“‘Go home,’ the kinder folk said. ‘You have children of your own and a husband at home. You haven’t seen them in two years. Go to them.’
“But they still had to drag her away, so limp was she from crying, knowing she would never see her little suckling again. They took her out by the funeral door, which seems just somehow. To us in here, it is as if she had died and gone to be buried outside the walls.
“The little Prince, he set up a wail, too, to see his sobbing nurse carried away. They could not hush him. None of them had her soft, quiet ways, you know. They couldn’t hold him for his struggles, and when they set him down, he tried to toddle after her, reaching out his little hands—I shall never forget it. Ever. His first steps alone were to her. And then these ... He clung to the handle, crying, pounding, until—oh, it was hours later—he fell into a whimpering sleep. In his fit, he broke the wound open again. That’s when it got infected, I’ll wager. But that’s when they brought me to this place, so I don’t know.”
Just then the head laundress came in. “You still on about it, girl?” she asked. “Still fretting about the young Prince’s weaning, Allah shield him. Fie, everyone has to be weaned sooner or later. Normal women celebrate and give a little party when it finally happens for them.”
“Weaning is one thing,” the girl spoke up. “I swear by Allah, this will starve the Prince to death.”
The laundress was a formidable woman, tall, large, with arms like a butcher’s, and what gentleness might once have been in her face, the pox had ravaged. Still, she was not a cruel person, and she tried to speak with sympathy. “It is a matter we do not understand,” she said.
“Because I was taken from my mother at an early age means I understand more, not less,” the girl insisted.
“The gossips tell me Safiye stopped using her aloe and rue while Murad was here. I’m sure she realizes just how important her son’s well-being is to her position and perhaps, if Allah wills, she may get another.”
“Another she can neglect so,” the maid said, angrily stabbing with her wooden pole into the steaming water.
“Now Prince Murad has returned to Magnesia. He is content that all things are well here, and that Safiye and the Prince will join him there at the end of the summer.”
“I suppose it is easy to be content when one is a prince,” the maid said bitterly.
“These are matters of royal love, girl. You,” the laundress said with an eyebrow raised to the girl’s dark skin, “and I”—she referred to her own pocked face—”will never know.”
“I’d say it’s ignorance of love, not knowledge, that ignores love’s product.”
“Come, girl, the child is young. He’ll get over it. Children don’t remember anything that happens to them before they’re three or four.”
“Yes, perhaps. And they can block out horrible things much later. But that scar on his face. That will always be there. And I’m sure whenever he touches it, no memory, perhaps, but something dark and cold. I’m sure it will haunt him ‘til the day he dies.”
The laundress shook her head. She tried to be kind, but she was pressed with the great responsibility of washing for five hundred souls. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get this load drying. We’ve got three more to do today, and I don’t think the sun will last, by the looks of the sky. Come on, girl.”
And the maid turned from me to pull the steaming garments out of the pot. What should her pole first drag up, however, but a tiny pair of footed trousers in cream and crimson—the little Prince’s. I left her burnishing her face with the back of her hand—tears, steam, and sweat into a high-polish black.
XLI
On our next visit to the palace, Safiye drew my lady off to speak in private. I thought at first, and Esmikhan thought much longer than I, that the purpose of this attention was to share some wisdom about pregnancy in the fourth month, which was about all my lady had time to think about these days. But though Esmikhan was flattered by this private attention from the darling of the harem, the two were actually very different women indeed.
“Esmikhan, the great drums in the court of the janissaries have mustered the army.”
“Yes,” my lady replied, wistfully rubbing the swelling of her stomach. “All the cavalry has gone, too, including that from the provinces.”
“I suppose you miss your husband.” Safiye plied her with sympathy, but to this Esmikhan nodded rather apathetically. She bit her plump lower lip and wondered if this sudden attention from Safiye were a sign of more closeness to come, and if she should encourage it by divulging the name of her child’s real father.
“They marched north this year,” Safiye said.
“Did they?” Esmikhan had not cared which direction they marched, only that they had passed through Constantinople, long enough for her to receive the gift of a single budding rose, and then marched on.
“I find that most curious.”
“The land in all directions belongs by right to Allah and His Faithful,” Esmikhan said. She didn’t find it curious at all.
“But you must know that your father signed a treaty of peace with
