The Harem Midwife Read Online Free PDF Page A

“Try to stand up so the birth cake will come free.”
    Two slave girls helped the Sultana to rise. An attendant handed Hannah a bowl, which she placed between Safiye’s legs, and the birth cake fell into it with a gratifying plop. How messy this part was and yet how necessary. The cake must be complete. If it was torn or disintegrated, it meant segments left behind in the womb. Hannah flipped over the contents of the basin with a pair of ivory tongs an attendant handed her, feeling ridiculously like a soothsayer studying entrails for omens.
    “Good. We have it all out.”
    The slave girls lowered Safiye back onto the divan.
    When she was comfortably settled, Safiye reached for the baby and clasped her to her breast. Hannah smiled at the sight of the two of them, Safiye tearful and happy, oblivious to everyone’s disappointment that the child was female. The baby was pink as rose-water sherbet and breathing strongly now. A slave girl removed the soiled linen from the divan and brought in fresh towels scented with sandalwood with which to bathe Safiye.
    The Sultana was exhausted, every movement an effort, and barely able to cradle her tiny infant.
    Hannah said, “Shall I bind you now or would you prefer to wait?” In accordance with custom, the wet-nurse would suckle the child for two or three years. To prevent theSultana’s milk from coming in, Hannah must wrap strips of linen tightly around Safiye’s breasts. It would be painful for a few days, but then her milk would cease.
    “I prefer to wait. You have earned my mother-in-law’s gratitude as well as mine,” Safiye murmured, her eyes never leaving the baby’s face.
    So she had heard Kübra’s whispered thanks from the Valide. Even in the midst of her travail, Safiye was attuned to the actions of the woman who held the power of life and death over every woman in the harem.
    Hannah knelt next to Safiye and whispered in her ear, “You have a lovely princess. Next year I will deliver you a little prince. I am certain of it.”
    “I am happy with my daughter. I shall name her Ayşe. I shall have the pleasure of her company all of my life. Whereas a son? Who knows what might happen?”
    Hannah said, “It is a wise woman who is content to receive what God has bestowed upon her.” The Sultana was referring to the cruel custom of fratricide, which had been the practice of the Imperial House of Osman for a hundred and fifty years. When her son, Mehmet, if he survived, took the throne from his father, he would be obliged to have any younger brothers and half-brothers strangled to prevent a war of succession. It was a custom that appalled Hannah.
    She replaced her birthing spoons, her cloths, her herbs and potions and salves in her linen bag and rinsed Safiye’s blood from her hands. The baby was dozing in her wetnurse’s arm. In a short time, little Ayşe would be nursing contentedly.
    In forty days there would be a celebration in the hamam. Hannah would be invited to attend because she had delivered Ayşe. A duck’s egg would be broken into a bowl and rubbed onto the baby’s skin to accustom her to water and keep her safe from drowning.
    And yet, far more serious dangers than drowning faced the princess and, indeed, everyone in the realm as Hannah and every subject in the realm knew. The great Ottoman Empire was in as much peril as if an enemy army were camped outside the walls of the city. The Empire, the mightiest the world had ever seen, stretched from Budapest on the Danube River to Aswan on the Nile and from the Euphrates almost to Gibraltar. It included the Balkan Peninsula, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Wallachia. It encompassed the Black Sea to the east and the Red Sea, and the Persian Gulf to the south. Fifty million souls, freeborn and slave—Muslim, Jews, and Christians—lived within its realm, but without a healthy male heir, there would be civil war. The enemies of the Empire—most of Christendom, including Habsburg Naples and Sicily, and even the