The Aviary Gate (6 page)

‘Does anyone come and go freely from that place?'

‘Of course, many, many people. Every day. It's just the small matter of finding the right one,' Paul said, lifting his head to look through the window.

Carew came and stood beside him. Although the sun was now high in the sky, the pale disc of an almost-full moon was just visible still, sinking slowly on the horizon. He rested his elbows on the windowsill, looked up at the sky. ‘Perhaps the stars can tell us what to do. You should ask your friend, what's his name?'

‘Do you mean Jamal?'

‘If that's his name. The stargazer.'

‘Yes, that's him. Jamal. Jamal al-Andalus.' Paul was already pulling on his Ottoman robe. ‘Call the janissary, but be discreet. Come on; we've no time to lose.'

Loving Friend, I have received your letter, &ct. 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, daughter of the late Captayn of that ship, who on the eve of her marriage to a merchant of the Levant Company, later Sir Paul Pindar, the late Honourable Embassador from his Majestie at Constantinople, who was carryed as a Slave by the Turks and sold at Constantinople, and from there chosen to serve as
cariye
in the Seraglio of the Grand Signor, the which, as near as God shall enable me, I will make knowne unto you.

Elizabeth's heart was racing.
I knew it
. Although the ink was now faded to a thin sepia, it was still perfectly legible, the writing itself even and not too cramped: a good clear secretary hand, surprisingly easy to read. The paper, apart from the watermark along one of the folded sides, was in better condition than she had dared hope.

Elizabeth glanced up. It was just after nine on Saturday morning and she was one of only two or three people in the Oriental Reading Room at that early hour. She had managed to install herself at one of the corner tables, as far away as possible from the librarian's desk. Soon, she knew, she would have to show them her discovery, but she wanted a chance to be able to read it first, make her own copy of it, without anyone breathing down her neck.

She bent her head again over the paper and read.

The
Celia
set sail from Venice, with a fair wind, on the seventeenth, and a cargo of silkes, velvets and cloth of gold and tissue, Peasters, Chickines and Sultanies, in the hold, the last voyage the Captayn Lamprey would make before the winter storms.

The night of the nineteenth, ten leagues from Ragusa, on the barren, broken coast of Dalmatia, it pleased God to send dirty weather. There arose a great gust of wind out of the north, and soon the wind did increase so much that all on board were afeared of their lives …

Although the next few lines were made illegible by the watermark, Elizabeth read on.

And the
Celia
being something tender sided, and her Ports being all open, her Lee Ports were all under water and all the chests of silkes and velvets and cloth of gold and tissue, several of which were not the merchants wares but were to have been the bride's wedding portion, and all the other things that were betwixt the Deckes did swimme, and the Piece of Ordnance that was hald in, got loose and fell to Leeward, and like to carrie out the side.

Here, too, there followed several lines that were illegible.

At length they espied this Sayle coming out of the west, and gave thanks, thinking that their deliverance was at hand … of one hundred tunnes or thereabouts, and they knew then that hee was a Turkish man of Warre. And when Captayn Lamprey saw him, he knew that there was no hope of running away, but that they must either fight it out or runne ashore and be smashed on the rocks. So the Captayn he called up his Company, and asked them what they would doe, whether they would stand by him and shew themselves like men, and that it might never be said that they should runne away from him, being not much bigger than they, although hee had as many more Ordnance as they had.

… Captayn Lamprey bade all the women on board, nuns from the Convent at Santa Clara, shut themselves in the Steerage and hale the Steerage doore to and make it fast on the inside, and there guard the youngest nun who was with them, and also his daughter Celia, and cause them not to come out, not under any pretext, until he should give word.

Elizabeth now came to one of the folds in the paper, where the watermark had obliterated several lines of text.

But Captayn Lamprey, seeing what they were, told him that they were Dogges, scurvy cur-tailed skin-clipping Dogges, but that they should have all the silver plate, and all the Chickins and Piastres that they could carry if they would go away from them, that there was nothing more for them here. But one of the chiefs of these men, who was a Renegado, one that could speake very good English, said to him, Thou Dog, if I doe finde anything more then thou hast confest to me, I will give thee a hundred times as much, and when I have done, I will heave thee overboard. But still Captayn Lamprey he said nothing …

Now in the meantime the women were still locked in the Steerage, in terror of their lives, water lapping almost up to their waistes, the skirts of their gowns heavy as lead. As the Captayn had bid them, they made not a sound. Not daring to speke they beseeched God in their hearts to deliver them, for if the Turkes did not get them, they feared to drowne in the Sea …

And they caused three men to take him, and they laid him upon his belly upon the lower Decke, and two of them lay on his legges, and one sate on his neck and gave him so many blowes that his daughter, for all that the nuns entreated her nay, swiftly unbarred the Cabbin doore and ran out from her hiding place and cried out stop stop take me but spare my poor father I beseech you, and seeing that her father had six or seven bleeding wounds upon him she fell down on her knees, her face white as death, and did entreate the Turkes again that they would take her but save his life. Whereupon the Captayn of the Turkes did straight away pinyon her, and in the heat of bloud in front of her verie eyes did runne her father in the side with a Culaxee, and bore him up against the Steerage doore, cutting him cleane through his body—

‘And there it ends, just like that?'

‘Yes. In mid-sentence. What I thought was a whole narrative turns out to be just a fragment after all.'

The Reading Room closed at one o'clock on a Saturday and Elizabeth was having a late lunch with Eve at Alfie's in the covered
market. Although Christmas was still six weeks away the waitress was wearing a red and white pinafore and reindeer horns made from green tinsel.

‘Oh, come on – it's an amazing find.' Eve was spreading butter on the last of her bread. ‘And I believe that means you owe me fifty quid.'

‘Yeah, right.'

‘Ah well, at least I made you smile.' Eve looked pleased. ‘You look almost cheerful this morning, my girl—' She seemed to be about to add something to this, but then thought better of it. Shall I tell her about last night? Elizabeth thought, still glowing inwardly – but Eve was in such a mellow mood it seemed a shame to spoil it by having another argument about Marius.

‘So, what happens now? Will you be able to look at it again?'

‘They've taken it off to show to their early manuscript expert, as you'd expect. But the librarian seemed to think that it'll come back to the Oriental Library – eventually.'

‘Don't hold your breath,' Eve said cynically. ‘In my experience, once you let the experts in, that's it –
pouf
. It'll never see the light of day again. You should have kept quiet about it.'

Elizabeth shrugged. ‘Oh well, too late now.'

‘Did you manage to copy any of it?'

‘Most of it, although some of it's rather patchy.' Elizabeth explained about the watermark. ‘But it's enough to be getting on with. The question of authorship, for instance—' the waitress came up, bringing them two cups of coffee, ‘it's written in the third person, but the account is so incredibly vivid, I just can't believe the person who wrote it wasn't there.'

‘And the letter, that didn't give you any indication?'

‘None at all. Only that the account was written at someone's request, but it doesn't say who that someone was. It's a mystery.'

‘How exciting, I love mysteries.' Eve took a sip of her coffee, her glasses misting up in the steam. ‘Anything else?'

‘Well, I did a lot of Googling yesterday. No prizes for guessing that there were no entries under Celia Lamprey.'

‘And under Pindar?'

‘What, an obscure Elizabethan merchant?' Elizabeth shook her head. ‘You won't believe this, but there are hundreds, literally
hundreds. Not all of them are about Pindar himself, of course. Quite a few turned out to be about this pub in Bishopsgate, it's built on the site where Pindar once had a house.' Elizabeth took a last mouthful of soup. ‘A socking great pile, by the sounds of it, part of the country estate he built for himself when he retired; pulled down in the nineteenth century when they extended Liverpool Street Station. But that's really neither here nor there,' she waved her spoon in the air. ‘The most interesting thing about him seems to have been the Levant Company mission, in which he took part in 1599.'

‘I remember, you mentioned it before.'

‘I seem to keep coming back to it. The company wanted to renew their trading rights in the Ottoman-controlled parts of the Mediterranean, and in order to do that the etiquette was that they had to give the Sultan a wonderful gift. Something that was better than anyone else's gift – most especially the French and the Venetians, who were their trading rivals. So after a great deal of wrangling they finally commissioned this man, an organ maker named Thomas Dallam, to create what seems to have been a wonderful mechanical toy.'

‘I thought you said it was a clock?'

‘More like a kind of automaton: part clock, part musical instrument. The clock was the main mechanism, but when it struck the hour all kinds of things began to happen: a chime of bells went off, two angels played on silver trumpets, the organ played a tune, and finally a holly bush full of mechanical birds – black birds and thrushes – shook their wings and sang.'

‘So did it do the trick?'

‘It was nearly a complete disaster. Thomas Dallam travelled all the way out to Constantinople with his amazing contraption – six months on the company's ship the
Hector
– only to find when he arrived there that it had been all but destroyed on the voyage. Sea water had seeped into the packing cases, and much of the wood was not only wet, but had completely rotted away. The merchants were dismayed, of course. They'd been waiting for four years to present the Sultan with their gift. Anyway, there was nothing else for it, Thomas Dallam had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. He left his own account of his adventures,' she searched in her notes, ‘yes, here it is, in Hakluyt apparently:
The Account of an Organ Carryed to the Grand Seignor and Other Curious Matter, 1599
.'

‘I wonder what the other curious matter could be.'

‘I'll let you know.' Elizabeth closed her notebook. ‘I'm hoping to track it down this afternoon.'

Eve looked at her watch. ‘Oh my God, is that the time? Sorry, sweetie, got to go.' She jumped up, pulling out a ten-pound note and putting it on the table. ‘Will that be enough?'

‘Yes, of course. Go, go.'

Elizabeth watched Eve pull on the bright pink mohair coat she was wearing that day. She was halfway to the door, when suddenly on impulse she came back to their table.

‘Good girl!' she said softly. And leant in to kiss Elizabeth swiftly on the cheek.

Elizabeth was in no hurry. She ordered another cup of coffee and sat looking through her notes. The prospect of the work ahead of her filled her with sudden energy. She felt calmer and more focused, she realised, than she had for weeks.

From the table behind her she became aware of the voices of two women speaking together. Turning her head slightly, she recognised the older of the two women, a visiting American colleague of Marius's she had met once last summer at an English Faculty drinks party he had taken her to in the very early days of their affair. For reasons that she now found hard to recall, Elizabeth had not liked her much. ‘There's something … phoney about her,' she had said to Marius, ‘why should I think that?' But he had only laughed.

Now, although it was winter, the American wore open-toed white Birkenstocks on her feet. Her skin was heavily tanned, the exact colour, and, quite possibly, texture, Elizabeth mused with uncharacteristic spikiness, of some endangered tropical wood. She had patronised Elizabeth then as she was patronising the younger woman with her now – one of her students, Elizabeth guessed. Her voice had that quality peculiar to certain academics: not strident, exactly, but somehow … implacable. Its cadences, with their long flat vowels, rose and fell like the swell of the Pacific Ocean. They were taking of DPhil theses; the words ‘gendered' and ‘discourse' droned through their conversation.