The Janissary Tree

[ 132 ]

Was there a twist?” The valide smiled. “I like a twist.”

“Yes,” Yashim said. He thought of telling the unvarnished truth, but knew that it would never make a proper story. “The seraskier was rotten to the core. He planned the whole thing.”

The valide clapped her hands.

“I knew it!” she cried. “How did you guess?”

“It was a number of little things,” Yashim told her. He told her about the seraskier’s awkwardness in western dress, and the way he had claimed to speak French, and then denied it. He told her how eager the seraskier had been to spread panic at the murders, at which the valide had nodded vigorously and said that he was obviously being used. How, exactly, had the men been murdered, she wanted to know?

And Yashim told her.

He explained that his friend Palewski had overheard him speaking French—he thought it was French—at a cafe one evening.

“When he denied all knowledge of it! Ha ha!” The valide wagged a finger.

He told her then about the Russian, Potemkin.

“What a villain!” the valide snorted. “Ruined by his scar, no doubt. He must have been charming, in his way, to lure the fellows into his carriage. But all the same,” she added, putting the image of the wounded charmer to one side, and considering the practicalities, “what did the Russians have to gain by getting involved?”

And Yashim told her.

“They’re poised for a takeover of Istanbul,” he said. “Ever since the days of the Byzantines they’ve dreamed of the city. It was the second Rome—and Moscow is the third. They wanted anarchy in Istanbul. They didn’t care how it happened—a Janissary coup, the seraskier going mad and proclaiming himself ruler, anything. If the House of Osman was extinguished, imagine the consequences! They’re camped a week or so away. They’d claim to be restoring order, or to be protecting the Orthodox, or to be being sucked into the vortex one way or another, it wouldn’t matter how. Just so long as they could occupy the city and provide themselves with a reasonable excuse afterwards, when the European Powers started kicking up a fuss. The French, the English, they’re terrified of letting the Russians in—but once they’re in, they’d be here to stay. Look at the Crimea.”

“What brutes!” the valide breathed. The Crimea had been taken by the Russians, by a combination of threats and stealth and bloody war. “They backed the Greeks, as well!”

“Everyone backed the Greeks,” Yashim reminded her soberly. “But certainly the Russians lit the spark there, too.”

The valide was silent.

“To think that all this was hovering over our heads while I dealt with the kislar in the palace,” she said after a pause. “I thought that was a drama, but it was a sideshow.”

“Not really,” Yashim suggested. “If the seraskier’s plans hadn’t come off—and they didn’t, did they?—there would still have been a revolution, but for you. A counter-revolution, as they call it, going back to the old ways.”

“It was the girl,” the valide pointed out. “I’ve seen plays, you know. When I was young, I saw them in Dominique. If I set the scene, she performed the final act. Thanks to you, Yashim.”

Yashim bowed his head.

The valide reached for a bag by her divan, and pulled the string at its mouth.

“I’ve got just the thing for you,” she said.

She fished inside the bag and brought out a book with paper covers.

She held it up between her two hands and let Yashim read the title, emblazoned in red.

“Pere Goriot,” he read. “By Honore de Balzac.”

“There.” She held it out. “Quite disgusting, I’m afraid.”

“What makes you give it to me?”

“They say it’s all the rage in Paris. I’ve read it now, and it’s all about corruption, deceit, greed, lies.”

She patted the cover of the book and held it out to Yashim.

“Sometimes, you know, I am so glad I never got to see France.”