Desert Queen by Janet Wallach Read Free Book Online Page B

correspondent for The Times , the thirty-seven-year-old Chirol, born in Paris to English parents, brought up Catholic and educated mainly in France, had graduated from the Sorbonne, trained in the Foreign Office and traveled (with no apparent assignment) for sixteen years throughout the Continent and the East. Highly intelligent and well informed, he spoke a dozen languages, made impressive contacts and provided information to Whitehall. No one called him a spy, but he served his government well. The portly five-foot-ten, red-haired, red-bearded Chirol, who loved good food and good wine, was nicknamed Domnul during his stay in Romania, and would become one of Gertrude’s closest friends.
    For four months during the winter of 1889 Gertrude laughed, danced and flirted her way through Bucharest, and although no one asked for her hand in marriage, she was pleased by the attention she received. And almost always near her side was the blue-eyed Billy Lascelles, a good dancer but a bit too aloof for her liking. “He rarely confesses himself amused,” she complained in a letter home. “As for me I dance from the beginning of any ball to the end and I am genuinely amused all the time.” Nevertheless, the two were becoming close. As the winter snows melted, their friendship warmed. Then, at the end of April, with the well-traveled Domnul leading the way, they left Romania for a visit to Constantinople.

    E ast across the Byzantine Empire in Asia Minor and west into the Balkan peninsula of Europe, the Ottoman Turks had advanced, expanding from a thirteenth-century Turkish state, with Constantinople at its head, into a sixteenth-century empire that stretched from the Euphrates in Iraq to the Danube in Austria. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottomans controlled Egypt, Arabia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia and Turkey in the East and Hungary and the Balkans—Bulgaria, Albania, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Serbia, Greece and Romania—in the West. For hundreds of years the Ottoman Empire had served as a stabilizing force, balancing the Russian power in the East with the British and French in the West. For Britain and France it provided protection against Arab attacks on Western traders conducting lucrative commerce: the British in the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf and Mesopotamia, the French in Syria.
    But by the nineteenth century, weakened by corruption, greed and too loose a management style, the Ottoman Empire had diminished and decayed. The loss of Egypt and Greece, along with a depleted economy, had forced the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman Government was called) to rely more on the West. When the Russians marched toward Constantinople in 1878 in search of a warm-water port, the Turks, aided by Britain and France, were able to hold them off. But the Turks had fought a costly war. And when a surge of nationalism swept through the Balkans, the Turks lost Bulgaria and Romania, Bosnia and Herzegovina. To the West the Ottoman Empire had become “the Sick Man of Europe”; its fate in the Balkans, the critical “Eastern Question.”
    What worried the British most was that Russia would once again menace Constantinople, a threat England could not afford. Turkish protection was essential along the route to India, and an Ottoman defeat by the Russians could doom the jewel in the British crown. And thus the British held out a generous hand of financing to prop up the Turks.

    B ut the Eastern Question mattered little to Gertrude, at least for now. Her curiosity centered on Constantinople, the cosmopolitan city that straddled Europe and Asia; the splendid city on the Bosporus, ancient capital of Byzantium, seat of the Muslim Caliphate and symbol of Ottoman strength. In Bucharest, she had sampled a soupçon of Turkish flavoring; here, in Istanbul, she could savor an Oriental feast. A banquet of gorgeous colors and exotic shapes unfolded before her, “perfectly delicious” she wrote, as the low sun glittered on the water, bringing color back to