The Speckled Monster (14 page)

As her departure neared, Lady Mary's women friends broke into tears whenever they saw her, but she made light of both their nerves and her own. To Pope, she wrote,
I think I ought to bid Adieu to my friends with the same solemnity as if I was going to mount a breach, at least if I am to believe the information of the people here, who denounce all sort of terrors to me. I am threatened at the same time with being frozen to death, buried in the snow, and taken by the Tatars. How my adventures will conclude I leave entirely to Providence; if comically, you shall hear of them
.

To Frances, she claimed that her only fears were for her son. They were not, however, dire enough to make her alter her course. Also, she was having trouble taking Prince Eugene's warnings seriously. She saw the great man often, she said, but it was as if she had met Hercules serving as a slave in women's clothing at the court of Queen Omphale. She refused, however, to elaborate on this tantalizing bit of innuendo.

Adieu, dear sister. . . . If I survive my journey you shall hear from me again
.

 

On January 16, 1717, they slid out of Vienna. Snow lay thick over the land, but the ambassadorial party wrapped themselves in furs and set their coaches on runners to become sleighs, racing southeast across “the finest plains in the world, as even as if they were paved.” Far from being terrified or even tremulous, Lady Mary was exhilarated.

At night, they lodged with governors and army officers. They were given honor guards, and bishops and nobles feasted them with wine, winter fruit, and venison. Five days later, they reached Buda, the old royal Hungarian city that has since combined with the mercantile town of Pest on the opposite bank of the Danube to form Budapest. The city and its castle lay in ruins; outside the walls a Serbian shantytown huddled in narrow rows, the odd, half-dug-out houses looking like thatched tents. With no reason to linger, they departed that same day.

Heading almost due south, they skirted the western edge of the Hungarian Plain, keeping close to the Danube. The hiss and slice of the runners, the jingle of harness and crack of whip, the snort and heave of the horses, sounded thin and brittle in a world otherwise wrapped in white silence. During the day, they glimpsed the ruins of Turkish towns in the distance, marked only by falling minarets. Nearer their path, farms and fields lay destroyed and deserted. Immense flocks of birds rose up around them, and wolves howled in the shadows of the forests that pressed down the mountains toward the river. In the few villages they passed, the sheepskin-clad villagers always gave the travelers space to warm up by their stoves and dished up abundant food, garnered mostly by hunting: wild boar, venison, and pheasant. They had been ordered to provide the ambassador's party with whatever they needed gratis, but Wortley paid them full worth—which made their hosts press ever more food on the travelers, as parting gifts. At night, the winter stars glittered overhead like shards of ice.

On January 26, they crossed the frozen river. At the hilltop fortress of Peterwaradin, they waited two days to finalize the details of their transfer from the Austrian to the Ottoman Empire and then set off with an escort of two hundred heavily armed Imperial troops. The Turks were to meet them with exactly equal numbers, exactly halfway through the no-man's-land between Austrian Peterwaradin and Turkish Belgrade.

A little ways outside town, they came upon the site of the Austrian victory that had been celebrated with such relentless joy in Vienna. Thirty thousand Turks had died in a matter of hours, and had been left to the wolves and the crows. In deep winter, the cold thinned the odor into nothingness, but the diamond shimmer of the ice only heightened the horror that enveloped the ambassador's party. For what seemed like hours, they drove in silence across a field strewn with skulls and the mangled and shredded bodies of men, horses, and camels, all frozen into a grisly, glistening tableau.

At the village appointed, their Turkish escort turned up with one hundred too many unsmiling soldiers. Hatred was far keener than the cold; no one wished to linger. Circled by turbans and scimitars, the British ambassador, his lady and son, and their retinue were soon speeding south and east, while the relieved Austrians retreated north.

Wading through thick snow, the British party's horses dragged them uphill into heavily fortified Belgrade on February 5. They expected to stay only one night, but the pasha, or military governor, sent a polite but firm invitation for them to remain until he heard from the grand vizier in Adrianople. Regretfully, that might take as long as a month. Surrounded by several hundred heavily armed soldiers, they were in no position to refuse his request. They were lodged with a qadi, or religious judge, named Achmet Bey, in one of the most splendid houses in the town.

They were awarded a whole chamber of Janissaries—the crack troops of the Ottoman army—to guard them, but whether they were being guarded from enemies or as enemies remained disconcertingly vague. The Janissaries, Achmet Bey confirmed, were slave soldiers just as Lady Mary had heard. But in their case, he said, the word
slave
was misleading: they were indeed slaves of the sultan, but the Janissaries were among the most powerful men in the empire. The wiliest and most ruthless rose to become pashas (a title for generals and governors) or even the sultan's chief executive officer, the grand vizier himself.

“They owe loyalty to nothing and no one but the sultan,” said Achmet Bey, “and sometimes, they force that formula in the other direction.” Seized as young boys from among the empire's non-Muslim population—mostly Balkan Christians, he said—they were marched to Constantinople, where they were circumcised, converted, and mercilessly trained. Lady Mary tried to pity them, but whenever she glimpsed them through the door, their scorn dried her pity to dust.

Their host spent much of the day in his library, but he supped with the ambassador and his lady every evening. Unaccustomed to the free ways of Western women, he delighted to spend hours sitting cross-legged on cushions with Lady Mary, discussing poetry, religion, and philosophy. She began by telling him—in Italian, the language they shared—a Persian tale she had read in French; he paid her the compliment of assuming she was cultured enough to have learned it directly from the source, and went on to stir her with the bright delicacy and searing sensuality of Arabic and Ottoman love poetry. At her request, he taught her the rudiments of Arabic grammar and scansion; at his, one of the ambassador's secretaries taught him the Roman alphabet. Lady Mary sparred with him in lively debates about their differences in religion and day-today life, especially the confinement of women in harems and veils. “There is but one advantage in it,” he teased her. “When our wives cheat us, nobody knows it.”

He both entertained and educated her with inexhaustible grace, but still, she yearned to be back on the road and moving. To Pope, she chalked it up to the weather: colder than it had ever been anywhere but Greenland, she groused. Despite the hardworking stove, the windows kept freezing up on the inside. Faintly audible between the lines of her letter was a hum of nerves pulled taut, and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the whisperings of inadmissible fear.

 

At last, three weeks later, official summons to Adrianople arrived. Assured that the route was plague free, they headed for the town of Nissa (modern Nis, in Yugoslavia). Their guard of Janissaries swelled to five hundred: against the thieving Serbs, they were told. For seven days, they traveled at breakneck speed through narrow mountain valleys, with dark fir forests pressing down on all sides. The horses foundered and died in their traces, or stumbled lame; in compensation, their peasant owners were beaten for slowing the company down. Lady Mary wanted to empty her pockets in payment, but Wortley stopped her: the aga, or general, of their Janissaries would only take the money as soon as it left her hands. When they came to villages, the Janissaries seized whatever they fancied, no matter how ill the peasants could spare it or how little sense it made in terms of husbandry. “Lambs just fallen, geese and turkeys big with egg: all massacred without distinction,” she mourned. Watching this grinning cruelty, but helpless to stop it, Lady Mary wept tears of rage every day.

At one village, their second cook fell ill; the Janissaries would have left him to freeze alone on the road, but their surgeon, Mr. Maitland, insisted upon staying behind with him. They would catch up, he assured Lady Mary in his Scottish burr, as soon as the man recovered. As long as the ambassador did not threaten to slip from their grasp, the Janissaries were indifferent. Lady Mary pressed the surgeon's hand in gratitude, and the Wortleys sped on. After a brief stop in Nis, they pushed up and over yet another range of peaks and rumbled down to the city of Sofia (now the capital of Bulgaria) on the banks of the River Iskar, in the midst of another large and beautiful plain. There, she had the luxury of one free day.

As if she might wash all the anger, horror, and fear away, at ten o'clock in the morning she summoned a Turkish-style coach and headed, informally and incognito, for the hot baths for which Sofia was famous.

 

The
hamam
or bathhouse was a pale cluster of domes like opaque bubbles that had settled into the ground. In the outer dome, Lady Mary slipped off her shoes and tipped the portress a crown. An interpretress and two maids in tow, she ducked inside.

Small round skylights pierced the high marble curve of the ceiling, so that the air itself, moist and faintly redolent of sulfur, gleamed faintly with the sheen of pearl. A sinuous Turkish melody wound languidly through the vault overhead. In the center of the tiled room, four scented fountains of cool water plashed and sang, arcing into basins that spilled smoothly into streams running into inner rooms. Around the edges of the room ran two sofas: not Western couches, but built-in ledges of marble, one set above the other like a wide stair, the lower spread with crimson carpets and cushions. Reclining on these, braiding each other's ebony and honey-gold hair with pearl and ribbon, drinking the bittersweet earth of thick Turkish coffee and the sweetened fruit juice called sherbet, lounged two hundred women.

For a moment, all movement ceased. Long before, Lady Mary had startled the Kit-Cat Club into silence for being dressed up like a lady. Now, it was simply for being dressed: save Lady Mary and the servants stepping in behind her, every woman in the room was naked.

The Turkish ladies recovered first. Unfolding themselves from the attentions of their slaves, they approached her cooing with delight:
Uzelle, pek uzelle,
they murmured over and over: “Charming, very charming.”

They drew her farther into the room and tried to help her out of her clothes, but thankfully, they had a little trouble with the flaring jacket and fitted waistcoat of her riding habit. At last, though, she let a black-haired young beauty who was also the highest-ranking lady among them slide the jacket from her shoulders and reach in with slender fingers to unbutton her waistcoat.

At the sight of her tightly laced stays beneath, all the Turkish ladies blanched and stepped back aghast, but curiosity and civility soon drew the black-haired lady back again. “Englishmen,” she informed her companions after inspecting the boned corset, “lock up their wives in little boxes shaped like their bodies.” Inch by inch, the others crept near. European women, they all assured Lady Mary through her interpretress, were to be pitied for being such slaves as to be kept prisoner in their own clothing; no man of the East would dream of such barbarity.

Lady Mary shed no more than her jacket and waistcoat; unwilling to endure the sight of more savagery, her hostesses pressed her no further. All around her, though, women sat, knelt, and walked with a majestic grace that made her think of Milton's Eve, clad in nothing but proud honor. They were beautiful in face and slender of body, and their long, lustrous falls of hair were unlike anything she had seen among the rarely washed, oft powdered and pomaded heads of Europe. But what entranced her more than anything else was the shining expanse of smooth skin, all of it un-marred, as she was all too aware that hers was, by the red pits and twists of smallpox scars.

 

She left earlier than she would have liked: she had only one day to play tourist and thought a visit to the ruins of Justinian's church should not be passed up. The ruins were a disappointment; she longed to return to the baths, but Mr. Wortley and the Janissaries were relentless. Their cavalcade left the next morning, toiling up and over the last mountain range that blocked their way to Constantinople.

Every step toward Turkey swathed her more luxuriously in a warm Mediterranean world scented with lemon, wild thyme, and cedar. Vines grew wild over the hillsides, and the very air was spiked with paprika and mint, softened with olive oil, and sweetened with honey. Cypress speared the sky and music twined like serpents swimming through the trees. Lithe, long-haired boys danced, sunlight rained gold upon an infinite carpet of flowers, and everywhere shone the color blue. From the dome of the sky, to smooth jewel-stones set in gold, to the tiles poured across walls, the Ottomans washed their world in the intense brilliant blue still known simply as “Turkish,” in its old French form: turquoise.

On March 24, they at last reached Adrianople (modern Edirne), the jewel of western Turkey and Sultan Achmet III's favorite home away from the splendors of Topkapi Palace in Constantinople, as well as the staging ground for invasions of Austria. As the sultan found it pleasing to be in Adrianople that spring, so did all his ambassadors. The Wortleys were housed in one of the grand signior's palaces on the banks of the Maritza River. As Wortley impatiently awaited his audience with the sultan, Lady Mary sat day after day in a marble kiosk in the garden, listening to the dance of the river and sipping sherbet or coffee as nightingales sang in the cedars. Poetry was everywhere: fine ladies at their looms made her think of the
Iliad;
Greek children playing upon Pan pipes and adorning lambs with flower garlands brought to mind the pastoral worlds of romance.