The Gabriel Hounds Read online

  MARY STEWART

  The Gabriel Hounds

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  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

  Also by Mary Stewart

  About the Author

  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

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For

  Helen King

  Author’s Note

  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.

  1

  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 a
nd 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.’