Sokolli Pasha alone seemed to feel the weight of what this might do to the discipline of the troops and to public morale throughout the courtyards and back lanes of the empire. It was there the tale had flown as fast as pigeons gone home to roost. Of course it was upon Sokolli’s shoulders that the scandal and dishonor fell most squarely—and for no reason, it seemed, but a mad whim of Allah. My master wore the face of a man in the prime of life who awakens one morning to find his whole left side paralyzed.
That night I stood at my post to see if he would send to the harem for a girl for comfort—simply to beat her, perhaps, as others do. But my master was never like that. I stood longer to see if he would like to talk, but he was never like that, either. My master never trusted but a very few with even a half of his thoughts. This hard time might have been eased if he had been a different man.
But had he been a different man, such a time would never have come to him.
My master went alone that night into his room and shut the door behind him. I could consider myself dismissed, but I sat up much later, seeing the light under the door and knowing Sokolli could not sleep either.
That night Sokolli Pasha wrote a very long letter in his own hand. It went to the one person he trusted most of all—Arab, now governor of Cyprus. Arab Pasha, who’d come as close to flesh and blood as my master ever knew.
XXXIV
“Abdullah, come here.”
It was Gul Ruh’s voice stifled into a whisper that drew my attention up into the big plane tree by the wall.
That girl! A year since she’d first been sent to the harem and still she was fighting it. I’d put one of my assistants on her full time. A jolly, fat eunuch, I’d chosen him because he could tell tales and jokes and sing songs that kept her satisfied at his knees for hours on end. But he did like his narghile with a few grains of opium in it, and when he’d start that bubbling, you could bet Gul Ruh would not sit quietly beside him doing needlework. Then I had to go off and find her myself.
“No, come right up here,” she insisted, pointing to the limb beside her. Simply standing at the trunk to break her fall was not enough.
A plane tree by a garden wall on a cool day in early spring. It reminded me of another day and another place when another girl—just slightly older than this one as the sun tells time, but much, much older in reality—had piped me to my fate with a bawdy song.
Turkish women’s shalvar, I noticed, made climbing tress much easier than full Venetian skirts and farthingales. Once up there, they were basically more modest, too. Still, they could be pulled suggestively tight. The gauzy bodice (and Gul Ruh’s vest was perpetually missing a little pearl button or two) revealed more than a hard bone corset just how close to being a woman she was. Her satin slippers were scuffed from the climb and hung from her feet by only the toes. The bare ankles, white but firm, crossed and uncrossed with excitement at just my nose’s level.
Had I been the man who’d climbed the convent’s garden wall, I would have refused to join her. Pride and a little petulance would have hidden the flush in my face, the racing of my heart and the tightness in my codpiece. The victory of forcing my will over hers, of getting her down from the tree when she wanted me up—by physical means if necessary—would be practice for the more intimate forcing I would have had next in mind.
But I loved my little mistress in a way that was foreign tongue to the passion of my youth and yet, I believe, having known them both, was more true and enduring. I tried the branch carefully to see if it would hold us both, then joined her there. It had been a lifetime, I realized sadly, since I’d climbed a ship’s rigging like a little monkey. The long, heavy robes of my office did not help matters, either. Gul Ruh had to cover her giggles with her hand as she watched my struggle up.
“The Jew, Joseph Nassey,” I replied, panting from the struggle, to her first question, “Who is that?”
But to her second, “What is he doing there in front of our gate?” I could not answer at all.
“I’ll go ask,” I offered, but she did not send me and I didn’t go at once. We both just sat and watched with wonder the spectacle that appeared between the naked branches of the plane tree.
Had we not been the only ones about, I would have dragged the girl down from the tree in an instant. In spite of the meager and unknown audience we made, Joseph Nassey walked to and fro in front of the master’s gate with a mincing stiffness in his hips that said he expected more eyes. His head was thrown back, singing or shouting, I couldn’t tell which in the distance. And, hung around his neck by its heavy iron chain, he wore the wooden coat of arms that had swung so long and so vainly in front of his own house.
We watched this spectacle together for some time. Gul Ruh reached through the branches of the tree to hold my hand for protection against the strangeness of it. But finally a question without an answer bored her and she scrambled down of her own accord and went back into the house to provoke her personal guardian into entertainment.
As I had more means to unscramble the puzzle at my disposal, I pursued it much longer and was finally able to discover the man’s purpose. He had taken heart by the recent
