Angels of Istanbul, page 2
He pointed uphill at something. Frank couldn’t pick out the exact building in the meringue of white walls and cupolas, the pink and grey and green arched roofs. “That’s the hospital he built, and that is the monastery that Bishop Ivireanul built in imitation of him. He had a vision of us as a nation, and he turned that vision into architecture—influenced by the West, your people, the French, the Saxons—rooted in the history of Byzantium, but with our own particular style. Dignified. Forward-thinking.”
He waved sideways at a large, crisply built square building, whose lower story of columns around an inner room reminded Frank of Greek temples. It was built of a ruddy pink brick, the colour of sunset in the mountains. The second story repeated the arches of the columns in a decorative band of white pilasters. Then an overhanging roof waterproofed with verdigrised copper was topped with a tall cupola pierced with a lantern of windows. “That is the institute he built for our scholars to begin the study of natural history. Pretty, yes?”
“It is,” Frank agreed, although pretty wasn’t quite the word. Elegant would be better. Elegant would convey the restraint, if not the reassuring solid strength of the style.
“The scholars never got through the door,” Radu went on, with a sidelong glance to make sure Frank was getting the point. “It’s an inn now. As is the palace of Mogoșoaia. Brâncoveanu was denounced to the Turks, and he and all his sons were executed in Istanbul, his property seized by the state.”
“Brâncoveanu was a traitor.” The official paused between one footstep and the next, cast the observation over his shoulder mildly for all its force. “The sultan crowned him, and he repaid that trust by promising his support to the sultan’s enemies. But I should know better than to expect a boyar of this country to understand anything about loyalty.”
Radu stopped in the middle of the street, and the Jews, who had their stalls in this part of the city, looked up with a well-honed instinct for trouble, and stepped back into their doorways.
“The only reason I am not killing you for that insult is that you are beneath me.”
The official raised the ends of his lips in an unimpressed smile. “My lord, I meant no insult. You must know that, from one horizon to the other, the inconstancy of the boyars is a well-known fact. If you can teach me otherwise, I will hear you.”
Frank remembered what Radu had told him about Vlad Dracul—that his first move in establishing his power as voivode had been to kill off his nobles. He wasn’t surprised, therefore, when Radu could only muster a sullen, “And that has always been our right,” in defence. No Magna Carta here, eh? Or at least not one that stuck. What a country!
“Not anymore.”
They walked in silence after that, passing monastery walls and gates. The roar of city bustle—wagons in the streets, horses and oxen hard driven, iron wheels on hollow timber, street seller’s shouts, and distantly a Roma’s song underscored by a wailing violin—went on beneath ringing bells and the susurration of thousands of monks’ sandaled feet. Here and there, plain chant rolled from an open door as great-bearded clergymen in black returned like crows to the roost.
The palace was in the old style, built like a fortress out of grey stone. It seemed very medieval, for all the gilding and the out-of-place, spindly Versailles furniture. There was history in every flagstone underfoot, a history that spoke of long, long ages of warfare, of the readiness to fight and die. Used to the well-proportioned, airy buildings of Cambridge and London—Enlightenment buildings that spoke of reason and balance—Frank found the heavy arches claustrophobic, and the low, white-painted stone walls uncomfortably brutal.
This building was a machine of war, but it was also a theatre. As they entered the final room, Radu nodded to him to indicate that he should fall deferentially behind. He slumped, trying to de-emphasise his height, to hold himself as if he were invisible.
It worked. When they came out onto the floor of the great, bare warehouse of a room, the gazes passed over him indifferently. They fixed on Radu as though the leading man in a well-rehearsed drama had just walked in. The impression was reinforced by the fact that the room was divided like a theatre. In the corner a golden throne, as spiky as a cathedral, held a youngish man with a smooth, round face, a square fur hat, and a coat of heavy velvet so stiff with gold embroidery it might have served for armour.
Beneath the throne, a stagelike dais ran along one wall. There sat the boyars who were part of the prince’s counsel, all of them agleam with jewels and fat with self-satisfaction.
On the floor, in what might be the audience pit, the second rank of aristocracy was drawn up in almost military lines. They, too, were like a hothouse full of butterflies, their silken kaftans contrasting strangely with their beaver-skin hats. Next to this world of opulence, Radu’s travelling clothes, though they were of fine green wool lined with wolf fur, were so out of date, so aggressively plain, that they might have been an intentional insult. More than one onlooker stiffened at the sight of him as though they had been personally rebuked.
Radu reacted to this sudden metaphorical chill by standing up so straight he could have been used as a caryatid. He strode to the foot of the throne and looked up, silver eyes as cold as his reception. Oh, don’t, Frank thought, when the pause stretched on long enough to make it doubtful whether Radu would kneel at all. Was he here to destroy his family in the easiest way possible? To go out in a blaze of defiance and take the Văcărescus with him? It would be like him.
The prince raised a bushy eyebrow. Whispers hissed from the far corners of the room. Frank tried not to think too hard about what being impaled would feel like. And then Radu knelt, punctiliously, as though the excellence itself was a rebuke.
The faces around Frank had all iced over, motionless, their reactions as unseen as winter seeds beneath the snow.
“You were not present at our coronation,” said the prince, in a light, dry voice. His face was soft, rounded and comfortable, but his eyes were as sharp as the strigoi’s fangs.
“No, your highness.”
“We received your gift and your apologies by proxy, and under advisement from our council, we allowed this.”
“Your Highness is most gracious.”
“I am.” Voivode Mavrocordatos gave a wry smile. It was, Frank thought, a meeting between past and present, and Radu represented the past. His was the old, feudal style of the fifteenth century—where power was based on force and threat of force—passed down directly from those who had lived in it. Prince Mavrocordatos, though, was a politician, quiet-spoken, insinuating and thoroughly in charge. A power perhaps more deadly because it no longer showed its face plainly.
“You were told you could make your obeisance to me at your earliest convenience. That was in 1737. It has taken you five years to find it convenient.”
“Yes, highness.”
The prince leaned forward, elbow on his knee. Light hit the back of the golden chair and threw a halo around him. “In fact the only reason you are alive at all is that you did not come to the coronation of Mihail Racoviţă either, nor my father, nor that of Grigore Ghica. You are not partisan, at least, in your neglect. What have you been doing up there in your mountains that was more important than your duty to the Porte?”
Some of the frozen faces on the dais twitched, with an emotion Frank couldn’t read. Was it possible they knew? That they too were complicit in hiding the monsters?
“I have been containing a plague, Highness.”
“And now the plague is cured?”
Radu returned the urbane smile. On him it looked less like a scalpel, more like a sword. “After many years, it has finally left our region. That being so, I took the chance of leaving too.”
Perhaps it was the hint of a lie that made the prince’s smile broaden—perhaps it was that Radu was really not convincing at all, and Mavrocordatos had learned to appreciate a vassal so easily read. He raised his head and clapped for a servant.
“I will accept your fealty. You will stay here and make yourself available. If, by the end of the year, you have not proved false, we will find a small position for you to fill. In the meantime . . .”
The servant put a carved chest into the prince’s hands. From the clink and slither, and the way the servant slowly straightened up afterwards, it held quite a weight of coin. Then Mavrocordatos threw back the lid and the burst of light was the colour of his throne. “Take it.”
Radu scrambled off his knees with a hiss. “I don’t need to be bought!”
It took the prince’s laughter to set free the guffaws that were being held in check, but when Mavrocordatos sniggered, a howl of amusement rolled across the chamber, leaving Radu bright red in the middle of the floor.
“Please do not think”—the prince’s soft words silenced the amusement as if he’d waved a hand and cut it off with their heads—“that you can raise the price by some pretence at principle. I know you people better than you know yourselves. Money is all you understand. Take it, then, and remember that I am the fountainhead from which it came. I expect as much loyalty from you as you would give to the man offering the largest bribe.”
The servant lifted the chest from the prince’s hands and held it out to Radu, who slowly paled as he stood, eyeing it the way another man might eye the gift of a poisonous snake. Frank pitied him, at that point. Raised to be lord of all he surveyed, raised to think himself above the normal run of humanity as a predator is above prey, to come here and be so cruelly reminded that he was but an inexperienced pawn in a game of greater men? Radu was proud, but he clearly didn’t know what to do.
As Frank watched the reactions of the courtiers on the dais, one of them caught his eye, nodded at the still tableau where Radu had still not taken the money, and made a tiny shooing gesture with the tips of his fingers. Frank thought it was good advice, and though it went against his every instinct to be the only one to move in that petrified crowd, someone had to. He took a deep breath, pushed himself off the drop—walked forward a step and leaned down to whisper in Radu’s ear. “He’s ordered you to take it. If you don’t, it will be an obvious act of disobedience.”
From the tightening of the corner of Radu’s mouth, he understood this part perfectly. And Frank, though he had little pride of his own, had lived with his father long enough to know that could make a man’s blood boil. He changed tack. “He’s not bribing you . . . not really. He’s testing you. Do you know how to take an order from your prince? Thank him. Take it—you can throw it away later.”
Radu looked up at this, and met the prince’s interested gaze. Then he smiled—coldly. “Your Highness is most generous.”
He took the money, and when waved away, stalked out holding it as though it burnt him. Frank followed, trying not to pant as though he had literally been fencing, and both of them collapsed to a seat in the first empty anteroom they came to.
Silence fell between them, the sounds of discussion and business and rushing feet in another world outside in the corridor. An occasional cough behind a shut white door at the end of the room said that someone important was at work in there, but here in the waiting room there was time and peace.
Radu closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more humiliated,” he said at last. “You are a visitor to my country. I should not have bared her secrets or her shame to you.”
“I am your secretary,” said Frank, rather stung by this. “And I may not have been born in this country, but she’s been kinder to me than my own. I intend to love her for your sake.”
Radu sighed and sat up straighter, clearly rested enough, ready to go on. “I said ‘secretary’ off the cuff, because I could not think what else to say. But if you want the position, it’s yours.”
Frank laughed, half a release of tension and half a feeling that he had been floating downriver for a long time and had finally come to shore. “I saved your life in there, you know.”
Radu bowed his head, but there was a wariness in his expression. “You did.”
“So can I be your librarian too?”
A soft exhalation as Radu laughed in return, and they were left grinning at each other. Recovered, mostly. “You value my life remarkably little.”
This, Frank thought—though he found it as difficult to judge Radu’s sense of humour as Radu did his, a matter of cultural differences—was meant as a joke. He treated it as one. “If I could spend the rest of my life repairing and translating old books, I would think I was in paradise.”
“Your ambitions are as commendably small as your actions are wise.” The sonorous voice from the doorway startled them both. A man round as a fool’s bladder came in preceded by his stomach, trailed by a cloak of sky-blue silk, lined in sable. It was Frank’s friend from the dais, his expression now open and kindly. He had cut his beard into a severe square, and his homely face was lopsided, with two curved duelling scars puckering one cheek, slicing the end off his right eyebrow. His eyes were the same colour as his cloak.
Despite his friendly air, Frank and Radu both rose automatically at his obvious authority and bowed without thought or regret.
“Decebal Sterescu,” he introduced himself, “by God’s grace stolnic to this court. Come, let us walk a little.”
He punctuated this request by taking Radu by the arm and steering him out of the door, leaving Frank to follow. They threaded their way through passages that opulent tapestries, wood panelling, and golden mirrors could not make less dank. Chandeliers glittered incongruously overhead, though the ceilings were so low that the candles all left sooty marks on the brightly coloured vaulting, and from the massive walls and heavy arches, painted saints regarded them solemnly with crossed arms, green faces, and flat, uncompromising eyes.
Outside, it was a relief to emerge into the warmth of late spring. Sterescu walked quickly for such a large man, oddly buoyant on his feet, guiding them down flagged paths into a walled garden of knot work and cedars centred on a mirror-smooth pool with a wide lip of silvery-grey stone. There he puffed to a halt and sat, making ripples in the reflective surface with his fingertips. “You made quite an impression, young man.”
Radu looked for a seat and, unable to find one, settled for leaning against one of the statues of the four seasons that marked the garden’s cardinal points. Frank supposed he was not entitled even to that amount of comfort, so simply folded his hands and tried to blend in with the brickwork.
“I’m aware.” Radu grimaced. “I would be glad to be banished back to my lands and told never to show my face at court again.”
“Oh.” Sterescu smiled. “What’s even better is that apparently you don’t know what that impression was.”
“A bad one.” Radu rubbed two fingers beneath the brim of his hat.
“Not at all. Shall I tell you? There we all are, drawn up in our silken Turkish finery, lounging on our divans, worrying if we’re five minutes late to the latest fashion, agonising over whether the tone of our recent ‘good morning’ to the prince could be taken as less than perfectly respectful . . . and there you are, dressed for riding, ready to die for honour and choking on a lie? You made us all feel old and ashamed.”
“I didn’t—”
“What’s better is that you did this under the prince’s nose. Either he accepts that you are as you appear—blazing with a rather antiquated honesty—or he suspects you are fiendishly clever enough to use that appearance knowingly, to be playing a deep game.”
“Whereas actually I’m simply a rustic up from the country and finding it hard to adapt.”
Sterescu laughed again, and Frank joined him, rather bitterly, because he had not forgotten that Radu did have secrets, deadly ones, and—whatever Sterescu’s conclusion about the game being played here—he would be very far off the mark.
“Or that’s what you wish us to think.” The big man cut off any objections with a raised finger. “No, I only wanted to thank you for reminding me that we were warriors once, and to invite you to a ball at my house on Friday night. Come meet everyone in a less daunting setting. I can promise a spectacle such as you’ve never seen before. Imagine who I’ve lured to entertain us . . . Gabrielle Giroux, the great illusionist of Versailles! It was difficult to get her to travel so far, but my daughter persuaded her in the end. No one can say no to Ecaterina.” He rose and dusted himself off, his robe making him resemble a great ball swathed in a golden curtain. Sapphires sparkled in his hat. “So you will come?”
“I would be honoured.”
Sterescu darted another meaningful glance at Frank, but this one he couldn’t translate. “Have you decided what to do with the money?”
“I thought I would use it to buy a present, which I could give to the prince.”
The older man laughed again. “Ironic,” he agreed, “but a little too pointed. You could . . . endow a monastery. Build a church.”
Frank was struck suddenly with the thought of the peasants he’d seen, driven off the land, piling all their furniture on wagons and heading for Transylvania, where the taxes were less punitive and they could actually afford to eat.
“Send it home,” he said, astonished it hadn’t occurred to anyone before. “Give it to your people to pay the taxes with. You’ll be giving it back to the prince, in essence, while doing good for your country at the same time.”
The boyars grinned together, and at that moment Frank could see why Radu reminded Sterescu of a vanished youth—there was a fleeting resemblance between them, a marker of a long-shared history. “Perfect!”
“Your servant’s name . . .?”
“Forgive me.” Radu rubbed his smile off with an open hand and winced. “This is the honourable Frank Carew, the son of the English Earl of Hungerford. He has honoured me by agreeing to take a place in my household, but he is my companion, not my servant.”
For all Frank claimed to have no pride, being overlooked and dismissed from a conversation had rankled. This warmed his heart.
It also warmed Sterescu’s expression. “Ah, I should have known that no mere servant could be so wise. Forgive me, sir, and of course you must come to my party too.”
