The Aviary Gate (51 page)

Dr Alis and Elizabeth said goodbye to Richard Omar on the steps of the library.

When he had gone, Susan Alis sniffed the air. ‘Look,' she said, ‘it's a beautiful day after all.'

And it was true. The sky was blue, the sun sparkled on the snow.

‘And where to now?' Dr Alis gave Elizabeth a sly sideways look.

‘Do you mean, am I going back to Istanbul?' Elizabeth laughed. ‘Oh yes, I expect so.'

‘I meant now, as a matter of fact.'

‘I'm meeting Eve; but not till later.' Elizabeth took her arm. ‘Can I walk you back to college?'

‘By all means.'

For a while they walked together in silence.

‘You know, I keep asking myself, what happened, what happened to her in the end?' Elizabeth said thoughtfully as they went along. ‘And it's just occurred to me that in some way, well, perhaps this
is
the end of Celia Lamprey's story. With the finding of the fragment, and the compendium – and now the poem. With us, here, piecing her story together—'

‘—after four hundred years in the dark.'

‘What?' Elizabeth gave a startled laugh. ‘What did you just say?'

‘I said “after four hundred years in the dark”.'

‘Yes, that's what I thought you said.'

They stopped and stared at one another.

‘How odd,' Dr Alis said, giving Elizabeth a puzzled look. She put her head to one side as though she were listening for something, ‘Now whatever made me say that?'

I would like to thank Doris Nicholson, at the Oriental Reading Room of the Bodleian Library, for tracking down the Paul Pindar bequest, and for helping me decipher the Syriac and Arabic texts. At the British Museum, Silke Ackermann navigated me through the workings of the astrolabe. I am grateful, too, to Professor Lisa Jardine for her advice about modern research practices, Ziauddin Sardar, Dr Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and Professor Owen Gingerich, for conversations about Islamic and Copernican astronomy, to Abdou Filali-Ansari for his advice on Arabic transcriptions, and most especially to John and Dolores Freely, who, when I first started researching this book fourteen years ago, were the most generous and entertaining of guides around Istanbul, past and present. Grateful thanks, too, to John Gilkes, Justine Taylor, Reina Lewis, Charlotte Bloefeld, Melanie Gibson, Maureen Freely, Simon Hussey, Tom Innes, Dr David Mitchell and my agent Gill Coleridge. My affectionate thanks, also, to Lucy Gray and Felice Shoenfeld who valiantly helped to keep my house and family in order during the three years that it took to write this novel.

Finally, I would like to thank A.C. Grayling for his numerous, forensic readings of various drafts of
The Aviary Gate
, and for Celia's poem. And last but not least, everyone at Bloomsbury: especially Mary Morris, Anya Rosenberg and Kathleen Farrar in London; Karen Rinaldi, Gillian Blake and Yelena Gitlin in New York; but most especially my editor Alexandra Pringle, without whose vision and extraordinary powers of diplomacy this novel might never have been written.

Katie Hickman is the author of five previous books, including two bestselling history books,
Courtesans
and
Daughters of Britannia
. She has written two travel books:
Travels with a Circus
, about her experiences travelling with a Mexican circus, which was shortlisted for the 1993 Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, and
Dreams of the Peaceful Dragon
, about a journey on horseback through the forbidden Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year award for her novel
The Quetzal Summer
. Katie Hickman lives in London with her two children and her husband, the philosopher A.C. Grayling.

First published in Great Britain 2008
Copyright © 2008 by Kate Hickman

This electronic edition published 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

 T S Eliot, `Burnt Norton', part of `Four Quartets', from Collected Poems 1909±1962 by T S Eliot. Reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd/The T S Eliot Estate

Map by John Gilkes

The right of Kate Hickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 0941 9

www.bloomsbury.com/katehickman

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