a discolored and incomplete set of piano keys. "But for what does la belle mademoiselle want brass? Pfui, brass! It is attar of roses, the incomparable essences of Damascus and Baghdad, which delight the heart and offer the gift of sweetness to God.
Only thirty piastres... That wretched cheating son of an Armenian camel driver is going to charge you more than fifty for a brass thimble that won't be brass at all, but cheap tin with a brass wash no more substantial than a Greek's sworn word... Thirty piastres? Fifteen!"
Lydia smiled, curtseyed, murmured, "Merci... merci," and with Slavonic clairvoyance Prince Razumovsky, enormous in exquisite London-cut mufti, appeared at her side and said, "Come along, come along," steering both women-Margaret hanging back for one more sniff of a painted ointment pot-into the crowd. "Can we go back there?" Margaret asked diffidently of His Highness. "When we've found the storyteller, I mean? True attar of roses costs ten or twelve shillings for a flask that size back home."
She craned her neck, trying to look back between a jostling pair of German businessmen and several drab-uniformed soldiers at the tiny stall with its magic rows of twinkling glass. The shopkeeper gave her another demolished smile and a wink as bright as his wares.
"My dear Miss Potton," the prince smiled through the Colchian fleeces of his beard, "twenty feet from this spot you can buy a flask that size for two piastres, if you look sufficiently indifferent. It requires practice. Hold in your mind the image of a room-a building!-filled with such flasks... or, rather, think of having to carry a veddras of the stuff-about three of your gallons-up a steep hill, and then go back for another, and another, and another..."
Margaret giggled and blushed, and someone else cried out in awful Greek-accented French, "Madame, Madame, here all the perfume, all best roses of land of nightingales...!"
The light that suffused the bewildering mazes of the Grand Bazaar was never direct, falling as it did through windows high in the vaulted ceiling, and in the pale green archways the voices of every nation from the North Sea to the Indian Ocean swirled like soup. There were no genuine spots of light, nor actual shadows, but a dizzy kaleidoscope of color that shifted too quickly for Lydia to guess at distant things-the contents of the shops they passed, the faces or nationalities of men who seemed, at a distance, to be only swirls of white or dark or colored robes. As they passed close they came into focus: swarthy Turkish men in pantaloons sitting on floors to bargain, talk, drink glasses of scalding tea; Greek men in wide white skirts and bright caps or women in close- fitting, dowdy black, arguing with shopkeepers at the top of their lungs; porters bent matter-of-factly under superhuman loads; Armenians in baggy trousers, Orthodox priests and thick-bearded Jews in black gabardine and prayer shawls. Young boys shouted offers of shoe shines or guides to the city, or dashed importantly through the jostling shoppers bearing brass trays on which rested single glasses of tea. The air was redolent of sweaty wool, garlic, carpets, dog, and sewage.
Down the aisles that branched from side to side, Lydia glimpsed wares at which she could only guess: coats of karakul and astrakhan, carpets of blue and crimson, shawls, bright-flashing glass, hanging racks of silver earrings, bolts of prosaic wool alternating with gauzy rainbows of veils. Every time a beggar came whining up to them-hideously disfigured, some of them, freaks who would have been confined to fairs anywhere in Europe-every time they passed strolling groups of soldiers who whistled and rolled their eyes, Lydia was heartily glad she'd asked the prince to act as their protector and guide.
He'd been right. This wasn't England. It would have been madness to investigate alone.
She'd slept uneasily for the few hours after Ysidro's departure, prey to troubling dreams. Part had concerned the harem, with its smelly little cells, its cramped windows blocking out all view of the city, of the sea, of the sunlight had it been day: The walls sweat with their pettiness, their boredom, and their tears. She'd dreamed of wandering in that darkness, looking for someone, the rooms growing smaller and smaller around her while she felt the waiting presence of something lying very still on a burst and stinking divan, listening for her footfalls with a smile on what had long ago been its face. Once, very briefly, she'd had a fragmentary image of a Gothic