The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (31 page)

“And all his letters are read to her by me,” she added. “They come first into my hands. And you can quite safely write anything you want on them in invisible ink, since I am the person who first breaks the seal. And I will be able to read your messages and dispose of them by taper before she ever sees the letters. That was my first thought.”

“And what was your second?” He was almost afraid to hear the answer.

“Actually, my second thought was my first thought,” she answered. “It came to me when you wrote your note — a very nice note, by the way. It proves what a good tutor I have been to you. Anyway, if you are to be a personal scribe to my father, there have to be times when you can get your hands on the letters that he sends to Hürrem, so you can write notes to me at the bottom of the pages in invisible ink and I will be able to read them before I show my father’s letters to her.”

Danilo had heard tales of the tricks and deceptions practiced by the women of the harem, but finding himself personally implicated in one was a new and oddly daunting prospect.

As she so often did, the princess read his mind.

“This is dangerous work.” She fixed him with a penetrating glance. “If we are discovered, we are as good as dead. Are you certain you want to do it?”

It was one thing to have reasonable doubts, quite another to have his courage questioned.

“Of course,” he replied quickly. “I will live for your messages. It’s just it may not be so easy for me to get my hands on the Sultan’s private mail —”

Before he could complete the sentence, she cut in on him. “Oh, you will find a way. You have to. You are my paladin. You are my knight. You are the love of my life.”

Captivated as always by her sweetness, he held out his arms to her. But she had time only for a short kiss on the cheek before she went on.

“I have ordered fourteen vials of the magic ink. Plus a packet of special quills. You must wrap each vial in a pocket handkerchief to keep them from being broken. And remember, don’t pack them all in the same place. That way, if some get crushed, you will have replacements. In return, you must bring me a new supply of the doctor’s sleeping powder so that I can get out to meet you when you return without alerting Hürrem. Let us each bring our packets to the Grand Vizier’s dock tomorrow evening at the usual time. If anything prevents me, Narcissus will come in my stead. Just do your part and it will all work out.”

“You seem so sure . . .”

“You forget that I have been learning how to manage these things since I was a child in the harem.” She held out her arms. “It’s getting late.”

“Wait!” Taking her by the shoulders and looking directly into her eyes, he asked, “Have you ever tried it? The secret writing, I mean.”

“Of course not.” Now her impatience was palpable. “How many times must I tell you that you are my only love? I have no one else to write love letters to. Nor will I ever have. But I have seen enough in the harem to know that this ink never fails. One more safety measure — we must never use our own names or speak of our love.”

Once again he felt himself falling into a swamp of confusion.

“What am I to write about?” he asked “The weather?”

As she so often did when she wanted to make sure she had his complete attention, she grasped his hands in hers.

“The words don’t matter,” she explained gently. “I will read the real message in the sight of your hand on the page. Think of this. You have already proved that you know how to compose coded messages.”

“I have?”

She reached into her pocket and held up the note of condolence he had passed through to the guardian at the harem gate.

“This note of yours was meant to be read by the sentry as a social gesture. But it was actually meant to tell me that you wanted to see me and that you were leaving the city. The harem girls have found all kinds of ways to code their messages — a couplet from a
gazel,
an old adage, a comment that seems to follow from the real letter. I have even seen a passage from the Koran used to set a date and place for a clandestine meeting.”

Now her plan was beginning to make sense to him. The messages had to be encoded in the seemingly innocent language of polite correspondence. How simple. How clever. And on that far-from-romantic note the lovers exchanged a farewell embrace.

Not for the first time, Danilo was left marveling at having discovered yet another side of his infinitely various princess. Clearly she was as capable of focusing her attention on a target as a siege engine and, if necessary, of letting fly a full armamentarium of lies, secrecy, and deception.

“But you have to understand, Bucephalus,” he explained to his old confidant after the princess had quit the stable, “that as a woman, those are the only weapons she has. But if she still loves me as much as she says she does, she might have shed at least one tear . . .”

27

JUDAH’S FAREWELL GIFTS

Judah del Medigo was a conscientious physician with a strong sense of responsibility to his patients, his masters, his family, and his god: a compassionate, modest, and generous man. But deep in his nature lurked a fatal flaw: a lifelong habit of refusing to recognize realities that he found too painful to face, and behaving as if they did not exist.

Just such an event had presented itself to him early in his marriage to Grazia dei Rossi, when he returned to Venice after the French wars to find her pregnant with a child who could not possibly be his. All his life, he had longed for a son. To have a beautiful baby boy thrust into his arms seemed to him like a gift from God. His way was to accept the boy without question and bring him up as his own son, but never to acknowledge his awareness of the deceit, even to his wife.

Perhaps to her discredit, Grazia tacitly played her part in the charade. So the subject of their son’s fatherhood was never broached between them, and the boy, named Danilo after his maternal grandfather, grew up believing that Judah was his natural father and never even heard the name of his blood father until after his mother’s death, when he read of it in her secret book.

To Judah’s credit, once the truth was out, he made no effort to hide the fact that not he but a Christian knight, Lord Pirro Gonzaga of Gazuollo, was the boy’s blood father. Pressed by Danilo for details on what the boy called his “other father,” the doctor pronounced the knight to be an upright and decent man descended from the cadet branch of a family any boy would be proud of. Further, he agreed to write to the Gonzagas in Italy to inform them that Lord Pirro’s natural son had been saved from his mother’s fate at sea and was safe with the doctor in Istanbul.

But, somehow, that letter never got into the courier’s pouch. Time passed and no reply was received from Lord Pirro. (How could there have been when no letter had been sent?) All of which led the boy to conclude that the distant Lord Pirro Gonzaga had chosen not to acknowledge his bastard son. And Danilo del Medigo settled down to live as the doctor’s son in Topkapi Palace, and gradually the “other father” disappeared as a member of the family circle.

Being a bible scholar, Judah was fully aware of the story of Jacob and Esau. He knew that he had falsified Danilo’s birthright as surely as Jacob had stolen his brother’s blessing. But he loved the boy past reason. And God knows he had been a devoted father to him for seventeen years.

No surprise that Judah had considered withholding the Sultan’s letter inviting Danilo on his mission to fabled Baghdad to follow in the very footsteps of Alexander. It was a dream beyond the boy’s wildest imaginings. But this time, his better nature did prevail, and when he finally decided to face the reality of losing his son to the lure of glory, Judah, being the man he was, gave himself over to the task with his whole heart. He would prepare his son for the venture in every way he knew, both as a physician and as an experienced campaigner.

The doctor was never one to make protestations of love. But the succession of small packets that he painstakingly put together and packed into wooden casks — a veritable mountain of remedies against snake bites, gunshot burns, knife wounds, fever, and loose bowels, together with ribbon-bound sets of candles to light on Friday nights and socks knitted from a special water-repellent yarn for wearing when fording rivers, plus foods and spices and remedies, box after box — each offered the closest the doctor could come to a love poem.

They spent their last hours together in the gathering dark of the evening labeling and annotating the items: a salve to be used for three days only (after that it became poisonous); a vest to be worn wherever bullets were flying; alpaca socks (knitted from the hair of Mongolian goats, the very socks that protected Ghengis Khan’s feet from freezing); a liquid to be sprayed on pillows and quilts to ward off mites; greenish-colored sand to keep ants out of the food, only to be spread around the edges, never to be eaten; and a manuscript of Quintus Curtius’ dictionary. Plus, of course, frequently repeated warnings to be on guard against overripe melons.

They worked silently, piling box upon box to be hauled away at dawn the next morning by Danilo’s newly assigned porter. And finally it was time to say goodbye. But before the twine was wound around the last carton, Judah excused himself to fetch one last offering: an unlabeled vial of deep purple liquid that he sealed with wax and placed in his son’s hands.

“This is my most valuable possession, my son. It is a nostrum of my own invention. To it, I owe the success of my long tenure as the Sultan’s physician.” Still, he kept his hands on the vial as if he could not bear to part with it.

Finally, Danilo asked, “What is it, Papa?”

“It is the physic that I concocted to ease the Sultan’s gout. Yes, gout. I see you are laughing. But, believe me, gout on campaign can be worse than a bullet wound. And the Sultan has a very bad case of it. Of all his physicians I am the only one who has ever been able to relieve it. When it hits, it strikes his extremities with crippling force. The pain is so intense that he is unable even to grasp his sword. He becomes a commander who cannot sit on a horse. This is the coin” — he held out the vial — “that can buy you the gratitude of kings. Treat it as if it were pure gold. Keep it in the money purse that hangs around your waist. Never let it out of your sight.”

Coming from anyone else, Danilo would have received this oddly emotional burst of rhetoric with a measure of skepticism. But coming from Judah, the sworn enemy of grandiloquence and bombast, he took the advice at face value, reached for the purse, already heavy with gold, and found a safe niche among the coins for the peculiar treasure. And later, after Judah had retired, when the practiced Argonaut let himself out the back door and set off to zigzag down the slope to the Grand Vizier’s dock, he had to admit that having the amazing tincture so close to his skin made him feel strangely invincible.

Somehow, it did not surprise him to find waiting for him on the dock not the princess but unflappable Narcissus, pacing back and forth like an anxious lover.

“I was unable to make arrangements to carry her over the water,” the slave explained.

So time, which had stood still for them obediently over the years, had run out and was even now whipping the slave, who, as he spoke, held out a packet in plain paper.

“Here are the fourteen vials of magic ink,” he continued. “You must wrap each in a pocket handkerchief. Don’t put them all in the same place. Also, there is a packet of special quills. Before you pack them away, take a few minutes to practice writing with the ink and making it visible.” Narcissus tapped his foot nervously on the wooden pier. “Where is the sleeping potion?” he asked, holding out his hand to expedite the transaction.

As Danilo handed over the flagon, he noticed that the hand receiving it trembled. The slave was frightened out of his wits.

“Was it very dangerous to come out tonight?” he asked.

“It is always dangerous, master,” Narcissus replied, with ill-disguised impatience.

“Then why do you do it?”

The foot stopped tapping, and Narcissus took a precious moment to think before he answered. When he did, there was just a trace of a smile around his lips.

“That is my secret, master. And hers.”

With that, he turned and sped off into the prickly undergrowth.

But before the deep night swallowed him completely, the slave threw back over his shoulder one last message: “May your god watch over you and bring you safely back to us.”

The thin, reedy voice echoed across the water and like a lightning flash he was gone, breaking Danilo del Medigo’s last link with the life he was leaving behind. A flood of dejection washed over him. Tears threatened. But behind the tears his heart began to beat faster with the heady expectation of the great adventure that awaited him on the road to Baghdad.