Jason Goodwin: An Evil eye

But not today.

Elif stuck with Melda, who seemed to know where she was going.

The lady Talfa stepped out of the room, hand across her mouth, the sound of cannon and the screaming in her ears.

She saw women sweep down the corridor, hammering at the doors, dragging at each other’s clothes, and baring their teeth, like wolves.

A vase wobbled on its stand, between two windows. As the lady Talfa watched, a skirt brushed against the stand. A woman flung back her hand and caught the rim of the vase as it circled. It swung wide and went over with a smack, shivering to pieces on the wooden floor.

Slippered feet trampled over the fragments.

Two girls ran past, hand in hand, laughing. The lady Talfa saw the color in their cheeks, the sparkle in their eyes.

She stepped forward.

“Who are you? Where do you think you’re going?” she hissed.

Elif’s head whipped around. She saw a woman in the doorway. “It’s our turn now, auntie,” Elif spat. She laughed at the shock on the older woman’s face and her pretty blue eyes narrowed. The woman was jowly and pallid and she had lost her waist.

Elif cupped her hands beneath her breasts. “We’re the pretty girls.”

She saw the look of hesitation on Talfa’s face, and her glance shifted over Talfa’s shoulder. “What’s this room, Melda? What’s in here?” she said, tugging at her friend’s hand.

But the other girl drew back impatiently. “I know where to go, Elif. Don’t waste time.”

Elif shrugged. “All right, you lead.” As she sped off she half turned her head: “Better get packing, auntie!”

Talfa blinked. She had seen the carriages drawn up in the courtyard, and the women stuffing the sultan’s treasures into little bags. It was all they had, whatever they could carry off.

But they could have been allowed to leave the harem in peace, with dignity.

It was a serious blunder for which Ibou, the chief black eunuch, should be made to pay.

The lady Talfa gripped the door frame as another burst of wild laughter rang down the corridor, followed by an anguished scream.

Elif and Melda reached the stairs at the end of the corridor and scampered up them, giggling and breathless.

At the top they had a corridor to themselves. They chose a door and burst into a room that overlooked the Bosphorus.

A woman was shoveling the contents of a small table into a bag.

They all stared at one another. Then the woman screamed and Melda sprang at the woman and slapped her on the cheek.

“Stop that! Stop it! What are you doing with that bag?”

The woman tightened her grip on the bag. “This is mine! Get out!”

Melda made a grab for the bag. The woman yanked it back and the table went over.

“Now look!”

Elif snatched at the woman’s scarf. Melda kept her eyes on the bag. “What’s in there? What are you stealing?”

They heard running footsteps in the corridor and one of their girls put her head around the door, then withdrew it again.

The woman with the bag seemed to have trouble breathing. Her eyes bulged and her face went red. Elif gave the scarf a last savage tug and Melda went for the bag. The woman staggered and let it go. “It’s mine,” she choked.

“Drop it, auntie. If it was yours you’d have packed it by now. Go on, get out!”

They shoved the woman into the corridor. She was wringing her hands, but there were two of them and there wasn’t much she could do. Melda and Elif put their backs to the door and watched the handle rattle.

After a while they heard more people running in the corridor. The handle went still.

The two girls turned to each other and burst out laughing.

Later they looked into the bag. It was pathetic what those women tried to carry off-right down to their kohl, and half-used bottles of rosewater, and little paper talismans. The woman they’d surprised had obviously thought she could get away with the coffeepot! Even if she’d been the coffee kalfa, it didn’t belong to her. The rest of the stuff in the bag was almost certainly stolen, too. All that money-and she wasn’t even pretty.

Elif shrugged. Those women were old and their sultan was dead. She thought of the woman they’d frightened on the floor below. Perhaps they should have seized her room.

It is our turn now, she thought, as she examined the scarf. It wasn’t even torn.

But Elif had made a serious mistake.

The woman on the floor below was the lady Talfa. She was neither particularly young nor particularly pretty. But she had no plans to leave. She took no orders from the chief black eunuch.

The lady Talfa was not one of the late Sultan Mahmut’s slaves.

She was his sister.

New girls could come in. Her nephew Abdulmecid could move into his new palace chambers. But for now, and always, this harem was her home.

She stamped her foot. Where was Bezmialem? The sultan’s mother should have been here, taking control of her son’s girls. The young valide.

Talfa glared down the corridor and saw a familiar figure in a brown cloak.

“Yashim!” she cried. “Can’t you do anything? Can’t you stop all this-this noise?”

Yashim ordered the halberdiers to move the baggage to the carriages: the new girls were already beginning to paw at it themselves. The soldiers moved slowly, with infinite gentleness, eyes down: the women lunged and clung to their arms.

The women who served the late sultan were to leave for Eski Saray, the old Palace of Tears, for centuries a home for the harem beauties whose sultan had died. Some-the lucky ones, maybe-would marry, entering the harem of some Ottoman officer of the guard, or a pasha of the civil bureaucracy. The rest could hope for little more than to drag out their existence behind the walls of the Palace of Tears, forgotten and ignored.

Getting the luggage away made things easier: the women followed their belongings. Others-dragging their fingernails down their cheeks, or cramming their things into little sacks-felt suddenly resigned to do what Yashim suggested. They were drawn to him, just as the lady Talfa had been; they relied on him, as Ibou the chief black eunuch relied on him, instinctively. Against the bright plumage of the harem women, Yashim’s brown cloak was modest almost to invisibility. He spoke quietly, in a room that rang with shrieks and tears; his gestures were restrained. There was a stillness in Yashim that made the women pause and listen. His low voice wearied and fascinated them, as if it carried an echo of the burdens of life. It was the voice of a man, perhaps: yet Yashim was not, quite, a man himself. Yashim was a eunuch. By evening the women had taken to the carriages, and gone.

Upstairs, in her new room, Elif picked up her oud and began to play.

Farther along the corridor, a pale woman reclined on her divan, shading her eyes with the back of her hand.

Bezmialem had heard the pandemonium and locked her door. She sought only peace and seclusion.

At her moment of triumph, when her son returned to the palace as sultan, Bezmialem had a headache.

“Yashim efendi?”

The halberdier swung back the door of the gatehouse. Outside Yashim saw a small closed carriage, with another soldier holding the door.

“Please, efendi.”

“Where are we going?”

“We must be quick, efendi.”

Yashim climbed into the cab and the halberdier slammed the door. Yashim heard him shout something to the driver and then, with a lurch that shot him back into the buttoned leather seat, they were off. The carriage squeaked and swayed; Yashim wound his fingers around a leather strap in the dark. The windows of the cab were tightly curtained, but he could feel the drumming of the wheels on the cobbles and the slick lurch when they left hard ground for muddier, unpaved streets.