I begrudged Esmikhan none of her guests’ delighted praises for the accomplishments of either interior decorating or the kitchen. In the service of the kitchen, too, I had risen to the challenge, aiding the success in ways that a secluded woman cannot imagine. Who saw to the quality of the olives, the honey, shrewed the merchant for his rancid oil? When this sudden warm snap made the icemen’s usual cartloads melt, who arranged for the horseback riders? The riders had raced the nearly twenty farsakh from the mountain the Turks called Olympus, vying with the ancient Greek place of the same name, where the snowcap is stored over summer in caves. The riders had raced back with their panniers of ice wrapped in flannel and cooling vines showing only the first hint of dampness. I had paid them what such a chase was worth so our guests had to give no thought to the delicious coldness of their sherbets. They had only to make a choice of flavors from the assortment with which my lady dazzled them—rosewater, aloe, linden, ambergris, or gardenia.
Esmikhan had worked on the blending of syrups like an Alto Adige vintner with his wines. These oversweetened things with ingredients I was used to calling perfumes and medicines were hard for a Venetian to take in the place of his daily libation. Sometimes I wanted a glass of the basic old Bardolino in the worst way. And I often thought that, given the present state of my life, I would quickly and easily drown in my cups—if cups were available. That was one more void for which to damn Islam.
But at Esmikhan’s hand I had learned to appreciate the tang of lemon-almond with a little linden—innocent of intoxication. And to appreciate that sherbet could sicken if it wasn’t cold. I saw to it that every glass she served was very, very cold.
I did not mind that our guests gave Esmikhan the credit, nor even that she took it to herself with blushes of pleasure. That was the form of Turkish manners; watching the quiet satisfaction of others was a new sort of triumph for me.
When I was a man, I had disparaged such things, and would have turned away to look at the view as if I were above food and drink, even as Safiye was doing. Her disregard shamed me and, when I saw through the shame, I was infuriated. Baffo’s daughter was a woman; she should know better.
Her negligence was almost as if she had written off Esmikhan. The world of power and politics might write off my dear, sweet lady, might not even know that she existed. Because Esmikhan had no wish in her heart but to please—and particularly to please Safiye, whose beauty, liveliness, and daring held my lady entranced—men would take my lady for granted. Would Baffo’s daughter do the same?
Or would Baffo’s daughter reject another woman just for having a baby? In Safiye’s almond eyes this condition seemed almost to remove my lady from the cycle of living instead of entrenching her all the more deeply in it.
“Ah, she dreams of her prince.”
The Quince spoke, watching Safiye’s detachment with a long, warm, bubbly drag on her pipe. The midwife had brought her own wad for the bowl and I couldn’t distinguish its smell over all the other odors compressed in that hot room.
The lattice work at the window mimicked the room’s new inlay, with the gleam of blue-gray sky in place of mother-of-pearl. Over a fringe of pine and cypress, the height of the house’s situation revealed a prospect of the sea, its islands and the blue-hazed Asian mountains.
No chance existed that Safiye would see Murad through that window. At her feet bloomed no more than a quiet spot in the harem garden where the tulips, in profusion, remained oblivious or even defiantly careless of the power ploys of men. I suspected her mind was not on Murad, but that was because mine was not.
Lawn was being cut somewhere by men with scythes, hard, but sweet-smelling work. These spring sights and sounds reminded me once again that a year almost to the day we had first come to this city, Safiye and I. She had told me once how she had passed regiments of tulips to enter “the belly of this beast”—as she’d called the imperial harem—for the first time.
But I should have known better than to think that Safiye’s thoughts had time for any such sentimentality. Still less were they, as Esmikhan’s compassion made her weep to think, centered on prayers for a child of her own.
Safiye did not speak to defend herself, however. Curiously, it was Nur Banu who did, leaping into the silence after the Quince’s statement rather more hastily than necessary.
“Allah preserve him, my friend, but do you remember the night my son was born?”
“I do indeed.” The midwife smiled, nodding at Esmikhan to listen now and gain a young woman’s education for her own birthing.
“We had a time getting him to suck, didn’t we? Four wet nurses we went through, and all the time it was his own perversity.”
“Yes. The little lion refused to suck for three...”
“Four days. It was four.”
“Yes, it was almost four days.”
“I was sure he would starve.”
“All he needed was to get hungry enough. Then he sucked like a leech.”
“Praise Allah, he did all right then.”
The midwife continued thoughtfully, “I always take omens from the birth of a child and his first few days.”
“Are such omens trustworthy?” Esmikhan asked.
“Of course,” the Quince replied. “Your brother—he has been the same with affairs
