Amid clouds of dust, half a dozen household servants scurried along the dirt path leading down to the village of Djoun, bringing with them a skittish collection of mares, donkeys and goats, the sturdiest saddled with hastily-packed bags and whatever furniture could be lashed into place, such things of value they hoped would compensate for unpaid wages. A boy clutched a red leather-bound book filled with strange divinatory symbols he did not understand.
In her bedroom with its stone-cut windows, the woman they called Syt Mylady was dead. Her open eyes stared straight ahead. A white turban was bound tightly around her skull-cropped grey hair. Incense smouldered in an earthenware saucer and candles had burnt to waxy stubs. She had died in the house which she had first glimpsed more than a quarter of a century earlier, not realizing then that it would become the one true object of her ambitions. How the light had glittered and danced about her then! Light, which she craved as a young woman, light that was exhilarating and alive under a cobalt-blue sky.
For the last seven years she had remained within her fortress walls, leaving her private quarters only to walk in her garden whenever it pleased her, at any hour of night or day. She would visit her mares, rest her hand on their warm flanks as they slept, or lie under her bitter orange trees, scrutinizing the constellations.
Now her body lay on coarse Barbary blankets, on a low-slung bed that was nothing but five planks nailed together, tilted slightly to incline her head. She was dressed in her customary night-dress – a chemise of cotton and silk, a white, quilted abaya and with a striped pale red and yellow keffiyeh tied under her chin, the way she had learned from the Bedouin. Her fingers still gripped a crooked staff with a naïve carving at the top shaped to resemble a ram’s head.
In death, her features – which were those of an old woman, for she died in her sixty-third year – seemed to soften. Her face was very pale and gaunt, making what some had affectionately called her famous Chatham nose look even more pronounced. This was the same unmistakable nose that had perched defiantly on the faces of four generations of Pitts before her, including not only two of England’s most outstanding and powerful Prime Ministers, father and son – both wartime leaders – but also ‘Diamond’ Pitt, her great-great-grandfather, curmudgeon of the first order and maker of the family fortune. It was his ability to thrive in an alien country, and by a combination of boldness and tenacity to rise from the rank of humble merchant, firstly, by founding a trading concern which grew formidable enough to rival even the East India Company, and later, to be Governor of Madras. She often used to say it was the blood of this Pitt that ‘flowed like lava’ through her veins.
Yet of all her relatives, aside from her mother, it was her grandfather, Pitt the Elder, she resembled most as she grew older. Indeed, by the age of fifty, she could have been his female incarnation: the same large, almond-shaped blue-grey eyes, with their direct, contemplative gaze; the refined oval face and high forehead.
These last few nights she had dreamed such living dreams. Herself, strong again, with all of her youth and boldness restored. Visions, half-dreams, half-memories from a time long distant, came to her. Footsteps echoed down familiar passageways, but this time she recognized them as the impatient, joyful steps of her younger self. Voices called to her, chided her in the old, loving ways. In sing-song French and Arabic: ‘Ne verse pas des larmes, ma chère et belle marquise …’ and in English.
There she was again at Walmer, standing on the drawbridge in the sunlight near the shore, laughing after her straw hat as it blew away, her long dark chestnut hair like an aureole, and her blue dress billowing, a vision so unrestrained that the red-coated soldiers turned to stare. She had the ears and the heart of the Prime Minister. ‘Oh, Hester,’ he would say, with the tender exasperation he reserved especially for her. Not the love between father and daughter, or brother and sister, but something possessive all the same. Their secret language when in company, much of it conveyed implicitly by the eyebrows and in sideways glances, gave no clue to the paroxysms of laughter they shared later in private. What could she not have achieved, had she set her mind to it? Before, when every expectation and anticipation she held of life had not been disappointed.
On Friday, she wavered from her appointment with death, and sent one of her men down the hill with orders to bring back the first European doctor he could find. She seethed, knowing that an Italian doctor – ‘that useless Lunardi’ – was at that very moment hurrying on his way to return to her service, no doubt hopeful that the fee for this voyage, as well as the large sum owing on his earlier ministrations, would be reimbursed upon his arrival. Unable to eat, and barely sipping water, her coughing became worse, and with each attack, blood poured from her mouth. She acknowledged defeat, too weak even to pull at the hemp rope within her reach, attached by an apparatus of pulleys to a large brass bell. She ordered only that the candles be kept constantly lit in the whitewashed alcove at her bedside, so she could watch the flames. That night the moon and stars were clear, and she could smell the breath of jackals as they prowled beneath her window. Did she fear death then? Many believed her fearless. She believed in the divine, in the transmigration of souls – that she herself was marked for greatness. She had looked death in the face many times, and fancied she could see it written in the faces of men, and so could judge their fate.
Now Lady Hester Stanhope lay dead, and all that she had been was gone. Her garden would be left to run wild – the arbours of yellow jasmine, fountain pavilions and her favourite archways of periwinkle with its bright blue flowers – and her splendid house would be left to rot and crumble, the bricks themselves to melt back into the earth. Her hill would become no more than a place you might climb for a better view of the sea, as it was when she came.
It was not until ten o’clock the next night that two strangers could be seen making their way up the hillside to the house, their torches bobbing like fireflies, their horses stumbling at the steep incline. A guide from the village walked alongside, fearful in the darkness of snakes, wild boar, jackals, wolves and even panthers. The journey had taken the two men more than ten hours of hard riding. It had fallen to the British consul in Beirut, Niven Moore, to investigate the death of Lady Stanhope. She was, after all, granddaughter of the Great Commoner himself and the niece of William Pitt, even if she had placed herself beyond the reach of reasonable society in such curious and remote circumstances. He had asked an American missionary, the Reverend William McClure Thomson, a man well liked by the British community in Beirut, to accompany him and conduct whatever funeral service they could manage.1
Moore was already well acquainted with the affairs of ‘Her Ladyship’. He was in glum possession of a dispatch box of documents bristling with notarized seals thrust upon him by her numerous creditors. It was said that not only had Lady Hester Stanhope descended from bankruptcy to penury – patronizing moneylenders all the way up the coast from Sidon to Tripoli, with escalating debts in half a dozen currencies – but was now quite mad. Gossip about her was as commonplace in the Beirut souk as in a Bath tearoom. Of all the young Victoria’s subjects in this part of the world, he mused, she was surely one of the most problematic. Or at the very least, notorious.
Nothing had deterred her, not travelling at sea during the Napoleonic wars, not riding through deserts of warring Bedouin, nor the threat of assassination during civil war in Syria, a semi-barbarous country at the best of times. Who could resist speculating about the lovers she had entertained in her fairytale fortress, about the way she presided like a chieftain over her raggle-taggle band of servants, about what fate befell those whose throats she had threatened to have cut, in her make-believe kingdom, with its dungeons and secret passages. Many times she had sheltered refugees: Arabs, Jews, Armenians and Albanians who fled to her after the siege of Acre, and scores of panicked Europeans after the Battle of Navarino. It was true that for a time she was more like a warlord than a woman, and she had hired her own army of Albanian soldiers. Had not the wily Mehemet Ali, ruler of Egypt and her erstwhile friend, grumbled: ‘The Englishwoman has caused me more trouble than all the insurgent people of Syria or Palestine.’
It was said she was like Scheherazade and could transport her listeners to other worlds. To all those of a certain age who heard her talk, it was impossible not to think of her grandfather, the greatest orator that England had ever produced.