The Janissary Tree

[ 57 ]

It was already dark when Preen got back to her boarding house. Not that she had done very much that day: the action had taken place last night, at a stag-night where alcohol had been served and Preen had agreed to take a drink herself, after the dancing. It broke one of her cardinal rules, but even cardinal rules are made to be broken, she’d thought, as one drink became two and the groom-to-be asked her agitated questions about the wedding night.

So she’d ended up staying over, sleeping late, and waking up with a hangover. The other guests had left long since, taking the groom with them: she had a faint recollection of hearing stifled laughter and groans in the early morning, before she rolled over and went back to sleep. A very fat Armenian woman, sniffing with disapproval, had made her some coffee, and she had spent the rest of the day at the baths with a towel over her head.

She’d stopped for a pastry on the way home, but the hangover had taken away her appetite and she only nibbled at the corner before she asked the vendor to wrap it. It was in her bag now, but really she only wanted to go upstairs and sleep. She pushed the door, and her landlady rapped immediately on the lattice.

“Message for you,” she screeched. The flap dropped, and Preen saw her hand shoot out clutching a folded note.

“Thanks,” she said. “May I have a light?”

“Urgent, he called it. It was that gentleman of yours who came by the other day. Nicely spoken. Here you are.”

She means Yashim, Preen thought as she took the candlestick. As usual, the candle was only a stub: the landlady was careful with things like that. She wondered if she should turn around and try to find Yashim right away: she certainly wasn’t going to be able to read the note, but she didn’t want the landlady to know that.

Perhaps, if she hadn’t been standing at the foot of the stairs with the candle, she would have gone to look for Yashim. Or if the landlady hadn’t added, in what passed for a confidential undertone, that she’d be grateful if everyone would remember not to take food upstairs—the smell in her room had disturbed the help.

Preen climbed the stairs slowly. At this time of year there was a perpetual draught in the old house and the stubby candle needed shielding. On the second floor she turned left down a low corridor past two doors, both shut and silent within, to reach the tiny, crooked flight of stairs that led to her own door. Gradually she mounted, following the sharp twist she never liked because it somehow put her at odds with the rest of the house, shutting her in. She glanced up and saw the door. In the narrow stairwell the shadows flickered like a troop of wild monkeys.

She stopped and sniffed. There was a smell, just as the landlady had said. For the first time she wondered what it might be. Perhaps a rat had died under the floorboards. She shuddered, and put out her finger.

And that was something else she didn’t like about those stairs, about that door: having to reach into the dark hole to finger the latch on the inside.

It was like sticking her finger into a dark mouth.