“No, I am not the mullah,” Yashim laughed.
“Sounds like some kind of prank anyway. If you’ll excuse me…”
[ 10 ]
The girl lay on the bed in her vestal finery, her eyes closed. Her hair was elaborately braided, fastened with a malachite clasp. Perhaps it was the kohl, but her eyes seemed very dark, while the skin of her beautiful face seemed almost to glitter in the slatted sunlight that filtered through the shutters of the room. Heavy tassels of gold thread hung from the gauze scarf she wore around her breasts, and her long legs were encased in pantaloons of a satin muslin so fine it was as though she were naked. A small golden slipper dangled from the toe of her left foot.
The tongue that protruded slightly between her rouged lips suggested that she needed more than a kiss to waken her now.
Yashim bent over and examined the girl’s neck. Two black bruises on either side of her throat. The pressure had been severe, and she’d been killed from in front: she would have seen the killer’s face before she died.
He glanced down at the girl’s body and felt a pang of pity. So flawless: death had made her more like a jewel, lustrous and cold, her beauty beyond all power of touch. And, he thought sadly, I will die like her: a virgin. More mangled, in my case. He blocked the thoughts, quickly: years ago they had maddened and tormented him, but he had learned to control them. They were his thoughts, his desires, and so he could sheath them like a sword. He was alive. That was good.
His eyes travelled over her skin. The pallor of death had left it like cold white butter. He almost missed the tiny suggestion that she was not, after all, absolutely without a flaw. Around the middle finger of her right hand he spotted the very slight trace of a narrow band where the skin had been squeezed. She had worn a ring; she was not wearing it now.
He raised his head. Something in the atmosphere of the room had changed—a slight shift in pressure, perhaps, a shift in the balance of the living to the dead. He turned quickly and scanned the room: hangings, columns, plenty of places for someone else to hide. Someone who had already killed?
Out of the shadows a woman glided forward, her head slightly cocked to one side, her hands outstretched.
“
It was the Valide Sultan, the queen mother herself: and she spoke, he noticed without surprise, in the voice of the Marquise de Merteuil. It was she who had given him the book. In his dreams, the marquise spoke French with what Yashim was not to know was a Creole twang.
She took his hands and pecked him on the cheek, three times. Then she glanced down at the lovely form laid out in death for his inspection.
“
He knew exactly what she meant.
“
“Absolutely. A Bulgarian fisherman.”
The Valide Sultan put a pretty hand to her mouth.
“I was about fifteen.”
She waved him away, smiling.
“Yashim,
Yashim gazed at her. In the half-light she looked almost young; in any light she was still beautiful. He wondered if the dead girl would have looked so good at her age—or would have survived so long. Aimee—the sultan’s mother. It was the role that every woman in the harem fought for: to sleep with the sultan, bear a son and, in due course, engineer his elevation to the throne of Osman. Each step required a greater concentration of miracles. The woman in front of him had possessed a singular advantage, though: she was a Frenchwoman. One miracle under her belt from the start.
“You’re not telling me that I never showed you the Napoleon jewels?” she was saying. “Well, my God, you are the lucky man. I bore everyone with these jewels. I admire them, my guest admires them—and I’m quite sure they all think them as ugly as I do. But they came from the Emperor Napoleon to me.
