“By Allah, I had no idea there were so many!”
“No, few do. The girls are all still alive, but Safiye’s Muhammed, Mitra’s two, and two to the favorites of Nur Banu—that is all that are left to him now of the sons with the death of this little fellow. Some die to the usual enemies of childhood, disease and weakness, I suppose. But the rate is far too high to be natural. A nurse and her assistants must be awake every moment and even then, as we have just seen, there is danger. Especially when they begin to toddle off on their own...”
“Always falls?” I asked, cringing with horror, for I had just caught a glimpse of the broken little boy in his grieving mother’s arms.
“I suppose that is the most favored way, for it can happen in an instant when a nurse’s back is turned and boys especially at that age—or so I’m told—like to explore and be independent. Alas that those same virtues that would make for the best ruler are the very things that see to it that the boy never gets his chance to rule. Yes, there are all too many falls—one of Nur Banu’s camp survived, but he is witless from it, or so the gossips say.
“Falls, but there have been drownings as well, in the fountain, the bath. Strangulation may be seen when the mother or nurse is blamed for rolling on her child in the night. A piece of candy is dropped in a likely place, the child finds it, puts it in his mouth. It is poison. One plate of poisoned halvah was discovered over in Nur Banu’s rooms just before you arrived here. It was discovered when some birds that had come to feed from it died. The beekeeper was hung for selling the bakers bad honey, but Allah alone knows how many infant bouts with fever and dysentery, vomiting and colic are natural in this place.
“Then of course there is the evil eye. I myself am skeptical and think, especially in a child so young, that ‘evil eye’ is just an excuse to cover the doctors’ ignorance. But one does begin to wonder when its effects are seen so very, very often.”
“It is one thing to see my master killed, a man who had lived a long and useful life,” I declared with new vehemence. “But a child?”
“Mitra is lucky to be in Edirne with her boys,” was all the comfort Ghazanfer could offer me.
LI
While I was still recovering from the Persian’s attack (and thinking how curious it was that a man should have his handiwork live so long and painfully after him) Gul Ruh confided in me where she had been when I’d gone looking for her. The word aggravated my headache. I tried to persuade my young lady against such a position. But when she was not moved, I faithfully kept her confidence until after the death of the little prince—nearly four months and a long time for any secret to be kept in the harem. But eventually one of her spies must have told Safiye, and there was sudden and violent furor—as I had tried to warn Gul Ruh there would be—when it became commonly known. Esmikhan’s daughter spent much of her time not in the garden, on the rooftops nor in a hidden corner of the library, but in the company of Nur Banu.
“Whatever do you do there, child?” was the horrified reaction of all and sundry.
“I sew mostly,” she replied, which was the truth.
No one had been more surprised than I to see that wild little head bent over a needle and thread with concentration as wild as it was diligent. Nur Banu happened to have a seamstress who may not have been as skillful as the next, but who had twice the patience and did not mind undoing forty rats’ nests of a thread a day if rewarded with but the first glimmer of interest. Gul Ruh confessed to me that those knots and tears and crooked seams had driven her to more than a few tantrums. There were days when she would run clear to the end of the garden so fast her lungs ached and there she screamed at the top of her voice like one gone mad. But she refused to quit.
“Why?” I could not refrain from asking.
“Because,” she said simply, “I am to be married. What sort of bride will I be if I bring no trousseau of household goods?”
“You could leave it all for the slaves to do. Many another girl in your station would.”
“No. I want some at least to be of my own hand. It is only right.”
Then I remembered that last night of Sokolli’s on earth, how he had called his daughter to him and how, in the morning, I had gone to look for her to promise to find some way out of the match for her. I had forgotten—forgotten because I had not believed and also because of the horrors that had immediately followed—what the slave girl had told me. “She rose at early prayers and called for the seamstress to attend her.” I discovered that not only had the maid spoken the truth, but that this passion had continued—indeed, been inflamed—by Sokolli’s passing.
I came at length not only to see that this was true, but that this was a reflection on the new Gul Ruh struggling to bloom on the horrible destruction of the old caused by the deaths of first Arab Pasha and then her father. And afterwards I discovered yet another reason she chose to associate with Nur Banu’s suite. Nur Banu was the one with whom Umm Kulthum, the Mufti’s widow and mother of the Mufti’s son, was most familiar. Safiye always declared she could
