I really didn’t look for an answer. I had only ever had one good conversation with the midwife—the day she assured me no power on earth could restore my lost manhood. Otherwise, she had always been one of those women—the majority—for whom khuddam were just one more item of harem furniture. Like cushions and divans we were, there to make life comfortable, but never expected to intrude upon her business with conversation.
The Quince had presided closely over my lady’s health for over two years. I was familiar with the midwife’s quirks, as she must have been with ours, that my lady and I did not hold to the usual formalities between eunuch and mistress.
My lady’s little slave girl took the midwife’s veils and wraps as I’d taught her and hung them on pegs to dry. But even before her pinched, sour face was revealed, I could tell our guest’s manner was even more brusque and agitated than usual.
So I spoke to set her at ease. “We didn’t hope to have you back with us in Constantinople for many months more.” Though, if I’d thought about it, I would have done better to serve with the impassivity of a pillow—something she was used to—if I truly sought her comfort and not my own.
Frankly, curiosity put decorum the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. The last time we’d had the bustle of this woman in our house had been just before the sea lanes closed for the winter. At that time, Esmikhan had been daily hoping for Safiye’s return for the season. Such hopes had been dashed, then quickly dispelled by even happier news. Safiye’s condition forbade her removal on any long journey; my lady’s child was no longer the most royal expectation in the empire.
“Of course you must go to her,” my lady had told her midwife.
“Safiye isn’t due until three, four months after you, lady,” I’d interjected. “The midwife could see you, inshallah, safe and have plenty of time to travel on to see to your brother’s child.”
Esmikhan had chosen to ignore me and spoke exclusively to our guest. “Safiye will need you. And I—I have done this so many times I can manage with another midwife.”
The Quince hadn’t needed more convincing. She’d packed her things in an hour and caught the final ship out of the Golden Horn—to see to Safiye and the royal child she was expecting.
“My brother’s child, inshallah, will be heir to the throne,” my lady had said wistfully when at last we’d been alone. “It needs the best midwife, not I.”
Now, here was the Quince, back after only three months, no more. My lady was yet undelivered. The sea lanes had hardly opened again. Perhaps the midwife had even come by land. Or perhaps she’d not made it to Magnesia at all.
What could it mean? Curiosity prodded me to attempt one more speech. “Are we to expect you for an extended stay, madam?”
If she did plan to move back in with us, as had been her custom as long as Esmikhan carried her ill-fated children, I would need to know so I could make arrangements. The Quince could hardly deny me an answer to this.
The eye she turned on me simmered with impatience that I, the cushion, had forced any pronouncement from her at all. “I just come for a little visit,” she said in clipped tones.
And then we were in my lady’s presence, so I retreated to my post by the door of the room and trusted Esmikhan to draw out the details.
My lady sat on the floor before the low table on which lay one of the seven or eight dainty meals she ate a day at this stage of her pregnancies, when the huge mass of child pressed awkwardly on her stomach. Earlier that morning, I had placed a metal brazier packed with fresh coals under that table and a heavy rug over the top of it. My lady had gone directly from her nighttime quilts to this rug. Though other pregnancies in the ninth month had prostrated her with the heat, so grim and cold was this day that she kept all of the lower half of her body tucked under the insulating rug, her knees and feet almost touching the room’s only source of heat.
The light was bad through the window. I’d lit a lamp or two but considered lighting more. Unpainted olive-wood lattice was difficult to distinguish from the gray of the sky beyond. Many other details in the room were obscured as well, but in the darkest corners the sweet smell of the sandalwood I’d put along with other fuel in the brazier snuggled the nose. The weather outside, vacillating between a drizzle and an even damper fog, hissed in the ear. The entire mood, close to sightless though it was, remained safe from the world’s cold blasts. As usual, I liked to see my lady as a gem—perhaps dull onyx today—in a setting of my own design.
But the effect was lost on the Quince.
Esmikhan’s reaction upon seeing her guest was much as mine had been. Even our words were identical,-though the Quince eked this rehearsal out with greetings in return and a salaam as negligent as her usual attentions to such forms.
When my lady reached the part about the length of her stay with us, the Quince repeated, “Just a little visit “but added, “Just long enough to see my prize patient and the new child, mashallah.”
“I am fine, thanks to Allah,” my lady replied. She shifted her attitude and the rug so the midwife could give her hem a cursory kiss, as royal blood demanded. “The child—well, that is in the hands of heaven. I am doing my best for him. And yourself, madam?”
There was no reply. As she raised herself from the obeisance and got her first good look at my lady in the half-light, the Quince started. She could not have been more shocked and surprised if Esmikhan had pulled a
