Having thus established her sense of purpose—if not to say superiority—Safiye allowed herself to reach out. She took an oval fingertip full of almond and jasmine cream and rubbed it into her face, releasing the cloying scent into the air about her like curls of blood in a warm bath. The alabaster of her face firmed and whitened under the cool smoothness in further layers of perfection.
When one girl’s complexion is praised as being like feta cheese, Safiye thought, another’s like Turkish delight, I still rejoice in the alabaster of my own. Cheese is too spongy, Turkish delight too tinted and transparent—both too easily dissolved, digested.
Confirmed in the solidity of her being as well as in its centeredness, Safiye reached out again, letting her attention go further, to the delicate blue glass phial that held her beauty cream. Glass made in Murano, she noticed with no twinge either of homesickness or self-banishment, but rather with an affirmation of the state of trade and policy between her old homeland and her new one.
She looked beyond to the hands that held the vessel towards her, the Quince’s greenish knots of knuckle. Then she allowed those hands to take up their own daub of cream and conform it to the oval. Safiye knew that while she herself was alabaster in response to that touch, the midwife’s hands, otherwise so confident and calm, would quiver.
They did, like stone-scraped flesh.
Prince Murad’s reaction was the same when he caressed her.
The linger of the Quince’s fingers grew so long as to annoy. But Safiye took care to keep her annoyance shut behind her mind’s grille.
Nor did she bother to break the boundaries of her own oval perfection to wonder about the older woman’s fascination. Safiye only knew that the midwife—otherwise so incorruptible-—remained vigilant at Esmikhan’s. And returned again and again to sit on the cushion next to Safiye with new Venetian glass filled with this new potion and that.
Baffo’s daughter wasn’t convinced of the efficacy of beauty rituals. She never had been. In this as in everything else she felt self-sufficient, above a groveling slavery to fashion. She was certain she had won Murad and continued to hold him not because of any human concoction but by a touch of God.
Safiye had the feeling that her face had, in fact, been made in much the same manner as divine fire honed the prophets of old. She had an innate right to be beautiful, and heaven would allow no hindrance to the authority beauty gave her, that same heaven’s open gift. This was perhaps the extent of her theology in either her native religion or her adopted one. If pushed to a corner, however, or even on the rack, she might confess nothing more: Safiye Baffo recognized no divinity beyond the rim of her own face.
Still, if cloves and ginger were no fail-proof way to attain irresistibility for those God had not blessed, Safiye saw no harm in the spices. She saw no harm in any ritual—whether prayer or fasting or feasting—she discovered here among the Turks.
The tingle in the Quince’s fingers: Well, it might be the burn of cloves, of ginger, nothing more. But Safiye needed very little convincing to see that these rituals did serve beyond the surface. Their rare ingredients did have efficacy greater than merely translating her God-given gift to the Turkish vernacular.
And then the Quince let the quiver affecting her olive-green fingers move to her tongue. “Pepper is cheap in the spice market,” the midwife said, following the curve of Safiye’s cheek down to oval chin as if touching holy relics and uttering prayer instead of venalities. “It’s so cheap, I’d almost scrub my pots with it in place of sand. A pity there’s little beauty benefit in pepper, my sweetest mountain flower. But I’ve stocked up on enough sacks of the stuff to poultice a hundred winters’ coughs.”
“That’ll be the twenty thousand quintals of pepper Sultan Suleiman’s ships have confiscated from the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean.” Safiye spoke, and watched in the mirror how entranced the Quince’s fingers were by the slightest movement of her lips.
“You care a lot about the source of your spices,” the midwife commented. “More than about the spices themselves, I think.”
Safiye smiled and condescended to speak some more. “This cargo has been brought to Alexandria. Thence some comes to us in Constantinople, much to the Venetian traders for an excellent price.”
“You favor the traders of your homeland, fairest of the fair?” The Quince asked it as if she would willingly capture the moon for Safiye if that would please as well as a coup for Venice.
“In this case, what helps the Venetian Republic helps the realm of Islam, too. I do not pick sides except against the Portuguese who, ever since their ships rounded Africa, have had unfair—uncustomary—advantage of the Indian seas.”
“No wonder the cooks have been over-peppering the sauces lately.”
“Your ambition, my Quince, extends no further than your belly?”
“While yours, my fair one, encompasses the entire earth.” Was that a note of exasperation in the midwife’s tone?
‘Where the pepper goes, there goes the gold,’ was a saying when I was a child.” Safiye unfurled her eyelids and drawled, letting the midwife think she was half a-swoon with caresses. “I remember the smell when, as a child, we’d pole through the canals where the richest merchants warehoused. Sometimes cloves, sometimes cinnamon, but always, always pepper. The smell of wealth. The smell of power.”
“Come to my surgery, heart of my heart.” The Quince quieted to a whisper in her intensity. “Leave this silly, garish communal hall. You shall smell that smell again.”
Safiye pushed a smile up into
