The Venetian Contract (4 page)

She was met at the door by the Kelebek, Nur Banu’s
Gedik
, her lady-in-waiting. ‘Blessings be upon the Sultan, Feyra.’

Kelebek, a plain woman among all this beauty, was clearly agitated, but still observed protocol. Feyra was too flustered to reply formally. She was not, yet, truly worried about Nur Banu’s condition – the Valide Sultan suffered occasionally with a malady of the stomach which gave her much bloating and pain, but an emetic of Feyra’s own making usually settled matters within the hour. Feyra was more concerned that her tardiness had bought her trouble. She saw a silver dish on the nightstand, piled high with iced fruit, and her own stomach grumbled, reminding her that she had not eaten. The grapes, tumbling down from the dish, tempted her with their green globes. She reached out to pluck one, but another moan sounded from the bed and she pulled her hand back. ‘Has she been asking for me?’

‘No. She asks for Cecilia Baffo.’

‘Who is Cecilia Baffo?’

‘We don’t know. None of us know.’ Kelebek swept her hand to indicate the Odalisques, the concubines-in-training for the Sultan’s bed. Five young women, all beautiful, all dressed in white shifts, all of them biting their lips or looking at the floor. Unschooled and unlettered as they were, they knew there was something wrong.

Feeling a sickly foreboding Feyra climbed the steps of the dais and drew back the fine embroidered muslin curtains of the Valide Sultan’s bed.

The Sultan’s mother lay twisted on the bed, her eyes half closed, her skin an unnatural hue, somewhere between the colour of bone and bile. Her veins stood out knotted on her throat, black and blue as if a mandrake was grown about her neck. Her cheeks, normally plump and pink, were drawn in dark hollows, and her eyes seemed painted beneath with violet shadows. The blonde hair was damp and lank, dark with sweat and plastered to her forehead. Nur Banu was a woman of perhaps fifty, and pleasantly fleshy, her skin usually pale as a foreigner’s, but now her skin beneath her jewelled shift looked pouchy, livid and mottled, and instead of being pleasantly rounded the flesh was sunken and loose, as if a bladder had been popped and deflated. The cries had ceased and Nur Banu was, it seemed, asleep.

Feyra took the Valide Sultan’s wrist where the blood passed and her mistress, at the pressure, moved, moaned and spoke, calling out, in the accents of another tongue, ‘Cecilia Baffo. Cecilia Baffo.’

Nur Banu’s voice, usually low and musical, was now the rasp of a crow. Her eyes flew open, shot with blood and milky. But she seemed to recognize Feyra. She said the girl’s
name, clasped her close, and spoke in a language that only Feyra knew – Nur Banu’s own language, a language that lilted and bounced as if it had hoofbeats, a language where every word seemed to end in in an
a
or an
o
. The Valide Sultan had taught this language – Phoenician, she called it – to Feyra since she was a little girl visiting the palace with her father. It had become a language of secrets between them, used for the Valide Sultan’s most private business, and she used it now. ‘You must tell him. Tell him, Feyra, you and only you.’

Feyra thought she understood. She turned to Kelebek, now afraid. ‘We must tell the doctor and get word to the Sultan.’

‘No!’ The Valide Sultan sat up, suddenly wide awake and fearful. ‘Cecilia Baffo. Cecilia Baffo. Four Horsemen; riding, riding.
Come and see
.’ Nur Banu’s breath was foul, and a thread of bile-coloured spittle dropped from her chin. Feyra soothed her, shushing her and stroking her cheek like a child until her mistress seemed to sleep fitfully once more.

Feyra retreated through the curtain and closed it behind her, beckoning Kelebek to her. ‘Cecilia Baffo,’ Feyra murmured. ‘Who is she? And who are the Four Horsemen?’

Kelebek shrugged. ‘My lady was brought here many years ago, by corsairs who captured her. Could there have been four of them?’

‘Perhaps. But what of the name? Who is Cecilia Baffo?’

‘I don’t know!’ Kelebek’s voice was shrill with anxiety.

Feyra thought. ‘Describe to me my lady’s day, precisely, from sun-up.’

Kelebek knitted her fingers together. ‘She woke and directed that we dress her in her jewelled bedgown, for she was to have company.’

Feyra narrowed her eyes. It was not against protocol for the Valide Sultan, a widow after all, to take a lover, but Feyra had not known her mistress lie with a man since the death of her husband Selim Sultan, two years ago. ‘Who? A man?’

‘No. She said she was to break her fast with the Dogaressa of Genoa, before the Genoese ship sailed on the morning tide.’

‘Has the ship now sailed?’

‘Moments ago.’

‘Cecilia Baffo.’ Feyra mused aloud. ‘It is a foreign-sounding name. Could be Genoese. What is the Genoese Dogaressa called? Can someone find out?’

‘How, Feyra?’ Capable enough in the ordinary way, Kelebek reverted, in crisis, to her village girl origins.

Feyra was suddenly impatient with her peasant ways. ‘
Ask
someone,’ she snapped. ‘The Kizlar Agha.’

Kelebek’s eyes widened in fear – the Kizlar Agha, master of the girls and chief of the Black Eunuchs, was the Sultan’s deputy in the Harem who administered justice in these walls. This current Agha, Beyazid, was a fearsome basilisk of a man; seven feet tall with ebony skin. If a girl displeased the Sultan, if perhaps she found the Sultan’s tastes too adventurous, she was sewn into a sack and Beyazid personally threw her from the ramparts of the Tower of Justice into the Bosphorus. The girls were forced to gather and watch as the sack darkened with water and sank below the surface, to listen to the screams of the victim, to witness the consequences of disobedience. At the sound of the Kizlar Agha’s name, Kelebek took a pace backward. ‘I cannot ask him, Feyra.’

Feyra sighed testily. She feared the Agha as much as
Kelebek did, but she feared what might be happening to her mistress more. She left the room and crossed the Courtyard of the Concubines. The sun was fully up, and as she turned right into the Courtyard of the Black Eunuchs the shadows under the marble columns were deep and dark, and the sun’s rays refracted through the wrought iron lamps hanging above, splitting them into diamonds, dazzling her. When she knocked and entered the Kizlar Agha’s chamber, she briefly could not see at all.

Slowly Feyra’s eyes began to adjust. She was in a long room with two streams of water running in marble channels set into the floor. The little light that silvered the streams came from stars cut into the stone ceiling, so that shafts of bleached sun fell in geometric shapes on the floor like paper cutouts. Feyra stepped between the shafts, as if it were a trial by light. She could almost have been alone in the room; Beyazid’s skin was polished ebony, black as the chair he sat in, but he smoked a hookah pipe that issued baby clouds as he spoke. The smoke gathered about his head and was illuminated in the star shafts.

‘Feyra, Timurhan’s daughter? What do you want of me?

Beyazid, it seemed, had no trouble seeing her. ‘O Kizlar Agha, what is the name of the Genoese Dogaressa who broke her fast with my lady Nur Banu Sultan?’

Now Feyra could make out his form, massive even in repose, his arm muscles bulging and shortening beneath their gold bands as he carried the hookah to his mouth, the false starlight silvering his bald head. ‘Her name is Prospera Centurione Fattinanti.’ His tones, for a man of such bulk, were high and clear like a boy’s; for he had been unmanned before adulthood. The strange contradiction of voice and
physique did not make him any less threatening. He breathed out another cloud. ‘Is that all?’

‘Yes, Kizlar Agha.’ Feyra turned, then turned back with a courage she did not know she had. ‘That is, no. Who is Cecilia Baffo?’

She saw two crescents of white as his eyes opened a fraction in what seemed an involuntary impulse of recognition. For a moment, she was afraid. But the eyes closed again. ‘I know not. Now leave me. Blessings be upon the Sultan.’

‘For he is the light of my eyes and the delight of my heart.’

Feyra left the darkness and walked back through the bright courtyard, reluctant to return to what she would find. But in the Valide Sultan’s chamber it was as if the sun had risen there too. Kelebek was smiling, the Odalisques were twittering like so many white doves, and the mood had noticeably lightened. ‘
Come and see
,’ invited Kelebek.

Feyra pulled the muslin curtains of the bed aside once again. Nur Banu sat up against her pillows, the knotted venous cords gone from her throat, her eyes bright, her cheeks ruddy. Her eyes were shadowed with no more than the liner that she always wore, painted on daily with a brush no bigger than a gilder’s tip. She greeted Feyra, and Feyra was suffused with relief. She sat on the bed beside the Valide Sultan with a familiarity afforded to only her, and took Nur Banu’s wrist once again. This time the pulse beat strong and regular, and Feyra moved her fingers up to clasp her mistress’s hand. Nur Banu smiled at her. ‘Feyra? What’s amiss?’

‘Mistress, how are you?’

Nur Banu laughed, a genuine spurt of mirth. Usually Feyra loved the sound, but today it sounded wrong, like a discord on a zither. ‘Me? I have never been better. Bring my
writing materials, Feyra. Then call for my breakfast and tell the Eunuchs to ready my barge – shall we sail to Pera today? The day is fair. Can you spare time from your doctoring?’

Feyra bowed in acquiescence but was troubled. The change in Nur Banu was so complete that Feyra began to believe that she had imagined that brief, dreadful illness. But Kelebek had been here too, and the Odalisques. She hesitated. ‘Mistress, when I came here, not one hour ago, you were insensible, your looks were dire, you were sleeping and waking fitfully and crying out.’

Nur Banu’s plump, kind face looked at her quizzically. ‘Feyra, what are you talking about?’

‘You do not recall?’

Feyra’s dread returned as she examined her mistress closely. The bright eyes, sparkling like brilliants. The bloom of too-livid colour on the cheeks. The blonde hair now curling damply around the face like a halo. The complete absence of memory of the episode that had gone before.

Feyra turned and looked about her. She walked down the dais again and her eyes lighted on the iced fruit sitting innocently on the marquetry table. She drew the
Gedik
to her. ‘Kelebek,’ she hissed sharply in the girl’s ear. ‘Did my lady take any food or drink this morning?’

‘Not yet. But it is still early … She has eaten nothing but a little fruit that the Dogaressa brought her.’

‘Did anyone taste it first?’

Kelebek’s eyes were as round and green as the grapes. ‘Why, no, Feyra; you were not here. But I thought it would be all right; it was a gift from the Dogaressa, she is a friend of my mistress’s heart – a beautiful lady!’

Feyra approached the abundant bowl of fruit, her feet heavy with dread. The ice pooling in the silver bowl
crackled slightly in protest as it melted. Her eye was captured once again by the grapes. They looked delicious, tumbling over the edge of the bowl: round, and glittering with a bloom of dew. For the second time in as many moments Feyra thought that something had too much colour in it.

She picked a grape from its stalk and broke it open with her fingernail. She walked to the window and held the ruptured fruit to the sun. There, nestling in the jade heart of the grape, was a dark clot where the seed should have been. She gouged out the clot and spread it on a white tessera of mosaic on the windowsill. Then she reached for her medicine belt and pulled out an eye-glass with a brass surround which she fitted in her eye. She peered and poked at the black smear. She could see, once the clot was spread, a collection of tiny seeds, each one the shape of a star anise. Her stomach plunged.

Poison.

Not just any poison but the like of which she had seen only once before. Haji Musa had once intercepted an attempt on the old Sultan’s life, poison found in a gift of a jug of English ale. The doctor had shown her the star-shaped spores, taken from the fruit of the Bartholomew tree found in the hills around Damascus, and told her to take care; for the spores were one of the deadliest poisons known to man, tasteless, odourless, and with no antidote. The victim would feel the ill effects for half of one hour, then recover once as if healthful again, and after this would deteriorate rapidly as the spores multiplied in the organs, crowding the liver and lights, pulping the innards to mulch.

Fascinated by such a powerful poison, Feyra had begged a lame merlin from the Sultan’s falconers and fed the hawk
some of the spores. He greedily pecked them down. Then Feyra sat on the stone floor of the Topkapi mews and watched him. For half an hour he had fallen to the floor and rolled and flapped, squawking in distress. Feyra watched, dispassionately, then the bird had miraculously recovered. For the following hour the merlin had been well, and lively; even his foot seemed no longer lame. But before Feyra’s legs had stiffened on the stone floor he had fallen over once again and turned black, glass-eyed and gasping until she had picked him up and wrung his neck. He lay in her hand, warm and surprisingly light, his head dangling. For a moment Feyra had felt a misgiving; this hawk would never rise above the dome of the Sophia again. Then she had hardened her heart and sliced him open, there and then on the pavings with a scalpel from her belt to discover his innards black with spores, his organs riven and pulped, indistinguishable from each other, the viscera as one.

Feyra thought quickly, running in her mind through all the remedies she knew, everything she carried in her belt. Nothing would help. If she’d been here, God above, if she’d only been here when the grapes had been eaten there might have been something. She had some tallow beads in one of the little glass vials, which, if chewed, would induce instant, violent vomiting above and purging below. But even then, by the time the symptoms manifested themselves, by that first initial illness, it was already too late. And besides, Feyra thought grimly, as Kelebek had reminded her; if she
had
been here, as Nur Banu’s
Kira
, she would have tasted the grapes and would now be waiting for her own death too.