Feyra thought. ‘Describe to me my lady’s day, precisely, from sun-up.’
Kelebek knitted her fingers together. ‘She woke and directed that we dress her in her jewelled bedgown, for she was to have company.’
Feyra narrowed her eyes. It was not against protocol for the Valide Sultan, a widow after all, to take a lover, but Feyra had not known her mistress lie with a man since the death of her husband Selim Sultan, two years ago. ‘Who? A man?’
‘No. She said she was to break her fast with the Dogaressa of Genoa, before the Genoese ship sailed on the morning tide.’
‘Has the ship now sailed?’
‘Moments ago.’
‘Cecilia Baffo.’ Feyra mused aloud. ‘It is a foreign-sounding name. Could be Genoese. What is the Genoese Dogaressa called? Can someone find out?’
‘How, Feyra?’ Capable enough in the ordinary way, Kelebek reverted, in crisis, to her village girl origins.
Feyra was suddenly impatient with her peasant ways. ‘Ask someone,’ she snapped. ‘The Kizlar Agha.’
Kelebek’s eyes widened in fear – the Kizlar Agha, master of the girls and chief of the Black Eunuchs, was the Sultan’s deputy in the Harem who administered justice in these walls. This current Agha, Beyazid, was a fearsome basilisk of a man; seven feet tall with ebony skin. If a girl displeased the Sultan, if perhaps she found the Sultan’s tastes too adventurous, she was sewn into a sack and Beyazid personally threw her from the ramparts of the Tower of Justice into the Bosphorus. The girls were forced to gather and watch as the sack darkened with water and sank below the surface, to listen to the screams of the victim, to witness the consequences of disobedience. At the sound of the Kizlar Agha’s name, Kelebek took a pace backward. ‘I cannot ask him, Feyra.’
Feyra sighed testily. She feared the Agha as much as Kelebek did, but she feared what might be happening to her mistress more. She left the room and crossed the Courtyard of the Concubines. The sun was fully up, and as she turned right into the Courtyard of the Black Eunuchs the shadows under the marble columns were deep and dark, and the sun’s rays refracted through the wrought iron lamps hanging above, splitting them into diamonds, dazzling her. When she knocked and entered the Kizlar Agha’s chamber, she briefly could not see at all.
Slowly Feyra’s eyes began to adjust. She was in a long room with two streams of water running in marble channels set into the floor. The little light that silvered the streams came from stars cut into the stone ceiling, so that shafts of bleached sun fell in geometric shapes on the floor like paper cutouts. Feyra stepped between the shafts, as if it were a trial by light. She could almost have been alone in the room; Beyazid’s skin was polished ebony, black as the chair he sat in, but he smoked a hookah pipe that issued baby clouds as he spoke. The smoke gathered about his head and was illuminated in the star shafts.
‘Feyra, Timurhan’s daughter? What do you want of me?
Beyazid, it seemed, had no trouble seeing her. ‘O Kizlar Agha, what is the name of the Genoese Dogaressa who broke her fast with my lady Nur Banu Sultan?’
Now Feyra could make out his form, massive even in repose, his arm muscles bulging and shortening beneath their gold bands as he carried the hookah to his mouth, the false starlight silvering his bald head. ‘Her name is Prospera Centurione Fattinanti.’ His tones, for a man of such bulk, were high and clear like a boy’s; for he had been unmanned before adulthood. The strange contradiction of voice and physique did not make him any less threatening. He breathed out another cloud. ‘Is that all?’
‘Yes, Kizlar Agha.’ Feyra turned, then turned back with a courage she did not know she had. ‘That is, no. Who is Cecilia Baffo?’
She saw two crescents of white as his eyes opened a fraction in what seemed an involuntary impulse of recognition. For a moment, she was afraid. But the eyes closed again. ‘I know not. Now leave me. Blessings be upon the Sultan.’
‘For he is the light of my eyes and the delight of my heart.’
Feyra left the darkness and walked back through the bright courtyard, reluctant to return to what she would find. But in the Valide Sultan’s chamber it was as if the sun had risen there too. Kelebek was smiling, the Odalisques were twittering like so many white doves, and the mood had noticeably lightened. ‘Come and see,’ invited Kelebek.
Feyra pulled the muslin curtains of the bed aside once again. Nur Banu sat up against her pillows, the knotted venous cords gone from her throat, her eyes bright, her cheeks ruddy. Her eyes were shadowed with no more than the liner that she always wore, painted on daily with a brush no bigger than a gilder’s tip. She greeted Feyra, and Feyra was suffused with relief. She sat on the bed beside the Valide Sultan with a familiarity afforded to only her, and took Nur Banu’s wrist once again. This time the pulse beat strong and regular, and Feyra moved her fingers up to clasp her mistress’s hand. Nur Banu smiled at her. ‘Feyra? What’s amiss?’
‘Mistress, how are you?’
Nur Banu laughed, a genuine spurt of mirth. Usually Feyra loved the sound, but today it sounded wrong, like a discord on a zither. ‘Me? I have never been better. Bring my writing materials, Feyra. Then call for my breakfast and tell the Eunuchs to ready my barge – shall we sail to Pera today? The day is fair. Can you spare time from your doctoring?’
Feyra bowed in acquiescence but was troubled. The change in Nur Banu was so complete that Feyra began to believe that she had imagined that brief, dreadful illness. But Kelebek had been here too, and the Odalisques. She hesitated. ‘Mistress, when I came here, not one hour ago, you were insensible, your looks were dire, you were sleeping and waking fitfully and crying out.’
Nur Banu’s plump, kind face looked at her quizzically. ‘Feyra, what are you talking about?’
‘You do not recall?’
Feyra’s dread returned as she examined her mistress closely. The bright eyes, sparkling like brilliants. The bloom of too-livid colour on the cheeks. The blonde hair now curling damply around the face like a halo. The complete absence of memory of the episode that had gone before.
Feyra turned and looked about her. She walked down the dais again and her eyes lighted on the iced fruit sitting innocently on the marquetry table. She drew the Gedik to her. ‘Kelebek,’ she hissed sharply in the girl’s ear. ‘Did my lady take any food or drink this morning?’
‘Not yet. But it is still early … She has eaten nothing but a little fruit that the Dogaressa brought her.’
‘Did anyone taste it first?’
Kelebek’s eyes were as round and green as the grapes. ‘Why, no, Feyra; you were not here. But I thought it would be all right; it was a gift from the Dogaressa, she is a friend of my mistress’s heart – a beautiful lady!’
Feyra approached the abundant bowl of fruit, her feet heavy with dread. The ice pooling in the silver bowl crackled slightly in protest as it melted. Her eye was captured once again by the grapes. They looked delicious, tumbling over the edge of the bowl: round, and glittering with a bloom of dew. For the second time in as many moments Feyra thought that something had too much colour in it.
She picked a grape from its stalk and broke it open with her fingernail. She walked to the window and held the ruptured fruit to the sun. There, nestling in the jade heart of the grape, was a dark clot where the seed should have been. She gouged out the clot and spread it on a white tessera of mosaic on the windowsill. Then she reached for her medicine belt and pulled out an eye-glass with a brass surround which she fitted in her eye. She peered and poked at the black smear. She could see, once the clot was spread, a collection of tiny seeds, each one the shape of a star anise. Her stomach plunged.
Poison.
Not just any poison but the like of which she had seen only once before. Haji Musa had once intercepted an attempt on the old Sultan’s life, poison found in a gift of a jug of English ale. The doctor had shown her the star-shaped spores, taken from the fruit of the Bartholomew tree found in the hills around Damascus, and told her to take care; for the spores were one of t
he deadliest poisons known to man, tasteless, odourless, and with no antidote. The victim would feel the ill effects for half of one hour, then recover once as if healthful again, and after this would deteriorate rapidly as the spores multiplied in the organs, crowding the liver and lights, pulping the innards to mulch.
Fascinated by such a powerful poison, Feyra had begged a lame merlin from the Sultan’s falconers and fed the hawk some of the spores. He greedily pecked them down. Then Feyra sat on the stone floor of the Topkapi mews and watched him. For half an hour he had fallen to the floor and rolled and flapped, squawking in distress. Feyra watched, dispassionately, then the bird had miraculously recovered. For the following hour the merlin had been well, and lively; even his foot seemed no longer lame. But before Feyra’s legs had stiffened on the stone floor he had fallen over once again and turned black, glass-eyed and gasping until she had picked him up and wrung his neck. He lay in her hand, warm and surprisingly light, his head dangling. For a moment Feyra had felt a misgiving; this hawk would never rise above the dome of the Sophia again. Then she had hardened her heart and sliced him open, there and then on the pavings with a scalpel from her belt to discover his innards black with spores, his organs riven and pulped, indistinguishable from each other, the viscera as one.
Feyra thought quickly, running in her mind through all the remedies she knew, everything she carried in her belt. Nothing would help. If she’d been here, God above, if she’d only been here when the grapes had been eaten there might have been something. She had some tallow beads in one of the little glass vials, which, if chewed, would induce instant, violent vomiting above and purging below. But even then, by the time the symptoms manifested themselves, by that first initial illness, it was already too late. And besides, Feyra thought grimly, as Kelebek had reminded her; if she had been here, as Nur Banu’s Kira, she would have tasted the grapes and would now be waiting for her own death too.
Feyra thought for a moment. It was too late for her mistress – now it was all about who she could save. The Odalisques were all beauties, all virgins, they all had material value to the Sultan. The Odalisques would be left alone. ‘Leave us, all of you,’ she snapped to them, and watched them exit.
Kelebek remained, Kelebek who was plain and five-and-twenty. Feyra saw in her mind’s eye a sack darkening with water, being pulled down until Kelebek’s screams were silenced in a bubbling final cry. Feyra strode to the window where a gold filigree box caught at the filaments of the morning sun. She snatched off her headscarf and wrapped the box around and around, till there was not one telltale glimmer. She thrust it in the girl’s hands. ‘Kelebek, take this box and –’ she rummaged in her breeches ‘– three dirham. Take a boat to Pera. Where is your father’s house?’
‘Edirne.’
‘Sell the box at Pera and buy a mule and ride it there. Ride all the way to Edirne, and don’t stop. Then have your father find you a nice man from the village and marry him. Your time at Topkapi is over.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The Valide Sultan is going to die, and you gave her poisoned fruit.’
Kelebek began to tremble. ‘How … but I didn’t … I didn’t know …’ Her head weaved from side to side, and she moaned, as she struggled with this information. ‘Can you not … there must be … have you nothing in your medicine belt to aid her?’ For Kelebek, and the concubines too, Feyra’s belt was nothing short of miraculous, a panacea for all illnesses, cures brought forth from each little stoppered bottle. Feyra looked the girl in the eyes and shook her head.
It was enough. Kelebek took the box and hurried away.
Feyra leapt back up the stairs to the bed and tore back the curtain. Fear made her strident. ‘Who is Cecilia Baffo?’ she demanded.
Nur Banu Sultan, relaxed on her embroidered pillows, laughed again; but this time it was a nervous, false trill. ‘I’ve really no idea, Feyra. Now, please get my writing materials.’ But Feyra did not budge. Her mistress had not known that she had been ill, had not remembered those dreadful few minutes when she twisted and writhed in her coverlet, but she knew very well who Cecilia Baffo was.
Feyra sat down on the bed, unbidden, and looked Nur Banu Sultan full in the eyes. She spoke very clearly, and a little loudly. ‘Listen to me, mistress. The grapes the Dogaressa left you were poisoned with the spores of the Bartholomew tree. When you first ingest the spores, for half of an hour, you feel dreadfully sick, as if death is at your door. Then, very quickly, you feel better. Your skin has a bloom on it, your eyes sparkle. You have no memory of what has happened to you. Your body is fighting the spores, and your humours even find some benefit in them from the opiates within the poison. You will feel, for an hour or so, better that you have ever felt. I will order you some goat’s milk and some hard tack bread to slow the absorption. But soon, very soon, you will feel worse again, much worse, and soon after that you will not be able to speak. Knowing this now, is there anything you wish to say? Something you want to tell me? Do you have any messages for your son, bequests to your family, directions for your interment? Or,’ she said with significance, ‘the identity of Cecilia Baffo?’
The Valide Sultan drew herself up on her pillows, her eyes flashing. ‘I will say that goat’s milk and hard tack be damned. What nonsense, to speak of death on such a golden day! I will have my breakfast, Feyra. And the Genoese Dogaressa is my friend. I will hear no more of this nonsense.’
Feyra nodded. ‘I know at present you do not believe me, and I understand you. Your spirits feel well, your body tingles with health. But it will not last and there is no antidote. The poison is tasteless and takes some time to work, so even your taster, had she been on time –’ here she mumbled shamefacedly, ‘– would not have saved you. As a judicial poison it cannot be rivalled. And that is why, I suppose, the Genoese favour it so. I must leave you now, and wait for your body to tell you what I cannot.’
Nur Banu Sultan opened her mouth to shout but Feyra stood her ground braced for battering. The Valide Sultan’s anger could be great, and she could be as fearsome as she was kind. Feyra had never, in all her years of service, had the rough side of the Sultana’s tongue, but she understood. No one wanted to accept that they were dying.
She had seen all the reactions in her years as a Harem doctor; denial, anger, dread. Some broke down at once and pleaded for a cure. She had had to tell women with a canker on the breast or the womb that death was coming for them, but that it could take weeks or months or years. But her mistress would be dead by noon, and that was something it was impossible to comprehend. Bracing herself for a blast of recrimination, she knew that it was futile to stay. The Valide Sultan had to come to terms with the truth and then put her affairs in order in the short time she had left. At last Feyra thought of something to say. Feeling as if she were throwing a stone into a storm, she said quietly, when Nur Banu paused for breath, ‘Cecilia Baffo.’ At the sound of the name, Nur Banu fell silent, breathing heavily. ‘When you were in your greatest suffering, and did not know what you said, you asked not for your son, nor for me, but for Cecilia Baffo. She is clearly very important to you.’ Feyra knelt by the bed. ‘Time is short, mistress. If you want me to find her, or get a message to her, tell me now.’ She got to her feet again. ‘Only think of this. I have never lied to you. But you have lied to me. You know who Cecilia Baffo is.’ Feyra spoke with utter certainty. ‘And when you are ready to tell me, I will be in the Samahane.’
She hurried down the steps from the dais, tore open the door and found the five Odalisques crowded eavesdropping at the keyhole. ‘Attend your mistress,’ she snapped, and she walked out of the room and away, on swift slippers, until she could no longer hear Nur Banu’s angry calls.
Feyra walked through the quiet courts to the Samahane, the ritual hall. She entered and climbed to the mezzanine, for women were forbidden to attend the rituals. She seated herself beneath one of the ornamental arches and drew the silken curtain behind her. She needed time and space to think.
She
peered down over the balustrade. The Mevlevi order – the Dervishes – were whirling. Nine of the order revolved around their priest in the centre of the group, white skirts flying out to a perfect circle, tall brown hats seemingly motionless, forming their central axis as they turned. Their feet spun almost noiselessly on the tiled floor of the Samahane, pattering gently like rain.
Feyra fell into a trance, her thoughts pattering in her head like the soft footsteps of the Dervishes as they turned. She knew the symbolism of the order’s attire – their white robes were the colour of death, and their tall brown hats, like an elongated Fez, represented a tombstone. Their apparel brought them closer to the afterlife, to the other side. White for death, she thought, and brown for the tombstone. The Dervishes were harbingers of death. Nur Banu would soon be wrapped in a white shroud and buried in the crypt with a stone at her head.
Feyra’s legs grew stiff, and her arms ached where they rested on the stone balustrade. What would become of her? Would she be pursued and imprisoned because she had been too late to taste the deadly fruit before the Valide Sultan ate it? Because she could then not cure her mistress of her malady? Should she run, like Kelebek? And what of her father? Could he intercede for her with the Sultan? Or should they run together? Would he sail her across that sea she had wondered about, only this morning?
Feyra was suddenly visited by a vivid memory, as bright and over-coloured as the fruit and her mistress had been. She saw, as clear as day, herself as a six-year-old-child, outside her father’s door, playing in the dust with her friends. One of the boys had a top, and he spun it for what seemed like infinity. Feyra had seen magic in it, as it hung there, barely moving, held by some invisible celestial force. Then, at last, the stillness broke into a tremor, then a wobble, before the white top fell into the dust to skitter away between the children’s feet. Feyra captured it and spun it once, twice, until she had the trick of it; and while it spun round its still centre it held her gaze; she and the top unmoving, fascinated that something could move so much that it became still. The other children melted away in search of another game, bored, but Feyra stayed, watching; waiting with excitement and something akin to dread.
The Venetian Contract Page 3