“I see,” whispered my lady, the fear of how close she’d come to harming her child strangling any other response.
As if my lady had accused her of having something to hide, the Quince lighted on what must have seemed the most harmless of creatures—me—when she assured further: “Khuddam like them. I mix up these goodies for khuddam all the time.”
And the dialogue moved to other things.
Not too much later, the Quince’s belongings arrived.
“Oh, they’ve forgotten my best garments—and most of the drugs,” the Quince sighed out her exasperation. “I shall have to make another trip myself.”
“But another day,” my lady said. “Surely you’ve done enough for today and can rest until tomorrow. Anything that’s mine belongs to the guest of Allah as well.”
“Yes, it can wait,” the midwife agreed.
So, in the meantime, the women got up to see what could be done about getting her settled before the noon call to prayer was heard. This left the menials and me to clear away the remains of the meal. The girls took off the trays of pilaf, as they’d done any number of times before, to go and eat the leftovers themselves in the kitchen. The Quince’s kerchief, the only unfamiliar thing on the table, remained for me.
For all intents and purposes, the midwife had finished off the whole lot herself. Still, there were some fair-sized crumbs left among the gold and green threads. Out of idle curiosity—and being hungry myself, since the midwife’s arrival had disrupted our usual schedule—I licked a finger and brought it to my mouth covered with crumbs. Well, the woman had said—hadn’t she?—that this concoction was good for a eunuch’s ills.
I dropped my hand at once—and the kerchief as well.
“Good God!” I couldn’t help exclaiming aloud—and in my most basic tongue.
Under all the coating of sugar and mastic, a familiar buzzing sweetness filled my mouth. My gorge rose to meet it. In my memory, the taste was too closely tied to an ineffective attempt to strip me of my senses as the cutters stripped me of everything else in the dim little house in Pera.
These candies contained opium in an edible, concentrated, candy form instead of the more popular and milder smoke.
The midwife must have just ingested enough to fill a thousand and one nights with heady dreams.
XVIII
When that third infant son was born, taken to Paradise and buried all on a single cheerless winter’s day, I truly feared for my lady’s sanity. The Quince departed for Magnesia after nursing Esmikhan through but three weeks of indifferent recovery. I cannot say I was sorry to see her go, having caught her with her golden comfit balls on at least two other occasions and having noted a decided distraction in her attentions as well. But I wasn’t certain I could bring my lady out of the serious slump into which I saw her sliding. I would have liked some sort of second, just so as not to feel so helpless and alone.
The moment the midwife and her veils were out of the door, however, things improved immediately. I would have suspected some sort of slow, wasting poison went out the door with her—if I hadn’t taken to tasting my lady’s food myself as a precaution. And if Esmikhan didn’t instantly explain the reason for her rally herself.
“Why, I must go as well,” she said, clapping her hands with the thrill of it.
“Beg pardon, lady?” I could hardly condemn what I thought she meant when she grew so suddenly cheerful. I hadn’t seen her eyes so brightly polished with excitement—no, not since those first few days I knew her, before her marriage, I decided.
“I must go to Magnesia as well.”
“My lady? In your condition?” Although at the moment her condition seemed much improved, not harmed, by the prospect, this might be the frenzy of delirium. The journey she suggested was certainly madness enough to jump to that conclusion.
Before I could protest further, Esmikhan made her purpose clear by saying, “And what is my condition but that of a childless woman? Didn’t you tell me my husband is in Magnesia?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe that’s true.” I’d told her when the dispatches came, but then she’d seemed to spare not the slightest care for Sokolli Pasha. Because she didn’t remember, I didn’t bother either.
“I had no reason to remember,” she said now, reading my thoughts, “before the baby—-Allah preserve him. My need was to stay here then, to give him the best health I could.” She swiped impatiently at a tear or two in her sense of repeated fail- lire—and at what she had tried so single-mindedly to do. “But now...now I remember that you told me this.”
“Yes, Magnesia is indeed where the master is. He, along with my lord your brother, is charged with mustering the troops and reserve units from that western portion of the Empire at Bozdag. Later, he is to march them northward and meet up with the rest of the army under your grandfather’s direct command. Together they will undertake this summer’s campaign against Hungary and Austria.”
“You see? I must go to him at once.”
“My lady, is it advised? When the master will be so occupied and you...?”
“And on his march north, won’t he be even more occupied? How many days do you suppose he may spend in Constantinople?”
“Two, perhaps three. You know how it goes.”
“I know. And you are trying to placate me, Abdullah. I’m no fool. I’ve been the wife of Sokolli Pasha too long. He’ll be here one day at the most. If he doesn’t send word that he must not leave his men for ‘his own personal pleasure’ while they are already sworn to battle. And what if I should be suffering my time of uncleanliness on that one night he may deign to give me? Abdullah, in that case I may not go near
