The Janissary Tree

She darted him a roguish look.

“You think—sentimental value? Rubbish. They are, however, part of my batterie de guerre. Beauty is cheap within these walls. Distinction, though, comes at a price. Look at her. Not all the mountains of Circassia could produce a creature so lovely again—but my son would have forgotten her name in a week. Tanya? Alesha? What does it matter?”

“It mattered to somebody,” Yashim reminded her. “Somebody killed her.”

“Because she was beautiful? Pah, everyone is beautiful here.”

“No. Perhaps because she was about to lie with the sultan.”

She eyed him suddenly: at times like this he knew exactly why she was valide, and no one else. He held her gaze.

“Perhaps.” She gave a pretty little shrug. “I want to tell you about my jewels. Ugly, very useful—and worth a fortune.”

He wondered if she needed money: but she had read his thoughts. “One never knows,” she said, tapping him on the arm. “Things are never quite as one expects.”

He bowed slightly to acknowledge the truth of her remark. In his life, it was true. In hers? Without question: and with an unexpectedness that was fantastic.

Fifty years before a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West Indies to Marseilles. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was being sent to Paris to complete her education, and find a suitable husband.

She never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs. The corsairs presented her to the Dey of Algiers, who marvelled at her exotic beauty and her white, white skin. The dey knew she was far too valuable to be retained. So he sent her on, to Istanbul.

But that was only half the story: the half that was merely unusual. Over the centuries other Christian captives had made their way into a sultan’s bed. Not many; some. But the whim of destiny is powerful and inscrutable. On Martinique, young Aimee had been almost inseparable from another French Creole girl called Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. A year after Aimee set out on her fateful voyage to France, young Rose had followed. Same route: a luckier ship. Reaching Paris, she had weathered revolution, imprisonment, hunger and the desires of ambitious men to become the lover, the wife, and finally the Empress of Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. Aimee, the friend of Rose’s youth, had vanished to the world as the Valide Sultan. Rose was Empress Josephine.

One never knows.

She reached up and gave him a chaste kiss. At the door she turned.

“Find my jewels, Yashim. Find them soon—or I swear I’ll never lend you another novel as long as I live!”

[ 11 ]

In the rain, in the night, even a city of two million souls can be quiet and deserted. It was the dead hour between the evening and the night prayers. A rat, its wet fur glistening, scrambled out of an overflowing drain and began to scuttle along the foot of a building, looking for shelter. The rising water pursued it almost imperceptibly.

Slowly the puddle rose, from one cobble to the next, probing the joints for a means of escape. When it found one, it began to trickle through, blindly but unerringly seeking its path downhill. From time to time it stopped, pooled, and started over, insistently seeking its own way to the Bosphorus, lining the banks of its own clear trail with mud, twigs, hairs, crumbs. It spread across a lateral street but pooled again on the other side where a flight of stone steps ran down to the Mosque of the Victory, just newly completed on the shore.

The rain, continuing to fall, continued to back up against the drain. At the hour of the morning star the janitor of the mosque sent two workmen to trace the torrent that was threatening to seep into the cement floors and spoil the carpets. They hitched their woollen cloaks over their heads with their elbows against the rain, and started up the steps.

About two hundred yards uphill they found a section of road which had turned into a pond, and cautiously probed the muddy water with their rods.

Eventually they located the drain, and started work trying to unblock it: first with the rods and later, standing up to their chins in the freezing, filthy water, with their hands and feet. The obstruction was a soft package of some sort, so tightly bound with cords that neither man, slipping foot-first into the icy murk for a few seconds at a time, could get a proper purchase on it. At last, shortly before daybreak, they managed to guide a rod between the package and the wall of the drain, and lever it away far enough to let the water escape with a gurgle.

The workman who leaned in up to his chest and gripped the obstruction finally saw what looked at first like a gigantic turkey, trussed for roasting.