The Sultan's Daughter (16 page)

Somewhat less reassuring was the conversation I had with the bearers. We exchanged small talk as they prepared for the trek back to the imperial palace. I had seen to it that they were offered refreshment and narghiles to warm themselves in the lower rooms while they waited out the Quince’s return and I hated to see them torn from such comforts in any rush.

So I said something innocuous like: “It was certainly nice of the Quince to come so soon upon her return from Magnesia. She can hardly be rested from her journey.”

The head bearer was a Greek, with brows that met in the middle of a heavy forehead over a hooked nose. He gave this reply: “Not at all. The midwife’s been in town these two, three weeks. She did seem to want to keep her presence a secret, but nonetheless she delivered a set of twins in that time—
mashallah
—and two or three others. All wonderfully healthy babes, thanks be to Allah. Cured a few rheumatisms and fevers as well. Now if she could only cure me of the life of a bearer...”The fellow shifted his shoulder muscles in his own form of cure.

I didn’t know what to make of this information, so I followed the drift of our pleasantries from there in their usual fashion. At length the men sloshed off in ankle-deep mud and were soon lost from my view in the fog.

But I stood staring at the spot where they’d disappeared for some time after. It seemed odd to me. First, that the Quince should be back in Constantinople so soon before Safiye’s time. By St. Mark—or whomever one prayed to in such events (I was beginning to forget things like that)—this didn’t bode well for the empire’s heir.

Even more disconcerting was the notion that the midwife should have been avoiding us once she did return. Although it was clearly her place to be with the princess throughout the confinement, the Quince had given priority to other cases instead. She had purposely stayed away from my lady until—well, until some informant, confused in her facts, had said the baby was already safely delivered. The Quince didn’t want to deliver this baby. Was she afraid she might fail us again?

By the time I returned to the brazier-snug room, the first part of the mystery, at any rate—how it was that the Quince had returned to Constantinople when Safiye’s child wasn’t due until late spring—was in the process of being unraveled.

“Safiye? How is she?” My lady felt her guest was so far out of danger now that she could begin the inquiry. “Pray Allah she is well. And the child—the child was not untimely born, Allah forbid—that you left her so soon?”

“Safiye is well.”

“Thank heaven. And the child?”

“Just as well as could be when I left them. No thanks to its mother, I must say.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

I tendered the kerchief towards its owner, who snatched it from my hand. Her fingers shook with something akin to greed—this was weakness, indeed—as she unknotted the bundle. She would not answer the question until she had popped one of the golden balls of sugar revealed by the kerchief’s petals into her mouth to chase the pilaf.

“I mean,” the Quince said over her sippet, “I hadn’t been in Magnesia through a single hour of prayer before Safiye was asking me to get rid of it for her.”

My lady looked almost as ill as her guest had not long before, which was a greater drop from her accustomed blooming health than from the Quince’s sallow. “You don’t mean...?”

“I do mean.” The midwife made a face around her chewing as if at some bitter medicine, then continued. “‘I won’t carry it,’ that Fair One says. ‘He hasn’t married me; I am not a legal queen. I won’t have a prince unless I am a queen.’“

“Madam, you refused.”

“Of course I refused,” the Quince snapped.

“I didn’t mean to suggest, madam, that you could be capable of such a crime.”

The Quince gave her hostess and her patient an even, unflinching look, then popped another comfit in her mouth. She seemed to wait until the candy masked her words before she spoke them.

“I’ve emptied many a womb before,” the midwife said. “Don’t think I haven’t. And don’t look so scandalized, majesty. I think it no sin at all for a poor woman who already has too many mouths to feed; for a woman whom another pregnancy might well kill. When a rich man calls me to clean out his slave girl so he doesn’t have to free her or her child, well, I usually refuse then. And in this case—as Allah is my witness—I wouldn’t do it. The heir to the throne? Safiye’s own child? I wouldn’t do it.”

The Quince looked at my lady across the table under which their knees must nearly touch. The look was almost a dare. “I do have my limits, princess.”

“Of course you do, madam.” Esmikhan retreated from what had been an attitude of subservience in the first place.

“‘Why else do you think I tolerate you here?’ the Fair One tells me. Me, her Quince! And ‘Then I will get someone else to do it.’ And she did. Tried a few old wives’ concoctions. They didn’t work. Made her good and sick to her stomach for a while, but never a spot of blood nor a single cramp. Amateurs they are out there in the provinces.”

“So she will keep the child?”

“The Fair One has no choice. For the first time in her life, perhaps, Safiye Baffo has no choice.”

“It is Allah’s will.”

“Yes, and she hates it.” The midwife gave a thin smile, sour in spite of all the sweets she’d eaten. “She was much too far along, anyway, when I got there for even my methods to work in perfect safety. Why, she’d already got herself the hardest little round belly.” The Quince popped another comfit, having studied it as if it were a swollen belly, too.

“My brother, then, can’t be ignorant.”

“Oh, he is fully aware of her condition, yes.”

“But what would she have said to him if she’d lost it?”

“‘I miscarried. These things happen.’“ She captured Safiye’s very shrug in that quote.

“And does Murad threaten to leave her, as she always feared he would, now that her shape is vanishing?”

“Of course not. I’ve never seen a man more thrilled about his heir than your brother the prince. On his knees in thanks to heaven twenty times a day, pouring money into that mosque of his, showering his love with gifts, scratching out stacks of poems as the spirit moves him.”

“So when you wouldn’t do as she asked, Safiye dismissed you?

“There was that, yes.”

“And something else?”

“As long as your child, majesty, was yet unborn, she wanted me here with you. I was ordered—yes, ordered to attend you. ‘There’ll be plenty of time, afterwards,’ Safiye said. ‘Months and months. You can deliver...deliver the princess and then return and see to me. And should you not make it back? Well, there are good women here. I’ll be fine.’

“Good women?” The Quince grunted with scorn. “Women who don’t have the first idea about getting rid of a child. So how can they hope to save one?”

Esmikhan murmured something kind and full of confidence in the midwife’s skill. “And I am also most grateful that you would make this long journey—at this time of year—to attend me.”

The midwife grunted again—she often did—as if to say, “Yes, thank me when you’ve reason to.” Then she leaned back into her supporting cushions, suddenly overcome with exhaustion. She closed her eyes like one in the throes of some dream.

Esmikhan had no desire to disturb her guest. As she always did when in doubt, my lady reached for something to eat instead. Having had her fill of everything else on the table, she thought to help herself to one of the two or three comfits left on the Quince’s kerchief. They were of a variety not usually fabricated in our kitchen.

The morsel was just before her lips when the Quince suddenly bolted upright and knocked the candy violently from her hand. “My lady, you mustn’t,” the midwife exclaimed, as close as she’d come to an apology. “These candies—though wholesome for...for some of us—are very bad for a woman with child.”

“I see,” whispered my lady, the fear of how close she’d come to harming her child strangling any other response.

As if my lady had accused her of having something to hide, the Quince lighted on what must have seemed the most harmless of creatures—me—when she assured further: “
Khuddam
like them. I mix up these goodies for khuddam all the time.”

And the dialogue moved to other things.

Not too much later, the Quince’s belongings arrived.

“Oh, they’ve forgotten my best garments—and most of the drugs,” the Quince sighed out her exasperation. “I shall have to make another trip myself.”

“But another day,” my lady said. “Surely you’ve done enough for today and can rest until tomorrow. Anything that’s mine belongs to the guest of Allah as well.”

“Yes, it can wait,” the midwife agreed.

So, in the meantime, the women got up to see what could be done about getting her settled before the noon call to prayer was heard. This left the menials and me to clear away the remains of the meal. The girls took off the trays of pilaf, as they’d done any number of times before, to go and eat the leftovers themselves in the kitchen. The Quince’s kerchief, the only unfamiliar thing on the table, remained for me.

For all intents and purposes, the midwife had finished off the whole lot herself. Still, there were some fair-sized crumbs left among the gold and green threads. Out of idle curiosity—and being hungry myself, since the midwife’s arrival had disrupted our usual schedule—I licked a finger and brought it to my mouth covered with crumbs. Well, the woman had said—hadn’t she?—that this concoction was good for a eunuch’s ills.

I dropped my hand at once—and the kerchief as well.

“Good God!” I couldn’t help exclaiming aloud—and in my most basic tongue.

Under all the coating of sugar and mastic, a familiar buzzing sweetness filled my mouth. My gorge rose to meet it. In my memory, the taste was too closely tied to an ineffective attempt to strip me of my senses as the cutters stripped me of everything else in the dim little house in Pera.

These candies contained opium in an edible, concentrated, candy form instead of the more popular and milder smoke.

The midwife must have just ingested enough to fill a thousand and one nights with heady dreams.

When that third infant son was born, taken to Paradise and buried all on a single cheerless winter’s day, I truly feared for my lady’s sanity. The Quince departed for Magnesia after nursing Esmikhan through but three weeks of indifferent recovery. I cannot say I was sorry to see her go, having caught her with her golden comfit balls on at least two other occasions and having noted a decided distraction in her attentions as well. But I wasn’t certain I could bring my lady out of the serious slump into which I saw her sliding. I would have liked some sort of second, just so as not to feel so helpless and alone.

The moment the midwife and her veils were out of the door, however, things improved immediately. I would have suspected some sort of slow, wasting poison went out the door with her—if I hadn’t taken to tasting my lady’s food myself as a precaution. And if Esmikhan didn’t instantly explain the reason for her rally herself.

“Why, I must go as well,” she said, clapping her hands with the thrill of it.

“Beg pardon, lady?” I could hardly condemn what I thought she meant when she grew so suddenly cheerful. I hadn’t seen her eyes so brightly polished with excitement—no, not since those first few days I knew her, before her marriage, I decided.

“I must go to Magnesia as well.”

“My lady? In your condition?” Although at the moment her condition seemed much improved, not harmed, by the prospect, this might be the frenzy of delirium. The journey she suggested was certainly madness enough to jump to that conclusion.

Before I could protest further, Esmikhan made her purpose clear by saying, “And what is my condition but that of a childless woman? Didn’t you tell me my husband is in Magnesia?”

“Yes. Yes, I believe that’s true.” I’d told her when the dispatches came, but then she’d seemed to spare not the slightest care for Sokolli Pasha. Because she didn’t remember, I didn’t bother either.

“I had no reason to remember,” she said now, reading my thoughts, “before the baby—-Allah preserve him. My need was to stay here then, to give him the best health I could.” She swiped impatiently at a tear or two in her sense of repeated fail- lire—and at what she had tried so single-mindedly to do. “But now...now I remember that you told me this.”

“Yes, Magnesia is indeed where the master is. He, along with my lord your brother, is charged with mustering the troops and reserve units from that western portion of the Empire at Bozdag. Later, he is to march them northward and meet up with the rest of the army under your grandfather’s direct command. Together they will undertake this summer’s campaign against Hungary and Austria.”

“You see? I must go to him at once.”

“My lady, is it advised? When the master will be so occupied and you...?”

“And on his march north, won’t he be even more occupied? How many days do you suppose he may spend in Constantinople?”

“Two, perhaps three. You know how it goes.”

“I know. And you are trying to placate me, Abdullah. I’m no fool. I’ve been the wife of Sokolli Pasha too long. He’ll be here one day at the most. If he doesn’t send word that he must not leave his men for ‘his own personal pleasure’ while they are already sworn to battle. And what if I should be suffering my time of uncleanliness on that one night he may deign to give me? Abdullah, in that case I may not go near him. Don’t you see? That means I will not see him—even if Allah favors me—for nine whole months or more. I could not bear all that time without hope of a child.”

She caught my hands in the desperation I had expected all along, considering the tragedy she’d just been through. “If I can have—oh, just a week with him in Magnesia, I shall know I have done my best—and the rest is Allah’s will, whether I conceive or not.”

“Lady, he will be much occupied with the affairs of the army in Bozdag.”

“Of course. But he will not refuse me. He cannot, when I have gone all that way, just to be with him. When you tell him...”

“It is a long journey. You may not feel well enough to see him at the end.”

“The journey’s by sea, as Safiye always likes to gloat. Not nearly so strenuous as by land.” Esmikhan withdrew her hands now, sulking—which she knew had its effect on me—rounding her face, pouting her lips. Had she been clamoring for my bed, there would have been no more discussion. “Besides, any discomfort is worth the hope of getting a child that might,
inshallah
, live.”