The Sultan's Seal (5 page)

He looks up at Kamil, showing a row of crooked yellow teeth. “Been a decade now. 1876, wasn’t it? June, I remember. Seemed an odd thing to do on such a warm day. Nice chap, dash it all.” He moves the piece of paper before him to the corner of the desk, then looks puzzled, as if he has lost something.

“Didn’t go much better for his replacement, eh?” he continues. “That Murad fellow, a tippler, from what I hear. Wasn’t sultan long enough for me to meet him. Had a nervous breakdown after only three months. Seems to be an occupational hazard.” He whinnies a laugh. “Can’t imagine why these reformists keep trying to put him back on the throne. Congenial fellow, I hear. Maybe that’s why.”

Kamil avoids meeting the blue eyes that are seeking his. Critical as he is of his own government, he feels offended by the ambassador’s disrespectful commentary.

He is startled by Sybil’s cheerful voice. “Wouldn’t you like some tea, Kamil Pasha?”

My Dearest Maitlin,

I hope that this letter finds you well and in good health and spirits. I have received no letters from you for several weeks. Much as I am aware of the vagaries that beset a missive on the long journey between Essex and Stamboul, nevertheless the lack of news from you, dearest sister, has worried me. I hope and pray that you, Richard, and my darling nephews Dickie and Nate are well. I picture you all sitting in the garden over tea and cakes, or sprinting across the lawn in one of those lively and contentious games of badminton we played as children. As always, the indomitable Maitlin wins.

The heat has been oppressive, with not the slightest breeze to relieve us. The hot days have unleashed a series of calamitous events that have kept us all alert. The most grievous is that Mary Dixon has been murdered. Mary was a governess in the imperial household. I’m sure I mentioned her in one of my earlier letters. She arrived here a year or so ago. I didn’t know her well—she kept mostly to herself—but it is still a shock. It appears that she drowned, an awful tragedy, and so like the drowning death of that other governess, Hannah Simmons, eight years ago. Hannah’s murderer was never found and the police superintendent’s head rolled over it (given that this is the Orient, I need add that I am speaking figuratively).

His replacement is a keenly intelligent man named Kamil Pasha. His father also is a pasha, a kind of lord, who used to be governor of Istanbul. Kamil Pasha isn’t a policeman, but a magistrate in the new judicial system the Turks set up a few years ago, inspired by our European model. He trained at Cambridge University, if you can imagine. In any case, I think we are in much better hands this time with regard to finding Mary’s murderer. The old superintendent was quite a curmudgeon. He came by to see Mother once after I had arrived. An unpleasant man with a misshapen fez, as if it had been crushed in a fight and he couldn’t afford to replace it. By contrast, Kamil Pasha is quite personable.

Poor Mary. Just over a month ago, she joined us for the first garden party of the year. It was a lovely night with one of those full moons that fills the horizon. I remember seeing her in the garden, chatting with the other guests. She was one of those brittle little blondes whose bones seem always about to snap. I gather that some men find that sort of fragility attractive, even though she wore her hair short in a rather shocking and unfeminine style. She was laughing so gaily, it breaks my heart to think of it. I thought at the time that I should sit with her and gently explain the mores of Ottoman society so that she wasn’t tempted to transgress them.

Madam Rossini, the Italian ambassador’s wasp-tongued wife, came over and informed me quite tartly that Mary and one of the Turkish journalists, Hamza Efendi, appeared to be quarreling, as if I could do anything about it. I told her my impression was that they were simply having a lively conversation, probably about politics. Mary had quite definite opinions and seemed to take great pleasure in being provocative. Is it not remarkable that anger and joy should be so alike as to be indistinguishable? Whichever it was, I would have recommended moderation. At least then one knows what is what. But that advice is too late for poor Mary. I am not, of course, suggesting that she provoked her own murder, my dear. Only that she was of immoderate temperament.

Cousin Bernie sends fond greetings. I’m so happy to have had his company these few months, though I selfishly wish for more. He comes often to dine with us and his witty conversation is a blessing, as it draws father out. But with the exception of the opera, I rarely can persuade Bernie to accompany me anywhere. He spends all his time researching his new book on Ottoman relations with the Far East. Pera is a hive of social activity and it would be nice to have an escort, but it seems I will have to content myself with Madam Rossini and her brood. In any case, Bernie said to let you and Richard know that, despite some setbacks, he is pushing ahead with his project and hopes to have it done before the year is out.

Has your work at the clinic found more acceptance among the doctors, now that you have demonstrated your skill during the last epidemic? I suppose their reluctance to give you more challenging cases can be attributed as much to their suspicion of the French, in whose hospitals you trained, as to their conviction that our sex has limited talents. Still, my dear, you must persevere. Doctoring has always been your goal, and you have suffered much to attain the skills, even if denied the formal acknowledgement of a title. You must set an example so that other women see it can be done. I do so admire you. Would that my talents and courage were a fraction of yours.

I do what is within with my humble abilities to help Father. When I think what a child I was when I came to Stamboul! You should know that Father has requested again that his duty here be extended. He expresses absolutely no interest in going home to England. He is to be ambassador for at least another year. I admit to being saddened that neither he nor I have had the opportunity to get to know Dickie and Nate. By the time we return, they’ll be grown men! But I see no alternative. I must remain by his side until he is strong enough to return. At the moment, he rarely leaves his library except to attend to his official duties. When these include traveling to another part of the empire, he becomes particularly anxious, driving the servants mad by having them check and recheck his baggage and papers. So you see, he is still unwell. I take it as an indication of the depth of his love for Mother that he has taken her death so badly for so long. Here, at least, his duties keep his mind occupied, for there is much going on that requires the attention of the British ambassador.

Sultan Abdulhamid has taken offense at our government’s steadying hand on the reins of his rebellious Egyptian province. He calls it an occupation and, out of spite, has invited German advisors to his court, thinking to push us out, as if that were possible. The Ottomans need British support. If we hadn’t stepped in after they lost their war with Russia eight years ago and insisted that the San Stefano peace treaty be renegotiated, the sultan would have lost a great deal more to the Russians than a few dusty Anatolian provinces. Father has been trying to convince them for years that we have only their best interests at heart. We want the Ottoman Empire intact as a buffer against Russia, always fattening on its neighbors. You remember that Queen Victoria even sent bandages to the Turkish troops when they were fighting the Russians. What more proof of friendship can the sultan need?

Bernie’s presence here has brought back memories of those lovely summers together in England, when Uncle Albert and Aunt Grace brought him to meet his British cousins. Remembering again the sights and sounds of those summers brings me closer to you as well, my dear sister. Pray keep well and give my love and all the good wishes in the world to your husband and my precious nephews. My congratulations to Richard on his promotion at the Ministry.

I shall end here. The Judas trees are in bloom outside my window in Pera. The Bosphorus glitters like the scales of a sleeping dragon. As you can see, the quiet summer has given way to great, if distressing, excitement. Our paths in life are so complex, dearest Maitlin, and cross at so many unexpected intersections. Who would have expected, when we were children playing catch-me on the lawns, that someday I would be writing to you from what the Ottomans call The Abode of Bliss? Or that Mary should find her end here? Perhaps the Orientals are right when they point out, as they continually do, that we are all in the hands of a fate written on our foreheads before we are born.

I wish you, dear sister, and your family, which is my family, a straight path through life to your own abodes of bliss.

M
ichel stands inside the door to Kamil’s office, his feet slightly apart, hands loose at his sides, as if ready to take on an opposing wrestler. Kamil looks up and lays aside the file he has been frowning over. He waves Michel over to a comfortable chair.

“Two herbalists in the Egyptian Spice Bazaar sell dried tube flowers,” he reports, hunched forward in the chair, arms on his knees. “It’s not belladonna, but a related plant,
Datura stramonium.
The symptoms are almost the same. There’s quite a lively trade in tube flowers, unfortunately.” Michel grimaces. “In the past month, at least four people bought them, three women and an old man. There are other sources. It’s fairly common. It even grows wild outside the city walls.”

Kamil sits behind his desk, its dark, polished mahogany visible in neat avenues between stacks of letters and files. He drums his fingers on the wood.

“I had them track down two of the women,” Michel continues. “Both are midwives who use the herbs to cure bronchial troubles. The man too had a cough.”

“So this leads us nowhere.”

“There’s more. One of the midwives bought a large quantity. She sold them to several households around Chamyeri the week before the murder.”

“Anyone suspicious?”

Michel frowns. “Unfortunately not. The men checked every household and asked the neighbors. They verified that someone in each of the homes had been ill that week. That doesn’t mean someone couldn’t have taken some of the herb and used it for another purpose, but it seems unlikely. These are common village families. What contact would they have had with a British woman?”

“How was it administered?”

“We have to assume she drank it. The only other way to ingest the dried flowers is to smoke them, but that has only a mild effect and doesn’t dilate the eyes. The seeds are poisonous, but there was no sign that she died of something else before falling into the water. Perhaps it was given to her in a glass of tea. Too bad we couldn’t take a look at her stomach fluids,” he mutters.

“Where would such a woman drink tea? And with whom?”

“Not in a village. They wouldn’t even be able to communicate.”

“Chamyeri again. Both women were English governesses.” Kamil draws his fingertip along the edge of sunlight on his desk. “I wonder if anyone in Ismail Hodja’s family speaks English.” He looks up. “What about his niece?”

“Jaanan Hanoum?”

“She must have been there when Hannah Simmons’s body was found. She was a child then, of course.” Kamil’s lips tighten. “It must have been difficult for her. The young woman has had a rough time of it.” He shakes his head sympathetically.

Michel ignores Kamil’s evaluation. “Probably educated by tutors at home, like all women of that class. She had a French governess, but it’s possible she also learned English. Her father is one of those modernist social climbers.”

“He’s an official at the Foreign Ministry, I believe.”

“Yes.”

“But she lives with her uncle at Chamyeri, rather than at her father’s house.”

“Her mother went to live with her brother, the hodja, when her husband took a kuma. A modernist,” Michel adds sourly, “and a hypocrite. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

“The man is insane. Two wives.” Kamil shakes his head in disbelief. “He might as well hurl himself in front of a tram.”

They share an uneasy burst of laughter.

“When Jaanan Hanoum came of age, she moved back to the city, to her father’s house. It’s pretty isolated up there, no place for a girl looking to be married. But since her troubles this past year, she’s been staying at Chamyeri again.”

“Istanbul society can be unforgiving. Poor girl. I wonder how she’s doing.”

“She’s gone. I asked around the village yesterday. They said that three days ago Jaanan Hanoum’s maid had an accident. She slipped and fell into that pond behind the house, and almost drowned.”

“Women should learn to swim,” Kamil snaps irritably. “Just last week I heard of two seventeen-year-old girls that drowned in a shallow stream. One fell in and the other tried to save her. They panicked and pulled each other under. It’s absurd that women are kept ignorant of even the most basic survival skills.”

“Jaanan Hanoum pulled the maid out,” Michel continues, “but she lost her sight. She must have hit her head on a rock. Jaanan Hanoum is on her way to relatives in Paris, left early yesterday morning. Planning to study, apparently.”

Kamil thinks about this, flipping his beads around his hand. “I wonder if either of them knew Mary Dixon.”

“Coincidence?” suggests Michel.

“I have no faith in coincidences,” Kamil mutters.

“If they heard the news in Chamyeri about the Englishwoman’s death, maybe it was just one tragedy too many for the young woman.”

“Maybe. But I still would have liked to speak with her. Who is left up there at Chamyeri now?”

“Just her uncle Ismail Hodja, his chauffeur, the gardener, and some daily staff.”

“I can’t imagine any of them having tea with an English governess, much less drugging and killing her.” Kamil shakes his head. “What else is near Chamyeri?”

Michel stands and paces the room, thinking. The folds of his robe tangle his muscular legs like tethers on a horse. He stops suddenly.

“I wonder.”

“What?”

“The sea hamam. It’s below Emirgan, just north of Chamyeri.”

“Ah, yes, I’ve heard of it,” Kamil muses. “It’s built on a jetty over the water so people can swim in private.”

“More like wading in a cage rather than swimming. The Emirgan one is for women.”

“I misjudged our women’s progressiveness. What made you think of the sea hamam, of all things?”

“It’s a perfect place to meet if you want complete privacy. It’s closed at night, but it wouldn’t be hard to get in. In fact, it probably hasn’t been used since last year. It usually doesn’t open until midsummer. Other than a few villas and fishing settlements, there aren’t a lot of other possibilities. No one in the villas claims to remember an Englishwoman.”

Michel opens the door to the judicial antechamber, letting in a din of voices. He and Kamil push through the tide of plaintiffs, petitioners, clerks, and their assistants and emerge from the squat stone courthouse onto the busy Grande Rue de Pera. A horse-drawn tram clangs along the boulevard, carrying matrons from the new northern suburbs into town for shopping. As they wait for their driver to bring the carriage, Kamil surveys the early morning bustle of Istanbul’s most modern quarter. Apprentices balance nested copper tins of hot food and trays of steaming tea, hurrying toward customers waiting in shops and hotels. Carts rattle as vendors pull their wares along the cobbled street. Advertisements for their services, or for mulberries, green plums, carpets, or scrap metal, issue from practiced throats. Shop windows display the latest products.

This tumult, Kamil knows, is surrounded by the tranquillity of old Constantinople, the name many residents still use for their city, its Byzantine roots as capital of the eastern Roman Empire still everywhere in evidence. At one end of Pera is a pleasant cemetery beneath a vast canopy of cypresses where people stroll and picnic on the raised tombs. Embassies set in lush gardens line the boulevard. To the west, Pera overlooks the waters of the Golden Horn, which takes its name from the reflected fires of the setting sun. To the east, the land falls off precipitously to reveal the Bosphorus and the wide triangle of water where the strait and inlet merge to push into the Sea of Marmara. Cascading down the hillsides are canyons of stone apartment buildings and old wooden houses strung together by alleys meandering around the remains of Byzantine and Genoese walls, towers, and archways. Where the inclines are too steep, roads become wide stairways.

Kamil and Michel head north in an open phaeton, bundled against the wind. It is a long, dusty trip winding through the hills above the Bosphorus, but their driver knows the road well and keeps a steady pace. Kamil’s eyes graze the edge of the forest as they pass, alert for telltale colors and shapes of flowering plants, challenging himself to remember their botanical names. His fingers worry the warm amber in his pocket.

If he fails to solve this case, he will have the unpleasant task of reporting his failure to Minister of Justice Nizam Pasha. On the first Thursday of every month, Kamil must stand, hands folded before him, eyes lowered, in the drafty reception hall and wait for permission to speak. Nizam Pasha, seated cross-legged on a raised divan, listens in grim silence, regarding him with flat, unreadable eyes. When Kamil has finished, Nizam Pasha whispers to his subordinate, then dismisses Kamil with a careless wave of his fingers and a moue of the mouth, as if he has tasted something foul.

Only once has the minister spoken directly to Kamil, this during his first audience.

“Do not presume here on the cloak of your ancestors. You are naked in the sight of the padishah. Do not disappoint him.”

Nizam Pasha reports directly to the sultan, but his is only one vein among many pumping information into the heart of the empire. The secret police are the insomniac sultan’s eyes, watching, suspicious, invisible to all but a few in the palace. They spy on the police and the judges, as they do on all the other servants of the state.

Kamil reflects that his position as pasha and son of a pasha affords little protection from the secret police, who will punish not only those who displease them, but their entire families. The images of his unhappy but determined sister Feride and her young daughters flashes though his mind. And his silent father, captive to an inner world populated only by his dead wife. Kamil knows he must steer a delicate path between politically astute silence and the demands posed by proper judicial procedure and scientific investigation. This was never more important than in these uncertain days.

While the sultan wraps himself ever more closely in the cloak of religion by catering to the powerful sheikhs and leaders of Islamic brotherhoods, it is rumored that even among the sultan’s inner circle there are those who would like to see a representative government and an Islam compatible with modern notions of progress and reason. These are the men who pushed through the new legal system that has effectively taken away the power of religiously trained kadi judges and given it to magistrates, young men like Kamil with secular training and a preference for science and logic. In the new courts, magistrates argue cases before a state judge and supervise investigations. The formerly all-powerful kadis are restricted to handling local divorces and inheritance disputes, although a kadi still has a place on the bench in the Majlis-i Tahkikat, the Court of Inquiry, the highest court in the province of Istanbul. It is not surprising, Kamil thinks, that men like Nizam Pasha, whose education has been in religious medreses and who speak no European languages, should feel threatened by the magistrates under their jurisdiction.

He glances fondly at his companion in the phaeton. Michel has been his ally in puzzling through the logical complexities of many cases. His mood lifts as he remembers the pleasant hours spent listening to Ladino songs and Italian cantos in tiny clubs hidden in the alleys of Galata, Michel as his guide to the richly textured but insular world of the Jewish community. Jews and Christians had been the merchants, bankers, surgeons, and artists, the beating international heart of the empire for hundreds of years. Their presence here predates that of the Ottomans. Jewish migrants and refugees not only were gladly sheltered, but sought after by the sultans, who valued their education and acumen. The Sephardic Jews expelled in 1492 by Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of Spain were invited by Sultan Bayezid II to settle in the empire under his protection, with the following comment: “How can one call this king wise and sensible, when he beggars his own country and enriches mine?” Their descendants in Istanbul, like Michel, still speak Ladino, the Spanish of the expulsion.

On their free afternoons, Kamil and Michel meet in the café where they had become reacquainted, discussing the latest medical advances and scientific techniques in the books and journals with which the book dealers in the courtyard behind the Grand Bazaar keep them well supplied. Sadly, the young surgeon does not share his interest in botany, but is more interested in the volatile properties of plants, the secrets they are forced to release under duress.

After a while, Kamil leans his head against the padded leather headrest and allows himself to drift. He finds himself dwelling on a memory of Sybil lifting the bundle of the dead woman’s jewelry from her lap. Her hands were plump and dimpled as a baby’s. The tender feeling evoked by the memory surprises him. Then he realizes, they are his mother’s hands.

A
MID A RACKET
of gulls, they make their way along the creaking jetty to the small square structure at its end. The Bosphorus here has thrown up a long scallop of rough brown sand and rocks. The sea hamam is built on stilts over shallow water, reached by a long pier. Its bleached boards are bearded with sea moss. The door is latched but not locked. There would be nothing inside to protect. Kamil opens the door and enters a windowless room. There is a musty smell of swollen wood and unwashed laundry. The Bosphorus has no odor. It is too swift. It tears the briny air with it like a flag in a gale. But there is a sense of the sea inside the dark room, a feeling of motion, as if the room is tilting.

Kamil stops a moment to let his eyes adjust, then looks around. The entryway is blind, designed so that no one standing outside can see into the inner quarters. There is a rack for shoes, empty now. He moves to the door at the end of the hidden leg of the room. He does not hear Michel enter behind him, but knows he is there. This door leads to a platform around a square expanse of water. The sea sucks noisily at the flimsy pillars that hold the structure above the level of the water.

He clicks his tongue in disapproval. “I doubt this will be standing by midsummer.”

“They’ll repair it before they open. They can’t afford to have naked society ladies swept away by the current.”

Ringing the platform are wooden cubicles with low wide shelves that, in season, would be cushioned so that bathers could lounge on them and drink tea. Each cubicle is faced with a slatted double door that can be closed for privacy or flung open so that the occupant can face the captured sea and chat with other bathers.