I made one final, desperate attempt. I pleaded that the Sultan would blame his Grand Vizier more if, because of his negligence, either Safiye or the child were lost than he would if he allowed the best and most immediate medical treatment, even if it happened to be male.
Now my master touched my arm again to calm me and said, “Very well. Until the midwife comes.” He added that he would be interested to see this man’s art in practice. “But you must arrange it so that when this veiled one is treated, not even her face may be seen.”
We moved quickly and there was really not so much to be done. Gul Ruh had female tutors for all of her subjects from recitation of the Koran—at which she did very well, having now almost a third of the scripture committed to memory—to needlework. But for Persian, Sokolli Pasha was unsatisfied with anyone but this great poet with whom he even now conversed. Gul Ruh was as yet a child but it was still a delicate situation as many of the texts they were to study would of necessity be love poems. By devising a large screen to stand between student and teacher and having a eunuch present at all times we managed to keep the tongues from wagging.
We set this screen up for Safiye and the doctor in the mabein, the room a neutral zone between the haremlik and selamlik. Our mabein had more the air of a schoolroom, smelling of ink and book bindings, for the master hardly visited my lady any more, even in duty.
The little window through which Gul Ruh could pass her written exercises for examination now served to pass Safiye’s wrist. I do not know how much the man could learn from that pulse alone. It was hardly the natural pulse it might have been had a woman taken it. Safiye’s breath must have come with more difficulty through the veils in which we’d robed her in lest the screen fail. Then, too, the touch of a man’s hand was not something to leave her unaffected. My master’s anxieties were plain now: How could a mixed doctor-patient relationship ever produce the objective diagnosis necessary for proper treatment?
Whatever the man found in that wrist, it was both interesting and informative. The two remained huddled on either side of that screen for a very long time.
“What did they say?” I asked the assistant I’d put to oversee the meeting.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “It was in no language I can understand.”
I cursed myself soundly. Of course! They would speak in Italian, and I was the only one who could understand that. Why had I thought my first responsibility was to Esmikhan, who was taking the whole business very hard? Because, I realized, Safiye had suggested it with a weak roll of those wonderful eyes.
I spent a long time afterwards going over the physician’s features in my mind. He was an old, withered man interested in little beyond his art. Even his next meal was of little concern when there was scientific study or doctoring to be done. He had a small, pointed white beard and the grey eyes of a grandfather. Although Safiye could not have seen these things except from a distance through the harem grille, surely his hands would show her that in the rest of the man there could be of little interest for a lover. These were hands thin and bulging with veins and knuckles until they seemed more mechanical than flesh and blood, hands that had handled drugs and diseased limbs from Spain to Cathay.
Others might have been reassured by such thoughts, thinking romance was the worst confidence those two could have exchanged. But something Esmikhan said made me guess otherwise and gave me more ill ease.
“Is the doctor still seeing her?” Esmikhan demanded of me when I came to comfort her. “Is he seeing her?”
“Yes, lady,” I replied, giving her my hand. “Allah willing, she may be made well now.”
“Allah willing, it may be so. But I would not trust my body and my unborn child to that Christian.”
“Do not fear, lady. Medicine, the knowledge of Allah, may cure whether the practitioner be Muslim or not.”
“Still, I cannot think what Safiye can be imagining. She must be delirious, poor child.”
“The doctor may help delirium,” I said, though “poor child” had never been an epithet I’d give to Safiye, even when she was much younger.
“But after the things we overheard him say to my husband and the other gentlemen yesterday...”
“What did he say?”
“Why, he said—actually bragged—that many of the great authorities had known much of the ways of the child in the womb, but that he had learned more than any of them. In some distant land he had learned to give abortions without danger to the mother. He can make it look like a miscarriage. And he can bring on a case of child-bed fever looking as natural as the real thing. He also knows, he said, more of poisons than anyone who has ever lived, both antidote and administration. Surely that is black magic and ought to be avoided, don’t you think?”
I left Esmikhan as soon as I could after this without causing her alarm and ran to the mabein. But by then another midwife had arrived and my assistants were diligently ushering the doctor out as they had been ordered.
XXIV
When Safiye threw off her veil to let the old woman examine her—the old woman clucking against any witchcraft the unbeliever might have applied—I had never seen Baffo’s daughter look healthier.
And Ghazanfer had arrived. Where he’d been all this while was a mystery, even to Safiye it seemed. I remembered how fearfully she’d asked after him in the midst of
