It was a message that the eunuch had no hesitation in delivering — formal, respectful, no ambiguous phrases or hidden meanings. As for subterfuge and deceit, that possibility was obviated by the information that the writer was about to set off as a member of the Padishah’s elite guard to fight a jihad against the Shiite heresy in Persia.
26
MAGIC INK
The next morning came and went without a perfumed note or cinnamon stick on Danilo’s pillow in the dormitory. As the afternoon hours passed he began to wonder if perhaps the harem sentinel had been less gullible than he appeared and had confiscated his condolences to the princess. By late afternoon he found himself on the watch for a pair of husky harem eunuchs come to take him away to the dungeons for having attempted to stain the honor of a royal princess. At the end of the school day, when an acknowledgment of his letter had still not appeared, he made his way to the gerit field with a heavy heart, prepared for the worst. What a relief it was to find Narcissus there waiting for him.
With no time to gather rose petals or commandeer a caique, the eunuch simply muttered a curt order: “Be in your stall with your horse after the third prayer,” and melted off into the sunset. Not until Narcissus was out of sight did Danilo realize that the eunuch had not even taken the time to don his silk caftan, which he took as a sign that he too had better be prompt.
Just after the muezzin began his third call, Danilo excused himself from hurling drill and headed for the familiar Eunuch’s Path. There was a shorter route to the Sultan’s stables through the heavily manned gate that separated the Third and Second Courts. But he chose a circuitous route that took him in and out of the palace grounds by a narrow path and that made it impossible for anyone to follow him without being seen. Still, he did not feel completely safe until he was cozily tucked up with Bucephalus in the horse’s stall. Bucephalus could be depended on never to give him away. After a few moments of snuggling with the silent horse, he was joined by a cloaked figure in a very badly wound turban and sporting a bushy black mustache. What she thought she was supposed to be, Danilo could not imagine. But apparently her disguise was effective since none of the stable hands paid any heed to the strangely gotten-up visitor. Nor did they take notice when the blond page and the ill-turbaned pasha retired to the back of the horse stall and barricaded themselves behind two tall hay bales.
From the first word, she was all business. “So when do you go?” she asked as soon they were well concealed.
“I report at Üsküdar in three days,” he answered, equally terse.
“That soon?” And before he had a chance to answer: “But you are already gone from me.”
“Am I not here?” he asked, genuinely puzzled.
“Only in body,” she replied. “Your spirit is already off to war. Do not deny it. You are filled with longing for some far-away battle.”
“How do you know that?”
“There may not be much to learn in the harem,” she answered, “but on the subject of men and wars, harem-bred women are very well versed. As a little girl, I already knew that although a woman can sometimes pry a man loose from another woman, all her wiles are useless against the call to arms. Men are made for war as women are made for love. Tell me the truth. Are you not happy to be going off to war and leaving me?”
“No!”
“So be it.” She placed two fingers gently against his lips. “There is no time for quarrels. I was able to come today on the pretext of bidding my father farewell and wishing him great success in his Asian jihad. His carriage is waiting to take me back to the Old Palace as we speak. But I wanted to tell you one more time that no matter how long we are apart, you will always be the love of my life.”
“You don’t seem to be very sad to see me go,” he observed, not without some pique.
“I am not sad. I am heartsick,” she corrected him in the same pedantic way she had years before when she was his eleven-year-old tutor. “Heartsick,” she repeated. “But I am consoled when I remind myself that, although there may be long stretches of time ahead with no contact between us, we’ve endured months apart between the Bayrams and have always come together afterwards. Believe me, this is not a final goodbye.”
This was not the distraught maiden in tears he had expected to find. “What makes you so certain?” he asked.
“Because I tell myself that, for all the time you are gone, my father will also be gone. And for me to be married in his absence is unthinkable. Don’t you see?”
He was beginning to.
“It breaks my heart that we will not see each other for a year or even more. But when you return from the Baghdad campaign we will have at least one last chance to meet unobserved during the festival for my father’s victorious homecoming. After that . . .” She rubbed her eyes as if to banish the vision of what the future held. Then she straightened her shoulders and turned to look directly into his eyes. “But I have devised a way for us to stay close while we are far apart.” Even in the semi-darkness of the stall, he could make out a trace of the old devilment in her eyes. “Through letters!”
“Letters?”
“The letters in my father’s pouch. He sends and receives them every day when he is on campaign.”
“But letters can fall into the wrong hands and be read by the wrong people,” he reminded her.
“Not if they’re written in invisible ink.”
This plan was beginning to sound like something she had picked up from The Thousand and One Nights.
“Written in what?”
“Written in invisible ink at the bottom of other people’s letters. The harem girls use invisible ink to arrange meetings with their lovers outside the walls. Love letters are a major preoccupation with them. And I have bathed with them in the hamam for years.” She paused. Then, with a twinkle, she added, “I even know how to make the magic ink.”
It did not take magic to read the incredulity on Danilo’s face.
“They make up batches of it every week,” she explained.
“In the harem?”
“The girls have plenty of time and it’s not difficult,” she continued. “First you soak a handkerchief in a mixture of nitrate, soda, and starch. Then you dry the fabric. The chemicals come out when the cloth is placed in water, and that liquid becomes invisible ink for your quill pen.”
It did seem as if she knew what she was talking about. “But how do I read these messages if they are invisible?”
“Simple. The flame from a lighted taper will reveal the invisible writing. But you must be quick. Once the ink is melted it fades quickly and is gone forever.”
All very well, but for Danilo that did not solve the problem of how to get their messages, visible or invisible, into the right hands and keep them out of the wrong hands.
“I’ve thought about the letters,” she went on, as if she had read his mind. “Hürrem always writes to my father when he is on campaign. And now that my grandmother is gone, he will write to Hürrem as he did to his mother. He has promised. And my father always does what he says he will do.”
“But —”
“Listen to me,” she cut him off. “You forget that Hürrem cannot read or write. I am still having difficulty teaching her after all these years. So . . .”
“So all her letters to him are written by you.” This was not the first time he had underestimated her. It was the pouts and pranks that misled him.
“And all his letters are read to her by me,” she added. “They come first into my hands. And you can quite safely write anything you want on them in invisible ink, since I am the person who first breaks the seal. And I will be able to read your messages and dispose of them by taper before she ever sees the letters. That was my first thought.”
“And what was your second?” He was almost afraid to hear the answer.
“Actually, my second thought was my first thought,” she answ
ered. “It came to me when you wrote your note — a very nice note, by the way. It proves what a good tutor I have been to you. Anyway, if you are to be a personal scribe to my father, there have to be times when you can get your hands on the letters that he sends to Hürrem, so you can write notes to me at the bottom of the pages in invisible ink and I will be able to read them before I show my father’s letters to her.”
Danilo had heard tales of the tricks and deceptions practiced by the women of the harem, but finding himself personally implicated in one was a new and oddly daunting prospect.
As she so often did, the princess read his mind.
“This is dangerous work.” She fixed him with a penetrating glance. “If we are discovered, we are as good as dead. Are you certain you want to do it?”
It was one thing to have reasonable doubts, quite another to have his courage questioned.
“Of course,” he replied quickly. “I will live for your messages. It’s just it may not be so easy for me to get my hands on the Sultan’s private mail —”
Before he could complete the sentence, she cut in on him. “Oh, you will find a way. You have to. You are my paladin. You are my knight. You are the love of my life.”
Captivated as always by her sweetness, he held out his arms to her. But she had time only for a short kiss on the cheek before she went on.
“I have ordered fourteen vials of the magic ink. Plus a packet of special quills. You must wrap each vial in a pocket handkerchief to keep them from being broken. And remember, don’t pack them all in the same place. That way, if some get crushed, you will have replacements. In return, you must bring me a new supply of the doctor’s sleeping powder so that I can get out to meet you when you return without alerting Hürrem. Let us each bring our packets to the Grand Vizier’s dock tomorrow evening at the usual time. If anything prevents me, Narcissus will come in my stead. Just do your part and it will all work out.”
“You seem so sure . . .”
“You forget that I have been learning how to manage these things since I was a child in the harem.” She held out her arms. “It’s getting late.”
“Wait!” Taking her by the shoulders and looking directly into her eyes, he asked, “Have you ever tried it? The secret writing, I mean.”
“Of course not.” Now her impatience was palpable. “How many times must I tell you that you are my only love? I have no one else to write love letters to. Nor will I ever have. But I have seen enough in the harem to know that this ink never fails. One more safety measure — we must never use our own names or speak of our love.”
Once again he felt himself falling into a swamp of confusion.
“What am I to write about?” he asked “The weather?”
As she so often did when she wanted to make sure she had his complete attention, she grasped his hands in hers.
“The words don’t matter,” she explained gently. “I will read the real message in the sight of your hand on the page. Think of this. You have already proved that you know how to compose coded messages.”
“I have?”
She reached into her pocket and held up the note of condolence he had passed through to the guardian at the harem gate.
“This note of yours was meant to be read by the sentry as a social gesture. But it was actually meant to tell me that you wanted to see me and that you were leaving the city. The harem girls have found all kinds of ways to code their messages — a couplet from a gazel, an old adage, a comment that seems to follow from the real letter. I have even seen a passage from the Koran used to set a date and place for a clandestine meeting.”
Now her plan was beginning to make sense to him. The messages had to be encoded in the seemingly innocent language of polite correspondence. How simple. How clever. And on that far-from-romantic note the lovers exchanged a farewell embrace.
Not for the first time, Danilo was left marveling at having discovered yet another side of his infinitely various princess. Clearly she was as capable of focusing her attention on a target as a siege engine and, if necessary, of letting fly a full armamentarium of lies, secrecy, and deception.
“But you have to understand, Bucephalus,” he explained to his old confidant after the princess had quit the stable, “that as a woman, those are the only weapons she has. But if she still loves me as much as she says she does, she might have shed at least one tear . . .”
27
JUDAH’S FAREWELL GIFTS
Judah del Medigo was a conscientious physician with a strong sense of responsibility to his patients, his masters, his family, and his god: a compassionate, modest, and generous man. But deep in his nature lurked a fatal flaw: a lifelong habit of refusing to recognize realities that he found too painful to face, and behaving as if they did not exist.
Just such an event had presented itself to him early in his marriage to Grazia dei Rossi, when he returned to Venice after the French wars to find her pregnant with a child who could not possibly be his. All his life, he had longed for a son. To have a beautiful baby boy thrust into his arms seemed to him like a gift from God. His way was to accept the boy without question and bring him up as his own son, but never to acknowledge his awareness of the deceit, even to his wife.
Perhaps to her discredit, Grazia tacitly played her part in the charade. So the subject of their son’s fatherhood was never broached between them, and the boy, named Danilo after his maternal grandfather, grew up believing that Judah was his natural father and never even heard the name of his blood father until after his mother’s death, when he read of it in her secret book.
To Judah’s credit, once the truth was out, he made no effort to hide the fact that not he but a Christian knight, Lord Pirro Gonzaga of Gazuollo, was the boy’s blood father. Pressed by Danilo for details on what the boy called his “other father,” the doctor pronounced the knight to be an upright and decent man descended from the cadet branch of a family any boy would be proud of. Further, he agreed to write to the Gonzagas in Italy to inform them that Lord Pirro’s natural son had been saved from his mother’s fate at sea and was safe with the doctor in Istanbul.
But, somehow, that letter never got into the courier’s pouch. Time passed and no reply was received from Lord Pirro. (How could there have been when no letter had been sent?) All of which led the boy to conclude that the distant Lord Pirro Gonzaga had chosen not to acknowledge his bastard son. And Danilo del Medigo settled down to live as the doctor’s son in Topkapi Palace, and gradually the “other father” disappeared as a member of the family circle.
Being a bible scholar, Judah was fully aware of the story of Jacob and Esau. He knew that he had falsified Danilo’s birthright as surely as Jacob had stolen his brother’s blessing. But he loved the boy past reason. And God knows he had been a devoted father to him for seventeen years.
No surprise that Judah had considered withholding the Sultan’s letter inviting Danilo on his mission to fabled Baghdad to follow in the very footsteps of Alexander. It was a dream beyond the boy’s wildest imaginings. But this time, his better nature did prevail, and when he finally decided to face the reality of losing his son to the lure of glory, Judah, being the man he was, gave himself over to the task with his whole heart. He would prepare his son for the venture in every way he knew, both as a physician and as an experienced campaigner.
The doctor was never one to make protestations of love. But the succession of small packets that he painstakingly put together and packed into wooden casks — a veritable mountain of remedies against snake bites, gunshot burns, knife wounds, fever, and loose bowels, together with ribbon-bound sets of candles to light on Friday nights and socks knitted from a special water-repellent yarn for wearing when fording rivers, plus foods and spices and remedies, box after box — each offered the closest the doctor could come to a love poem.
They spent their last hours together in the gathering dark of the evening labeling and annot
ating the items: a salve to be used for three days only (after that it became poisonous); a vest to be worn wherever bullets were flying; alpaca socks (knitted from the hair of Mongolian goats, the very socks that protected Ghengis Khan’s feet from freezing); a liquid to be sprayed on pillows and quilts to ward off mites; greenish-colored sand to keep ants out of the food, only to be spread around the edges, never to be eaten; and a manuscript of Quintus Curtius’ dictionary. Plus, of course, frequently repeated warnings to be on guard against overripe melons.
They worked silently, piling box upon box to be hauled away at dawn the next morning by Danilo’s newly assigned porter. And finally it was time to say goodbye. But before the twine was wound around the last carton, Judah excused himself to fetch one last offering: an unlabeled vial of deep purple liquid that he sealed with wax and placed in his son’s hands.
“This is my most valuable possession, my son. It is a nostrum of my own invention. To it, I owe the success of my long tenure as the Sultan’s physician.” Still, he kept his hands on the vial as if he could not bear to part with it.
Finally, Danilo asked, “What is it, Papa?”
“It is the physic that I concocted to ease the Sultan’s gout. Yes, gout. I see you are laughing. But, believe me, gout on campaign can be worse than a bullet wound. And the Sultan has a very bad case of it. Of all his physicians I am the only one who has ever been able to relieve it. When it hits, it strikes his extremities with crippling force. The pain is so intense that he is unable even to grasp his sword. He becomes a commander who cannot sit on a horse. This is the coin” — he held out the vial — “that can buy you the gratitude of kings. Treat it as if it were pure gold. Keep it in the money purse that hangs around your waist. Never let it out of your sight.”
The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi Page 22