The Gabriel Hounds (18 page)

A hunt along the eastern arcade and into the recesses of the hammam on the corner convinced me that there was no staircase there, nor a door that could lead to
one, so after a while I abandoned the Seraglio, and set out to investigate the untidy sprawl of the palace buildings.

I am sure that the place was not as vast as I imagined it to be, but there were so many twisting stairs, narrow, dark corridors, small rooms opening apparently haphazard, one out of the other – many of them in half darkness and all untidy with the clutter and decay of years – that I very soon lost all sense of direction, and simply wandered at random. Every time I came to a window I looked through it to get my bearings, but many of the rooms were lit only by skylights, or by narrow windows giving on corridors. Here and there a window would look over the countryside; one small court, indeed, had an open arcade giving straight out over the Adonis gorge, with a magnificent view of snow-clad peaks beyond, and a sheer drop to the river below. One ground-floor window, I remember, looked north from the end of a black corridor, towards the village; but this window was barred, and beside it were two heavy doors with grills inset, giving on what I had no difficulty in recognising as prison cells.

After wandering for nearly two hours, getting my hands grimy and my shoes grey with dust, I was no nearer finding any door that could be the postern, or any staircase that took me down to it. Certainly during my wanderings I had come across several locked doors. The most promising of these was on the east side of the
midan
, a high door with a barred ventilator. But when (the place being apparently deserted for the afternoon) I pulled myself up for a quick glance through, I could
see nothing except a yard or two of roughly cobbled flooring leading into darkness, apparently on the level and in the wrong direction. No sign of stairs – and in any case the door was fast locked. There were, of course, stairways in plenty that led crazily and seemingly at random from one level to another, but I found nothing that could definitely be called a basement or lower storey. The longest flight of steps counted only twelve, and led up to a gallery surrounding some echoing chamber big enough for a ballroom, where swallows nested in the roof, and the bougainvillaea had come in through the unglazed window arches. These running along the gallery at knee height, lighted the two long sides of the chamber, one row looking out to the south, the other inwards over an otherwise unlighted corridor. Hot buttresses of sunlight thrust diagonally in through the outer arches: round them the magenta flowers hung limp and still; the sound of the water from the gorge below came as little more than a murmur.

Quarter to five. I moved to the shady inner side of the gallery and sat down rather wearily on a deep sill to rest. Either the ‘postern’ was a mirage after all, or it was irrevocably hidden from me by one of the locked doors. My search could not have been anything but perfunctory, but I dared not take it further. The chance simply hadn’t come off. Charles would have to climb in after all. And (I thought irritably, brushing dust from my slacks) serve him right.

In one respect my luck had been in; I had met no one all afternoon, though under the complex of watching
windows I had been careful to preserve the air of an innocent and random explorer. I did wonder several times if the hounds were loose, and if the fact that they had seen me in John Lethman’s company would make them friendly; but I need not have worried, I saw nothing of them. If they were still shut in the small court, they made no sign. Doubtless they, too, slept in the heat of the afternoon.

I was roused by the sound of a door opening somewhere below me on the far side of the corridor. The siesta was over, the place was waking up. I had better get back to my room in case someone thought of bringing tea.

Light steps on stone, and the gleam of scarlet silk. Halide paused in the doorway, looking back to speak softly to someone still in the room, her slim brown hands languidly adjusting the gilded belt at her waist. She had discarded her working-clothes; this time the dress was scarlet over pale green, and her gilt sandals had high heels and curved Persian toes. The bird had its plumage on again, and prettier than ever.

Mating plumage, at that. It was John Lethman’s voice that answered her from the room, and a moment later he followed her to the door. He was wearing a long Arab robe of white silk, open to the waist, and his feet were bare. He looked as if he had just woken up.

It was too late to move now without being seen: I kept still.

The girl said something more, and laughed, and he pulled her towards him, still half sleepily, and made some reply against her hair.

I edged back from the window, hoping they were too absorbed to catch the movement and look up. But almost immediately a sound, familiar by now but almost shocking in the drowsy silence, froze me to my window-sill. The bell from the Prince’s Divan. And after it, inevitably, the clamour of the hounds.

I don’t know what I had expected to happen then – some reaction from Halide, perhaps, like the fear she had shown last night; certainly a rush to answer that arrogant summons. But no such thing happened. The two of them raised their heads, but stayed where they were, Halide (I thought) looking slightly startled, and throwing a question at John Lethman. He answered shortly, and then she laughed. A stream of Arabic from her, punctuated by laughter, then he was laughing too, and the hounds stopped their noise and fell quiet. Then the man pushed the girl away from him, with a gesture and a jerk of the head which obviously meant ‘You’d better go’, and, still laughing, she put a hand up to push the tumbled hair back from his brow, kissed him, and went, not hurrying.

I made no attempt to move. I stayed where I was, staring after her. And for the first time since Charles had made his fantastic proposal for tonight’s break-in, I was whole-heartedly glad of it. I could hardly wait to tell him what I had seen.

Halide had been wearing Great-Aunt Harriet’s ruby ring.

There was no mistake about it. As she had lifted her hand to John Lethman’s hair, the light, falling from some source in the room behind him, had lit the jewel
unmistakably. And she had laughed when the bell had rung, and gone, but not hurrying.

I stared after her, chewing my lip. I had a sudden picture of the lamplit room last night; the old woman wrapped up, huddled in the welter of wool and silk on her bed in the corner; Halide beside her, watching all the time with that wary look; and behind me John Lethman …

He went back into the room and shut the door.

I gave it three minutes, then went quietly downstairs from the gallery, and made my way back to the Seraglio Court.

At first I thought that Charles’s alternative plan – the ‘soap-opera’ one – was also doomed to failure. In the last brief hour between daylight and darkness – between six and seven o’clock – I explored the arcade on the north side of the lake. Still carefully looking as if I was interested only in the view outside, I wandered from window to window examining the metal grilles and the state of the stone that held them. All were sound enough – too sound for me to be able to do anything about it, and the only one that wasn’t barred had been boarded up with heavy shutters. Here and there, it is true, a bar was broken or bent, or the edge of the grille had rusted out of the rotten stone; but the grille was in heavy six-inch squares, and only a gap of half the window would have served to let a body through. There was no such gap, nothing that would have let anything in larger than a cat or a small and agile dog.

And if there had been, I thought bitterly, surprised at my own furious disappointment, it would have been blocked up somehow. Charles and I had been too sanguine. This was after all a lonely place, and Great-Aunt Harriet had the reputation of being rich. It was only reasonable, whatever the interior of the building was like, that the guards on the only accessible windows should be kept in good repair.

I am ashamed to say that I had stood there for a full five minutes staring at the barred windows and wondering what in the world to do next, before the thought hit me with all the beautiful simplicity and force of the apple dropping on Newton’s head. One of the windows
had
been blocked. The end one. By a shutter.

And a shutter that was put up from inside could presumably be taken down from inside.

I ran along the arcade and peered anxiously at it in the now fading light.

At first sight it looked horribly permanent. Stout wooden shutters with nails as big as rivets were closed tightly over from either side like double doors, and across these a heavy bar, or rather plank, was nailed to hold them together. But when I examined this more closely, fingering the nails that held it in place. I found to my joy that they were not nails, but screws, two to each end, big-headed screws that I thought I might be able to manage. Surely among the assorted junk that I had seen lying around, there would be something that would do the job?

I didn’t have far to look; most of the rooms were empty, some even open to the air with doors broken or
left standing wide; but three doors down from the corner I remembered a room that – when I had literally pushed my way in to find a way to the postern – had looked like an abandoned junk-shop.

It had been at some time a bedroom, but would have a rated a poor fourth class in the tattiest hotel guide, The sagging bed, the broken table, every inch of the dusty floor was covered with a clutter of the most useless looking objects. I picked my way over a camel saddle, an old sewing-machine and a couple of swords, to a chest of drawers where I remembered seeing, beside a pile of dusty books, a paper-knife,

It was good and heavy and should do the job admirably. I carried it to the door and blew the dust off, to find it was no paper-knife at all, but a quite genuine dagger, an affair with an elaborately inlaid handle and a workmanlike steel blade, I ran back to the shuttered window.

The screw I tackled first was rusty and had bitten deeply into the wood, so after a few minutes’ struggle I abandoned it and attacked the other one. This, though stiff at first, came out eventually. I went to the other end. The bar was lying on a slant, and I had to stand on tiptoe to deal with the other two screws, but after some difficulty got one of them out, and the other moving fairly easily. I left it there. There was no point in opening the shutters yet, before John Lethman had been and gone. I didn’t bother with the rusted screw; if I freed one end of the bar I could pull it down using the rusted screw as a hinge, and leave it hanging there.

No one was likely to miss the dagger. I hid it under
the cushions of the window-seat in my room, went along to the hammam to wash, and regained my room just in time to meet Jassim carrying a lighted lamp, a bottle of arak, and a note from John Lethman to say that he himself had to dine with Great-Aunt Harriet, but food would be brought to me at nine and he would come along at ten to make sure I had everything I wanted for the night.

The note concluded: ‘I didn’t tell her you’d come back. It didn’t seem quite the time. I’m sure you’ll understand.’

I thought I understood very well. I put the note into my handbag, and regarded the bottle of arak with loathing, I’d have given an awful lot for a nice cup of tea.

He came as he had promised, staying chatting for half an hour, and went shortly after ten-thirty taking my supper tray with him. At something just after eleven I heard again the furious peal of Great-Aunt Harriet’s bell, and somewhere in the palace the sound of a slamming door. Thereafter, silence. I turned out my lamp, sat for a little while to let my eyes get used to the darkness, then opened the door of my room and went out into the garden.

The night was warm and scented, the sky black, with that clear blackness that one imagines in outer space. Hanging in it, the clustered stars seemed as large as dog-daisies, and there was a crescent moon. Here and there its light struck a gleam from the surface of the lake. A couple of nightingales sang one against the
other in a sort of wild angelic counterpoint, punctuated from the water with rude noises from the frogs. In the shadow of a pillar I nearly fell over a sleeping peahen, which went blundering off with loud expostulations between the pillars, disturbing a covey of rock partridges which exploded in their turn, grumbling, through the bushes. A few frogs dived with a noise like the popping of champagne corks.

Altogether it was a fairly public progress, and by the time I reached the shuttered window I was waiting, with every nerve jumping, for the hounds to add their warning to the rest. But they made no sign. I gave it a minute or two, then tackled the window.

The screw answered easily to the dagger, and I lowered the bar.

I had been afraid that the shutters might prove to be fixed in some way, but the right-hand one shifted when I pulled at it, and finally came open with a shriek of rusty hinges that seemed to fill the night. Recklessly I shoved it back to the wall and waited, straining my ears. Nothing, not even from the nightingales, which had apparently been shocked into silence.

So much the better. I pulled the other side open and leaned out.

And I could lean out. I had been right about the reason for the shutters. Except for a few inches of crumbling iron sticking out of the stone here and there, the grille had gone completely. I hung over the sill and strained my eyes to see.

The window was about thirty feet from the ground, and directly below it ran the path which skirted the
north wall of the palace. Beyond the path the rocky ground fell away in a gentle bank covered with bushes, scrubby trees, and a few thin poplars which clung to the edge of the drop to the Nahr el-Sal’q. Off to the left I could see the sizeable grove of sycamores which shaded the top of the cliff path down to the ford.

Nothing of any height grew near, except the thin unclimbable poplars, and there were no creepers on the walls; but Charles, I thought, might be right, and the decaying state of the palace be in his favour. I couldn’t see much in the moonlight, but here and there below me something furred or broke the line of the masonry, indicating that ferns and plants had thrust the mortar from between the stones, and the rock below that, though sheer, looked rough enough to provide holds for a clever climber.