She did, and watched him showing her the tiny catch which slipped the dagger from its scabbard.
“It reminds me of something,” she said mischievously. “And someone.”
Their eyes met, and the mischievous look disappeared.
“I don’t think—”
“That we’ll meet again? No. But…I will always dream. Of you.”
“If I told the ladies of St Petersburg—”
“Don’t say a word.”
Eugenia shook her lovely head. “I won’t,” she said. “I never would.”
She leaned forwards, tilting her head slightly to one side so that a lock of her black hair swung free.
“Kiss me,” she said.
They kissed.
Russian or otherwise, a butler is a butler. He is unflappable. He is discreet.
Yashim had gone before he served the tea.
[ 131 ]
So it seems that the seraskier was right,” said Mahmut IV. “It’s good that we had him in the city. But what a terrible accident, just when everything was going so well.”
“Yes, sultan.”
“They say he fell. I suppose he’d climbed up somewhere for a better view. Fires to fight, and all that, eh?”
“Yes, sultan.”
“We’ll give him a splendid funeral, don’t worry about that. You two got along pretty well, didn’t you?”
Yashim inclined his head.
“Something new, he’d have liked that. Gun carriages, maybe, and a few platoons of Guards firing volleys over his grave. Show that the sultan doesn’t forget his friends. We might even name the fire-tower at Beyazit after him. Ugly object. Seraskier’s Tower. Hmm. The empire honours its heroes, you know.”
The sultan picked at his nose.
“I never liked him much. That’s the worst I can say of him. At least he knew his duty.”
Yashim kept his eyes fixed on the ground.
The sultan looked at him with narrowed eyes.
“My mother says that you did a great deal to prepare her for the ordeal she passed through last night. It seems to me you did very little.”
He snuffed. Yashim looked up and caught his eye.
The sultan blinked and looked away.
“Hrrmph. I suppose it was enough in the end. And frankly, the eunuchs are perfectly quiet now. Takes one to catch one, I imagine.”
He picked up a little whisk and began to twirl it between his fingers.
“The point is, I need someone in here, since the kislar’s gone. Someone who knows the ropes, but a bit younger.”
Yashim froze. It was the second job he’d been offered in the last twenty-four hours. The eyes and ears of the new republic? Now it was power and the promise of riches. The second job he didn’t want.
He began to say that he wasn’t young. He was white. Whiteish, anyway—but the sultan wasn’t listening.
“There’s an archivist,” he said. “New man. Keen, good looking, it’d frighten some of the old men, wouldn’t it? I can’t replace them all. And I could keep an eye on him, too. Reminds me of the kislar when he was young, before he started spooning up this tradition stuff and murdering the girls. He wasn’t in on the whole charade, either. That’s what I like. Give him a frock coat and a baton. That’s it. My man.”
Yashim felt a flood of relief. He had no doubt that Ibou would prove to be a perfect Kislar Agha; a little young perhaps, but time would offer its inevitable solution. At least he would vault straight over all the terrible compromises and feuds that had driven the former incumbent to the verge of madness as he clambered his way to the top. And he would be quick to learn his duty. Maybe even genuinely grateful.
“The sultan is most wise,” he said. It was better not to say more.
“Well, well.” The sultan rose from his chair. “This has been a most interesting discussion. To be honest, Yashim, I sometimes think you know more than you say. Which may be wise in its way, too. It is for God to know everything, and for us to learn only what we need.”
He scrabbled short-sightedly at the little table, and picked up a leather purse.
“Take this. The seraskier would no doubt have rewarded you, and in the circumstances the task is left to me.”
Yashim caught the purse in mid-air.
He bowed. The sultan nodded shortly.
“The valide wants a gossip, I understand. There was an Edict,” he added, “but it will have to wait after all. We’ll see the household settled before that. And the city, too.”
He waved a hand, and Yashim bowed as he withdrew.
[ 132 ]
Was there a twist?” The valide smiled. “I like a twist.”
“Yes,” Yashim said. He thought of telling the unvarnished truth, but knew that it would never make a proper story. “The seraskier was rotten to the core. He planned the whole thing.”
The valide clapped her hands.
“I knew it!” she cried. “How did you guess?”
“It was a number of little things,” Yashim told her. He told her about the seraskier’s awkwardness in western dress, and the way he had claimed to speak French, and then denied it. He told her how eager the seraskier had been to spread panic at the murders, at which the valide had nodded vigorously and said that he was obviously being used. How, exactly, had the men been murdered, she wanted to know?
And Yashim told her.
He explained that his friend Palewski had overheard him speaking French—he thought it was French—at a cafe one evening.
“When he denied all knowledge of it! Ha ha!” The valide wagged a finger.
He told her then about the Russian, Potemkin.
“What a villain!” the valide snorted. “Ruined by his scar, no doubt. He must have been charming, in his way, to lure the fellows into his carriage. But all the same,” she added, putting the image of the wounded charmer to one side, and considering the practicalities, “what did the Russians have to gain by getting involved?”
And Yashim told her.
“They’re poised for a takeover of Istanbul,” he said. “Ever since the days of the Byzantines they’ve dreamed of the city. It was the second Rome—and Moscow is the third. They wanted anarchy in Istanbul. They didn’t care how it happened—a Janissary coup, the seraskier going mad and proclaiming himself ruler, anything. If the House of Osman was extinguished, imagine the consequences! They’re camped a week or so away. They’d claim to be restoring order, or to be protecting the Orthodox, or to be being sucked into the vortex one way or another, it wouldn’t matter how. Just so long as they could occupy the city and provide themselves with a reasonable excuse afterwards, when the European Powers started kicking up a fuss. The French, the English, they’re terrified of letting the Russians in—but once they’re in, they’d be here to stay. Look at the Crimea.”
“What brutes!” the valide breathed. The Crimea had been taken by the Russians, by a combination of threats and stealth and bloody war. “They backed the Greeks, as well!”
“Everyone backed the Greeks,” Yashim reminded her soberly. “But certainly the Russians lit the spark there, too.”
The valide was silent.
“To think that all this was hovering over our heads while I dealt with the kislar in the palace,” she said after a pause. “I thought that was a drama, but it was a sideshow.”
“Not really,” Yashim suggested. “If the seraskier’s plans hadn’t come off—and they didn’t, did they?—there would still have been a revolution, but for you. A counter-revolution, as they call it, going back to the old ways.”
“It was the girl,” the valide pointed out. “I’ve seen plays, you know. When I was young, I saw them in Dominique. If I set the scene, she performed the final act. Thanks to you, Yashim.”
Yashim bowed his head.
The valide reached for a bag by her divan, and pulled the string at its mouth.
“I’ve got just the thing for you,” she said.
She fished inside the bag and brought out a book with paper cover
s.
She held it up between her two hands and let Yashim read the title, emblazoned in red.
“Pere Goriot,” he read. “By Honore de Balzac.”
“There.” She held it out. “Quite disgusting, I’m afraid.”
“What makes you give it to me?”
“They say it’s all the rage in Paris. I’ve read it now, and it’s all about corruption, deceit, greed, lies.”
She patted the cover of the book and held it out to Yashim.
“Sometimes, you know, I am so glad I never got to see France.”
2006 - The Janissary Tree Page 31