* * *
“I received a visit from Huma yesterday.” Over an hour later, Esmikhan, sustained by sherbet, sweets, and sunset clouds of pillows on Safiye’s divan, had sufficiently recovered from her exertions and the pleasantries of formulaic greetings. My lady broached the main purpose of our journey.
Safiye was busy with her voluminous correspondence and hardly concealed her annoyance at the interruption. “Not that woman again!”
“Safiye, how can you speak in such tones of a woman whom Allah, in His impenetrable wisdom—may we all submit to Him—has chosen to use so cruelly?”
“Last week she pestered your aunt Mihrimah, the week before, Nur Banu, and in between, at every Divan, at every Friday procession to prayers, she approaches the stirrup of the Sultan himself. I have even heard your level-headed Sokolli Pasha, Esmikhan—spurred by his harem, no doubt—speak for her.”
“And why not? How else is a poor, weak woman to get justice in this world of mighty men if she doesn’t tear her veil and make a scene? This is what the protection of our screens and eunuchs is for.”
Safiye shook her head in pity, seeing no logical connection. “Every vizier and pasha’s plagued by her,” she said, “until there’s no room left in their heads for anything else.”
“But Safiye! The poor woman—”
“She is poor. And so of little consequence.”
“Safiye. On the last day, Allah will command His angels to seize and fetter those who did not urge mercy for the poor during their lives. It is my religious duty to petition the French embassy. Aunt Mihrimah has done the same. I am surprised Huma has not come here.”
“She has. Ghazanfer,” Safiye said with a glare in my direction, “knows enough to turn such people away.”
“Even my husband the Pasha has—”
“Sokolli Pasha has refused the poor French ambassador—who’s only a man trying to do his job, after all—any more concessions until this matter is resolved.”
The tension showed in white patches on my lady’s face. “And why shouldn’t my husband refuse him? My father the Sultan—may Allah favor him—has released three French captives in good faith and hope of exchange. But nothing is forthcoming from the infidel French. Nothing.”
“Esmikhan, the widow Huma’s daughters were taken nearly twenty years ago.”
“By the Knights of Saint John.”
“So was I. So was I.” Safiye could not resist a glance in my direction. We’d been taken by the Knights together, she and I. And though she might acknowledge this, the fact that our misfortunes must be laid squarely at her door was not admitted even in her eyes.
“The girls were on their way with their father and brother to Holy Mecca,” Esmikhan said. “The sanctity of their pilgrimage was violated by those pirates.”
“As ships going to Mecca have been known to suddenly turn pirate when it suited them and attack Christians heading towards Jerusalem.”
“They haven’t. They wouldn’t.”
“You, my dear friend, have little experience of how the world works.”
“I don’t want to know. Not such a world as you see, Safiye.”
Safiye shrugged her perfect shoulders up into her perfect blond braids. “The fact remains that Huma’s daughters have been in France twice as long as I have been in Turkey—most of their lives, in fact. They can hardly remember anything else.”
“How can you say so? That any girl would ever, ever forget her mother. I haven’t forgotten mine.” Esmikhan’s eyes misted with tears. “And she died when I was born.”
At that moment, the little girls—Gul Ruh and Safiye’s Aysha, just toddling—came running in from the fountain and plantings of the private courtyard. As mother of a prince, the Fair One was entitled to this perquisite of air and space in the harem world, otherwise rather sterile and cramped in accommodations. Aysha stumbled on the threshold and it was Gul Ruh who picked her up and mothered her out of her tears, although there was less than a head’s difference between the two. Aysha already had Safiye’s long, dancing limbs under her.
Aysha’s bevy of nurses came secondarily. One changed the bands of diaper cloth covering the little girl’s sex, of which she was as yet carelessly unaware. A child graduated to such swaddling when she would no longer stay put in a cradle. One nurse swept the soiled bands off to the laundry. The third stopped her mouth with a knob of marzipan knotted in a square of linen. Safiye herself did nothing but drape her graceful arms over her desk to protect the work.
I had to wonder if the marzipan had been soaked in poppy-head water as well, for very soon the toddler had suckled herself to sleep. She was allowed to nap just where she fell, a little hillock of flowered red-and-gold silk amidst the blooms of the finest Isfahan rugs laid three deep on Safiye’s floors, the year as yet too early for the tile beneath to be exposed.
“Hush. You mustn’t bother Aysha Sultan now,” Esmikhan told her daughter. “Come here and sit by me.”
Grudgingly, Gul Ruh took the second option offered her, to go and toss a ball in the yard with the now unemployed nurses for a while. Encrusted with jewels whose gold casings could cut skin if thrown too hard, the ball was in fact not much of a plaything. But it was the best to hand in this world where the most common everyday objects were too readily gaudied past all usefulness.
“Isn’t Muhammed here yet?” my little lady pleaded of Safiye, leaning back as long as she could on a nurse’s hand.
Esmikhan gave a little cough of warning and Gul Ruh remembered her manners. “I mean, my honored cousin Prince Muhammed—may Allah smile on his house until Judgment Day.”
“You know the single-reason-for-my-being has lessons with his eunuchs and tutors during the day.”
The way Safiye rattled off the euphemism to avoid using the preciousness of her son’s name mimicked Gul Ruh’s attempt at manners. At the very least Baffo’s
