As I had more means to unscramble the puzzle at my disposal, I pursued it much longer and was finally able to discover the man’s purpose. He had taken heart by the recent and public displays of Sokolli Pasha’s weakness and thought the time ripe to bid for his long-denied kingship once more. Since Selim’s death, free access to the Divan had been refused to the Jew and so he determined on this plot to call attention to himself.
Years of heavy disappointment weighed on him: Few who saw his protest did not consider it at least halfway mad. But the intelligence I received from the palace led me to believe Nassey would, indeed, have earned his Cyprus by this ploy if for no other reason than that it would give a slap to Sokolli and to his favorite Arab Pasha.
Fortunately, the hand of God moved in. Whether it was a damp, cold night in the street he couldn’t stand at his age, whether his madness, or whether foul play was involved (there were no sure signs of it, so my master escaped suspicion), the man was found dead in the gutter in the morning. His coat of arms hung rudely away about his iron-cold neck, as if it had choked him.
It fell my master’s lot to see that the deceased’s property returned to the royal coffers. The house and furniture were sold, the gold, silver, jewels, and slaves were confiscated and brought in bulk to the rooms beyond the sacred protection of the Prophet’s Cloak in the palace. This was the usual practice when a Jew or a Christian whose wealth was so largely due to the favors of the Sultan died; they cannot secure their goods’ separate perpetuation by the founding of charities attached to the mosques.
* * *
One week after Joseph Nassey’s death, my master had me collect some women’s clothes “of substantial size,” and a full apricot-colored veil. He instructed me to bring them to a house near the Small Khan, then pick them up again—on the person of the new addition to our harem.
“Bring her to me!” Esmikhan cried when she heard. “I will scratch her eyes out!”
The thought of such a confrontation I did not relish. Although I had only seen the new girl in her veils, even then I could tell she was no mean figure. At least one advantage she had over my lady: She was mobile on her feet, if somewhat heavy. And that heaviness might be due to her awkwardness with a veil if she were new to the land of the Faithful.
Still, somehow I doubted her novitiate. Though I’d been unable to provoke a word from her, not even the statement of her name, she seemed to understand quickly enough when directions were given. She climbed into the sedan chair and turned right or left down the hallway with none of the usual hand signals and gentle shoves a eunuch had to use with new slaves.
Irrational as it was, one could hardly blame my lady’s reaction. Never had she had cause to be jealous before, never had the master given her one. She was one Sultan’s daughter and the sister of another. No woman bought on the block could ever supplant her in that harem, should she bear a thousand sons. And it was perfectly legitimate that Sokolli Pasha should find someone younger, stronger, more beautiful to be his companion in idle hours. Indeed, gossips only wondered why he had not done so years ago. Still, it was not a comfortable position for my mistress to find herself in so suddenly and so without precedent.
Her discomfort tended to out-and-out panic, mostly because the new addition remained a complete unknown. There was no chance to observe her strengths, plot to combat them, or to wheedle out weaknesses and find them great enough for eternal damnation. The new slave remained in the mabein—that room of connubial bliss which had been unused for years—and was allowed no visitor but the master and myself. This was not Sokolli’s mere suggestion; it was a holy commandment to which he made me swear my life.
Normally, Sokolli Pasha made few requests concerning the harem. Like weather and seasons, we came and went and carried out our business as if by the will of Allah alone. He gave little thought to the processes which were my whole occupation. Therefore, when he did choose to take a stand against the elements, I would certainly do my best to see that he was obeyed, almost as if he were a wonder-working saint.
And so my lady alternately tried on new jewels and gowns to improve her attractions, swore violence, and conferred with a whole string of midwives and holy women about spells, amulets, and potions. The house reeked of wild rue and Job’s tears, the prime ingredients of such concoctions. I nearly lost my heart out of my throat one time when I came upon the dried skin of a snake and viper’s fangs set carefully in a niche—witchcraft. But desperate measures were called for, anything that might serve to improve Esmikhan’s position, with the help of Allah. Her own powers, it was clear, must fail miserably.
I alone visited the mabein twice a day with food on a tray. From curiosity as much as politeness I would offer the newcomer a bath or try to draw her into conversation, or even only try to get her to take off her veil so she might have more air. Although every scrap of any quantity of food had vanished when I returned, I always locked the door to the mabein behind me unsatisfied.
“I do not know,” I had to reply to my lady’s distraught enquiries after anything and everything.
“But my husband,” she said, biting her lip, “still spends time with her?”
“Several hours at least every night.”
“Night only?”
“As far as I know.”
“Oh, Allah, night is night! What do they do?”
“That, my lady, is their business and Allah’s alone. But I have heard talking. Low talk at least. That’s more than she’s ever given me.”
Here my lady would burst into tears and exclaim wildly, “She must bathe soon or the neighbors will complain of the smell. She must have her menses sometime this month and he will not approach her then. Unless, oh, Allah forbid, she is with child already and then...”Things of that nature babbled over her lips until the stress overcame her with silence.
One day I met Gul Ruh dawdling about the mabein door when I brought the new girl the evening meal. My young lady was there when I came out again so I knew it was not just by chance.
“Abdullah, let me in to see her, please. I won’t scratch her eyes out like Mother would.”
“Off with you, silly girl,” I said, giving her backside a playful swat.
Gul Ruh’s eyes watched me narrowly as I replaced the mabein key carefully into my belt for safekeeping.
“Abdullah,” she stopped me to ask a day later. “Do ladies in your country relieve themselves standing up?”
“We are not like the wild Arabs of the desert,” I told her decidedly. “Our women squat the same as you. Why do you ask such a question, little monkey?”
“No reason. Just wondered.”
As she turned to run off, I noticed a smear of dirty red brick color on one sleeve and across the neighboring hip. I called her attention to it, warning how angry the laundress would be when she saw that on new yellow silk.
“Oh, she’ll get over it,” Gul Ruh said carelessly, dusting vigorously as she disappeared down the hallway.
Thinking, she’s always running somewhere, I turned myself in the opposite direction and proceeded about my own business. As I did, I felt an unusual draft and then saw that the latch on one of the lattices on the windows of that hallway was open. When I went to close it, I paused a moment before the vision of sky, iron-grey with a relapse into winter. Then I saw a clean patch on the red tile just below the window. It was the very same dirty brick red as Gul Ruh had worn on her jacket sleeve.
And then I saw something that made my heart stop. Not far from the smear of red was a missing tile. My young mistress had come within a hand’s breadth of falling to the courtyard, two stories below. By Allah, and she hadn’t even been out of breath!
Looking to either side to see I was not watched (even as she must have done), I climbed onto the ledge myself and then onto the tiles, my legs shaking as they felt for other loose spots. I looked down and grew dizzy, not fearing for myself, for I usually have no such fear, but fearing for her. On the pebbles of the courtyard below I saw a glint of gold—a woman’s
broken bangle in a place it could never have gotten except from the air, for that yard was in the public selamlik.
Very well, it was quite clear Gul Ruh had been out on that roof and saved from a horrible accident only by the Merciful One. But what had she been doing there? To the left, the housetops of the city lay in a fascinating jumble: the back alleyways and open markets, the parks, mosques, and caravanserais. To the right, over the rather ill-defined mass of the palace, ships on the Bosphorus with the hills of Asia, gauzed that day like women’s breasts, lay in the distance. There was much for a child to see there, indeed, a child grown oh-so weary of being cooped up like a rabbit in a hutch.
The view towards Asia was blocked somewhat by the cupola that domed over the mabein. I could just press between it and the wall of the harem—it would be easier for a ten-year-old—and when I had done that, I saw what she must have seen. There, on the other side of the cupola, was a tiny courtyard with a dried-up fountain, weedy beds and trees sadly in need of the pruner’s hook. It was a courtyard that could only be reached from the mabein, where the architect had imagined the lord and his favorite could spend many delightful hours together. Although in demand throughout the Believing world, Sinan the architect had woefully misread the needs of this particular client—until now. Now I saw how commodious the yard was. There was even a tiny outhouse in one corner, open with large windows to let in fresh air—and the spying glance of a girl on the harem roof.
So I discovered that Gul Ruh must have seen—well, something. I climbed back inside, latched the window tightly and immediately called in workmen. They fixed the tile and then hammered a well-placed nail in the lattice to hold it to the frame. While they were at work, I cordoned off that part of the harem for them and made sure one of my seconds watched their every movement. I also dropped a word to the veiled figure in the mabein: She should keep indoors during daylight hours if she didn’t want to be seen.
Then I went down into the courtyard of the selamlik and retrieved the broken bangle. When I’d had it repaired, I found an opportunity to speak with Gul Ruh alone. I caught her by the wrist from which the ornament had broken and replaced it, saying simply as I did, “I hope you don’t make me do this again.”
I think she understood my message, for I left her fingering the mended hoop in a subdued manner.
XXXV
What Gul Ruh suspected after that I didn’t know. But I had begun to have suspicions of my own.
It was incredible. Such things happened only in the Thousand and One Nights. Gul Ruh, for whose child’s idealism life still had the qualities of a fairy tale, might leap to such conclusions easier than I. That I should begin to reach them, too, was one more point towards substantiation.
The matter was clinched, in my mind, at least, by the events of the very next morning.
“Abdullah, come here.”
From my master’s tone I caught the fact that we were on display now. From his eye I caught more than that: an almost desperate look that I must not fail him now.
“Master?” I replied, and made obeisance to the ground, a formality we never had recourse to when we were alone.
“Abdullah, these men would like a word with you.”
He turned, and turned me with him, to the room. The visitors—if they could be called that, for they had penetrated far into the house, to the very door of the mabein—were brazenly making a search of every alcove, pulling back curtains, opening blanket chests, and peering into large jugs. Their uniforms and swords told me at once who they were: from the palace, the Sultan’s personal bodyguard.
And my master and I were on the opposing side.
“You the head of the Grand Vizier’s harem?” One of them confronted me.
“By Allah’s most merciful favor,” I replied, bowing again.
“Tell me, khadim, how’s the honor of your harem?”
“By Allah, it’s my life if my master’s honor is not beyond reproach.”
“But might it not also be your life if you do not aid your master in concealing something behind the walls of your precious harem?”
“Sir, my honor and my master’s cannot allow you to continue in this vein. You will please retract such insinuation.”
The captain of the troop now came face-to-face with the mabein door. He looked at it hard as if he wished to see through it, his hand reached out to try the door, but in the end the sanctity of the place kept even him from trying it. He turned his piercing stare on me then and I met it with what I hoped was discretion as solid as the wood of the door.
“Very well,” the captain said. “I’ll take your word, khadim. But you should know that this is a very serious matter.”
“Wealth belonging to the Imperial coffers—to the Caliph of all the Faithful—has been lost,” my master explained quietly, with a quiet hand on my shoulder. “Lost in the business of the death of Joseph Nassey.”
“‘Stolen’ is more like it,” the captain said. “And if you are found to have had connection with this business, it will not go easy with you.”
My master replied: “Good man, I assure you and his graciousness the Sultan, once again I assure you that no crime has been committed at all. My agents sold the Jew’s goods exactly as I commanded them and every akçe was brought to the treasury. The accounts were carefully kept. I have shown them to his majesty many times. There is no failure there. If he expected the Jew’s property to amount to more, that I cannot help. I cannot help that what the records say Sultan Selim—may he find mercy in Paradise—paid out to the man is more than three times the figure we got. Please remember, gentlemen, the present state of the currency and its effect on the marketplace. Besides, Joseph Nassey was obviously a spendthrift. We cannot be held responsible for that, just because of the dark suspicions that peasant Turk Uweis may harbor.”
“Better that my lord Uweis harbor suspicions in defense of our master’s goods than that you harbor the man wanted for questioning in connection with the pilfering—that man, Feridun Bey, your secretary. He has very curiously disappeared from the city.”
“Would it were our master’s goods that concerned Uweis. Unfortunately, the Sultan promised that small Turk all the dead Jew’s goods as his own. It’s greed that fuels his suspicions.”
“Be careful what accusations you speak against Uweis Bey unless you can explain the whereabouts of your secretary.”
“Feridun Bey is an honest man,” Sokolli said. “Were every soul in the Divan as honest, they would recall that he was Keeper of the Imperial Seal for a time, and had proven his worth there long before I was fortunate enough to gain his talents for myself.”
The captain moved in close to Sokolli Pasha, threatening. “Tell me where you have hidden this man of many talents, then.”
“I do not know where the man is,” my master repeated firmly.
And I came to my master’s defense with these words: “What man would jeopardize the safety —not to mention the honor—of his harem by inducing something of that nature into it?”
But by the time the soldiers had turned on their heels to leave, I was convinced that when I next took a meal into the mabein, the features and gestures I might discern beneath the light apricot veil would be those of the secretary, Feridun Bey.
* * *
It seems Uweis was not totally convinced by the blank wall of the harem, either, for that afternoon, in company with Nur Banu, the little Turk’s wife came to pay a call on my lady. They had hardly been on speaking terms before.
We received them with customary and polite formality, with rose-water, tea, and little saucers of preserves. I didn’t even bother to try to caution my lady against it. I knew as soon as the formalized phrases—”We are all well, Allah be praised”—had run out, nothing on earth could keep Esmikhan from bemoaning the fact that her position was being usurped by a newcomer. Had she suspected there was anything to hide, she could not help behaving in a suspicious manner, trying to cover up something that consumed her every waking thought. Better to give
her free rein on this subject, common in all harems.
“Bring the girl out and let us judge the depth of the threat for ourselves,” Nur Banu said.
Uweis’s wife, a simple, silly woman, had been reduced to tears of sympathy in the first few minutes. But the Queen Mother was much shrewder. Indeed, Nur Banu probably endured her companion only because she could carry messages quickly to her husband, the Turkish hunter who had the Sultan’s ear.
“She will not come out,” my lady moaned.
Uweis’s wife wanted to stay and talk. She knew only too well what it was like to have a younger, more beautiful woman catch her husband’s fancy. But Nur Banu had learned now what she’d come for: that there was a newcomer in the harem whom nobody had seen. She did not draw the visit out.
“Thank heaven they’re gone!” Gul Ruh exclaimed when I returned from seeing the ladies into their sedan chairs. My young mistress threw her arms about my waist and, in an unaccustomed display of affection, stroked my chest.
I looked down on that pretty young head—noticing it was not so far down any longer, for she had inherited her father’s height—and caressed it in return.
“Why do you say that, little garden flower?” I asked.
“Because—” she said, catching my eye with an intense stare. “Well, Abdullah, aren’t you glad as well?”
I had to admit I shared the exuberance. But our momentary relief did nothing about the live charge fusing in our mabein.
XXXVI
Before sunset that evening, the soldiers had come again, but this time they would not be put off by the mabein door.
“We must hear her voice,” the captain said. “To make certain it is indeed a female.”
“She may not speak,” the master stammered. “She is very shy.”
The Reign of the Favored Women Page 23