Hyacinth shimmered away, and a few moments later he returned with the girl, who held her mandolin by the neck and her eyes downcast. She bowed, touching the floor.
“I know you, don’t I? I set you to look after the little girl.”
“Yes, hanum efendi,” Melda replied in a small voice.
“Then what—?” Talfa drew herself up and swept her arm slowly around the room: “Then what are you doing here? This is not her place, Hyacinth. It is entirely irregular. If the girl is ill, she should be seen by a doctor, in Besiktas. That is where her duties lie, am I not right?”
“Quite right, hanum efendi,” Hyacinth began. “But the Kislar aga—”
Talfa waved him off. “Does the valide know this girl is here?”
“I’m not sure, hanum ef—”
“That’s enough. The girl can speak. She can tell me why she has come to Topkapi. Well?”
Melda’s eyes flickered uncertainly toward the elderly eunuch, then down to the floor again. Talfa’s expression tightened. Hyacinth wrung his hands, and his head bobbed low. “Hanum efendi, you will allow me to interject. Melda is only staying with us for a short while, until she regains her—her strength. She has had”—he fluttered his fingers in the air, looking for the permissible euphemism—“an inauspicious occurrence, a shock, exactly, so the Kislar aga and Yashim efendi had her sent to us, to recover.”
“Ah!” Talfa barked, as if she had got the truth at last. “Yashim!”
Hyacinth bowed again, and said nothing. He had served in the palace for a long time.
Talfa continued to study the downcast girl. At length her expression softened, and she almost smiled.
“Come, come, little one. I don’t bite, you know.” She tittered, and heaved herself off the divan. “Necla, my love, I want you to stay here a little longer, on my account.” She patted her daughter’s hand. “It’s Melda, isn’t it? Let’s go somewhere quiet, just you and me, and we’ll have a little talk. Let’s see what your auntie Talfa can do for you. Eh?”
She took Melda’s hand in hers.
“Come on, my dear. I know just the spot. I was born at Topkapi, after all.” She turned to Hyacinth, and scrunched up her plump face with amusement. “Don’t look so worried, Hyacinth. Melda and I can have a little chat, and you can look after Necla.”
Hyacinth smiled uncertainly, and bowed. It was a deep bow, because he felt that something was wrong, and when he straightened up, Talfa and the girl were gone.
92
DARKNESS was falling when Yashim arrived at the Polish residency. As he climbed the stairs he heard the sound of a violin, and when he entered the drawing room Palewski motioned him to an armchair with a swoop of the fiddle under his chin.
He sat for several minutes, eyes closed, pondering the story of Fevzi Ahmet’s youth, the sister’s death, the father’s curse. He only noticed that Palewski had finished playing when the ambassador flopped into the neighboring chair.
Yashim opened his eyes. “Why do you think Fevzi Ahmet chose to defect?”
“Bitterness and greed,” Palewski replied, as if the answer were obvious.
Yashim turned his head. “You think he took Egyptian gold?” He sounded curious.
“I imagine,” Palewski answered more slowly, “that he took Egypt’s gratitude. The gold, I am afraid, was Russian. It often is.”
“But why, if he was working for the Russians, did Fevzi Pasha kill the man in the well?”
Palewski shrugged.
Yashim said moodily, “Husrev Pasha thinks the same as you.”
“Well, I may say that the grand vizier is not a fool. Istanbul is vulnerable without a fleet—and the Russians are very close already.” Palewski sighed. “I’m afraid Fevzi Pasha’s defection makes it likely that they will come, as they might say, to protect the city.”
“The European Powers won’t like that much,” Yashim said.
“Perhaps not,” Palewski said, and Yashim could hear the doubt in his voice. “And they should have thought about that twelve years ago, when they helped the Greeks get independence. I hate to say it, Yash, but your empire hasn’t many friends.”
“The French—or the English—wouldn’t let the Russians take it over,” Yashim said, stoutly.
“If it meant crowning the tsar in Ayasofya, no, they wouldn’t like that. But the Russians can afford to play it softly. They’ve been waiting centuries to restore the empire of orthodoxy to its original seat—Constantinople. A loose protectorate might be a useful start.”
He crossed to his shelves and dragged down an atlas.
“Whatever they say at the British Foreign Office—or on the Quai d’Orsay—about letting Russians into Constantinople, an independent Bulgaria would be popular with public opinion. Free the Moldavians?” He stabbed a finger at the map. “Give the Greeks a Black Sea state? Let the Walachians choose a king? Nations, that’s what the British cotton millers understand. And black the sultan’s eye, into the bargain? They’d love it, Yash.”
“And you? You’d like it too?”
Palewski ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. “I ask only for Poland,” he said. “A Russian Constantinople is not the way.”
“You’re sure?”
“The English cotton millers, Yashim, live far away. They stand in little danger of being spattered with the blood of the Bulgarians, or the Turks, or the Moldavians, if Russia decides to assume control. It would be very bloody. And Russia would be stronger.”
He seemed to sag over the atlas. After a moment he shut it, and walked to the window.
“It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if your Fevzi Pasha’s defection led to women and children being hounded to death in the Balkan hills?” He spread his arms and rested his hands on the sash. “I’m beginning to think that something needs to be done.”
“And yet,” Yashim said sadly, “we have no friends.”
“But between rulers there are no friendships. Only alliances of interest. And your empire, I’m afraid, has failed to provide them. Leaving the state even weaker than it appears.”
“No one to help?”
Palewski caught his eye. “No help that I can think of, Yash. And I am sorry, for all our sakes.”
93
HYACINTH shuffled across the frozen cobbles. The lady Talfa had gone home but the valide had been fretful all afternoon and he was feeling tired. His feet ached and the cold assaulted him when he stepped outside.
One little thing, Hyacinth thought, might cheer him up right now. The old lalas were drinking coffee, but coffee was always bitter, however much sugar you put in.
Tülin would never mind if he took a little piece of chocolate.
He would have asked her to prepare him some, the way she did; but there was orchestra rehearsal at Besiktas and Tülin was not due back until later.
He reached her door and turned the handle. It was almost dark inside, but the room was small and he had no doubt that he could find the chocolate easily. There would be a jar somewhere, and he could dip a finger into the dark, bitter flakes. Perhaps she would never have to know.
There was a jar. Hyacinth opened it expectantly, and shook it, and sniffed. It wasn’t chocolate.
He set the jar back on the floor and squatted on his hams, surprised. The corner of the room was full of jars. Not only jars: there were packets in paper, and little wooden boxes, and clay pots, and some tiny brass containers with lids. He opened one at random: it was a sticky paste that smelled familiar.
Hyacinth’s mouth turned down at the corners.
Chocolate was one thing. But as he opened one pot after another, and poked his fingers into packets and boxes, the turn of Hyacinth’s mouth deepened.
It was his duty now to talk to the girl, he thought.
But his desire was to speak to Yashim.
94
THE man with the knife crossed the mountains in snow. He was used to the snow, to the cold, to picking his way along the mule tracks.
He did not consider the barki
ng as he made his way down toward the valley. At this time of year dogs would be chained close to the sheep, to warn of the approach of wolves—or a stranger.
At last he lifted his head, and listened. The barking was growing closer. The man tightened his grip on his stick and loosened the knife in his belt.
With a strange dog you had to look big. Talk loud. Dogs understood firm signals. The man prepared by shifting his sheepskin coat onto his shoulders, just in case.
95
THE Court of the Favorites, in the Topkapi Palace, was an open and airy space surrounded by a colonnade on three sides. It was the work of the great Ottoman architect Sinan, who created the sublime panorama of Istanbul’s domes, which move forward and retreat in dignified counterpoint as the traveler approaches the city by sea.
Sinan also worked on buildings that were to be seen by very few people. The fourth side of the Court of the Favorites was enclosed by a low balustrade, beneath which Sinan had constructed a delightful bathing pool as a grateful addition to the amenities of the harem. Stretched out in the sun below the balustrade, part of the pool filtered back through the old Byzantine arches into deep, almost subterranean shade.
As autumn came, and the days shortened and the air grew cool, the eunuch of the baths would test the water with his skinny elbow, until the sad day arrived when he pronounced the pool closed for the season. Then the pool was drained, to protect the tiling from frost and ice; because it stood on a hill, the draining was swift and effective. The entrances were locked, to await the return of summer, and the sultan’s girls.
The girls were warned not to approach the balustrade, which was quite low; in spite of salt and gravel, the surface of the courtyard in winter was sometimes slippery with ice. But in recent years the filling and the emptying of the pool had become no more than a formality. The girls had gone. The pool became a seasonal tradition that continued because it was seasonal, and no one had thought, or would ever think, to order it stopped.
Hyacinth did not find it necessary to repeat the warning to the older women who had returned to the palace from Besiktas: they knew the danger already, and they rarely ventured out now that the frosts had come. Instead they remained indoors, clustering around the barely adequate fireplaces that warmed their lodgings, and complaining incessantly about the cold. Palewski was right: the Ottomans seemed not to reckon with winter until it was already upon them.
Thus the Court of the Favorites was largely deserted, and only Melda, who had the heat of youth in her veins, sought it out as a quiet place to sit, under the colonnade.
96
“HYACINTH,”the valide remarked as she watched the flakes settle in the tiny court outside her window, “should order someone to sweep away the snow. I never liked it, Tülin.”
Tülin smiled, and put down her embroidery. “That is because you were raised in a hot country, valide,” she pointed out. “Most of the ladies are Circassians, and it does them good to see the snow again.”
The valide made a moue. “I’m surprised any of them are capable of remembering that far back. If they are Circassian, which I doubt. You all pretend, Tülin.”
Tülin laughed pleasantly, and stretched. The valide shot her a surprised glance. “I would like Hyacinth to order the court swept,” she said.
“Of course, valide. If you are comfortable, I will attend to it right away.”
Tülin gathered her embroidery and set it on a footstool, then plucked a fur-lined pelisse from a hook by the door and whirled it around her shoulders.
Outside she moved fast, one hand to the wall to steady herself over the icy cobbles. A blast of cold wind hit her as she turned into the corridor that linked the valide’s court with the little suite of rooms set aside for the black eunuchs, and the cape fluttered.
She approached the door of the halberdiers. She could hear them beyond, conversing in low voices; now and then she caught the sound of a laugh, and of dice rattling on a table.
She stood and listened to the mesmerizing voices of the men. Her breath made puffs in the chill air.
The sound of a door opening in their room, and closing with a bang as the wind caught it, made her jump.
“I’m sorry, valide,” she said later as she shook the snowflakes from her pelisse and hung it back on the peg. “I looked everywhere, but I think that Hyacinth has gone out.”
The valide put her head on one side. “Hyacinth? Why do you want to find Hyacinth? It’s cold, chérie. I think you might want to put another log on the fire.”
It was true; the room had grown colder while she was out. Tülin reached into the basket and picked up a log. She noticed that her fingers were trembling slightly.
“There,” she said with a grunt as she heaved the log into the fire. “That’s much better.”
“Much better,” the valide echoed as she felt the warmth on her face: but she was aware that there had been something else she wanted, not fire, quite. She could not remember what it was. “Much better, yes.”
97
HYACINTH had not gone out. Indeed, just as he had feared, he would never again leave the palace, which had been his home for so many years.
There was no one alive, except the valide herself, who could have remembered the stringy little African boy who had arrived at the Topkapi Palace in the cold winter of 1789. When he had first seen snow, he had shrieked with terror: for a whole day he sat in the antechamber of the eunuchs’ apartments, with his hands over his funny little ears, and shrieked every time someone opened the door. The old eunuchs had found this quite hilarious; and some of the more mischievous girls had come to tease him, pretending the sky really was falling on their heads, until the Kislar aga of the day had shooed them all away, and sentenced Hyacinth to stand in the snow in bare feet until he understood what it was.
Which was also how he got his name, Hyacinth, growing most incongruously out of the snow-covered ground.
Hyacinth no longer minded the snow, of course. As it settled on his hair, and on his back, and drifted between his curled fingers, he was quite dead to the ancient terror it had once inspired.
He lay in the pool, on the tiles, exactly where he had fallen, as snow covered the lake of blood that seeped from his smashed forehead, and turned to dark ice on the frozen ground.
98
THE man with the knife saw and heard the dog before the dog saw him.
It ran howling out of the pine trees, a big mastiff with a thick, matted yellow coat. A proper shepherd’s dog. When it stumbled and lurched sideways, snapping at its own tail, the man with the knife felt a tremor of fear.
He stood very still, thinking the mastiff might not see him if he did not move. Its eyes were sticky, foam lashing at its jaws, and it whirled from side to side, stumbling nearer to him across the frozen ground. But there was no purpose in its erratic course. There was a chance that the dog would simply pass him by.
When the dog was only a few yards away, the man reluctantly lifted his stick.
At no moment did the frenzied animal recognize the man, or make up its mind to attack: it seemed lost in its own suffering. But as he raised his stick, the dog flung itself at him, suddenly, with its lips peeled back and jaws wide.
The man was caught off guard, but he was strong and his aim was good. The stick connected with the dog’s muzzle in mid-spring, as the man stepped back. The dog landed heavily, shook its huge head, and bared its teeth with a strangled sound.
He hit it again, a more considered blow on the side of its head.
The mastiff staggered, and seemed about to fall, but as the man raised the stick again it sprang disjointedly. The vicious jaws snapped shut on the stick, and with a heave of its head it almost pulled it out of his hands.
The man pressed the stick to the ground, lowering the dog’s head, watching the saliva run toward his hands. It took great strength to hold the stick down. He wanted his knife.
The dog shook the stick a few times, then yelped and dropped back, jaws agape.
That wa
s all the time the man needed. He plucked his knife from his belt and raised the stick, and when the dog came on again, grinding its fangs from side to side, he slammed the stick against its jaws with one hand and with the other stuck the knife straight and hard into the dog’s neck, behind the ear.
He felt its hot breath against his chest; he felt the heat of its blood running over his hand. He twisted the knife and dragged down savagely, once, twice, grunting with exertion as he pulled the blade through the matted fur.
The dog sagged, overbalancing them both. The man fell back, unable to keep the weight of the dog from sinking against his chest. Blood from its gashed neck spurted out over his legs and he scrambled backward, the slippery hilt of the knife sliding from his fingers.
On the ground the mastiff jerked spasmodically, working its jaws while its hind legs scrabbled for purchase. But the man knew it was over.
He held the back of his wrist to his mouth and watched the dog die.
It died with a sort of ragged gasp. One moment it had muscles, and a form; the next, it was splayed on the ground, haunches high, the head lolling and blood staining the grass.
The man waited for a few minutes, until his heartbeat settled. He bent down and pulled the knife clear. He wiped it on the grass: he did not wish to touch the dog.
99
YASHIM woke early, groping for the quilt that had slipped from his legs. He squinted at the unaccustomed brightness and then sat up, yawning, and rubbed the condensation from the window pane. Snow lay thick on the rooftops of Balat.
He drew up his knees and leaned back against the cushions, watching his dragon’s breath.
After a few moments he began to grope for his clothes, drawing them under the quilt to warm up, before he sprang with a shiver from the divan and began to dress, hurriedly wriggling his arms into the sleeves of the cambric shirt he wore over his woolen vest. There was ice in the washbasin: Yashim pulled a face, plunged his hand through the ice, and splashed freezing water over his eyes, his mouth and ears. He dried himself quickly on a towel, feeling newly awake. Over his shirt he put on a woolen waistcoat and a quilted jacket; then he tucked his feet into a pair of slippers.
An Evil Eye: A Novel Page 18
