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Kelebek had been here too, and the Odalisques. She hesitated. ‘Mistress, when I came here, not one hour ago, you were insensible, your looks were dire, you were sleeping and waking fitfully and crying out.’
    Nur Banu’s plump, kind face looked at her quizzically. ‘Feyra, what are you talking about?’
    ‘You do not recall?’
    Feyra’s dread returned as she examined her mistress closely. The bright eyes, sparkling like brilliants. The bloom of too-livid colour on the cheeks. The blonde hair now curling damply around the face like a halo. The complete absence of memory of the episode that had gone before.
    Feyra turned and looked about her. She walked down the dais again and her eyes lighted on the iced fruit sitting innocently on the marquetry table. She drew the
Gedik
to her. ‘Kelebek,’ she hissed sharply in the girl’s ear. ‘Did my lady take any food or drink this morning?’
    ‘Not yet. But it is still early … She has eaten nothing but a little fruit that the Dogaressa brought her.’
    ‘Did anyone taste it first?’
    Kelebek’s eyes were as round and green as the grapes. ‘Why, no, Feyra; you were not here. But I thought it would be all right; it was a gift from the Dogaressa, she is a friend of my mistress’s heart – a beautiful lady!’
    Feyra approached the abundant bowl of fruit, her feet heavy with dread. The ice pooling in the silver bowlcrackled slightly in protest as it melted. Her eye was captured once again by the grapes. They looked delicious, tumbling over the edge of the bowl: round, and glittering with a bloom of dew. For the second time in as many moments Feyra thought that something had too much colour in it.
    She picked a grape from its stalk and broke it open with her fingernail. She walked to the window and held the ruptured fruit to the sun. There, nestling in the jade heart of the grape, was a dark clot where the seed should have been. She gouged out the clot and spread it on a white tessera of mosaic on the windowsill. Then she reached for her medicine belt and pulled out an eye-glass with a brass surround which she fitted in her eye. She peered and poked at the black smear. She could see, once the clot was spread, a collection of tiny seeds, each one the shape of a star anise. Her stomach plunged.
    Poison.
    Not just any poison but the like of which she had seen only once before. Haji Musa had once intercepted an attempt on the old Sultan’s life, poison found in a gift of a jug of English ale. The doctor had shown her the star-shaped spores, taken from the fruit of the Bartholomew tree found in the hills around Damascus, and told her to take care; for the spores were one of the deadliest poisons known to man, tasteless, odourless, and with no antidote. The victim would feel the ill effects for half of one hour, then recover once as if healthful again, and after this would deteriorate rapidly as the spores multiplied in the organs, crowding the liver and lights, pulping the innards to mulch.
    Fascinated by such a powerful poison, Feyra had begged a lame merlin from the Sultan’s falconers and fed the hawksome of the spores. He greedily pecked them down. Then Feyra sat on the stone floor of the Topkapi mews and watched him. For half an hour he had fallen to the floor and rolled and flapped, squawking in distress. Feyra watched, dispassionately, then the bird had miraculously recovered. For the following hour the merlin had been well, and lively; even his foot seemed no longer lame. But before Feyra’s legs had stiffened on the stone floor he had fallen over once again and turned black, glass-eyed and gasping until she had picked him up and wrung his neck. He lay in her hand, warm and surprisingly light, his head dangling. For a moment Feyra had felt a misgiving; this hawk would never rise above the dome of the Sophia again. Then she had hardened her heart and sliced him open, there and then on the pavings with a scalpel from her belt to discover his innards black with