By the time I returned to the brazier-snug room, the first part of the mystery, at any rate—how it was that the Quince had returned to Constantinople when Safiye’s child wasn’t due until late spring—was in the process of being unraveled.
“Safiye? How is she?” My lady felt her guest was so far out of danger now that she could begin the inquiry. “Pray Allah she is well. And the child—the child was not untimely born, Allah forbid—that you left her so soon?”
“Safiye is well.”
“Thank heaven. And the child?”
“Just as well as could be when I left them. No thanks to its mother, I must say.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
I tendered the kerchief towards its owner, who snatched it from my hand. Her fingers shook with something akin to greed—this was weakness, indeed—as she unknotted the bundle. She would not answer the question until she had popped one of the golden balls of sugar revealed by the kerchief’s petals into her mouth to chase the pilaf.
“I mean,” the Quince said over her sippet, “I hadn’t been in Magnesia through a single hour of prayer before Safiye was asking me to get rid of it for her.”
My lady looked almost as ill as her guest had not long before, which was a greater drop from her accustomed blooming health than from the Quince’s sallow. “You don’t mean...?”
“I do mean.” The midwife made a face around her chewing as if at some bitter medicine, then continued. “‘I won’t carry it,’ that Fair One says. ‘He hasn’t married me; I am not a legal queen. I won’t have a prince unless I am a queen.’“
“Madam, you refused.”
“Of course I refused,” the Quince snapped.
“I didn’t mean to suggest, madam, that you could be capable of such a crime.”
The Quince gave her hostess and her patient an even, unflinching look, then popped another comfit in her mouth. She seemed to wait until the candy masked her words before she spoke them.
“I’ve emptied many a womb before,” the midwife said. “Don’t think I haven’t. And don’t look so scandalized, majesty. I think it no sin at all for a poor woman who already has too many mouths to feed; for a woman whom another pregnancy might well kill. When a rich man calls me to clean out his slave girl so he doesn’t have to free her or her child, well, I usually refuse then. And in this case—as Allah is my witness—I wouldn’t do it. The heir to the throne? Safiye’s own child? I wouldn’t do it.”
The Quince looked at my lady across the table under which their knees must nearly touch. The look was almost a dare. “I do have my limits, princess.”
“Of course you do, madam.” Esmikhan retreated from what had been an attitude of subservience in the first place.
“‘Why else do you think I tolerate you here?’ the Fair One tells me. Me, her Quince! And ‘Then I will get someone else to do it.’ And she did. Tried a few old wives’ concoctions. They didn’t work. Made her good and sick to her stomach for a while, but never a spot of blood nor a single cramp. Amateurs they are out there in the provinces.”
“So she will keep the child?”
“The Fair One has no choice. For the first time in her life, perhaps, Safiye Baffo has no choice.”
“It is Allah’s will.”
“Yes, and she hates it.” The midwife gave a thin smile, sour in spite of all the sweets she’d eaten. “She was much too far along, anyway, when I got there for even my methods to work in perfect safety. Why, she’d already got herself the hardest little round belly.” The Quince popped another comfit, having studied it as if it were a swollen belly, too.
“My brother, then, can’t be ignorant.”
“Oh, he is fully aware of her condition, yes.”
“But what would she have said to him if she’d lost it?”
“‘I miscarried. These things happen.’“ She captured Safiye’s very shrug in that quote.
“And does Murad threaten to leave her, as she always feared he would, now that her shape is vanishing?”
“Of course not. I’ve never seen a man more thrilled about his heir than your brother the prince. On his knees in thanks to heaven twenty times a day, pouring money into that mosque of his, showering his love with gifts, scratching out stacks of poems as the spirit moves him.”
“So when you wouldn’t do as she asked, Safiye dismissed you?
“There was that, yes.”
“And something else?”
“As long as your child, majesty, was yet unborn, she wanted me here with you. I was ordered—yes, ordered to attend you. ‘There’ll be plenty of time, afterwards,’ Safiye said. ‘Months and months. You can deliver...deliver the princess and then return and see to me. And should you not make it back? Well, there are good women here. I’ll be fine.’
“Good women?” The Quince grunted with scorn. “Women who don’t have the first idea about getting rid of a child. So how can they hope to save one?”
Esmikhan murmured something kind and full of confidence in the midwife’s skill. “And I am also most grateful that you would make this long journey—at this time of year—to attend me.”
The midwife grunted again—she often did—as if to say, “Yes, thank me when you’ve reason to.” Then she leaned back into her supporting cushions, suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She closed her eyes like one in the throes of some dream.
Esmikhan had no desire to disturb her guest. As she always did when in doubt, my lady reached for something to eat instead. Having had her fill of everything else on the table, she thought to help herself to one of the two or three comfits left on the Quince’s kerchief. They were of a variety not usually fabricated in our kitchen.
The morsel was just before her lips when the Quince suddenly bolted upright and knocked the candy violently from her hand. “My lady,
