The Tournament (18 page)

THE SMALL CROWD THAT
was gathered in the doorway of the slaughter room consisted of a cook, three slave boys and two servant girls.

With a loud boom, the door behind us suddenly slammed shut. I spun. Latif had closed it, sealing us all inside.

Latif glared at the slaves as he spoke in common Greek: ‘Not a word shall be spoken of this until the Sultan has been informed.’ He thrust his head outside the door and called for some guards. Then he stood in front of the door, blocking the way—evidently, none of us would even be allowed to leave until the Sultan had been advised about the situation, which could be some time, since he was at that moment still watching the opening match. Our escort clearly had orders of his own to follow.

My teacher sighed. He gazed up at the suspended bodies of Brunello and Marianna.

I said, ‘When we met Brunello last night, he did not strike me as melancholy or prone to taking his own life.’

‘I thought similarly,’ my teacher said. ‘Are we to assume that for some reason he poisoned a high-ranking visiting cardinal and then, in a fit of remorse, killed himself?’

‘I fear I am still trying to catch up with your reasoning about Brunello poisoning Cardinal Farnese,’ I said.

Mr Ascham leaned around and behind Brunello’s body and peered up at the dead chef’s hands. ‘That the cardinal was poisoned we can deduce from the rash in his mouth and the swelling of his tongue,’ he explained without looking at me. ‘That he was poisoned by Brunello, well, I am deducing that from the fact that the meal that poisoned Cardinal Farnese was brought to his rooms from the kitchens where it had been prepared by Brunello, the Christian chef in charge of meals for visiting dignitaries with weak stomachs.’

‘Ah . . .’

‘And yet now the murderer would appear to have hanged himself,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘The question is, why would he do such a thing?’

‘All right. Why would he?’

Mr Ascham nodded silently at the dead man’s wrists. I followed his eyeline. Red rope burns could be discerned there. I saw similar marks on Marianna’s wrists.

Mr Ascham whispered: ‘Their hands were bound when they were hanged, and then after it was done, the bonds were removed. The good chef and his wife did not kill themselves at all.’

My eyes widened. ‘But then that would mean—’

‘Let us keep our counsel to ourselves for a while, Bess. At least until the Sultan gets here. This palace, it would seem, hides many secrets and I think we have only scratched the surface.’

An hour passed. I assumed the Sultan was busy enjoying Zaman’s match and would not come to the kitchens until it was finished. The slaughter room had a rank odour—I was not sure if it stemmed from previous slaughters or the bodies or both.

My teacher and I sat on the floor facing the six kitchen hands. Like us, their only crime, as far as I could see, had been to see the dead couple.

Only Latif stood. He still guarded the door.

At one stage, Mr Ascham rose and walked in a full circle around the two hanging bodies. Oddly, though, he did not look up at them. Rather, he walked with his head bent, peering at the floor.

I went over to him. ‘Whatever are you doing?’

He crouched low. The floor in the centre of the room was covered in a ghastly layer of sawdust intermixed with dried animal blood. The foul mush felt soft under my feet, like mud. Many overlapping footprints, including our own, could be discerned in the mixture.

‘Sandals mainly,’ Mr Ascham said. ‘Leather-soled sandals of the kind worn by the kitchen hands. But in several places I see
this
footprint, made by a flat
wooden
sole with a nick in it between the big toe and the second toe, a prominent V-shaped nick. It is the wearer’s left shoe. Wooden sandals are a more expensive kind of shoe, worn by someone of moderate status.’

‘Why do you say
moderate
status?’

‘Because, dear Bess, if the wearer was a person of high status, he could afford to buy new shoes or at least mend his nicked sandal.’ My teacher turned to the others in the room. ‘Latif. May I see everyone’s shoes, please? Yours, too.’

Upon examination, he found that all six of the kitchen workers in that room wore basic leather-soled sandals, so the print had not been made by any of them. Only Latif wore sandals with solid wooden soles, but his left one bore no incriminating nick.

‘Am I above suspicion now?’ Latif asked as he lowered his foot back to the ground.

‘No,’ Mr Ascham answered flatly. ‘Nobody is above suspicion, least of all anyone who keeps me confined in a room against my will.’

‘I serve the Sultan’s interests, not yours.’

‘Believe me, I am keenly aware of that.’

Mr Ascham then stepped over to the body of Brunello’s wife, Marianna, and looked thoughtfully up at her. He reached up and touched the rosary beads looped around her neck, examining the black bow tied to them.

He turned to face the kitchen hands and spoke in Greek. ‘Do any of you speak Greek?’

One of the servant girls nodded. She said her name was Sasha and that she had lived in Macedonia before she’d been captured by an Ottoman force and brought to Constantinople.

Mr Ascham said, ‘The chef’s wife wore a black ribbon on her rosary beads, which means she was mourning someone. For whom did she mourn?’

‘Her son,’ the girl said.

‘Her son? But we met him only last night.’

‘No, you would have met Pietro, their older boy. The one who died was their younger son, Benicio. He was a quiet boy, a sweet little angel with the most beautiful snow-white hair, but he was slow, of diminished mind. He was only twelve years of age but two weeks ago, he killed himself. He was found in one of these slaughter rooms with his wrists slashed.’

‘A boy of twelve committed suicide?’ my teacher said. ‘Suicide is very rare in children so young.’

‘We were all surprised and most upset. Slow though he was, little Benicio was a lovely boy, gentle, well liked in the kitchens. He had a round smiling face and was a little fat because of all the trimmings the chefs would slip him. That the little angel even knew how to kill anything, let alone his own earthly body, came as a shock to us all.’

‘How did Brunello and his wife cope with his death?’ Mr Ascham asked.

‘Marianna was devastated. She cried for days. Brunello was also upset but he was busy preparing the many banquets for the Sultan’s tournament. He became quick to anger, shouting at us for small transgressions. He even lost his temper with Cardinal Cardoza, shouting at the cardinal when he came into the kitchens one day, but I do not know what caused that outburst.’

‘Brunello raised his voice to Cardinal Cardoza?’ my teacher said. ‘Tell me, have you or any of the others here seen Brunello meeting or conversing overmuch with any of the visiting players or dignitaries this past week?’

The slave girl relayed the question to the others in the room in Turkish. The cook answered her.

Sasha translated: ‘He says that Brunello had four separate visits from the Austrian player, Maximilian of Vienna, in the days before the opening banquet. He would arrive with a young girl, the one the Austrians later gave as a gift to His Majesty, the Sultan.’

‘Helena,’ I said.

‘Is it known what they discussed?’ Mr Ascham asked.

Sasha asked the cook. He shook his head. ‘No, he does not know what they talked about.’

Some time later, I could not tell exactly how long, the door to the slaughter room opened and in walked the Sultan, the Grand Vizier, and eight of the Sultan’s personal guards. The kitchen area behind them had been completely cleared. The six kitchen hands in the room all clambered quickly to their feet and stood to attention, gazing meekly at their toes.

The Sultan peered up at the two hanging bodies—the look on his face more one of annoyance than sadness—before turning his stern gaze at my teacher, then me, then the kitchen hands.

‘You six are the only witnesses?’ he asked the workers in Greek.

Sasha spoke for the group. ‘We are, Your Majesty. I was about to run and tell the palace guards about it when these three’—a nod at Mr Ascham, Latif and me—‘arrived and the eunuch shut us in.’

The Sultan nodded sagely.

He turned to my teacher and switched to English. ‘Mr Roger Ascham. Why do I find you here?’

‘I made certain deductions, Your Majesty, but I must admit I didn’t expect to find Brunello dead—’

‘You may be cleverer than I thought,’ the Sultan cut him off. ‘I might have to watch my own actions around you. You surmised that the chef was connected to the death of the visiting cardinal?’

‘I did.’

‘And now the murderer is dead by his own hand?’

Mr Ascham glanced at the kitchen hands nearby, clearly hesitant to speak about his investigations in front of them.

‘You may speak freely,’ the Sultan said calmly.

‘That is what we are supposed to think, Your Majesty,’ my teacher said. ‘But I do not believe it to be the truth. Rather, I believe the chef and his wife were themselves murdered. The killer is still at large.’

The Sultan’s eyebrows rose. My teacher said nothing more while the Sultan appraised him. The great king eyed him very, very closely.

‘A second and a third murder in my palace,’ he said. ‘This I do not like. Have you any suspicions about these new deaths, Mr Roger Ascham?’

My teacher said, ‘There is a devious mind at work within these walls, Your Majesty. If each of these murders had been accepted at face value, we would have attributed the death of the cardinal to the insane fiend and these two to suicide. But no,
all three
killings have been deliberately designed to throw off further investigation. They are connected. Not only are my inquiries thus still unfinished, it is my advice to you to allow me to include the deaths of the chef and his wife in the existing investigation into the killing of Cardinal Farnese.’

The Sultan thought about this for a moment. ‘Fine. Do so and continue your investigation.’

The Sultan stepped aside, allowing us to leave. He indicated the six kitchen hands still in the slaughter room. ‘Have you spoken to these six?’

‘I have,’ Mr Ascham said.

‘Have you any further need of them?’

‘No. They are innocent. They just saw the bodies. They know nothing of value.’

The Sultan escorted us out of the slaughter room, turning to his chief guardsman as he did so and saying a few sharp words in Turkish.

I slowed my stride and turned to look back but Mr Ascham gently pressed my shoulder, keeping me moving.

He was right to do so, for as we walked away from that slaughter room and its door swung shut behind us, the last thing I saw—to my utter horror and disbelief—was the chief guardsman and the other guards drawing their swords.

WE EMERGED FROM THE
kitchen area to find that it was now mid-afternoon. The Sultan and his entourage left us without another word. They headed off toward the Harem.

I was in a state of some considerable dismay over the fates of Sasha and the other kitchen staff. ‘Mr Ascham, why did the Sultan order that those poor people be killed?’

‘We are in a strange and unholy land, Bess,’ Mr Ascham replied. ‘We should count ourselves lucky we didn’t suffer a similar fate. I imagine it was only your royal blood and my deductive abilities that allowed us to escape that room alive.’

We were standing in the Second Courtyard. Delegations and players were now milling around under its trees. Zaman’s match was over—he had beaten Maximilian of Vienna four games to nil, a thrashing—and now the privileged crowd was taking in some air before the second match of the day began, that of Vladimir of Muscovy and Mustafa of Cairo.

‘But why kill them?’ I said, still appalled. ‘They did nothing but see the dead couple.’

‘The most dangerous thing in any palace is a rumour,’ my teacher said. ‘They would have told others who would have told others still. Word is already spreading about the death of Cardinal Farnese. Whispers of more deaths cannot be tolerated. It would reflect poorly on the Sultan: he would be seen to have lost control of his own palace. Your father has executed dukes for no less a reason and should you ever become queen, you, too, will execute people for the dangerous things they say.’