Reign of the Favored Women (30 page)

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.

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
.

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.”

“Then you must make her speak or all Constantinople will suspect it is a man you hide in your harem. I leave you to wager how long you may remain Grand Vizier with that shame on your head.”

My master took a breath and went to the mabein door. He knocked very gently and had to clear his throat to get the words out.

“Fatima! Fatima!” he called. As if he’d called her Maria in Venice! That name was so common it probably arose suspicion in and of itself. My master was so transparently naive about women!

“Fatima, there are men here.” Best he warn his secretary at least, if he could do nothing else. “There are men from the palace and they would hear you speak. To make certain you are...what I say you are. It is a matter of honor. And of life and death. Fatima, can you come to the door and say something?”

There was no reply.

“She is modest,” my master protested, but the soldiers were not satisfied.

“Let me go in and encourage her with the gravity of the situation,” I offered.

“No,” the captain grabbed my arm. “You may be in on this hoax, khadim. It would be only too easy for you to open the harem door and let some slave girl in to speak for ‘her.’ No, either that person you say is in there speaks up by the count of ten or I shall be obliged to break down the door in the name of the Sultan.”

“Sir,” said my master. “I ask you to recall that this is not the mountains of Yugoslavia where a soldier may lose discipline with impunity. Violence against virtuous women of the Faith can be death.”

“And shielding a man wanted by the Sultan is also death. I think the odds are even. At least I am not afraid of the wager. Are you, Pasha? I am a great man of the gamble, by Allah. Men, prepare to force the door on the count of ten!”

And the captain began to count.

“Fatima, please. Won’t you come and speak? Spare both of us the shame of this violence.”

My master was pleading, and it was not an edifying sight in the person of the Grand Vizier. What he was pleading for I supposed to be the quick escape of Feridun Bey out through the mabein courtyard. But then where? Nothing else, short of a miracle, could be hoped for.

Perhaps it was the same blind hope for heaven’s intervention that kept me rooted to the spot. To bolt at that moment, to run around through the other doors and make an escape for the fugitive through the harem, though there might be time before the door was broken down, would be a clear expression of guilt. And somehow I continued to believe that right might still win heaven’s protection.

The door tore off its hinges and the soldiers burst in with drawn swords. My heart sank. The figure in the apricot veil had not even bothered to flee, but stood cowering in a corner. This took the soldiers aback for a moment, too. They had fully expected a man with a drawn sword to meet them. Still, they were convinced of their purpose. The captain, backed by his men, strode across the room and caught the apricot figure by one swathed arm.

As he pulled the veil tight, one could see the light swelling of young breasts beneath. Then a voice no one could doubt as a woman’s cried out, “Please, sir. For my sake and yours. Let me go.”

Had I still been the Christian I was born, I would never have believed it, even seeing it with my own eyes. Five armed men turned and fled for their lives from that cowering female figure as if from an army of thousands. My master made a sign. I was to have his bodyguard cut them off at the gateway. As I ran to carry out this scenario from a battlefield—excitement I thought Fate had deprived me of forever—I laughed aloud.

And I also saw, out of the corner of my eye, the master move clumsily to embrace that apricot-swathed figure. For both of us had recognized the voice at once when it spoke. It was Gul Ruh.

The violators were apprehended and the master assured of vengeance. The captain would be hanged to deprive Uweis of one of his most devoted cohorts and the others would be beaten soundly to teach them some proper Muslim manners.

I fully expected a beating myself—for being so careless of a princess of the blood-—but the master and his secretary were exulting too much over this narrow escape to bother with me. I passed them, laughing and clipping one another on the shoulder in the mabein courtyard where Feridun Bey, still absurd in women’s jacket and trousers, had hidden himself. I passed on into the harem, realizing that the punishment I expected from others I would mentally give myself over and over in the weeks and months to come.

For I had felt in my belt and found the key to the mabein missing. Gul Ruh must have stolen it to satisfy her curiosity during our embrace. For having been so careless, for having succumbed to women’s wiles—in my condition!—I would have loved the bite of a studded lash.

“All right, young lady,” I said, turning some of my anger against her. “I’d like you to give an accounting of yourself.”

“Me, Abdullah?” She played innocent. “Whatever have I done? I’ve been quietly playing chess with my khadim Carnation all this while. Isn’t that right. Carnation?”

And Carnation, my assistant who was just coming to see normally again since his last pipeful, assured me she spoke the truth.

That liar I motioned from the room, telling him I’d deal with him later.

Then I turned to her and began to lecture, “Young ladies should never—”

She interrupted me. “ ‘Young ladies should never!’ But how are we supposed to learn to behave ourselves when men are allowed into our sanctuary?”

“He wasn’t in the harem. He was only in the mabein,” I protested, but I knew she had a point.

“That’s still the harem.”

“The door was safely locked, and well you know it.”

“I suppose you’ll be wanting the key back,” she said, and, pulling it from her bodice, dangled it enticingly in front of me. When I reached for it, she pulled back and said, “But first you must tell me who he is.”