The Winter Thief

12

Despite the early hour, Kamil rode first to Feride’s house. He had to know whether Huseyin had come home. Deep shadows beneath Feride’s eyes revealed that she hadn’t slept. She was dressed in the same gown she had worn at dinner the night before. Elif sat beside her on the sofa and held her hand. Kamil thought Elif must have stayed the night. He imagined the steep streets of Galata, where she lived, had been made impassable by the storm.

Two anxious servant girls waited just inside the door. Glasses of tea and a plate of breakfast chörek rested untouched on the table beside the sofa. A fire roared in the grate.

“Kamil!” Feride jumped to her feet. “What are you doing here so early?” She turned to one of the servants. “Tea, and bring some breakfast.”

“I can’t stay long, Ferosh.” Kamil could see the tension around her eyes. The furrow that had appeared between her eyebrows after their father’s death had deepened. “Is Huseyin here?”

“Has something happened?” Her voice was steady, but he could hear her anguish moving like water beneath a thin sheet of ice.

He wasn’t sure what to tell her. In truth he knew nothing. “Do you know where he went last night?”

Elif stood also, her slight figure in a crumpled shirt and trousers. Her feet were bare. She looked at him questioningly, not wishing to upset Feride further by asking outright.

Kamil indicated with a shake of his head that he didn’t know, but there was a moment of understanding between them. She took a deep breath and put her arm around Feride.

“I think he has a mistress,” Feride said, her tone brutally frank, as she pushed Elif’s arm away.

“Nonsense, Ferosh,” Elif countered. “You’re jumping to conclusions.”

Feride looked unconvinced, the pain evident on her face, but she grasped Elif’s outstretched hand.

With a look, Kamil tried to communicate to Elif his gratitude that she was there to support his sister.

“Does he often stay out late, Ferosh?” Kamil asked. “Has he stayed away all night before?”

“He’s rarely away in the evenings without telling me where he’s going. A few times, especially in the last month, but he’s never stayed away all night without letting me know.”

“What’s different about the past month? Did something happen? Have you had unusual visitors?” Or a fight? Kamil wondered silently.

Feride thought, then shook her head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. Huseyin’s friends come and go, but I know most of them.”

The servants appeared and set down two trays of hot tea, freshly baked bread and pastries, cheese, olives, and honey.

“Business people? Tradesmen? Servants?” Kamil didn’t know what he was searching for. An alternative to death, he supposed, as an explanation for Huseyin’s absence. A business deal, a mistress.

“I wouldn’t know. My housekeeper handles all of that.”

They stared abstractedly at the food, but no one made a move to take anything.

Elif spoke up. “The vintner came a few weeks ago.”

“He comes once a month to take Huseyin’s wine order,” Feride said dismissively.

Elif looked as if she might say something more but closed her mouth.

“Tell me more, Elif,” Kamil coaxed.

“They were in Huseyin’s study and…”

“Really?” Feride exclaimed. “But he always sees tradesmen in the receiving room at the side of the house. What were they doing in his study?”

“Huseyin was trying to convince him of something, but I didn’t hear what. I thought the man said the name Rhea. You were out, Feride, and I had come back for some painting supplies I left behind. I noticed the vintner’s carriage when I left, so I assumed it was him.” She shrugged. “But maybe it was someone else.”

“Rhea.” Feride rose and walked to the window. She held aside the drapes and stared out into the gray shimmer of the day. “Rhea,” she repeated. “I’ll get hold of the vintner and find out what this is all about. They’re all the same, those Greeks,” she said, her voice breaking. “The women have no shame.”

“You’re upset,” Elif responded, taking her arm. “I may have been mistaken. They might have been talking about a new type of grape.”

Feride went to the desk in the corner of the room and picked up a piece of paper. “I sent a messenger to Doctor Moreno’s house. You remember him, don’t you, Kamil? He was a friend of Baba’s. They used to play chess together. He’s a surgeon at Yildiz Palace now. I thought he could find out whether Huseyin had been held up at the palace.” She handed Kamil a note. “Here’s his response. I know it doesn’t look good for me to be chasing my husband across the city, but I have to know.” She closed her eyes and shook with the effort of keeping her emotions under control, then opened them again. “Doctor Moreno is discreet.”

Kamil remembered Doctor Moreno, a tall Jewish surgeon with graying locks that hung like women’s curls down either side of his face. He had long, graceful fingers that picked up a chess piece with as much delicacy as a scalpel. Moreno’s note said that he hadn’t seen Huseyin for several days and knew nothing about a business meeting the night before. He placed himself at Feride’s service and said he would make some inquiries and come by in the morning, but that she shouldn’t worry.

Kamil wondered at the cavalier way men treated one another’s disappearances. It was as if every man was assumed to have a secret life and was expected to disappear into it from time to time without having to account for his absence. He hoped Feride was right. The tragedy of Huseyin’s keeping a mistress was nothing compared with his own worry.

“Where does Huseyin go during the day?” Elif asked.

“I don’t know. I suppose he must have an office at the palace. Do you know, Kamil?” Feride turned to him, a puzzled frown on her face. “I never realized until today how little I know about what Huseyin does when he isn’t at home.”

Kamil wasn’t surprised. Muslim men of Huseyin’s class never sullied their hands directly with commerce but guided the acquisition of wealth and power by Christian and Jewish merchants from the lofty heights of a bureaucratic admiral’s bridge. They did business with the help of many informal agreements rarely recorded or shared with their fellows, and certainly not with their wives. “He has an office in the Great Mabeyn,” he said. “That’s the building at the palace where the sultan meets with his staff and visitors.” Kamil had seen Huseyin’s enormous office and staff, appreciably larger than his own, but had little idea what exactly his brother-in-law did there. Perhaps the gold medal had belonged to another loyal subject of the sultan’s, Kamil thought, and it was premature to tell Feride about the fire. His momentary relief left him ill at ease. He knew he didn’t believe it.

Kamil took a sip of tea and encouraged Feride and Elif to eat something and then sleep until Doctor Moreno arrived. They both looked haggard. He saw in Elif’s face the shadows that had been there when she had first appeared on Huseyin’s doorstep after her harrowing escape from Macedonia.

Neither woman had any appetite, and Kamil left them sitting on the sofa, waiting. What he wanted to do was ride directly to Eyüp and check the hospital for Huseyin. Composing himself with difficulty, he spurred his horse toward the bank official Swyndon’s house instead.

After Kamil had left, Feride excused herself and went to her dressing room. There she opened an almost invisible door, painted white to match the wall. It led to a small, oddly shaped room that appeared to have been added by the architect of the mansion without a thought to function. Feride closed the door behind her. This was her space, where she could take off the social mask she was required to wear. The servants entered only to clean and keep the mangal coals alive so the room was always warm. Its single window looked out onto the top of a chestnut tree. She settled into a high-backed armchair. A footstool and a small table were the only furniture in the room. She watched the pink-breasted doves huddle on the ledge by the warmth of the slightly open window.

She thought about the early days of her marriage. She had seen Huseyin twice at formal meetings set up by their families after he had made his intentions known. She had agreed, even though she had two other suitors. What was it about Huseyin that had attracted her? He had rudely looked directly into her eyes and then smiled. What had he seen there? She was shy, and people had mistaken that for submissiveness, an attractive quality in a bride. Only Huseyin had seen what she needed, when she herself hadn’t known. She blushed when she remembered their first weeks after the wedding, the mad dashes about the rooms. He had laughed and licked her up and down like a cat, and finally she had turned on him and bitten him with her small teeth. They had laughed until tears came. After that Feride had ceased to be quite so afraid, as long as Huseyin was beside her.

She tried to imagine her husband licking another woman’s skin, but the image remained indistinct, a flickering shadow that presaged a darkness she knew she couldn’t bear. Worse was the thought that he would leave her, push her aside for a second wife. Or that he would die. For a brief moment, she considered that it would be better for him to die than to reject her, but at that the darkness descended. There was a frantic burst of flapping at the window as the doves fled, leaving behind a soiled windowsill.