But, “Off with you, boy.” Ali Pasha dashed the child’s hopes and sent him to howl in the harem with the rest. “Go stay with your mother. We have grown-up things to discuss now, these gentlemen and I.”
“I do not think that divorce will hold up in a court of law if the facts be known,” Ghazanfer confided to me after he had finished his tale.
“How so?” I asked, for hadn’t he just come from informing Safiye that there was no doubt now that all was legal for her and Esmikhan to proceed with the wedding plans?
“The law requires the presence of two Muslims as witnesses,” he answered my question.
“So?”
“I must confess I’ve never felt less like a Muslim in my life, to have to be a witness to that crime,” he said wistfully. “My lady was so quick to save me from my suffering in the Seven Towers, which Allah would have been pleased to end in death sooner rather than later. I cannot understand how she can now use that very same power of hers to cause suffering I doubt even Paradise can heal.”
Hours after hearing of the match between Ali Pasha and Esmikhan Sultan, Ferhad Pasha finally agreed to marry Aysha, the daughter of Sultan Murad. As soon as due pomp and display allowed, the formal nikah ceremony took place. The actual consummation would be performed sometime later, when the girl was mature, but the nikah was binding in every way and could only be broken from either side with great loss of honor. As the girl in this case was an Ottoman, in fact it couldn’t be broken at all by anything other than death.
Carried along by the momentum of this match, preparations for the nikah and consummation between Esmikhan and Ali Pasha moved on apace. The day before it was scheduled to happen, my lady called me to her and asked if I could arrange an interview for her with the groom. Such a request was rare, but it was not unheard of. It is Islamic law, after all, that the bride must not be married without her consent. A token meeting is always arranged, although granted it usually does not take place until the nikah is moments away from finalization. The bride is then usually too shy or frightened to do more than let her guardians speak for her.
No, if a woman doubts her guardians’ opinions in the matter, she had better see she uses some other means at her disposal to prevent things from getting so far along.
In a case such as this, however, where the woman was a widow, where the all-important maidenhead was not in the scales and where she was of a much higher class than the groom, arrangements could be made without raising too many eyebrows. I told Esmikhan so and promised I would do my best to make them as soon as possible. I had only two reservations.
The first was that my lady’s pale face and agitated manner spoke of something more serious than just a simple concern for compatibility and the chances for conjugal happiness. Second, I wondered why she had suddenly decided to go through me instead of through Safiye and her agents, who had been the only contact with the groom until then.
The greatest delay in bringing about the meeting, however, was caused by the governor of Hungary himself trying to decide which robe to wear to most favorably impress his royal bride.
“Does my lady prefer red or blue?” he asked.
When I told him that she looked best in pink or red, knew it, and always chose those colors for herself in spite of what others might prefer, he did not take the suggestion, but complained, “No, not the red. The blue is by far the most lavish with nearly an asper of silver woven into it and so many fine large pearls.”
In the end he opted for ostentation to carry the day rather than any sense of aesthetics. This was my first meeting with the man and I found him to be all that Ghazanfer had described and more. My most difficult task in this new harem, I decided, would be orchestrating the comings and goings of concubines, for a steady stream would be called for to match Ali Pasha’s high opinion of himself.
LIV
“A woman came to see me today,” Esmikhan said to Ah Pasha.
I had been busy serving our guest a tray of five little silver bowls, each with its own tiny spoon and a different jelly or preserve: rose petal, date, apricot, orange, plum, and bright green mint. I noticed he took date—it was the most costly and difficult to make.
I had only half listened to their talk until now. It consisted mostly of Ali Pasha, as carefully as he could without overstepping the bounds of prenuptial modesty, professing the honor he felt by both the proposed marriage and this interview. How beautiful and gracious he knew by all reports this daughter of Selim—Allah favor him—was. She was safely behind the screen so he could say it without a flinch. And he would serve and love her all of his life, with Allah’s favor.
These seven words of my lady were the first either of them had spoken out of formula and her first full sentence all together. But it was more than this that made me suddenly jerk up and stare. As it fell on our ears at this far end of the chamber, her tone held something so cold and vaporous that it sent chills down my spine.
Over the years, Esmikhan’s bulk had grown and come to consume a greater and greater proportion of my concern: How to move it here and there, how to make it comfortable and so on when it was half again as large as my own. With so much concern for the physical, I suppose I tended to forget
