Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [203]
To her fellow odalisques, she was aware, the only lunacy was hers and her protests a matter of friendly derision when, upon her third bath and her seventh hairwash of the week, she struggled against the stinging boredom of uprooting her hairline and eyebrows.
At first, sitting through extraordinary lectures on how to paint her lips red; to dye her eyebrows and lashes, to draw, with a steady hand, a black line above and under her lashes with a filthy mixture of antimony powder and oil they called surmèh, Philippa was too overawed to protest. When you are living, surrounded by giant black eunuchs, in a palace where the master has power of instant and hideous death, you do not niggle at trifles. When they spent half an hour painting her finger- and toe-nails, going on to demonstrate the uses of hènnah against perspiration and the alternative uses of kohl, kajal and tutia as a cooling eyeblack which also guarded the wearer from the perils of the Evil Eye, she began, after a day or two, to suffer a terrible impulse to giggle. She acquired her own moleshair brushes and pots, and learned how to get the paint off with linen and cream. She learned how to make kohl with lemons and plumbago over the Bath Superintendent’s brazier; and how to make face-powder with ground rice, borax and cowrie shells, mixed and dried in a melon rind with beanflour, lemons and eggs, but when they tried to put it on her face she exploded in a cloud of sneezes and laughter, and they had to give up for that day.
She grew bolder. She refused the Chinese mudpack of oil and rice-flour and would not let them shave off her eyebrows, although she submitted to the day-long hair brushing, the dressing with tonics of olive oil and maidenhair fern; the plaiting and scenting. On that point, watching her long, mouse-coloured hank gather lustre and colour, she was prepared to admit that, as Kate used to say naggingly, a little attention produced amazing results.
Under the bathing and massage, also, her skin was improving: that must be said. The fruit, too, had something to do with it: the apples and pears; the plums and raisins and figs; the grapes and peaches and melons. The red cherries of Sariyár, each yielding a hundred drops of their juice. The juice of Bokhara apricots, Mardin plums; Azerbaijan pears. Grapes from Smyrna; apples from Kojá-ili; Temesvár prunes. Water-ices made of snow flavoured with fruit-juice, pomegranates … Khusháf made from Stamboul peaches flavoured with amber and musk.
Kate and Gideon and she had led a life of simplicity: a loving community of amiable pursuits with which, making music, laughing and talking, they had filled the flying days of her childhood, when baths and diet and fussing about one’s appearance would have been as irrelevant as engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin.
Something of grace and good grooming, no doubt, had been missed. Walking up and down rebelliously, over the deep carpet in Kiaya Khátún’s room, Philippa did not enjoy having pointed out to her, in that deep, even voice, the undoubted faults of her posture and carriage. Because one cannot clown one’s way quite through everything, she learned to stand and to sit so that no one sang out something rude and nothing forced her to think out a reply. Under the Mistress of the Wardrobe, she learned to execute fine embroidery, to make rose-leaf pillows; to distinguish brocatelle from brocade, velvet from Bursa from Cyprus velvet; to tell the quality and the price of a pearl.
They were allowed to use their own small kitchens for lessons and experiments. It was unlikely, to say the least of it, that she would ever find herself explaining to Betty, in the big, cosy old kitchen at Flaw Valleys, how to make crystallized violets, or mince-meat pies, or rice dressed with butter and almonds, but she found this the least boring part of the day. Because of her appearance she was spared some of the other things which