Esmikhan lowered her head and blushed, but she said nothing.
Safiye took that as an excuse to continue. “Allah, what can I do? If I cannot get Aysha to him, someone in Nur Banu’s camp will go. That man is destined to be Grand Vizier, you mark my words. He’s young enough and clever enough to hold that post for a long, long time. And if she gains control over him...”
“He still won’t marry her?” Esmikhan sat up straight and asked with agitation.
Safiye didn’t bother to confirm or deny the question, but forged ahead with her complaints.
“But he needs a young, strong wife who can give him sons,” Esmikhan said in utter disbelief.
Safiye ignored the statement and continued to rant and rave as she always did when nothing else seemed to work. One subject led to another in her stream of frustrations and she was soon on another related problem.
“And what am I to do with that AH Pasha? He’s another powerful man who needs a well-placed wife so I can keep track of him.”
“Ah Pasha?”
“Yes, the new governor of Hungary. You know the dangers that go along with such newly conquered lands.”
“Yes. My late husband’s nephew in Buda. Allah save his soul.”
“Well, Ali Pasha has executed the government there quite remarkably. Outgrown that honor, we may say, and is busy looking around for more. He’s as dashing as could be. Why it should be so difficult to get him suitably married, I don’t know.”
“I...I would marry Ali Pasha,” Esmikhan said. “If you think...if you think it would help.”
“Help? Oh, my dear, it would be the most wonderful thing that’s happened around here in ages. He’s a man going somewhere, I tell you. And handsome—But would you really? You know, I’d often thought you must be lonely since Sokolli’s death—Allah favor him—but I never dared...”
“Yes, I’ll marry him,” Esmikhan said again.
One thing Safiye forgot to mention to my lady was that AH Pasha was already married with two sons and a daughter. But it went without saying that for the honor and advancement of marrying into the royal house, he’d divorce her in a minute.
* * *
Ghazanfer Agha was present at the divorce as one of the witnesses—the witness who would carry word of the transaction back to the harem, to let Safiye know that all was clear. Ali Pasha, he informed us, was a man of sharp features, slick and sure of his good looks. His brows, like two black daggers, met at the base of his hook of a nose and that nose thrust down to almost meet the black point of a beard that sheathed a dagger of a chin. He had just returned from the frontier and was lean and brown and hard and healthy from the rigors of a soldier’s life.
“I felt,” Ghazanfer confessed, “like a spark in the tail of a great comet.
As if I should feel myself fortunate to be even remotely associated with such glory.”
Then he described how that glory swept in upon the soon-to-be divorcee.
Having once belonged to the palace harem, the woman had both a natural beauty and a fine cultivation of manners and spirit that had been at least considered material for the Sultan’s bed. When, at twenty-six, she had seen other, younger girls move in to take her place and her hopes, she was given as a favor to this up-and-coming Pasha.
She had still considered herself fortunate and diligently set about founding a life and an orderly harem of her own to be the backbone of this man and his ambition. Love humbly gave way to respect and even a bit of awe in the look with which she met the return of her husband from the front.
Her three children had had their faces scrubbed until they gleamed like polished brass and wore brand-new outfits to welcome their father home. He had been gone so long that the two youngest could not remember him, but the oldest, in spite of all training in manners and decorum, could not resist springing from his ranks at the first sight and shouting, “Father!”
It was the woman who first realized something was wrong. From Ghazanfer, a eunuch, she feared nothing. But the other witness was both a man and a stranger and she had an instinctive fear of such creatures as cats have of dogs. She instantly threw the edge of her veil over her face and began to back towards the door in confusion. She had made some awful miscalculation, she realized, but what it could be escaped her and she floundered on unfirm ground.
“No, wife. Stay. Just a moment,” Ali Pasha said.
She obeyed, but he had not told her to be at ease and she certainly did not take that liberty.
“Gentlemen, witness,” Ali Pasha said, unsheathing a smile from the black of his beard. Then, “Woman, I divorce you.”
The wife staggered as if she’d been struck.
“I divorce you.”
And again, finally, “I divorce you. Be gone from my house and trouble me no more.”
As the blows fell, so had the woman’s veil, from utter astonishment. What sense she had left by the last pronouncement went to the protection of her children: She grabbed the little girl and pressed one side of her head to her breast, the other with both hands, so her daughter might be spared the world-shattering sound of those words.
The woman tried to move her lips. “Why? What have I done? Oh, husband, forgive it, for surely I never meant it. Why, for the love of Allah?” But nothing would come out. After another brief moment of hopeful disbelief, disbelief vanished. Clutching the little girl so tightly now that the mite was whimpering, and with the younger boy at her heels, she fled back into the harem.
The older boy stood still in his exuberance. Surely his worshipped father’s quarrel with his
