Free Tears of Pearl by TASHA ALEXANDER

she try to influence anyone else?”
    “She had a friendship with Jemal that grew too close.”
    “I met him at Topkap?. Does he work at both palaces?”
    “He was sent to Topkap? because of Ceyden. As I said, they’d become too close.”
    “Who forced him to move?”
    “I am valide sultan,” she said, smiling. “No one in the harem balks at my orders. It is as if they are law.”
    “Why did Ceyden’s friendship with Jemal concern you?”
    “Because I didn’t trust either of them.” I opened my mouth to ask why, but she did not let me speak. “And for now that is all there is to be said on the topic. It does not, I assure you, have any bearing on the matter at hand.”
    “Did Ceyden make any other attempts to circumvent you?”
    “There would be no point.”
    “The sultan never makes a selection on his own?”
    “He could, of course, but petty amusement is far from his top priority. He has an empire to run, Lady Emily. He already has children and their mothers to contend with.”
    I tried to squelch the judgment rising through me. Children and their mothers, yet still in need of petty amusement? For a moment, I wished I could return to my romanticized view of the harem. Candor, I decided, was my only option. “Perestu, forgive me. This is all so very foreign. I cannot imagine sharing my husband.”
    “How long have you been married?”
    “Only a few months.”
    “A short time, and you are very young. But this is not relevant.”
    “I suppose not. I’m only trying to better understand Ceyden’s situation.”
    “The harem is a world of its own. She wanted to climb to the top of it. I would not let her.”
    “Are you glad she’s dead?”
    “Her existence made no difference to me. It was, occasionally, amusing to watch her unschooled attempts at seduction.”
    “I thought you said she wasn’t close to the sultan?”
    “No, only to Jemal. She loved him.”
    “But the eunuchs . . .” I was now full in territory that repelled, fascinated, and confused me.
    “Are not true men,” she finished for me. “Quite right, but some of them are men enough.”
    A thousand questions leapt to my lips, but I could not bring myself to ask a single one. “I didn’t—”
    “You are unused to this sort of openness. Such subjects are not forbidden to women here, Lady Emily. Ceyden was not entirely incapable of using her charms, limited though they were, to her advantage.”
    “Could Jemal wield influence with the sultan?”
    “He would like to think he can influence me.”
    “Is he right?”
    “Sometimes,” she said.
    “Who was watching Roxelana and me in the park? One of the guards?”
    “We’ve covered quite enough for today.” She gave me a narrow smile and left the room.
    I spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing slaves and concubines, many of them stunning Circassians, the stuff of harem legend in Western tales. These women, brought from the Caucusus Mountains to be sold in Constantinople, were treasured for their beauty—pale, luminous skin, mesmerizing bright eyes, and lustrous hair, blond or dark. Everyone to whom I spoke agreed Ceyden had done whatever she could to gain Abdül Hamit’s notice, but her lack of success in doing so kept her from threatening the positions, or desired positions, of her compatriots. The similarities not only in substance but in verbiage of what they told me made it apparent that someone had coached them, and well. Only a handful of them spoke much English, so Perestu translated for the rest. I had no idea whether she accurately reported to me what they said.
    “Jemal must be subjected to extensive questioning,” I said to Colin as we sat on the balcony outside our bedroom that evening. The view stretched nearly to Topkap? in the south, the hills of the city piling on top of one another as they rose from the Bosphorus. Houses and buildings formed a dense tapestry above the waterline, flat and peaked roofs obstructing all but more roofs behind them, as if each