This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (16 page)

“How? Because we like and trust each other, I guess, and the sex felt so right for us. I suspect neither of us ever gave ourselves so completely to anyone as we did to each other. But that’s a guess. We never acknowledged it openly.”

“All right,” Mirella said, “you’ve told me the how, the when, and the why. But when did he pass you the note?”

“When he first came in and we were having drinks before lunch. He gave me a big smile and a hug, slipped the note into my pocket, and whispered in my ear, ‘I’m so very happy to see you.’ I went to powder my nose, and read his message, told myself: ‘Don’t do a takeover on him, Deeny. Remember, he’s an Englishman. So play it cool.’ And cool is how I played it, until now,” and she gave Mirella a tiny poke in the ribs, and the two women muffled their laughter with hands over their mouths.

“What was the sign you gave him? Are you sure he understood?” Mirella asked.

“What a question! You know me: cool I can play, but subtle I am not.”

“Oh, God, what did you do?”

“When he pulled the chair out for me at the dining table, I turned around, smiled, and said, ‘Yes.’ He smiled back and looked a bit tipsy and repeated, ‘Yes. How very nice.’ Then you saw the rest of it. He hardly gave me a glance or spoke to me through the whole meal. We were both playing it so cool I had to keep putting my hand in my pocket and feeling the paper to make sure I hadn’t dreamed it.”

“I know Brindley. He’s a serious man. As my lawyer, he’s
proven to me more than once that he gets what he goes after. He means to marry you, Deeny, I feel very sure of it.”

“Me, too, but for God’s sake don’t tell my mother. She had her heart set on a plastic surgeon. A real mensch face-lifter.”

10

M
irella entered the room, and it was as if the princess had cast a spell on it. For a second, when she opened the door, that same powerful feeling of déjà vu returned. She wavered on her feet. Only the memory of Deena’s joy and her absence from the room steadied her. Was life made up of just a series of memories?

Something was happening in the room and she wished that her oldest and best friend had stayed to be a part of it. As Mirella thought of Deena’s revelation, she had to hold back a tear of either joy or fear — she was not sure which. Deena, like herself, had found a man who would change her life, and although the two women would remain friends and loyal to each other, to the end of their lives, they would no longer be able to share their happiness as they once had.

Mirella felt herself drift toward the center of the room where the remaining three women were sitting. It was as though some force within was drawing her into the current, and the current was moving toward a center. She sat down on the opposite end of the white satin settee from Lili, facing the princess and Muhsine, who was now draped decoratively on the floor at the feet of the princess, refilling the Jacobean goblets. The two black eunuchs moved discreetly to stand on either side of the pair of living room doors.

Mirella felt as if she had been slowly circling the center of a life foreign to her for a very long time, and now, as she swam with the current around this center, created, here and now, by herself and Adam and enhanced by the presence of the princess, for the last time, she wished Deena had chosen to stay in the room. She wanted Deena to hold her hand and slip with her into the void, to spiral down into a future that was ordained from Mirella’s past, and tunnel out into a new present in the land of her forefathers, Turkey.

But Deena hadn’t chosen to remain, and, though sad for her loss, Mirella knew her friend had been right to leave. She was not part of Mirella’s new life with Adam and Rashid or Adam’s clan, nor would she ever be. Distanced from it, Deena would never understand the legacy Mirella inherited over and above the Oujie estate. She had chosen always to be a welcome tourist in their lives, but not a part of it.

“I was sorry to see your friend leave. Was she very upset?” asked the princess.

“No, she’s quite used to my family and their behavior.”

“Are you making excuses for me, Mirella? If so, please don’t.”

“There is no excuse for you, Mother. I was trying to make a discreet apology to the princess.”

“To apologize for my behavior? If I felt it was necessary, I would do it myself.”

“You are quite right, Lili,” said the princess. “I need no apology. I know very well what women are like when they get together. You see, women like your mother and myself have lived a good part of our lives secluded in a woman’s world, away from men. I am sorry Deena has left us because women in seclusion are more interesting when there are many. More intrigues, power plays, petty jealousies, more love, more hate, to watch and learn from. Women need other women for friends, so they can love men.”

“You worry me, Eirene,” said Lili. “In the same way that my mother worried me. You are women from an Eastern world; you think, you love, you manipulate people for your own ends and amusement, cleverly and successfully in a way I don’t understand. You are a whole generation away from me. You have lived through amazing world changes. But you have relinquished nothing of yourself to those changes. You live in a world that is foreign to me and I find you dangerous because you are dragging me into the past and into an atmosphere so strong I feel we might be not in New York but in one of Istanbul’s famed harems.

“It is as if you and my daughter, Adam and Rashid are strong enough, powerful enough, to live against convention, purity. You can play with debauchery, depravity, and evil, none of which I am able to cope with, nor want to. In that I am like my father, whom I loved and adored. He made one mistake — he bucked convention and married my mother. But
he never made a second one. I have to give my mother her due, from the day she married my father she led an impeccable life. But you could always see in her eyes a decadence — beautiful, opulent, repressed. I envy you, Eirene, just as I envied my mother. You say you were friends, close friends, but I don’t remember her ever mentioning your name.”

“That’s not surprising. We never saw or spoke to each other for the last fifty-eight years of her life. Not since the night she ran away with your father.”

A look of amazement crossed Lili’s face. She placed the goblet she had just sipped wine from on the table, and asked, in a more subdued manner than she had displayed all day, “Then you knew my father?”

“Yes, it was my house they used for their assignations, my yalis on the Bosporus where the illicit lovers fled to, my caïque they escaped in. He was so handsome and dashing, much younger than Inje, and completely besotted by her. He promised her the world, and he gave her Boston and love. That was not exactly the world.”

“He remained besotted by her to the end of her life. She ruined him, you know. He could think of nothing but her until the end of his life. He gave everything up for her and worried himself sick, for fear she wasn’t happy,” added Lili.

“She gave up more,” said the princess. “She gave up her life, her heritage, went into isolation away from her friends, abandoned her country, her history, and threw away her identity. She left a life of luxury and wealth. She turned her back on her patrons, her very personal and secret sexual preferences. She fought her own nature to the end of her days, for your father’s love, and for you. You see, she wanted you to have the security of a respectable name and a very American background. She fell in love with purity and innocence, kindness and caring, things she had never known or believed in until she met your father.

“She had her fling with him, fell in love with him and his fine qualities, and was bored with him before they even thought of running away together. It wasn’t even a matter of being torn between her sensuous, fickle nature, and the only sweet and kindly love she had ever known. She knew what she was and which way of life satisfied her. She loved him and
his noble nature, but was through with him. However, she had ruined your father and could not bear to desert him.

“The night they ran away, we parted after exchanging vows never to get in touch with each other again. She wanted to begin her life anew, in your father’s world, and wanted no contact with Turkey and her past. If she had, Inje was afraid she would allow herself to desert him for the depraved life she led before she met him.”

A hush filled the room. Lili was very pink in the face, and for once looked embarrassed and very sad. Mirella, who had always been her grandmother’s favorite, felt neither emotion, because Inje had always shared with Mirella what she could of her Turkish background without revealing too much of her past.

“Then she was a whore, just as I had imagined she had been,” said a very disturbed Lili.

“Rather a crude way of putting it, Lili. She was hardly a common whore. I would rather have described her as a very special lady of the night. A courtesan, a very beautiful, clever courtesan, who had several devoted patrons and many lovers until your father came along. But that hardly tells her story.”

“Now I begin to understand why we just barely got along. Why she skipped over me with her love and landed it on Mirella. Why she was so close with her grandchild and not with her daughter. I can’t understand why she wasn’t satisfied with us.”

“How could you? Your life is black and white, your mother’s was full of color, many shades of color. You understand nothing, Lili. You were not born in a palace, part of an immense architectural miracle that for centuries was one of the most inaccessible buildings in the world, the most guarded and secret harem ever built. A labyrinth of rooms and staircases, alleys and corridors, courtyards and gardens where fountains played and flowers bloomed. A massive profusion of rooms in a mélange of decorative styles — Turkish and Persian, French, Italian, Austrian, and even English — that opened one after the other, one above and below another, and revealed luxury beyond your imagination. Gold and silk, silver and brocade, velvet and jewels in abundance, draped and decorated, sparkled and charmed.

“Nor did you revel in the intrigues of the harem as your mother did. The intrigues of the sultan, and his mother.
Intrigues among concubines, between the black eunuchs and the white eunuchs — the most powerful people in the palace, whose bizarre machinations might lure their victims to their death. Murder and sexual depravity were talents they cultivated. It was a case of play the game and play it well, or die.

“And your mother was lucky. She had two things that ensured her survival. She was born a girl, not a boy, which saved her from the Princes’ Cage — a place famous even outside Turkey for its cruelty, misery, and bloodshed. It was where the sultans, the royal princes, and the most powerful women of the court removed all rivals for the throne. They murdered less often in your mother’s time, keeping their rivals locked up year after year with black eunuchs, sterile women, and deaf-mutes for companions.

“The second reason she was lucky was that she was born to the sultan’s favorite, the Kadin Roxelana Oujie. The most powerful, clever, and feared concubine in the court, Mirella’s benefactress, her great-grandmother. So how could you have any idea, how could you understand your mother, Lili, if you were ignorant of all this?”

Although Mirella had learned a great deal about her benefactress and all the ancestors before her from the archives found by Adam during an excavation, she had no idea about the life her grandmother, whom she had known and loved, had lived before her arrival in Boston. Mother and daughter were speechless, trying to equate the Princess Eirene’s revelations with the Inje Wesson-Cabot they knew.

The princess rose from her chair and walked thoughtfully around the room. One of her guards detached himself from the door and followed a few paces behind her. She waved him away with a gesture and a word and he became a sentry once more. She smiled at Lili and Mirella, touched the top of Muhsine’s head as she sat down again.

“I am not usually a woman to reminisce about the past. I like living for the moment too much. It keeps me young. One cannot become frail living every waking moment of one’s life. I am reminded of how long I’ve lived only by my guards, Hyacinth and Narcissus — silly names for men, but the black eunuchs of the seraglio always bear names of flowers, as it links them with virginity and whiteness, which suits men who are constantly in the service of women. Hyacinth and Narcissus have cared for me nearly all my life. Inje had half a
dozen such supports from the time she was five years old and was passed from the nursery in the seraglio to the eunuchs.”

“Why are you telling me all this?” asked a still further subdued Lili. “If you wanted me to know all this, why didn’t you tell me when it could have done me some good? Why rake all this up now?”

“Because, until Adam Corey came to me and told me he was in love with Mirella, and Rashid appeared with her at my picnic in Istanbul, I never knew you existed. I am telling you this remarkable story because it is part of Mirella’s heritage and part of yours. She is one of the true heirs of a line that reaches to the Ottoman Empire, and it is my fervent hope that she will continue her Turkish heritage and perpetuate it as I have, as Rashid does. As Adam more than any of us does — and he is not even an Ottoman, only a Turkophile. There are very few of us left who have seen what I have, participated in the last days of an empire. She is our chance to live on, after we are on the other side. For us, finding Mirella and the Oujie legacy is like the miracle that the White Russians needed: to find the royal Princess Anastasia and the Romanov treasures.

“I am not an unrealistic woman, Lili. I know you have been assimilated into an American culture so strong and powerful that you will never really understand Mirella any more than you did your mother. But you can appreciate that fate has dealt a hand, and your daughter has happily chosen to play it. She is more like Inje than you are.”

There was a discreet knock. Hyacinth opened the pair of doors, and Moses entered carrying a heavy silver tray bearing a coffee service of silver gilt and Sèvres demitasse cups and saucers.

“Shall I serve coffee now, Ms. Mirella?”

“No, Moses, I think not. Just leave the tray and we’ll help ourselves. Thanks.”

Moses’s entrance was an interruption welcome to the princess. She was finding her task of enlightening Mirella and Lili, especially Lili, hard going. For them it was not Ottoman memories that she was evoking but family history, knowledge of which could only expand their lives and understanding.

The more she spoke of Inje, the greater her recall. Long-forgotten episodes came to mind, not all of them welcome. Telling Inje’s story was very close in some ways to recounting
her own, and she found retrospection exhausting rather than invigorating.

Princess Eirene Bebescu smiled to herself. She had outwitted and outlived most of the men and women of her past by dint of her intelligence, beauty, and sensuality. And even now, in her advanced years, she had no rival capable of taking from her what she wanted.

The lovers, much younger than herself, handsome and virile men from all walks of life who made love to her, adored her, could still be tortured by her game-playing and intrigues with them. They kept her sexually ageless, and some of the most interesting and powerful men in the world waited to be summoned by her, wanting only to please Eirene Bibescu. She still practiced the persona she had learned growing up in the seraglio with Inje, and was certain that her friend had done so as well — only Boston-fashion. Her exhaustion had come not from memories but from sentimentality. When she detected that insidious feeling in herself, she mastered the exhaustion, took another sip of Yquem, and allowed the memories to surface.

Lili surprised the princess when she said, “My mother was the most beautiful and fascinating woman in Boston, and remained that way until she died. She had no rival, she was unique, mysterious, enticing. But her true self she kept a secret. What was her life like before my father that she felt compelled to keep it a secret to the grave?”