The Janissary Tree

Even more interesting, though, was the lie about the cab.

The lie—and the fact that the prince had known about it.

The fact that the prince himself had attempted to cover up.

“Excusez-moi, monsieur.”

Yashim turned. For once, he was almost nonplussed.

He hadn’t noticed her come in.

Yet standing beside him now was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

[ 39 ]

Madame,” he murmured. She was tall, almost as tall as him, and he guessed that this was the princess, the ambassador’s wife, although he might have expected someone older. The princess looked barely twenty. Her hair was drawn up to reveal her slender neck and shoulders, though a few black ringlets danced exotically against her fair skin. He noticed the tips of her ears, the soft curve of her chin, the almost Turkish slant of her cheekbones. Her large black eyes sparkled.

She was looking at him with an air of amusement.

Yashim could hardly understand how the footman could stand there unmoved, when the most ravishing creature, dark-eyed, black-haired, her face seemingly sculpted from the virgin snow, glided in front of him unchaperoned. Was he blind?

“I am Eugenia, monsieur. La femme de I’Ambassadeur le Prince.”

The ambassador’s wife. The ambassador’s woman. Her voice was singularly low. Her lips barely moved when she spoke.

“Yashim,” he murmured. He noticed that she had extended her hand, the fingers pointing to the ground. As if in a dream he took it and pressed it to his lips. The skin was warm.

“You should be more adventurous, Monsieur Yashim,” she said, dimpling her cheek.

Yashim’s eyes widened. He felt the blood rush to his face. “I…I am sorry—”

“I meant, of course, looking at old maps of your city.” She looked at him again, with curiosity. “You do speak French, or am I dreaming? Wonderful.”

“The map? Interesting, of course—it’s one of the first detailed maps of Istanbul ever made, shortly after the Conquest. Well, a hundred years or so. 1599, Flensburg, Melchior Lorich. All the same, I suggest we look at some of the paintings. Then, perhaps, you can form an idea of what we are like.”

Yashim was scarcely listening to what she was saying. The sensation he was experiencing was unlike any he had ever known before, and he recognised that it was not merely the effect of her beauty which produced it. Ordinary men might be staggered, he supposed, but for Yashim? Ridiculous! Beautiful women paraded by him every time he entered the sultan’s harem.

He saw them, sometimes, all but naked: how often they teased him, with their perfumed breasts and full thighs! How they pleaded with him, these perfect creatures, for a stray touch of what was forbidden and unknown! Yet they always seemed to him, in some fundamental sense, to be clothed, veiled, forbidden.

Here was a woman almost fully dressed—though he gazed at her lips, at the hollow in her throat, at her bare slender shoulders. It was she who seemed the more naked.

Never, in a public room, had a woman spoken to him like this. Allowed him to touch her skin with his lips.

She laid a hand on his arm and led him along the paintings which hung on the wall.

“Tell me, monsieur, does this shock you at all?”

The hand shocked him.

They were standing in front of a family portrait of the Czar Alexander, his wife and children. It was an informal composition, in the French style: the czar seated beneath a tree in the sun, the czarina, like a ripe apple, leaning against him, and several small, fair boys in silk breeches and girls in white frocks grouped around them.

Yashim tried to examine the picture but yes, she was right.