The Venetian Contract (3 page)

Today, her father must have had an appointment of some consequence, and an early one at that; for when Feyra opened the carved lattice shutters of her window she could see that the sun had barely risen over the city. The domes and the minarets that she loved were still only silhouettes, describing a perfect negative contour of darkness bitten out of the coral sky. Feyra breathed in the salt of the ether.

The smell of Constantinople.

She looked out to sea, barely yet a silver line in the dawn light, wondering what lay beyond it. For an instant she felt
a yearning for another land, for those places that lived for her only in the stories of a seafaring father.

But Feyra’s reverie had cost her time. Turning away from the view, she faced, instead, the rectangle of silver that hung on the wall, edged in enamel and polished to almost perfect reflection, distorted only slightly by the dents of the metal. It had been brought back for her by her father from some Eastern land over some Eastern sea and had hung in her room since she was a baby. As a child the mirror had been a curiosity; it had shown her what colour her eyes were, what her face looked like as she pulled it into odd shapes, how far her tongue could reach when she stuck it out. Now that Feyra was a woman, the mirror was her best friend.

Feyra looked carefully at her reflected self, trying to see what the men saw. When she’d first noticed men staring at her in the street, she had begun to cover her hair. Then they stared at her mouth, so she took to wearing the half-face veil, the
yashmak
. She had even chosen one with sequins at the hem, so that the gold would draw their eyes away from hers. But still they stared, so she switched to the
ormisi
, a thin veil about a hand span in width that was worn over the eyes. When this didn’t work she surmised that her body must be attracting the male gaze. She began to bind her budding breasts so tightly that they hurt, and yet still they stared.
Why
did they stare?

Feyra had read enough sonnets and odes of the lovesick to know that she did not confirm to the ideals of the Ottoman poets. Nor did she even resemble the maidens who featured in the bawdy macaroons her father’s sailor friends sang; she overheard them, sometimes, when she was in bed and they were downstairs at dinner and had had too much to drink.

Feyra did not consider her amber eyes, large but slightly slanted like a cat’s, round and dark enough to be praised in song. Her small, neat nose was too upturned for beauty. Her skin was the colour of coffee, not dusky enough for men to write poems about. Her hair, falling in thick swags and ringlets to her shoulder blades, was not silken and straight enough for the poets, and the colour was wrong too: every shade of tawny brown, not one of them dark enough to be compared to a raven’s wing. And her wide, ruddy mouth, strangest of all, with the top lip bigger than the bottom, was a generous shape that could not, in even the most heroic couplet, be compared to a rosebud.

To her, her features – taken separately, taken as a whole – were unremarkable, even odd. But they seemed to have some strange power that she didn’t understand, and certainly didn’t welcome. Even her disguises had limited efficacy. If she covered her eyes, men looked at her mouth. If she covered her mouth, they stared at her eyes. If she covered her hair, they looked at her figure. But she still had to try, for the inconveniences of her daily disguise were nothing to the consequences of revealing herself.

The Feyra in the looking-glass raised her chin a fraction and the reflection encouraged her. Today she must wear feminine garb; very well, she would make the best of it. She began her ritual.

Wearing only her wide billowing breeches made of transparent silk, Feyra took a long, cream bandage and tucked one end into her armpit. She pulled the material tight to her flesh, round and round her ample chest. When her breasts pained her and her breath felt short, she was grimly happy.

Now it was time for the gown. Feyra’s father had brought her gowns of gold and silver satin, brocade, bales of samite
and Damascene silk from the four corners of the world. But they lay untouched in a sea chest below the window. Instead she had bought a plain shift dress, a
barami
, in the Bedestan market. The dress fell without folds to the ground, disguising her shape. Next she added the upper gown, the
ferace
, bodice buttoned to the waist after which it was left open.

Then she combed and plaited her hair, coiling it around the top of her head like a crown. She struggled with the curls that crept from her veil by the day’s end however hard she tucked them back. Every day she tried to tame them. She placed and tied a veil of thin taminy over her hair, and tied it around the forehead with a braided thread. Then she damped the tendrils around her face with rosewater and pushed them viciously back until not a single strand could be seen.

Over it all she crammed a four-cornered
hotoz
cap, which buttoned under the chin, and a square
yemine
veil to cover her whole face. Then she took a length of plain tulle and wound it around her neck several times. She looked in the mirror again. Effectively swaddled, she was unrecognizable. Her clothes were the hue of sand and cinnamon, designed to blend in to the city and offer her camouflage. The only flare of colour were the yellow slippers of her faith – leather slippers with upturned toes that were fastened over the instep, practical and proof to water and the other more noxious fluids she was wont to encounter in her job.

Dressed at last, she added no ornaments to her apparel. Feyra had gold enough – she had as many trinkets as an indulgent father could provide, but bangles and baubles would draw attention to her – and what was more, interfere with her work.

Feyra’s finishing touch was born of utility, not fashion
nor status: a belt, bulky and ugly, an invention of her own. It held a series of little glass bottles and vials, each in an individual leather capsa, all strung together on a broad leather band with a large brass buckle. She strapped the thing beneath her
ferace
, so it was completely hidden at her waist while at the same time making her dumpy in the middle and giving her the silhouette of a woman twice her age.

By the time she was finished, the sun was fully up and the sky had bleached to a birds-egg blue. She allowed herself one more glance at the city she loved, now described in every daylit detail. The heartbreaking curve of the glittering bay, the houses and temples lying like a jewelled collar upon this matchless curve of coastline. Crouching like a sentinel of the Bosphorus was the great temple of the Hagia Sophia, where the Sultan’s hawks rose on the thermals from the sunbeaten golden dome. Feyra forgot her moment of yearning; she no longer wanted to know where the sea went. She vowed, instead, that she would never leave this city.

The wailing song of the
muezzin-basi
floated in a sweet, mournful thread from the towers of the Sophia to her ear.
Sabah
, sunrise prayer. Feyra turned and ran, clattering down the stairs.

She was very, very, late.

Chapter 2

I
n the street it was still cold, the shadows untouched by the sun.

In the normal way this would be Feyra’s favourite part of the day – it pleased her to dawdle, greeting the laundry-women carrying their baskets of washing to the bay, or buying a breakfast of
simit
and
salep
, cinnamon bread and root tea, from one of the blue and gold carts that seemed to be on every corner. It pleased her too, to pay with her own coin, for she was a professional, a working woman. Today she had to ignore the growling of her stomach, as she hurried on.

Now and again, as she climbed the hill from Sultanamet to Seraglio point, she would see the brief blue glances of the sea. Today she did not turn, as she did every other morning, to drink her fill of the view. Consequently, she did not notice a Genoese galleass which she would have had no trouble identifying due to her father’s schooling, sailing away, cleaving the cobalt waters of the mouth of the Bosphorus.

Feyra kept her eyes front, walked to the top of Mese Avenue and the Topkapi Palace. Set upon the perfect peninsula that was the Seraglio point, jutting out into the ocean where the Golden Horn, the Sea of Marmara and the
Bosphorus met, Topkapi was a small city of itself. The Imperial Gate, as the first point of entry for the visitor, was a powerful architectural assertion of importance, and a hint at the glories within. Between the twin conical towers of the gatehouse, below the golden inscription of past Sultans’ wisdom on the architrave (for the new Sultan, Feyra understood, had little wisdom to speak of, let alone inscribe in gold) stood a guard bearing a scroll, the first of many layers of security within the palace.

She didn’t know the man and didn’t expect to. He would have been drawn by lot this morning in the guard room, for there was a pool of three hundred and fifty-four sentinels of the Sultan, one for every day of the year in the Hicri Takvim calendar. No man could serve twice in a year, and no man knew which his day would be, so that he may not be bribed or coerced to let in an interloper.

‘Name?’

‘Feyra Adalet bint Timurhan Murad.’

‘And what do you do here?’

‘I am
Kira
to Nur Banu, the Valide Sultan.’ She took a breath. ‘And Harem Doctor.’

She watched him, and he behaved exactly as she predicted. He had barely looked up from his vellum when she told him she was a
Kira
, a go-between for the women of the Harem and the outside world. Sometimes the guard of the day would make a moue with their mouth, or raise an eyebrow, when she mentioned the name of Nur Banu, the Valide Sultan, mother of the Sultan and as such the most powerful woman in the palace, in Constantinople and in the Ottoman world. But all of them, without exception, reacted with surprise when she told them she was a doctor.

Only twenty-one, she had been distributing medicine and
performing minor operations for years. She had begun, at the age of thirteen, carrying medicines from the palace doctor from the main part of the palace to the Harem. She would meet the physician in the Hall of the Ablution Fountain, a beautiful courtyard which marked the limit of how far a man could pass into the Harem complex. At that age her task was merely to listen carefully to his directions resounding in the mosaicked atrium, parrot them back to him in competition with the echo, bow and walk down the Hall of the Concubines to the Harem proper.

As she became older Feyra was sent out of the palace to the market to buy herbs and compounds from the Grand Bazaar. There she would wander the crowded alleys, feeling the acrid, sweet and spicy smells gather in her nose as she bought the alien bottles and packages back to Topkapi. She began to pay attention and quickly learned to appreciate the workings of the medicines. As the years passed and as the doctor passed his prime and Feyra approached hers, their relationship subtly changed and she would begin to adjust the amounts he had directed. Sometimes she would substitute different herbs; some medicines the doctor prescribed never reached their patients. The ladies of the Harem had never been healthier. By now, Feyra knew precisely how to treat the women, but she still made her daily walk to the middle court, as a matter of courtesy. The doctor, now well into his dotage, concerned himself with the main palace and the Sultan himself; he trusted Feyra to take care of most of the ailments of the two hundred or more women in the Harem. He had even, two years before and with the blessing of the old Sultan, conferred upon her the title she now used with pride. The doctor barely came to the middle court any more, so she was surprised once
she’d finally reached the Hall of the Ablution Fountain, to find him waiting for her.

He seemed agitated and was wringing his hands. He looked old and small in this incredible setting, where once he would have stood tall. His name was Haji Musa, and he had once been respected for his surgical methods and medical writings throughout the world. Now the vast archway diminished him; the fine Kütahya tiles in watery greens and blues and whites gave his flesh a sickly hue, and the spouting fountain drowned his quavering voice so that Feyra had to ask him to repeat himself.

‘I beg your pardon, Teacher?’

‘Nur Banu Sultan,’ he said, his querulous tones rising above the fountain. ‘She is ill. So ill that they called me from the Second Court.’ He raised a shaking forefinger and waved it before her veil. ‘Listen to me, Feyra, never forget that Nur Banu is the Sultan’s mother. You will never treat a more exalted patient.’

Feyra felt impatient. She was already late. She didn’t see why Haji Musa was so agitated; after all, she had treated her mistress many times before. She bowed, as she had done that first time before him as a thirteen-year-old girl. Then she had been showing obedience. Now she was showing him that she wished to go.

He saw it at once. ‘Report to me. I’ll be waiting. Blessings be upon the Sultan.’

Feyra straightened. ‘For he is the light of my eyes and the delight of my heart.’

As she uttered the automatic rejoinder she was already turning to the women’s quarters. As she hurried away she was aware of the doctor patting and adjusting his turban as if the traditional blessing upon the Sultan had rattled him.
The reputation of the new Sultan was frightening enough in the ordinary way – if something was to befall his mother, his rage would be incendiary. She knew that Haji Musa was afraid for his head, and hoped that it would still be upon his shoulders at sundown.

Feyra hurried to the inner court and through the gates of the Harem. Here there was no interrogation – two of the black eunuchs opened the doors for her and she barely acknowledged them. She walked the Golden Way, where concubines were once showered with coins, straight to the quarters of Nur Banu and opened another door to the inner chamber. The large airy room, lined with incredible blue
Iznik
mosaic, had a small open court with a fountain, and a dais with a bed upon it. From the threshold Feyra could already hear cries.