Yashim privately cursed his impetuosity. He’d been taken into the palace just when the Valide Sultan took her evening nap, and the Kislar Agha had swiftly taken control. The Kislar Agha never slept. When Yashim had told him what he had to say, he had sent immediately for the dresser.
That was how the system worked, Yashim knew. Everyone had their own ideas about the imperial harem, but essentially it was like a machine. The sultan, pumping a new recruit in the cohort of imperial concubines, was simply a major piston of an engine designed to guarantee the continuous production of Ottoman sultans. All the rest—the eunuchs, the women—were cogs.
Christians viewed the sultan’s harem quite differently. Reading his way through some of the valide’s favourite French novels, it had slowly dawned on Yashim that westerners, as a rule, had an intensely romantic and imaginative picture of the harem. For them it was a honeyed fleshpot, in which the most beautiful women in the world engaged spontaneously at the whim of a single man in salacious acts of love and passion, a narcotic bacchanal. As though the women had only breasts and thighs, and neither brains nor histories. Let them dream, Yashim thought. The place was a machine, but the women had their lives, their will and their ambition. As for the hints of lascivious-ness, the machine simply let them off as steam.
The dresser was a case in point. He was something like a squeezed lemon, a sour and fussy creature, black, skinny, forty-five, meticulous about detail, with all the spontaneous effervescence of a dripping tap. The dresser’s tasks ranged from preparing the gozde, or chosen girl, for a sultan’s bed to buying their underwear. His staff included hairdressers, tailors, jewellers and a perfumier, whose own job involved, among other things, crushing and grinding scents, blending perfumes to suit the sultan’s taste, preparing soaps, oils and aphrodisiacs, and overseeing the making of the imperial incense. If anything went wrong, the dresser was the one to take the blame: but he always had lesser functionaries he, in turn, could kick.
“A ring, dresser,” the Kislar Agha was saying. “According to our friend here, the girl wore a ring. I do not know if she was wearing it when the unfortunate circumstance occurred. Perhaps you will tell us.”
The slight annular depression on the dead girl’s middle finger which Yashim had noticed before the Valide Sultan had interrupted his inspection of the body had interested him at the time. For all her finery and precious jewels, it had been the missing ring which recalled, however fractionally, her existence as a living person, with thoughts and feelings of her own. Perfectly engineered for the task she was never destined to perform—flawless, beautiful, perfectly accoutred, bathed and perfumed—had she nonetheless prepared to approach the sultan’s bed with the tiniest trace of an imperfection, a cold, white indentation on the middle finger of her right hand: the faint imprint of a choice?
Was the ring removed at the time of her death, or even later?
The dresser glanced at Yashim, who watched him without expression, arms folded patiently across his chest. The dresser gazed upwards, drumming his fingers nervously against his closed lips. Yashim had the impression that he already had the answer they wanted. He was trying to control his panic and work out the probable consequences of what he was about to say.
“Indeed. A ring. Just the one. She did wear the ring.”
The Kislar Agha tugged at his earlobe. He turned a bloodshot eye on Yashim, who said: “And the Page of the Chamber found the body. Can we talk to him?”
The Page of the Chamber, whose task was to lead the gozde to the sultan, was produced: he knew nothing about a ring. The Kislar Agha, who had been next on the scene, gave Yashim his answer only by a slight lowering of his eyelids.
“She was laid out in the bridal chamber, just as you saw her.”
“By -?”
“Among others, the dresser.”
The dresser could not remember if the ring had been missing then.
“But you might have noticed if it had been gone?” Yashim suggested.
The dresser hesitated.
“Yes, yes, I suppose that would have struck me. After all, I arranged her hands. Put like that, effendi, it’s obvious that she was wearing the ring when she—ah—she—”
“She died. Can you describe it?”
The dresser swallowed.
“A silver ring. Not of account. I’ve seen it quite often. Different girls wear it, pass it around. There are a lot of small pieces like that, not very special, that belong to the women in general, as it were. They wear them for a bit, tire of them, give them away. Frankly, I consider those sort of trinkets as beneath my notice -unless they are ugly, or spoil a composition, of course.”
“And you let her wear this ring to attend the sultan?”
