Jason Goodwin - An Evil eye

The valide’s face lit up with a mischievous smile. “Little Rose should have wished for so much.”

“Rose?” Tulin echoed.

“Rose Tascher de La Pagerie.” The valide lifted her chin.

“A ferenghi? Like you, valide?”

“Like me? Not at all. She was always dreadfully unlucky.” She pursed her lips, and added: “Bismallah.”

“Will you tell me about Rose?”

“I am sure I have told you all this before, but why not?” And so the valide sultan, mother and grandmother of sultans, began to explain how two French girls, born and raised on the same remote Caribbean island, each became consort to two great emperors.

Aimee, the daughter of Monsieur Dubucq de Rivery, planter of Martinique, was sent first across the Atlantic, to complete her education in Paris-and find a husband. But when her ship was taken by pirates off the coast of Spain, Aimee found herself not in Paris, but in Algiers.

From where the dey, admiring her white skin, had her sent to his overlord, the sultan, in Istanbul.

“The rest you know-or may imagine,” the valide concluded.

“But I know-it was you!” Tulin’s eyes were shining. “You were under the protection of God, hanum efendi.”

“Hmmph.” The valide sounded unconvinced. “It felt somewhat different, at the time.”

“And Rose? You were going to tell me about her, too.”

The valide gave a little shrug. “Rose? She crossed to France the following year, but not-it would seem-under the protection of God. She reached Paris. Some time later, she married a Beauharnais. Rather minor nobility, Tulin, but I have no doubt her father was delighted. He was a great drunkard, and practically a bankrupt.”

“I understand.”

The valide went on to sketch the principal events in Rose’s life, including her meeting with Napoleon. The great French commander renamed her Josephine, and had her crowned as empress in Notre Dame.

“Eventually, my dear, he cast her off in favor of a stout Austrian princess. Quite a humiliation. Which goes to show, I believe, that we Ottomans manage these affairs with greater tact. More discreetly, at least, within the harem. Poor Rose.”

“Did she never see the emperor again?”

“Never, I believe. She was pretty, in a rather common way. But she lacked something, I suppose.”

“What did she lack?”

“Rose lacked-address.” The valide took Tulin’s chin in her hand, and smiled. “You are very sweet, Tulin. You listen very well, and it’s not everyone who knows how to listen. But sometimes, do you know? I think there’s more going on in that head of yours than meets the eye. I don’t think you entirely lack address yourself.”

Tulin dimpled, and bowed her head. “The valide thinks too much of my modest abilities. I wish only to amuse you, and keep you from feeling… bored.”

“Well, Tulin, that is an excellent ambition.” The valide’s eyes narrowed. “And what, my dear, do you propose?”

“Never mind about the sandwich,” Yashim said. “I’ll buy another.”

He smiled as the boy got warily to his feet.

Yashim smiled. “You won’t run away when my back’s turned, will you?”

The fisherman eyed them both suspiciously as they returned to his boat.

“You owe me for the mackerel,” he said accusingly, as though it had been Yashim who had made it vanish.

“Here I am again; and we’ll have two more, if you please.”

Yashim paid for the sandwiches and led the way along the shore. After a hundred yards or so they found a small jetty and he invited Kadri to sit down.

“As good as any kiosk in the palace,” Yashim remarked comfortably, swinging his legs over the water. He liked the view over Pera, especially at night, when the streets were lit and the lights from the new apartment buildings sought their reflection in the still water. The outline of the old Genoese fire tower was distinct against the stars.

Yashim watched from the corner of his eye as Kadri tore into the mackerel with the appetite of a boy who hadn’t eaten all day. He was small but well proportioned, dark-skinned, with clear dark eyes and a shock of black hair that stuck out in comical tufts around his face.

“Have the other one,” Yashim suggested, holding out the untouched sandwich.

He could see the pale disk of Kadri’s face in the dark, but not his expression.

“Thank you,” the boy said. “I have eaten.” And then he added, “Thank you for the sandwich, efendi.”

“Take it, I’m not hungry,” Yashim said.

After a decent pause, Kadri’s hand came out and took the sandwich.

“I expect you’re wondering who I am,” Yashim said. “My name’s Yashim. Your tutor called me in to find you. It’s the kind of thing I do.”

“You find people?” There was a tone of disbelief in Kadri’s voice. “I didn’t know there was such a job.”

“No, well. I don’t live entirely on that kind of work, to tell the truth.”

“Because people don’t disappear often enough?”

“That, or I can’t find them often enough.”

The boy’s laugh was pleasant and unforced. “You found me, though, efendi.”

“I knew where you’d go.”

“In the whole of Istanbul? How?”

“Because it’s the same place I went when I ran away from the palace school myself.”

The boy was quiet for a moment. “You, efendi? You ran away?”

Yashim smiled ruefully in the dark. Kadri had been about to say something else-surprise that he’d been to the same school. Like the cadet at the gatehouse.

“Do you want to go back?”

“I–I don’t know, Yashim efendi. When I was hungry, I thought about it. But really I just wanted to get away. Or…”

Yashim imagined his face, screwed up with the effort to express what he felt.

“Or to be somewhere else, for a change?”

“That’s it, efendi. I just wanted to go into the streets. The ordinary streets.”

“And the ordinary rooftops, I imagine.”

“You know?” Kadri almost gasped.

“I think so,” Yashim said. “I guessed, when I saw the window on the landing.”

The boy leaned forward and put his chin in his hands.

“I think, Yashim efendi, that you find your people every time.”

Yashim laughed. “I try, Kadri. In the meantime, it’s getting late. If you aren’t going back immediately, we’re in danger of running out of options for the night.”

“Where will we go?”

Yashim was getting up. “I have an idea. Come.”

A single lamp burned low on an inlaid table, and above it a lozenge of incense drifted its heavy scent into the air.

Pembe lay against the pillows quite still, her eyes motionless, her hands folded placidly on her breast.

The girl neither saw the lamplight nor smelled the perfume in her nostrils. Her thoughts wandered down the cramped, dark corridors of her own small past, and into the ruins of her future.

In the past she could see a man in a sheepskin hat. Her father greases his carbine with mutton fat. A woman stoops to drag the stones from a patch of ground: when she straightens she is beautiful; she turns a wisp of her hair in her fingers and tucks it back beneath her kerchief and the hair is streaked with gray.

The girl remembered the first time she saw the sea. A ship. She thought they were both beautiful. The sun glittered on the water as it rose, lighting her path: a road strewn with flashing jewels.

Jewels around her neck; perfume between her breasts, and the tinkling of the bangles that she wore around her ankles. The path had glittered and she had smiled, knowing she was beautiful like the sea. Of course she had been chosen. Unafraid, warming the prince with that smile and the unblemished beauty of her white limbs.