by Mike Ashley
Sandro snorted derisively. “I’m sure you didn’t waste your opportunity to fondle.”
“I admit my hands slid over a few delicious curves when I was holding my silks against them. The temptation was too great.”
“I’m not interested in your lecherous pursuits, you rogue. What did you learn?”
“The Italian was reluctant to translate, but finally agreed to help. Naturally, the odalisques were enthralled with the murder and eager to gossip. Wasn’t there some rumour that Aysha was with child? A lie according to the Mistress of the Bath.”
“Mayhap she was anxious to keep the Sultan’s enthusiasm alert. Did they speak of lovers?”
“Very cautiously and with many glances over the shoulder. They favoured Rustum and say he swam across the lake each night.”
“From under the nose of the Kizier Aga?”
“Ah, he’s the one they fear more than the Sultan. But one girl bolder than the rest suggested he was drugged – or bribed. Aysha often made him gifts of confectionery from her kitchen.”
Sandro regarded him in silence for several minutes before he said, abruptly. “I hear all kinds of liaisons and little affairs and jealousies flare up among the odalisques.”
“What can one expect when women are imprisoned with no glimpse of the outside world or of other men? They seemed to hold the Italian in the sort of pity and contempt females love to revel in. One of the women tried to caress her and lift her veil, but in a mocking way, and was angrily rejected. It surprised me, master, that she wore a veil even among women.”
“What was said of Selma’s accident?”
“They seemed more concerned with who would succeed her as Mistress of Sherbets than disturbed by her death.”
“The harem hierarchy must be all-consuming.” He opened his hand. “What think you of this for a murder weapon?”
“A petal.”
“A rose. The white rose that only blooms in Roxana’s garden, heavily imbued with a virulent bane that smelled of almonds. Aysha tried to take many things from me, Roxana said. She coveted the white rose and it came to her and with it Death. Who brought it? The Kizier Aga, as go-between for Roxana, he who is privy to the secrets of the mighty and waxes fat on his knowledge. Had the Sultan discovered at last her infidelity? Was Murad Bey jealous of her influence? Was it Rustum, fearing betrayal? Or Roxana fearing for Rustum. I’ve no doubt Rustum was Aysha’s lover and that when he swam out to the gazebo Jevheh didn’t mistake it for the swooping of a nightbird on the water. No, the rose was placed in Aysha’s lap by someone she trusted.”
Sandro was glaring at the henchman as if he hated him. His eyes had a burning glitter like a dark exultation. Ugo shivered to the roots of his hair.
“You know who it is, don’t you?”
“I want you to carry two notes for me, one to the Kizier Aga and the other to Murad Bey.”
With Ugo gone on his errand, Sandro again made his way up to the terrace. The view before him shone with more brilliance in the noonday sun. The dazzle on the water was almost blinding. He shaded his eyes, gazing from the rippling grass and billowing palms out to the Bosphorus where the fishing boats and galleys had been joined by pleasure craft, luxurious barques with metallic strings tied to their prows to leave a sparkling wake.
He sat cross-legged on the wall where he imagined Selma had sat. It was a long wait. He had a sixth sense which had ensured his continued survival, but in a foreign world his nerves felt on the stretch. He was, after all, simply waiting for a murderer to secure his silence.
The soft snicker of slippers was almost imperceptible, but his heightened sense caught it. He swung his legs about at the onrush and stared into the contorted face.
“So yours is the face of the ifrit.”
She tottered on the brink of falling, her hands outstretched to push him. She had cast aside her veil and her face with its livid scars was revealed.
“You see now why I could never return to Venice. This is the face Aysha gave me when she took me from Roxana, so she would never again want me as her favourite.”
“That was what I suspected.”
“I loved Roxana as I could never love a man. Do you despise me?”
“I should beware pity. I pitied you, but you had no pity for Selma. I can understand why you took Aysha’s life but why Selma’s?”
“Because she was Roxana’s new favourite. Because she’d been given a white rose. That’s why I pushed her from the wall.
“Aysha was shallow enough to believe I could cajole a white rose for her from the Sultana. I stole it. How she gloated when I placed it in her lap before she was rowed to her house of the moon.”
“How did you poison it?”
“I’ve learned many secrets in the seraglio, Il Saracen, secrets that would make your Italian skin crawl. You think you know love, hate, vendetta, you know nothing till you’ve lived in an harem.” Her mutilated face smiled grotesquely. From her sash she drew a rose, a red rose, red as blood. “Will you smell my flower, Il Saracen? Will you savour death?”
Instinctively, he backed away. She scrambled on to the wall. His attention was snatched away by the intrusion of Murad and his halberdiers. When he glanced back, Kosem was inhaling the perfume of the rose.
“Why did she never give me a white rose?”
She hovered for an instant and then dropped out of sight below the wall.
“Don Alessandro!” Murad leapt forward with drawn scimitar. “Are you harmed?”
“No, scant thanks to you. If I’d been dreaming like Selma it would have been my body on the rocks below.”
“I had to ensure the women were locked away before I could invade the harem.” He crossed to the wall and glanced down. Sandro declined to follow his example. “You said in your message she would try to snare you here. How did you know?”
“I also sent a note to Jevheh Pasha, naming Kosem as Aysha’s murderer and asking him to meet me here. I suspected he was not well versed enough to understand the written word and would need it translated. Who else but by the Italian slave?”
On the terrace floor lay a petal like a drop of blood. Sandro crushed it under his boot. “You may tell the Lion of Istanbul the puzzle has been solved. Please make the necessary arrangements for my departure . . .”
“The Sultan will cover you with honours . . .”
“I’m not sure I want his honours. He has compounded an unnatural society. This is just one of many tragedies.”
In the opulent apartment Don Alessandro Orsini threw off his Turkish trappings and donned his Italian doublet. A slave brought him a purse of money. Sandro made a quick calculation of the coins. “What I might have expected after Jevheh Pasha and Murad Bey have had their cut.”
The purse was accompanied by a small gold case and a note written in Italian.
The puzzle of my kadin’s death has indeed been solved, but not the puzzle of your identity. I present you with a miniature of the young Ahmed painted by the Italian artist Gentile Bellini, who also painted my father.
“Master, what are you leaving behind?” Ugo stared at the gold case flung carelessly on the divan. “Have you examined it?”
Il Saracen smiled a sweet and melancholy smile. “I prefer to remain a mystery even to myself.”
Flibbertigibbet
Paul Finch
Paul Finch (b. 1964) is a journalist and former police officer who has used his knowledge and experience in several stories and scripts for the television series, The Bill. In the following novella we enter the Elizabethan period, where a serial killer is on the loose.
AD 1581
The crowd were stunned when Father Campion offered a prayer for the health of the queen; “his queen”, as he called her. Even the Lord Mayor, a pompous, self-important little man, who often spoke long and loud at such occasions, was momentarily lost for words.
Was this not Edmund Campion, the infamous Jesuit seditionist? Was he not a scheming subversive, who had abandoned his country for the wiles of Rome, and
had only returned here to undermine the Church of England and its most high and noble governor, Queen Elizabeth I?
Abruptly recovering himself, the Mayor rolled up the death-sentence, and laid it across the pommel of his saddle. “In which case,” he called out, “do you recant your papist beliefs? Might we take word back to the Queen that at the moment of truth, you returned to the Anglican faith and sought her forgiveness?”
Campion, who’d had difficulty standing since they’d lifted him from his hurdle, made no answer. Instead, he turned painfully to the executioners. “Please . . . do what you must.”
The chief executioner, a heavily built man clad entirely in leather, his head shrouded in the customary black hood with eye-slits, nodded, and turned to his red-garbed apprentices. The first one came forward with thongs and bound the priest’s hands behind his back; the second looped the noose over Father Campion’s head and tightened it into place. Throughout the process, the Mayor leaned forward from his horse, his eyes keen and hawk-like. Too often in the past, executioners and their staff had been bribed by families to end the ordeal swiftly – slipping a knife in here, twisting a neck there; occasionally, during the reign of Mary, they had acted from pity alone, craftily garotting with ligature before lighting the heaped faggots. None of this would be tolerated on a day like this . . . not with Edmund Campion as the object of attention: today’s spectacle had to be exemplary.
A moment passed, the chief executioner stoking the brazier in which he heated his tools, then his first apprentice leaped down into the cart, took up the reins and whipped the team away. Instantly, Father Campion was drawn up to the crossbeam of the gallows. There were gasps from the crowd as he swung there, silent but jerking in the frigid December air. He had been a tall man, well made and handsome, with a head of golden hair and laughing eyes. As well as a learned father and fine scholar, he’d also been a caring man. Charismatic in his oratory but patient in the debate, his polite and gentlemanly attitude had won the admiration of many, even those he’d encountered who didn’t share his beliefs. Now though . . . now, he was indistinguishable from so many other doomed wretches who had come this way to Tyburn. His lean form, battered and bruised, and through the cruel auspices of the Little Ease, withered almost to bones, was clad only in a filthied, blood-stained shroud. His tortured limbs twitched; his bruised and crudely shaven head turned first a shade of scarlet, then darkened quickly to purple as the rope bit into his neck.
There was an awesome silence in the great square. More and more people gathered to watch, but still the only sound was the slow and steady creaking of the gibbet.
To one side, behind the line of halberdiers, an elegant gentleman stood watching the affair. He was tall and sleek of appearance, his features smooth and aquiline, and excepting his neat beard and moustache, closely shaven. He wore a goffered ruff at his neck, a blue satin doublet over his lace-edged shirt, and a purple velvet cape to ward off the chill. His padded trunk-hose were the height of fashion, yet were almost concealed beneath thigh-high riding-boots waxed to a gleaming finish. On his head, there sat a tall beaver-hat complete with peacock feather, while at his left hip, a rapier hung in a decorated scabbard. Others of his class were also present, at the rear of the crowd, watching from carriage or horseback, every one decked in his or her festive finest, and clutching smelling-salts for fear they might swoon. Not so this gentleman at the front . . . for all his gorgeous apparel, he had a fearless, steely look, as if determined to see the business through from as close as possible, though by his hard indifference, it was difficult to tell whether he was against the prisoner or for him.
He didn’t seem the sort of gentleman to suffer fools lightly, yet he didn’t so much as stiffen when a mumbling beggar in ashes and sackcloth came and stood beside him; in truth, of course, the gentleman had already recognized Secretary of State Francis Walsingham, who as ever, was about his business . . . mixing now with the hoi polloi in search of Campion sympathizers.
“Good day, Master Urmston,” said the beggar at length. His voice was refined and purring. For all the grime upon his face, up close the Secretary of State’s small, demonic eyes and sharply pointed beard were unmistakable.
Urmston sniffed. “Is it a good day, my lord? I wish I could believe that.”
“Now now, Robert . . . don’t be disloyal.”
Urmston didn’t look round. His eyes were fixed on the hanging priest. “If loyalty is approving scenes like this, then it’s scarcely a desirable state.”
The beggar sighed. “This is not what the Queen wants.”
“Nevertheless, it’s what she has.”
“Campion was given every opportunity to recant his views,” the beggar replied. “She beseeched him personally during an audience at the Earl of Leicester’s house. She begged him . . . in her own hand, she held out a royal pardon to cancel all charges, if he would only recant. And even then he refused.”
“In which case, we’ve made him a martyr,” said Urmston. “God have mercy on our souls.”
The beggar’s cool, spy-master eyes slowly narrowed. He glanced sidelong at Urmston. “I trust you’re not questioning the supremacy of our Queen and our holy Church of England?”
Urmston wanted to shrug, to say that he didn’t care either way . . . but that would have been utter folly, as well as a blatant lie. “Of course not,” he finally muttered.
“You’ve accounted for enough of these scoundrels yourself, Robert.”
Urmston didn’t wish to be reminded of this. “My lord, my duty is to England and her sovereign. Rebels, traitors and Spanish spies . . . I will gladly dispatch to the scaffold. But to inflict this on some poor monk whose only crime is religious belief . . . in your conscience, you don’t find that disgusting?”
Lord Walsingham shook his head. “These men are traitors, Robert. There can’t be any other way to describe them. They were trained in French seminaries expressly for the purpose of coming here to England and undermining the faith.”
“And in response, we wreak a holocaust. I wonder which party history will deem the greater villain?”
Walsingham almost smiled. “I had no idea you felt so strongly.”
Urmston nodded. “Why else do you think I’ve resigned from your service?”
“Ah . . . now that is really the reason I’ve sought you out.”
The beggar was about to speak further, when movement at the gibbet distracted him. Campion’s body was being lowered to the platform. The priest had gone limp, though by the frantic palpitation of his chest, he still lived . . . which was greatly to the satisfaction of the Lord Mayor, who was now able to sit back in his saddle and preen himself.
The two apprentice executioners released the prisoner from the noose, then hoisted him up between them, and stripped off his ragged shift, to reveal an emaciated body, streaked with blood and sweat. Thus naked, he was lain on a trestle beside the gibbet, and strapped into place at his throat and feet. The chief executioner came forwards. In one gloved hand he held a long, slender knife, in the other a vicious-looking hook; both were glowing hot from the coals. Without further ado, he set to work with them, slitting the prisoner’s abdomen from his ribs to his groin.
Smoke rose, and a stench of burning flesh tainted the air. Incredibly it seemed, though the priest tensed and flopped wildly about in his bonds, he remained silent . . . even when the disembowelling commenced. At one point, he tried to raise his head, as if to see what was being done, though the vision of his own entrails, now being yanked out from his belly in loop after glistening loop, like coils of raw sausages, was perhaps too much, and he fainted dead away; either that, or, mercifully, he died. Either way, the chief executioner continued with his grim task for several more moments, depositing a great heap of steaming intestines on the floor around the trestle – more, it seemed, than any man’s belly cavity could contain, but at last laying his hook and knife aside, and reaching for the mighty axe, with which he might behead and then quarter the wretched creature.
&nbs
p; “Your resignation, yes,” said Lord Walsingham, taking up the conversation where they’d left off. “It’s been rejected.”
Urmston looked round in astonishment. “What?”
Lord Walsingham shrugged. “You’re too valuable an asset to me. There’s no conceivable way I can release you from your obligations now.”
“Obligations!” Urmston almost shouted.
Walsingham only smiled. “My dear Robert, you live the way you do . . . comfortably, because it pleases Her Majesty to retain you in her private household as Squire of the Royal Body. In return for this lofty honour, you are expected to attend upon her during her public appearances, to doff your cap and bow when she wanders idly past, and occasionally to take a turn around Greenwich Palace to ensure the men-at-arms are awake and the outer gates locked. It is scarcely demanding work.”
Urmston felt a tremor of rage pass through him, but also helplessness. He knew exactly what this implied, and more to the point, knew exactly how much, or rather how little he could do about it. “With all respect, my lord, this is unfair. You, better than anyone, know the full depth of my service to the Crown.”
The beggar shook his head. “You can’t have things both ways, Robert. You resign from one office, then I’m afraid you resign from the other also.”
Urmston’s hand tightened on his sword-hilt. He shook his head with impotent fury. “So be it . . . I still tender my resignation.”
Walsingham considered. “I see. Of course, if you really are intent on leaving the State Department, I must instruct my officers to investigate your reasons . . . as thoroughly as they can.”
“So now it’s a crime in England just to hold an opinion?”
