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Odalisque
Chapter 4
Inconstant in Constantinople
September 29, 1854, Athens
I take ship in the morning for Gallipoli and Constantinople. The next few weeks will be spent far to the north from my home in Athens, sailing back and forth across the Sea of Marmara, making all ready for the final runs down the Aegean before winter.
All of the goods we have bought and bartered for over the summer and have yet to be sent to market must be brought out of Constantinople before the winter storms close the straits or we will have to carry it on our inventory until next spring--a costly practice to be sure. We can afford to carry some goods over it is true, and we will, but not many. Some goods are even deliberately purchased for the long term and held in our warehouses along the Bosphorus, an eye being kept on their market value in the hopes it will rise and enrich the House when they are again sold. But very little merchandise can be held thus. The ravages of time and vermin will render fabrics and spices--the truly valuable goods--worthless if they are allowed to sit in storage too long.
So we must gather all the produce of a busy trading season and get the last of it dispatched off to market before the wealth it represents melts away. Already many of the clippers and other sailing ships in our fleet have flown away to the great ports of England and Holland. Now, at our docks on the straits, the stevedores will be loading the sturdy steamships that can drive under power through storms that would wreck a wind-driven ship.
I will of course sail my beloved sloop Bella Donna up and back, but she will not be laden with any cargo weightier than our bills and inventories. And the remaining gold of the season. Little enough of that, most having been spent and tied up in goods now traversing the Atlantic, or being sold by Olympia Holdings factors on the docks of London, The Hague, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Danzig. Bella Donna will be in ballast, able to dance across the waves where her heavier-laden sisters must plod along. We shall dart up the short way across the Aegean and through the Dardanelles. A quick stop at Gallipoli, then across the Marmara to Constantinople and a hasty lading and closing up the warehouses, paying off the stevedores for the last time this year, a few parties in Galata and at the mansions up the Bosphorus and along the Golden Horn, and then we scurry back down through the straits and the last deep water run to the Cyclades, Piraeus, and home. With luck, I shall be back within a fortnight.
#
And this time I have good reason to hurry, for Felicity has fallen ill. Papa says it is "only a virus." No doctor I have ever met has ever used this word. Nevertheless I trust him. He has his divine ability to travel in time and is, in that sense, eternal. Literally outside of time. He has been to lands and times where and when they know more of medicine than we do now ... here ... as hard as that is to believe. Even though he can do little more than today's leeches can, he knows sometimes the simple things to do--things he calls supportive rather than curative--that will ease the way for the body to bring to bear its own recuperative powers on the infirmity.
I do not have his unique knowledge of science and medicine and I do not understand "only a virus." I only know that my beloved Felicity is so ill that she cannot stand longer than it takes to use a chamberpot (and then she needs to lean on me), and that she is wasting away from vomiting and dysentery. She is feverish and cannot eat, complaining constantly of pain in her quiet, heroic way--not to whine, but simply to inform those charged with her care of the state of her being.
It tasks me sorely to be thus absented from her side at such a time as this. I know to trust Papa in what he says about the treatment she receives and her chances for recovery, (he says they are good and that in truth it is better that I be away, for by the time I return she will be in the very pink of health again). But it goes hard, oh heart of my heart, for me to see her thus--she who is so strong and accustomed to rise early and partake of an active--nay, strenuous--day. She lies pale and wan, like a peasant wife who has borne one brat too many and is like to die of it, her skin waxy and slick from sweat, her hair dank and straggling about her face, beautiful even now, her usually bright blue eyes so dull and listless. If I knew not the truth about gods, I would pray for her very life, but I do and the only gods I trust her to are already at her side and bend their every effort toward her recovery. Both Papa and Nana have been like the very Rock at Gibraltar in their steadiness and constancy and I bless them thrice over for Felicity's sake.
Rest easy, my heart. I shall not speed away but to fly back here again in winged haste to your side.
#
Gabrielle Francesca stood in the sunlight coming in the window by the head of Felicity's bed. It was a brown day outside, rainy, not cold and not hot, just clammy. A layer of soot and coal dust lay on the city in a miasma, like the dull throbbing pain of a headache, that the rain was not sufficient to flush away. The light that was admitted to the room was delicate and ethereal for all the smut in the filter that gave it its color. Everything in the room looked like it came out of a sepia tintype. The lace curtains seemed dipped in the light and all the purer white because of it. The color of Gabrielle Francesca's hair was deepened from its customary pale copper to a darker almost-brown by the light. It made her seem somehow flatter and colorless in her rich, brown and sand traveling dress and her sharp, stylish hat. Even her green eyes seemed somehow dimmer.
And Felicity! Darling Felicity, so pale and wan on the pillow, her hair in tortured strands that straggled across her damp face, her breathing labored and wracked with painful coughing. Gabrielle Francesca reached out a gentle, loving hand and brushed the hair off her beloved's face.
"You'll be good and attend to what Papa says, so that you'll be all better when I get back home? Please? For me?"
It almost broke her heart to see the compliant nod, lacking all of the fiery spirit that, had Felicity been in better health, would have occasioned some form of rebellion. But she trusted what Hephaestus said to be true, that rest and plenty of fluids--willow bark tea, and limes--would see her through. Soon enough the dark-haired woman would be up and about and her willful, cantankerous self once again.
Gabrielle Francesca bent and pressed her lips against the fevered forehead. "Then farewell, my love," she whispered for Felicity's ears alone. She straightened again and repeated, "Then farewell," but without the endearment, which they kept private between them. "'I shall see thee at Philipi'," she quoted with a soft smile. Neither of them would come anywhere near that metropolis before they met, but it was a commonplace that passed between them and had done so since they were young girls that someday they would meet in the Macedonian city, as the Biblical quote said.
"At Philipi, then," Felicity croaked with a weak smile coming to her chapped lips. "Go with Al Lah, Cara." For all that the two of them knew in truth about gods, living as they did in a household with two of them, and trafficking with multitudes more almost daily, there still were times when it soothed their souls to wish each other blessings of one faith or another.
Gabrielle Francesca nodded stiffly, wishing that propriety did not forbid her falling on the bed and pouring out her fears to her lifelong companion. But there were maids and nurses about and Aphrodite was in the next room working on some needlepoint and supervising Felicity's care. They two had long ago promised one another to keep their love secret, for they had learned quickly at a very early age what the rest of the world thought of such affections. No one but they two knew or had any slightest hint of the depth of the love between them, and they were committed to keeping it that way.
So a brief flickering of the eyes, the set of one's head, a twitch at the corner of the mouth... these had to suffice for the moment as a promissory for days to come.
Aphrodite knew. She had been the goddess of love in earlier times, after all. But she trusted the wisdom of her two charges and most assuredly knew the intolerance they faced in the wider world, living as they did in the borderlands between Christendom and Islam, neither being a friendly realm for women who loved women. Not at all. So she held her tongue and let the two of them keep their own council.
With a rustling of crinoline and lawn and the soft click of her boot soles on the hardwood floors of the house, Gabrielle Francesca took her leave of her friend and their guardian. At the front door of the house, she climbed into the carriage that was appointed to transport her to the docks and the waiting Bella Donna.
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