The Gabriel Hounds
Read The Gabriel Hounds Online
Authors: Mary Stewart
| The Gabriel Hounds |
| Mary Stewart |
| 2011 |
The Lebanon is a country where anything can happen, a land wreathed in opium smoke and the sweet smell of hashish. Legend has it, that, when the Gabriel Hounds run howling over the crumbling palace of Dar Ibrahim, someone will die. When Christie Mansel arrives to look up her great-aunt Harriet, the eccentric Englishwoman who lives in seclusion amid the decaying splendour of the palace, she fears the legend will mean she is not allowed to leave …
MARY STEWART
First published in Great Britain in 1967 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK Company
Copyright © Mary Stewart 1967
The right of Mary Stewart to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Epub ISBN: 978 1 444 72055 6
Book ISBN: 978 1 444 72054 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
An Hachette UK Company
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For
Helen King
This story is freely based on the accounts of the life of the Lady Hester Stanhope. I have tried to shorten my references as much as possible, but for those who are interested, the list of books of page
68
will act as a guide and also an acknowledgement of my main sources. My debt to Doughty’s
Travels in Arabia Deserta
, and also to Robin Fedden’s marvellous
Syria and Lebanon
(John Murray) will be more than obvious.
One other word may perhaps be necessary. In a story of this sort it is inevitable that officials are mentioned by office, if not by name. Any references to Government bodies, Cabinet Ministers, frontier officials, etc., are made purely for the purposes of this story, and do not refer to any actual holders of these offices, living or dead. Moreover, though the Adonis Valley certainly exists, the Nahr el-Sal’q – with the village and the palace of Dar Ibrahim – does not.
I should also like to thank all those friends, from Edinburgh to Damascus, who have given me so much generous help.
M. S.
No vain discourse shalt thou hear therein:
Therein shall be a gushing fountain;
Therein shall be raised couches,
And goblets ready placed,
And cushions laid in order,
And carpets spread forth.
The Koran:
Sura LXXXVII
I
MET
him in the street called Straight.
I had come out of the dark shop doorway into the dazzle of the Damascus sun, my arms full of silks. I didn’t see anything at first, because the sun was right in my eyes and he was in shadow, just where the Straight Street becomes a dim tunnel under its high corrugated iron roof.
The souk was crowded. Someone stopped in front of me to take a photograph. A crowd of youths went by, eyeing me and calling comments in Arabic, punctuated by ‘Miss’ and ‘Allo’ and ‘Goodbye’. A small grey donkey pattered past under a load of vegetables three times its own width. A taxi shaved me so near that I took a half step back into the shop doorway, and the shopkeeper, at my elbow, put out a protective hand for
his rolls of silk. The taxi swerved, horn blaring, past the donkey, parted a tight group of ragged children the way a ship parts water, and aimed without any slackening of speed at the bottleneck where the street narrowed sharply between jutting rows of stalls.
It was then that I saw him. He had been standing, head bent, in front of a jeweller’s stall, turning over some small gilt trinket in his hand. At the blast of the taxi’s horn he glanced up, and stepped quickly out of the way. The step took him from black shadow full into the sun’s glare, and, with a queer jerk of the heart, I saw who it was. I had known he was in this part of the world, and I suppose it was no odder to meet him in the middle of Damascus than anywhere else, but I stood there in the sunlight gazing, I suppose rather blankly, at the averted profile, four years strange to me, yet so immediately familiar, and somehow so inevitably here.
The taxi vanished into the black tunnel of the main souk with a jarring of gears and another yell of its horn. Between us the dirty hot street was empty. One of the rolls of silk slipped from my hands, and I grabbed for it, to catch it in a cascade of crimson just before it reached the filthy ground. The movement and the blinding colour must have caught his attention, for he turned, and our eyes met. I saw them widen, then he dropped the gilt object back on the jeweller’s stall, and, ignoring the stream of bad American which the man was shouting after him, crossed the street towards me. The years rolled back more swiftly even than the crimson silk as he said, with exactly the same intonation
with which a small boy had daily greeted his even smaller worshipper:
‘Oh, hullo! It’s you!’
I wasn’t a small girl any more, I was twenty-two, and this was only my cousin Charles, whom of course I didn’t worship any more. For some reason it seemed important to make this clear. I tried to echo his tone, but only managed to achieve a sort of idiotic deadpan calm. ‘Hullo. How nice to see you. How you’ve grown!’
‘Haven’t I just, and I shave nearly every week now.’ He grinned at me, and suddenly it wasn’t the small boy any more. ‘Christy love, thank goodness I’ve found you! What in the world are you doing here?’
‘Didn’t you know I was in Damascus?’
‘I knew you were coming, but I couldn’t find out when. I meant, what are you doing on your own? I thought you were here with a package tour?’
‘Oh, I am,’ I said, ‘I just got kind of detached. Did Mummy tell you about it?’
‘She told my mother, who passed it on to me, but nobody seemed very clear what you were doing or just when you’d be here, or even where you’d be staying. You might have known I’d want to catch up with you. Don’t you ever give anyone your address?’
‘I thought I had.’
‘You did tell your mother a hotel, but it was the wrong one. When I rang them up they told me your group had gone to Jerusalem, and when I telephoned there they referred me back to Damascus. You cover your tracks well, young Christy.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘if I’d known there was a chance of
meeting you before Beirut … Our itinerary was changed, that’s all, something to do with the flight bookings, so we’re doing the tour back to front, and they had to alter the Damascus hotel. Oh, blast, and we leave for Beirut tomorrow! We’ve been here three days now. Have you been here all the time?’
‘Only since yesterday. The man I have to see in Damascus isn’t coming home till Saturday, but when I was told you’d be about due to arrive here, I came straight up. As you say, blast. Look, perhaps it’s a good thing they’ve turned your tour arsy-versy – you needn’t go tomorrow, surely? I’ve got to wait here till the weekend myself, so why don’t you cut loose from your group and we’ll do Damascus together and then go on to Beirut? You’re not bound to stay with them, are you?’ He looked down at me, raising his brows. ‘What on earth are you doing in a package tour, anyway? I wouldn’t have thought it was exactly your thing?’
‘I suppose not, but I got a sudden yen to see this part of the world, and I didn’t know a thing about it, and they make it so easy – they do everything about bookings and things, and there’s a courier who speaks Arabic and knows the score. I couldn’t very well come on my own, could I?’
‘I don’t see why not. And don’t look at me with those great big helpless eyes, either. If any female was ever entirely capable of looking after herself, it’s you.’
‘Oh, sure, Black Belt of the
n
th degree, that’s me.’ I regarded him with pleasure. ‘Oh, Charles, believe it or not, it’s marvellous to see you! Thank goodness your
mother caught up with you and told you I’d be here! It’d have been lovely to have some time here with you, but it can’t be helped. I’d planned to wait around in Beirut after the rest of my group goes home on Saturday, so I’ll stick to that, I think. Have you had a good trip? A sort of Grand Tour, wasn’t it, with Robbie?’
‘Sort of. Seeing the world and brushing up my Arabic before doing some real work in Beirut. Oh, it all went like a bomb … We drove down through France and shipped the car to Tangier and then ambled along through North Africa. Robbie had to go home from Cairo, so I came on alone. It was in Cario that I got Mother’s letter saying you were coming on this trip of yours, so I came straight up, hoping we’d coincide.’
‘Did you say you had to see someone here? Business?’
‘Partly. Look, what are we standing here for? This place smells, and any minute now we’ll be mown down by one of these donkeys. Come and have some tea.’
‘Love to, but where do you propose to find tea in the middle of Damascus?’
‘In my little pad, which is the nearest thing to the Azem Palace you ever saw.’ He grinned. ‘I’m not at an hotel, I’m staying with a man I knew at Oxford, Ben Sifara, I don’t know whether you ever heard your father mention the name? Ben’s father’s a bit of a VIP in Damascus – knows everyone and owns a bit of everything, has a brother banking in Beirut and a brother-in-law in the Cabinet – Minister of the Interior,
no less. The family’s what they call a “good family” over here, which in Syria just means stinking rich.’
‘Nice going. At that rate we’d be well up in the stud book.’
‘Well, aren’t we?’ My cousin was crisply ironic. I knew what he meant. My own family of merchant bankers had been stinking rich for three generations, and it was surprising how many people were willing to overlook the very mixed, not to say plain bastard blood that pumped through the Mansel veins.
I laughed. ‘I suppose he’s a business contact of Daddy and Uncle Chas?’
‘Yes. Ben made me promise to look him up if ever I was in Syria, and Father was keen for me to make contact, so here I am.’
‘Big deal. Well, I’d love to come. Just wait a moment till I get my silk.’ I considered the brilliant mass in my arms. ‘The only thing is, which?’
‘I’m not wild keen on either, if you want the truth.’ My cousin lifted a fold, felt it, frowned on it, and let it fall. ‘Nice texture, but the red’s rather fierce, isn’t it? People’d post letters in you. And the blue…? not, but not, for you, my love. It doesn’t suit me, and I like my girls to tone.’
I regarded him coldly. ‘And just for that I’ll buy them both and have them made up in stripes. Horizontal. No, I do rather see what you mean. They looked all right in the shop.’
‘Since they keep it pitch dark in there, they would.’
‘Well, fair enough, I wanted it for a dressing-gown. Perhaps in a dim light …? I mean, the pattern’s rather nice and Eastern …?’
‘No.’
‘The sickening thing about you,’ I said bitterly, ‘is that you’re sometimes right. What were you buying for yourself along Woolworth Alley, if it comes to that? A ring for Emily?’