THE girl lay on the bed in her vestal finery, her eyes closed. Her hair was elaborately braided, fastened with a malachite clasp. Perhaps it was the kohl, but her eyes seemed very dark, while the skin of her beautiful face seemed almost to glitter in the slatted sunlight that filtered through the shutters of the room. Heavy tassels of gold thread hung from the gauze scarf she wore around her breasts, and her long legs were encased in pantaloons of a satin muslin so fine it was as though she were naked. A small golden slipper dangled from the toe of her left foot.
The tongue that protruded slightly between her rouged lips suggested that she needed more than a kiss to waken her now.
Yashim bent over and examined the girl’s neck. Two black bruises on either side of her throat. The pressure had been severe, and she’d been killed from in front: she would have seen the killer’s face before she died.
He glanced down at the girl’s body and felt a pang of pity. So flawless: death had made her like a jewel, lustrous and cold, her beauty beyond all power of touch. And, he thought sadly, I will die like her: a virgin. More mangled, in my case. He quickly blocked the thoughts: years ago they had maddened and tormented him, but he had learned to control them. They were his thoughts, his desires, and so he could sheath them like a sword. He was alive. That was good.
His eyes traveled over her skin. The pallor of death had left it like cold white butter. He almost missed the tiny suggestion that she was not, after all, absolutely without a flaw. Around the middle finger of her right hand he spotted the very slight trace of a narrow band where the skin had been squeezed. She had worn a ring; she was not wearing it now.
He raised his head. Something in the atmosphere of the room had changed—a slight shift in pressure, perhaps, a shift in the balance of the living to the dead. He turned quickly and scanned the room: hangings, columns, plenty of places for someone else to hide. Someone who had already killed?
Out of the shadows a woman glided forward, her head slightly cocked to one side, her hands outstretched.
“Yashim, chéri! Tu te souviens de ta vieille amie?”
It was the valide sultan, the queen mother herself: and she spoke, he noticed without surprise, in the voice of the Marquise de Merteuil. It was she who had given him the book. In his dreams, the marquise spoke French with what Yashim was not to know was a Creole twang.
She took his hands and pecked him on the cheek, three times. Then she glanced down at the lovely form laid out in death for his inspection.
“C’est triste,” she said simply. Her eyes came up to meet his. “Poor you.”
He knew exactly what she meant.
“Alors, you know who did it?”
“Absolutely. A Bulgarian fisherman.”
The valide sultan put a pretty hand to her mouth.
“I was about fifteen.”
She waved him away, smiling.
“Yashim, sois serieux. The little girl’s dead and—don’t shout now—also my jewels have gone. The Napoleon jewels. We are all having a very bad time in the appartements.”
Yashim gazed at her. In the half-light she looked almost young; in any light she was still beautiful. He wondered if the dead girl would have looked so good at her age—or would have survived so long. Aimée—the sultan’s mother. It was the role that every woman in the harem fought for: to sleep with the sultan, bear a son and, in due course, engineer his elevation to the throne of Osman. Each step required a greater concentration of miracles. The woman in front of him had possessed a singular advantage, though: she was a Frenchwoman. One miracle under her belt from the start.
“You’re not telling me that I never showed you the Napoleon jewels?” she was saying. “Well, my God, you are the lucky man. I bore everyone with these jewels. I admire them, my guests admire them—and I’m quite sure they all think them as ugly as I do. But they came from the Emperor Napoleon to me. Personnellement!”
She darted him a roguish look.
“You think—sentimental value? Rubbish. They are, however, part of my batterie de guerre. Beauty is cheap within these walls. Distinction, though, comes at a price. Look at her. Not all the mountains of Circassia could produce a creature so lovely again—but my son would have forgotten her name in a week. Tanya? Alesha? What does it matter?”
“It mattered to somebody,” Yashim reminded her. “Somebody killed her.”
“Because she was beautiful? Pah, everyone is beautiful here.”
“No. Perhaps because she was about to lie with the sultan.”
She eyed him suddenly: at times like this he knew exactly why she was valide, and no one else. He held her gaze.
“Perhaps.” She gave a pretty little shrug. “I want to tell you about my jewels. Ugly, very useful—and worth a fortune.”
He wondered if she needed money, but she had read his thoughts. “One never knows,” she said, tapping him on the arm. “Things are never quite as one expects.”
He bowed slightly to acknowledge the truth of her remark. In his life, it was true. In hers? Without question: and with an unexpectedness that was fantastic.
Fifty years before, a young woman had boarded a French packet en route from the West Indies to Marseille. Raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, she was being sent to Paris to complete her education and find a suitable husband.
She never arrived. In the eastern Atlantic her ship was taken by a North African xebec, and the beautiful young woman became the prisoner of Algerian corsairs. The corsairs presented her to the dey of Algiers, who marveled at her exotic beauty and her white, white skin. The dey knew she was far too valuable to be retained. So he sent her on, to Istanbul.
But that was only half the story, the half that was merely unusual. Over the centuries, other Christian captives had made their way into a sultan’s bed. Not many; some. But the whim of destiny is powerful and inscrutable. On Martinique, young Aimée had been almost inseparable from another French Creole girl called Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. A year after Aimée set out on her fateful voyage to France, young Rose had followed. Same route: a luckier ship. Reaching Paris, she had weathered revolution, imprisonment, hunger, and the desires of ambitious men to become the lover, the wife, and finally the empress of Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of France. Aimée, the friend of Rose’s youth, had vanished to the world as the valide sultan. Rose was Empress Josephine.
One never knows.
She reached up and gave him a chaste kiss. At the door she turned.
“Find my jewels, Yashim. Find them soon—or I swear I’ll never lend you another novel as long as I live!”