The deaf mutes frightened her. They seemed somehow uncanny as they scuttled down the passages in their ill-fitting slippers.

There were dwarfs who capered in front of the Sultan to amuse him while the harem could watch from behind lattice balconies, but they seemed to Yamina to be singularly unamusing.

But always there was someone moving surreptitiously about the Palace.

Everybody walked softly on bare feet or in jewelled slippers and there was something hushed and stealthy about it, something that made Yamina, when she was alone, shiver with fear.

Even Mihri, she felt at times, was on edge.

There were unknown, hidden, unimagined dangers in this Palace of intrigue.

Who was to know that a sherbet made of sugar and violets did not contain poison, that a jewelled dagger, richly ornamented, would not strike home as one moved down a narrow corridor?

A sip of coffee might be a sip of death and the flutter of a rival’s gauze handkerchief might conceal a death-dealing phial.

One man and so many women. One favourite and so many jealous envious eyes, so many hearts consumed by hatred.

One evening when Mihri was showing Yamina her jewellery for the hundredth time, the diamonds, rubies and emeralds flashing in the sunshine coming through the windows, she said in a low voice,

“We have to make plans for you to leave!”

Yamina was suddenly alert.

“Why?”

“Because,” Mihri answered, “it will not be safe for you to stay here very much longer.”

“Why? Why?” Yamina enquired.

For a moment she wondered if she had in some way offended the Sultan.

She had never seen him, but she had learnt only too well that he had only to utter the fatal phrase, “Let her disappear!” for any inmate of the harem’s doom to be sealed.

She had been told with relish by one of the more elderly and embittered odalisques who had never caught the Sultan’s eye that a previous ruler in a fit of boredom had ordered his entire harem to die overnight.

“He wished to have new faces around him!”

She was Persian and she had tried ever since Yamina had arrived to make her apprehensive and afraid.

“How were they killed?” Yamina enquired, knowing it was expected of her.

“In the usual way,” the Persian answered. “Their feet were weighted, they were sewn into sacks and thrown into the Bosporus!”

She smiled unpleasantly as she continued,

“It is said that a diver once going beneath the waters saw them all standing upright on the bottom bowing and swaying in the tide. Dead, but still moving!”

Yamina felt herself shiver, not only at the story itself but also at the way it had been related to her.