She might appear genuinely French to an Englishman or to a Turk, but certainly not to a Frenchman.

Yet everything she had ever heard about the Sultan’s harem, the secrecy, the mystery and the crimes that took place there seemed to close in on her like a nightmare of horror.

Always since she had been in Constantinople, she had been conscious of the Seraglio now empty for two years, standing dark against the skyline.

Although it had been a town in itself, housing several thousand persons and containing everything within its sacred precincts from woodcutters to musicians, from astrologers to apothecaries, dwarfs and buffoons to the Keeper of the Parrot Cages, it was now still, peopled only by ghosts, terrifying.

How could a woman not think of all the whispered rumours about the Seraglio of the bostanjis – the gardener-boatmen who sewed any woman who was unfaithful or had displeased the Sultan into a weighted sack and drowned her in Seraglio Point?

They died in the presence of the Black Eunuchs who supervised them in death as they had done in life.

To the Christian world the Sultans in Constantinople were looked upon as monsters of licentiousness and sin.

Although Yamina was too well educated and too intelligent not to know that the present Sultan under the influence of the British Ambassador was an intelligent man who had carried out a large number of reforms, there was still in the background the mystery of his private life.

Her father had often explained to her that the Turkish passion for concealment amounted to a fetish.

Their homes, their women, and their Monarch were all shrouded in mystery not only from foreigners but also from each other.

“It is typical,” he had said, “that, when the Sultan rides abroad in his Capital, he is surrounded by guards who carry banners and pearl-fringed umbrellas and even wear helmets topped by waving ostrich plumes so as to screen their Master from curious eyes.”

“Why are the Turks like that?” Yamina had asked with interest.

“It is bred deep into their character,” her father replied. “That is why so many legends are told about the cruelty and the crimes perpetrated inside the Seraglio. Some may be true, but I am prepared to believe that a large number of them are invented.”

“Will we ever know the truth?” Yamina enquired.

“It is unlikely,” he answered. “I believe the British Ambassador has persuaded the Sultan recently to change much of his protocol. In the past the foreign visitors he received were first submitted to a ritual bath.”

“A bath!” Yamina cried.

“As you know, the Moslems are fanatical about cleanliness,” her father smiled. “So having been cleansed before entering the sacred precincts, visitors were then clothed in magnificent robes and lifted bodily into the presence of the Sultan supported on each side by Court dignitaries.”

“But why?” Yamina asked.

Her father had laughed.

“I suppose the overwhelming honour might have paralysed them!”