The Tournament (14 page)

He crouched in front of me so that we faced each other nose to nose. ‘Can you promise me three things, Bess? Can you promise me that you will stay close by my side during whatever follows?’

‘I promise.’

‘Can you promise me that you will do exactly as I say during whatever follows?’

‘I promise,’ I said eagerly. ‘And the third thing?’

‘Can you promise me that you will never
ever
tell Mrs Ponsonby about your participation in this affair?’

My face broke into a broad grin. I nodded vigorously. ‘I absolutely promise.’

‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘Come then, put on a cloak, and stay close to me.’

We stepped into the corridor outside our rooms.

An armed man stood there and I stopped short.

Bald and muscular, he had the deep black skin of an Abyssinian and he wore a white tunic and a bronze collar around his neck: a pre-eminent slave. His cheekbones were etched with raised dots and tribal scarring.

Mr Ascham didn’t even miss a step.

‘Elizabeth, this is Latif, one of the Sultan’s most trusted eunuchs,’ he said. ‘In addition to the local languages, he speaks Latin and Greek and a little bit of English. The Sultan has assigned him to be my escort throughout the investigation. Latif, this is my student, Elizabeth.’

The big eunuch bowed to me but said nothing. He carried an ornate bronze bow and matching quiver on his back, and two gold-hilted cutlasses on his belt.

‘Latif,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘I would like to see the exact place where the cardinal’s body was found and then I would like to see the body itself.’

IT WAS WELL AFTER MIDNIGHT
when Mr Ascham, Latif and I arrived at the latticed arcade that separated the Third Courtyard from the Fourth.

The palace was silent in the moonlight. The many tables from the banquet had long since been packed away. Four sternfaced palace guards bearing scimitars and spears guarded the lattice gate leading to the reflecting pool in the Fourth Courtyard, but at a word from Latif they stepped aside and let us pass.

As we stepped through the gate and came to the stairs beyond it, I recalled the grim sight of Cardinal Farnese’s corpse lying face-up and spreadeagled in the shallow rectangular pool.

We beheld that same pool now.

No corpse lay in it.

A few small smears of blood on the pool’s right rim were the only evidence of anything untoward happening there. They wouldn’t remain for long: at that very moment, a slave girl was on her knees scrubbing them away.

‘He was in that pool?’ Mr Ascham asked.

‘Yes, he was lying on his back with his arms spread wide, Christ-like. His eyes were open and the skin around his jaw had been . . . torn away . . .’

I guided my teacher to the edge of the pool. ‘He lay this way, with his feet pointed toward the Third Courtyard.’

Mr Ascham surveyed the scene in silence.

Then he turned to me and said, ‘Bess, was there much blood? On the stones surrounding the pool? On the rim, perhaps?’

I thought about this. ‘No. Just those small smears that are being cleaned off now.’

‘What about the water in the pool: was it clear or was it reddened by the blood of the dead man?’

‘It was clear,’ I said. Despite his many wounds, I had been able to see the cardinal’s body clearly under the water’s surface.

‘I see.’ Mr Ascham turned to Latif. ‘Who ordered the body to be taken away?’

‘His Majesty the Sultan did,’ our escort said curtly. ‘He did not wish any of his guests to see it.’

‘Who specifically took it away, then?’

Latif spoke briefly in Turkish with the slave girl scrubbing the rim of the pool. ‘Captain Faad, the head of the Palace Guard, took the body away.’

‘Where is it now? I would like to see it.’

‘Why?’ Latif said with a frown. ‘The man is dead. He cannot tell you anything.’

‘We shall see about that.’

Latif shrugged and another quick conversation with the scrubbing girl was had. ‘The body was taken to the Sultan’s main dungeon,’ he reported.

Mr Ascham nodded. ‘Please take us there, then, so that I may see this corpse for myself.’

For as I long as I could remember, the most frightening structure in all of London was the Tower.

It stood like a dark behemoth at the eastern extremity of the city, at the point where the Thames left the walls of London and headed for the sea. When one passed by the Tower in a boat one could hear the wails and cries of the traitors inside being tortured. A few days later, their heads would be on display atop London Bridge. As a young girl, I prayed to the Lord that I would never find myself in the Tower of London.

But judging from the accounts I had read of English soldiers who had been captured during the Crusades to the Holy Land, the dungeons of the Moslems were an even greater Hell.

They were the stuff of grim legend. Those Englishmen who had been captured during the various holy wars in Jerusalem had returned with tales of the most frightening barbarism. Beheadings, brandings, severed tongues and hands. And this was all before one heard of the Moslems’ instruments of torture: spiked head-cages, neck vices and heated tanks of scalding water into which naked men were plunged.

Curiously, in the centuries after those ill-fated crusades, all of those contraptions of torture found their way into the dungeons of Europe. Europe received much knowledge from the Moslems—astronomy, mathematics, the works of the ancient Greeks, chess and, evidently, many methods of breaking a human body slowly and in great agony.

It was with these thoughts flitting through my mind that I descended a long flight of stone stairs beneath the Tower of Justice and entered the dungeons of the Sultan.

After passing through several tunnels we came to a guard station where Latif spoke briefly with a hard-eyed guard who bore a hideous Y-shaped scar on his right cheek. The guard let us pass and we entered a wide stone-walled chamber lit by torches and ringed by barred cells.

An iron cage hung above a pit of hot coals; manacles dangled in front of a bloodstained wall; dry hay lined the floor. The place smelled of urine, blood and shit. Dull moans could be heard from within the cells but the guards had long ago grown deaf to them.

Lying on a wide stone slab in the centre of the dungeon was the body of Cardinal Farnese. I imagined that the slab was usually used for beheadings or, perhaps, for amputating the hands of thieves.

It lay naked and face-up, the cardinal’s immense paunch bulging over his genitals. His skin was pale and grey. Dozens of bloody stab wounds pierced it. And the exposed bones of his jaws and teeth pointed up at the stone ceiling.

My teacher circumnavigated the slab, peering at the body curiously without the slightest appearance of discomfort. He glanced over at me. ‘Are you all right?’

I nodded even though I was utterly horrified.

Mr Ascham touched one of the stab wounds, as if checking to make sure it was real. Then he casually picked up one of the dead cardinal’s hands and looked at both sides of it with no more care or enthusiasm than a woman at a fruit stall assessing a bruised apple. He let the hand fall back onto the stone slab with a dull slap before he checked the other one. Both hands were pudgy and pale, wet and grey, and as far as I could tell, completely unremarkable.

Now my teacher came to the corpse’s mutilated head.

He bent over the cardinal’s exposed jawbone and looked at it closely. I couldn’t conceive how he could get so close to something so foul and yet still be so calm. I half expected the corpse to leap up and bite him.

He peered inside the cardinal’s skinless mouth—and here my teacher emitted a grunt of discovery.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘The cardinal’s gums and tongue are covered in a rash, a rather aggressive rash. The tongue is greatly swollen, too.’ At this point, to my great disgust and horror, Mr Ascham reached
into
the dead man’s ghastly mouth with his index finger and poked around inside it.

‘How very interesting,’ he said casually. ‘The entire underside of his tongue is covered in a black residue. The good cardinal, it appears, indulged in regular opium use.’

Then my teacher did something even more peculiar: he pushed down sharply and firmly on the corpse’s chest, peering intently at the dead cardinal’s mouth as he did so.

‘What are you—?’ I began.

He held up a finger, and pumped the chest a few more times.

When at last he stopped, he said thoughtfully, ‘No water.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No water in his lungs,’ he said. ‘Which means he was not breathing when he was thrown into the pool. He was dead already.’

Mr Ascham pursed his lips. Then he straightened. ‘Come, Bess, we’re done here. It was beneficial to see the body so close to the time of the murder but we will learn no more tonight. Let us return to our lodgings and get some sleep, for tomorrow promises to be a busy day.’

WE RETURNED TO OUR QUARTERS
. There my teacher bade me good night and retired to his room. He closed the heavy curtain that served as a door but I could see the light of a candle in there and heard the scratching of a quill for some time thereafter—he was writing down his thoughts while they were fresh in his mind.

I myself was both fatigued and invigorated by the evening’s events. I went into the room I shared with Elsie and hurried to her bed to wake her and tell her about the awful things I had seen.

Her bed was still empty. I had forgotten about the late-night gathering hosted by the Crown Prince that she had crept away to attend earlier.

I didn’t pause to think about Elsie for long. My weariness was suddenly quite profound. I folded into my bed and was asleep within a minute.

I was shaken awake by a most excited Elsie.

‘Oh, Bessie, Bessie, you won’t believe the wonders I have seen!’

I sat up. I didn’t know how long I had been asleep. It was still dark outside, but judging by the soft glow on the horizon I gathered it was closer to dawn than to midnight. Elsie had been out a very long time.

‘What? Where?’ I whispered weakly.

‘Why, at the party in the Crown Prince’s quarters, silly,’ she said. ‘Oh, Bessie, how could I possibly sleep—this place is so wondrous. Sultans, princes, artists, champion chess players, wrestlers, fireworks and now a scandalous murder. After I slipped out of here, I went directly over to the Harem, where I told the guards the password—that I was a privileged friend of the Crown Prince’s—and thus I was granted entry and escorted to his rooms.

‘Oh, my . . .’ she sighed dramatically. ‘You cannot
imagine
what I beheld there.
Dionysian
does not even begin to describe it. The Crown Prince’s quarters were simply lavish: a broad chamber composed of cushioned lounges and cosy side-booths. And the whole place was veiled in a haze of incense and smoke from ganja-weed pipes. Somewhere a lyre played. Olive-oil lamps illuminated the chamber in a dim golden glow that allowed for fleeting glimpses of what was taking place.’

‘What was taking place there?’ I asked.

‘The first thing I saw was the silhouette of a couple, a woman kneeling astride a man, the two of them moving to a slow rhythm that caused the man to throw his head back in pleasure and the woman to grip his shoulders to contain her own delight. It was fornication, Bessie, right there out in the open!’

‘Goodness me,’ I said.

‘I ventured further into the dim chamber,’ Elsie said. ‘There was subtle movement all around me, half-seen shadows in the golden mist: caressing and kissing, heaving and sliding. It wasn’t the rushed rutting I have seen back in England, designed for quick and base pleasure—it was smooth and gentle; mutual pleasure, happily given and willingly received.

‘The sweet smoke all around me meant that I could only see one or two pairings at a time, but as I penetrated deeper into the chamber, I realised that there were couplings everywhere: young people, perhaps twenty of them, all naked, all frolicking in some way or another. In one corner, I glimpsed a chess player kissing the breasts of a young woman; in another, a great oiled wrestler occupied a tiny servant girl, making her pant pleasurably; in a third, two young Turkish men kissed each other tenderly.’