But if she wasn’t a thief...
‘Did your father tell you who this was?’
‘There is a story he told me. Not written in the official histories of the court or the harem, so no trace of her will be found there, that there was a woman who came from the West, with blond hair and blue eyes and who was found wandering lost and alone, and sick with fever, after her tour party was raided, the horses and camels stolen, her guides lost or murdered.’ He shrugged. ‘Nobody knew.
‘She was taken to the Pavilion of the Moon, where the Sultan happened to be visiting.
‘The harem was back at the palace, no women accompanied him for this was a place of reflection and prayer. But he took the woman in and she recovered and became his secret desert wife. His business was at the palace, his visits to her necessarily infrequent given the distance, but in time she bore him a child. A daughter. Fortuitous for her, because by now her existence was whispered of in the palace, and if she’d borne him a son she and the child would most certainly have been killed. As it was, her presence was tolerated only because she had no impact on the succession. Alas, the child ailed and died in infancy.
‘A year later, and it was the Sultan himself, who died. He had left instructions before his death that the woman be sent home, because it would be too dangerous for her to remain.
‘My father arranged as the Sultan had commanded. She pressed this brooch into his hand as she made her thanks to him and boarded the ship that would take her home.’
Kadar’s gut was churning, his thoughts in turmoil, as he asked the question he did not want to hear the answer to. ‘What was the name of this woman, do you know?’
‘They called her Kehribar.’
A muscle in Kadar’s jaw popped.
The Turkish word for amber.
A coincidence. Surely it was a terrible coincidence.
‘Did she take anything with her when she left?’
Mehmet thought for a moment and then nodded. ‘Ah, yes. Whatever made you think of that? I had forgotten that part of the story. There were two bracelets the Sultan had fashioned for her as a gift. Kehribar asked my father that he place one bracelet in the Sultan’s tomb, as an eternal memory of her, while the other she would keep close to her heart. Alas, that would not be tolerated, so the bracelet was returned to the Pavilion of the Moon, where it remains today.’
As it surely did.
Two bracelets, then. And the woman had taken one and her descendant had unwittingly brought it back, only to be accused of stealing it.
Only for Kadar to accuse her of stealing it.
She’d been telling him the truth all along.
Oh, God, what had he done?
‘She told me a story,’ he said, the words of his admission having to all but chisel their way out through his rock-hard throat, ‘that an ancestor of hers had travelled to Constantinople where she’d disappeared only to turn up on the family doorstep more than five years later. When I found her with a bracelet of gold and jewels, I told her she was lying. That she’d made up a story to cover her tracks. That the bracelet she had said she had brought with her was stolen. From the Pavilion of the Moon.’
‘And did you check to see if that particular bracelet was still there?’
‘No.’ Because they’d been back in Istanbul by then and he hadn’t needed to anyway, or so he’d thought. Because he’d been convinced it was the same one. He’d seen her gazing longingly at it in the display case, her eyes wide, her lips parted, and that had been his proof. He’d interpreted her shock—her discovery—as lust, pure and simple.
And he hadn’t been in any hurry to check if the bracelet was still there, because he hadn’t wanted to discover that she’d been telling the truth the whole time.
‘I was wrong,’ he said. But, God, how wrong? He remembered her defiance when he’d found her with the bracelet. Her defiance. Her tears. He remembered his unwavering certainty. She’d begged him to listen, and he hadn’t. She’d pleaded with him to check the bracelet was still there and he hadn’t. He remembered her scribbling down her address so he could return the bracelet when he discovered she’d been telling the truth and he’d screwed it up and flung it away as easily as he’d discarded the feeling in his heart that she was special. He hadn’t given her a chance. ‘I’ve never been so wrong. But it’s worse than that, Mehmet. Because I wronged her.’
The old man made a rasping scratchy sound, half sigh, half recrimination, or that was the way that Kadar read it, because it was a sound that grated on what was left of Kadar’s conscience. ‘And what comes next, my young friend?’