The Sultan's Seal: A Novel (Kamil Pasha Novels)

by Jenny White

  “Do you know if she had any friends?”

  “I didn’t see her very often.” Sybil pauses. “But I do remember that one evening last autumn she spent quite some time chatting with a young Turkish woman. I wondered about it at the time. It seemed as if they knew each other well.”

  “Do you remember the young lady’s name?”

  “I think it was Jaanan Hanoum, the daughter of an official, I believe, at the Foreign Ministry.”

  “The niece of the scholar Ismail Hodja?”

  “Yes, that sounds right. I believe someone mentioned that he was a relation. I suppose it’s possible that Mary met her before at one of our soirees. Jaanan Hanoum sometimes came with her father. I just never noticed them together before.”

  Kamil leans forward, pondering this further link to Chamyeri.

  Sybil looks down, her fingers entwined in her lap. “Oh, dear, you must think me quite wicked for being so critical, when the poor woman is no longer here to defend herself.”

  “Not at all, Sybil Hanoum. You’ve been extremely helpful.”

  She doesn’t look up.

  “Please don’t worry yourself. You’re mistaken to think you are somehow unjust to Miss Dixon’s memory by telling me what you know of her. On the contrary, you are helping me sort out what I believe you English call a ‘fine kettle of fish.’”

  Sybil laughs. “Your English really is remarkable.” Then, turning serious violet eyes on Kamil, still sitting with his back to the offending paintings, she ventures, “Could I entice you to stay for lunch?”

  “I would be honored.”

  Sybil calls the maid to give instructions, then, to Kamil’s great relief, leads the way out of the reception room.

  “FROM WHOM DID you inherit your discerning palate, then?”

  A servant in a pressed black suit stands just inside the French doors, far enough away that he cannot hear their conversation, although Kamil sees the young man’s head straining their way. They sit on the patio, cooled by breezes from the Golden Horn.

  “From my grandmother. Since my parents were abroad so much, my sister, Maitlin, and I lived with my grandmother in Essex. Nana was quite a bon vivant. She had the most fabulous dinner parties with coq au vin, flans, these delicate almond fingers…I can almost taste them now. You know, she hired a French cook for her kitchen. It was quite a radical thing to do, since the French were—and still are—quite unpopular. In fact, some of her kitchen staff quit because they refused to work under a “Frenchie.” But the cook, Monsieur Menard, was such an unassuming person that the staff eventually accepted him. His passion was cooking and he produced the most remarkable meals. Other people served stodgy English fare, but Nana’s dinners were always interesting. Not all of her guests approved, of course.” She laughs, exposing tiny round teeth. “I remember one particular lamb chop that was so tender that I can still, to this day, taste the bubble of flavor that burst in my mouth when I took the first bite.”

  Sybil stops abruptly and leans forward, embarrassed. “You must think me trivial to be obsessing over a lamb chop when you are here on a matter of murder.”

  “One’s past is never trivial. Your description made me think of the house I grew up in, my mother’s house in Bahchekoy. I still live there.” Sybil’s vivid account of her grandmother’s house has pulled him into a conspiracy of memories from which he doesn’t have the will or the desire to disentangle himself.

  “My father was governor of Istanbul, and he was also responsible for the police and the gendarmes, so he was busy much of the time. Even when he was at home, we rarely saw him. The governor’s palace was enormous, with so many rooms always crowded with servants and guests and people coming to petition my father or pay social visits to my mother as the governor’s wife. I think it was all a bit too much for her. So when we were still quite young, she moved my sister and me to her childhood home. It’s a lovely villa, surrounded by gardens. You can see the Bosphorus from the gardens. And instead of your Monsieur Menard, we have Fatma and Karanfil,” he adds with a smile.

  “Are they your relations?”

  “No, they’re local women who cook for the household. Fatma lived in the cook’s quarters that were behind the house then, at the back of the yard. She never married. Her sister Karanfil came in the morning and then returned to her own home. Her husband was a water carrier.”

  He remembers them as they appeared in his childhood, two short, round women, their baggy, brightly flowered shalwar trousers expanding upward to meet layers of brightly patterned sweaters and cardigans. Their faces are full moons, but set with disconcertingly delicate features, as if the women have different, slender selves that somehow have been mistakenly absorbed by their heavy bodies.

  A powerful, sensual memory of the kitchen of his childhood floods him as he waits for Sybil to refill his water glass. He toys with the fried mullet on his plate.

  The women were in continual motion, cooking and cleaning. In summer they brought their work into the yard. He has an image of Fatma, squatting beside a basin of soapy water, her powerful arms twisting a rope of wet laundry. In winter the blue-washed kitchen walls were festooned with ears of corn and strings of red peppers, pulsating with color. A ceramic water urn stood just inside the door, a tinned copper plate across the top to keep out dust. A copper mug rested on the plate. Kamil remembers lifting the plate and looking into the urn, which stood almost to his chest, the hollow quality of the air and the loamy smell of wet clay, the resistance of metal against the skin of water and the satisfying whirlpool entering his mug. Water directly from this urn always tasted like an entirely different substance than water drunk from a glass. To this day, he keeps a clay jar of water and a tinned mug on the dressing table in his bedroom. He drinks from it to clear his mind and calm his senses.

  He sips from his glass. Sybil waits expectantly for him to continue, unwilling to break his reverie by prompting him.

  He tries to describe the garden, the kitchen, the fresh, lightly spiced cuisine: roasted aubergines, chicken pounded with walnuts and sesame oil, tart grape leaves stuffed with savory rice mixed with currants. Fatma and Karanfil called him their little lamb and plied him with flaky cheese-filled pastries and sweet cakes, washed down with glasses of diluted sugary black tea. Through the crackle of fire and the slap of dough against wood, Fatma’s husky voice wove Turkish fables and legends and cautionary tales of djinns and demons.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Karanfil’s husband died in a fire and now she, her son Yakup, and Fatma live in an extension I had built onto the kitchen house after my mother died. With the help of a few other servants, they keep house. They cook for me and tend the garden and my plants.”

  “You live there alone, then, with your servants.” A statement.

  “Yes.”

  This time, the silence is awkward. One word carries an insupportable burden, where an hour-long conversation has flown by with unguarded wings.

  Sybil’s face and neck flush red. She motions brusquely to the servant waiting by the door and asks for tea to be served in the garden. She stands and leads Kamil to a table set beneath an incongruous palm tree.

  “Tell me about your plants,” Sybil suggests in a voice too charged with interest.

  “I have a small winter garden, I believe you call it. I collect orchids.”

  “Orchids? How delightful! But how do you get them here? Aren’t they from South America? I’ve heard they’re quite delicate.”

  “Not just from South America, Sybil Hanoum. There are many varieties of orchids all around us.”

  “Here? In Turkey?”

  “There is a lovely orchid with sprays of violet blooms that grows in the forests around Istanbul, Cephalanthera rubra.” He smiles at her. “It is our connection to Europe, where this variety is also found.”

  Sybil is flustered. “How lovely. Imagine my ignorance. But, but I would so like to see your collection,” she blurts out. She looks down to rearrange her skirts with exaggerate
d care. “I’m sorry. That would be inappropriate, of course.”

  “It would be a great pleasure”—he pauses briefly—“but perhaps it would be better if your father accompanied you.” The sight of her crestfallen face dismays him, but he is unwilling to risk her reputation—or, he admits to himself, his privacy. Still, the image of Sybil bending appreciatively over his scented orchids has taken root in his mind.

  Regarding Sybil over the rim of his cup, Kamil lets the warm, eggshell-thin china rest for a moment against his lower lip before he sips from it.

  THAT EVENING, KAMIL blots the ink on the letter he is trying to write. The words he has written seem to have taken on too much color, lost the dry rustle of truth and factualness that makes them scientific and, thus, to be believed by the recipient, H. G. Reichenbach.

  Since the garden party, his thoughts have slipped their accustomed tether and he finds himself dwelling on Sybil’s tapered fingers twined around the stem of the wineglass; the plump mound at the inside of her wrist; the hollow at the base of her neck. He thinks with disquiet, but also a little more sympathy, of his father, who, in his opium dreams, has surrendered to blissful communication with his dead wife. He takes up his pen and continues writing.

  Dear Professor Reichenbach,

  I write as an amateur botanist, but one with scientific observations that I hope to bring to your esteemed attention. I am in possession of a glorious and most unusual orchidae that to my knowledge has not been described elsewhere. It is a small plant with two roundish, semi-attached tubers and basal leaves with one spike culminating in a single showy flower. The flower is velvety black, with an arched labellum and densely hairy petals. The speculum is divided into two symmetrical halves and is a bright, shining blue, almost phosphorescent. I observed the plant in its habitat over several weeks. The arched labellum attracts male insects that cross-pollinate the flowers, perhaps lured by some volatile chemical compound released from its surface.

  I collected this orchid in marshland at the edge of a forest in northwest Anatolia near the Black Sea. I have never seen another, nor does it fit the description of any of the orchidacae in your famous Glossary.

  It is but one of many wondrous orchidacae in the Ottoman Empire, some of which I have described in previous letters to you. Many are found only here in Turkish lands; others join us to Europe in a continuous ecology. The tulip, the carnation, the lily, these are everywhere depicted, yet the true treasure of the empire, the orchid, is inexplicably absent.

  I most respectfully await your response. If you desire it, I can arrange to have a sketch of the orchid sent to you so that you may inspect it further.

  Yours most sincerely,

  Kamil Pasha

  Magistrate and Fellow Lover of Orchids

  This is not his first letter to Professor Reichenbach, but he has not yet received a response.

  10

  Hill of Stars

  Hamza had been my friend almost as long as I could remember. When Mama and I still lived with Papa on the hill in Nishantashou, he engaged Hamza, his sister’s son, as my tutor. Hamza had graduated from L’École Supérieure in Paris and, thanks to Papa’s influence, was awarded a position as translator at the Foreign Ministry in Istanbul. His family lived in Aleppo, where, Papa told me, his father had been a kadi. Since his father was retired and unable to set Hamza up in his own household, Hamza lived with us as part of our extended family. Every morning, he set off for work dressed in Frankish trousers and the long, slim stambouline jacket fashionable among modern Ottomans. Papa too had long since discarded the traditional long robe and turban for trousers and a dashing red fez.

  I watched from behind the wooden lattice that screened the women’s quarters from the street as Papa and Hamza got into the carriage for their trip to the Sublime Porte. I caressed the words “Sublime Porte” in my mouth. I imagined it to be the entrance to the palace, an enormous carved wooden door studded with jewels and guarded by Nubian eunuchs, through which Papa and Hamza entered every day to go to their offices. When I was little, driving by in a carriage, my governess had pointed out the palace gates. They were enormous, of white stone, and set into an endlessly high wall the color of dried blood that rose on both sides of the narrow road. That first time, driving past the gates, I panicked and screamed, imagining that, with so little of the sky visible, the walls had begun to move together and would crush us. I learned that this was the Dolmabahche Palace, the home of Sultan Abdulaziz, not the Old Palace of many gates and pavilions that sat like a jewel box on a promontory at the confluence of the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara.

  Some years later, when Sultan Abdulhamid had replaced Abdulaziz and I was living with Mama at Chamyeri, Hamza pointed these palaces out to me as we slid past them on the bright water in a caïque. Hamza was escorting Mama and me on a summer picnic trip to the islands at the mouth of the Marmara, our caique propelled by six strong rowers. Even though mother and I were invisible under our feradje cloaks and yashmak veils, the rowers studiously avoided looking toward the stern of the boat where we sat on cushioned benches. Hamza sat beside me, not touching, but so close I felt the heat of his body. The Russians had invaded the empire two months earlier and were slowly making their way toward Istanbul, but on this peerless summer day, the horizon was that of a young girl in love.

  The first palaces we passed were ornate white confections, first the smaller Chiraghan Palace, crumbling around Sultan Abdulhamid’s elder brother Murad and his family, who Hamza told me were imprisoned there, then the endless expanse of Dolmabahche right along the water’s edge, wing after wing of ornamented white stone behind enormous white marble archways. I realized it must have been the landward walls of Dolmabahche that had so frightened me, but I did not tell him that, so he would not think me a baby. I was, after all, eleven.

  “Sultan Abdulhamid’s family and retainers live and work in Dolmabahche,” Hamza told me, “but the sultan wants privacy and security. He trusts no one, not even members of his own family and staff.” He pointed toward the top of the hill. “So he has built himself a new palace on the hill above the old one.”

  I looked up and saw a yellow wall snake through the trees. Looking higher, I caught glimpses of pitch-roofed buildings within the forest. From Nishantashou, I could see the lighted Yildiz Palace fill up the night like a hill of stars. I had always wondered who lived there, but since no one in the household ever looked in its direction, I hadn’t wanted to reveal my ignorance by asking.

  Finally, as the boat slipped from the narrow Bosphorus into the open sea, Hamza pointed to the breast of land riding the confluence of the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn, and the Sea of Marmara. The Old Palace on the hill was like the magic land from Hamza’s tales, its turrets and pavilions set like jewels among trees and gardens.

  “This is Topkapi Palace, where servants and slaves are sent to live out their days when they are old. And the harems and households of former sultans, and their widows.” He pointed to a door in the enormous red wall that stretched along the entire expanse of the waterfront.

  “That’s the only door through which the women can leave again. It’s where the dead are taken out for burial.”

  Irritated at Hamza for spoiling my vision with his depressing observations, I responded in a determinedly sprightly voice, “Still, I think it’s a lovely place. I should like to live there.”

  Hamza looked at me thoughtfully.

  “You shouldn’t wish that, princess. They are not allowed to leave, nor are their children. Sultans fear their brothers and their children. If they’re in line for the throne, they might try to depose the ruler. If they’re not, they’ll scheme to eliminate those in line before them. Even the daughters, should they marry, might be used by their in-laws to meddle in palace affairs. Connections and family links between the royal House of Osman and the rest of the empire are always kept to a minimum. One way to do that is to isolate members of your family. Another way is to kill them.”

  I averted my eyes from the Old
Palace then. A leaden chill made me pull my feradje more tightly about my shoulders. I felt vaguely resentful at Hamza for telling me this. In a small gesture of punishment, I let my yashmak fall forward so it hid my eyes and mouth and didn’t speak again until we landed on Prinkipo Island.

  The Sublime Porte, I learned later, was nothing more than a heavy stone building crouching by the side of the Golden Horn.

  WHEN I WAS a child at Nishantashou, only Papa moved freely between the harem, where Papa’s mother and Mama presided, and the rest of the house. As a child I had a certain freedom to explore, as long as I did not interrupt the gatherings of men that my father held many evenings in the salon. That was easy enough to do, as the rumble of their voices could be heard at quite a distance.

  Hamza and a succession of other tutors taught me to read and write Ottoman and Persian and introduced me to French and English, all of which my forward-looking father considered necessary skills for a modern Ottoman woman in order for her to be a suitable wife, entertaining and speaking intelligently with her husband’s guests. I overheard Papa explain this to Hamza and wondered at the time why Mama refused to help Papa entertain. Later, I understood that Aunt Hüsnü was willing to dress in a Frankish gown, her face uncovered, and mingle with Papa’s male guests and their modern wives, while my mother was unable to bring herself to drop her veil and stand naked, as it would seem to her, before strangers. Servants used to stretch a tunnel of silk between the front door and the carriage so that Mama could leave the house without being seen.

  Of all my lessons, I looked forward to Hamza’s the most. I practiced intensely in order to impress him, to gain the reward of his broad smile and words of praise when he realized what I had accomplished—and to avoid the thin drumming of his fingers on the table when I struggled. I strove to tether his eyes and was anguished when his gaze floated free, perhaps mesmerized by the brilliant reflections on the distant water or drawn through the vivid sky to thoughts that precluded me. I was jealous even of the sea. I was infatuated with Hamza and in love with Papa and, at least in that, I did my duty as a young girl. I learned in order to please them. It was my luck (although some might think it misfortune) that just then I moved into the orbit of Ismail Dayi, who had no such preconceptions about what and why young women were to learn.