“Yes, well, you’ll have to learn not to let them get away before you go making claims like that.”
The child howled.
“Take your damned brat away before I...”
There was a sudden, awful slap across soft baby flesh. There was a moment of horrified silence, and then the howl of pained innocence, perhaps the most dreadful sound in the world. It carried. The khadim at the other end of the hall stood up straight and looked at me. But before I could make any gesture of explanation, the door opened again. Safiye stuck her head out. She was flushed, panting with rage—and perhaps a little with fear, although you would never hear her admit it.
“Hello?” she said. “Oh, Veniero. Run and get someone to take this child, will you?”
She was holding the baby clumsily, not just because she was unused to the procedure, nor because the child was writhing so, but also in a vain attempt to keep the blood from a vicious cut across his face from staining her clothes.
I wanted to take the child myself. Even I, who had never held a baby before, would have done a better job of it than that.
“Not you,” Safiye told me sharply. “Go get someone who knows what she’s doing.”
The child’s scream had gone soundless with pain, but her sharp voice made him take breath in again and it came out, rending the air like doomsday. I could bear it no longer. I couldn’t leave him there with his parents. I feared for his life. I snatched him away and ran, Murad’s abuse and Safiye’s Italian curses pursuing me all the way down the hall.
A young black nursemaid’s assistant was there in the nursery trying to revive some sort of life in her superior. The rag of a woman had thrown herself in a corner, was tearing her hair, quite senseless to the pain, and moaning over and over, “O Allah, Allah, if You are Merciful, take me now. Take me before my poor Mansur finds out how he has been betrayed, O Allah!”
The minute she saw little Muhammed, however, she instantly forgot her own grief. By that time the poor child looked as if he must have lost the skin off half his face and his howls were mortifying. My arm, too, looked as if it must have sustained a grievous wound, it was so soaked with his blood.
Little Muhammed went to her and took some comfort—either that, or finally stilled his sobs to a low hum from sheer exhaustion. The nurse cooed to him through hysterical tears of her own, and tried to mop the wound first with her sleeve, then with a kerchief the maid handed her.
“Allah, it won’t stop bleeding!” she cried. “Allah, how it gapes across your poor cheek, my angel.” Then, “Run for the Quince,” she told her assistant. “Run, this instant!”
I stayed until the midwife came. The blood was still oozing out and the grim noises and greenish color that came from the old woman told me that her skills would be tried with this case. This made me so furious, fury above my fear, that I determined to march down to the mabein at once and tell the daughter of Baffo—and, the Prince, too—just what their violence had done.
I was stopped at their door. I heard sounds of their violence grown into a violence of love. My anger rotted in my stomach and made me ill.
“Ah, cursed veal!” a novice eunuch who was still staggering, exclaimed sympathetically when he saw me. He assumed by my looks that I had eaten from the tainted pot last night, too.
***
It was a week or two later when we visited the Serai again. Safiye was bright and lively, making no plans to go to Magnesia and saying no word about her son. So when I happened to see the little black nurse’s assistant, I could not help but ask for news. I never stopped to think how curious it was to find her in the hot, humid, stone, and metallic world of the laundry off the nine-pillared court of the menial slaves instead of in the nursery.
She blinked at me over the great copper kettle, and I thought her tears were from the steam. I soon realized, however, that the irritation was in her heart.
“They tell me his little cheek got infected,” she said. “He will always have a scar, that perfect, pure little face! They did not dress it properly, I’m sure. Maybe they even let the flies get to it. By Allah, if I were still in the nursery, I would see it cleared up. I wouldn’t stop to do anything else, to gossip, to try on new clothes like those others must be doing. I would stay up all night to see that he got better.”
“But surely his nurse is as dedicated to the little Prince as you are,” I suggested.
“You cannot have heard.”
“No, I’ve heard nothing.”
“The nurse is no longer in the palace.”
“But where has she gone?”
“Home.”
“And left little Muhammed?”
“She made her go.”
“She?”
“The Fair One, Safiye. She says it was because of the nurse’s carelessness that he got that horrible wound on his cheek. By Allah, it isn’t true!”
“No,” I said. “I know it isn’t true.”
“I say it’s because she’s jealous. The nurse told me in dark whispers in the corner—she told me what happened, how Murad tried to...Well, Safiye realizes now that her position in the harem is not as secure as she thought. Murad could easily take another. Easily, easily. Why not? If only this realization would make her more careful of the little Prince. No, I refuse to call him her son. She doesn’t deserve to be called a mother. If anyone does, it’s my dear mistress, his nurse.
“But Safiye got jealous of her. She made her life miserable, hoping she would ask to be released. My mistress was miserable, but she would not leave the baby for anything. Safiye finally forced her to leave.
“I shall never forget the sorrow
