The Gabriel Hounds (21 page)

I asked sharply: ‘You don’t mean that you could pick the lock?’

He laughed. ‘That’s the first note of honest admiration I’ve heard from you since the time I blew the apple-loft door open with carbide. Christy, my sweet, you were born to be a banker’s moll. Take it from me, lock-picking is practically required study in Mansels.’

‘Well, naturally. But—’ I paused, then went on slowly: ‘What this amounts to is that there really is something wrong going on … I haven’t had time to tell you yet, but this afternoon I saw Halide wearing Great-Aunt Harriet’s ruby ring – you remember the one? – and she and John Lethman are certainly having an affair, and not paying very much attention to Aunt H, either, from the look of things – which seemed odd, after last night, when they were so attentive in front of me.’

I told him then, very quickly, about the little scene I had glimpsed this afternoon. He had stopped to listen,
and against the moonlight I could see the attentive slant of his head, but when I had finished he made no comment, merely moving on along the arcade.

I followed. ‘And why did he lie to me?’ I persisted. ‘There must be some reason for the lies about the way he got in, and the hounds, too … Oh, he passed it off tonight, but he really did make a lot of it before, how savage they were, and how unsafe it would be for me to wander about. He made rather a thing about their being loose at night.’

‘Probably wanted you contained in your own court while he carried on his affair with the girl.’

‘Come off it,’ I said curtly. ‘He was carrying that on with me wandering about the place all afternoon. Anyway, the palace is big enough, heaven knows. Charles, she really was wearing that ring, and if you ask me—’

‘Hush a minute, I want to put the light on. Can you hear anything?’

‘No.’

‘Then stay out here and keep your ears open while I go in and look for a rope.’

He vanished through the doorway of the junk-room.

I looked after him thoughtfully. I might not have seen him for four years, but I still knew every tone of his voice as well as I knew my own. For some reason he had suddenly clammed up on me. There was something he knew, or something he thought, that he didn’t propose to share with me. He had been stalling very well, but still he had been stalling.

‘Ah,’ he said, from inside the room.

‘Found one?’

‘Not so long as a cur’s tail, nor so strong as a cobweb, but ’twill serve. Hold the torch while I test it, will you …? Good grief, it’s filthy … Well, I wouldn’t exactly climb the west face of the Dru with it, but it should help me down the wall if we don’t find the back door.’

He emerged from the room, wiping the dirt off his hands. ‘And now a wash, and a wait. We’ll give it an hour, shall we? As long as I can get out of here and away by first light … It’s even possible the Nahr el-Sal’q may have gone down dramatically by morning, and I can save myself a lot of trouble by cutting straight across it and away before anyone sees me.’

‘Where’s your car this time?’

‘I left it about half a mile below the village. There’s a small quarry where I could get it off the road and pretty well out of sight. I did play with the idea of spending the rest of the night in the car and coming across for you myself in the morning, but there’s always the risk that someone might see it standing there in the small hours and Nasirulla bring the news over before you’re clear of the place. And if I ever do want to see Aunt H, I don’t fancy having to talk my way out of that one … So I left a message for Hamid to come up for you at half past nine tomorrow, and I’ll go down to Beirut and wait for you there. And now show me your bathroom, Christy mine, and we’ll listen to the nightingales while I get my picklocks sorted out.’

O softly tread, said Christabel.

S. T. Coleridge:
Christabel

B
UT
they weren’t needed after all.

When we set out again the thin moon had drifted higher, clear of the island trees, and by her faint light we negotiated the bridge once more, and made our way up into the pavilion. The painted door swung out silently, and Charles wedged it open with a stone. Torchlight speared ahead of us into the black gap as we stepped delicately inside and started down the spiral stair.

The paintings slid past us, spectral in the moving light. Domes and minarets, cypresses like spear-heads, gazelles, hawks, Arabian stallions, fruit-trees and singing-birds … and at the bottom a door.

Shut, of course. It looked massive and impassable in that frail light, but to my surprise, when Charles put a hand to it and pulled cautiously, it came easily, and with the same well oiled silence as the one above. I saw then that the latch was gone, and where the original lock had been was a splintered panel of wood. Part of the palace’s history, no doubt, that smashed lock …
The door had been secured again in more recent times – and by a stout hasp and staple and a padlock – but a lock is only as strong as its moorings, and these, like the rest of the palace appointments, were rotten. The padlock was still in place, and locked, but on one side the hasp had been pulled away from the crumbling jamb, and hung there with one socket still holding the useless screw, the other empty.

This, then, was how the dogs had got through. It seemed probable that they had broken the lock themselves, and tonight, since otherwise it would surely have been mended again. And the damage was obviously recent, for splinters and sawdust showed on the floor, and when Charles shone the torch down I caught the gleam of the fallen screw.

‘Luck,’ he said softly.

‘Good for the Gabriel Hounds,’ I breathed.

He smiled, and beckoned. I soft-shoed after him through the door.

It was very dark, a great arched passage with ribbed and vaulted ceiling where the torchlight seemed little more than an impertinent gleam. We were at the end of a sort of underground T-junction, under a vault made by crossed arches. Our door closed one end of the top shaft of the T. A few yards along from us on the left, an open archway led off into blackness, some sort of passageway down which came a draught of air. Straight ahead, and closing the top bar of the T, was another door. Like the main gate of the palace, this door was of bronze, its panels elaborately worked and its surface – in spite of age and damage – retaining
the silky beauty of hand-hammered metal. To either side of it were ornate iron brackets which must once have held torches, and beneath these we saw recesses in the wall, man-high like sentry boxes. The archway itself was carved, and held traces of peeling paint.

‘Must be the Prince’s door,’ I whispered. ‘You were right, it’s the low road to the Seraglio. See if it’s locked.’

But he shook his head and sent the light shifting from the door towards the passageway on the left.

‘Line of retreat first,’ he said softly. ‘This way to the postern, what do you bet? Shall we go see?’

The tunnel was long and curved, not quite level, and very dark. Our progress was slow. As far as I could see the walls were of rough stone – no paintings here – and at intervals bore rusty iron brackets for lights. The floor was rough, too, big slabs of paving with a border of crude cobbles, all worn, filthy, and treacherous with holes. Once a scuffle in the blackness made me stop and clutch at Charles’s arm, but the rat or whatever it was made off without my seeing it. The passage bent to the left, turned uphill a little, and met another at right angles.

We paused at the junction. Our passage was the main stem of another T, this time with a bigger passage crossing the head of it. Charles put the torch out, and we stood for a moment listening. The air was fresher here, and it was an easy guess that this corridor was open to the upper air. Then from somewhere away to the right I heard, faintly, the snuffle and whine of the hounds.

Charles flashed the light that way momentarily, to
show the rough floor of the tunnel mounting in wide and very shallow steps. ‘That probably goes up to the gate you saw in the
midan
, which means, unless I’m wrong—’ He turned the beam to the left, and almost immediately it seemed to focus on something lying in the middle of the sloping way. A scattered trail of droppings, horse or mule. ‘I’m not wrong,’ he said. ‘This way.’

A minute or two later we were looking out through the grove of trees at the edge of the Adonis gorge.

The postern gate was built into the solid rock, recessed deeply into it, and below the level of the plateau behind the palace. A steep ramp cut from the rock led down to it through the grove, and the roots of the sycamores, level with the lintel, reached bare and twisted like mangroves half across the top of the doorway. A buttress protected it on the landward side, and weeds and creepers grew profusely among the tree roots and overhung the cutting from above. Anyone approaching from the plateau would have seen merely a buttress jutting out into the grove, and beyond this the drop to the Adonis gorge. The ramp was just wide enough for a laden beast, and the gate was a heavy, studded affair in excellent repair, both locked and barred.

‘You see?’ said my cousin. ‘Just big enough to take a mule or horse – an emergency door – and the long passage leading under the Seraglio and up to the
midan
. Well this’ll save me a climb, praise be to Allah. Nice of them to leave the key in the lock, wasn’t it? Come back in – no, don’t shoot the bolts again, I think
we’ll leave it unlocked.’ Inside the shut gate again he glanced at his watch. ‘After two. They can’t stay up all night surely?’

‘If anyone’s still awake, it’ll only be Aunt Harriet.’

‘Yes,’ said my cousin. ‘Well …’

He was looking at the ground, fiddling with the button of the flashlight. As it came on again, I caught his expression. This was abstracted, even bleak. He glanced up suddenly. ‘Shall we go back now?’

‘Back? To the Prince’s door? That’ll be locked, too, I expect.’ There must have been something in the ancient secrecies of the place that were making themselves felt; I found myself almost speaking with relief, and I saw him give me another quick glance.

‘Possibly, though I doubt if they’d have the place sealed up internally, so to speak. Christy—’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you want to go on?’

‘On?’ We had reached the first T-fork and turned into the home run. ‘Back here, you mean? Where else can we go?’

‘I mean on to the Prince’s door. Would you rather just go back to the Seraglio?’

‘Would you?’

‘No, not now. But if you’d rather get out from under and leave it to me—’

‘Do me a favour, will you? I’m not afraid of John Lethman, even if you are.’

He started to say something, apparently thought better of it, then grinned and said merely: ‘
En avant, mes braves
.’ We went on.

And the Prince’s door wasn’t locked. It opened silently, and beyond it was a long, vaulted corridor, pitch black and very still and quite empty. Charles paused. The torchlight seemed almost to be lost in the blackness ahead of us. I thought he hesitated a moment, then he went forward. I followed.

The corridor, like the spiral stair, had once been richly decorated, but though it was swept and reasonably clean underfoot it was in bad repair, and the painted landscapes on the walls were faded and peeling, and even in the torchlight could be seen to be very dirty. The floor was of marble, overlaid with some drab and tattered matting, on which our footsteps made no sound. The air was still and dead and smelled of dust.

To either side, at intervals, were doorways of the kind familiar to me from my wanderings in the palace, most of them gaps of darkness where broken doors hung open on emptiness or confusion. Charles shone the light into the first of these, which seemed to contain nothing but large earthenware jars.

‘Nothing there but forty thieves,’ he commented.

‘What did you expect?’

‘Heaven knows … And here’s Aladdin’s cave. Half a minute, let’s look.’

At first I couldn’t see what had caught his attention. The room seemed to contain much the same jumble as the ‘junk-room’ in the Seraglio; furniture, ornaments, cobwebs – the same dreary and neglected clutter of years. On a rickety chest of drawers was a pile of books, rather less dusty than the rest.

The torchlight probed along the pile, and after it went
Charles’s fastidious fingers. He turned the thickest volume spine upwards. ‘I thought so.’

‘What is it?’

‘Chambers’s Dictionary.’

It had fallen open in his hand. I peered at it in the torchlight. ‘So useful. Did you know what a cusk was? It says it’s a torsk or a burbot. What d’you know? Crosswords, Charles.’

‘As you say.’ He shut the book on a puff of dust, and picked up another.

This was smaller than the dictionary, but had a more important look, with thick leather covers which, under their fine greying of dust, seemed to be elaborately tooled. He handled this gently, and when he blew the dust off I caught the gleam of gilding.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a copy of the Koran, and a rather gorgeous copy at that. Take a look.’

The paper was thick and felt expensive, and the Arabic script, beautiful in itself, was enhanced by the ornate designs which headed the Suras, or chapters. It was certainly not the kind of book I would have imagined anyone would throw out into a dusty room to be forgotten.

He laid it down without comment, and the light was sent straying further over the debris. It halted suddenly.

‘See what I see?’

At first, among the grey anonymous rubbish, all I could distinguish was the shape of a battered violin, something that might have been a pair of roller skates,
and a tangle of leather thongs and buckles and tassels which resolved itself eventually into a couple of bridles. Behind these and half hidden by them were two dusty objects that looked like ornaments. China dogs.

Even so, I stared at them for a good five seconds, I suppose, before I got there.

‘Charles! Not your Gabriel Hounds?’

‘Indeed and indeed.’ He knelt down in the dust beside the tangle of leather. ‘Hold the torch, will you?’

I watched him as he carefully lifted the bridles aside and the one of the china ornaments in his hands. I noticed with some wonder how gently, reverently almost, he handled the thing. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, and began to wipe the dust away.