Free The Sultan's Seal by Jenny White

the following comment: “How can one call this king wise and sensible, when he beggars his own country and enriches mine?” Their descendants in Istanbul, like Michel, still speak Ladino, the Spanish of the expulsion.
    On their free afternoons, Kamil and Michel meet in the café where they had become reacquainted, discussing the latest medical advances and scientific techniques in the books and journals with which the book dealers in the courtyard behind the Grand Bazaar keep them well supplied. Sadly, the young surgeon does not share his interest in botany, but is more interested in the volatile properties of plants, the secrets they are forced to release under duress.
    After a while, Kamil leans his head against the padded leather headrest and allows himself to drift. He finds himself dwelling on a memory of Sybil lifting the bundle of the dead woman’s jewelry from her lap. Her hands were plump and dimpled as a baby’s. The tender feeling evoked by the memory surprises him. Then he realizes, they are his mother’s hands.
     
    A MID A RACKET of gulls, they make their way along the creaking jetty to the small square structure at its end. The Bosphorus here has thrown up a long scallop of rough brown sand and rocks. The sea hamam is built on stilts over shallow water, reached by a long pier. Its bleached boards are bearded with sea moss. The door is latched but not locked. There would be nothing inside to protect. Kamil opens the door and enters a windowless room. There is a musty smell of swollen wood and unwashed laundry. The Bosphorus has no odor. It is too swift. It tears the briny air with it like a flag in a gale. But there is a sense of the sea inside the dark room, a feeling of motion, as if the room is tilting.
    Kamil stops a moment to let his eyes adjust, then looks around. The entryway is blind, designed so that no one standing outside can see into the inner quarters. There is a rack for shoes, empty now. He moves to the door at the end of the hidden leg of the room. He does not hear Michel enter behind him, but knows he is there. This door leads to a platform around a square expanse of water. The sea sucks noisily at the flimsy pillars that hold the structure above the level of the water.
    He clicks his tongue in disapproval. “I doubt this will be standing by midsummer.”
    “They’ll repair it before they open. They can’t afford to have naked society ladies swept away by the current.”
    Ringing the platform are wooden cubicles with low wide shelves that, in season, would be cushioned so that bathers could lounge on them and drink tea. Each cubicle is faced with a slatted double door that can be closed for privacy or flung open so that the occupant can face the captured sea and chat with other bathers.
    They begin methodically to search each cubicle, Kamil moving clockwise and Michel counterclockwise around the hamam.
    “There’s a mattress here,” Michel calls. Kamil comes over to look. It is an expensive one, stuffed with wool and covered in flowered cotton. On a high shelf, he finds two tea glasses, of cheap quality but showy, decorated with crudely painted gold flowers. Michel gets his leather bag.
    “What do you have in there?”
    “Things we might need.” He pulls out a squirming sack and extracts a black and white kitten. “A quick test. I dilute any residue, then put a drop of the liquid in his eyes; if they dilate, we know we have datura.” He pushes the kitten back into the sack and cinches it.
    Kamil is amused by the surgeon’s innovation. He hands the glasses to Michel, who examines them thoroughly.
    “Too bad,” a disappointed Michel comments. “No residue.”
    Kamil is looking over the lip of the bathing platform.
    “This isn’t very deep. I wonder if there’s anything down there.”
    “If I wanted to get rid of something quickly, what better way than to drop it into the water? The current would take it away.”
    Kamil lies on his stomach and looks under the