The Panther and The Pearl (2 page)

She was proud and willful; very well, so was he. She would be a challenge. He was tired of the tractable harem women, this one would provide some sport. And what pleasure he would take in her when she finally submitted.
 

Kalid swallowed the rest of his drink and put the back of his hand to his mouth. He wanted her. He wanted her hot, searching mouth on his, her soft, long fingered hands clutching him convulsively in a frenzy of passion, her pale, yielding body opening to receive his like a sheath accepting a sword.

He closed his eyes, the sweat beading on his forehead, his fists now clenched at his sides.

He would make it happen. He must.
 

Memtaz waited anxiously in Sarah’s chamber; set aside for the
ikbal,
the favorite, it was the most luxurious in the harem, second only to the apartments of the pasha’s female relatives.

“What happened?” the little maid demanded.
 

“Nothing,” Sarah replied.

“Nothing?” Memtaz echoed in puzzlement. A Circassian slave long in Ottoman service, she had been instrumental in Sarah’s robing for the presentation to Kalid and was most anxious for her foreign charge to do well.

“He looked me over as if I were a prize mare he had purchased at the county fair and then sent me back here,” Sarah said.
 

“County fair?”
 

“Never mind.”
 

“He didn’t touch you?”

“He touched me.”
 

“Nothing more?”

“No.”

“He was not pleased with you?” Memtaz said, distressed. “How is that possible? You look so lovely, I don’t understand. How could my master think he had made a bad choice?”

“He didn’t think that, Memtaz,” Sarah said wearily. “He said he would have paid anything to get me. He was satisfied. With my appearance, anyway.”
 

Memtaz stared at her, dumfounded.

“Don’t look at me like that, this is your cursed country,” Sarah muttered, collapsing on a plush divan covered with satin cushions. She surveyed the opulent wall hangings indifferently and then looked once more at the servant.
 

“How is it that Kalid Shah speaks English so well?”

“His mother taught him, and me,” Memtaz explained. “She was a blue eye-gavur...”

“Foreigner?” Sarah said. “A captive?”

Memtaz nodded vigorously. “Yes, captured by the corsairs and sold to the valide pasha, Kalid’s father. She was English, like you.”
 

“I’m American.”

Memtaz shrugged, as if the difference were of no importance. “The old master loved her very much and had no other kadin while she lived. He indulged her and when she wished her son to be sent to school in England, to learn the ways of her people, the old master complied. There is a university, oh, what is it called, Oxfar... ”

“Oxford?” Sarah asked, startled.

“Yes, yes. The young master went to school there before his father died and he returned here to claim his inheritance.”
 

Good lord, Sarah thought. This barbarian who had bought her as if she were a length of yard goods had an Oxford education? His mixed parentage did explain some things, though; his height and the honeyed tinge of his skin as well as his excellent command of her language.

“Memtaz, what is going to happen to me?” she asked the servant unhappily.
 

Memtaz shook her head. “Who can say? If you had been a gift from the Sultan, my master would have been forced to marry you, as is our custom. But since he gained you in this way...”

“Yes?”

“Most likely you will take your place in the harem as an odalisque.”
 

“What’s that?” Sarah asked quickly, but she knew. She had heard the term in the Sultan’s Seraglio.
 

“Female slave.”
 

“Like you?” Sarah asked; she was sure not.

“No, I am
gedikli
, reserved for household tasks. You would be
haseki.
..” Memtaz hesitated.
 

“Tell me.”

“Reserved for my master’s pleasure.”

“You mean a concubine,” Sarah said dully. She had known it, but saying it aloud somehow made it worse.
 

Memtaz did not disagree.

Sarah closed her eyes.
 

“Don’t look so sad, mistress,” Memtaz said soothingly. “You are really very fortunate. You will have a luxurious life, with nothing to do but bathe in the
hamman
, anoint yourself with fragrant oils and array yourself in splendid garments, smoke the and eat the choicest sherbets and sweetmeats.”

“I don’t want to bathe in the hamman, Memtaz, or smoke hashish. I want to be free.”

“And Pasha Kalid is young,” Memtaz went on, as if Sarah had not spoken. “He is the most handsome man in Bursa, perhaps in the whole Empire. All the harem women sigh heavily for his touch and pray to be chosen for a night of love. You could be bound to an old, ugly, fat man who stinks of garlic. My master is very rich too, he inherited this palace and all its holdings from his father, the harem and the surrounding pashadom from the Golden Horn down into the Bosporous, and up to the bedouin hills...”
 

Sarah held up her hand to stop the speech. “Thank you, Memtaz. I know you are trying to comfort me, but I need to be alone now, to think. You may go.”

Memtaz bowed.

“And Memtaz?”
 

The maid turned.

“What does ‘kourista’ mean?”
 

Memtaz smiled. “Oh, it is a love term, a great flattering...you understand?”

“A compliment?”
 

“Yes. When a man calls a woman this it means that she is the object of his aching longing, his strongest... desire.”

Sarah looked away.
 

Memtaz withdrew quietly to the anteroom where she slept. Sarah turned and stared out the barred window of her chamber at the stone walls of the carriage house which connected the pasha’s harem to the outside world.
 

There had to be a way to escape from this place. But how to determine it?

Sarah sighed wretchedly. What was she going to do? She was thousands of miles from home with no way to get in touch with anyone. Even if Roxalena knew what had happened to Sarah, the Princess could do nothing against her father. James was the only western person Sarah knew in the whole Ottoman Empire, possibly the only one who could help her, but her cousin was as lost to her as if she had been swallowed by an earthquake.
 

Sarah’s throat closed in horror at her situation. She had been sold,
sold
, for God’s sake, to a man who aroused such conflicting feelings in her that the very thought of seeing him again brought her to the verge of tears. Sarah lay back on the couch and looked above the red tiled roof of the carriage house at the sapphire night sky, thinking back to the series of events that had brought her to this unexpected pass, in this dangerous and exotic place.

Chapter 1

Constantinople
 

Capital, Ottoman Empire

July, 1885
 

“So you are curious about harem life?” James Woolcott said, smiling, taking a sip of his iced drink.

“Of course,” Sarah replied. “Who wouldn’t be?” His first cousin, she shared his last name and the same passion for travel; they had been raised together in Massachusetts by James’ father, Sarah’s uncle, like brother and sister.
 

“Really, James, you should not spend Sarah’s vacation with us discussing the immoral practices of these lewd foreigners,” Beatrice said stiffly, rising to set her glass next to the silver pitcher on the table. She removed her lace handkerchief from the sleeve of her blue silk afternoon dress and dabbed at her temples with it. Her skirt, which was draped up to show a pleated, striped underpanel, rustled as she sat again and fingered the trailing wisps of her chignon.

“I’m afraid you are the foreigner here, my dear, and immorality is merely a matter of perspective,” her husband replied, winking broadly at Sarah.

They were sitting on the second floor terrace of the Woolcott home in the European section of the city, within view of the Bosporous Bridge, trying to catch a breeze from the water. Below them the bustle of the market, the creaking of carriage wheels and clopping of horses’ hooves and the cries of the vendors, was muted but still audible.
 

Beatrice picked up a folding fan, its handle inlaid with ivory, from the arm of her rattan chair and began to waft it vigorously.

“Is there any more ice?” she asked her husband.

“Not until the next delivery at the end of the week,” he replied. James looked at Sarah. “The ice is brought from snow pits on Mount Olympus, but the trip is very long and arduous and so the ice is scarce and extremely expensive.”

“But it helps to make these roasting summer days bearable. I have never gotten used to the heat, my dear,” Beatrice said to Sarah, her freckled face scarlet. “I’m sure it’s a bother for you, too.”

“Actually, after twenty years of New England winters, I find the balmy climate a nice change,” Sarah said. “The train trip from Paris on the Orient Express gave me plenty of time to adjust to the weather.”

“I think Sarah is already in love with the east, Bea, and don’t change the subject,” James observed. “We were discussing Sultan Hammid’s harem.”

“I wasn’t,” Beatrice replied darkly, fanning herself even more vigorously.

“Is there more than one?” Sarah asked.
 

“Oh, yes. Each of the regional princes, or pashas, has a harem, but Sultan Abdul Hammid’s is the largest. It is called the Grand Seraglio, sometimes known as the Sublime Porte, said to contain the most beautiful women in the entire world. Hammid’s agents scour the Egyptian slave markets and deal with the Barbary pirates selling captives in order to acquire the most succulent ladies for their master.”
 

Beatrice made a disgusted sound, annoyed at Sarah’s obvious fascination.

“Where is the seraglio?” Sarah asked.

“Deep within Hammid’s palace, Topkapi, built on the isthmus between the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn.”

“What lovely names,” Sarah murmured.

“Turkish is a remarkably expressive language, very moving in its images,” James remarked.

“I prefer English,” Beatrice said.

“Yes, my dear, I know you do, but unfortunately I cannot operate a rug exporting business from Boston Common,” James said briskly, setting his sweating glass on the table. “You might adopt Sarah’s attitude and look upon our time here as a learning experience rather than as a sentence to purgatory.”

“It’s hot enough to be purgatory,” Beatrice murmured. She adjusted the waist of her fitted bodice, wincing as the whalebone corset pinched her flesh.

“So the Sultan is the chief ruler of the Empire?” Sarah asked.

James nodded. “He is the
padishah
, or king pasha, and all the lesser pashas, though in command of their own districts, are his subjects. And the Sultan rules with an iron hand, he is an absolute monarch. To thwart his will means death.”

“These people here have no rights, not as we know them in the west,” Beatrice interjected, shuddering. “It’s very frightening.”

“But how can the Sultan sleep with all those women in the harem?” Sarah asked. Her blue eyes were wide.

James burst out laughing. “I see which subject interests you the most! The answer is he doesn’t, only one at a time, and he has his favorite mistresses, as well as kadins, or wives, up to four by law. But the women are all available to him at any time. Their lives consist mostly of waiting, keeping themselves ready to please and entertain should they be called.”

“Despicable practice,” Beatrice muttered.

“And do they stay there always?” Sarah asked.

“Unless they are given away to one of the pashas, married off, or sold,” James replied, smoothing his neat blond hair, the same pale gold as Sarah’s.

“And the people here just accept this system?” Sarah said.

“Oh, there are always insurrections, but so far no one has been able to unify the tribes scattered throughout the empire against the Sultan. And of course the bedouins are constantly fighting with everybody.”

“Bedouins?”

“Desert gypsies, Arabs, mortal foes of the Turks. They dwell in tents and live by selling whatever comes their way. They are always staging raids on the outlying districts, traveling caravans, that sort of thing. They resent any attempt to rule them and consider themselves subject to no one.”

“It’s all so...” Sarah groped for a word.

“Uncivilized?” Beatrice supplied, bobbing her head so that her earrings, marcasite studded beads dangling from silver wires, danced with the motion.