The Aviary Gate

A Novel

KATIE HICKMAN

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Cast of Characters

Glossary

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

Imprint

This book is for my son

Luke

Nur ‘Aynayya

Light of My Eyes

who was there at the very beginning

(*
indicates that they existed in real life
)

English

*Paul Pindar – Levant Company merchant; secretary to the English ambassador

John Carew – his servant, a master cook

*Sir Henry Lello – the English ambassador

Lady Lello – his wife

*Thomas Dallam – organ maker

*Thomas Glover – Levant Company merchant, secretary to the English ambassador

*William and Jonas Aldridge – merchants, English consuls at Chios and Patras

*John Sanderson – Levant Company merchant

*John Hanger – his apprentice

*Mr Sharp and Mr Lambeth – Levant Company merchants based in Aleppo

*The Reverend May – parson to the English embassy in Constantinople

*Cuthbert Bull – cook to the English embassy

Thomas Lamprey – a sea captain

Celia Lamprey – his daughter

Annetta – her friend

Ottoman

*Safiye, the Valide Sultan – the mother of Sultan Mehmet III

*Esperanza Malchi – the Valide's
kira

Gulbahar, Ayshe, Fatma and Turhan – the Valide's principal handmaids

Gulay, the Sultan's Haseki – the Sultan's most favoured concubine

*Handan – the Sultan's concubine, and mother of Prince Ahmet

Hanza – a young woman in the harem

Hassan Aga, also known as Little Nightingale – Chief Black Eunuch

Hyacinth – a eunuch

Suleiman Aga – a senior eunuch

Cariye Lala – the Under-Mistress of the Harem Baths

Cariye Tata and Cariye Tusa – harem servants

*Sultan Mehmet III – Ottoman Sultan 1595–1603

*Nurbanu – his mother, the old Valide Sultan

*Janfreda Khatun – a former harem stewardess

Jamal al-Andalus – an astronomer

Others

*De Brèves – the French Ambassador

*The Venetian Bailo – the Venetian Ambassador

Aga
– Master, chief

cariye
– The humblest ranking of the slave girls in the palace

gözde
– ‘Girl in the sultan's eye', a term indicating a possible relationship with the sultan

Haseki
– ‘Favourite', a sixteenth-century title given to the principal concubine of the sultan

kadιn
– An honorific meaning ‘lady of rank'. This word replaced the earlier ‘
khatun
', also an honorific used by high-ranking women.

kira
– Business agent working for the Valide Sultan, or any other lady in the harem

Padishah
– ‘God's Shadow upon Earth', the usual term used by the Ottomans to mean ‘the sovereign'

Valide Sultan
– ‘Royal mother', the mother of the reigning sultan

yalι
-
A mansion beside the Bosphorous

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind
.

T. S. Eliot –
Four Quartets

The parchment, when Elizabeth found it, was the amber colour of old tea, frail as leaf mould.

A small folio sheet, it had been folded carefully three ways so that it fitted perfectly between the pages of the book. Along one of the folded sides was a watermark. Elizabeth looked back at the catalogue entry quickly –
opus astronomicus quaorum prima de sphaera planetarium
– and then at the folded sheet again.

I've found it.

Her throat felt tight. For a moment she sat quite still. The librarian had his back to her, was bending down over a trolley of books. She looked up at the clock on the wall opposite: five minutes to seven.

She had five minutes till the library closed, perhaps less. The bell had already rung, and most of the other readers were beginning to pack their things away. But still Elizabeth could not bring herself to unfold the paper. Instead she picked up the book and, holding it carefully ajar, the spine of the book cradled in her cupped hands, she raised it to her face. Carefully, very carefully now, she told herself.

Then, with both eyes closed, the sniff of a tentative cat. And at once: snuff and old dust, a faint whiff of camphor. And then the sea, definitely the sea. And something else, what was it? She breathed in again, very gently this time.

Roses. Sadness.

Elizabeth put the book down, her hands trembling.

‘Are they dead?'

‘The girl, yes.'

A slim figure, two thin gold chains just visible on delicate ankles, lay sprawled face down amongst the cushions on the floor.

‘The other?'

The Valide Sultan's
kira
, the Jewess Esperanza Malchi, brought her lantern a little closer to the face of the second body, spreadeagled clumsily on the divan. From the pocket in her robe she brought out a small jewelled mirror and held it close to the nostrils. An almost imperceptible film clouded the surface of the glass. ‘No, Majesty. Not yet.'

In the shadows by the doorway to the little bedchamber, Safiye, the Valide Sultan, the mother of God's Shadow Upon Earth, drew her veil a little closer round her shoulders, shivering despite the closeness of the night. On her finger an emerald the size of a pigeon's egg, briefly catching the light from Esperanza's lantern, glittered like a cat's eye. ‘But it cannot be long. What do you think?'

‘It won't be long, Majesty. Shall I send for the physician?'

‘No!' the reply was sharp. ‘No physician. Not yet.'

They turned towards the dying figure on the divan, a massive mound of soft black flesh. On the floor beside the divan was an upturned tray, its contents spewed across the floor. Thin stains of some dark liquid, food or vomit, glimmered like spiders' threads amongst the cushions. Another thin black stain trickled from one ear.

‘Poison?'

‘Yes, Majesty.' Esperanza gave a curt nod. ‘Look …' she bent down and picked something up from amongst the broken porcelain.

‘What?'

‘I'm not sure. A child's toy, I think … a ship.'

‘It doesn't look like a toy.'

Esperanza peered at the object in her hands more closely, and as she did so a piece came away in her fingers. ‘No, not a toy,' she said, consideringly. ‘A sweetmeat, made of sugar.' She made as if to bite off a piece.

‘Don't taste it
!' Safiye almost knocked the sugar toy from her hand. ‘I'll take it, Esperanza. Give it to me …'

Behind the divan was an open window which gave on to a green and white tiled corridor where jasmine grew in pots. In the cloistered sweetness of the night, suddenly, there was a noise.

‘Quick, the lamp.'

Esperanza damped down her lantern. For a few moments the women stood without moving.

‘A cat, Majesty.' Safiye's handmaid, veiled like her mistress so that Esperanza could not see her face, now spoke softly from the darkness behind them.

‘What time is it, Gulbahar?'

‘Just a few hours till daybreak, Majesty.'

‘So soon?'

Outside the window a sliver of night sky was visible in the space above the corridor's high walls. Now the clouds parted and a flood of moonlight, brighter by far than Esperanza's lantern, filled the room. On the walls of the little bedchamber the tiles seemed to shiver and tremble, silver-blue and silver-green, like water in a moon-viewing pool. Motionless beneath them the body, naked except for the thinnest wrapping of white muslin around the loins, was illuminated too. Safiye could now make out its contours. It was a woman's body, soft and almost hairless: the voluptuously naked hips, pendulous breasts, nipples the colour of molasses. A monumental sculpture of flesh. The skin, by day so shiny and black, now had a dusty matt look to it, as if the poison had sucked out all its light. And at the corners of the lips, which fanned out hideously fat and red as hibiscus flowers, bubbled flecks of foam.

‘Majesty…' The Jewess's eyes flickered nervously towards Safiye. ‘Tell us what to do, Majesty,' she urged.

But Safiye seemed not to hear her. She took a step forwards into the room. ‘Little Nightingale, my old friend …' The words were no more than a whisper.

The heavy thighs were splayed out on the cushions, as unmindful of modesty as a woman in childbirth. The cat, which had been nosing around the fallen debris on the floor, now sprang up on to the divan. The movement caused some of the thin muslin covering to come awry, exposing the parts beneath. Esperanza made as if to cover them again, but the Valide Sultan, with a quick movement of her hand, stayed her. ‘No. Let me look. I want to look.'

She took another step into the room. From her handmaid Gulbahar came a small muffled sound, an almost imperceptible sigh. Like the rest of the body, the groin was completely hairless. Between the plumpness of the thighs, where the parts should have been, there was nothing. In their place was an empty space: a single angry scar, sinewed and scorched as if by a burn, where a single slice of the knife had once, in some unimaginably far-distant moment of his unimaginably long life, sliced off the penis and testicles of Hassan Aga, chief of the Valide Sultan's black eunuchs.