The Aviary Gate (35 page)

For a long time Safiye held out against them. First with her own beauty, but when that was no longer enough, with the help of Little Nightingale and Cariye Mihrimah. For right from the beginning, from their very first months in Manisa, the three of them had all been agreed. Each of them had sworn always to do everything in their power to help the others. And so they had. When fortune favoured one of them, it smiled on them all. Under Safiye's patronage Little Nightingale had risen to become Hassan Aga, the Chief Black Eunuch; and, in the old harem still presided over by the Valide Sultan Nurbanu, Cariye Mihrimah – Safiye could think of her by no other name – had become the harem official second only to the great Harem Stewardess, Janfreda Khatun.

Little Nightingale and Cariye Mihrimah were the first and most important rung in Safiye's formidable network of allegiances, a network that had taken a lifetime to create. Like the huntress she was, Safiye relied on surprise and disguise, and often it was only she who knew who they were – the mutes, the eunuchs, the palace slaves, and above all the harem women she bought at high prices and then freed after only a few years' service, marrying them off advantageously to a grateful pasha or vizier.

But it was the Nightingales alone, Safiye knew, who would do anything she asked, whose loyalty was absolute. For her she knew they would lie, spy, cajole, steal – perhaps even kill. They would do, in short, whatever it took: which in the end was everything.

And so it was that when Safiye could no longer hold the Sultan's interest on her own, it was Little Nightingale who had found the physician for her. And when his handiwork was discovered, it had been Cariye Mirhima – who else? – who took the blame.

Another sound, even fainter than the first, registered somewhere in her consciousness: a small sound like a mouse scuffling in the wainscoting. Safiye Sultan glanced up to the shadowy ceiling and smiled. Very good, my little Judas goat. It's about time we had a resolution to this business, once and for all.

It was a Saturday towards the middle of December that was finally fixed on for Elizabeth's trip on Mehmet's boat.

On Haddba's instructions she took a taxi early in the morning to the small dock near the Galata Bridge where it was moored. Mehmet was to meet her there. She rang the mobile phone number that Haddba had given her, and stood shivering on the dock, waiting for him to appear.

‘Elizabeth.'

He was taller than she had recollected.

‘Hello.'

She half expected him to kiss her hand again, but he did not.

‘Well, it looks as though we have chosen a good day for it after all.'

She remembered now how much she had liked his voice.

‘Haddba made me bring this,' Elizabeth said, holding out a basket.

‘A picnic? Ah, Haddba! She thinks of everything. Here, allow me.'

He took the basket from her. ‘You didn't mind getting up so early on a Saturday morning?'

‘No, I like it.'

‘We think alike then.' He turned to smile at her over his shoulder. ‘My uncle used to say that the person who wakes up early skims the cream off the day.'

The boat turned out to be a launch with a small cabin at the front. They set off straight away, along the Golden Horn towards the entrance of the Bosphorous. There was little water traffic at that time of the day. It was cold, but clear; the sky transparent, flecked with
pink and gold. On the Sea of Marmara, Elizabeth could see where the tankers had gathered, whole flocks of them, paper cut-out behemoths, painted black and red.

He followed her gaze. ‘Do you like them?'

‘They're absolutely amazing.'

He seemed amused by her enthusiasm.

‘Are you laughing at me?' she said, but she found that she did not mind. Marius, she thought, would have laughed at her, too, and she would have felt diminished by it. But she did not feel diminished; she felt, to her surprise, exhilarated; intoxicated by the strangeness of it all.

‘Well, most people would prefer to look at the sailing boats, a beautiful sloop, say, or even one of the big ocean liners that we get here now. But not the … how do you say it?' he gave her a teasing look, ‘the grotty old tankers.'

‘But look at them,' Elizabeth said, ‘they're wonderful; so vast and yet there they are just sort of … floating. Like clouds, completely weightless, just floating there on the horizon.'

‘They're waiting for their turn to make their way up the Bosphorous, to the Black Sea mostly. It's such a very narrow channel they have to navigate. In the old days, when more people lived on houses that fronted directly on to the water, families were known to wake up with half a tanker in their house.'

He took her first up the western shore of the Bosphorous, past palaces and small docks, the smart yachts and cruise liners in the harbour at Bebek. On the water, the roar of the city was muffled. Elizabeth could see shoals of lilac-coloured jellyfish, floating pale and clear like mermaids' hair in the water. She felt completely at ease in his presence. They could talk or not talk with equal comfort.

‘You're very thoughtful,' he said after a while.

‘I'm trying to imagine what the city used to look like; you know, before—'

‘Before what? Before the motor car came along and choked us all to a standstill?'

‘Oh no, much before then,' she said. ‘I meant in the sixteenth century.'

Although she had not intended to, Elizabeth told him the story of Celia and Paul. She told him everything: about the Levant Company
merchants and their marvellous gift to the Sultan, the mechanical organ with its astronomical clocks, and automata of trumpeting angels and singing blackbirds; she told him about the shipwreck and the missing fragment of narrative.

‘It's the reason I came to Istanbul in the first place, to try to find it – the missing fragment, I mean.'

Mehmet had listened carefully, without interrupting. Now he said, ‘I never thought academia would be so exciting. You make it sound like a piece of detective work.'

‘Well, that's exactly what it feels like sometimes,' Elizabeth said. ‘I suppose that's why I love it so much – although I know that Haddba thinks I'm absolutely mad to shut myself up with a lot of books all day long.'

A gust of wind rattled the door of the cabin. Elizabeth shivered, and pulled her coat more closely round her shoulders. She made no mention of the other reasons that she had come to Istanbul.

Over the hills on the eastern shores of the Bosphorous a pale winter sun rose at last. Light caught at the roofs of the houses, turning the grey waters a brilliant blue.

‘And so? Have you found any clues?'

‘So far nothing on Celia. I've applied for permission to visit the State archives, but they keep wanting more and more pieces of paper, letters of recommendation from my supervisor, and I don't know what,' Elizabeth said. ‘It's always the same with archives. They want you to tell them exactly which documents you'd like to look at,' she sighed, ‘which of course you can't possibly do until you go there and see for yourself what they've got.'

‘All very Byzantine.' He gave her a smiling sideways glance. ‘So she remains a mystery, your little slave girl?'

‘So far. But I just have this feeling, you know …' She turned to him.

‘What kind of a feeling?'

‘Oh well, it's just that the more I think about it, the more I think she did eventually escape – in fact, she must have done.' Elizabeth found that she had put her hand protectively to her stomach. ‘Otherwise how would her story ever have come to be written?'

‘Why should she have had to escape?' Mehmet said. ‘Have you considered that there might be some other far simpler explanation?
People assume that slavery was for life but, from what I learnt at school, I seem to remember that under the Ottoman system it hardly ever was. Slaves were freed all the time, and for all sorts of reasons.'

‘Even from the Imperial Harem?'

‘Especially from the Imperial Harem. If a woman didn't catch the Sultan's eye, after a few years she was given dowry and then married off to some high-ranking official – the personal slaves of the Valide in particular. It was considered a very meritorious act on her part. Because of their training – and their contacts with the palace – they were extremely highly prized. It's perfectly possible that your Celia Lamprey was one of them.'

‘Well, maybe you're right.'

Elizabeth thought of the strange atmosphere she had picked up in the harem that day. Not only in the Valide's apartments, with its double walls, its secret corridors hidden in the wainscoting, but in the warren of tiny rooms, rotting and claustrophobic, belonging to the ordinary rank and file women, that sense of a windowless labyrinth. She was certain now that Celia must at some point have left the palace, but Mehmet's explanation sounded just … well, it sounded too easy.

‘And if she did leave, then what would have happened to her?' he asked.

‘That's what I'm trying to find out.'

‘You think she was reunited with her merchant?'

‘It's what I'd like to think.'

‘Ah!' he smiled again. ‘Not only a detective, but a romantic too. Well, if you really want to know what Istanbul looked like in the sixteenth century—' he turned and pointed back down the Bosphorous in the direction from which they had just come, ‘then that's the view you want.'

Elizabeth turned and saw the silhouette of the old city massed on the horizon behind her. Now that the sun was up, a glow like golden mist hovered over it. Grey walls spiralled down into the green and black parkland; golden domes and minarets and the spiked tips of cypress trees pushed up into a pale-blue winter sky. And in a strange trick of the light, the whole city seemed to rise up from a dazzling expanse of water, a citadel conjured up by djinns.

At around midday they came to Andalou Hisari, the last village on the Asian shore before the Bosphorous opened into the Black Sea. The shores here were thickly wooded. Wisps of morning mist still clung to their dark interiors; men fished from the rocks.

They anchored in the little bay. The water was flat, an opaque green reflecting the trees.

‘Come,' he said, ‘I'm going to take you for lunch. If we're lucky we might see dolphins here.'

‘What about Haddba's picnic?'

‘In December? I think not,' he laughed, holding out his hand to her. ‘Don't worry, Haddba won't mind.'

He knew a fish restaurant on the front. Although it was out of season, the place was open. A deferential waiter showed them to a table overlooking the water. While they waited for their food to arrive they talked, watched the fishing boats and the gulls, improbably large, bobbing like corks on the water.

He told her about his family, Turkish father, French mother, four brothers; and she about hers, parents in the Oxfordshire village, no siblings, unless you counted Eve, the sister she had never had. They were so concentrated on one another that their conversation seemed to proceed in a kind of shorthand.

‘Do you have someone?' he asked. ‘Back in England, I mean.'

‘I did,' Elizabeth watched a flock of cormorants flying low over the water, ‘not now.'

No other explanation seemed necessary. The image came to her of Marius: a Marius who, she realised, had not so much as crossed her mind all day. Now she seemed to see his figure as if on a distant shore, a prancing incubus, waving to her as he receded, getting smaller and smaller, until in a tiny pouf of smoke he was gone.

She turned to Mehmet with a smile. ‘You?'

‘The same,' he said. ‘Or something like that.'

To pass the time he ordered them a plate of fresh almonds. As he spoke to the waiter she studied him carefully. He was not so much a handsome man, she thought, as a vivid physical presence.

‘What's your favourite drink?' he asked her.

‘Let me guess … yours is … pineapple juice,' she countered.

‘Pineapple juice? Don't be absurd!'

‘Well, what it is it then?'

‘Vodka. Grey Goose, of course. And you?'

‘You'll never guess mine.'

‘Bet I will.'

She shook her head. ‘I'll give you a million pounds if you do.'

‘Champagne.'

‘Champagne? Well, I have to admit that does come a very close second, but no.'

The conversation shimmered and spiralled between them on golden threads.

‘What is it then?'

‘Picnic thermos tea.'

‘Picnic thermos tea,' he laughed. ‘Well, OK, I guess you'll have to keep your million pounds. But,' he leant back in his chair, ‘I bet I can guess what your favourite food is.' He looked at her through narrowed eyes.

‘Oh?' she smiled at him, and as he held her gaze she was suddenly and overwhelmingly so erotically possessed that she felt as though she might faint.