Pawn in Frankincense (62 page)

They were allowed to use their own small kitchens for lessons and experiments. It was unlikely, to say the least of it, that she would ever find herself explaining to Betty, in the big, cosy old kitchen at Flaw Valleys, how to make crystallized violets, or mince-meat pies, or rice dressed with butter and almonds, but she found this the least boring part of the day. Because of her appearance she was spared some of the other things which came every day, in covered dishes, from the long range of harem kitchens. Such as tripe, the Prince of Dishes. She had stopped quoting that, since the Kislar Agha had spoken about it. Tripe, with pepper and cloves, had been one of the Prophet’s favourite dishes. The Prophet had been fond of his food. ‘
The love of sweetmeats comes from the Faith. The Faithful are sweet; the wicked, sour.
’

The Prophet had said a few other things too, as she was reminded on the day when her eyebrows were plucked. It had been altogether one of the less happy days, when Kuzucuyum, who had a slight temperature, had been kept in the nursery quarters, and when, that morning, she had received with the other novices her first lesson, in Kiaya Khátún’s golden, ironical voice, on how to attract, to foster and to satisfy the peculiar cravings of man.

One does not live on a farm in the Border country of England and remain unduly naïve. On the other hand, for Philippa up to that day, the world had been divided into people, some of whom, like Kate and herself, were female, and some of them male. Whatever the sex of your friend, you extended to him or to her the kindness, the
courtesy, the thoughtfulness which affection prompted, and would expect to receive the same in return. Very occasionally, at Flaw Valleys, Philippa had observed someone—a servant, a neighbour—embark on some long, subtle campaign designed to prompt favours. They had received short shrift from Kate.

Between human beings, it was an indignity. Between friends, it was an insult. Between man and woman, as a means to promote love, it seemed to Philippa, there would be surely nothing more childish and degrading than a planned and detailed exercise to provoke and allure.

‘Look, it doesn’t hurt,’ Laila had said soothingly as Philippa sat bolt upright under the tweezers. ‘You’ll look a different person.’

Philippa gazed at her with the eyes of despair. ‘But I’m a different person
now
. All they’re doing is making us all look the
same.
’

‘Lie down.’ The Mistress of the Baths stood no nonsense. ‘There is a standard. You must conform to it.’

Fleur de Lis, amused, said, ‘Your hair shines. You do not mind that? Then why object to having your features improved?’

Between finger and thumb, the tweezers nipped their implacable way over her skin. ‘All right,’ said Philippa. ‘Let’s take care of what’s there already. But why spend so much time and emotion and energy upon improving on it? I’m happy with my face as it is. If it’s not frightening you or the eunuchs silly, I don’t see why we can’t all leave it alone.’

The Mistress paused, tweezers in hand, and regarded her. ‘You have good points,’ she said. ‘The eyes; the bones. I have little to complain of in the hands. The flesh will come. But you have not yet that which will draw your lord’s eyes as you stand with the others in the Golden Road. One day—Allah preserve her, long hence—Roxelana Sultan will enter the green fields of Paradise, or, Allah forbid, the Lord himself will leave to walk in the paths of the Blessed. Then each night one of you will be chosen; and will be sent to me, and to Kiaya Khátún and the Wardrobe Mistress to be bathed and painted and scented and robed as you have been shown. Then, when you enter the Grand Seigneur’s chamber, and the old women part the sheets at the foot, and you draw yourself up, as you have been taught, until you lie at his side … then you will have need of every art you have learned, to charm and to arouse; to pique and to surprise; to know when to satisfy and how to leave unsatisfied something he will not take to another.

‘If you please him; if you do as you have been told, you may become First Khátún, his bedfellow, with a suite of your own, where he may visit you: where you may cook for him and entertain him by day as well as by night. If you bear him a son, you may rule, through your son, the whole Ottoman Empire.
Now
will you lie still while I pluck?’

In spite of her goose-pimples, Philippa laughed. But later, taken to task alone by Kiaya Khátún for her disobedience, Philippa indulged
in spite of herself with an outburst. ‘The cooking lessons, the sewing, the scenting, the painting—it’s nothing to do with life or culture or accomplishments or self-respect. It’s a ritual aimed at provoking the senses. It’s the same as scrubbing the pigs the day before market. The effect on the girls doesn’t matter. We’re being turned out and polished like buttons, for the Sultan’s petty adornment.’

Kiaya Khátún, unsurprised, did not stir from her pile of delicate cushions. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That is the function of the harem precisely. Did you believe you had joined a seminar for feminine culture? Very few of your companions, I promise you, would wish it. Do they strike you as unhappy? They have nothing to do but study how to make themselves desirable. Were they to tell you the truth, their only complaint might well be that, under this Sultan, it is put to no use.’

Philippa’s straight brown gaze did not waver. ‘I know. They’re not unhappy,’ she said. ‘Any woman will run to seed like that, given the chance. You get sort of hypnotized by the mirror, and you’re still painted when they lay you in your coffin. I don’t want it to happen to me.’

There were some papers lying at Kiaya Khátún’s side. She picked them up with her little, ringed hands, and looked up at Philippa. ‘If you are summoned by the Sultan you will have to go. You know that.’

‘Yes,’ said Philippa. ‘The boys are told the same thing. But
they
go to school.’

‘Outside the bedchamber,’ said Kiaya Khátún, watching her quietly, ‘the boys will have men’s lives to lead. Moreover, it has been ordained by Mohammed that women should not be treated as intellectual beings … lest they aspire to equality with men.’

‘Do you agree?’ said Philippa Somerville directly.

There was a little silence, during which Kiaya Khátún, her black eyebrows arched, stared at Philippa, coolly surprised. But when she spoke, she sounded less angry than thoughtful. ‘You are an outspoken child, are you not?’ said Güzel. ‘I will answer your question with another. Are there any of your acquaintance, men or women, with whom you do not consider yourself equal?’

‘Kate,’ said Philippa, and flushed. ‘My mother. And my father, when he was alive. And there’s a woman in Scotland … whose name is Sybilla,’ She stopped.

‘You have, I see, a commendable degree of honesty,’ said Güzel gravely. ‘There are three people to whom you feel inferior.’

From pink, Philippa went scarlet all down her neck and the flat, transparent front of her blouse. ‘Then I put it badly,’ she said. ‘There are three I know will always be better than I am, no matter how long I live. As for everybody else, I don’t see how I can tell till I’m older. When you’re sixteen you’re inferior to practically everybody. I can do what I like with Kuzucuyum, for he’s only two. If he were sixteen he might very well show me up as a moron.’

‘And his father?’ said Güzel.

‘Shows everybody up as a moron,’ said Philippa, who had learned a good many skills in a month. ‘The point is, even if you were equal to him, you wouldn’t feel equal to him, if you know what I mean. My mother can handle him.’

Kiaya Khátún veiled her eyes over the laughter within them. ‘Your mother,’ she said, ‘seems to have enjoyed a large number of successes.… I am having you registered for a short course of tuition in the Princes’ school. You will be escorted there and back every morning, and we shall see later whether the course might be developed. The report here says that you are exceptionally quick to train, if one ignores your slow progress with Turkish. Also’—as Philippa, paling with pleasure and amazement, was opening her mouth—‘you are further advanced than any in the harem, I am told, in the execution of music. In the afternoons, from now on, you will have the extra duty of presenting yourself to play in the apartments of Roxelana Sultan, and to perform any other service she may require. This will take you out of the main building of the harem and is an exceptional honour. I shall accompany you.’

Which was how, as Philippa confided to her diary later that evening, the Fates took a hand in the headlong diploma course in Running to Seed.

Next day, Philippa was moved out of the little dormitory she shared with nine others, and given a room, along the same narrow corridor, to herself. It was still more of a prison than a room, with tiny windows overlooking a courtyard and a double grille in the corridor wall, locked on its inner side, through which the slaves were able to kindle her lamp. Apart from rugs and cushions and a single low folding table, the room was empty. Her bedding, neatly rolled, was kept on a wide high shelf, reached by a ladder, together with such possessions as she had.

To suit her new dignity, her wardrobe was increased, and the number and quality of her jewels. To look after them she had, in addition to Tulip, a pleasant soft-spoken negress for her own, and a small allowance of slipper-money for presents. And for the first time, that morning, she missed the interminable painting and prinking, and went instead, with her servants and eunuch, down the narrow stairs and along the network of passages until she came to the Black Eunuch’s courtyard, where on her first day the Kislar Agha had seen her. There, in a series of small interlocked rooms overlooking the courtyard, the young princes of the harem were once educated.

Now, since the Sultan’s heirs were grown men and none had been born since except to Khourrém his wife, the daily tutors had little to do but attend a handful of the younger well-born: a vizier’s two sons, and the son of a friend of Khourrém’s. Blowing under her veil, with her new high arched boots pinching, but a vast satisfaction under her
flat nacré velvet, Philippa sat down crosslegged with her escort in a row at the back of her juniors, and proceeded, with an eagerness which would have paralysed her mother’s entire sensory system, to imbibe the principles of logic, metaphysics, Greek, grammar and rhetoric, for a start.

The afternoon was a different matter. In the afternoon, painted, trousered, kaftáned, and perfumed to a disturbing degree (one of the Five Sensuous Offerings) Philippa followed Kiaya Khátún with reluctance through the threaded stairways and walks of the harem to a courtyard, and across the courtyard, where a fountain played and carp glinted red in a pool, to the rooms of Khourrém the Laughing One; now Roxelana Sultán.

The wife of Suleiman the Magnificent had a large chamber; bigger than any Philippa had yet seen. Its floors were of coloured mosaics, overlaid with a pattern of rugs and drenched with light from above, where the cupola, gilded within and without, was ringed with a fillet of windows. The walls were of tiles: green and orange and white, masked here and there by the velour of deep hanging rugs. Silver lamps hung on long silver laces from the ceiling carved in a fretting of stucco, and the embrasures all round the walls, where her jewelled ewer stood, and her books and her lute, were each framed in a lattice of cedarwood. A motif of tulips, half concealed by the coloured silk hangings, was inlaid, discreetly, in ivory within the dark wood of the door, and the backless throne on which Khourrém sat, wide as a bed, was padded with furs.

The small figure on the spread leopard-skins had none of the repose or the classical beauty of Güzel. Philippa saw a Roman nose, set in a pure oval face with a pursed mouth and plucked brow wreathed with shivering pendants. The jewelled silk gauze which draped her high headdress like a fragile pavilion fluttered and rolled as she turned her head, speaking in rapid Turkish to a negro page-boy behind her, and then to one of her mutes. Philippa knew how her lips were so rosy and her eyebrows so high and deliciously arched, but the round dark eyes on either side of that imperious nose were Khourrém’s own native beauty, and her speech was articulate and precise. The confidence of a middle-aged woman, who twelve years ago had simply left the Old Seraglio, a thing unheard of, with her slaves, her companions, her pages, her black and white eunuchs, and had joined her lord, here.

She ceased speaking and, at a sign from one of the eunuchs, Kiaya Khátún glided forward. Philippa, her neck aching, her eyes humbly downcast, heard her new name being repeated and the fact that although she had little Turkish, she could respond to simple commands. She was aware of being looked at; then Roxelana Sultán raised her voice. ‘Come!’

Obedient as one of the mutes, Philippa summoned all her hard-won
training and glided too, without mishap, over the carpets. The brown eyes were shrewd; the clothes rich but neat: the three-foot train tucked into the wide jewelled sash; the slippers curled, and of a skittish red satin. Khourrém had a neat ankle, and knew it.

She was being asked to bring sherbet. Philippa bowed, hand on heart, thought strengtheningly of Kate, and turned smoothly, to catch the eye of the small page, who already had a jug in his hands. Keep at it, and head eunuch for you, thought Philippa to herself, and grinned at him, accepting the jug, while he brought her a tray and cups to go with it, trotting behind with a towel. He might have been twelve.

The cups were solid emerald. She filled one for Roxelana and one for Kiaya Khátún who had seated herself, on command, by the steps of the throne. The page brought a table and Philippa laid the sherbet tray on it, restraining herself from a mad desire to drain the whole jug. ‘Now, the lute,’ said Kiaya Khátún. ‘Khourrém Sultán desires you to play for her.’

No shortage of helpers. The eunuch brought the lute: the pageboy arranged a pile of cushions for her to sit on.

Someone had presented the instrument: it was made western-style, with an inscription in Latin. It was quite out of tune.

No Gideon, now, to chaff her and give her an A. Get it wrong now, dearie, said Philippa to Durr-i Bakht; and they’ll stitch your mouth shut and tip you into a jar. She tuned, quickly, and got her strings at least in the proper relationship before wondering what on earth she was expected to play. Kiaya Khátún saved her the trouble. ‘I have told the Sultana,’ she said,’of the song “The Knight of Stevermark” I encountered on shipboard. Play this, if you know it. Even better: if you know the words, sing.’