The Aviary Gate (20 page)

‘Just that: “the English ship”?'

‘Just that.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I was there this morning when they found him. I often use a room in the eunuchs' quarters in which to teach some of the little princes. Hassan Aga was delirious, wandering around the gardens; no one knows how he got there, or why. The whole place was in an uproar. I tell you, Paul, it would have been impossible
not
to know what was going on.'

‘So, are you going to tell me where John is?'

‘No, I can't. I don't know myself.' Jamal shrugged. ‘He's safe, that's all I know.'

‘But how did they know to go after Carew?' Paul said, perplexed.

‘Apparently, it was he who delivered the sweetmeats himself. One of the halberdiers at the harem gates recognised him. It seems he'd been there once already that day, on some other business.'

‘But surely as far as the palace is concerned he's just a servant?' Paul sat down again heavily. ‘Why bother with him? Why not come after the ambassador? Or me, for that matter? Carew is not an embassy retainer: he is here because he is my servant.'

At this Jamal did not reply.

‘Why Carew, Jamal?' Paul insisted. ‘None of this makes the least sense.'

‘I think you've already answered that question, my friend: because he is not important. The palace does not want a big scandal any more than your embassy does. That's my conclusion, anyway. But, until Hassan Aga recovers enough to say what really happened, they must be seen to be doing something.' He gave Paul a quick glance. ‘For internal reasons, let's say.'

Paul walked over to the other side of the octagonal room. A breeze was blowing through one of the windows. He looked around him. Everything was the same as it had always been, ever since he had first met Jamal, two years ago. The austere space, with its plain whitewashed walls, more reminiscent to European eyes of a monastic cell than an astronomer's observatory. The collection of instruments that Jamal had showed them yesterday – the quadrant, his collections of astrolabes and sundials, the
qibla
indicator – were all here. And yet it all felt somehow … different. The paints and pots of gold leaf, the parchments and pens with which the astronomer recorded his observations and that they had seen on his work bench only the day before were no longer there. In their place were pieces of ground glass, similar in shape and size to the piece that Jamal was still holding in his hand. Some were flat and round, like large coins; others were almost spherical, like crystal balls. Under any other circumstances Paul's curiosity would have drawn him to them immediately. He would have picked up the pieces of glass and examined them, besieging Jamal with questions as to their exact manufacture and function. Now he hardly noticed them.

Instead, he was aware of the astronomer watching him from the other side of the room. Jamal's face was in shadow. His white gown fell in gleaming folds to the ground like an alchemist's robes. His
expression, it seemed to Paul, was no longer playful. He seemed taller suddenly; taller and graver.

Paul's head was spinning. The feeling of nausea returned, stronger now. This was the moment for which he had been waiting. If he were going to ask Jamal for help this was surely the right time – and yet now that it was here, somehow he could not speak. So much was in the balance, so much was at stake – Celia, and now Carew – that his courage almost failed him.

Perhaps Carew had been right after all: why should Jamal help him? Why did he suddenly have the feeling that the astrologer knew a great deal more than he was telling him? Paul put his hand in his pocket, his fingers closed around the smooth form of his compendium. He was aware that Jamal was watching him from the other side of the room, intently now, and felt a shiver down his spine.

‘I know you must have many questions, Paul,' Jamal was saying. ‘If there are any I can answer, I will do so gladly.'

‘Will you?'

‘But of course. For example, you ask: why Carew?'

‘No,' Paul met Jamal's gaze steadily. ‘Why you, Jamal?'

With his hand still inside his pocket, he flicked the catch on his compendium: open and shut, open and shut.

‘Why me?'

‘You are privy to a great deal in the affairs of the palace suddenly.'

To Paul's surprise, Jamal threw back his head and laughed. ‘And I thought that was what you wanted from me?' His eyes glittered, the old Jamal again. ‘Someone with an insider's knowledge of the palace.'

‘Carew told you that?'

‘But of course. That's what he told me when he came to visit me again this morning.'

In his mind's eye Paul slid his hands around Carew's neck again, shaking him like a rat so that his teeth rattled.

‘What else did he say?'

‘Only that you wanted to speak to me again urgently about something, and that you needed someone with such knowledge. He wouldn't say anything more. I must say I am curious: what was it about?'

‘It's not important now.'

‘Really?' Jamal had come to stand in front of him. ‘Why are you so strange today, Paul? Look at you, clothes, hair – dishevelled, all of it. This isn't to do with Carew at all, is it?'

Before Paul could stop him, Jamal reached out and caught at his wrist, pulling his hand, compendium and all, from his pocket and holding it between his fingers.

‘Are you ill?'

‘No, of course not—'

‘But your pulse is racing.' Still holding his wrist, Jamal stared intently into his face. ‘Pupils, dilated. Skin, cold and clammy.' He shook his head wonderingly. ‘You look – forgive me for saying so – but you look as though you've seen a ghost.'

With a click the loosened catch sprung free, the compendium glided open on Paul's outstretched palm.

‘That's just it, Jamal,' he heard himself say. ‘I have. I think I have seen a ghost.'

On Monday morning Elizabeth presented herself at the Topkapı Palace. She had arranged to meet Berin, her contact at the Bosphorous University, at the gateway of the second courtyard. There were no tourists that day. Two sulky guards at the entrance-way took Elizabeth's passport, and after examining it for what seemed like an unnecessarily long time, checked her name off their list and with obvious reluctance let her through.

Berin, a small mild-mannered Turkish woman in her early forties who was wearing a neat brown coat and headscarf, was waiting for Elizabeth on the other side. ‘This is Suzie.' Berin introduced Elizabeth to the English production assistant. They shook hands. Suzie wore black jeans and a leather biker's jacket. A walkie-talkie buzzed and crackled in a belt at her waist.

‘Thanks so much for this, I really appreciate it,' Elizabeth said.

‘I just thought your project sounded so cool. If anyone asks just say you're a researcher. Which is exactly what you are,' she smiled at Elizabeth, ‘just not one of ours, that's all.'

‘Berin told me about the work you're doing here,' Suzie added as they walked across a formal garden of grass and cypress trees. A few late-flowering roses shivered in the chilly wind. ‘And that you think there might once have been an English slave here in this harem.'

‘I'm pretty sure of it, yes. A young woman called Celia Lamprey.' Elizabeth explained about the fragment of narrative she had discovered. ‘She was the daughter of a sea captain, shipwrecked in the Adriatic, probably some time in the late 1590s, then taken captive by
Ottoman corsairs. The part of the narrative that has survived claims that she ended up here, in the Sultan's harem.'

‘And what would she have been: a wife or a concubine or a servant, or what?'

‘It's hard to say at this stage. The narrative says she was sold as a
cariye
, which in Turkish simply means slave woman. In the palace hierarchy the term was generally used to describe the lowest-ranking women, but since every woman here was technically a slave – oh, except for the Sultan's daughters and his mother, of course, the Valide Sultan, who would automatically have been freed on the death of her master – it might not mean that at all. My guess is that she was sold to the palace as a potential concubine. With one or two exceptions, the Sultans never took wives. It's one of the strangest things about the Ottoman system, the fact that every one of the Sultan's women was from somewhere else: Georgia, Circassia, Armenia, various parts of the Balkans, Albania even. But never Turkey itself.'

‘There was a French woman, I seem to remember, in the early nineteenth century.' Suzie said. ‘What was she called?'

‘You're probably thinking of Aimée Dubucq de Rivery.' Elizabeth said. ‘A cousin of Josephine Bonaparte. Yes, that's right, but until now, no Englishwoman, or not that we know of anyway.'

They reached the entrance to the harem. A large quantity of filming equipment, rolls of flex and large black and silver crates, was piled up nearby, but apart from that the place was deserted. An empty crisp packet swirled at their feet. In the window of a ticket office a hand-written sign, left over from the day before, said ‘Last tour 15.10 hours'.

Elizabeth followed Suzie though one of the now unguarded turnstiles. Berin followed after them.

‘But what you're forgetting is that it wasn't just the women who were slaves,' Berin said. ‘The whole Ottoman empire was based on it. But it wasn't slavery in the way people usually think of it today. There was no stigma attached to being a slave. And it wasn't a particularly cruel system – not at all like what you might call “plantation slavery”. More of a career opportunity, really.' She smiled. ‘Most of our Grand Viziers started out as slaves.'

‘You think that was what the women thought about it?' Suzie said sceptically. ‘I doubt it.'

‘Don't be so sure.' In her quiet way, Berin was insistent. ‘I think that's exactly what most of them thought. Even your Celia Lamprey might have come to think that way eventually.' She put her hand on Elizabeth's arm. ‘Don't dismiss that as an idea, it's not impossible, you know. Plenty of European men did very well for themselves under the Ottomans – so why not a woman?'

An immense wooden door stood before them, studded with brass nails. Over the door was some lettering in gilded Arabic script. Elizabeth looked up at it and shivered. What had Celia Lamprey thought when she entered these doors for the first time? Had it been a haven for her, or a hell? Was it ever possible to see clearly into the past?

‘The fact is, no one has ever really known who these women were.' Berin pulled up the collar of her coat, as though she too felt a sudden chill. ‘And for the most part we never will. Of all the hundreds of women who passed through these doors, we can only put names to a handful of them, let alone any other details. That's the meaning of the word “harem” after all. It means “forbidden”. We're not
supposed
to know.' She gave Elizabeth a teasing smile. ‘Still, I hope you find her – your Celia Lamprey, I mean. Come—' She too looked up at the vast door in front of her. ‘Shall we go in?'

The first thing Elizabeth noticed was how dark it was inside. She left Berin, Suzie and the rest of the film crew setting up their equipment in the Sultan's Imperial Chamber and began to look around on her own. At first one of the guards followed her, but he soon grew bored and went back to his guard room where he could read the newspaper in peace. Elizabeth found that she could wander at liberty through the deserted rooms.

From the entrance hall, the Dome with the Cupboard, she made her way slowly down the corridor of the eunuchs. No furniture, few windows; tiny rooms no bigger than cubby holes. Iznik tiles of extraordinary antiquity and beauty lined the crooked walls, giving off a curious pale green light.

At the end of this corridor was a high domed vestibule from which three other corridors led off at angles. She looked at her map and read their names. The first, leading to the Sultan's quarters, was marked on her map as the Golden Road, the corridor down which concubines
were taken to see their master. The second, leading into the heart of the harem, was marked prosaically as ‘the food corridor'; while the third, which led out of the harem altogether and into the innermost courtyard and the men's quarters, was marked as the Aviary Gate. Elizabeth decided to follow the second corridor, and found herself in a small two-storeyed courtyard, cordoned off with ropes. A sign said ‘Courtyard of the Cariyes'.

She looked around her. There was no sign of the guard, so cautiously she stepped over the ropes. A number of rooms led off the courtyard. Most of the doors had been bolted shut. Through a crack in one door she could just make out the marble remains of an old bathhouse. The rooms beyond it were empty, their plasterwork cracked and stained. There was a feeling of decay and a slight fustiness about the place, which even the insolent gaze of the modern tour groups had somehow been unable to dispel. Opposite the bathhouse, she found a staircase which led steeply down into some dormitory-like rooms, and from there out into the gardens. But in these rooms, so small and cramped that they could only have been occupied by rank and file women, the planks were so rotten that she nearly put her foot through one of them.

Returning to the courtyard she found herself at the entrance to the Valide Sultan's apartments. A series of interconnected rooms, still surprisingly small, but decorated as the eunuchs' corridor had been with the same turquoise, blue and green tiles; the same curious pale green light. Elizabeth half thought that the guard might have followed her in here, but he had not. She listened, but there was not a sound.

When she was sure that she was entirely alone, Elizabeth sat down on a raised divan next to a window and waited. She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate, but nothing came. No connections at all. She trailed her hand along the tiles, tracing their patterns of peacock feathers, carnations, tulips – but still nothing. She got up again and made a thorough search of the apartment, but it was the same everywhere. Even the discovery of a series of hidden but interconnecting wooden passageways behind the Valide's main rooms, bedroom, prayer room and sitting room, did nothing to decrease her sense of detachment from the place.