Jason Goodwin - An Evil eye

“The French-or the English-wouldn’t let the Russians take it over,” Yashim said, stoutly.

“If it meant crowning the tsar in Ayasofya, no, they wouldn’t like that. But the Russians can afford to play it softly. They’ve been waiting centuries to restore the empire of orthodoxy to its original seat-Constantinople. A loose protectorate might be a useful start.”

He crossed to his shelves and dragged down an atlas.

“Whatever they say at the British Foreign Office-or on the Quai d’Orsay-about letting Russians into Constantinople, an independent Bulgaria would be popular with public opinion. Free the Moldavians?” He stabbed a finger at the map. “Give the Greeks a Black Sea state? Let the Walachians choose a king? Nations, that’s what the British cotton millers understand. And black the sultan’s eye, into the bargain? They’d love it, Yash.”

“And you? You’d like it too?”

Palewski ran his fingers distractedly through his hair. “I ask only for Poland,” he said. “A Russian Constantinople is not the way.”

“You’re sure?”

“The English cotton millers, Yashim, live far away. They stand in little danger of being spattered with the blood of the Bulgarians, or the Turks, or the Moldavians, if Russia decides to assume control. It would be very bloody. And Russia would be stronger.”

He seemed to sag over the atlas. After a moment he shut it, and walked to the window.

“It would be strange, wouldn’t it, if your Fevzi Pasha’s defection led to women and children being hounded to death in the Balkan hills?” He spread his arms and rested his hands on the sash. “I’m beginning to think that something needs to be done.”

“And yet,” Yashim said sadly, “we have no friends.”

“But between rulers there are no friendships. Only alliances of interest. And your empire, I’m afraid, has failed to provide them. Leaving the state even weaker than it appears.”

“No one to help?”

Palewski caught his eye. “No help that I can think of, Yash. And I am sorry, for all our sakes.”

Hyacinth shuffled across the frozen cobbles. The lady Talfa had gone home but the valide had been fretful all afternoon and he was feeling tired. His feet ached and the cold assaulted him when he stepped outside.

One little thing, Hyacinth thought, might cheer him up right now. The old lala s were drinking coffee, but coffee was always bitter, however much sugar you put in.

Tulin would never mind if he took a little piece of chocolate.

He would have asked her to prepare him some, the way she did; but there was orchestra rehearsal at Besiktas and Tulin was not due back until later.

He reached her door and turned the handle. It was almost dark inside, but the room was small and he had no doubt that he could find the chocolate easily. There would be a jar somewhere, and he could dip a finger into the dark, bitter flakes. Perhaps she would never have to know.

There was a jar. Hyacinth opened it expectantly, and shook it, and sniffed. It wasn’t chocolate.

He set the jar back on the floor and squatted on his hams, surprised. The corner of the room was full of jars. Not only jars: there were packets in paper, and little wooden boxes, and clay pots, and some tiny brass containers with lids. He opened one at random: it was a sticky paste that smelled familiar.

Hyacinth’s mouth turned down at the corners.

Chocolate was one thing. But as he opened one pot after another, and poked his fingers into packets and boxes, the turn of Hyacinth’s mouth deepened.

It was his duty now to talk to the girl, he thought.

But his desire was to speak to Yashim.

The man with the knife crossed the mountains in snow. He was used to the snow, to the cold, to picking his way along the mule tracks.

He did not consider the barking as he made his way down toward the valley. At this time of year dogs would be chained close to the sheep, to warn of the approach of wolves-or a stranger.

At last he lifted his head, and listened. The barking was growing closer. The man tightened his grip on his stick and loosened the knife in his belt.

With a strange dog you had to look big. Talk loud. Dogs understood firm signals. The man prepared by shifting his sheepskin coat onto his shoulders, just in case.

The Court of the Favorites, in the Topkapi Palace, was an open and airy space surrounded by a colonnade on three sides. It was the work of the great Ottoman architect Sinan, who created the sublime panorama of Istanbul’s domes, which move forward and retreat in dignified counterpoint as the traveler approaches the city by sea.

Sinan also worked on buildings that were to be seen by very few people. The fourth side of the Court of the Favorites was enclosed by a low balustrade, beneath which Sinan had constructed a delightful bathing pool as a grateful addition to the amenities of the harem. Stretched out in the sun below the balustrade, part of the pool filtered back through the old Byzantine arches into deep, almost subterranean shade.

As autumn came, and the days shortened and the air grew cool, the eunuch of the baths would test the water with his skinny elbow, until the sad day arrived when he pronounced the pool closed for the season. Then the pool was drained, to protect the tiling from frost and ice; because it stood on a hill, the draining was swift and effective. The entrances were locked, to await the return of summer, and the sultan’s girls.

The girls were warned not to approach the balustrade, which was quite low; in spite of salt and gravel, the surface of the courtyard in winter was sometimes slippery with ice. But in recent years the filling and the emptying of the pool had become no more than a formality. The girls had gone. The pool became a seasonal tradition that continued because it was seasonal, and no one had thought, or would ever think, to order it stopped.

Hyacinth did not find it necessary to repeat the warning to the older women who had returned to the palace from Besiktas: they knew the danger already, and they rarely ventured out now that the frosts had come. Instead they remained indoors, clustering around the barely adequate fireplaces that warmed their lodgings, and complaining incessantly about the cold. Palewski was right: the Ottomans seemed not to reckon with winter until it was already upon them.

Thus the Court of the Favorites was largely deserted, and only Melda, who had the heat of youth in her veins, sought it out as a quiet place to sit, under the colonnade.

“Hyacinth,”the valide remarked as she watched the flakes settle in the tiny court outside her window, “should order someone to sweep away the snow. I never liked it, Tulin.”

Tulin smiled, and put down her embroidery. “That is because you were raised in a hot country, valide,” she pointed out. “Most of the ladies are Circassians, and it does them good to see the snow again.”

The valide made a moue. “I’m surprised any of them are capable of remembering that far back. If they are Circassian, which I doubt. You all pretend, Tulin.”

Tulin laughed pleasantly, and stretched. The valide shot her a surprised glance. “I would like Hyacinth to order the court swept,” she said.

“Of course, valide. If you are comfortable, I will attend to it right away.”

Tulin gathered her embroidery and set it on a footstool, then plucked a fur-lined pelisse from a hook by the door and whirled it around her shoulders.

Outside she moved fast, one hand to the wall to steady herself over the icy cobbles. A blast of cold wind hit her as she turned into the corridor that linked the valide’s court with the little suite of rooms set aside for the black eunuchs, and the cape fluttered.