An Evil Eye

5

Elif and Melda reached the stairs at the end of the corridor and scampered up them, giggling and breathless.

At the top they had a corridor to themselves. They chose a door and burst into a room that overlooked the Bosphorus.

A woman was shoveling the contents of a small table into a bag.

They all stared at one another. Then the woman screamed and Melda sprang at the woman and slapped her on the cheek.

“Stop that! Stop it! What are you doing with that bag?”

The woman tightened her grip on the bag. “This is mine! Get out!”

Melda made a grab for the bag. The woman yanked it back and the table went over.

“Now look!”

Elif snatched at the woman’s scarf. Melda kept her eyes on the bag. “What’s in there? What are you stealing?”

They heard running footsteps in the corridor and one of their girls put her head around the door, then withdrew it again.

The woman with the bag seemed to have trouble breathing. Her eyes bulged and her face went red. Elif gave the scarf a last savage tug and Melda went for the bag. The woman staggered and let it go. “It’s mine,” she choked.

“Drop it, auntie. If it was yours you’d have packed it by now. Go on, get out!”

They shoved the woman into the corridor. She was wringing her hands, but there were two of them and there wasn’t much she could do. Melda and Elif put their backs to the door and watched the handle rattle.

After a while they heard more people running in the corridor. The handle went still.

The two girls turned to each other and burst out laughing.

Later they looked into the bag. It was pathetic what those women tried to carry off-right down to their kohl, and half-used bottles of rosewater, and little paper talismans. The woman they’d surprised had obviously thought she could get away with the coffeepot! Even if she’d been the coffee kalfa, it didn’t belong to her. The rest of the stuff in the bag was almost certainly stolen, too. All that money-and she wasn’t even pretty.

Elif shrugged. Those women were old and their sultan was dead. She thought of the woman they’d frightened on the floor below. Perhaps they should have seized her room.

It is our turn now, she thought, as she examined the scarf. It wasn’t even torn.

But Elif had made a serious mistake.

The woman on the floor below was the lady Talfa. She was neither particularly young nor particularly pretty. But she had no plans to leave. She took no orders from the chief black eunuch.

The lady Talfa was not one of the late Sultan Mahmut’s slaves.

She was his sister.

New girls could come in. Her nephew Abdulmecid could move into his new palace chambers. But for now, and always, this harem was her home.

She stamped her foot. Where was Bezmialem? The sultan’s mother should have been here, taking control of her son’s girls. The young valide.

Talfa glared down the corridor and saw a familiar figure in a brown cloak.

“Yashim!” she cried. “Can’t you do anything? Can’t you stop all this-this noise?”