The Sultan's Seal (4 page)

When he reaches the road beyond the forest, he spurs his horse to a gallop.

E
very morning, my dayi, Ismail Hodja, put a soft-boiled egg in his mouth and sat without chewing, eyes lowered, until the egg was gone. It was not until I was in my twenties that I understood. Anticipation is the brilliant goad to pleasure. But at the time, I was only a child of nine, transfixed at the breakfast table. Ismail Dayi always ate the same breakfast: black tea in a tulip-shaped glass, one slice of white franjala bread, a handful of black, brine-soaked olives, a chunk of goat’s cheese, a small bowl of yoghurt, and a glass of whey. In that order. Then the egg, which lay peeled and shivering in a cobalt blue saucer, blue-white and glinting with moisture. Its broad end was slightly raised, the yolk casting a sickle-moon shadow. My uncle ate his breakfast slowly and methodically, without speaking. Then he reached for the egg with two long, slim fingers. His fingers indented the pudgy waistline of the egg as he lifted it, quivering, to his mouth. He deposited it carefully on his tongue, taking care not to brush it with his teeth. Then he closed his lips around the egg and, eyes lowered, sat until it had magically disappeared. I saw him neither chew nor swallow.

During this time, Mama was in the kitchen, rinsing the plates and topping up the double boiler in which the tea brewed. We did not have live-in servants in Ismail Dayi’s house and Mama herself prepared our breakfast before the cook and her assistant arrived for the day. When I would ask Mama, “Why does Ismail Dayi keep the egg in his mouth?” she would look away and busy herself.

“I don’t know what you mean. Don’t ask silly questions, Jaanan. Drink your tea.”

Ismail was my mother’s brother. We lived in his house because Papa had taken a second wife, and Mama had moved out of our big house in Nishantashou, where Papa lived now with Aunt Hüsnü.

Ismail Dayi’s house was two stories high, its smooth wooden flanks painted rust red. It was set in a garden on the shore of the Bosphorus just outside the village of Chamyeri. Behind the house, a forest of plane trees, cypresses, and oaks painted the steep hills. The house was set on the narrow stage of the shore in front of this towering green backdrop. Before us, the broad band of the Bosphorus glittered with light, its currents twining and coiling like a living creature. Sometimes the water threw up arcs of dolphins trailing aquatic rainbows. The colors of the water changed constantly in response to forces I still do not understand, from oily black to bottle green and, on rare magical days, to a translucent pastel green so clear that I felt if I looked long enough, I would see the bottom. On days of such clarity, I lay on the warm stones of the shore wall and let my head hang over the edge, looking for quicksilver sprays of anchovies. Below them I imagined the cool, heavy bodies of bigger fish turning and slipping through the liquid light. The shifting sands beneath uncovered the pale moon faces of dead princesses, eyes closed, lips slightly parted in fruitless protests against their fate. The gold thread of their brocaded gowns weighed them down. Their delicate hands lay, palms up, pinned to the sand by enormous emerald and diamond rings. Their black hair streamed in the current.

On cold days, I lay reading on the cushioned divan in the garden pavilion. It was a one-room structure with tall windows looking out over the water. Stacks of mattresses and quilts were kept ready for visitors who preferred to sleep there on hot nights. In winter, wooden shutters protected it against the wind and a brazier provided warmth and heated water for tea, although hardly anyone went there once the weather turned chill.

Mama complained about being isolated from her friends and the social life of the city. It was a long way to come from Istanbul by bullock cart or boat just to share a cup of coffee. The ferry from Istanbul took almost two hours and docked north of here at Emirgan. It took a carriage another hour to come the rest of the distance. Not many ladies had their husbands’ permission to stay the night. Only in summer, when the ladies moved to their summer houses on the Bosphorus, did we socialize. But I loved Ismail Dayi’s house. I was allowed to roam the garden in the benign care of Halil, our old gardener, and, later, under the watchful eyes of Madam Élise, my French governess and teacher.

Those first years in Chamyeri, Papa came once every week to try to convince Mama to return. I heard them arguing behind the carved wooden doors of the receiving room. He told her he would buy a separate house for her, that there was no need for her to live with her brother. But no matter how much I flattened my ear against the door, I never heard my mother’s response. In retrospect, I can see that her refusal to return to Papa’s protection must have shamed him before his family and peers, and this small protest gave my mother strength. By moving into my father’s house, even into a house apart from the one in Nishantashou where he lived with Aunt Hüsnü, Mama would have signaled her acceptance of Aunt Hüsnü as his kuma.

I don’t know whether Papa sent my mother’s financial due to Ismail Dayi, or, if he did, whether Ismail Dayi accepted it. Despite his eccentricities, Ismail Dayi was a respected hodja, a jurist and poet who had inherited his parents’ house and considerable wealth. Mama’s inheritance had gone with her into her marriage dowry, but remained hers to claim. Between Papa’s visits, Mama sat at her needlework in the receiving room, waiting for visitors who rarely arrived, her fingers dancing over the silk thread.

This was our life at Chamyeri until I was thirteen, in the Rumi year 1294, or 1878 by your reckoning, when I found the body of a woman in the pond behind our house. The pond, fed by an invisible spring, is shallow at one end and unfathomably deep at the other. It is so wide that a stone hurled by a young girl will not reach the other side. It is hidden behind a ruined stone wall in the forest. The woman Hannah was floating in knee-deep water, face down, her arms outstretched in an embrace. I did not realize she was dead, having no experience in such things. I stroked her hair. She looked peaceful, like a water princess, and I tried not to disturb her too much as I took her hand and turned her face to the sky. Her blue eyes were open. I told her that I lived here with my mother and my dayi. She looked surprised. I combed her hair with my fingers, arranged her dress, and placed a wildflower against her throat before going back to the house. When I told Madam Élise that a woman was asleep in the water and I could not wake her, I did not yet know the water there was deep enough to drown in.

The Bosphorus is a powerful sinew of water that flexes and pushes and roils down its long, wide chute to the Sea of Marmara, impatient to find the warm Mediterranean and dissolve into the salty womb of the ocean. Young boys from the village jump in and disappear, moments later emerging hundreds of yards downstream, where they must use all the force of their thin brown arms to reach shore again. Despite vigorous rowing, a boat headed upstream seems held in place by an unseen hand. When one next looks out, magically the boat has progressed.

Boats headed south, toward Istanbul, shoot along, passengers holding firmly to the creaking shell as the boatmen battle with their rudders. Halil, who had been a fisherman before he lost two fingers to a runaway net and became our gardener, told me that the Bosphorus has two currents. One runs north to south along the surface, carrying cold fresh water from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean; the other, a slippery rope of warm saline liquid, slithers south to north forty meters beneath the hard-muscled surface. The fishermen know that if you drop a line a certain length, you will catch palamut, lufer, and is tavrit that in spring dangle like silver coins from the fishermen’s lines. If you lower your hook farther, there abide mezgit and kalkan. A net caught up by the lower current will pull a boat inescapably northward. When the lodos blows from the southwest, the currents tangle and shift. The wrong fish are caught. Village boys do not reemerge. Young women drown in knee-deep water.

When Madam Élise saw the dead girl in the pond, she left us that same afternoon, crying and flailing her arms if anyone came near her.

After Madam Élise’s abrupt departure, I was happy. With no lessons, I spent hours perched on the stone wall dangling my legs toward the water below, watching large pleasure kayaks go by like creatures with many legs moving up and down in unison. I could make out the conical red felt hats of the teams of rowers. Veiled ladies sat on cushions and carpets on the foredeck, their heads nodding to one another in conversation like doves. Maidservants shaded them with fringed parasols. If they were women of high officials or the royal family, between the women and the rowers, under a particularly large parasol, would sit a fat eunuch, his dark skin melting into the shade. Sometimes I lay on my back on the warm stones, watching the sky careen about me. The scent of jasmine trailed across me like a cloak worn by the breeze.

When I went to the long, gold-framed mirror in the receiving room, the only mirror Mama allowed in the house, I saw a girl-child with black curls that hung to her waist, eyes a pure azure blue, as if they had absorbed the summer sky. My eyes, mother told me, were inherited from a Circassian ancestor, a slave who had become the wife of a high official.

I
LEARNED TO
swim. I owe that skill to Violet. Violet is the daughter of Mama’s distant relation, a fisherman in Cheshme on the Aegean coast. As a child, I had never been to the coast, but Violet brought it to me—the warm sand, the smell of pine, and above all the kinship with the sea that flows in the veins of all its residents. Violet grew up a dolphin. When she came to us as my companion and servant, I was fourteen and she fifteen.

Violet had been sent to us by her father because he was in need of a new fishing boat. It was not uncommon for a wealthy family to adopt a poorer relative as a servant. The girl was expected to obey and serve her new family and to behave in a manner that brought credit to them. In return, the wealthier family gave her room and board, perhaps a simple education, eventually found her a suitable husband and paid the considerable wedding expenses. Through intermediaries, Ismail Dayi had sent out word that his niece needed a companion and had sent Violet’s father the price of a new boat in return for a chance at a better life for his daughter. As was traditional for servants entering a household, Mama gave her a flower name. Violet, because she was small and shy.

Halil brought her in the cart from the boat landing in Chamyeri. A small brown figure in a rough cloak, she slid from the cart, clutching her bundle. She refused to surrender it to Halil to carry. In the first months, she kept her eyes lowered and spoke only when spoken to. Mama gave her a room at the back of the house that looked toward the road and into the forest. The green of the forest colored the air in Violet’s room, unlike our own bright bedrooms floating between the blues of water and sky. At night, I crept down the corridor and set my ear to her door, listening to the faraway sound of her weeping.

Violet’s body was slim, taut, and brown as a nut. It gleamed with the energy of the sea. She boasted of her ability to swim and I begged her to teach me. We shed our cloaks and hovered like water fairies in the silk gauze smocks I had assumed would be appropriate swimwear.

In Cheshme, Violet confided, she had entered the sea—the sea, she stressed, not a small pond—wearing, scandalously, nothing. When no one was about, she hastened to assure me.

“How can you swim in this sack?” she asked scathingly, bunching the gauze in her small brown fists.

That afternoon, Halil had walked to the coffeehouse in the village, and I knew he would be gone for hours. There were no visitors expected. I pulled off the chemise, the white silk pooling at my feet. My skin had a blue cast to it, and I was immediately covered in goose bumps. Violet was like an animal of a different species. She glowed with a mineral health. I could not then differentiate between earthy enjoyment of the common brown nut and the delicate flavor of the peeled unripe almond newly released from its green veil. At the time, I envied Violet the unconcerned windmilling of her arms and her broad-legged stance, unmindful of the cut of her sex, that place that Madam Élise had impressed upon me was to be guarded against intrusion, never to be revealed.

Violet slid into the deep end of the pond and bobbed up, looking at me expectantly. Keeping my legs together, I sat at the edge of the water, the cold, slick stone unfamiliar and thrilling to my naked flesh. I do not recall thinking long about things. That is the advantage and disadvantage of youth. In one motion, I let myself fall into this new world. I remember the thrill of swift silk drawn over my body. I fell and fell into a world of dumb cries, huge shadows, and a lethargy of limbs. I remember noticing the sunlight cutting the water like a gem. And opened my mouth. Panic. Flailing. A grip on my waist, and I was hauled up into a blinding world, the light inside my head too bright to bear. Pulled onto the stones. Beached. Exposed. Violet was heaving beside me, dripping everywhere. When I could breathe again, I squinted at her and we began to laugh.

K
amil stands in a reception room at the British Embassy while a servant carries his calling card on a silver tray to the ambassador of Her Majesty’s government to the Ottoman Empire. Someone has tried to offset the heavy, dark furniture with rich, warm fabrics and a bright carpet. Kamil steps over to a small fireplace behind an ornate ironwork grate and is disappointed to see it is not lit. He can’t shake off the chill of the old building, despite the early summer heat gathering outside the windows. His eye is drawn to a large oil painting above the mantel depicting what he assumes to be a scene from classical mythology: a pale, naked youth reaching for a nubile and equally bare young woman fleeing his embrace. Discreet billows of white cloth snake across their loins. The woman’s limbs are round and solid as pillars so that, incongruously, she appears stronger than the delicate young man pursuing her. Her small, plump lips are parted in a half smile, her nipples bright pink and erect, and a wash of red over areas of her pearly skin hints at arousal. Kamil wonders what the outcome of this chase would be.

He thinks sadly of his own limited experience: the French actress who played for a season at the Mezkur Theatre; the young Circassian slave to whom, after a time, he had given enough money for a dowry so that she could be freed and married to a young man of her station. He thinks of her now, her long, white limbs blending with those in the painting. He wonders if she ever thinks of him. Dust motes dance in the weak sunlight filtering from behind the heavy plum-colored drapes.

The door opens behind him. Kamil is startled and does not turn right away. Suddenly he has a deeper understanding of the Muslim prohibition of depictions of the body. How odd to hang such a provocative artwork in a room where guests are to be formally received. He notices that the light has changed. How long has he been left to wait in this room?

The elderly servant stands just inside the door, staring at a spot beyond Kamil’s left shoulder. Kamil wonders whether the man sees the angel sitting on the shoulder of every Muslim, one on the left, one on the right, or is looking at the naked woman on the wall behind him. Is that a smirk in the corner of the butler’s mouth? Perhaps he finds it amusing to trap Muslims in a room with a naked woman. Kamil presumes there are other, more sedately decorated reception rooms. Surely women visitors are not brought here. He struggles to hide his annoyance. He remembers other butlers from his stay in England, all the warmth and personality bred out of them. While Kamil respects and admires European knowledge and technology, there are many areas in which they have much to learn from the Ottomans.

Kamil does not acknowledge the butler, but stands unsmiling, his hands clasped behind his back.

“The ambassador will see you now, sir.” Kamil is certain there was an infinitesimal pause before the “sir.”

The butler leads the way across the white marble tiles, through the echoing, arched hall and up a magnificent curved stairway. As he follows, Kamil admires the frescoes and peers into the dark lacquered depths of the paintings that line the hall. A frowning Queen Victoria, her neck sheathed in a painful ruff, stares at a point above his head. A race of butlers, he thinks again, bloodless butlers. How have they managed to make such inroads into his lovely, vibrant society, so rich with color and emotion? He remembers the clean logic of his college texts and sighs. Perhaps this is the future, he thinks gloomily. Chaos vanquished by cleanliness, nuance lost to order.

The butler knocks on a heavy white door embossed with gold. At a sound from within, he pushes the door open and stands aside. Kamil enters. The door closes behind him with a click.

T
HE AMBASSADOR’S OFFICE
seems even colder than the reception room, despite the heat Kamil can see shimmering beyond the heavy velvet curtains. Kamil suppresses a shiver and crosses the expanse of gold and blue carpet toward an enormous desk that dwarfs the man sitting behind it. The room has an unwashed smell, as if it has not been aired in a long time. As Kamil approaches, the man stands and moves to greet him, placing one lanky leg before the other in slow motion as if to mime a stride across a larger space. The ambassador is taller than he appears when folded behind his ship of a desk. Almost painfully thin beneath his dark, tailored suit, he has a long, elegant face devoid of expression. Thick whiskers swallow his cheeks, making his face appear even narrower. Kamil remembers that the English call these “muttonchops.” The reason escapes him. As he approaches, Kamil sees that the ambassador’s cheeks and nose are dusky red, his skin a lace of broken capillaries. His small eyes are a watery blue. The ambassador blinks rapidly, then reaches out a bony hand to Kamil. Kamil, pleased at the courtesy, smiles as he shakes his hand. It is dry as paper and exerts almost no pressure. The ambassador’s smile is thin. His breath has the same damp odor as the room.

“What can I do for you, Magistrate?” He motions toward a padded leather armchair and retreats behind his desk.

“I have come on a grave matter, sir,” Kamil begins in his accented English, the careful formality of the Orient burnished by a British lilt. “This morning we discovered a woman, deceased. We think she may be one of your subjects.”

“A deceased woman, you say?” He shifts nervously in his chair.

“We need to know whether someone has been reported missing, sir. A short, blond woman, about twenty years of age.”

“Why are the Turks involved in this?” the ambassador mumbles, as if to himself. He squints quizzically at Kamil, drawing up one side of his lip, exposing a yellowed tooth. “What did she die of?”

“She was murdered, sir.”

“What?” The ambassador is surprised. “Well, that is a different matter. Awful. Awful.”

“We don’t know whether she is English or not, and we don’t know the circumstances of her death. I had hoped for your assistance in that.”

“Why do you think she’s one of our subjects?”

“We don’t know that she is. She was Christian. A cross was found around her neck. Judging from her jewelry, she was well off.”

“What was she wearing? That should give it away, shouldn’t it?”

“She was not wearing clothing.”

“By God.” The ambassador reddens. “A crime of the most heinous kind, then.”

“It may not be…such a crime. There was no evidence of a struggle. She was wearing a pendant with an inscription. I have it here.”

Kamil reaches into his jacket and withdraws a small bundle wrapped in a linen handkerchief. He unties the cloth and places it on the desk.

“The cross and gold bracelet were hers too.”

The ambassador cranes his neck and with the tips of his fingers slides the handkerchief nearer. He picks up the gold bracelet to test its weight.

“Nice piece of workmanship.” He replaces the bracelet carefully on the cloth and touches the bent enameled cross with the tip of one bony finger.

“Where is the inscription?”

“Inside the silver pendant.”

The ambassador picks up the small round ball of silver, opens it, and peers into the two halves.

“Can’t see a thing.” He returns the pendant to the handkerchief. “What does it say?

“Sultan Abdulaziz’s tughra is on one side and a design or an ideogram of some kind is on the other.”

“Interesting. Any idea what it all means?”

“No, sir. Do you recognize these?”

“What? No. What do I know about ladies’ jewelry? I’ll tell you who will know. My daughter. Not much for jewelry herself. Like her mother that way.” The ambassador stops for a moment, his face still except for the nervous fluttering of his eyelids. “Just like her mother.”

Kamil is embarrassed. One never speaks openly to a stranger of one’s family. It is almost as if the ambassador has pulled his wife into the room naked.

“She’s all that’s left to me now.” The ambassador shakes his head slowly, his hand toying absently with the pendant.

Kamil searches for the correct words of condolence, but English is so frustratingly devoid of formulaic responses. In Turkish, he would know exactly what to say. In Persian. In Arabic. What does it say about the Franks, that the language for every important event in life has to be invented anew each time?

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Ambassador.” It seems a feather-light phrase to Kamil. The Turkish formula, “Health to your head,” seems more caring and immediate, but he isn’t sure how to translate it.

The ambassador waves his fingers in Kamil’s direction, then reaches for the brocade bellpull on the wall behind his chair. A moment later, the butler steps in. Kamil wonders whether he has been listening at the door.

“Sir?” “Please ask Miss Sybil to join us.”

S
OME MINUTES LATER
, with the sound of silk rubbing against silk, a plump young woman enters and stands by the door. She is wearing a lace-edged indigo gown. A single teardrop pearl, suspended on a gold chain, rests at the base of her throat, matching the pearls at her ears. Her light brown hair is caught in a halo around her head. Her face is round, with small features, a plain face given grace by a dreaminess that animates her mouth and wide-set violet eyes. She reminds Kamil of the sturdy but perfectly proportioned
Gymnadenia
orchid common in forests around the city. Its sepals curve downward and with the petals form a shy pink hood that releases an intense perfume.

The young woman’s brightness is shaded by sadness, perhaps resignation. She moves with the comfortable efficiency of a treasured servant.

“Yes, Father. You asked for me?”

Kamil stands hurriedly and bows. Her father waves her over.

“Sybil, my dear. This is Magistrate Kamil Pasha. He says someone was found. Well, it’s rather awkward. I’ll let the magistrate explain.” His eyes drift to the papers on his desk.

Sybil turns to Kamil with a questioning look. She reaches only to his shoulder. Her curious violet eyes regard him earnestly.

“Madam.” He bows deeply. “Please sit.”

She sets herself down primly onto the chair opposite him. The ambassador has begun to read his dispatches.

“What is it that you wish to know?” Her voice is soft but lilting, like water in a stream.

Kamil feels awkward. He is not used to speaking of such things to ladies. He hesitates. What should he say to cushion the effect?

She tilts her head and says encouragingly, “Please, just tell me what the problem is. Who was found?”

“We found a woman, dead.” He looks up quickly to see the effect of this on the ambassador’s daughter. She is pale but composed. He continues, “We think she may be a foreign subject. I have been given charge of the matter because it is possible that she was murdered. At the moment we are trying to identify her.”

“What makes you think she was murdered?”

“She drowned, which, in itself, is not unusual, given the powerful undertow in the Bosphorus. But she was drugged.”

“Drugged? With what, may I ask?”

“We believe she ingested belladonna. I think you call it deadly nightshade.”

“I see. Belladonna,” she muses. “Does that not make one drowsy?”

“Not drowsy, but, in sufficient quantity, paralyzed. In such a state, a person could drown even in a puddle.”

“How awful. The poor woman. What else can you tell me about her? What was she wearing?”

“She was found without…” Kamil pauses, wondering how to continue.

“Without clothing?” The young woman’s face flushes pink.

“She was found in the Bosphorus within hours of her death. It’s possible that the currents are responsible for her state, but it’s unlikely.”

“Why would that be outside the realm of possibility? You said yourself there are powerful currents.”

Kamil considers how to put this. “European women’s clothing is not easily disarranged.”

The ambassador’s startled face rises momentarily from his papers.

Sybil’s eyes flash with amusement. Then she says softly, “How terribly sad. You say she was young?”

“Yes, in her twenties. Small, slim, blonde hair. Some jewelry was found with her.” He reaches for the handkerchief still on the ambassador’s desk. “Would you permit me?”

“Yes, I’ll look at them.” Her skin has gone the color of parchment, revealing a scattering of tiny freckles across the bridge of her nose. She leans over to take the bundle from Kamil. Her hands are plump, dimpled at the knuckles. Her fingers taper to tiny oval fingernails translucent as seashells. She places the bundle in her lap and unwraps it.

“Poor woman,” she murmurs as she strokes each item in turn. She picks up the cross, her face creasing into a frown.

“What is it?” Kamil asks eagerly.

“I’ve seen this, but I can’t remember where. At an evening function of some sort, probably at one of the embassies.” She looks up. “Can you tell me anything more about her?”

“Only that her hair was cut rather short and that she had a large mole on her right shoulder.”

“Yes, of course!” Her face crumples. “Oh, how simply awful.”

Kamil feels a thrill. She knows who it is.

The ambassador looks up at her, then over at Kamil, his face disapproving. He sighs heavily, “I say, Sybil, dear.” He remains in his chair, his fingers compulsively smoothing the paper before him.

Kamil stands and walks to her chair.

“Sybil Hanoum.” He gently takes the bundle from her hands and replaces it with another clean handkerchief drawn from his pocket. Her slim, tapered fingers twine themselves in the fine linen and she dabs her eyes. Kamil never uses handkerchiefs for their intended purpose, a disgusting Frankish practice, but has found many other uses for a handy square of clean cloth.

“I’m sorry, Kamil Pasha.”

Kamil sits again and looks at her expectantly.

“It must be Mary Dixon.”

“Who is that, my dear?” the ambassador asks.

“You remember her, don’t you, Father? Mary is governess for Sultan Abdulaziz’s granddaughter, Perihan.”

“Abdulaziz, yes. Neurotic fellow. Committed suicide. Couldn’t take it when those reformists deposed him. Pushed him right over the edge. Must be hard when you’ve been all-powerful for fifteen years, and then, suddenly, nothing. Asked his mother for a pair of scissors to trim his beard. Used them to open his veins instead.” He regards the palm of his hand, then turns it over and stares at the back. “Nothing left. Just a suite of rooms in some hand-me-down palace.”