Sultan's Wife by Jane Johnson Page A

the brush on the canvas felt like a caress; and with each brushstroke I felt myself grow more beautiful. I dreamed of the life he and I would have together, the children I would bear him. And suddenly I wanted his children with a passion. I had never thought of having a child until that time: but after, the idea gripped me like a sickness.
    Did I think I was exerting some sort of silent spell over him during those quiet hours? The more deeply I fell in love with him, the more sure I became that my feelings were reciprocated – by the tilt of his head, the set of his lips, by the way he stayed to take a glass of sugared lemon water or one of the little cakes I took such care to prepare for him each day.
    He refused to show me the work while it was in progress, but by the time he completed the commission I had convinced myself of what I would see captured by his clever hands, in the immortal oils he squeezed out so lasciviously on to his palette. So at last when he revealed the finished painting I thought he was playing a trick on me, had substituted for mine anotherwoman’s portrait. This woman was plain and dull-looking, in her sensibly high-necked dress and her starched white cap and collar … Her eyes, screwed up against the light in the kitchen garden, were lost in folds of white flesh; her nose was beak-like, her lips set in a firm line. She looked a severe Puritan virgin, rather than like the daughter of an English royalist who was dying for a French artist to tear off her clothes and ravish her amongst the broad beans and radishes.
    I choked down my disappointment, paid him and bade him farewell. He had spent four hours every day for three weeks in my company: he took the money and was gone within five minutes, not looking back once. I never saw him again.
    I took a long, hard look at that portrait. Then I burned it. I carry the painting within me as my image of who I am … and it is certainly not the woman staring back at me from Lalla Zahra’s mirror. This is the woman Laurent should have painted, this exotic minx, with her glowing skin and bright, loose hair, whose eyes shine with the same turquoise lights as the silk. This woman might have captivated him as I had so longed to do.
    I give my reflection a wry smile: just as well, I think, that I did not.
    Lalla Zahra misreads my expression for one of self-satisfaction. ‘You see, Alys, you will make a fine courtesan. The kaftan becomes you.’
    She does not understand at all when I tear it off and throw it back at her and burst into tears. It is the first time I have cried since being taken captive.
    The kaftan is only the beginning. I am taken to a place they call a hammam, a type of communal bath. There, I am stripped and marched into a very hot chamber filled with steam. It is hard to see for all the vapour, but when it clears I find large numbers of local women walking about stark naked with no more shame than Eve before she bit the apple. Some sit; others squat, displaying clefts as hairless as a child’s. All of them chatter away in their strange language, and their cries and laughter echo off the close stone walls. If I close my eyes, I can believe I have entered a colony of apes.
    This easy nakedness shocks me, for in the streets the women cover themselves from head to toe in swathed attire that offers nothing to even the most prurient imagination. I will have to reassess the people I find myselfamongst. If the gentler sex can be so brazen, what must the men be like, and how would they treat a woman like me?
    The maids wash my hair and scrub my skin and I give up trying to fight them off, until, that is, I am taken into an anteroom and made to lie spread-eagled on a block of stone. The strip of chemise with which I have covered my loins is unceremoniously torn away, and for the next half an hour I have to close my eyes and think myself back in the tranquil courtyard at Lalla Zahra’s house, for the indignities I