An Evil Eye

101

He found, instead, the valide’s slave.

She put a finger to her lips and let him through the door.

“She’s sleeping, Yashim efendi,” she whispered.

Yashim nodded. He had momentarily forgotten the young woman’s name.

“Perhaps I should wait,” he said.

The girl’s head bobbed. Her eyes were wide. “It’s Hyacinth, isn’t it? He’s dead.”

“Yes, I’m afraid so, Tulin,” he added, remembering her name. For a moment he had felt like one of the old men. “He must have fallen on the ice. He died instantly.”

“Hamdullah,” the girl mumbled: by the grace of God.

“Hamdullah,” Yashim repeated. “He was an old man.”

She said gently: “I can tell the valide about it, if you’d prefer.”

“I don’t think so, Tulin. The valide has known Hyacinth for a very long time.”

It came out as a rebuke, more emphatically than he’d meant. He glanced across and saw a slight flicker in the girl’s eyes as she registered what he’d left unsaid. That she was less significant than Hyacinth. That she was less to the valide than Yashim himself.

He flashed her a brief, friendly smile. A girl of her age could scarcely comprehend what Hyacinth embodied: the shared experience, the years of enclosure and drama and ennui.

He turned from Tulin and stood looking into the fire that smoldered in the vestibule.

“Hyacinth was important to the valide in a way that might be hard to understand,” he began. He would have added that the old eunuch was like a lovely vase given to her years ago to keep, which was now lost and broken; but at that moment a bell tinkled faintly in the room beyond.

“Tulin! Tulin!”

She brushed past him swiftly, with a glance he found hard to interpret, and before he could say another word she had gone in to the valide.

Yashim sighed, wondering whether he should stay. If he waited, it was at Tulin’s pleasure: he could hardly blunder into the valide’s chamber unannounced. He cocked his head. He could hear the valide muttering something next door, and the lower, soothing tones of Tulin’s voice; but farther off he could hear, too, the sound of the muezzin calling the Friday prayer.

He started, surprised it had grown so late.

At the door he brushed past a damp cloak hanging on a peg; the coldness made him shudder. He noticed a pair of galoshes on the floor, surrounded by a little muddied pool of meltwater, and the sight suddenly brought tears to his eyes. It was, he thought, just the sort of little thing Hyacinth would have fussed over, in his punctilious way.

Yashim considered it the proper time to offer up his prayers.