The Black Tulip

The Mistress of the Gardens

Until now, Leyla has never given much thought to who watches over the world beyond the harem walls. Over their days together, Belkıs has already explained that the Mistress of the Flowers spends so much time with the plants that she is slowly becoming one of them herself. “She can communicate with flowers and plants,” Belkıs says. “They tell her exactly how to care for them, though the bostanjis often disagree with how she does things.” When Leyla asks who the bostanjis are, Belkıs describes huge, gigantic men with bald heads and huge mustaches, visible even from a distance as they patrol the edges of the palace grounds; the harem girls never cross paths with them, only glimpse them beyond the walls. Belkıs explains they are responsible for everything that happens inside and outside the gates of Topkapı. They protect the palace grounds and are the guardians of the forests and public palace gardens. They are also the executioners.

Leyla shudders at the mention of executioners. She thought no men were allowed in the harem except the padishah and his sons. She thought the girls did all the gardening. Belkıs nods, saying under the Mistress of the Flowers, they garden only within the harem walls, which are, of course, closed off from the rest of the palace. Everything beyond those walls, forests and public gardens alike, belongs to the bostanjis instead.

The girls find the Mistress of the Flowers in a large, beautiful garden, preparing a large floral arrangement in autumn colors. She’s startlingly small and thin, no bigger than a child, and her skin is so translucent that Leyla can see the blue veins underneath, giving her an almost greenish glow, as though she really has begun turning into one of her own plants. She looks fragile and sensitive, like a leaf that could tear in a strong wind, but her whole face lights up the moment she spots the girls, and she smiles warmly at them.

Belkıs explains who Leyla is, and the mistress studies her, her gaze seeming to pass straight through her. She leads the girls into a huge, beautiful greenhouse nursery topped with a glass dome. Row after row of drawers line one wall, dozens of them, each labeled with words Leyla cannot yet read, and the mistress points to one in particular. When the mistress slides one open, it’s stuffed with tulip bulbs, more than Leyla has ever seen gathered in one place, and she nearly swallows her tongue in astonishment. From there, the mistress guides the girls to a nearby plot of dark, freshly turned earth that reeks of manure, a smell that instantly carries Leyla back to the farms near her childhood home, and a wave of homesickness washes over her.

Leyla wants to ask whether she should begin planting the bulbs there, but something in the mistress’s quiet, deliberate manner stops the question in her throat. She senses the woman prefers gestures to words. Belkıs speaks up instead, in careful, formal phrasing. “Yes, Leyla will start working in this bed tomorrow, as you wish, ma’am.” Without saying a word, the mistress presses her hand to her heart and releases the girls.

Only once they’re walking back toward the dormitory does Belkıs reveal the truth: the Mistress of the Flowers is mute. She cannot speak to people at all, only to plants, and though her silence and her pale, greenish look unnerve some of the harem women, everyone respects her seemingly magical touch with growing things.

Leyla doesn’t find her odd in the slightest. If anything, she senses something extraordinary in her. As a fellow gardener, she guesses that the mistress has such an affinity for plants that she genuinely prefers their quiet company to that of people, that she might even prefer the world of plants to the world of people altogether. Perhaps the mistress understands some deeper connection between plants and people, one that doesn’t need words to communicate. Leyla finds a kindred spirit in her, strangeness and all. She feels fortunate to be placed under her for this apprenticeship, out of all the departments to which a new girl might have been assigned, and senses that the mistress has chosen her for the tulip beds specifically because she recognized Leyla’s own natural affinity. She wonders whether the coin the poet once gave her is the true source of this stroke of good kısmet.