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“If that is true, then I should rather die!” said Ramiz, looking at the floor. He really was more handsome than the Major.

The Governor Pasha made a show of being angry and disappointed with this declaration, then left the cell. The next morning, after half a day’s journey on an army rowboat, Ramiz and his men were released in one of the coves in the north of the island. Ramiz had no consuls to protect him, so the Governor had judged it sufficient to set him free in this manner. As proof of his repentance and confession, they had also had him sign a piece of paper with half a page of hastily scribbled text on it. Ramiz had been released on the condition that he must never return to Arkaz again, but both sides knew that this was a promise that would never be kept.

CHAPTER 30

Doctor Nuri, Doctor Nikos, and two Greek doctors tried to look for an antidote and make the patient regurgitate the poison, but their attempts proved fruitless. After vomiting blood, Doctor Ilias fell into a coma and later died in Theodoropoulos Hospital, one day after ingesting the rose-and-walnut biscuit. To prevent the kinds of discussions that would be harmful to the quarantine effort, the true cause of death was concealed from the whole island, so that only the doctors knew that it had been poisoning, and Doctor Ilias was buried with the plague victims.

The “exposition”—as Princess Pakize herself called it—of this murder-and-poisoning plot features prominently in the Princess’s correspondence from this period. Adopting in some ways the same logical approach her uncle Abdul Hamid favored, Princess Pakize, “like Sherlock Holmes,” sat at her writing desk and sought, together with her husband, to unravel and chronicle the secrets of this hidden assassination from a distance.

When her husband had first described to her how Doctor Ilias had been poisoned by a biscuit and told her of the dog and the bay horse that had also been poisoned and killed by the same biscuits, Princess Pakize had remarked: “Once again, everything comes back to my uncle and to the line of succession.” Sultan Abdul Hamid may have been the single topic she and her husband most frequently discussed, but the second was surely the palace’s proliferating population of indolent princes. Our readers must not think that we are straying too far from our story if we too take a moment now to examine the reasons behind this phenomenon.

Any man who wedded a sultan’s daughter, a princess, would soon find that because he had married into the royal family, his life would inevitably come to resemble the lives of the idle, aimless princes of the Ottoman dynasty. Doctor and Prince Consort Nuri had no intention of giving up his profession, yet he couldn’t help but feel that no matter how hard he tried to resist, he would eventually be compelled to lead the same hollow, vacuous existence those princes led.

Abdul Hamid had already awarded the title of Pasha to the husbands he had found for the three sisters—his nieces—he’d separated from their father, gifting them each a mansion on the shores of the Bosphorus and arranging for them to receive generous stipends. Like her sisters’ and Abdul Hamid’s daughter’s waterside mansions, Princess Pakize and her husband’s too was in Ortaköy. Her sisters’ husbands had already reduced their duties at the palace. Soon they would give them up completely. Their newfound position in the dynastic order made it awkward for them to be given orders or tasks or be assigned any other kind of duty. It was a strange quandary, and one that derived, of course, from centuries of Ottoman history.

During the first five hundred years of Ottoman rule, there were three main avenues for the edification of Ottoman princes: the palace school, the army, and provincial government. But with both academic and military training growing increasingly westernized, the administration of local provinces shifted away from an older system to a new order where these roles were assigned to salaried governor pashas selected from among specially trained army officers and bureaucrats, and careers in the army and in local government were no longer available to Ottoman princes. During the early years of the Ottoman Empire, the throne was supposed to be passed on from the father to eldest son. But sometimes one of the other sons, ruling perhaps over Trebizond or Magnesia, would try to upend the order of succession and take the throne for himself, gathering his armies to march to Istanbul before his older brothers could get there. This tradition often led to civil war, so that eventually princes began to be kept in Istanbul. But this in turn led to certain incidents that would later be considered cause for great shame, most notably Sultan Mehmed III’s order—on the day he ascended to the throne—to have every single one of his nineteen brothers strangled to death, until it was eventually decided that sultans would no longer pass on the throne to their son but to their eldest male sibling instead. But like Abdul Hamid, most sultans were suspicious by nature, and so in an effort to prevent not just their one or two siblings who were closest in line to the throne but all their other brothers and their nephews too from meeting with dissenters and becoming involved in coup attempts, they took to physically confining their rivals to so-called princes’ quarters inside royal palaces, all in a concerted effort to sever them altogether from life beyond the palace, Istanbul, and the rest of the world.

Throughout the course of Ottoman history, one of the most famous of these confined princes was Princess Pakize’s older brother, forty-year-old Prince Mehmet Selahattin Effendi. Just three months after happily watching his father Murad V take the throne, the then fifteen-year-old Mehmet Selahattin Effendi was imprisoned along with his deposed father. For twenty-five years since, he had been stuck inside the same palace, living a life of captivity. Like his father and sisters, he played the piano. He filled journal after journal with aphorisms, memoirs, and theater scripts. Unlike other princes, he was neither lazy nor uneducated. He enjoyed reading, if only occasionally—just like his father, whom he venerated. With Princess Pakize, he was always amiable and loving. The Princess, who knew that he was not like those other idle, spoiled princes, would sometimes see from the expression on his face as he stood surrounded by his captive sisters, other princesses, footmen, and servants, just how desolate he was, and she would feel sorry for him. In the palace that served as his prison, the Prince had his own harem (more than forty beautiful women of varying ranks and titles, each vying for his attention), and seven living children.

Princess Pakize was particularly concerned that her husband should not become “anything like” one of these isolated, ignorant, and lazy princes. One reason for this was that she was proud of her husband’s quarantine achievements and of the fact that his name was known—if not too widely—in the international medical community. What her enemies also noted was that the Princess, who was not nearly as beautiful or striking as either of her two sisters, was merely being realistic and preparing herself for what would most likely be a fairly plain and unextravagant existence. The third reason for her concern was the tales Princess Pakize had heard from her sister about the princes of the Ottoman dynasty.

Her two older sisters Hatice and Fehime had both left their father’s home before she had and entered the harem in the Yıldız Palace, where they had made friends with their uncle’s unmarried daughters and been introduced from a distance to the princes themselves. The royal dynasty’s daughters and princesses of marriageable age would gossip freely about these princes, just as they did about the sons of pashas and viziers. After the supposed abolition of slavery and in the wake of the gradual westernization of Ottoman court customs and harem life, most of these princes and potential future sultans were no longer interested in following the many centuries of tradition which might have seen them wed a Circassian or Ukrainian slave girl brought in from some distant province and expected instead to marry women who had been given European-style piano lessons in palace harems, spoke French, and read novels. On the other hand, these sophisticated young women, with their good breeding and westernized education, found those pampered princes to be coarse, uninformed, and dull witted. (Indeed even in that period very few “matrimonies” took place between sultans’ daughters and Ottoman princes.) Teaching these princes anything was very difficult; to strike a young man who might one day sit on the Ottoman throne and become the caliph of four hundred million Muslims was unthinkable, and the Ottomans were only just beginning to discover how to discipline students without beating them.

Princess Pakize’s sisters would often laugh and occasionally bristle with fury as they traded stories about these princes, who had, like them, spent their lives confined inside royal palaces, and who (so the sisters believed) were too afraid of Abdul Hamid to propose to them. Here was Osman Celâlettin Effendi, seventh in line to the throne, who had locked himself up in his mansion in Nişantaşı and devoted twenty-three years of his life trying to figure out how to “be himself,” an endeavor which he considered to be more important than seizing the throne, and which finally cost him his sanity. Prince Mahmut Seyfettin Effendi, who was rather close to the front of the line of succession, had lived for twenty-eight years without once setting foot outside his quarters in the Çırağan Palace, so that when he saw, for the first time in his life, a sheep standing in the palace’s central courtyard, he shouted “Monster!” and summoned his guards. (Others told similar stories about the sisters’ own brother, Mehmet Selahattin.) Then there was Prince Ahmet Nizamettin, who was not only exceptionally vain, but had also taken out substantial loans by promising, despite having no chance of ever sitting on the throne, that he would soon pay the lenders back with interest, until there had been so many complaints about his failure to do so that he had had to be reprimanded by the Sultan. But the most feared and the most odious of all the princes was of course Abdul Hamid’s fourth-born son, Mehmet Burhanettin Effendi. Composer of the official “Naval March,” which he had created at the age of seven, Burhanettin Effendi had for a time been the Sultan’s favorite son, always sitting next to him in the royal carriage during public processions to Friday prayers, and Princess Pakize’s sisters, who were much older than he was, dreaded this spoiled young princeling’s practical jokes and cruel impertinences, suspecting the boy’s father to be behind these provocations. Meek and timorous Mehmet Vahdettin Effendi reported in writing to Abdul Hamid with information on the other princes (his brothers and cousins) in exchange for gifts of money, land, and houses (and would end up on the throne himself seventeen years later). Then there was the acutely sensitive and introverted Necip Kemalettin Effendi, who loved art and had no interest in romancing women. Finally there were those like Mehmet Hamdi and Ahmet Reşit Effendi, who were close to the bottom of the order of succession and free to roam around Istanbul as they pleased, but were nevertheless all too quick to feel aggrieved and claim that the Sultan was following their every move. Even these princes who knew they would never have the opportunity to sit on the throne insisted that the Sultan might still attempt to poison them and studiously avoided shopping at the Yıldız Palace Pharmacy.

“Did you ever go to that pharmacy?” asked the Doctor and Prince Consort.

“I stayed at the Yıldız Palace for a month before our wedding. We rarely left our quarters,” said Princess Pakize. “Anyway there was a second pharmacy at the palace only for our and for my uncle’s use. You see, my uncle too was afraid he might get poisoned, just like those princes were. Of course no one knew more about this subject than Bonkowski Pasha—may he rest in peace—for he was the one who ran this private pharmacy, the laboratory, as my uncle sometimes called it.”

“Pharmacist Nikiforos might know something about it too!” said her husband.

It was almost midday before Doctor Nuri had the opportunity to discuss the matter with Bonkowski Pasha’s old friend Pharmacist Nikiforos.

He had first seen him that morning among the doctors and other pharmacists gathered around Doctor Ilias’s bed in the Theodoropoulos Hospital. Every now and then Doctor Ilias would lift his head from his pillow and cry out for his wife in Istanbul: “Despina!” He had just been given an antidote whose formula had been devised jointly by the doctors and the pharmacists. The consensus at the time had been that the antidote seemed to be bringing the patient some relief.

They met five minutes later at the Pharmacie Nikiforos, just a few steps from the Theodoropoulos Hospital.

“You once told me that a long time ago Bonkowski Pasha prepared a report for our beloved sultan on the kinds of herbs he might be able to grow in the Yıldız Gardens and use for making poisons!” said the Doctor and Prince Consort, getting directly to the point.

“I thought of that too when I found out that Doctor Ilias had been poisoned,” said Nikiforos. “The Sultan was always most afraid of ratsbane, which could be administered gradually over a long time and in doses so small that he wouldn’t even notice them in his food. The British newspapers always wrote about that kind of thing. But these people have done just the opposite with the arsenic they’ve used on poor Doctor Ilias.”

“How do you know it was arsenic?”

“That is a very good question, and the Governor Pasha would be especially pleased to hear you ask it, for it puts me in a rather suspicious position. Allow me, then, to provide you with a detailed response, so that I might eliminate any trace of suspicion that may have come to rest upon me.”

“That’s not why I asked.”

“I must beg your pardon for what may turn out to be a needlessly elaborate disquisition, but as you know, we pharmacists can’t help ourselves: even our words must be weighed and measured. The island of Mingheria has certainly never experienced any cases of ratsbane poisoning comparable to those we have seen in Europe, where they have often captured the popular imagination and been investigated by public prosecutors and regional and national inquest committees. But in the time that I have been running my shop here, the locals have learned that rat poison can be used to slowly kill a person and leave no trace. Twenty-two years ago, when his first wife passed away, the still-childless eldest son of the wealthy Greek Aldoni family spent a lot of effort and vast sums of money trying to find a young and beautiful Mingherian girl to take as his second wife, and eventually married Tanasis’s daughter, whose father runs one of the seaside tavernas in Ora. Not too long after the wedding, the groom came to me complaining of stomachaches and vomiting and asking for medicine. The doctors could not seem to come up with a diagnosis. The skin on his hands and face had darkened, and there were sores on his arms and fingers. But unless they read French novels, nobody would have been able to put those things together and come to any kind of conclusion. In just one year I saw that forty-year-old man waste away and die. At his funeral, which we all attended, his young widow cried more than anyone else, so much so that nobody could really think there had been any kind of wrongdoing. But when that same widow sold all that she had inherited from him and ran away to Smyrna with her young lover just three months after the funeral, people began to say, ‘They killed him.’ It was Pharmacist Mitsos (who is known to enjoy reading French novels in Greek translation) who first told me it might have been a case of arsenic poisoning. But by then the horse had long since bolted. We are all of us Ottoman citizens. Never mind twenty years ago, even today our Ottoman courts are still not equipped to investigate this kind of murder as the European courts would do, using scientific methods to uncover a case of poisoning. No wonder people were so impressed with the fictional doctors (and jealous of them too) that they read about in these detective novels that are so popular in Europe, and that are translated and serialized in our newspapers. Then, as now, rat poison—sold under the name white arsenic—was readily available to purchase from any herbalist’s shop. This particular incident was not reported in the island’s newspapers, but our Greek and Turkish papers did write about these sorts of poisonings sometimes, and always with a tone that seemed to say, ‘Look at the terrible things that happen in Europe.’