Two Empresses Read online

  I raced frantically through the twists and turns of the maze-like palace. Soon I was hopelessly lost. When I met a man in one of the corridors he flung up his arm to shield his eyes and turned his back and hurried away from me. I didn’t understand why, and I didn’t know the words to ask him for help.

  “Sir, please!” I ran after him, but that only made him quicken his steps. “Harem!” I kept desperately repeating, hoping he would understand that I was lost and trying to find my way back there. I didn’t know where else to go; even if I were able to find my way out of the palace into the city proper my coloring marked me out as so unusual I feared the attentions of any man I might encounter.

  I don’t know how long I wandered through that great, magnificent maze, more luxurious than anything I had ever seen, before a pair of black eunuchs came and shepherded me gently back to the harem and my divan in the dormitory. I was so relieved to see it that I flung myself down upon it and wept.

  Lâle came to me a little while later.

  I sat up and hastily dried my tears. Euphemia David’s snake charm fell from my handkerchief, onto my lap. I caught it up and clutched it tight in my hand, praying that it would give me courage.

  “Have you brought the sack?” I asked Lâle.

  “No,” he answered, “I have come to take you to the Sultan.”

  “No!” I stood and stamped my foot. “I will not go! I will not be that old man’s concubine!”

  “You will go to him,” Lâle said calmly. “Dry your tears and fix your face. If he sends you from him in disgrace before this night is over, I will have the sack ready, waiting for you when you come back. If the morning light finds you still in his favor, you will begin learning our ways, and our language.”

  He took a step toward me and clasped my face hard between his hands and stared deep into my eyes.

  “Do not be a fool, girl; your future will be as golden as your hair if you but let it! You will never go home again, whether you please the Sultan or not. The life you knew is over; consider it dead and buried! Your family has probably already given you up for dead. Even if you could get word to them, to reassure them that you are still alive, do you think it would make them feel better to know where you are, and what you are now—a concubine in the Sultan’s harem? Most Christians would account it a fate worse than death; some would rather see their daughters dead. . . .”

  My breath caught in my throat and almost choked me. I had never thought of that! My poor parents, how they would weep; they would be inconsolable if they knew I was living but lost to them in this most shameful and dreadful manner. Their torment would be constant; they would never be at peace. From convent girl to concubine, it would surely kill them. They must never know. I would rather keep my silence and let them mourn me as dead than torture them with the truth. The Aimee they had known and loved had been lost at sea, so it was not exactly a lie. I was about to be reborn as someone new; soon I would even be given a new name, and a new tongue to speak. Mama, Papa, keep that girl alive in your hearts, I prayed. Think of her fondly, once in a while gaze upon her picture, and always remember how much she loved you.

  Lâle gave my shoulders a shake, to get my attention. “Think about that later, when you have time! Meanwhile . . . your new life begins tonight! Or . . . you can resist the Sultan and die for it. Even if he should choose to be merciful and spare your life, yours would be a living death and this place your tomb until misery drives you to take your own life or else you waste away grieving the opportunity you scorned. For I tell you now, once lost it will never come again; there are no second chances in the harem. Or you can be sensible and wise, please the Sultan, and prosper; if you do, you will reign here, and you might someday rule. Just because you are a slave does not mean you have to be powerless. You might find someday that you hold the reins of power right here in your hand.” He tapped my palm.

  When he touched my hand and spoke those words I gasped and stepped back as though he had struck me. Though he did not know it, Lâle was echoing words spoken by a voodoo sorceress long ago. I sank down onto the bed and uncurled my fist and regarded the golden serpent with ruby glass eyes swallowing its own tail. I remembered the words Euphemia David had whispered to me the night before I sailed away to France when she had given me this talisman.

  “In my end is my beginning,” I whispered tremulously.

  I took a deep breath, willing myself to be strong, and then I stood and went to the mirror to straighten my hair and repair the damage my tears had caused to my maquillage. Impulsively I knelt, said a quick prayer, and crossed myself. God give me courage and forgive me for what I am about to do!

  I squared my shoulders and held my head up high, like I was about to enter the grand ballroom at Versailles, not that terrible Turk’s bedroom, and imperiously held out my hand to Lâle.

  “I am ready now.”

  “Yes, you are!” He smiled and took my hand and triumphantly led me down the Golden Path. That was what they called the long corridor of gleaming gold-flecked stone, lit by ivory candles clasped in golden fists, that led the way to the Sultan’s bedchamber. Every woman in the harem dreamed of walking it . . . except me. I felt like a condemned prisoner walking the last mile leading to the scaffold. I both wanted and never wanted it to end.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Sultan’s bed was the biggest I had ever seen; I doubted any French king ever had one finer. It occupied fully half the room. It was set low as beds and couches were in this country, but unlike the backless, armless divans the women slept on in the odalisques’ dormitory, it had a framework and canopy just like a four-poster bed, though more opulent than any I’m sure that had ever existed. The posts were carved like braided, entwined vines gilded silver and gold from which rubies, emeralds, and sapphires the size of hens’ eggs and carved like tulips bloomed. It was hung with stiff gold brocade curtains encrusted with diamonds and pearls, ruby, emerald, and sapphire brilliants all set within whirls and swirls of silver embroidery. The curtains were open in the center, to reveal the Sultan sitting cross-legged on his mattress, waiting for me.

  He was still wearing the same rich robe, turban, and jewels as when I was presented to him and I wondered if I was expected to undress him. I had assumed he would have already changed to his sleeping attire or else be nude in his bed, waiting for me to join him. Lâle had said nothing of this when, outside the door, he had given me my instructions. I was to kneel before the Sultan, kiss his feet, and then advance upwards, all the way up his body, until my lips met his.

  “Even in Paradise,” Lâle explained over my appalled and outraged protestations, “Muslims believe that a woman’s place is beneath the soles of a man’s feet. In token of this belief, to show your humility and respect, you start at the Sultan’s feet.”

  “You’d best go see about that sack!” I said tartly as I flounced past Lâle in an indignant rustle of pink taffeta and irately swinging gold tassels. I just wanted to be done with all this. I didn’t want to die, but they were probably going to kill me anyway, so I might as well get it over with while trying to preserve some degree of dignity.

  Instead of entering gracefully, like a lady, I flounced in like a sulky, pouting child. The lamps were burning golden and low and the incense formed a dense blue-gray cloud. I heard the music of lutes and harps and was startled to see a pair of musicians sitting in the shadows.

  “Don’t worry; they cannot see you. They are blind,” said a kind voice in the same oddly accented French that Lâle spoke. I was so grateful that the Sultan spoke my language I almost wept. At least this awkward seduction would not have to be conducted in pantomime!

  That was when I whirled around and had my first sight of the weary Sultan sitting cross-legged on his magnificent bed. Abdul Hamid was sixty-four, jaded and weary. He had the eyes of a man who thinks he has lived too long and seen too much. His beard and hair were dyed a startling black, but this only served to emphasize his age and the deep lines hewn into his face rather than encouraging the illu
sion of youth. His hands, the skin thin and crinkled like crêpe, bearing the dark spots of age, rested in the lap of his regal robe, seemingly exhausted by the weight of the enormous rings, great slabs of gemstones set in heavy gold, that he wore on every finger. There was a general air of weariness about him, like he carried the weight of the world upon his shoulders and was only waiting for the day when he could at last lay this burden down.

  I stood and stared and then recollected myself and bobbed a quick curtsy.

  The Sultan chuckled. “Come here,” he said.

  I took a tentative step forward as the musicians finished one song and began another. I paused and glanced back at them.

  “Did you blind them? Or order it done?” I asked. I was suddenly overcome with curiosity. I had heard that some of the songbird sellers in Paris believed that blind birds made better singers, so they carefully stuck pins in their eyes. I thought it was terribly cruel and hated to think that there were men in this world who would do that to another and that I might have the misfortune to be standing before one of them.

  “No, they were born that way,” the Sultan said patiently.

  There was an amused smile on his lips as he held out his hand to me.

  I knew what must be done, so I might as well do it and get it over with; brooding about it only made it worse. But I certainly wasn’t going to go groveling on the floor to him. Pride aside, my stays were laced so tight they would never allow it.

  As my hand landed lightly as a hummingbird in his the Sultan’s smile broadened. “Ah, how beautiful you are!” he sighed. “A living woman of gold and alabaster with sapphires for eyes!”

  In that moment I realized that unlike any other concubine who had ever come to him before, he was looking up at me instead of down. In all the years that women had been coming to Abdul Hamid’s bed, first as a prince, and then as a sultan, I was the only one who had approached him on her feet instead of crawling on her knees.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, and curtsied again so he would not think me insolent, if he didn’t already, since we both knew I really should be kneeling.

  “Lâle told you what to do?” he asked.

  Now the subject was out in the open. I almost felt relieved.

  “He did.” I nodded.

  “So why do you not do it?” Abdul Hamid asked in such a way that I wasn’t sure if he was curious or cross.

  “Well . . .” I nibbled my lower lip thoughtfully, then decided to throw all caution to the wind. Boldness, I decided, would be either my destruction or my salvation. “It could be that I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees, or my stays are too tight to allow me to grovel about on the floor like a pig after truffles.” As I spoke I touched my torso, tracing the lines of the whalebone beneath the taut taffeta bodice in case the Sultan, like his ladies, was unfamiliar with corsets. “Then again”—I smiled—“it might be both; a woman mustn’t give away all her secrets upon first acquaintance, Your Majesty.” This time I made the perfect slow and graceful curtsy; after the nine years they had spent drilling me in this routine day after tedious day, the nuns would have been so proud of me.

  Abdul Hamid threw back his head and laughed until tears ran from his dark almond eyes. “How marvelous!” he cried, and gleefully clapped his hands. In that moment, the years seemed to fall from him, and I glimpsed the boy that still lived deep inside the old man.

  “Lâle said I should endeavor to please the Sultan,” I said. “I hope in this small way I have succeeded by giving him the gift of laughter.”

  “And fearlessness,” Abdul Hamid added. “You are not afraid of me.”

  I didn’t dare disappoint him by telling him that I was, so I just smiled. Brazen it out, I kept telling myself.

  “Come, sit with me”—he patted the mattress beside him—“if you can manage it,” he added, smiling as I struggled with my unwieldy skirts. “Tell me of yourself, and this”—he flourished his hand to take in my attire—“thing you are wearing. And do not speak of dying; you are so very young and have so much life yet ahead of you; for you the end of the road is not even in sight.”

  “Ah, but what sort of life, Sire?” I sighed, glancing around at this dimly lit damask-lined room with the subdued glimmer of gold everywhere my eyes lighted upon—in the weave of the carpets and the wall hangings, in every fixture and ornament, the lamps swaying overhead and the incense burners. It was like being trapped inside a perfumed jewel box.

  “That remains to be seen,” the Sultan said. “As does what is beneath all this.” He batted playfully at my pink flounces. “Generous hips are believed to be a sign that a woman will be fertile and give her husband many sons, but surely your hips are not quite so generous as this.” He indicated my panniers.

  Now it was my turn to laugh. “Not even by half, Sire. It is the fashion in Paris. The Queen wears them even wider than this; they have had to have all the doorways widened and raised at Versailles to accommodate her skirts and hair.” I touched my rose-and-plume-festooned pompadour and raised my hand to show that Marie Antoinette wore hers even higher.

  Abdul Hamid shook with laughter. “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard! A beautiful woman has no need of such foolish adornments.”

  I was surprised by how easy it was to talk to him, and by how much I enjoyed it. He asked many questions and wanted to know everything about me. My life in Martinique and at the convent school in France—my battle of wills with Mother Angélique particularly amused him—the voodoo and black magic that existed side by side with the Catholic faith on my native isle, and Parisian society and its customs and ever-evolving fashions.

  He was keenly interested in King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and that beautiful lady’s flamboyant foibles and fashions. King Louis was said to be bookish and almost painfully shy and to prefer clock and lock making to royal pageantry and affairs of state, and to be lost without his spectacles. These descriptions of him reminded Abdul Hamid of his nephew, and heir, Prince Selim. I learned then that in Turkey the throne does not pass from father to son in a direct line but is instead inherited by the eldest surviving male. Abdul Hamid did have a son, Mustafa, the young boy I had seen seated with him on the dais, but the throne would only be his when death claimed his cousin Selim.

  Abdul Hamid was kind and wise, with a wry sense of humor. He put me at ease and made me laugh too. I found it impossible to hate him or think of him as a cruel barbarian, a Terrible Turk, holding me captive. And it made me feel good to know that I had lifted the mantle of weariness from his shoulders and brought a light back to his eyes. As we sat and talked, sipped sherbets and nibbled sweetmeats, that jaded and world-weary air that had been almost the first thing I noticed about him disappeared entirely.

  “You replenish me,” he said, and I accounted it a very great compliment. “You peel the years away from this old husk”—he touched his chest—“and make me feel almost young again.”

  “Sixty-four seems not so old to me, Sire,” I said. “Euphemia David, the Queen of the Voodoos on our island, is said to be over one hundred years old, some say she is nearer to two hundred, that she was still a young woman when their own grandparents danced to the drumbeats, and I have known slaves well into their eighth decade, many of them still quite spry.”

  He smiled into my eyes and reached out to caress my cheek. I did not avert my eyes or flinch, not even when his fingers strayed down to toy with the golden ringlets falling over my shoulder, onto my breasts. He touched me gently, respectfully, almost reverently. I did not feel sullied or cheapened at all, nor any of the self-hatred I had always been led to believe a woman of easy virtue and low morals must feel. I didn’t feel wrong at all, only right.

  At last, the Sultan asked, “Will you stay the night with me?”

  I knew what he was asking and what was expected of me. I wondered what would happen to me if I said no. Was there any chance he would take pity on me and send me home to Martinique? Or would all his good humor vanish and a vengefu
l barbarian rise up before my eyes, ready to cut me down or entomb me alive? I thought of the weighted sack and wondered if Lâle already had it ready, waiting for me. But what surprised me most was that I didn’t really want to see what the bitter fruits of refusal would be; it was only idle curiosity with no serious intent behind it. Of my own free will, I wanted to stay and find out what would happen if I said yes.

  I struggled to my feet, hampered by my heavy skirts, almost knocking over a gilt pitcher of sherbet with my panniers, and turned my back to the Sultan, leaving him wondering, just for a moment, if I was about to walk away. I glanced back over my shoulder and smiled as I drew his attention to the pink laces crisscrossing the back of my bodice. “I cannot manage this on my own.”

  “I shall be happy to help you.” Abdul Hamid smiled as he came to me. “Tell me what to do; I have never before played tiring woman.”

  He put his arms around me and kissed the curve of my shoulder. “As novel as this costume is”—his hands glided over my tightly cinched waist, then followed the lines of my panniers, taffeta trembling and rustling with every touch—“I think you shall look even more alluring in Turkish clothes; and they are much more easily shed. And you will be more comfortable, and less clumsy too. Your hips will not be putting pitchers in peril every time you turn around.”

  Layer by layer, with an abundance of shared laughter, we managed to divest me of my French finery. As each garment was laid aside I told him the name of it. And when it was my turn, with nervous, trembling hands, to help him disrobe, he told me the name of each garment in Turkish.

  When we were naked as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, kneeling on the bed, he was patient with me, and so very kind. I kept my eyes wide open all the time. Mother Angélique would have been appalled!

  As I lay beneath him, a maiden no more, but a woman who had just experienced the most exquisite pleasure—he had taken such care with me!—Abdul Hamid smiled down into my eyes and kissed my brow. “Nakshidil,” he whispered tenderly. “Do you know what that means?”