Free The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) by Jason Goodwin Page B

clacking at her underwear and pinching her cheeks. In spite of everything, Yashim, I don’t think of you as—well, at least, it is not your place. But you may tell her that I will be ready to receive her in an hour.”
    He found Natasha in her apartment, sitting on the divan and still in her outdoor clothes. Only the bonnet lay beside her, its ribbons dangling.
    “Then I must dress,” she said wearily. “She wants entertainment—but I don’t dance the troika.”
    “At her age,” Yashim said quietly, “the valide has seen a great deal of the hot and cold of fate. Now, I think, she wishes to avoid melancholy.”
    Natasha tilted her head to one side. “If you say so.” Her voice was flat, bored. Why, it was as if Natasha Borisova had come all this way to turn the empire over in her mind, like a piece of china in the bazaar.
    “You have come with an object, I understand that,” he said, “but you are also the valide’s guest. Her first foreign guest, I believe. Perhaps you didn’t know that?”
    Natasha said nothing.
    “I just want you to understand that the valide has done something quite unusual. Of course she’s being watched by—everyone. The other ladies. The eunuchs. The gossips. That’s the nature of palace life. And you can make it easier for her to help you. I hope you don’t think I am being too crude.”
    She gazed at him levelly, for the first time. “It’s what we Russians understand,” she said heavily.
    She put out a hand and groped for the ribbons of her bonnet on the bed.
    Yashim took a step forward. “Mademoiselle Borisova—I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean … Please don’t cry.”
    The tears had sprung from beneath her closed eyes. “Oh, Monsieur Yashim, oh, oh, oh!”
    He spotted a pile of lace handkerchiefs and passed her one.
    “Forgive me. I thought—” He was about to say he thought she was dissatisfied, and that Istanbul gave her no pleasure, but she broke in first, wiping her tears away with her fingers.
    “I can’t dance!” She hiccuped through her tears, shaking her head. “Can’t sing! I know I am plain, and not elegant, and everyone wants me to be a beautiful princess who knows how to sing and be witty and I don’t know how … I don’t know … oh!”
    She went to the window and stood there, covering her face with her hands, her shoulders heaving.
    Yashim bowed his head. “Among the Ottomans, Natasha,” he said, “princesses, like pashas, are not only born: they are made. It’s not like Russia or France, where everyone defers to ancient families. The only ancient family in the whole Ottoman Empire is the family of Osman bey, the founder of the dynasty. The greatest princess that ever lived was Roxelana, the wife of Suleyman the Magnificent. She was Russian like you, captured in some raid across the Don. No aristocrat by birth, and she certainly spoke no French.”
    She shrugged miserably.
    “And you don’t have to win a sultan’s heart, either.”
    She pulled a rueful face. “It’s just as well.”
    Without her bonnet, now that Yashim could see her face properly, she was not bad-looking, with those sloping eyes and high cheekbones.
    “Who knows? In another age…” he said gently, and smiled. She glanced around and blinked.
    “The valide asked you here, Natasha, because she liked the girl who wrote her those letters. Not some princess poised to wield her charms: women like that, remember, have surrounded the valide all her life. She saw through them all, long ago. Your letters are clever, and funny. You draw beautifully. You wrote to her in your own voice, not with the affected lisp of some Circassian beauty.”
    “Are they so affected, then?” She almost smiled.
    “Terribly. Lisping is the fashion, and mincing, and speaking in a sort of high-pitched trill. And a lot of malice underneath, believe me. Flint, beneath the honey.”
    He drew her down onto the divan, to sit beside him, and held her hand.
    “I wrote to no one else,” she said, with