“Hundreds of important people will be present to hear Lord Elgin’s speech. And we shall be the only two women among them,” Mary continued.
“It’s a naughty bit of scheming, if you ask me—which, to be fair, you did not,” Masterman said.
Masterman had never approved of Mary’s tactics, but Mary rarely took this fact into consideration. Though women were strictly forbidden to attend any court function, Mary had devised a scheme for admittance. She would dress in men’s clothing and be presented as Lord Bruce, presumably a young relative of Lord Elgin, and Masterman would accompany her as a manservant. Mary knew that she would have to rise well before dawn and set out upon a long journey in heavy clothing, enduring long hours in the rituals of the Ottoman court, and she was unsure that at this stage of her pregnancy she would be able to handle the adventure alone.
She was sure that her charade was unique and that, with Masterman’s support, she could pull it off, until she met a woman at a party who had attempted the same thing, with disastrous results. The woman was found out in the middle of the ceremony, and physically removed from the premises by Janissaries—“roughly,” she’d said, “fearing for my life.”
“I have found the Turks to be most chivalrous and respectful,” Mary had said. “Upon my honor, I just wrote to my mother that I had not known politeness until I met Turks.”
“That is true enough,” the woman answered, “until one exceeds the boundaries set for women.”
Still, Mary was not to be deterred. She had already exceeded the boundaries of her gender, and rather than reprisal, the Capitan Pasha had met her daring with admiration.
“You show no enthusiasm, Masterman, though you are literally making history today,” Mary chided.
“This sort of thing makes me queasy in the middle. You might have been meant for a career upon the stage, Miss Mary Nisbet, if your father had not been a gentleman. But I am just a poor lady’s maid with no stomach for pretending games.”
“There is nothing to worry about. I have the permission of the Capitan Pasha to carry out my plan. I begged his indulgence for my desire to see my husband deliver his speech and to know firsthand the ways of the Turkish court. He sent his messenger with a personal response that we might attend with his assurances that all would go smoothly for me.” For her, he had emphasized, and Mary was not unaware of the enormity of the favor.
Elgin had marveled at her pluck. He was anxious about delivering his speech and determined to make a bold impression on the Grand Vezir. He wanted his wife to be present at the event so that she might afterwards indulge in an analysis of his performance. This time, he did not object to the special favor showered upon her by the Capitan Pasha, who assured Mary that anyone who subjected her to the slightest insult or mistreatment would answer directly to him.
“The pasha is sending us his sister’s lavish carriage, which he assures me is the most comfortable one in the city,” Mary added. He had been concerned over a woman in Mary’s condition having to ride through the city’s rugged streets.
The carriage had four lovely glasses from which they could see the minarets and domes of the city thrusting up into the skies, and the houses, crowded together as if leaning upon one another for support, painted bright reds, greens, and blues. Though it was barely past dawn, in the streets, merchants in great white turbans hawked goods, while beggars hassled their clients for coin. The sheer multitude of painted surfaces made Mary think that all of England and Scotland, by contrast, contained only two colors—gray in the cities and green in the countryside.
Arriving at the palace of the Grand Vezir, the two women were escorted into a small room, where they were served coffee, and Mary was given an opportunity to speak with the official dragoman of the Porte, the court interpreter, who, though he had already met her as Lady Elgin, agreed to address her, and treat her, as Lord Bruce. From this antechamber they were escorted into the larger, grander audience room, crowded with at least two hundred men, dressed in the strange and beautiful clothing of their nations. The Turks wore robes of dazzling jewel-colored silks over loose pants tucked into high suede boots, and tall hats of many sorts—conical, flat-topped, plumed, and some wrapped in the turban style about their heads with a tiny feather jutting from the center, above the forehead. Mary could not identify the other ambassadors except for her neighbors, the Russians, who wore tailored black jackets with fur-lined lapels and dark shirts with severe high collars underneath, though she assumed that the other westerners were Venetians and Swedes, whom she would eventually meet and entertain.
At the commencement of the official ceremony, Elgin and the Grand Vezir toasted each other with delicate coffee cups. After servants took the cups, a tray of scents was brought out and Elgin and the vezir were perfumed.
“I don’t imagine our Mr. Pitt sharing a spray with foreign gentlemen!” Masterman whispered, looking down her nose.
“We are in an exotic land,” Mary whispered back. “We must respect their customs, as different as they are from our own.”
“Different indeed! That’s a mouthful,” Masterman said.
“Now, hush!” Mary said as Elgin stood to give his speech. Mary’s heart pounded in her chest. She did not want him to suffer any distraction. She had gone over the speech with him so many times the night before that she had to stop herself from mouthing the words as he said them. Though only she and one or perhaps two others in the room could understand what he said, her nervousness on his behalf was not quelled until he delivered the last of the words, to great applause.
Finally, the Grand Vezir delivered to Elgin his official credentials, after which two Turkish attendants brought forth great fur cloaks made of lush reddish-black sable. They draped one over Elgin’s shoulders, and he motioned for his wife to stand.
Mary stepped forward, and the vezir’s men placed the second cloak over her shoulders.
“Lord Bruce,” one of them announced to the Grand Vezir. The attendant released the weight of the cloak onto Mary’s shoulders, and she almost dropped with the heaviness of it. She had never seen such luxurious fur, much less felt it upon her small frame. Once she adjusted to its oppressive mass, she felt its soft hairs tickle her face and neck, and she had to stifle the urge to giggle.
“Lord Bruce will now be presented to the Grand Vezir,” whispered the dragoman.
“Ye gads!” Mary said. By this time, she had been awake for many hours, with little sleep the night before, and almost nothing in her stomach. She feared that between the hunger and the dizziness, she would drop at the great man’s feet if she tried to bow.
“Steady me, old girl,” she whispered to Masterman as she stood. Blackness rose in front of her eyes, but holding on to Masterman’s arm, she waited the few moments until her vision returned.
Smiling, but trying to maintain the solemnity of a man at his duties, she walked toward the vezir in his emerald green robe. His intense dark eyes seemed to command her to look directly at him. Did he suspect that the male wardrobe was a sham? Was she walking too much like a woman? With the squarest shoulders and longest neck she could affect, Mary focused on putting one foot ahead of the other until she was within the appropriate distance of the Grand Vezir to bow her head, relieved to be released from the man’s stare.
“And have you any daughters?” Mary heard the dragoman ask Elgin, interpreting the question asked by the vezir. She looked up just in time to see the surprised look on Elgin’s face when he realized that she had been mistaken for his son. She almost lost all composure as her eyes met Elgin’s and he smiled at her.
But their moment was interrupted by what seemed a battle cry, a fierce and dreadful yell. Mary crouched, turning to see the origin of the sound, afraid that perhaps she and Masterman had been found out, and a riot was about to take place. The dragoman must have seen the look of fear on her face. He ran to her, crouching over her.
“It is a prayer for the Sultan,” he whispered in her ear. It sounded to her much more like a call for war or revol
ution, and she was mightily relieved when the cries to heaven subsided and calm was restored.
Though the rest of the afternoon was uneventful, the journey home was long, and her nerves did not recover from the fright. She arrived at home after five o’clock in the afternoon, spent after her day of pomp, ceremony, and heavy men’s clothing. Mary had never experienced the sort of fatigue that accompanied pregnancy—the kind of tiredness that could not be overcome by a positive mental outlook or a good cup of tea. It was an exhaustion that overruled one’s greater intentions and demanded surrender.
“I think I’ll have a nap,” she said to Masterman.
“It’s Thursday, remember?” Masterman replied. Thursday was the day Mary and Elgin had fixed as their weekly “public evening,” when they would entertain all the appropriate dignitaries and visitors in the city. “You are hosting a supper, followed by a ball. The guest list tops out at one hundred.”
“But I am exhausted,” Mary protested.
“That may be so, but you have less than fifteen minutes to transform yourself back into a grand lady, Lord Bruce.”
Mary greeted the guests at six o’clock as planned. As the night wore on, Elgin took those with whom he required private discourse into his study, leaving Mary to entertain the others. When she ran out of conversation, she played the pianoforte for them, and finally, in desperation, taught the guests how to dance Scottish reels. She was not certain that any of them would have left had she not instructed the servants to stop replacing the long tapers that lit much of the room. It was not until midnight that the last of the guests gave in to the message sent by the dwindling candles.
“Lordy, I have had enough of them!” Mary said to Masterman as the older woman helped her undress.
“In seven days, you’ll be doing it again, mistress. And then seven days after that, and seven days after that, and on for two years,” Masterman said dryly. “So you mightn’t want to tire of their company so soon.”
“By my calculations, I can anticipate one hundred and four Thursdays of entertaining one hundred guests,” Mary later said to Elgin as they climbed into bed. “The mathematics of it defeats me.”
“Ah, but you are a superb hostess, Mary. Everyone tonight has commented on it,” he answered.
“Thank you, my darling. I want everything to be absolutely perfect for you while we are here,” she said, not revealing to him that she felt fatigue deep within her very bones. Then she prayed quickly to God to let her have a good and refreshing night’s sleep. Mid-prayer, she felt herself begin to lose consciousness. Her last memory as she drifted off to sleep was Elgin cozying up to her warm body in their bed and untying the neat bow she had made in fastening her nightgown. Whatever transpired after that was anyone’s guess.
MARY WOKE THE NEXT day, put on her dressing gown, and went out onto the balcony off her bedroom to greet the giant yellow sun that so often presided over Constantinople. The Elgins and staff were ensconced in the former French Embassy Palace on the Grand Rue, the street that housed ambassadors from around the world. She looked out over the view of the shimmering waters of the Bosphorus, the strait that divided the city; the Golden Horn, its inlet; and the Sea of Marmara. She could see all of them from this, her favorite part of the lavish palace. She loved her mornings when she stole a few private moments, taking her tea tray outside as she looked over the city, all the way to the imposing towers of the Sultan’s palace.
She finished her tea and went inside, pondering what she must do on this day. She was sure that she had some appointments, and she thought she would wear the little scoop bonnet she’d bought in London in the style that had recently become so popular. Where was it? Maybe she would save Masterman some time and find it herself. She went to one of the wardrobes in the dressing room adjacent to her bedroom and opened its tall doors. A scent escaped that was not familiar to her. Nor were the clothes that hung in the wardrobe.
“Oh dear,” she said aloud. This was not the first time that she had discovered the abandoned possessions of the French ambassador, the palace’s most recent occupant, who had been unceremoniously evicted and was imprisoned in Yedikule, the daunting seven-towered fortress. She closed the doors just as Elgin came into the room.
“We must have the servants pack up the belongings of our predecessors,” she said. “I do not like to think of those French diplomats in Turkish prisons.”
“Mary, do not worry. I promise to appeal to the Grand Vezir for their humane treatment. For surely they are gentlemen, victims of the politics of the time and the ambitions of their general, who does not know how to honor an alliance.”
Others could say what they wished about her husband, but Mary saw his idealism and his desire to always do the right thing, and she loved him for those qualities.
“But one shift in the political tides, and the French could be back in the palace and you and I in the prison!”
“Nonsense, Mary. We have no Bonaparte to send us on the road to ruin. At any rate, you have done a splendid job of imprinting our own style upon the place,” he said. “Whoever says that the French are the current arbiters of taste have not met my Poll.”
“I have worked hard to rid the rooms of the ghosts of the former tenants.”
Mary had already spent almost two thousand pounds of her own money refurbishing the private rooms she shared with Elgin as well as the rooms of his staff, trying to erase the memory of regimes gone by. She knew how important a comfortable environment was to her husband—to any man—and she wanted to give both Elgin and his staff every opportunity to thrive. She only hoped that when her parents saw the bills, they would share her perspective. If not, she would write to them and explain the situation. If they balked at the cost of feeding sixty mouths thrice a day, and entertaining the multitudes of Hottentots, they should take it up with His Majesty’s government, which refused to pay the true costs of running a foreign embassy.
Elgin went off on his appointments, and Mary went in to breakfast, hoping for a quiet morning. Instead, she was greeted by the entire embassy staff of sixty.
“They have appointed me to speak for them,” said Reverend Hunt as she ushered him into her private office. “We have threats of mutiny, Lady Elgin. Some are upset with their living conditions, some with their pay, and some with the hours at which they are to take their meals.”
Hunt was so polite in the asking that even though she was annoyed at the staff’s complaints, she spent the next day trying to fix everyone’s difficulties with his or her rooms, and she made a schedule for dining that seemed agreeable to all. Then she reconvened the staff.
“May I remind you that those of you who make deliveries to the palaces of the Sultan and other Turkish dignitaries receive gratuities equivalent to two years of your salaries? All of you will prosper from the great generosity of the Turks, but only if you carry out your duties with a modicum of grace.”
Because of the English government’s parsimony, Mary was personally responsible for most of the expenses of running the embassy, and she was not about to increase anyone’s salary now that she saw firsthand the riches that the entire staff might accumulate if they simply did their jobs.
“Just yesterday,” she continued, “those of you who delivered the chandelier to the Sultan as a gift from Lord Elgin and the English government were rewarded for your trouble with coin five times the annual income you would be earning at home!” The men to whom she referred avoided her eyes, staring sheepishly at the floor.
How she wished that this group of whining ingrates had to perform their tasks with a baby in their bellies as she did. She wished with all her heart that she could say this to them right now, but it would be unseemly.
The week continued in the same vein—socializing, entertaining, redecorating, and attending to the complaints of the staff.
“I’m as tired as a working mule,” Mary commented to Mr. Morier, one of Elgin’s secretaries. “Sunday is the Lord’s Day, made for nothing but services and rest.”
?
??Oh dear,” he replied. “So sorry, Your Ladyship, but may I remind you that a golden chair is to arrive within the hour to carry you to dinner at the Russian embassy?”
Exhausted, she dressed for the occasion, summoning whatever energy remained in her wrung-out body. When she stepped into the chair, she realized that the only time she ever sat down was on these excursions. Yet one was always on display. A parade of eight Janissaries, four footmen, and a dragoman served as her escort this evening. Windows all along the street opened to watch this elegant tableau as they made their way down the street to the neighboring palace.
At the dinner, the guests announced that they had heard about Mary’s tutelage of Scottish country-dances and asked for a repeat performance. But she had to decline because it was Sunday, and she was not about to dance on the Lord’s Day. Just because they were in the land of heathens, it would not do to throw Christian ideals out the window. She had to reply in the same way when the wife of the Russian minister invited her to sit down to a game of whist, Mary’s favorite card game and one at which Madame Tamara, the Russian ambassadress, claimed to excel.
Mary was looking for an excuse to leave the party early when Elgin rushed in carrying a letter. He took Mary aside. “You’ve been summoned,” he said.
“Have I? And by whom?”
Elgin showed her the official letter, replete with its golden seal.
“By the Supreme Head of the House of Osmanh,” Elgin said. “He who presides over the Golden Horn and all the territories from the Adriatic to the hinterlands of Persia.”
“The Sultan?” Mary felt slightly queasy as she said the word and she put her hand on the small table behind her to steady herself.
“Tomorrow morning before the sun rises, you must be dressed and ready to be taken to the Palace of the Topkapi Sarayi. I suggest we make our apologies and get you home to bed.” Elgin seemed giddy at this new turn of events. “It’s unprecedented, Mary. You are breaking every rule and custom.”
“But why would the Sultan summon me?” Mary asked.