I could not read everything over Safiye’s shoulder, draped with her thick blond braids. I did not dare let on that I suspected too much, raising either her scorn or her increased caution—I’m not certain which I feared more. That she did not scrupulously hide what she wrote convinced me that, as far as this letter was concerned, she did not care too much that I knew what message she was smuggling abroad.
Then Safiye noticed my attention and smiled, thick with more diversion—flirtation. Such a look would always send a stabbing memory pain to my groin—and set me even more on guard.
Safiye addressed my watchfulness: “Any letter in Turkish would have to go through the outer clerk’s office to receive a Divan-approved translation into whatever foreign language necessary. But you see, since Catherine and I are both native speakers of Italian, there is no need. I make my own translation as we go along and spare the clerk’s office the trouble.”
The points of almond in Safiye’s glance dared me to call her on this, and I almost did.
But though Esmikhan might not see the danger in a parallel letter, she did see it in my opening mouth. “Pray Allah, you two,” my lady said. “Don’t start your bickering in Italian again. I can’t bear it.”
So, for my lady’s sake, I resisted. Still my face burned under the almond sweetness of Safiye’s triumphant smile. I knew she was diverting my attention, so I redoubled it, yet under such a veil that it may seem to have halved instead.
Obviously, what Safiye wrote in Italian on paper with a Venetian watermark was not going to be a faithful translation of the Turkish. I suspected she’d already written two or three lines while Belqis was still smoothing and creasing in the margin.
Just as obviously, this was not the first time the Fair One had employed this means of smuggling correspondence, not just to lovesick Venetian attachés but to foreign heads of state. France had refused to join the Christian alliance at Lepanto, I recalled. Was this due to Safiye’s hand? How many other foreign states received her letters-within-letters? What else could be laid at her deceptively cloistered door? What did she offer them? And what did they grant in return? The answers to such dangerous questions were impossible to answer at the moment. But I must try to begin.
XII
As opposed to Belqis’s flower garden, Safiye limited her letter’s greeting to an affectionate “My dear sister queen.” This gave her plenty of time to thank Catherine for the recent gift of a copy of a work that had been dedicated to the French queen’s father, Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. “Perhaps no one but yourself can understand how like inspiration the words came to me as I read,” Safiye’s quick hand wrote. “I devoured the whole in a sitting, and have since reread it many times.” Reading this over the blond-haired shoulder made my blood run cold. I knew The Prince, having found a copy of it myself in a shop specializing in foreign texts near Beyazid Square. There’d been booksellers in that place since their wares had been Greek on parchment scrolls. I often browsed there, looking for things to delight my lady—such as the Homer that had once brought us so close together—and particularly now that her health precluded many other activities. From such a title, I had supposed this man Machiavelli to have penned some innocent little romance.
I realized Machiavelli was only putting into print what plenty of people practiced anyway, instinctively, in spite of religion’s best efforts, without his instruction. Safiye, for example, had been Machiavellian long before Catherine’s gift arrived in her hands. My life was clear evidence of that.
Now, as I watched the dual letter to the Queen Mother of France taking shape, phrases from Machiavelli’s book ran through my mind like the horrors of the little house beyond Pera where manhood had been tortured from me. “Because people are bad and will not keep faith with you, you too are not bound to observe it with them.” I couldn’t shake such words, though a merciful God would have allowed me to, as He ought to have allowed me to forget Pera. Both memories had the same effect, a sickness in the bowels, a dampness in the palms, a tendency to lose touch with the present when, if anything, both such words and the scarred-over event should have taught me to keep my wits—to prevent further tragedy.
“Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot.”
Did Safiye consider I had been crushed beyond threat? Was that why she so nonchalantly taunted me with glimpses of what she was doing? I may have felt so crushed at one point in my life, but caring for my lady had changed that. At least it had once more given me something worth avenging—if attacked.
My thoughts were interrupted as I noticed that meanwhile, Belqis had progressed to Sultan Selim. For his pious honoring of Allah and His Prophet, her flowery language honored him in return as “Khan of the seven climes at this auspicious time, the Shah en-Shah in Baghdad, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the Sultan. May he live long and attain what he desires.”
My lady Esmikhan sighed with wonder at the artistry the scribe displayed.
But Safiye’s letter was where my vigilance must stay. She was discussing French politics with a familiarity that made it difficult for me to follow. But, as well as I could make out, her words were, “How clever of you, my dear sister queen, to have maintained the interest of England’s Elizabeth in your son Alençon, albeit he is more than twenty years her junior. And in spite of the necessary unpleasantness of St. Bartholomew’s Day which might well make a Protestant queen think twice. I understand your son has grown taller and managed to produce a beard, which may do much to hide his youth and imperfections. As long as Elizabeth continues to call your son her ‘little froggy,’ I fully expect I may soon hear that you are the mother, not only of the king of France, the king of Poland, but of England as well. You are indeed the mother-in-law of Europe, and that is not the term of shrewish powerlessness we often imagine, but praise for the greatest of Machiavellians.”
Aloud, Belqis tried out her honorific formulas for Selim’s son Murad. “The straight-grown cypress in the garden of kingship.” Esmikhan particularly liked that description of her brother, who had begotten His Highness Muhammed, “possessor of the crown of twelve illustrious ancestors.”
Safiye’s letter continued in a different vein: “Further as to what you might do with these Huguenots is difficult for me to advise. I must tell you the reflex here in Turkey is to side with Protestantism, if for no other reason than that we both share Catholic countries as our nearest and most inimical neighbors. Protestants run about destroying Catholic shrines and holy pictures; Turks share the same attitude towards ‘idolatry.’ For this cause I find it most difficult to plead on your behalf against Protestant England here in the Divan.”
A look in Safiye’s almond eyes made me think she enjoyed taunting me with bits of this letter. If there was anything here I’d been able to thwart, certainly she would have put off the correspondence until later.
I read more: “Your refusal to ally against us at Lepanto was helpful. But you must know that news of the measures taken to quell your internal rebellion with the fierceness demanded to prevent a rekindling from the coals, your ‘St. Bartholomew’s Breakfast,’ was met here with nothing short of outrage. Nonetheless, if we assume you can forge a mixed alliance with England as successfully as you did with your daughter and Protestant Navarre, things may proceed much more in our favor.”
Women finally found their place in the official reality of Belqis’s words. His Royal Highness Muhammed’s mother, “Most favored of the veiled and modest heads, the most exalted fleshly cradle of princes” sent greetings to “the support of Christian womanhood...trailing skirts of glory and power, woman of Mary the mother of Jesus’s way.”
Safiye returned to the subject of mothers-in-law. “Mothers-in-law here in the East are given much greater power in the formation of marital alliances than I remember in the West. Mothers are, after all, the only ones in a position to know prospective brides, for such a veil of modesty hangs over w
omenfolk that men will never broach the subject among themselves without risking censure of the deepest kind for their rudeness. Nonetheless, it is not until I had your example that I realized just how powerful I might become in this next stage of my career.”
Safiye caught my eyes and smiled slightly. How much, I wondered, of this intimacy was also flattery? Machiavelli could turn on the Machiavellian, could he not? I couldn’t tell and didn’t dare take my eyes from the manuscript to think of the matter longer, for the Fair One’s bangles were winking even faster across the page now.
“Although the Ottoman imperial house does maintain an ancient prejudice against marrying beneath them—and since they are the greatest empire in the world, finding peers must needs be difficult—I think, with your inspiration and that of Signor Machiavelli, I shall accomplish something.”
A touch of fear crackled along my spine. Now this was an area that might well affect me, my lady, and little Gul Ruh. I sent another protective glance out into the courtyard. All seemed well, but the light blinded my eyes so much that I couldn’t read Safiye’s writing for a moment after I returned to the dappled light within. I listened to Belqis’s phrases instead, still in praise of Catherine.
“May her last moments be concluded with good...Let there be made a salutation so gracious that all the rose garden’s roses are but one petal from it and a speech so sincere that the whole repertoire of the garden’s nightingales is but one stanza of it, a praise which brings forth felicity in this world and the next.”
I shivered again at the invocation of sincerity in a letter meant to lay a false scent and reminded myself to read more of the real one.
“I beg your understanding of the position I am in here in the East before you condemn my simpleness. I had to get to the position of favorite first. Favorite is not the comfortable once-and-for-always of a wife under the Catholic sacrament of marriage. Even having attained this position, I was still unsure of it for many years. I resisted the realization that the more children I have to bargain with, the more bargains I can strike.
“In any case, with your example, dear sister queen, what I had tried to escape when I feared my only weapon was my good looks I have now embraced. And I once thought these Turkish women so benighted in their slavery to fertility! I doubt I shall, at this point, manage to equal your own ten offspring, but I am pleased to announce that after Prince Muhammed and little Aysha—and due to Murad’s visit to the capital over the winter—a third imperial heir is on the way.”
This was news indeed! Esmikhan, I was certain, had not been told yet, or she would have been able to speak of nothing else, not even the plight of the poor widow Huma. Granted, before the letter got to France, the new prince or princess might well be born. At any rate, its imminent arrival would no longer be possible to keep a secret. But that Safiye would tell this distant queen she’d never met before she told my most devoted lady was a matter to be considered. I knew I couldn’t break the news to Esmikhan; the hurt would kill her.
Safiye sharpened herself a new pen—one of the reeds they used in the East instead of the quills of the West—and wrote on. “What an alliance that would be, my Aysha with your youngest, Hercule. The age difference is not so sharp as that between your son and Elizabeth, and the forging of Catholic to Protestant would be nothing to it. Everything from Constantinople and Paris would be crushed to powder between that alloy. I know your priests would not approve, not to mention the muftis. Still, it is pleasant to dream.
“And there is always Muhammed to your Marguerite—should you find Navarre more trouble than you can safely keep under house arrest and in need of more drastic remedy. The muftis even encourage Muslim men to marry infidel women, hoping for conversion. And women’s beliefs, of course, are of little account. I don’t think I can promise you my son will not take other wives and concubines, as the religion here allows. Marguerite might be distressed—but I imagine your nature is such that you can see the advantage here, even if youthful romantic hearts cannot.
“The shrewd mother, you have taught me, must think of such things from the cradle. At any rate, the first thing in Muhammed’s case, here among the Muslims, is to have the lad circumcised—he would never be considered a man and marriageable before this.”
What Safiye planned on that front—converting Muslim ritual to her will—I did not read. The lavish greetings having taken up more than half of her paper, Belqis must ask confirmation for her brief mention of Huma’s daughters. Then she closed: “May this reach you at an august time whose every moment is more precious than several years...”
But Safiye continued to write and I alone noticed the discrepancy. The light had now changed so that I was unable to see enough to make a full sentence of it. She turned the watermark crown upside down and crammed lines in the margins.
Meanwhile, Belqis was distracted by what she had left to do and my lady, who did very little correspondence of her own, by Belqis and her ritual. And, I must confess, such was the glamour of the scribe’s actions that I was entranced myself and failed even the attempt to move where light on the Venetian page would be better.
An imperial scribe uses gold dust for drying the most important documents instead of sand. Belqis uncorked a dal of the precious substance and sprinkled it from the head of her letter to the foot. Then she curled the paper up into a funnel and let most of the gold slip back into its container to reuse next time. Unlike sand, however, a certain amount of the gold was expected to linger, dazzling the receiver with yet more opulence.
Safiye contented herself with sand for her letter, then quickly folded the paper in western fashion, from the top down, because Belqis was waiting. Over this smaller white packet, Belqis folded from the bottom up and finally placed the seal. Before the warm wax smell, scented with jasmine, had had time to fade and the imprinted tughra to harden, the scribe plucked up a little box that sat next to the vial of gold dust. She poured the contents of the box into her hand—they were gems—and chose from among them three tiny but exquisitely cut rubies and a diamond. These she set artfully among the bars of the seal’s calligraphy like birds in a cage. Thus Belqis, all unwittingly, crowned her masterpiece with yet one more diversion from the communication’s true import.
And this was none too soon, for just at that moment, Nur Banu sailed unannounced into Safiye’s room, her dark eyes crackling with fury. She didn’t even stop to answer little Gul Ruh’s happy chirp of greeting out in the yard.
XIII
“What is the meaning of this?” Nur Banu’s black eyes flashed like two more jewels among the king’s ransom she wore about her person. I always found some pathos in the lavishness of her dress, as if she hoped to prove her life was satisfying by such things.
“The meaning of what, O most favored among the veiled heads?” Safiye’s quotation of the phrase of elaborate reverence so recently used in her own cover letter assured me she was playing innocent and had ulterior motives here as well.
“You are tempting the will of Allah and planning for Muhammed’s circumcision.”
“Yes, planning.”
There was much at stake between the two, for Prince Muhammed was the son of one woman and the grandson of the other. And how a boy takes this important step into manhood, or so the saying goes, will determine the path of the rest of his life. Though she might conceal them here in the East, I knew Safiye at least had just explained her motives to a European queen, or as nearly as I was ever going to learn them.
Safiye gestured Belqis to pack away the correspondence, but she otherwise gave no gesture of welcome to the woman who, as mother of her lover, deserved respect. I remembered, as the Fair One must have done, that her eunuch Ghazanfer was away running messages, else Nur Banu, no more than the widow Huma, would not have gained entry here.
Safiye continued: “My lord, the royal prince’s father, has given his permission and spoken to the necessary officials. It is all arranged.”
Esmikhan offered a polite greeting to her stepmother in an a
ttempt to ease the tension. It didn’t work.
Nur Banu fumed: “I’ll wager you didn’t even consult the astrologers.”
“The astrologers have been consulted.” Safiye spoke as if to console, but nothing could be more calculated to aggravate than her words. “They have given a day a fortnight from now as the most auspicious.”
“A fortnight. That’s not enough time.”
“It pleases me well. The weather should be settled by then.”
“Not nearly enough time.”
“The astrologers say there will not come a better day for over a year.
“How can we prepare for a prince’s circumcision in two weeks?”
“Well, we certainly cannot if we must spend our time sitting around arguing.” Safiye gestured after the departing scribe. “Personally, I have seen to many important things today and if you’ll allow me—”
“The festivities that must come before, the foreign dignitaries to invite, the gifts to acquire? I don’t care who you think you are, you cannot work miracles. It will seem my grandson—Allah forbid-—is a merchant’s brat, a peasant, a wild Turk of the steppe, no Ottoman prince to be made a man with so little care.”
“Nevertheless, it is settled.” Safiye shrugged the wealth of her thick blond hair off both shoulders. “My man has made a decision, since your Selim is incapable. And Murad arranged that it pleases his father as well—may he reign forever—since I pleased him so well during his recent visit to Constantinople.”
Safiye smoothed her hand over the snug pearl buttons down the front of her yelek. She blushed with obvious pleasure—and unshakable beauty—obviously thinking of another fruit of the prince’s attention which as yet only she and I knew.
Nur Banu’s cheeks flushed, too, but with fury and an unbecoming clash against the redder splotches of rouge there, against her hennaed hair so orange and stiff it might have been forged of brass. “Yet you will not go where you belong, to my son’s side in Magnesia.”
The Reign of the Favored Women Page 9