Well, extra flesh distracted from the other deformities eunuchs were prone to—the barrel chest, the long, dangling, apelike arms and clawed hands. As eating and drinking distracted from invisible distortions within.
So far I had avoided the outward mutations, but I feared it was only a matter of time. Slackening into cushions on a warm afternoon seemed one sure way to hasten the inevitable, so as soon as I saw my colleagues settled, I left them. Their reedy voices pursued me, like the fragile notes of a ship’s flautist on the night air, up through the stairwell. Here, over the neat rows of discarded feminine footwear on the threshold, the scent of jasmine still lingered, trapped.
“Alas, the day is too warm to show off the braziers,” was the first thing I heard my lady say over the preliminary oohs and ahs of her guests. Esmikhan had been fretting over that all morning. “But you were right, Nur Banu Kadin. I was just telling Abdullah.”
“About what, my dear?” The ambergris’s question was still muffled by the white gauze that rode over the bridge of her nose and scrunched into the black sharpness of her eyes.
“I should have started with the summer rooms. Here it is, too hot for braziers, and we must spend the summer in this velvet-lined chest without a single cooling fountain.”
Absently, Esmikhan smoothed the buttons down the front of her yelek; she was already leaving three undone as her belly grew. “Summer” had become synonymous with “baby” for her. “It is hard to think of summer when you’re cold.”
“Allah willing, all will be well, my little mountain spring,” said Nur Banu.
“Inshallah,” Esmikhan echoed.
“It is warm, lady,” I agreed as I nudged our still ill-trained maidservants forward to remove the guests’ wraps. We could ease their heat that much in any case.
My lady caught my eye. I read gratitude there—for covering for the stupefaction of the maids. I’m not certain how much of my concern was towards Esmikhan and how much that Safiye should not find too much amiss in our house.
But Esmikhan’s look also carried her empathy to me.
Earlier that morning, during the last hectic rush of preparation, Esmikhan had caught me staring out the window at this sudden warmth of spring. Touching my arm folded across my chest in a eunuch’s habitual attitude, she’d murmured, “It’s been about a year, hasn’t it?”
I didn’t need to say. My lady sensed how the spring air with its bath of light, warmth, and birdsong, reminded me of my first days among the Turks. How the exquisite opposition of such beauty and new life with remembered pain and death of all hope in a dark house in Pera sometimes came close to tearing my soul apart. How a year ago, through the machinations of Sofia Baffo—or my own stupidity and youth—I had lost family, homeland, manhood, more than most men could lose without considering their lives at an end.
My lady was aware of my pain now, even with the pressure of friends and family upon her, and I was grateful. Then I caught Safiye’s scrutiny upon our silent communication. Our little maid had pulled back Safiye’s veils as if they were curtains on a theatre act in which some heinous murder lay revealed.
That face had not changed from the first time I saw it—and settled my own fate in the same instant. If anything, Baffo’s daughter had grown more beautiful. The convent garden where we’d first become acquainted had provided an ill medium for the cultivation of women’s appearance when compared to the imperial harem. Still, she stood out, even among women scoured from an empire for their loveliness.
Her glorious golden hair and almond eyes had intensified during the year of our acquaintance like a quarter moon coming to its full. The cold demonic nature of that moonlight could turn a man’s reason. Time was when it had turned mine. Knowing of what she was capable, using that breathtaking beauty as her weapon, I looked away in horror. And Safiye’s exquisite alabaster features quickly covered any signs of disapproval at what she had seen pass between my lady and me.
Still, I vowed to keep an eye on her. And hoped, for once, that the castrator had done his job well enough to make me immune to her infection.
Now the admiration of the rooms, which had hardly even started, was interrupted by Nur Banu. “Do you remember our Quince, Esmikhan Sultan, my dear?”
The Kadin gave over her veils and wrappers to our slaves with a flash of her commanding eyes. She was a handsome woman still, her formerly raven-black hair now wearing the bronze cast of gray-covering henna, but those eyes, demanding obedience, were as bright as ever.
“The harem’s midwife?” my lady asked. This woman I’d never met before with the medicinal smell of stored linen bent to kiss my lady’s hem. “But of course. Madam, you are welcome.” And Esmikhan returned the kiss of honor with a nod of deference. “You delivered my mother of me, I believe.”
“Indeed, lady, I had that honor.”
Few women own as much power as the midwife in a harem. Of course, this explained the woman’s awkwardness. A midwife alone is included in a harem not because of her beauty and grace but because of her intelligence and skill. I was ashamed of the threat I’d felt from this woman at first and was glad I hadn’t acted on it.
And how apt her nickname! Never had the exigencies of womanhood swollen out a more bulbous shape. Her skin had a yellow, quince-like cast to it, exaggerated by the olive green of her coin-trimmed head scarf and a great deal of facial hair she had not the self-absorption to remove. Not to mention her stored-fruit smell.
“Nur Banu Kadin has decided the Quince ought to stay with you, my dear Esmikhan, until your baby is born.”
This was Safiye speaking, diverting attention from the cloud that had imperceptibly passed
