm.

For a few moments they stared at the screen in silence.

‘My word …' Dr Alis said at last, ‘what does it say?'

‘I'm not entirely sure … it's too small to read.' Elizabeth turned to Richard. ‘Can you enlarge it?'

He nodded silently.

‘Oh my God—' Elizabeth felt tears start into her eyes.

‘What? What is it?'

‘It's, well, it looks like a poem.'

‘Read it,' Dr Alis said, ‘read it to me, Elizabeth.'

So Elizabeth read:

To my love, farewell –

Whenas I saw you at the gate

Barred hence from my enslave'd fate

And knew in that one instant sore

I would not see you ever more:

Oh love! How my small heart did break

And tears course down for thy dear sake!

And now I think me where thou art

And with what weight of lonely heart,

And wish me where thou liest, to say

Perhaps hard fortune will one day

Relent its cruel division of me:

My sad heart here, its love with thee …

But in the darkest hours of night

When ev'n the moon has lost her sight

And from the dark mosques' tow'rs arise

The heathens' strangest midnight sighs,

I lie awake and hear truth speak:

Thou'rt lost, and never more to seek.

Oh love! Remember me I pray

When to thy eyes the English day

Sheds oft its soft and ruby glow

Upon the gard'n we trod below,

When all the world and time was ours,

Unnumbered in its bliss-thought hours;

Remember me, that on the beach

Of Bosphorous thy name doth teach

Beneath a bough of foreign tree

In whispers to my memory:

Who loves thee still, and ever will,

Though time's long grief my heart doth kill.

The shrill sound of the telephone ringing again at the librarian's desk finally punctuated the silence in the Reading Room. Susan Alis was the first to speak.

‘Well, well,' she turned to Richard Omar, ‘congratulations, young man, I take it all back, this is a wonderful find, absolutely wonderful.'

Richard bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘I know it's not the missing part of the narrative,' he said to Elizabeth, ‘but it looks as though you hit on the right conclusion after all. I'm afraid I don't think the girl got the boy.'

‘You knew that all along.'

‘Only if the poem was written by Celia Lamprey. Do you think it was?'

‘Oh yes,' Elizabeth said, ‘I'm sure of it. Although I don't suppose it can ever be proved absolutely. I keep thinking of what you were saying earlier,' she turned to Dr Alis, ‘about how arbitrary our knowledge of the past can be. Sometimes it's as if we know
just
enough,' she held her thumb and forefinger up, an inch apart, ‘for us
to ask ourselves what it is that we
don't
know; what is it that's missing?'

She turned back to the screen again. ‘When as I saw you at the gate …' What gate? Could she possibly have meant Thomas Dallam's grille? But no, if she had meant a grille she would have said so, surely … Elizabeth ran a hand impatiently through her hair.

‘So it looks as if she did see him one last time – or was hoping to. But then what happened? I don't suppose we'll ever know for sure.'

‘But someone knew.' Thoughtfully, Dr Alis picked up the treated fragment again. ‘Whoever wrote the poem – and perhaps it was Celia Lamprey – seems to have known she would never be set free. But maybe someone else was, years later, for all we know, someone – another concubine perhaps – who knew her, and knew her story. Someone who cared about her enough to write it all down – and send it to Paul Pindar, her “Loving Friend”.'

‘Perhaps Richard's right. Perhaps it was one of the nuns after all.'

‘You mean perhaps they survived the shipwreck together?' Dr Alis said. ‘Well, that's plausible enough. But then they would both have to have been bought at exactly the same time, by exactly the same slave master. And then sold as concubines into the Seraglio at exactly the same moment. Come on, what are the chances of that?'

‘You're right, of course,' Elizabeth said.

‘But isn't that what we're dealing with all the time?' Richard was packing his laptop back into its case. ‘With chance. With coincidence. The most implausible, apparently arbitrary things happen all the time.' He zipped up his bag. ‘After all, what were the chances that you would find the fragment after all these years? Or that I would have found the poem on the back? And consider this: if you had been even a year or two earlier with your discovery we would have missed it altogether. The technology simply didn't exist.'

As they stood up to leave, Elizabeth took the fragment and held it for one last time. ‘She bided her time then. Waited for exactly the right moment.'

‘What do you mean?' Richard was putting on his coat and scarf.

‘Celia. I know you'll say it's fanciful of me,' Elizabeth glanced round at Dr Alis, ‘but all the way along I've had the most curious feeling that Celia found me – rather than the other way round. I don't
know why.' She handed the folder back to Richard. ‘It's silly of me, I know. Here, take it. I shan't be needing it again.'