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In later years, after the foundation of the Turkish Republic, a different and completely false version of this story would be published across the history pages of national newspapers, according to which Queen Victoria was alleged to have offered the princesses of the British royal family in marriage to Abdul Hamid and Murad while they waited in London to inherit the Ottoman throne. The fact that a British princess would never be married to someone—no matter who he was—who already had four wives and countless concubines he slept with and mistreated, and that the Queen would not consider matching any members of her own family with men who tried to poison one another and didn’t even speak any English, will be obvious to any person with even the slightest trace of common sense and, like us, they might struggle to understand why the many followers of these history columns still so thoroughly believe and so greatly enjoy reading and rereading the various iterations of this fabrication that recur every three years or so under different headlines (“The Year Queen Victoria Offered Her Daughter to Abdul Hamid”) on the pages of Turkish newspapers.

Abdul Hamid took the throne nine years after this trip to Europe (following his uncle’s assassination and his older brother’s bout of insanity), and in those nine years he must surely have learned that, from a scientific perspective, the soft bezoar stone carried by many kings and rulers throughout the course of history (particularly in the East) could have had no effect at all that day in London. One of the first reports he commissioned from Bonkowski Pasha after he became sultan was on the subjects of which plants growing in the gardens of the Yıldız Palace could be “scientifically” employed to produce poisons, on new poisons without known antidotes, and on poisons that did not leave traces.

The Sultan had first heard of Bonkowski Bey through the activities of the Société de Pharmacie de Constantinople (also known as the Pharmacists’ Guild of Der-i Saadet), which Bonkowski had founded with Pharmacist Nikiforos. This organization was at war with the other pharmacists’ guilds, and championed a cause it hoped the state would back. At the center of this cause was the demand for traditional herbalists who stocked spices, powders, pastes, plants, and roots of all kinds to be banned from selling poisons and other hazardous materials. Substances like arsenic, ratsbane, wormwood, phenol, codeine, cantharidin, ether, iodoform, sabadilla, coal tar (or creosote), opium, morphine—nearly one hundred in all—must be banned from herbalists’ shops and sold only in modern, European-style pharmacies, which should in turn be subject to regulation and regular inspections and only supply these items when presented with a doctor’s prescription.

Abdul Hamid must have learned about ratsbane and how it could be used to slowly and almost imperceptibly poison people from the murder mysteries he had recently started reading. The Sultan would pay particularly close attention to those passages that described how to use poison and how to avoid leaving traces, and he would ask for some sections to be read out to him twice. As for his interest in cultivating toxic plants in the palace gardens, our readers should look at it this way: like all modern Eastern emperors, Abdul Hamid viewed his palace’s gardens as a version of the world in miniature. So really the Sultan’s question to young Bonkowski Bey was a simpler one: Which plants could be used to make effective poisons?

Bonkowski Bey had been in the middle of writing his report to Abdul Hamid on this subject when he was put in charge of the private pharmacy—sometimes known as the chemistry laboratory—on the grounds of the Yıldız Palace. This was also the same period when Bonkowski Bey was very busy with the Pharmacists’ Guild and its crusade against traditional herbalists, so his conversations with the Sultan inevitably touched on poisons and how easily they could still be obtained.

Abdul Hamid knew that most of the poisons that had been used on his ancestors—such as the kind which had gradually killed Mehmed the Conqueror four hundred and twenty years ago, and left no trace—could still be obtained from any one of the hundreds of herbalists’ shops scattered all over Istanbul. The Yıldız Palace archives tell us of the many varieties of poison that palace clerks dispatched for this purpose were able to find in shops in the Yeniçarşı, Beyazıt, Kapalıçarşı, and Fatih neighborhoods and bring back to the palace laboratory.

Doctor Nuri got back to the State Hall from his meeting with Nikiforos at midday, and the Governor called him to his office.

“To stop any rumors about poisoning, I have ordered him to be buried with the plague victims and have lime poured over his corpse,” he began. “If we acknowledge that Doctor Ilias, like Bonkowski Pasha before him, has fallen victim to a nefarious assassination plot, it would be tantamount to admitting that the organs of the Ottoman state are powerless on the island of Mingheria—and that is something neither I nor Istanbul will allow. Should the Sultan find out that Bonkowski Pasha’s assistant has been killed too, and that neither you nor I have yet been able to find the culprit, he might even conclude that we are doing it on purpose.”

“Do you think that the people who did this are the same people who killed Bonkowski Pasha?” asked Doctor Nuri.

“We have not been able to find out, as you know!” said the Governor. “Though if Istanbul had insisted, we would have done what needed to be done and found someone to confess to having put rat poison into the biscuits eventually. But now this task falls to you. Since you will be conducting your investigation using the Sherlock Holmes method, there will be no torture and no foot whipping either. You will find the culprit by questioning herbalists and pharmacists, just as His Excellency the Sultan’s favorite detective would do. Good luck to you. The herbalists are expecting you; the necessary precautions have been taken! Let us see what they say this time.”

The garrison kitchen’s cook, his helpers, and everyone who had been questioned and tortured so far, had each been taken to the principal herbalists’ shops and shown to the owners, their assistants, and their errand boys, but nobody recalled seeing the suspects or anybody else come in to buy rat poison.

Doctor Nuri first went to a small store in the Eyoklima neighborhood. It reminded him of those pleasant-smelling shops run by Jews in Istanbul’s Mahmutpaşa neighborhood. In front of the counter were sacks containing different-colored powders and spices. There were jars full of spherical objects, fruits, and medicines. Herbs and bundles and all sorts of strange, spongelike substances hung on pieces of string tied up to the ceiling. But the physician who would usually be waiting for patients—as was customary in shops in Istanbul too—wasn’t there, and the only person in the shop was its owner Vasil Effendi, who had been warned by the State Hall clerks to prepare for Doctor Nuri’s arrival.

Having bowed all the way to the floor to greet his visitors from the palace, Vasil Effendi repeated the statement he had already made to the authorities. Neither the cook nor his helpers had been to his shop, and sales of rat poison had been slowing down now anyway as the number of rats in people’s homes and on the streets was less than it had been in the early days. Besides, the municipal government was pouring rat poison over the streets for free. Vasil Effendi explained in his broken Turkish that it was much easier these days to procure large quantities of rat poison from municipal supplies. Every time the Doctor and Prince Consort peered or sniffed at any one of the powders, boxes, tins of colorful spices, measuring instruments, herbs, and glass containers filled with sweet-scented roots displayed in bags, bottles, and jars all over Vasil Effendi’s shelves, the herbalist would interrupt his account to point out what they were: mustard, jasmine, rhubarb, henna, coca, menthol, cherry-seed powder (mahleb), lice-bane, cinnamon. The herbalist also showed Doctor Nuri the bag where he kept the ratsbane powder, noting that he was careful about whom he allowed near the poisonous substances and that he was always there, in his shop, whenever prescriptions were issued and medicinal pastes were made. He told the story of an herbalist in Smyrna who had sent his apprentice instructions for a prescription from home, but the apprentice had accidentally mixed in three dirhams of the wrong white powder (from the bag on the right-hand side of the counter instead of the bag on the left), and the patient had died. He had heard about this from his business partner, whose shop was on the same street as the herbalist’s in Smyrna, and who sent Vasil Effendi spiced sausages on the Messageries ferry. Vasil Effendi’s shop was the only one on the island where you could get sausages sourced from Smyrna.

The herbalist then set about creating a special preparation for Doctor Nuri. First he ground eight cedar seeds and a slice of ginger and mixed them together. To this concoction he added juniper tar and dried chickpea powder, proudly inviting the Doctor and Prince Consort to sniff the bags they were stored in, then crushed and stirred everything into a paste. Using a mold in the manner of a spoon, he started scooping up the mixture and shaping it into pills. “If you have diarrhea, take one on an empty stomach, and it’ll sort you out right away,” he declared with an air of satisfaction.

Doctor Nuri saw similar sacks of dye, coffee beans, sugar, and spices when he visited two other herbalists’ shops. Vasil had put an ostrich egg in front of his shop so that prescription holders who did not know how to read or write would still be able to find it. Another shop in the Old Market had a small model of the Arab Lighthouse at its door, while the herbalist in Vavla had put up a sign with an enormous pair of scissors on it. In these two other shops too, the most frequently requested products were laxatives, hemorrhoid creams, cough pills, lotions for wounds and rheumatic pains, and stomachache treatments. Doctor Nuri discovered that some of the medicines and ingredients—like bitter almond oil, black juniper, sabadilla, and devil’s snare—that Pharmacist Nikiforos had pointed out to him, and that pressure from pharmacists in Istanbul had ensured could no longer be sold by herbalists there, were still readily available in all of these shops. Doctor Nuri also made a note of the fact that chamomile, fennel, aniseed, and love-in-a-mist were all substances commonly used in the preparation of stomachache remedies, in the hope that this kind of detail might eventually help in finding the perpetrators of the plot against the quarantine doctors. The herbalist with the enormous pair of scissors in front of his shop told Doctor Nuri that the ointment they most commonly prescribed to the sheikhs who gave out consecrated prayer sheets and talismans was made out of sulfur, beeswax, olive oil, and rose petals, and he gave Doctor Nuri a bottle to take away.

Back in the guesthouse, Princess Pakize teased him about trying some of these salves and mixtures out, but her husband forbade it. After some arguing and sulking and playful flirting, the bottles were set aside. But Doctor Nuri never gave up on visiting Arkaz’s herbalists.

CHAPTER 32

The news of the death of a passenger aboard the Odityis, which had set sail for Athens before quarantine measures had been imposed, was quickly picked up by all the main newspapers in Greece, whereupon European newspapers began to write that the Ottomans had failed to contain the epidemic that had come to the West from China and India via the Hejaz and Suez, and that Europe would have to step in. The trope of “the sick man of Europe,” which had often been repeated in the pages of Paris’s Le Petit Journal and Le Petit Parisien and in London’s Daily Telegraph, was thus revived once more. The ports of western Europe began to treat any ship coming from Arkaz as if it were flying the yellow flag, and passengers were put in isolation for at least ten days when they reached their destinations.

There was also a punitive character to these quarantine precautions. The leading Western nations complained to Abdul Hamid about the Governor of Mingheria, who seemed incapable of implementing quarantine rules as they should be, and sent the Ottoman Empire the same warning they often did during outbreaks of cholera in the Hejaz. They said that unless the Governor of Mingheria quarantined departing ships properly, they would have to intervene with their warships and do the job themselves, and they sent word through their ambassadors to the Sublime Porte that they already had vessels at the ready in the Mediterranean.

The Palace and the Sublime Porte would inform the Governor of all these developments, the Governor would discuss them with the Doctor and Prince Consort, the Prince Consort would share them with his wife, and finally Princess Pakize would write to her sister to report what she had learned.

“There haven’t been any mail boats coming in, which means your letters must be piling up in a basket somewhere in the Post Office!” her husband had once remarked. “I wonder if it might be more prudent to keep them here for the time being?”

“I have to send out the one I am writing before I can start a new one!” Princess Pakize had replied. “Do you think the Major might bring me twenty more of these postcards?”

She was holding seven black-and-white (that is to say, not hand-painted) postcards printed in Istanbul. Princess Pakize liked to amuse herself sometimes by reading out their captions in French as if she were reciting a poem: “Citadelle de Mingher,” “Hôtel Splendide Palace,” “Vue générale de la baie,” “Phare d’Arkad et son port,” “Ville vue prise de la citadelle,” “Hamidié Palace et bazaar,” “Église Saint-Antoine et la baie.”

Princess Pakize had often read aloud to her father in French, and also read romances to pass the time. Through her husband’s accounts, she was following the Major’s story as if it were a novel, and writing to her sister about what she heard. Although her grandfather, her uncle, and her father—all current or former sultans—had each had half a dozen wives and a harem full of concubines, Princess Pakize did not think it was right for men to be allowed to marry more than one woman at a time. Her sisters and most of the other princesses also felt the same way. This would have been due partly to the Western-style education they had all received in the harem. But mainly it was because of the rule that stated that anyone who married the daughter of a sultan, a princess of royal blood, was not allowed to take any other wife.

From the moment she had discovered that Zeynep, the Major’s bride-to-be, had given up on a previous match with a suitor her father had chosen for her when she’d realized that the prospective groom already had another wife back in his ancestral village, Princess Pakize had held the younger woman in the highest regard, and dismissed any other reasons Zeynep might have had for her decision. Two days later Princess Pakize learned from her husband that Major Kâmil and Zeynep had met, and that this encounter had sparked a mysterious attraction between them. As readers of Princess Pakize’s letters will discover, this love story so cherished by the people of Mingheria rested on many small coincidences.