The Gabriel Hounds

by Mary Stewart

Genres: Romantic Suspense; General Fiction

Synopsis

When Christabel runs across her cousin Charles while vacationing in Damascus, he mentions their ancient Great Aunt Harriet, who lives cloistered in Dar Ibrahim, a palace atop a hill in Lebanon's Adonis Valley. On a whim, she decides to meet this legendary relative of hers, a Grand Dame replete with young male retinue and secret seraglio. Though her family has told of her aunt's many eccentricities, Christabel is unprepared for what lurks behind Dar Ibrahim's walls.

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

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 nth 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?’

‘A jewel for my love, certainly. A blue bead for my car.’

‘A blue bead for your—? A blue bead for your car? Now this I really do not believe!’

He laughed. ‘Don’t you know? Blue beads ward off the Evil Eye. All the camels and donkeys wear them, so why not the car? They sometimes have rather fetching turquoise ones. Never mind now, I can get one any time. Do you really want some silk? Have a heart, anything you get at home will be just as good, and you won’t have the trouble of carrying it.’

The shopkeeper, who was just behind me, and whose presence we had both completely forgotten, here said with justifiable bitterness: ‘We do all right till you come, The lady had very good taste.’

‘I’m sure she had,’ said my cousin, ‘but you can’t expect me to stand for a dressing-gown in pillar-box red or budgie blue. If you’ve anything else more suitable perhaps you’ll show it to us.’

The man’s expression lightened to pleased comprehension, and, as he took in my cousin’s obviously expensive clothes, anticipation. ‘I understand. Forgive, sir. You are the lady’s husband.’

‘Not yet,’ said Charles. ‘Come on, Christy, let’s go in and buy it, and then get out of this and go where we can talk. My car’s in the square at the end of the street. Where is your party, by the way?’

‘I don’t know, I lost them. We’d been through the Great Mosque, and then we were all trailing in a sort of croc through the souks and I stopped to look at the stalls, and then they’d sort of gone.’

‘And you let them go? Won’t they start combing the souks with bloodhounds when they find you’re missing?’

‘Probably.’ I gathered up the silks and turned to the shop doorway. ‘Charles, if there was some really luscious off-white—’

‘Seriously, hadn’t you better telephone the hotel?’

I shrugged. ‘I doubt if they’ll even miss me before dinner. They’re used to me wandering off by now.’

‘Still the same spoiled little madam I love?’

‘I just don’t like crowds. Anyway, look, who’s talking! Daddy always said you were spoiled rotten yourself, and it’s true, so help me.’

‘But yes. Dear Uncle Chris,’ said my cousin placidly, following me into the black cave of the shop.

In the end I did buy white, some lovely heavy off-white brocade which, not much to my surprise, Charles seemed to conjure from some dim shelf which the shopkeeper hadn’t previously shown me. Moreover, it was cheaper than anything I had yet seen. Nor did it come as much of a surprise to hear Charles talking to the shopkeeper and his assistant in slowish but what seemed to be passably fluent Arabic. He might (as my parents had often told one another in my hearing) be ‘spoiled rotten’, but nobody had ever denied that he had considerable intelligence when he chose to use it – which was (as they insisted) about once a month, and then entirely in his own interests.

When we had reached the square, followed by the shop boy carrying the silk, Charles’s car was instantly recognizable – not by its make or colour, neither of which could be seen, but by the six-deep crowd of small boys who stood round it. On investigation it proved to be a white Porsche 911 S. And because I loved my cousin and knew my stuff, I promptly gave him his cue.

‘What a little beauty! How do you like her?’

He told me. He opened the bonnet and showed me. He almost stripped her down to demonstrate to me. The small boys loved it. They crowded in, twelve deep now, open-mouthed and staring, and probably taking in rather more than I did of the MacPherson struts and lower wishbones, compression ratios and torques and telescopic dampers … I let the loverlike phrases roll over me and watched my cousin’s face and hands and remembered all the other times – the electric train set, the kestrel’s egg, the first wristwatch, the bicycle …

He straightened up, hauled a couple of boys backwards out of the engine and shut the bonnet, paid off the two biggest who had presumably been on guard for him, and gave the shop boy a tip that startled him into fervent speech. We drove off.

‘What’s he saying?’

‘Just “thank you”. In other words, “The blessing of Allah be upon you, your children, and your children’s children.”’ The car threaded its competent way out of the packed square, and turned down a narrow rutted street with every telescopic damper working overtime. ‘This means you, more or less. I hope we’re still engaged?’

‘Faute de mieux, I suppose we are. But I seem to remember that you broke it off yourself, and in writing, when you met that blonde female – what was her name, the model? The one that looked like a Belsen case.’

‘Samantha? She was very chic’

‘Oh, sure. They have to look that anyway, don’t they, so that they can wear all that far-out clobber standing up to their knees in the sea, or stable straw, or empty Coke bottles or something. What happened to Samantha?’

‘Probably met her just fate, but not with me.’

‘Well, that was ages ago – just after the last time we met. No one else in my way? You can’t tell me you’ve been going straight for four years?’

‘Are you joking?’ He changed down, turned sharp left and accelerated down another filthy little alley with a total width of about a yard and a half. ‘But actually, yes. Virtually, if you get me.’

‘I get you. What happened to Emily?’

‘Who the devil’s Emily?’

‘Wasn’t it Emily? Last year, I’m sure Mummy said Emily – or was it Myrtle? The names you pick.’

‘I can’t see that any of them are worse than Christabel.’

I laughed. ‘You have a point there.’

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said my cousin, ‘we’re still pledged as from the cradle. The lovely lolly is still in the family, and Great-Grandfather Rosenbaum, on whom be peace, can stop whirling in his whited sepulchre as from now, so—’

‘Mind that puppy!’

‘It’s all right, I saw it – at least, the Porsche did. So that’s settled. Also gut!’

‘You take a lot for granted, don’t you? Just because I stayed faithful all my teens, even when you had spots.’

‘A fat lot of chance you had to be anything else,’ said my cousin. ‘You were as fat as a seal puppy yourself. I must say you’ve improved.’ A sideways look, summarily brotherly, with rather less sexual appraisement than a dog-show judge. ‘In fact you’re rather gorgeous, coz, and I like that dress. Well, blight my hopes if you must. Is there someone?’

I grinned. ‘Watch it, love, or you’ll find it’s for real, and you’ll be selling your car to buy a diamond.’

‘Suits me,’ he said lightly. ‘And here we are.’

The Porsche slowed down and turned at right angles out of the street into a small unappetising courtyard, where the sun struck blindly down into the dust, and two cats slept on a stack of battered petrol cans. In one corner was a wedge of indigo shade, and into this, with an elegant economy of effort, he drove the car and parked it.

‘Front entrance. Damascus style, Looks like nothing on earth, doesn’t it? Come in.’

It didn’t look at first as if the courtyard could be the entrance to anything. It was boxed, stiflingly, by its high, blind walls, and smelt of hens and stale urine. But at one side a big archway was forbiddingly blocked by a door whose warped timbers still held, in the massive wrought handle and hinges, a hint of some ancient splendour. Charles opened the door on a black passageway, which gave at the other end on an arch of light. We went through.

The light came from a second courtyard, this time an oblong about the size of a tennis court, with pointed Moorish arches on three sides holding a shady cloister, and on the fourth, at the end of the court, a raised platform or dais behind a triple arch, which made a kind of stage or small inner room. The back and sides of this dais were furnished with wide bench seats set against the wall, and I recognized the ‘divan’ or place where men of the East meet and talk. Even in modern Eastern houses today the sitting-rooms are often arranged like this, traditionally, with chairs and sofas backed against the wall on three sides of the room. Low tables stood in front of the couches. In the middle of the court a fountain played; the floor was tiled with blue and white, and the miniature colonnade was jewelled and glittering with mosaics in blue and green and gilt. A turtle dove crooned somewhere, orange trees stood here and there in tubs, and where the fountain splashed I caught the gleam of gold fin. The court was very cool, and smelt of orange-blossom.

‘Come into the divan,’ said Charles. ‘Yes, it’s rather lovely, isn’t it? There’s something very satisfying about Arab building, I always think – all poetry and passion and romance, but very elegant with it. Like their literature, if it comes to that. But you ought to see the furniture; my bedroom’s done up with the rejects from Bluebeard’s chamber.’

‘I know what you mean, I saw some choice pieces in those homey little rooms in the Azem Palace – all inlaid with mother-of-pearl like smallpox, or else pure Victorian and made of arthritic bamboos. But oh, Charles, the rugs! Look at those … and that blue one on the couch … am I really allowed to sit on it?’

‘Go right ahead. I think Ben’ll be in soon, but meanwhile, as he keeps telling me, his house is mine, so what would you like? Tea?’

‘I think I’d rather have coffee. What do you do, clap your hands and summon the eunuchs?’

‘More or less.’ There was a little brass bell on the quite hideous inlaid table in front of me. He picked this up and rang it, then prowled restlessly – he had always been restless – down the steps of the divan as far as the fountain, waiting. I sat down on the beautiful blue rug, leaned against the cushions, and watched him.

No, he hadn’t changed. As children, we were always supposed to be very much alike, Charles and I; in fact, when we were small, people had taken us for twins. This had always infuriated Charles, who in those days had been aggressively masculine, but to me, dumbly worshipping my clever cousin as only a small girl can, it had been a delight. As we grew up the resemblance had, of course, faded. There were still the basic similarities, the dark hair, high Slav cheekbones, slightly aquiline nose, grey eyes and spare build. Now he was some inches taller than I, and he had broadened, but had seemingly reacted from the aggressive masculinity of adolescence towards a sort of carefully casual elegance which somehow suited him, and oddly enough was no less male. He had on his North African travels acquired a fine tan, and this made his eyes look lighter than my own, though this may only have been in contrast to the black lashes which were (in Nature’s unfair way) longer and thicker than mine. Be that as it may, Charles’s eyes were beautiful, dark grey and thickly fringed. Occasionally still, I thought, the resemblance between us must be striking; a turn of the head, a trick of the voice, a movement. What we certainly had in common was the ‘spoiled’ quality that we were so quick to recognise in one another; a flippant cleverness that could become waspish, an arrogance that did not spring from any pride of achievement but was, I am afraid, the result of having too much too young; a fiercely self-conscious rejecting of any personal ties (including those of our families) which we called independence, but which was really an almost morbid fear of possessiveness; and something we called sensitivity, which probably only meant that our skins were too thin for our own comfort.

Perhaps I should explain here that the relationship between Charles and myself was rather closer than that between ordinary cousins. Our fathers, Charles and Christopher Mansel, were identical twins who had been, almost up to the time they were married, both inseparable and indistinguishable, and they had in fact married on the same day – girls who bore no relation to one another, but who (as one could see still) had been of much the same physical type. And happily the two Mrs Mansels liked one another immensely – happily, because Charles and Christopher were business partners, and when the elder twin had inherited the family house in Kent, the younger, Christopher, had built one for himself within a mile of it. So Charles’s son and Christopher’s daughter had been brought up together until four years ago, when Christopher had exported his family – Mummy and myself – to Los Angeles, from which earthly paradise we had escaped occasionally to stay at Charles’s home, ours being let for the duration. But my visits there had never coincided with my cousin’s. In the intervals of Oxford he had spent his time abroad, enjoying himself doing what he called ‘looking around’, and indulging the flair for languages which was part of our heritage from a mongrel ancestry, and which young Charles intended to turn to account when he went into one of the family’s Continental banks. I had not flown so high. I had brought nothing home from Los Angeles except an American flair for dressing, an accent which I lost as soon as I reasonably could, and three years’ experience of the frenetic world of American commercial television, where I had served a wild apprenticeship as producer’s assistant in a small company calling itself Sunshine Television Incorporated – this apparently in blissful ignorance of the fact that like most companies it was normally referred to by its initials, S.T. Inc.

Now here we were again, my cousin and I, and back without effort on the same terms. It was not that we had been, like our fathers, inseparable – that wasn’t possible. What had held us so easily together was, paradoxically enough, a sort of mutual rejection. We had each recognised in the other a refusal to be claimed, and respected this. This had made tolerable – and even funny – the thin-worn family joke about our engagement, and all the cooings over us and ‘how lovely it would be …’ that we had had to endure as children. The cradle-made match of the joke had not in fact come from our parents – I had heard my father insisting that the family characteristics were bad enough singly, but squared they would undoubtedly produce criminal lunatics, where upon Charles’s father would retort that nothing could be more likely in a match that was practically incest, but that since my mother was partly Irish, and Charles’s half-Austrian, half-Russian with French overtones (as her husband put it) the stock might be strong enough to stand it. We also had a Polish Jew, a Dane and a German among our assorted great-grandparents, and counted ourselves English, which was fair enough.

But the auntly cooings over the two charming children (as I believe we were) had gone on, and Charles and I had listened, fought, hated and defended one another, and stayed together. It had occurred to neither of us in actual fact that we could be the object of one another’s sexual stirrings – it would, at sixteen or seventeen, have indeed been incest. So, as much proof against one another as brother and sister, we had watched with equal amusement and derision each other’s first romantic adventures.

The affairs were brief, and inevitable. Sooner or later the girl would start assuming a claim on Charles, and be dropped without trace. Or, somehow, my own pinup would lose his gloss, Charles would say something less than forgiveable about him, I would retort furiously, then laugh and agree, and life would be whole once more.

And our respective parents bore with us lovingly through it all, took off the leading strings, gave us the money, listened to what mattered and forgot the rest, possibly because they wanted freedom from us as urgently as we thought we wanted freedom from them. The result was that we went back to them at intervals like homing bees, and we were happy. Perhaps they saw more clearly than could Charles and I, the basic security in our lives which made his restlessness and my indecisiveness nothing more than the taking of soundings outside the harbour. Perhaps they could even see, through it all, the end that would come.

But here we were at the beginning. A young Arab in white had brought in a tray holding an elaborately chased copper urn and two small blue cups which he set on the table in front of me. He said something to Charles, and went out. My cousin came quickly up the steps of the divan and sat down beside me.

‘He says Ben won’t be in just yet, not until evening. Go on, you pour.’

‘Is his mother away, too?’

‘His mother’s dead. His father’s sister runs the place for them, but she lives retired, as they say. No, not a harem, so don’t look so curious and hopeful; she merely has a long siesta and won’t come out till dinner-time. Smoke?’

‘Not now. I don’t much, as a matter of fact, only now and again for effect, rather silly. Good heavens, what are those? Hashish or something?’

‘No, absolutely harmless. Egyptian. They do look awful, don’t they? Well now, tell me what you’ve been doing.’

He accepted the cup of strong black coffee from me and curled back on the silk-covered seat, waiting expectantly.

Four years of gossip is a lot to catch up on, and we had never been letter-writers. I suppose more than an hour had gone by, and the sun had moved over to leave half the court in shadow before my cousin stretched, stubbed out another Egyptian cigarette and said: ‘Look, what’s all this about sticking with your group? Won’t you change your mind and cut loose now? Stay till Sunday, and I’ll drive you up – the Barada Valley’s lovely and there’s a good road.’

‘Thanks all the same, but I’d better stay with them. We’re doing that run by car in any case, and having a look at Baalbek on the way.’

‘I’d take you there.’

‘It would be smashing, but it’s all fixed, and as a matter of fact I’ve packed, and you know there’s all that silly business with visas here. Mine’s dated tomorrow, and there’s this business of a group passport, and there was such a hooha anyway about my staying behind after the group leaves for England on Saturday that I can’t face it all over again. I think I’ll just go.’

‘All right, then, I’ll see you in Beirut. Where are you staying?’

‘I thought I’d move to the Phoenicia once I’m on my own.’

‘I’ll join you there. Book in for me, will you? I’ll telephone you before I leave Damascus. What had you planned to do with the extra time, apart – I suppose – from going up to Dar Ibrahim?’

‘Dar Ibrahim?’ I repeated blankly.

‘Great-Aunt Harriet’s place. That’s its name, surely you knew? It’s on the Nahr Ibrahim, the Adonis river.’

‘I – yes, I suppose I knew, but I’d forgotten. Goodness, Great-Aunt Harriet … I never. . .