‘Lord, yes, I’d forgotten that … I don’t know if I could do anything about them. If he does take me up to see Aunt H again, there’s a chance he may shut them up, but otherwise—’
‘Have to chance it, don’t worry. It’s a big place. Let’s get back, shall we?’
‘What about the faun?’
‘I dare say I could buy his silence, wouldn’t you say?’
‘I’m darned sure you could,’ I said.
‘And there’s no one in the village going to be able to cross the Narh el-Sal’q to report that a white Porsche has been standing in the village street all day. Incidentally, I’ll wait for a bit till I’ve made sure they’ve let you back into the palace. If they don’t, come down again to the ford, and we’ll think again. But I’m certain they will.’
‘It’s all very well for you. I don’t want to have to spend another night without even a nightie.’
‘That’s not my fault, that’s the will of Allah. I’ll bring you a toothbrush tonight, but I’m damned if I’ll climb back across the cascade carrying a nightie. You could always borrow a djibbah from Great-Aunt Harriet.’
And on this note of unfeeling comfort he led the way back towards the cascade and the gully.
8
But who shall teach thee what the night-comer is?
The Koran: Sura LXXXVI
IT all went exactly as Charles would have wished. It seemed almost too easy. Jassim may have imagined it was Nasirulla who was ringing for entry, for he opened the gate immediately, and when he saw who it was, let me in with not much more than a bit of sulky muttering, and in a moment or two I was explaining the circumstances to John Lethman.
If he was put out he concealed it very well. ‘How stupid of me not to have expected this, especially when Nasirulla didn’t turn up. It’s happened before after heavy rain when the snows are still melting. Of course you must stay. Did you really go the whole way up the river to try and find a way across?’
‘Yes, right up to the source, at least I suppose it’s the source, it’s a sort of cascade coming out of the cliff. The driver thought there might be a way over if he helped me, but it would have taken a rock-climber, and I jolly well wasn’t going to risk it. So he gave up, and I came back.’
‘He’s gone back to Beirut?’
I nodded. ‘He said there’d be no chance of its going down before tomorrow. So I gave him a message for my cousin Charles not to come up here, because Great-Aunt Harriet wasn’t well enough to see him.’ I added: ‘That’s how I put it, anyway. I’ll explain better when I see him myself. Are you going to tell her I’ve come back?’
He hesitated, then turned up a hand, smiling. ‘I’m not sure. Let’s defer the decision until she wakes up, shall we?’
‘You play by ear, do you?’
‘Exactly that. Come back to your garden, Miss Mansel. You’re just in time for lunch.’
Whether Jassim had managed to convey the news to Halide, or whether she would normally have shared the meal with John Lethman herself, I had no way of telling. Only a few minutes after he had shown me back to the room in the Seraglio Court, the girl arrived with a tray set for two, which she thumped down with patent resentment on the table, and then stood smouldering at me and directing a rapid stream of Arabic at John Lethman which sounded like nothing more nor less than the spitting of an angry cat.
He took it calmly, only once interrupting with slight irritation, and finally, with a glance at his watch, making some statement that seemed to satisfy her. At any rate it silenced her and sent her away, with another look at me and a flouncing swirl of black skirts. No pretty silks this morning, I noticed, and no paint; just a working dress of rusty black, and none too clean at that. I thought with half-irritated amusement that if it was competition she was worrying about, she need hardly count me; I hadn’t seen hot water or a hairbrush for more than twenty-four hours, and must look the worse for my long, hot trek up the Nahr el-Sal’q and back; but it wasn’t exactly possible to explain that I wasn’t entering the competition anyway.
Lethman was looking embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry about that. Have a drink.’
He brought a glass of wine and handed it to me. As I took it our hands touched. His was reddish-brown, mine pale brown; but both what you would call white. Perhaps she had reason after all.
‘Poor Halide,’ I said, and sipped the wine. It was the same cool golden stuff of yesterday. I added quickly: ‘It isn’t fair when she has so much to do. Would she be offended if I left her something? I didn’t this morning because I wasn’t quite sure.’
‘Offended?’ There was the slightest edge on his voice. ‘You can’t offend an Arab with money.’
‘How very sensible,’ I said, and helped myself from a dish of kefta, savoury meat balls on a mound of rice. ‘This waterfall I saw at the top of the Narh el-Sal’q, does it have any part in the Adonis cult you were telling me about?’
‘Not really, though there’s a minor site near by which was supposed to be a subsidiary of the temple of Venus at Afka. You wouldn’t see it unless you climbed up out of the gorge … no? Well, it’s hardly worth a special trip …’
The rest of the luncheon passed pleasantly, and it was easy enough to keep him on impersonal subjects. This much to my relief. I didn’t want to strain my talent for deception too far, and my recent meeting with Charles was just a little too vivid in my mind. Any further discussion of family affairs was better avoided, and I wasn’t anxious to press for another interview with Great-Aunt Harriet. And here it seemed probable that John Lethman’s interests coincided with my own.
As soon as lunch was over he got to his feet. If I didn’t mind …? He had things he must see to … If I would excuse him now …? I reassured him quickly, almost too eagerly. The garden was drowsy with the afternoon’s heat, and I would sit there, I told him, and doze over a book. And if I might do a bit of exploring later on? Not the Prince’s Court, of course, but elsewhere? So fascinating … a chance I might never have again … and of course I wouldn’t dream of disturbing Great-Aunt Harriet … no earthly need for her even to know …
We parted on a mutual note of restrained relief. After he had gone, taking the tray with him, I collected some cushions off the window-seat and took them out into the garden, where I settled myself at the edge of the pool in the shade of a tamarisk tree.
It was very quiet. The trees hung still, the water was a flat, flashing glass, the flowers drooped in the heat. Near me on the stone a lizard slept motionless, not even moving when a quail shuffled past to settle in the dust, wings outspread. On the broken bridge the peacock displayed half-heartedly to a mate who wasn’t even watching. Somewhere among the blazing magenta flowers of the bougainvillaea which covered the arcade a bird sang, and I recognised last night’s king, the nightingale. Somehow, he didn’t sound the same as he had with the trappings of storm and starlight. Some finches and a turtle-dove started up in opposition, and the nightingale, with a trill that sounded like a yawn, gave up. I didn’t blame him. I slept.
It was about an hour later that I woke, and the sleepy heat seemed to have overtaken the whole place. Now, there was no sound at all. When I got up from my cushions the lizard flicked out of sight, but the quail never moved its head from under its wing. I set out to explore.
There is little point in describing here in detail my wanderings of that afternoon. It wasn’t likely that any outer gate would open straight into the women’s quarters, but the ‘postern’ had been at the back, and since the Seraglio Court, with its rooms and enormous garden, stretched the full width of the palace at the rear, my search had obviously to start there. Now, the postern had apparently been hidden in the trees at the south-eastern corner. When I looked out of my bedroom window I could just see the tops of those trees where they projected beyond the corner. They were level with my window-sill. The Seraglio, was in fact, a storey and a half above the level of the plateau. The postern must open on some corridor below it, or at the foot of a flight of steps.
&n
bsp; 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.