The Panther and The Pearl (12 page)

Sarah was bored.

She watched Fatma light a jeweled chibuk and then expel a long stream of smoke. The tepidarium was almost empty today; only Fatma and Sarah and couple of others were present, along with the inevitable servants and eunuchs. Sarah studied Fatma, a gorgeous Russian from the Caucasus with flawless ivory skin and waist length wavy auburn hair. She couldn’t imagine why Kalid didn’t concentrate on her and leave his new ikbal alone.

Fatma was certainly much more willing.

Sarah sighed and went back to her book. For some reason, Kalid did not want everyone to know that they were not sleeping together. Maybe he didn’t want Sarah’s rebellion to give the other women ideas. Each night, she was taken by Memtaz to the men’s quarters and left in the music room adjoining the pasha’s apartments. There she spent the evening alone, amidst standing harps and timbrels and a Bullock’s grand piano, reading the English books that had thoughtfully been provided for her and teaching herself mah jongg.

Yes, she was very bored.

A servant appeared at her side with a dish of sherbet, rich burgundy in color, topped with a sauce of raspberry preserves. Sarah looked up to see Fatma smiling and nodding at her, gesturing for her to eat it.

Now this was a switch. A peace offering from the woman who had made no secret of her silent animosity up to this point? While Sarah puzzled over what to do, Memtaz appeared from the hamman and bent to straighten Sarah’s pattens under her couch.

“Do not eat that, mistress,” she said under her breath, her hands moving busily.

Sarah glanced at her, startled.

“A gift from such a one is not to be trusted,” Memtaz added in a louder whisper.

Sarah looked over at Fatma, who was watching her closely, immobile as a statue.

Sarah stood abruptly, stumbling ostentatiously and sending the dish of sherbet crashing to the floor. The crystal shattered and the gooey confection splattered on the tiles.

“Oh, how clumsy of me, I’m so sorry,” Sarah said, glancing over at Fatma and shrugging helplessly. “Memtaz, please tell Fatma that I appreciate her thoughtfulness.”

Then she fled, not looking back, as Memtaz conveyed the message and then patiently began to clean up the mess.

“Pasha Kalid requires your presence in the music room again tonight,” Memtaz announced.
 

Sarah stood obediently, anticipating another boring evening of reading
A Hiker’s Guide to the Cotswolds
or
A Thousand Years of British Monarchy
, obviously relics of the pasha’s Oxford days.

If this was the punishment Kalid had devised for her, it was certainly effective.

Sarah was shocked to enter the music room and find Kalid waiting for her.

Her heart began to pound the moment she saw him. He was once again in Western dress, this time silk chamois trousers and an embroidered cotton shirt. The pale colors complemented his vivid looks and made him seem deceptively like the young accountants and clerks and teachers she had known in Boston. If it weren’t for the Roman nose and the golden honey hue of his skin, he might have been attending a concert at the Conservatory of Music.

“You seem surprised to see me,” he greeted her.

“I didn’t go through the half-day hamman ritual, so I thought I would be alone.”

“Memtaz told me that you objected to the elaborate preparation, so I gave her permission to dispense with it.”

“So you have been keeping tabs on me.”

“Certainly.” He was standing next to a large map of the United States set up on an easel.

“Will this be a geography lesson?” Sarah asked.

“I wish to learn more about your country,” he said.

“Where did you get the map?”

“Almost everything is available to me, kourista. At the right price, of course.”

“Including people,” she said sarcastically.

He held up his hand. “I do not wish to argue this evening. I want you to show me the various places about which I inquire.”

“Fine,” Sarah said. Whatever he wanted. It would keep him happy and it had to be more interesting than the Cotswolds.

“Where is your government in Washington, D.C.?”

Sarah pointed to the capital between Virginia and Maryland on the Potomac River.

“I thought it was in the center of the country,” Kalid said.

Sarah shook her head.

“And where is Boston?”

Sarah raised her hand north and showed him her home town on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

“And that is in what district?”

“State. We call them states. Massachusetts.”

“Massa—bah, I cannot say it.”

“Mass-a-too-setts,” Sarah said, enunciating carefully.

Kalid imitated her, with creditable success.

“And your parents? Where did they come from?”

“My father was from Boston. My mother came from New Hampshire, here.”

He peered at her finger on the map. “And all of this,” he said gesturing west. “What is out here?”

“The rest of the country. It’s big—three thousand miles from coast to coast, between two oceans. How could you have gone to Oxford and be so ignorant about it?”

“In Oxford I learned about England, not the United States. What did you know about the Ottoman Empire before you came here?”

He had a point.

“And your work, where was that?” he asked.

“In Boston. I taught school there.”

“School?”

“Elementary school. Fourth grade.”

He raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“The children were about ten years old.”

“And did you never wish to have children of your own?” he asked, his dark eyes fixed on hers.

“Some day. When the time is right.”

“And the man is right?”

“Yes,” Sarah said cautiously. What was all this chit-chat? In the past he had gone in more for direct assault than polite conversation. Was he changing his methods? He was so tricky that she was almost afraid to look away from him.

A servant entered with coffee on a tray and set it on a carved mahogany table in front of Kalid. The pasha dismissed the girl with a wave of his hand.

“Sit,” he said, and Sarah joined him on a damask couch.

“Coffee?” Kalid said to Sarah.

“Is it drugged?” she countered, holding his gaze.

He was gracious enough to smile. “Let me ask you a question. If I had taken you aside at Topkapi and asked you if you would come here with me, would you have agreed?”

“Of course not.”

“Then what choice did you leave me but to drug you?”

“Kalid, didn’t it ever occur to you that you might not get what you wanted?”

“No,” he said ingenuously, and poured a stream of coffee into a delicate china cup.

“So your only alternative was to kidnap me?”

“Yes.”

Sarah sighed. “England obviously didn’t make much of an impression on you.”

“On the contrary,” he said in his clipped accent, sounding very English indeed. “My grandmother tells me that I am entirely too Western. She finds my intense need to have my desire for you reciprocated a quaint and curious English notion.”

Sarah looked away, feeling herself go weak in the knees. Hearing him talk about his obsession with her in such a detached fashion had more of an impact than his most ardent embrace; she was glad she was sitting down.

He handed her the cup of coffee. “Perhaps I did stay too long in England. I seem to fit nowhere now,” he observed.

“I think you fit here very well.”

He smiled dryly. “You say that because you are not Turkish. To the Turks, I am too lenient. They admire a strong hand. And the women are puzzled by my . . . discrimination. Here the number of women a man beds is proof of virility, and I am sorely lacking in that regard.”

Sarah almost choked on her coffee. “I wouldn’t agree,” she finally said, coughing.

“Kosem is very worried about me,” he said sadly.

Kosem didn’t witness our last two wrestling matches
, Sarah thought. Aloud she said, “Why?”

“She does not share my taste.”

“Beg pardon?”

“She thinks you are too skinny and doubts whether you will be able to bear children.”

Sarah put down her cup. “Kalid—” she began.

He held up his hand. “Don’t worry. I have reassured her on both counts.”

Sarah opened her mouth to frame a tart retort and then saw the smile in his eyes. Was he teasing her?

“Now,” he said, leaning forward to put his cup on the table, “let us continue my lesson.”

They talked for another two hours, about many different things, and then Kalid let her go.

It was only when she was walking back to her room between the two eunuchs that Sarah realized this was the first time she had seen him that he had not touched her.

It was another week before Kalid summoned Sarah again.

She tried not to admit to herself that she was disappointed. She knew that he was deliberately keeping her off balance; each day she didn’t know whether he would send for her, or if he would touch her when he did, so she was in a constant state of anxious anticipation.

She was, in short, leading the life of a harem woman.

When Memtaz bustled into her room in a state of high excitement, Sarah knew that the pasha had spoken.

“You will attend upon my master this evening, but first, this afternoon, you are going on an outing to the Kahouli Bazaar,” Memtaz said. She clapped her hands delightedly.

“Oh, is that fun?”

“The most fun. And you will bring sweetmeats and drinks and stop on the way back for a . . .” Memtaz paused.

“Picnic?” Sarah supplied.

“Yes, yes! A picnic.”

“Whose idea was this?” Sarah asked suspiciously.

“The valide pashana thought you needed an outing.”

Sarah filed that away. If she knew her valide pashanas, Kosem had an ulterior motive for this excursion.

“You are not going?” Sarah asked Memtaz.

“Not this time. But I have been there before and I will go again sometime.”

“Memtaz,” Sarah said thoughtfully, “you knew Kalid’s mother, is that right?”

“Yes, mistress. Very well.”

“What was she like?”

“Like you,” Memtaz replied, and smiled.

“Like me?” Sarah said. “Really?”

“Oh, yes. She came here against her will, too. She was a captive, as I told you. But she came to love the old pasha very much and lived out the rest of her life in happiness here.”

“She never wanted to go home again?”

“I think she had a longing, yes, a longing she passed on to her son. He wanted to go to England very much, to see it for her.”

“What did she look like?”

“Oh,
gulbeyaz
. Most beautiful. Once the pasha saw her, he was lost to all others. He had no other kadin for the rest of his life.”

“Was she blonde?”

“Not so much as you—darker, the color of amber. With the dimples, and the cleft in the chin, that my master has now.” Memtaz looked around the room. “Where is your
feradge
?”

“My what?”

“Your cloak. You must be completely veiled, covered up to the eyes in order to go out in a carriage.”

“Memtaz, I don’t think I have a feradge. I’ve never been out of the palace since I got here.”

“Oh, yes, I see. I’ll find you one. You must get ready—the carriages will be here at one o’clock.”

The feradge turned out to be a sort of wrap, like a blanket, which went over the shoulders and the head and concealed everything but the eyes of the wearer. As the harem women assembled by the Gates of Felicity with the khislar, Achmed, the little procession looked like a line of mummies or ghosts.

Achmed assigned two eunuchs to walk beside each carriage and a halberdier to drive it. The carriages had canopies of ivory silk fringed with gold tassels, and the seats were padded with plush and strewn with embroidered cushions. Twin lanterns sat on either side of the driver’s bench, and each coach was pulled by a matched team of horses. Kosem’s carriage was in the lead, the pasha’s crest emblazoned on the doors, and the valide pashana gestured for Sarah to join her for the drive down the hill into town.

The sea gleamed below them as the carriages proceeded at a walking pace, the khislar in the lead, down the dusty, winding road that led from the Orchid Palace to the bazaar in Bursa. This was the first time Sarah had seen the route she’d traveled the night she was kidnapped, and she craned her neck to peer over the side of the coach, trying to memorize landmarks and get her bearings.

“Planning your escape route?” Kosem’s voice interrupted her reverie. Sarah turned to look at the old lady; her black eyes were the only thing visible above her cloak.

“You look startled,” Kosem added serenely, smiling. “Was I reading your mind?”