“What it means for the Sultan. For his grandson.”
“For me. Your price quotes from the spice markets are as good—and as rapid—an indicator as any other I’ve discovered.”
The Quince seemed to take more compliment than Safiye had meant. But it was a sign that, secure in this ally, Baffo’s daughter could expand her attention to the rest of the room.
Here, harem walls contained the brilliant splinters of life created by close to two dozen young women yet uncontained within themselves. The young women’s native integrity imploded under the pressures of grille and veil. Although beautiful, indeed chosen first for this beauty, they were not naturally favored quite enough to be free of beauty’s thralldom—and all the other slaveries fashion brought in its wake.
The Quince sighed. “Your prince will call for you soon.”
Safiye hummed a half-attentive response.
“Too soon.”
After another circle of Safiye’s face, the midwife said: “Will he love the smell of jasmine on you as much as I do, my doe?”
Safiye could tell her lack of attention galled the Quince. Speaking would help, even if it were mindless repetition of thoughts she’d shared before.
“On my first visit to the harem,” Safiye said therefore, “before I’d even been bought and guaranteed a place here, I felt the pulse of power in these inner rooms. It was as if, in a body apparently dead, there had been this forceful sign of life. Can you appreciate that, my Quince? Have you ever come upon a body like that?”
“No. Mostly what I find dead is genuinely dead.”
“It was not just life, but a vigorous, splendid life, the most glorious life I could imagine.” And I claimed it for my own, she told herself with a fierce glance in the mirror.
“There is something in the harem I have tried to explain to you, my Fair One, but words have failed me. Something—between women. Was that what you sensed?”
Safiye shook her head, not so much at what the midwife said, which she hardly heard, but at her own discovery. “I realize now that the power I sensed came from Nur Banu.”
“Well, a woman and her mother-in-law are always at odds.”
“Mother-in-law?”
“That is what Nur Banu—Murad’s mother—is to you, though I suppose ‘law’ has nothing to do with this case. These troubles are proverbial among us.”
Safiye decided to humor the midwife and follow that train of thought for a while. It took less thought; the words came of their own accord.
“In Venice as well.” The husband’s mother is the wife’s devil,’ I was warned. Still, for much of my life my aunt and her fellow nuns were the women I knew. They would have had the Blessed Virgin Mary as their mother-in-law, wouldn’t they? A curious concept. I never thought of that before. I don’t suppose they could complain about her. Or aspire much to her position, do you think?”
The Quince said something about heathen Christendom and its abuse of women, so formulaic Safiye assumed she was not required to listen.
“No,” Safiye reverted the conversation to the line of her own thoughts. “I felt no repulsion from Nur Banu that first time I met her. Envy, perhaps. But I certainly thought we could be friends.”
“You didn’t know then that you’d have to share one man’s affections. “The Quince dropped her voice to her whispered intensity again. “You don’t have to, you know.”
“I wanted to be friends. I did. I wanted it desperately. I wanted to share her power, you see. The power of this place I sensed from her—in this carcass—like blood beat from the heart.”
“The other girls—women—they were not worthy of your attention?”
“The other girls, Nur Banu’s slaves, were mere veins through which her heart’s power coursed. Even when she was not in the room, she dictated their purpose. Why, it is the same tonight as it was then. Look around us. A girl might chat to a parrot or take individual joy in these last tulips of the season.”
Safiye gestured towards the closest vase, one of many, ladening the close harem air with their metallic scent. “Still,” she insisted, “every girl’s purpose here is dictated by the first woman.”
“The bash kadin. Because she has borne a son. Shall I stop making you the pessaries? Shall I make you a fecunding charm of coriander seed and salt crystal instead?”
“Just look at them this evening! Every girl’s main focus is the packing of chests and trunks, the rolling of mattresses and rugs for the spring journey across the bosom of Turkey for summer quarters in Kutahiya.”
“You yourself do not join in this project.”
“It’s not required of me.”
“No, it’s not.”
“I’m not a menial slave, after all. Must I appear before Murad all hot and sweaty?”
“That wall come soon enough after you meet him, I warrant.” The Quince did not conceal a sigh—and a smile. “A pity, however, you do not lend some of that effort to things in here.”
Safiye said nothing but looked in the mirror, feeling the point taken.
The Quince elaborated: “I mean socially, with the other girls, it would be helpful to join in. And to solidify your relationship to Nur Banu.”
“But since I have laid claim to Murad’s heart,” Safiye said, “I am a heart of my own.”
“Are you certain you are not too much his heart? Such dependence on men is common among your countrywomen, I understand. But you need not transfer it here. The harem helps us escape that.”
Escape in the harem seemed nonsense to Safiye, so she made sense of her own. “I have weaned Murad from his mother as surely as I weaned him from his opium. It is for this cause that I am at irreconcilable odds with Nur Banu. There is no reason to pretend otherwise.”
“Can you imagine, my Fair One, that I could have the freedom of my work if it were exposed to the men’s world? My work—my art would be taken over by men. If they let me practice at all, it would be according to their rules. It would be men telling me—and
